So much for her.
And Regan, for all her thinking and all her tail-chasing, can’t puzzle out how to stop the merry-go-round from spinning, whether it’s through Jodie’s way or some other, kinder method. She lies there staring at the ceiling until birds begin calling outside, too pained by her rotting body and whirling brain to snatch even the smallest scrap of rest.
And part of me felt good watching Topsy smash up that stall, didn’t it? Way down deep, something angry in me got satisfaction. The world’s so big and mean, and we’re so small in it with our hands and feet fettered. Little tiny helpless things, who can’t do a damn thing but cry and rage most days at the way the game’s rigged against us.
She gets up from bed. She watches her window go from black to gunmetal. When it’s light enough out to see, she digs around in the crate of Jodie’s stuff—pushing past the coin purse, the pill bottles, the busted music box with the little ceramic bluebird—until she finds the key on its ribbon, sifted way down to the bottom. She lets it hang twirling from her fingers before looping it around her neck.
So much for her.
* * *
The Men gathered, O Mothers
Hooting they led her forth, and she let them;
They called to the lightning:
“Lightning, strike this Mother
Burn her like dry grass,
Make Her Story wither and die,
So that she will never be They
Never be We.
Splinter,
Sunder,
Scatter!”
* * *
She considers going home, but the thought of all the research books waiting for her there makes her vaguely ill. Eventually her feet pull her to the nearest Q stop, where she drifts through the turnstile and down the stairs to the southbound platform.
There’s an excited little boy on the train. Nothing revelatory about that; Kat watches him bounce off the walls with her earbuds cranked as high as they’ll go, making it more or less like watching a death metal music video about the Black Goat of the Woods discovering their inner child. What’s interesting about him is that he’s wearing a t-shirt with Disney’s Topsy printed all over it, broken up and interspersed with bright green atoms. Are his parents taking him to Coney Island because of the cartoon? she muses. Did the innocent little sugar-sucker beg and plead to go because that’s where the finale dumps its sad, angry but good-at-heart heroine when things are at their darkest? Deeply fucked up, but also deeply probable. No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth’s nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.
There might have been kids at the actual electrocution. It was late in the day and the majority of the 150-plus crowd allowed inside had been men and older boys—so said the history books—but if Kat had to bet, she would guess there were some women and younger children hanging around, too. In those days, packing a picnic lunch and taking the family to watch someone or something die horribly wasn’t considered particularly unusual. Electricity was new and weird; so were elephants. Combining the two into something as lurid as an execution always sucked in quite a crowd.
What a fucked-up mess. And yet without that fucked-up mess, the Radium Elephant trials never would have happened. There’s no divorcing these things. Processing uranium to get at the sweet, sweet energy released left you with plutonium.
The Atlantic winks at her outside the window. The kid slams headfirst into the side of a seat and keeps moving in the opposite direction. She thinks about neutrons careening into nuclei like amped-up toddlers, the energy released and the expense and irreversible entropy coming on like a night with no stars.
* * *
TOPSY
(Traditional, 1919)
Brought her here from across the sea,
To this land of liberty
Seven feet tall, such a sight to see
Blow, Topsy, Blow
Blow, Topsy, Blow!
Factory boss said, “Topsy, m’girl,”
“Quit the circus, give work a whirl;
You’ll be treated fair and square,
Brush in your trunk and nary a care!”
Blow, Topsy, Blow,
Blow, Topsy, Blow!
Kind old Topsy hadn’t a clue,
’Bout radium, what it could do,
“I’m your gal, boss, let’s see ’er through!”
Blow, Topsy, Blow,
Blow, Topsy, Blow!
But what that foreman didn’t know,
Is that there’s so much injustice you can honestly sow,
Before the anger starts to grow
Blow, Topsy, Blow
Blow, Topsy, Blow!
* * *
Regan limps downtown, raccoon-eyed and none too daisy-fresh owing to how she felt too weak and too exhausted to scrub up in the dormitory showers before heading out. There’s a taste coating her tongue like the smell of dirty pennies combined with something gone moldy and forgot. The iron key around her neck bounces off her breastbone with every step. Between that and her jaw and throat throbbing molten bear traps in time to each rabbity pulsebeat, she’s got a pretty good rhythm going as she totters down the sidewalk.
She reaches the address, goes inside, and casts around until she finds the right locker. A few seconds more fiddling beneath the cotton of her shirt and the key is in her hand.
Jodie, she thinks. I dunno if it’s the good thing or the right thing or if you were even in your right goddamned mind when you put all of this together, but doing nothing’s done nothin’ but get more that don’t deserve it sold down the river. I’m tired, Jodie. I’m so eat up with anger over you and us and all of it I can’t see straight. And I’m tired of having to be angry all the time. I don’t got the energy to keep it up anymore, but I’ll be goddamned if I let them get away with murdering one more of us before this is all over and done with. Something’s gotta give.
A click and a clunk and the little metal box swings open for her. A glass jar no bigger than a bumblebee sits inside. Careful, like picking a baby bird up off the ground, Regan takes the vial and gently nests it in her right front pocket, where it’s least likely to be rattled by the walk and the long train ride to Coney Island.
* * *
And
(Poor things!)
She called to the lightning:
(Poor things!)
“Lightning, we have always been kin, always been We.”
(Poor prideful)
“Tell my Story.”
(Foolish)
“Tell my Truth in a voice like thunder.”
(Things!)
“And scatter them all like ripe red fruit.”
* * *
The memorial tower is forty feet high and carved out of marble, because they didn’t do things halfway back in the day, even in the teeth of two world wars. In the seaside dusk it looms over Kat like a great tusk, curving to lift the sagging blue-gray canopy of nightfall.
It stands alone on its irradiated patch of beachfront property, far away down the strand from the toffee sellers and funnel cakes and skeevy boardwalk rides. Luna Park had never recovered from the incident. The place was barely out of the construction stage when Topsy turned its gestation into a miscarriage, and the cost of rebuilding combined with the stigma of tragedy (and background radiation) had convinced the surviving shareholders to throw up their hands and fold. The plot had stood empty for a while until the idea of a memorial was hit upon; several years and several mysterious donors later and the Luna Park Memorial Tower rose, a joint marker for the people who had died and the Radium Elephants who had found their voices in the violent self-sacrifice of their comrade. Sculpted bronze trunks wind around the length of the thing like a barber’s pole all the way to the roof and top colonnade, where four bronze elephants and four bronze humans stand together gazing out to sea. In pictures and postcards of the place the trunks have l
ong since gone the patina green of sea serpents, tarnished pennies, and the Statue of Liberty. Tonight they’re stark black against the white.
Most people don’t even remember the memorial exists. It’s one of those oddities from an earlier time you learn about and then forget, something weird tucked away to stop and gawk at if you happen to be passing through the area on vacation or a day trip. Snap a photo, buy a postcard, namedrop it at a party when people ask what you did with your summer. Make a joke about Geiger counters and glowing craters if everyone else is clued in on the story. Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy’s.
Kat stares up at the column with her hands jammed in her pockets, thinking about truth and transmutation as the last light dies and the damp ocean breeze gnaws through her windbreaker. There’s no stopping decay, change, or entropy. No matter how many jellyfish genomes they strap to an elephant’s genetic material—no matter how many elephant mothers pass along the warning, long memories and unshakably interwoven strands of matriarchal polynucleotide narrative aside—the fact of the matter is, the basis for this project was contaminated from the start. It was decaying into something other than truth the day the first breathless article about Topsy was written, the day she died and someone else began telling her story and the cultural baggage accrued and replaced and eroded fact like radium in marrow.
Nuclear Topsy. No wonder the elephants don’t trust them.
She stands there until the vertebrae in her craned neck start complaining and her feet go numb. An ivory sickle moon rises in the east. Kat turns her back on the memorial and the roaring Atlantic dark and shuffles towards the garish electric dawn of Coney Island, some skeleton’s memory of what progress looked like.
* * *
Luna Park looks like a twister’s gone on a tear right through its muddy heart, lumber and splintered scaffolds and the great naked backbones of buildings-to-be lying stretched out across the ground in every whichaway direction. Everywhere you turn an eye men are working up a fine old sweat—hammering, sawing, stuck all over with sawdust and coal smut, spitting dirt and tobacco until the ground’s so churned mule teams bog down and split their pipes braying. The air this close to the ocean is a sponge—a damp, warm rag stuffed up under your nose so close you can almost taste the stink of mule shit and chaw spit and stale mud mixed with piss and spilled bourbon. And there’s another smell, too, yonder beneath the fresh pine and cigarette smoke—hay, blood, something big and wild and musky. An old reek, like a mountain breaking lather.
Once you’ve gotten a whiff of it, you never forget the smell of an elephant.
Nobody tries stopping Regan; she’s dressed like a boy, the way she’s most comfortable, and there are plenty of those running around. She wanders farther in—beneath the great wooden arch with its columns and crescent moons still unlit, past the rising spire they’ve already dubbed the “Electric Tower,” wired to glow like something out of The Arabian Nights—slopping on through ankle-deep pigpen muck where there aren’t boards laid yet, dizzy and sick and shaky-legged with her hurts but grimly determined not to faint. If that happens and she goes over on her side and the little bottle in her pocket gets broken and crushed, it’ll have been a wasted trip with a smoking pair of boots planted at the bottom of the crater.
The morning gets hotter. Sweat pops on her forehead, running down into her eyes to sting them shut. All of her joining pins have been replaced with knife blades, from heel to toe to aching hip. She holds off swallowing her own spit until her tongue is dog-paddling and she can’t help herself. These days, the automatic jerk of muscles she always took for granted before is like washing down coals with grain alcohol, a fierce tearing worse than her jaw if simply because of how much she has to make it happen. A beaten gulp and the fire roars up her throat and into her brain. Her knees give up the ghost and she finds herself slumping against a sawhorse, fingers clutching and unclutching at raw wood.
“Had a bit too much, eh, kid? Show’s not even on until tonight, pace yourself!” A jolly hand follows the jolly voice, slapping Regan on the back so hard her last few teeth rattle. She gums back a scream. She’s only got so much control left, but she clings to it with all she’s got like a baby squirrel in a windstorm. “Don’t let the policemen they got snooping around find you; you’ll be hitting that drunk tank ass-first quicker’n a New York minute.”
“Fine. I’m fine.” The words dribble down her chin. Even the passerby’s booming seems faded and faraway.
“You sure, son? You sure as hell don’t look it. Here, lemme give you a hand.“
“I’m FINE.” She hears the good Samaritan step back hastily. “Need to see the elephant. Come to see the elephant.”
“Yeah, you and every other pimple-popping boy-o from a hundred miles round.” His voice is sulled now. “It’s chained up in a tent just a little further the way you’re going.”
“Thanks.” She hangs there until she’s sure he’s moved away. C’mon, girl. Not much further to go. She pulls herself upright, gives her eyes and brain a minute to unfog, then staggers on.
You can hear the tent humming well before it ever hews into view, like a bee tree or a hive of wasps. Boys hoot and holler in and out beneath the canvas, confident as fighting cocks in their ability to outrun any bellowing grown-up that might come along with an idea to try and chase them. Older clumps smoke and chat warily outside. Regan pushes past best she can, careful not to let an elbow or swinging arm hit her pocket. Slowly—more like an old man than one of the boys now—she swings a shaky leg over the guide ropes and lifts the tent flap, ducking into a shadowland that smells like the beginning of the world.
Links rattle. Something big rumbles. Smaller shadows school like minnows, giggling and teasing, shying away at every snort or shift only to come flocking back when it looks like the danger’s passed. Not that there’s really any threat; as her eyes get used to the darkness Regan can see the chains and ropes looped and relooped around Topsy’s neck and ankles, big old logging chains meant to pull redwoods crashing to the ground. Pebbles bounce off her leathery hide, and she pays them no more mind than a hawk shrugging off a territorial cock sparrow. Boys poke sticks and lit cigarettes at her from across the ropes; she lifts her trunk out of range and dreams on, spirit touring times and places Regan can’t even guess at. Her mind is the most alien thing Regan’s ever had truck with outside the God in her mother’s Bible.
Almost there. She watches the scene a little longer, putting off what has to be done. One more trick. Jodie and the rest of them better appreciate this, wherever they are.
She takes a deep breath, latches onto a guide rope, gets her mind right for what’s coming, and bellows like a whipped mule.
“COPS! COPS! LOOK OUT, COPS ARE COMING!”
Veins in her throat give up and bust their dams. She can feel them popping before the shock snaps and she goes into freefall, mind and soul and all the things that make Regan Regan rubbed out by a root-shaking, roof-tearing wave of wrongness her brain recognizes from its treetop perch as the worst pain she’s ever felt—the kind you know is damaging things the moment it lands. Somewhere shadowy boys are shouting, shoving, scattering. They flutter past her like moths in a dream.
When she comes back to herself she’s on her knees in a puddle of something dark, throat still registering aftershocks. Topsy looks down at her impassively. She wipes her mouth with the back of one palsied hand; it comes back sticky, copper-smelling.
Hey, Regan signs.
No reply, just watchful stillness. Well there’s a damned surprise. She hauls herself to her feet, hay and dirt sticking to the blood on the palms of her hands.
I came here to see you, she continues. You and me got business.
Chains rattle. The air stirs. No, says the slow shadow of Topsy’s trunk, black against the canvas. No more business. No business but death.
That’s good, ’cause death is what I maybe came here to offer you. A righteous death. The
movement for “righteous” looks a little something like two tusks quickly dipping down and then back up again, a goring, tossing flip. Regan slips a hand into her pocket, palming the bottle’s cool cola-bottle smoothness. She sets it down on the ground between them—close enough so Topsy can reach, fettered up as she is—and steps back, head swimming from the act of bending over.
This, she signs, is a seed. Crush it and death sprouts. Not just yours. The men with the chains. The circus men, the poison-factory men, the ones who will come to see you burn—all of ’em. Like lightning striking. You’ll be lightning. You’ll burn and you’ll strike and then you’ll be gone. It’s up to you. Dying’s a personal thing. It’s . . . just . . . She trails off, hunting for the right words. Exhaustion is butting in on her thoughts, pushing them to the back of the hall.
. . . I just wanted to give you the option, she finishes, at a loss as to how to put it any better. A friend gave it to me. I’m passing it along to a higher power.
Even with her death waiting and the sounds of a crowd gathering outside, Topsy takes her sweet, thoughtful time responding. You can practically hear the gears groaning inside that great skull of hers, slow but unstoppably steady in their revolution. Righteousness. Regan thinks of the sign again, invisible enemies flung into the air like pinecones. An old word, indiscriminate as a knife’s edge, a tusk’s tip.
Like lightning, Topsy signs. For the first time, Regan notices that her trunktip is glowing a faint, familiar green.
Yup.
You wish for them to die, too. Not a question. For the poisoning. For killing you.
Regan shrugs. No argument there.
Asking nice never seemed to get either of us much, did it? Maybe this’ll get somebody’s attention.
Topsy reaches down. Her trunk curls and uncurls, twitching at the tip like an agitated cat’s tail. For the briefest blip of a second she hesitates and Regan thinks maybe she won’t take the bottle, that she’s sadder than she is angry, that her execution will amount to nothing more than a pitiful sentence in a history book swollen tick-tight with so many injustices the poisoning of a factory full of girls and the mean public death of a small god don’t even register as particularly noteworthy.
The Only Harmless Great Thing Page 5
