The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And maybe, after that, I’m not on the roof anymore. Maybe, after that, I’m sitting in a crowded bar down on Locust Street. I know the place, but I can never remember its name, not in the dream. Nothing to write home about, one way or the other. Neither classy enough nor sleazy enough to be especially memorable. Just fags and dykes wall to fucking wall and lousy, ancient disco blaring through unseen speakers. There’s a pint bottle of Wild Turkey sitting on the bar in front of me, and an empty shot glass. Someone’s holding a gun to the back of my head. And, yeah, I know the feeling of having a gun to my head, because it happened this one time on a run to Atlantic City that went almost bad as bad can be. I also know that it’s Joey the Kike holding the pistol, seeing as how there’s a dead scorpion the color of pus lying right there on the bar beside the bottle of bourbon.

  “This ain’t the way it ought to be,” he says, and I’m surprised I can hear his voice over the shitty music and all those queers trying to talk over the shitty music.

  “Then how about we find some other way to work it out,” I say, sounding lame as any asshole ever tried to talk his way out of a slug to the brain. “How about you sit down here next to me and we have a drink and make sure there are no more creepy crawlies in your shoes.”

  “I shouldn’t be seen in a place like this,” he says, and I hear him pull the hammer back. “People talk, they see you hanging round a place like this.”

  “People do fucking talk,” I agree. With my left index finger, I flick the dead scorpion off the bar. No one seems to notice. For that matter, no one seems to notice he’s got a gun to my head. I say, “Maybe you should bounce before some hard-nosed bastard takes a notion to make you his bitch, yeah? You ever taken it up the ass, Joey?”

  “You’re such a smart guy,” Joey replies, “you’re still gonna be passing woof tickets when you’re six-feet under, ain’t you? Expect you’ll manage to smack talk your way out of Hell, given half a chance.”

  “Well, you know me, Joey. Never let ’em see you sweat. Vini, vedi, vici and all that hùnzhàng.”

  And I’m sitting there waiting to die, when the music stops, and all eyes turn towards the rear of the bar. I look, too, though Joey’s still got his 9mm parked on my scalp. A baby spot with a green gel is playing across a tiny stage, and there’s Eli with a microphone. I’d think he was actual, factual fish if I didn’t know better, that’s how good Eli looks in a black evening gown and pumps and a wig that makes me think of Isabella Rossellini playing Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. The din of voices is only a murmur now, only a gentle whisper of expectation as we all wait to see which way the wind’s about to blow.

  “Damn, she’s hot,” Joey says.

  “Fuckin’ A, she’s hot,” I tell him. “You should be so goddamn lucky to get a piece of ass like that one day.”

  He tells me to keep quiet, zip it and toss the key, that he wants to hear, but it’s not me he wants to hear. So I make like a good boy and oblige. After all, I want to hear this nightingale, too. And then Eli begins to sing, a cappella and in Spanish, and everyone goes hushed as midnight after Judgment Day. His voice is his voice, not some dream impersonation, and I wonder why I never knew Eli could sing.

  Bueno, ahora, pagar la atención

  Sólo en caso de que no había oído…

  And I’m still right there in the bar, but I’m somewhere else, as well. I’m walking in a desert somewhere, like something out of an old Wild and Woolly West flick, and the sun beats down on me from a sky so blue it’s almost white. There are mountains far, far away, a jagged line against the horizon, and I wonder if that’s where I’m trying to get to. If there’s something in the mountains that I need to see. The playa stretches out all around me, a lifeless plain of alkali flats and desiccation cracks. Maybe this was a lake or inland sea, long, long ago. Maybe the water still comes back, from time to time. Sweat runs into my eyes, and I squint against the sting.

  On the little stage, Eli sings in Spanish, and I sit on my barstool with the barrel of Joey’s gun prodding my skull. I wish the shot glass weren’t empty, ’cause the baking desert sun has me thirsty as a motherfucker. I keep my eyes on Eli, and I hear the parching salt wind whipping across the flats, and I hear that song in a language that I can only half understand.

  Basta con mirar hacia el cielo

  Y gracias al Gobierno por la nieve

  Y cantar la baja hacia abajo…

  “What’s she sayin’?” Joey the Kike wants to know, and I ask him which part of me looks Mexican.

  In the desert, I stop walking and peer up at the sun. High above me, there are contrails. And I know that’s what Eli’s singing about – those vaporous wakes – even if I have no idea why.

  “It’s a dream,” I tell Joey the Kike, growing impatient with the gun. “Specifically, it’s my dream. I come here all the time, and I don’t remember ever inviting you.”

  The playa crunches loudly beneath my feet.

  Tony Palamara opens a briefcase, and I see half a dozen silver vials marked with yellow tape.

  A woman on a train wipes at her nose, and my ears pop.

  Eli is no longer singing in Spanish, though I don’t recall the transition. No one says a word. They’re all much too busy watching him make love to the resonant phallus of his microphone.

  Trying to make it rain.

  So when you’re out there in that blizzard,

  Shivering in the cold,

  Just look up to the sky…

  I kneel on that plain and dig my fingers into the scorched saline crust. I crush the sandy dirt in my hand, and the wind sweeps it away. And that’s when I notice what looks like a kid’s spinning top – only big around as a tractor-trailer’s wheel – lying on the ground maybe twenty yards ahead of me. A tattered drogue parachute is attached to the enormous top by a tangled skein of nylon kernmantle cord. The wind ruffles wildly through the chute, and I notice the skid marks leading from the spinning top that isn’t a spinning top, trailing away into the distance.

  And sing the low-down experimental cloud-seeding

  Who-needs-’em-baby? Silver-iodide blues…

  I stand, and look back the way I’ve come. In the dream, I guess I’ve come from the south, walking north. So, looking south, the desert seems to run on forever, with no unobtainable mountainous El Dorado to upset the monotony. There’s only the sky above, crisscrossed with contrails, and the yellow-brown playa below, the line drawn between them sharp as a paper cut. There’s not even the mirage shimmer of heat I’d have expected, but, of course, this desert is only required to obey the dictates of my unconscious mind, not any laws of physical science. I stand staring at the horizon for a moment, and then resume my northwards march. I know now I’m not trying to reach the mountains. No one reaches those mountains, not no way, not no how, right? I’m only trying to go as far as the kid’s top that’s not a top and its rippling nylon parachute. I understand that now, and I tell Joey to either pull the trigger or put his piece away. I don’t have time for reindeer games tonight. And if I did, I still wouldn’t be looking for action from the likes of him.

  I stare at the bar, and the pus-colored scorpion’s returned. This time, I don’t bother to make it go away. I do wonder if dead scorpions can still kill a guy. Was you ever bit by a dead bee?

  All those people in the bar have begun applauding, and Eli takes a bow and sets his mike back into its stand.

  “What you saw,” Joey sneers, “I got as much right to know as you. We were both slopping about in that stiff’s innards, and if something was wrong with him, I deserve to know. You got no place keepin’ it from me.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” I tell him, wishing it were the truth. “Now, are you going to shoot me or put away the roscoe and make nice?”

  “Making you nervous?” asks Joey,

  “Not really, but the potential for injury is pissing me off righteously.”

  I reach the top that’s not a top, and now I’m almost certain it’s actually some sort of return capsule
from a space probe. One side is scorched black, so I suppose that must be the heat shield. I stand three or four feet back, and I never, in any version of the dream, have touched the thing. It’s maybe five feet in diameter, maybe a little less. I’m wondering how long its been out here, and where it might have traveled before hurtling back to earth, and why no retrieval team’s come along to fetch it. I wonder if it’s even a NASA probe, or maybe, instead, a chunk of foreign hardware that strayed from its target area. Either way, no one leaves shit like this laying around in the goddamn desert. I know that much.

  “Yeah, you know it all,” Joey says, and jabs me a little harder with the muzzle of his gun. “You must be the original Doctor Einstein, and me, I’m just some schmuck can’t be trusted with the time of day.”

  Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket…

  And on the rooftop, Eli tells me, “The star at the centaur’s knee is Alpha Sagittarii, or Rukbat, which means ‘knee’ in Arabic. Rukbat is a blue class B star, one hundred and eighteen light years away. It’s twice as hot as the sun and forty times brighter.”

  “You been holding out on me, chica. Here I thought you were nothing but good looks and grace, and then you get all Wikipedia on me.”

  Eli laughs, and the crowded, noisy bar on Locust Street dissolves like fog, and the desert fades to half a memory. Joey the Kike and his pea-shooter, the dead scorpion and the bottle of Wild Turkey, every bit of it merely the echo of an echo now. I’m standing at the doorway of our bathroom, the tiny bathroom in mine and Eli’s place in Chinatown. Regardless which rendition of the dream we’re talking about, sooner or later they all end here. I’m standing in the open door of the bathroom, and Eli’s in the old claw-foot tub. The air is thick with steam and condensation drips in crystal beads from the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Even the floor, that mosaic of white hexagonal tiles, is slick. I’m barefoot, and the ceramic feels slick beneath my feet. I swear and ask Eli if he thinks he got the water hot enough, and he asks me about the briefcase I delivered to the Czech. It doesn’t even occur to me to ask how the hell he knows about the delivery.

  “What about we don’t talk shop just this once,” I say, as though it’s something we make a habit of doing. “And how about we most especially don’t linger on the subject of the fucking Czech?”

  “Hey, you brought it up, lover, not me,” Joey says, returning the soap to the scallop-shaped soap dish. His hand leaves behind a smear of silver on the sudsy bar. I stare at it, trying hard to recall something important that’s teetering right there on the tip end of my tongue.

  For love may come an’ tap you on the shoulder, some starless night…

  “Make yourself useful and hand me a towel,” he says. “Long as you’re standing there, I mean.”

  I reach into the linen closet for a bath towel, and when I turn back to pass it to Eli, he’s standing, the water lapping about his lower calves. Only it’s not water anymore. It’s something that looks like mercury, and it flows quickly up his legs, his hips, his ass, and drips like cum from the end of his dick. Eli either isn’t aware of what’s going on, or he doesn’t care. I hand him the towel as the silver reaches his smooth, hairless chest and begins to makes its way down both his arms.

  “Anyway,” he says, “we can talk about it or we can not talk about it. Either way’s fine by me. So long as you don’t start fooling yourself into thinking your hands are clean. I don’t want to hear about how you were only following orders, you know?”

  It’s easy to forget them without tryin’, with just a pocketful of starlight.

  My ears haven’t popped, and there’s been no dizziness, but, all the same, the bathroom is redolent with those caustic triplets, ammonia and ozone, and, more subtly, sugar sizzling away to a black carbon scum. The silver has reached Eli’s throat, and rushes up over his chin, finding its way into his mouth and nostrils. A moment more, and he stands staring back at me with eyes like polished ball bearings.

  “You and your gangster buddies, you get it in your heads you’re only blameless errand boys,” Eli says, and his voice has become smooth and shiny as what the silver has made of his flesh. “You think ignorance is some kind of virtue, and none of the evil shit you do for your taskmasters is ever coming back to haunt you.”

  I don’t argue with him, no matter whether Eli (or the sterling apparition standing where Eli stood a few moments before) is right or wrong or someplace in between. I could disagree, sure, but I don’t. I’m reasonably fucking confident it no longer makes any difference. The towel falls to the floor, fluttering like a drogue parachute in a desert gale, and Eli steps out of the tub, spreading silver in his wake.

  Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins

  Graze on my lips, and if those hills are dry, Stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie.

  William Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis” (1592–1593)

  1.

  Alieka Ferenczi has been walking for seven days, ever since the roller she’d bought back in Annapolis salted and sputtered its final sorrowful sput. She’d known the mole’s conversion coils were half a step from fried when she bought it off a scrapyard at the edge of the city by the sea. But she was almost at her last wad now, having already paid so much to the datswap jig for cords that would lead her across the Lunae to the walls of the Yellow House – or might get her there, if he’d been that solo honest jig in ever one thou. The sand and dust swirls around her, various-sized dervishes to testify to how BrantCorp and AOWT’s had gone so toto hit and miss on Barsoom. Sure, there were the shallow seas stretching from Chryse north to the pole, and the southern sea, and, here and there, patches of scrubland – cactus, josh trees, verde and ironwood, yukka, shitty little paradisio’s for snakes and lizards and the occasional rodent, but not much else. Alieka had always heard about how ace things had gone at far off Lake Hellas, with its drip-dense rainforgets and those silver cities rising from the shore like spirals bound for Heaven – Ausonia, New Moscow, Cañas, Tugaske, Kyoto Neo – three quarters of the planet’s population crushed into the lake’s eastern shore, and no newcomers welcome. Fuck all to the rest assward, right? Damn so, damn so.

  These were among Alieka Ferenczi’s bitter, weary thoughts as she dragged herself across wastes under the sky so bright with stars. Now and again, she’d stop and pick out the dot that was Earth. All sorta tales what went on homeworld, and they were most ghost tales for children and workers, House all happy and content out on the ring, sure. Talk about war and famine and tox oceans. Why, we’re better off than them leftbacks, them shite-rat also-rans, ain’t we just? Shi and she dy jarroo, lay your glimmers down if we’re wrong on that. These were among the jumble of her thoughts while the winds roaring down from the western highlands beat and whipped at her traveler’s fraying swaddle. She kept a hand on her leather cap lesten it sail off her scalp, and she pulled the layers of insul tighter about herself. She only walked at night, so here were the wastes at their coldest, but better than the sun. Better be gnawed at by Old Man Aeolusk than have her brains nuked by Old Lady Sol, eh?

  There was a light from the stars and light from Phobos rising in the west. She often ruminated on Phobos. Her da, whom she’d never met, had died in the phyllo mines up there. Lock breach, said her ma, and the entire shaft had gone spitter and kaputsky, said her ma. Not a dram of atmo, not nuff grav to house a cow tin from floating off. “He’s up there,” had said her ma. “You recall that, Alieka, when you gaze at the west moon. Still up there, goin’ round, round Barso. And watchin’ out for you.”

  Never did believe that, and she tried not to ponder at his frozen corpse orbiting the planet for all those centuries to come.

  Alieka managed to climb up one side of a dune, and managed not to take a tumble coming down the windward slope, so she decided that worthed her a sit at the base, just enough time for a stingy sip from her jug. Only a stingy, though, because out here on the Lunae, not even hardly enough humidity for a dew spread. Not dry as dry can get, but damno dry, betcha. Even
with the purdah shielding her nose and mouth, her throat and lungs felt crisp as crack, and her lips bloody. Her sinuses ached.

  May be I won’t make it to the Yellow House, she thought. Could be best, that turn, eh? And Alieka thought how good it would feel to lie down on the sand and never get up again. Let blazing Nair’s eye find her without the scant shade of the sheltie folded up in her knap, let the sand bury her, and let the scorpions and asps have their way. Tired as this, it was easy to forget why she’d ever started this fool’s parade across the rusty wastes where not even the sappers and sourdoughs dared to tread.

  “Muirgheal,” she whispered. “Bring back Muirgheal from the Maafa. That’s why, you withered cunny. You house your eyes and your mind on her. Ain’t no sleep surrender, or you’re something worse than the worst coward.”

  Not that anyone had ever come back once snatched by the Maafa. The slaver caravans tripped back and forth across the plains, and no one much argued when they set their sights on your daughter or son. Oh, there were a few had tried, put up barricades and taken up arms and all that happy crap. Right. But the Maafa were keen to any wait out, and sooner or later took their wares. You say any different, there were enough burnt settles to testify to having gone to the trouble, having been that much the imbecile. But, the long and short, Maafa bitch snatched up Muirgheal from her bed, and no matter what anyone else heard going on, ’cause no one right says no, leave her be, sidewinder eeshobee, and be on about. They took her, and she was ghosted, like never had she been. Excepting for Alieka, who’d had it stone for that pretty-pretty since they were in study together in low sector. But Alieka never had found the requisite, and so sure by now Muirgheal didn’t even spare a reminisce her way. And yet, and yet, and still, here was daft Alieka Ferenczi pilgrim on the waste and marching, what?, right up to the Yellow’s gates and saying “Let me in, and turn her back.” Or what? Have you even thought that far ahead?