The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  She very near thanks him, but thinks better just in time. It’s too perverse a gesture to consider. He spies at her with orange eyes, and she can’t recall if the others had orange eyes, but – having sat on the hard-packed dirt floor – Alieka doesn’t look up to spy back at.

  “I am here to find a girl,” she says, hardly above a whisper. “Her name be Muirgheal Hemingtrust, and she lived in Annapolis, and once wore blue ribbons in her hair.”

  “¿Es usted su madre?” the orange-eyed man asks.

  Is he making fun? No. That’s not the timbre of his wringer.

  “No.”

  “So, your sister?”

  “No.” Alicka raises her head.

  “Then, she must be your sheba, shi?”

  Only in your wettest, caboodled dreams, factory.

  “No,” Alieka tells the man. “Even though I wish that were so.”

  He smiles, revealing teeth filed to razor-sharp triangles. “Good answer, Alieka Ferenczi. I dislikes to the clatter of falsehoods upon my ears. So, you came so far to…take her home, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  The man frowns, and Alieka lowers her gaze, so she only has to see the glow of the fire on the dirt playing across her filthy rags.

  “You must know, no one comes into the Halls of the Maafa, who is not themselves Maafa, and goes back out again, yes?”

  “Those are the yarns,” she answers him.

  “But you came, anyway. Though no one ever does this.”

  She only nods.

  “A gallant, yonggan slit, are you. For that, a ward, it may come. For such a yonggan kite, a gift. This is what I think. Though you may not leave, and though you may not have what you came to retrieve, I will grant you view to her, eh? So long as you wish to see, at that.” There’s a surprised rumble of voices from the guards surrounding her.

  “If that’s the best,” she says, wanting a mouth of that roasting thing.

  The man is silent a while, then he says, “That’s the best, plus.”

  “Shi,” says she, knowing not what else to say. “No fair, then, my askin’ more.”

  “And when you’ve wearied of my gift, Alieka Ferenczi, praps be you think again on whether to be of the Maafa and learn the Elegy of Pain, shi? Now, with my blesses, yonggan. Go.”

  She doesn’t see him wave his left hand at her guards, but they haul Alieka to her feet, first time their hands upon her. They lift her from the floor and lead her away from the sweet en’fast turning on the spit. Down more black (or colorless) walls and stairs, and then another door creaks open, and inside there is light that is not firelight. Inside the chamber beyond the creaking doors is genny light, fluoro maybe, but sure electrics of one sort of another. She steps inside, a ring of glass tubes, each set into the wall. The chamber is very big, and there might be thirty tubes, all told. At the center, an inner ring of what might be control panels, not so unalike those the bosses run, switches, dials, toggles, pads, and such. She does not yet look directly at the tubes, no more than glance. They are tall, though, and big round as the boles of the sobba trees growing in the middle park back homecity. One of the guards is talking, and she can understand the woman just enough to know she is being told Alicka is to stay here as long as she wishes, and that the door will not be locked, so she may leave when she is ready. And, she thinks, not to dare lay hands on the make-and-breaks. Then they leave her, and the door shuts, and she is alone with the tubes.

  In my glass coffin, I am waitin’

  In my glass coffin, I am waitin’

  In my glass coffin, I am waitin’…

  Stray lines clattering through her head. Isn’t that some old Earth song? she thinks. Some folk ballad old when her grandmother’s mother was born.

  Let fall your dress

  I’ll pay to part

  Open this mouth wide, eat your heart.

  She walks the circuit of the room, does Alieka Ferenczi, and seeing the contents of each tube, those trapped within and unable to die, she is driven on towards the next. And, at finally, she arrives before that tube imprisoning the woman who was once, the now of then, a girl with sky-blue modal ribbons tied in her steel-grey hair. The woman, and what is inside the tube with her. Alieka knows those bugs, and knows what they do to a body, and that the death they bring will take many, many years. But already they’ve done with Muirgheal’s eyes and ears, which might be a mercy and might be worse than all damnations. Alieka sits on the floor (plastic, instead of dirt or stone), and she watches the remnants of the stolen, the one whom she loves who’s never loved her back again. It occurs to her that the Maafa didn’t take her knap, and the HNB might not drop down the Yellow House, but it would, she guesses, be plenty more than needed to vapor this circle of Hell, she dy jarroo. Alieka takes out the canister and hugs it to her chest. She says prayers to St. Anthony of Padua, as would, maybe, her ma. Her ma says St. Anthony of Padua is patron of the lost and forsaken. Alieka prays, and she thinks of the HNB, and she thinks, too, of that thing on the spit, and the offer that the man with the orange eyes made.

  Tidal Forces

  Charlotte says, “That’s just it, Em. There wasn’t any pain. I didn’t feel anything much at all.” She sips her coffee and stares out the kitchen window, squinting at the bright Monday morning sunlight. The sun melts like butter across her face. It catches in the strands of her brown hair, like a late summer afternoon tangling itself in dead cornstalks. It deepens the lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She takes another sip of coffee, then sets her cup down on the table. I’ve never once seen her use a saucer.

  And the next minute seems to last longer than it ought to last, longer than the mere sum of the sixty seconds that compose it, the way time stretches out to fill in awkward pauses. She smiles for me, and so I smile back. I don’t want to smile, but isn’t that what you do? The person you love is frightened, but she smiles anyway. So you have to smile back, despite your own fear. I tell myself it isn’t so much an act of reciprocation as an acknowledgement. I could be more honest with myself and say I only smiled back out of guilt.

  “I wish it had hurt,” she says, finally, on the other side of all that long, long moment. I don’t have to ask what she means, though I wish that I did. I wish I didn’t already know. She says the same words over again, but more quietly than before, and there’s a subtle shift in emphasis. “I wish it had hurt.”

  I apologize and say I shouldn’t have brought it up again, and she shrugs.

  “No, don’t be sorry, Em. Don’t let’s be sorry for anything.”

  I’m stacking days, building a house of cards made from nothing but days. Monday is the Ace of Hearts. Saturday is the Four of Spades. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. Thursday night is, I suspect, the Seven of Diamonds, and it might be heavy enough to bring the whole precarious thing tumbling down around my ears. I would spend an entire hour watching cards fall, because time would stretch, the same way it stretches out to fill in awkward pauses, the way time is stretched thin in that thundering moment of a car crash. Or at the edges of a wound.

  If it’s Monday morning, I can lean across the breakfast table and kiss her, as if nothing has happened. And if we’re lucky, that might be the moment that endures almost indefinitely. I can kiss her, taste her, savor her, drawing the moment out like a card drawn from a deck. But no, now it’s Thursday night, instead of Monday morning. There’s something playing on the television in the bedroom, but the sound is turned all the way down, so that whatever the something may be proceeds like a silent movie filmed in color and without intertitles. A movie for lip readers. There’s no other light but the light from the television. She’s lying next to me, almost undressed, asking me questions about the book I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to finish. I understand she’s not asking them because she needs to know the answers, which is the only reason I haven’t tried to change the subject.

  “The Age of Exploration was already long over with,” I say. “For all intents and purposes, it ended early
in the Seventeenth Century. Everything after that – reaching the north and south poles, for instance – is only a series of footnotes. There were no great blank spaces left for men to fill in. No more ‘Here be monsters.’”

  She’s lying on top of the sheets. It’s the middle of July and too hot for anything more than sheets. Clean white sheets and underwear. In the glow from the television, Charlotte looks less pale and less fragile than she would if the bedside lamp were on, and I’m grateful for the illusion. I want to stop talking, because it all sounds absurd, pedantic, all these unfinished, half-formed ideas that add up to nothing much at all. I want to stop talking and just lie here beside her.

  “So writers made up stories about lost worlds,” she says, having heard all this before and pretty much knowing it by heart. “But those made-up worlds weren’t really lost. They just weren’t found yet. They’d not yet been imagined.”

  “That’s the point” I reply. “The value of those stories rests in their insistence that blank spaces still do exist on the map. They have to exist, even if it’s necessary to twist and distort the map to make room for them. All those overlooked islands, inaccessible plateaus in South American jungles, the sunken continents and the entrances to a hollow earth, they were important psychological buffers against progress and certainty. It’s no coincidence that they’re usually places where time has stood still, to one degree or another.”

  “But not really so much time,” she says, “as the processes of evolution, which require time.”

  “See? You understand this stuff better than I do,” and I tell her she should write the book. I’m only half joking. That’s something else Charlotte knows. I lay my hand on her exposed belly, just below the navel, and she flinches and pulls away.

  “Don’t do that,” she says.

  “All right. I won’t. I wasn’t thinking.” I was thinking, but it’s easier if I tell her that I wasn’t.

  Monday morning. Thursday night. This day or that. My own private house of cards, held together by nothing more substantial than balance and friction. And the loops I’d rather make than admit to the present. Connecting dot-to-dot, from here to there, from there to here. Here being half an hour before dawn on a Saturday, the sky growing lighter by slow degrees. Here, where I’m on my knees, and Charlotte is standing naked in front of me. Here, now, when the perfectly round hole above her left hip and below her ribcage has grown from a pinprick to the size of the saucers she never uses for her coffee cups.

  “I don’t think it will hurt,” she tells me. And I can’t see any point in asking whether she means, I don’t think it will hurt me, or I don’t think it will hurt you.

  “Now?” I ask her, and she says, “No. Not yet. Wait.”

  So, handed that reprieve, I withdraw again to the relative safety of the Ace of Hearts – or Monday morning, call it what you will. In my mind’s eye, I run back to the kitchen washed in warm yellow sunlight. Charlotte is telling me about the time, when she was ten years old, that she was shot with a BB gun, her brother’s Red Ryder BB gun.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” she’s telling me. “He meant to do it. I still have the scar from where my mother had to dig the BB out of my ankle with tweezers and a sewing needle. It’s very small, but it’s a scar all the same.”

  “Is that what it felt like, like being hit with a BB?”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head and gazing down into her coffee cup. “It didn’t. But when I think about the two things, it seems like there’s a link between them, all these years apart. Like, somehow, this thing was an echo of the day he shot me with the BB gun.”

  “A meaningful coincidence,” I suggest. “A sort of synchronicity.”

  “Maybe,” Charlotte says. “But maybe not.” She looks out the window again. From the kitchen, you can see the three oaks and her flower bed and the land running down to the rocks and the churning sea. “It’s been an awfully long time since I read Jung. My memory’s rusty. And, anyway, maybe it’s not a coincidence. It could be something else. Just an echo.”

  “I don’t understand, Charlotte. I really don’t think I know what you mean.”

  “Never mind,” she says, not taking her eyes off the window. “Whatever I do or don’t mean, it isn’t important.”

  The warm yellow light from the sun, the colorless light from a color television. A purplish sky fading towards the light of false dawn. The complete absence of light from the hole punched into her body by something that wasn’t a BB. Something that also wasn’t a shadow.

  “What scares me most,” she says (and I could draw this particular card from anywhere in the deck), “is that it didn’t come back out the other side. So, it must still be lodged in there, in me.”

  I was watching when she was hit. I saw when she fell. I’m coming to that.

  “Writers made up stories about lost worlds” she says again, after she’s flinched, after I’ve pulled my hand back from the brink. “They did it because we were afraid of having found all there was to find. Accurate maps became more disturbing, at least unconsciously, than the idea of sailing off the edge of a flat world.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the book.”

  “Maybe that’s why you can’t finish it.”

  “Maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Probably,” she says, without the least bit of anger or impatience in her voice.

  I roll over, turning my back on Charlotte and the silent television. Turning my back on what cannot be heard and doesn’t want to be acknowledged. The sheets are damp with sweat, and there’s the stink of ozone that’s not quite the stink of ozone. The acrid smell that always follows her now, wherever she goes. No. That isn’t true. The smell doesn’t follow her, it comes from her. She radiates the stink that is almost, but not quite, the stink of ozone.

  “Does Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland count?” she asks me, even though I’ve said I don’t want to talk about the goddamned book. I’m sure that she heard me, and I don’t answer her.

  Better not to linger too long on Thursday night.

  Better if I return, instead, to Monday morning. Only Monday morning. Which I have carelessly, randomly, designated here as the Ace of Hearts, and hearts are cups, so Monday morning is the Ace of Cups. In four days more, Charlotte will ask me about Alice, and though I won’t respond to the question (at least not aloud), I will recall that Lewis Carroll considered the Queen of Hearts – who rules over the Ace and is also the Queen of Cups – I will recollect that Lewis Carroll considered her the embodiment of a certain type of passion. That passion, he said, which is ungovernable, but which exists as an aimless, unseeing, furious thing. And he said, also, that the Queen of Cups, the Queen of Hearts, is not to be confused with the Red Queen, whom he named another brand of passion altogether.

  Monday morning in the kitchen.

  “My brother always claimed he was shooting at a blue jay and missed. He said he was aiming for the bird, and hit me. He said the sun was in his eyes.”

  “Did he make a habit of shooting songbirds?”

  “Birds and squirrels,” she says. “Once he shot a neighbor’s cat, right between the eyes.” And Charlotte presses the tip of an index finger to the spot between her brows. “The cat had to be taken to a vet to get the BB out, and my mom had to pay the bill. Of course, he said he wasn’t shooting at the cat. He was shooting at a sparrow and missed.”

  “What a little bastard,” I say.

  “He was just a kid, only a year older than I was. Kids don’t mean to be cruel, Em, they just are sometimes. From our perspectives, they appear cruel. They exist outside the boundaries of adult conceits of morality. Anyway, after the cat, my dad took the BB gun away from him. So, after that, he always kind of hated cats.”

  But here I am neglecting Wednesday, overlooking Wednesday, even though I went to the trouble of drawing a card for it. And it occurs to me now I didn’t even draw one for Tuesday. Or Friday, for that matter. It occurs to me that I’m becoming lost in
this ungainly metaphor, that the tail is wagging the dog. But Wednesday was of consequence. More so than was Thursday night, with its mute TV and the Seven of Diamonds and Charlotte shying away from my touch.

  The Seven of Clubs. Wednesday, or the Seven of Pentacles, seen another way round. Charlotte, wrapped in her bathrobe, comes downstairs after taking a hot shower, and she finds me reading Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps, the book lying lewdly open in my lap. I quickly close it, feeling like I’m a teenager again, and my mother’s just barged into my room to find me masturbating to the Hustler centerfold. Yes, your daughter is a lesbian, and yes, your girlfriend is reading quantum theory behind your back.

  Charlotte stares at me awhile, staring silently, and then she stares at the thick volume lying on the coffee table, Principles of Physical Cosmology. She sits down on the floor, not far from the sofa. Her hair is dripping, spattering the hardwood.

  “I don’t believe you’re going to find anything in there,” she says, meaning the books.

  “I just thought…” I begin, but let the sentence die unfinished, because I’m not at all sure what I was thinking. Only that I’ve always turned to books for solace.

  And here, on the afternoon of the Seven of Pentacles, this Wednesday weighted with those seven visionary chalices, she tells me what happened in the shower. How she stood in the steaming spray watching the water rolling down her breasts and across her stomach and up her buttocks before falling into the hole in her side. Not in defiance of gravity, but in perfect accord with gravity. She hardly speaks above a whisper. I sit quietly listening, wishing that I could suppose she’d only lost her mind. Recourse to wishful thinking, the seven visionary chalices of the Seven of Pentacles, of the Seven of Clubs, or Wednesday. Running away to hide in the comfort of insanity, or the authority of books, or the delusion of lost worlds.