The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “When does this end?” she asks, asking the girl or herself or no one at all. “Where does it end?”

  “Take my hand,” the girl replies and reaches out to Ann, a bridge spanning the rill and time and spanning all these endless possibilities. “Take my hand and come back over. Just step across and stand with me.”

  “No,” Ann hears herself say, though it isn’t at all what she wanted to say or what she meant to say. “No, I can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

  And the air around her reeks of hay and sawdust, human filth and beer and cigarette smoke, and the sideshow barker is howling his line of ballyhoo to all the rubes who’ve paid their two-bits to get a seat under the tent. All the yokels and hayseeds who have come to point and whisper and laugh and gawk at the figure cowering inside the cage.

  “Them bars there, they are solid carbon steel, mind you,” the barker informs them. “Manufactured special for us by the same Pittsburgh firm that supplies prison bars to Alcatraz. Ain’t nothing else known to man strong enough to contain her, and if not for those iron bars, well…rest assured, my good people, we have not in the least exaggerated the threat she poses to life and limb, in the absence of such precautions.”

  Inside the cage, Ann squats in a corner, staring out at all the faces staring in. Only she has not been Ann Darrow in years – just ask the barker or the garish canvas flaps rattling in the chilly breeze of an Indiana autumn evening. She is the Ape Woman of Sumatra, captured at great personal risk by intrepid explorers and hauled out into the incandescent light of the Twentieth Century. She is naked, except for the moth-eaten scraps of buffalo and bear pelts they have given her to wear. Every inch of exposed skin is smeared with dirt and offal and whatever other filth has accumulated in her cage since it was last mucked out. Her snarled and matted hair hangs in her face, and there’s nothing the least bit human in the guttural serenade of growls and hoots and yaps that escapes her lips.

  The barker slams his walking cane against the iron bars, and she throws her head back and howls. A woman in the front row faints and has to be carried outside.

  “She was the queen and the goddess of the strange world she knew,” bellows the barker, “but now she comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Learned men at colleges – forsaking the words of the Good Book – proclaim that we are all descended from monkeys. And, I’ll tell you, seeing this wretched bitch, I am almost tempted to believe them, and also to suspect that in dark and far-flung corners of the globe there exist to this day beings still more simian than human, lower even than your ordinary niggers, hottentots, negritos, and lowly African pygmies.”

  Ann Darrow stands on the muddy bank of the red stream, and the girl from the ruined and vine-draped jewelry shop holds out her hand, the brown-skinned girl who has somehow found her way into the most secret, tortured recesses of Ann’s consciousness.

  “The world is still here,” the girl says, “only waiting for you to return.”

  “I have heard another tale of her origin,” the barker confides. “But I must warn you, it is not fit for the faint of heart or the ears of decent Christian women.”

  There is a long pause, while two or three of the women rise from their folding chairs and hurriedly leave the tent. The barker tugs at his pink suspenders and grins an enormous, satisfied grin, then glances into the cage.

  “As I was saying,” he continues, “there is another story. The Chinaman who sold me this pitiful oddity of human devolution said that its mother was born of French aristocracy, the lone survivor of a calamitous shipwreck, cast ashore on black volcanic sands. There, in the hideous misery and perdition of that Sumatran wilderness, the poor woman was defiled by some lustful species of jungle imp, though whether it were chimp or baboon I cannot say.”

  There is a collective gasp from the men and women inside the tent, and the barker rattles the bars again, eliciting another irate howl from its occupant.

  “And here before you is the foul spawn of that unnatural union of anthropoid and womankind. The aged Celestial confided to me that the mother expired shortly after giving birth, God rest her immortal soul. Her death was a mercy, I should think, as she would have lived always in shame and horror at having borne into the world this shameful, misbegotten progeny.”

  “Take my hand,” the girl says, reaching into the iron cage. “You do not have to stay here. Take my hand, Golden Mother, and I will help you find the path.”

  There below the hairy black tumulus, the great slumbering titan belching forth the headwaters of all the earth’s rivers, Ann Darrow takes a single hesitant step into the red stream. This is the most perilous part of the journey, she thinks, reaching to accept the girl’s outstretched hand. It wants me, this torrent, and if I am not careful, it will pull me down and drown me for my trespasses.

  “It’s only a little ways more,” the girl tells her and smiles. “Just step across to me.”

  The barker raps his silver-handled walking cane sharply against the bars of the cage, so that Ann remembers where she is and when, and doing so, forgets herself again. For the benefit of all those licentious, ogling eyes, all those slack jaws that have paid precious quarters to be shocked and titillated, she bites the head off a live hen, and when she has eaten her fill of the bird, she spreads her thighs and masturbates for the delight of her audience with filthy, bloodstained fingers.

  Elsewhen, she takes another step towards the girl, and the softly gurgling stream wraps itself greedily about her calves. Her feet sink deeply into the slimy bottom, and the sinuous, clammy bodies of conger eels and salamanders wriggle between her ankles and twine themselves about her legs. She cannot reach the girl, and the opposite bank may as well be a thousand miles away.

  In a smoke-filled screening room, Ann Darrow sits beside Carl Denham while the footage he shot on the island almost a year ago flickers across the screen at twenty-four frames per second. They are not alone, the room half-filled with low-level studio men from RKO and Paramount and Universal and a couple of would-be financiers lured here by the Hollywood rumor mill. Ann watches the images revealed in grainy shades of grey, in overexposed whites and underexposed smudges of black.

  “What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?” someone asks, impatiently.

  “We shot this stuff from the top of the wall, once Englehorn’s men had managed to frighten away all the goddamn tar babies. Just wait. It’s coming.”

  “Denham, we’ve already been sitting here half an hour. This shit’s pretty underwhelming, you ask me. You’re better off sticking to the safari pictures.”

  “It’s coming,” Denham insists and chomps anxiously at the stem of his pipe.

  And Ann knows he’s right, that it’s coming, because this is not the first time she’s seen the footage. Up there on the screen, the eye of the camera looks out over the jungle canopy, and it always reminds her of Gustave Doré’s visions of Eden from her mother’s copy of Paradise Lost, or the illustrations of lush Pre-Adamite landscapes from a geology book she once perused in the New York Public Library.

  “Honestly, Mr. Denham,” the man from RKO sighs. “I’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes – ”

  “There,” Denham says, pointing at the screen. “There it is. Right fucking there. Do you see it?”

  And the studio men and the would-be financiers fall silent as the beast’s head and shoulders emerge from the tangle of vines and orchid-encrusted branches and wide palm fronds. It stops and turns its mammoth head towards the camera, glaring hatefully up at the wall and directly into the smoke-filled room, across a million years and nine thousand miles. There is a dreadful, unexpected intelligence in those dark eyes as the creature tries to comprehend the purpose of the weird, pale men and their hand-crank contraption perched there on the wall above it. Its lips fold back, baring gigantic canines, eyeteeth longer than a grown man’s hand, and there is a low, rumbling sound, then a screeching sort of yell, before the thing the natives called Kong turns and vanishes back into the forest. />
  “Great god,” the Universal man whispers.

  “Yes, gentlemen,” says Denham, sounding very pleased with himself and no longer the least bit anxious, certain that he has them all right where he wants them. “That’s just exactly what those tar babies think. They worship it and offer up human sacrifices. Why, they wanted Ann here. Offered us six of their women so she could become the bride of Kong. And there’s our story, gentlemen.”

  “Great god,” the Universal man says again, louder than before.

  “But an expedition like this costs money,” Denham tells them, getting down to brass tacks as the reel ends and the lights come up. “I mean to make a picture the whole damn world’s gonna pay to see, and I can’t do that without committed backers.”

  “Excuse me,” Ann says, rising from her seat, feeling sick and dizzy and wanting to be away from these men and all their talk of profit and spectacle, wanting to drive the sight of the ape from her mind, once and for all.

  “I’m fine, really,” she tells them. “I just need some fresh air.”

  On the far side of the stream, the brown girl urges her forward; no more than twenty feet left to go and Ann will have reached the other side.

  “You’re waking up,” the girl says. “You’re almost there. Give me your hand.”

  I’m only going over Jordan

  I’m only going over home…

  And the moments flash and glimmer as the dream breaks apart around her, and the barker rattles the iron bars of a stinking cage, and her empty stomach rumbles as she watches men and women bending over their plates in a lunch room, and she sits on a bench in an alcove on the third floor of the American Museum of Natural History. Crossing the red stream, Ann Darrow hemorrhages time and possibility, all these seconds and hours and days vomited forth like a bellyful of tainted meals. She shuts her eyes and takes another step, sinking even deeper in the mud, the blood risen now as high as her waist. Here is the morning they brought her down from the Empire State Building, and the morning she wakes in her nest on Skull Mountain, and the night she watched Jack Driscoll devoured well within sight of the archaic gates. Here’s the Bowery tenement, and here the screening room, and here a fallen Manhattan, crumbling and lost in the storm-tossed gulf of eons, set adrift no differently than she has set herself adrift. Every moment, all at once, each as real as every other; never mind the contradictions; each moment damned and equally inevitable, all following from a stolen apple and the man who paid the Greek a dollar to look the other way.

  The world is a steamroller.

  Once I built a railroad; now it’s done.

  She stands alone in the seaward lee of the great wall and knows that its gates have been forever shut against her and all the daughters of men yet to come. This hallowed, living wall of human bone and sinew erected to protect what scrap of Paradise lies inside, not the dissolute, iniquitous world of men sprawling beyond its borders. Winged Cherubim stand guard on either side, and in their leonine forepaws they grasp flaming swords forged in unknown furnaces before the coming of the World, fiery brands that reach all the way to the sky and about which spin the hearts of newborn hurricanes. The molten eyes of the Cherubim watch her every move, and their indifferent minds know her every secret thought, these dispassionate servants of the vengeful god of her father and her mother. Neither tears nor all her words will ever wring mercy from these sentinels, for they know precisely what she is, and they know her crimes.

  I am she who cries out,

  and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.

  The starving, ragged woman who stole an apple. Starving in body and in mind, starving in spirit, if so base a thing as she can be said to possess a soul. Starving, and ragged in all ways.

  I am the members of my mother.

  I am the barren one

  and many are her sons.

  I am she whose wedding is great,

  and I have not taken a husband.

  And as is the way of all exiles, she cannot kill hope that her exile will one day end. Even the withering gaze of the Cherubim cannot kill that hope, and so hope is the cruelest reward.

  Brother, can you spare a dime?

  “Take my hand,” the girl says, and Ann Darrow feels herself grown weightless and buoyed from that foul brook, hauled free of the morass of her own nightmares and regret onto a clean shore of verdant mosses and zoysiagrass, bamboo and reeds, and the girl leans down and kisses her gently on the forehead. The girl smells like sweat and nutmeg and the pungent yellow pigment dabbed across her cheeks. The girl is salvation.

  “You have come home to us, Golden Mother,” she says, and there are tears in her eyes.

  “You don’t see,” Ann whispers, the words slipping out across her tongue and teeth and lips like her own ghost’s death rattle. If the jungle air were not so still and heavy, not so turgid with the smells of living and dying, decay and birth and conception, she’s sure it would lift her as easily as it might a stray feather and carry her away. She lies very still, her head cradled in the girl’s lap, and the stream flowing past them is only water and the random detritus of any forest stream.

  “The world blinds those who cannot close their eyes,” the girl tells her. “You were not always a god and have come here from some outer, dissolute world, so it may be you were never taught how to travel that path and not become lost in All-At-Once time.”

  Ann Darrow digs her fingers into the soft, damp earth, driving them into the loam of the jungle floor, holding on and still expecting this scene to shift, to unfurl, to send her tumbling pell-mell and head over heels into some other now, some other where.

  And sometime later, when she’s strong enough to stand again, and the sickening vertiginous sensation of fluidity has at last begun to ebb, the girl helps Ann to her feet, and together they follow the narrow dirt trail leading back up this long ravine to the temple. Like Ann, the girl is naked save a leather breechcloth tied about her waist. They walk together beneath the sagging boughs of trees that must have been old before Ann’s great-great grandmothers were born, and here and there is ample evidence of the civilization that ruled the island in some murky, immemorial past – glimpses of great stone idols worn away by time and rain and the humid air, disintegrating walls and archways leaning at such precarious angles Ann cannot fathom why they have not yet succumbed to gravity. Crumbling bas-reliefs depicting the loathsome gods and demons and the bizarre reptilian denizens of this place. As they draw nearer to the temple, the ruins become somewhat more intact, though even here the splayed roots of the trees are slowly forcing the masonry apart. The roots put Ann in mind of the tentacles of gargantuan octopuses or cuttlefish, and that is how she envisions the spirit of the jungles and marshes fanning out around this ridge – grey tentacles advancing inch by inch, year by year, inexorably reclaiming what has been theirs all along.

  As she and the girl begin to climb the steep, crooked steps leading up from the deep ravine – stones smoothed by untold generations of footsteps – Ann stops to catch her breath and asks the brown girl how she knew where to look, how it was she found her at the stream. But the girl only stares at her, confused and uncomprehending, and then she frowns and shakes her head and says something in the native tongue. In Anne’s long years on the island, since the Venture deserted her and sailed away with what remained of the dead ape, she has never learned more than a few words of that language, and she has never tried to teach this girl, nor any of her people, English. The girl looks back the way they’ve come; she presses the fingers of her left hand against her breast, above her heart, then uses the same hand to motion towards Ann.

  Life is just a bowl of cherries.

  Don’t take it serious; it’s too mysterious.

  By sunset, Ann has taken her place on the rough-hewn throne carved from beds of coral limestone thrust up from the seafloor in the throes of the island’s cataclysmic genesis. As night begins to gather once again, torches are lit, and the people come bearing sweet-smelling baskets of flowers and fruit, fish
and the roasted flesh of gulls and rats and crocodiles. They lay multicolored garlands and strings of pearls at her feet, a necklace of ankylosaur teeth, rodent claws, and monkey vertebrae, and she is only the Golden Mother once again. They bow and genuflect, and the tropical night rings out with joyous songs she cannot understand. The men and woman decorate their bodies with yellow paint in an effort to emulate Ann’s blonde hair, and a sort of pantomime is acted out for her benefit, as it is once every month, on the night of the new moon. She does not need to understand their words to grasp its meaning – the coming of the Venture from somewhere far away, Ann offered up as the bride of a god, her marriage and the death of Kong, and the obligatory ascent of the Golden Mother from a hellish underworld to preside in his stead. She who steals a god’s heart must herself become a god.

  The end of one myth and the beginning of another, the turning of a page. I am not lost, Ann thinks. I am right here, right now – here and now where, surely, I must belong, and she watches the glowing bonfire embers rising up to meet the dark sky. She knows she will see that terrible black hill again, the hill that is not a hill and its fetid crimson river, but she knows, too, that there will always be a road back from her dreams, from that All-At-Once tapestry of possibility and penitence. In her dreams, she will be lost and wander those treacherous, deceitful paths of Might-Have-Been, and always she will wake and find herself once more.

  Notes