Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Who is Coru?”

  “Ignorant Sun. You dumb kid.” There was a brief dance, flashes of knife-light, a good-natured laugh. Someone else said:

  “Why does he read a Khaati poet?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Why, Tatian?”

  “Why do you read poetry?”

  “Why do you want Bu?”

  “For my father,” he said through the ice-floe in his throat. There was silence. His head thudded back on the pavement; he closed his eyes, seeing stars again. “For my father,” he whispered. Then the silence became empty; he opened his eyes and saw no one.

  He tried to write a poem about that: about the dancing suns and the wild stars and the hard, cold hand of the world against the back of his head. But the memories kept intruding between him and the words. I saw the dead-end of time, he thought. I nearly died. On an empty street in a Khaati neighborhood. Died of not being able to speak. I would have been a body and a stack of poetry. They would have put the body in the ground and the poetry in the garbage. That’s it. End. Finis. Poof. He couldn’t sit still, he was too aware of his body, the amazing, continuous beating of his heart despite all odds against it. I should be able to write this, he thought. But he couldn’t.

  Poet, poet.

  Give it up, he thought the next morning. You don’t have to get Bu. You don’t have to kill your father.

  But that evening, as he walked home from a bar, a woman stepped out of a doorway and beckoned to him. She was back-lit, a sketch of a woman, a seduction of familiar lines: long, long hair, no face, a lithe body stylized as a cave drawing, to be recognized until the end of time. She lifted a slender hand; rings flashed. He turned mid-step, followed her. He heard the silken whisper of the traditional tight-fitting sheath that covered her from throat to ankle. Birds flew across it, spiraled around her body to hide within her hair. When she finally turned, he was startled at how old she was.

  She smiled slightly, young-old, knowing. They were in a small room behind a restaurant; he smelled spices, heard plates clatter, meat sizzling. Her face was very delicate, paper-pale, a country of small, secret roads. Her eyes were outlined in black, her hollowed cheeks flushed with pink powder. She smelled of ginger cigarettes and the perfume Aika wore. The perfume and her graceful, tapering fingers confused him. She was Aika, she was not Aika. She was young, she was old. Birds circled her. Her hair was dead-white, her eyes were beginning to sink a little into her head. Her body looked supple as a child’s. He wanted her, he did not.

  The smile-lines deepened under her eyes, beside her mouth. “Do you know,” she asked him, “how much death costs?”

  “No.” He had to say it twice before he could hear himself. “No.”

  “It is not cheap.”

  “No,” he agreed, though privately he considered death the cheapest thing in the universe. Hell, it was free. It handed itself out to anybody, anywhere. He cleared his throat again. “How much—” He thought of his meager salaries and shook his head. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. My father will pay. There’s nothing else he wants to buy.”

  “He wants it? Or you want it for him?”

  He stared at her, then realized what she was asking. “Do I want to murder my father, you mean? No, not really. Do you want me to bring you a note from him?” He felt himself trembling and wished he could sit. But it was like sitting in front of a goddess. The goddess pulled a battered chair out from the table and gestured. She sat across from him and lit a cigarette. She narrowed her eyes, at her smoke, or at something she saw in the smoke. She no longer smiled.

  “This is business,” she said. Her voice was low, slightly grainy from the smoke; if he closed his eyes she would be the faceless woman in the doorway, eternally young, beckoning with her voice.

  “Would they have killed me?” he asked abruptly. She looked at him, a face without an answer anywhere in it.

  “Khaati have customs, as you do. We, perhaps, are more practical. You regard death as an end. We see it as a doorway. If someone wishes to enter that doorway, we are not so reluctant, so terrified to let them. You Tatians do anything to avoid entering that doorway. You see only a wall. So. Things that are illegal for you may be overlooked for us. As long as we keep certain rules. As long as we do not provide death for the wrong reason. Once that happens, once we have that reputation, of selling death for the wrong reason, we will be subject to your rules. We must be very careful. Especially of Tatians. They do not buy death for good reasons. I must know that you are buying death for a good reason. Your father is rich?”

  He nodded, mute.

  “You live among us, not among wealthy Tatians. You eat our food, read our poets. Perhaps your father will not share his wealth with you now. If he dies you will be very rich.”

  He blinked. “Not very rich. Rich.”

  “Then you will no longer have to live among the poor, eating our food, listening to our music.”

  He shrugged, not answering. He smelled the perfume again, but he did not want the woman who said those things. She only wanted to be safe; she could never understand. He said finally, “I chose to live here. I could kill my father and be rich, yes. But then I would not have my father.” He was silent again, while she watched him. His mouth shook; he lifted his hand, hid it. “He is dying, anyway.”

  “That can be cured by Tatian ways. They always want to cure the dying.”

  “And they always die. This can’t be cured. It’s a recent, very rare virus. He will die in pain.”

  She said, “Ah,” very softly.

  “So his doctor told him about the—About death. Khaati death. And he asked me to get it for him. He’ll pay. Whatever you ask, he’ll pay. If you want to get rich yourself.”

  Something flickered in her eyes; she smiled fully then, showing blackened, broken teeth. “Money cannot buy death from me.”

  He drew breath, suddenly bewildered, depressed. “He’ll die anyway,” he said, more to himself than to her. “I don’t have to do this. But he asked me to. He asked me. I can’t remember the last time he asked me for anything. He always tried to give me things. A job, a trip, my own private air-shuttle. He never asked me before for anything that I might be able to give him. And now he asks this. So.” He looked at her wearily. “It’s not important how much.”

  Her terrible smile had gone; she watched him from behind her smoke. She put out her cigarette slowly, in an ashtray full of butts. She was looking beyond him again, her face thoughtful, absent; looking at her past, he realized, as he saw the ghost of her youth fly out of her face.

  “I gave Bu to my mother,” she said softly. “You are Tatian and I tell you that. A moment of peace, a dream, a doorway—that is what you will buy from me for your father. Not a wall, a doorway. You are Tatian, but you have found your way to me. You may have what you want.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “For my price.”

  “What is your price?” She told him.

  He flew north three days later, carrying a very old, very expensive bottle of brandy for his father. His father met his flight. He looked shrunken, and very tired, though he moved and spoke as stolidly as always. His vigor required more effort; his face glistened constantly with a sheen of sweat.

  “I brought you brandy,” Kel said when they were safely in the apartment.

  “Thanks,” his father said, and Kel gave him the box. He seemed to sense something, holding it. His eyes went to Kel abruptly, wide, and with more expression in them than Kel had seen in a long time. He lifted the bottle out of the box; both hands closed around it. He sighed, his eyes closing, opening again, and Kel’s throat burned at the relief in them. “Thanks, Son.”

  “You can take a few days to drink it. It won’t make you drunk right away.”

  “It’s all right,” his father said. “This place is private as a tomb. You can say what you want.”

  “They just—” He stopped again, rubbing his eyes. “I’m used to talking about it that way. They said you’ll have
three or four days free of pain. Then you go through the doorway.”

  “Through the doorway.”

  “That’s what they say. It’s not a wall but a doorway. Not an end. Just a path through to someplace else.”

  His father grunted. “They say where?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. He put his arm around Kel’s shoulders. “I never read any of your poetry. Send me some.”

  “I will. When—how long—”

  “Dr. Crena says I’ll need to go into the hospital soon. He says I won’t come back out. I’d rather not go in.”

  “So—” He was breathing shallowly, not finding air. “So—”

  “So you should go back home.”

  “No.” He drew breath with his mouth open, finally found air. “You shouldn’t drink this alone. I want to stay with you.”

  “You do?”

  “Keep you company. Is that all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” his father sighed. Kel moved closer to him, just to feel his big, sagging body, his breathing, his hold. “I didn’t want to ask you. I’d never have asked. I’ve done a lot in my life, but I never cared much for the thought of dying alone.” Kel’s face turned, burrowed against his shoulder a moment. Then he straightened, thinking: a doorway. That’s all it is, a doorway. “One thing I learned about life,” his father added, patting him awkwardly. “It wins all the arguments. Sit down, I’ll get a couple of glasses.” He loosed Kel, turned to a cupboard. “You didn’t say what this is costing me.”

  “Not much,” Kel said. His father turned to look at him then, with the direct, opaque look that he used like a microscope to examine things he was given and wasn’t sure he liked. Kel met his gaze, shrouding himself with visions of rain forests, white tigers, old women with long white hair and beckoning hands. When he was sure of his voice, sure of tranquillity, he continued, “What do you care, anyway? You’re opening the door and leaving me the rest. Unless you’ve written me out of your will. What kind of poet am I going to be, surrounded by all this?”

  “Ah.” His father waved a less costly bottle of brandy, reassured. “You’ll get used to it.” He handed Kel the bottle and a glass. He touched Kel’s glass very gently with the bottle Kel had brought. “Cheers.”

  Two weeks later, Kel sat on a shuttle heading east. A book of Coru’s poems lay open in his hands. But he no longer had to read it. He was about to travel into those words: into Coru’s land of dusty roads and green rivers, children hungry for rice, for souls.

  Find Aika, the old woman had said. Find Aika and bring her back. For your father I open the door. For Aika I close it. She is my daughter. Bring her back.

  That is my price.

  He waited, his blood singing in terror, to enter Aika’s land, where the children cried as they had never cried in Coru’s time, and where poems awaited him, and everywhere every door was open.

  What Inspires Me

  Guest of Honor Speech at WisCon 28, 2004

  A friend asked me recently, “What inspires you to write?”

  She is a writer herself, so I knew she wasn’t asking me, “Where do you get your ideas?” She would know that ideas are as random as shooting stars; they come while you’re cleaning the bathtub, or watching Four Weddings and a Funeral for the ninth time, or in the morning when the last bit of your dream is fraying away, just before you open your eyes. You see it, then, what you’ve been searching for all these weeks or months, clear as day; you look at it and think, “Oh. Yeah,” and open your eyes. That wasn’t what she was asking. And that was why I couldn’t answer; I could only sit and stare at her with my mouth hanging gracelessly open, because all the answers that sprang immediately to mind answered the question she hadn’t asked.

  Such as, well, money. Money is an enormous and entirely respectable source of inspiration when writing is your sole means of support. I did the math recently and was astonished. I’ve been writing for forty-two years, since I sat down one morning when I was fourteen and wrote a thirty-page fairy tale. I sold my first novel when I was twenty-three, so I’ve been published for thirty-three years. Which means I’ve been supporting myself by writing for over three decades. My agent swears that I’m most inspired when I’m broke. As when, during one financially dicey period, the cesspool of the 130-year-old house I had bought in the Catskills gave up the ghost one spring on the first day of May. It is a day indelibly etched in memory, because I had a guest with whom I was trying to kindle the fires of romance, my cesspool was backing into my bathtub, and I remembered then that my plumber and his wife, who threw a Kentucky Derby party every year, and everyone who worked for him would be three sheets to the wind by the time the horses galloped out of the starting gate.

  After the race was won and my guest had gone home, and I finally got someone interested in my problem, I had something else to worry about. My next-door neighbor, the minister for the elegant stone Dutch Reform church across the street, had walked over a mossy patch of my back lawn when I moved in, and told me that was where my cesspool was. I expressed mild interest and then forgot about it. Before that I’d lived for a quarter of a century in California, where nothing much was older than the Gold Rush. I understood apartments with white walls and shag carpets, or apartments that had done a little dance with the 1906 earthquake and refused to fall down. I had never needed to know what a cesspool was, or how it might affect my life. That morning I stood in the back yard and watched half a dozen hefty young guys unbury my cesspool, and I wondered uneasily how personal was this going to be, exactly? Would they, for instance, see my tampons floating around in the murk? What they unearthed first caused them all a great deal of interest. It was the passenger door to an ancient pickup truck somebody had laid down to cap the cesspool. There seemed to be a ritual involved here: the men could not lay the door aside until they had first figured out the make and model of the pickup truck. I waited; they sorted it out to their satisfaction, and moved it to uncover the source of my problem.

  To my surprise, I saw a very neatly constructed little fieldstone well, a perfect circle of stones running down into the earth, holding, to my relief, what seemed nothing less innocuous than the average mud-puddle. It was a gorgeous day in early spring, with lots of blue sky and budding leaves, and a good strong, sweet wind that probably saved the day. A shovel, inserted into the puddle, only went down a few inches. The well was pronounced dead, and was buried again. Being, as I said, temporarily out of funds, I borrowed money from my mother and repaid her a couple of months later for my new system with what was probably the delivery payment for The Book of Atrix.

  A steady accumulation of detail over a length of time is also a good source of ideas. For instance: music. I had followed it across country: friends who had played in a band in and around San Francisco also moved to the Catskills and played there in homespun places called the T-Bar, the Pine Hill Arms, Larry’s Place. I sat on maple barstools drinking whatever passed for white wine, and thought about all the variations on the theme of relationships a band and its groupies go through in time. Outside, a snow squall might be covering the country road, making the night seem very dark and very old. Left to my own devices, I was more inclined to blunder my way through Bach and Chopin on the piano. I learned soon that if you tossed a stone in pretty much any direction in those small mountain villages, you would hit a piano player. Or an aging fiddle-player, keeping up the traditional tunes of the region. A friend down the road played all of those things—Bach, rock, and fiddle. He also played recorders and from him I learned how much fun it is to play music with someone else. We played recorder and keyboard sonatas by Handel and Telemann. I took a fiddle class briefly, and met the wife of a missionary of some brand of faith I never quite figured out. She and her husband had traveled widely in Eastern Europe; she had once danced in a nightclub with a Russian general; she gave me a piece of the Berlin wall for a wedding present. We played sonatas of violin and piano, and actually performed, during one fiercely hot summer day when my fingers felt like sausag
es on the keys, for the residents of the village retirement home. Which had once been the country home of the railroad baron Jay Gould’s daughter. Who had built the elegant Dutch Reform church with the Tiffany windows next door in hope that the gesture would somehow ease her father’s way into heaven. Whose pulpit was graced, each Sunday, by the minister who had told me where to find my cesspool if I ever needed it. Who, later, scandalized the village by having an affair with—well, never mind. Music. I don’t know if the residents of the rest home were impressed by our performance or not, but I was certainly grateful when it was over.

  In a crying need to get out of those mountains for a bit, I registered for a music class offered at Julliard to the community at large. To this day I wonder if Julliard realized that the Catskills was part of its local community. The subject was World Music, which I didn’t know much about. It was held every Thursday evening from seven to nine, from late September to early December. To get to it, I would drive for an hour and a quarter out of the Catskills, across the Hudson River, to another tiny village called Rhinecliff, which boasted a little train station with two tracks. I would board an Amtrak train there. After an hour and forty minutes, the train would pull into Grand Central Station, and I would step into an entirely different planet. The huge buildings, the noise, the smells, the languages, the music, as varied as the languages, offered at every street corner were mind-boggling, intoxicating. By day, I explored the city; in the evening I sat in a classroom listening to weird instruments, exotic music. Afterwards, I would reverse the journey, moving farther and farther out of the enormous, intense hothouse of civilization until the roads became narrow and solitary, mountains hid the river and the city lights, and I reached the strange point in my drive home where I felt that I had somehow traveled so far that I had left the real world, real time behind. I had passed into the realm of Sleepy Hollow, the Otherworld, which was just a little farther than anyone should go.