*
Budapest is cold. Budapest is bright. He hadn’t expected the brightness. Bright, clear winter days, nights violently lit. He sits in his rented flat on the banks of the Beautiful Blue Danube and wonders if he might have better luck with a cabin in the woods. No one knows him here. Either way he’s just as alone. But really, that’s not true at all.
He sits on the balcony with the shortwave; he sits on the floor, on the narrow bed; he curls himself around it as he’d seen her do, protective. Except for some clothes and toiletries, it’s all he’s brought with him. All he has of her. No photos—but she is everywhere. He doesn’t need any.
She is everywhere, but here in his arms is still the majority of her. The pulsing little secret at the heart of her life.
Achtung. Achtung. Another woman’s voice—a different woman. He closes his eyes against the lights. Attention: You won’t find her here. Not on this station, not in this ether. You could blame the sunspot cycles, the alignment of satellites, the weather, but what it comes down to is that she’s gone.
Der Zwei. Der Drei. Der Ende.
Two days later he’s on a plane again, pushing north, voices dancing in the air all around him.
*
Station change. Little girl’s voice, repeating numbers like she’s not sure of them, like she’s asking a question. Is this one right? How about this one? Station change. Single horn blare, piercing, painful; instead of turning it off he turns it up and presses his ear against the little speakers. Moscow is colder than Budapest had been, and Moscow is just as bright. As he moves north, it seems that there is less day and more brightness. Moscow isn’t right either. He only stays there for three days and pushes north again. Saint Petersburg is full of night and more full of light than any city he’s yet been in, and he cowers in the corner of his sterile hotel room, radio to his ear, listening so hard that he doesn’t entirely feel like he’s listening with his ears anymore—he’s listening with his skin, his cells, the double-helix of his DNA vibrating with sound.
He doesn’t even know what he’s listening for. He doesn’t know how he’d recognize it if he heard it. He’s going on faith. If there’s a line between faith and desperation, it’s a thin one.
*
It’s strange to marry someone and have no idea what they do for a living. Except he knew, or he suspected, and in either case there had been the cover story, the open-air story, and he knew that one, so introducing her at parties had never been awkward. What had been awkward were the long nights alone, the times when she’d vanish for days with no word, the flat, gray afternoons sitting in the silent living room and wondering if this time might be the time when she didn’t come back.
After all that, cancer had seemed like such a mundane way to go. It hadn’t seemed worthy of her.
So there had been denial, and now denial looks like a thin man with thin hair, lost in a cold-lit night that doesn’t even end with the rising of the sun, listening to the chimes and whispers and mad gibbering that aren’t meant for him, waiting for the one message that will be.
And it will come. Because none of this makes any sense. In the absence of coherence, he waits for revelation.
*
It comes with dawn on Saint Petersburg, like the sun is bringing it. He’s asleep, and at first it feels like a dream, and it sounds like something out of a dream as well: a crackle, a mutter, a great screaming wall of sound exploding out of the tinny little speakers, grinding and clawing its way into the room. He jerks, rolls, sits up with his eyes wide, too shocked to cover his ears. Later he’ll regret it; it’s loud enough to hurt, drilling into his brain with the high frequencies, blunt force trauma with the low. It rises and swirls and falls, like wind, like fire, like the agonized wail of things in pain. Not human things. No human ever made this noise.
He breaks the stasis of the shock and lunges for the radio, twisting the dial and turning it down. But not off. He can’t lose this. It feels closer than he’s yet been, though maybe not to what he wanted. The lights seem fainter and weaker and the shadows in the corners of the room are closing in, putting out their cold fingers and reaching for him. She might be there, in any of them, darkness pouring out of her eyes and mouth.
At the end, her eyes had looked hollow. Like her flesh was already going insubstantial, her bones the only solid things left.
He presses his ear to the moaning thing and listens.
At first there’s nothing. Or rather, there’s something, but it’s more of the same, the rolling screams and mechanical grinding, the sharp twist of feedback. Then, there, under it, flowing beneath the noise like a dark river passing beneath a city. He’s groping for it with his brain, slogging through thick sonic mud and trying to reach it before it slips away again. If she’s trying to reach him, maybe she has to fight to do so. Maybe she has to fight for that message she promised him.
He’s standing in the hall of the old house, staring at the mirror; his eyes are empty pits. Her face is nowhere. There is grinding in the walls.
His face twists with pain; he barely feels it. He’s forcing the sound aside like thick curtains, only these curtains are spiked and razor-edged, and they slash at his hands. He’s forcing his way upward, up stairs that no longer creak but scream in rage every time his foot lands on them. Up, up past the point at which he might have wished he could stop, but what’s carrying him on now is not under his own power.
There’s light coming through the cracks in the attic door. Open it; it pours through into his brain.
Ready? Ready, baby? Here it comes. It snaps inside him like an orgasm, like when she’d wrench them out of him with her mouth and her hands. He is conscious of nothing. At some point he opens his eyes; thin morning light streaming in through the windows. He is curled on the floor, the radio lying to the side.
Shattered.
He gropes for it, breath frozen. Not wanting to believe it, even as some part of him feels a heavy pulse of relief, free, but it all fades quickly, because of what’s under the broken pieces, plastic and wire, scrawled on a torn shred of newspaper.
67.133056 39.666667
“Numbers,” he whispers, and laughs for an hour.
After that, he’s moving again.
*
The light fades, transmutes into a seemingly never-ending twilight. The lights of Saint Petersburg, of Moscow, of Budapest, they all feel very distant now—and they are, but being and feeling are not always the same. He drives out across a pale country that rolls and swells like a gentle sea, and it lulls him. It’s the first thing like peace that he’s felt in weeks. The first thing like quiet, but for the rumble of the truck’s engine. And there are no eyes here.
There is ice, and the road, and the low, low sun.
He watches the numbers roll on the dashboard GPS, edging toward what he wants. The numbers are like voices, drifting down to him from spinning eyes too far above to see, but they’re quiet voices and they only mean to help.
He sees birds, once, a great cloud of them spinning away south over a row of low hills. He watches them—no need to focus too much on such an empty road—their long necks and graceful wings, always pushing up and up, crying to each other. Crying messages. Direction? How do they all know where they should be?
He drives. The snow thickens. Once or twice, he sees low buildings in the distance, but there are no lights and he meets no one. His lips move in the darkening stillness. Old songs like benevolent ghosts.
Have you ever seen a lassie? Go this way. This way.
This is the way. He can feel it pulling at him.
*
At dawn, he passes into the zona without realizing that he’s done so. There are no signs, no markings. The place is not identified on any map that he carries, not on any map in the world. He would assume, if he stopped to consider the matter, that there are people who know why to stay away, and people who do not know why, but the avoidance is common to everyone. There are places in the world that scream wrongness, that warn even the birds awa
y. That carry no light.
Yet, he doesn’t hear the wrongness when he passes into it. It could be nights of sitting with the shortwave pressed against his ear, so much wrong that now he’s deafened to it. It might be none of that. Regardless, what he sees is not wrongness but a vast spread of land, the same as he has everywhere, naked trees and patchy earth blanketed in most places by snow. It’s early winter yet but this far north every winter is a hard winter, and now there may be no break in the snow for many months.
Not that he cares. Not that he plans to wait around to see.
What he does notice, if not the wrongness in the very earth, is the quiet. Deeper quiet than before. He hasn’t seen people in miles, but life grips even in the emptiest places, and there has always been the feeling of life unseen. Small life. Birds and rodents, rabbits, foxes, secret and strange.
Not here. Nothing here.
Buildings on the horizon. All the roads have been icy but now this road is falling to pieces as well, and he bumps and rattles along, fixing his eye on the squat blocks. Beyond, rising into the bloodless sky, towers like the fingers of a giant’s outspread hand.
He leaves the truck in an empty parking lot, steps out into the snow and starts to walk, head cocked, listening. The buildings rise all around him like thicker trees, empty, windows blasted and glassless, torn curtains flapping in the wind. Even with the wind, such total silence—in a world of people it should be impossible. But this is not a world of people. This is a world without people. They’ve left their structures and their signs—words he can’t even pretend to read, though she would naturally have been able to—but the trees have grown up over their streets, up through their walls and floors, and the snow covers everything. He stops in a clearing that might once have been a park—broken swingset poles like dead tree trunks—and turns, head thrown back and eyes closed, listening. He feels no gaze on him.
He sings. It’s a moment or two before he’s really aware that he’s doing it. Have you ever? Have you ever?
This way.
A two-headed bird lands in the snow in front of him, enormous and black, its second head shriveled and half-formed on the hulk of its shoulder. It looks at him for a moment or two with its good eyes—a black gaze with no weight behind it, a ghost-look—opens its mouth, and a long grinding scream fills the dead air.
He knows, without having to see any evidence, that she was here.
He knows he won’t be leaving.
He sits down in the snow. The bird sits down with him. There are other places like this in the world, he thinks. Pacific atolls, Japanese cities, deserts of melted glass. Known and secret. Hungry place, the zona, and what it doesn’t kill with fire it kills with slow poison. It pulls into itself, gathering its children. But it still lets them sing in the dark.
He sings, static and the shriek of steel on steel, the scream of breaking atoms. The bird sings with him. Night and the temperature fall together, and the zona is hospitable. It won’t turn away a weary traveler. And in the shadows, perhaps, she is waiting.
Have you ever? Here.
Now you have.
So Sharp That Blood Must Flow
In the end, the water goes black with the witch’s blood.
Before this happens, the little mermaid understands that a deal is a deal, a bargain a bargain, and there can’t be reneging. But this isn’t reneging, she tells herself as she sinks down, down, down into water so black that in truth it would be difficult to discern witch’s blood within it even had a hundred witches been slaughtered in its depths.
She is not sea foam. That was the first lie.
She is also not alive. That was truth.
Being not alive, she has no need to breathe. This is terribly convenient, given what she needs to do next.
*
Surrounded by a hundred crystal lanterns, a prince dances with his princess. This is iconic, archetypal; many of the people in the assembly sense this on some level and take pleasure in its even perfection. This is the ending of all the stories they have ever been told as children, all the stories they have ever told their children, all the stories their children will tell. The prince marries his princess and they dance and are blissfully happy.
She watches them from the parapet, her eyes burning and her feet cut to ribbons by invisible knives.
This was not her ending. And she sees no reason why she should take it gracefully.
The water is dark and deep below her, and she arcs down into it, her gown fluttering around her. She takes particular care to hit the water at such an angle as to break her neck, and so she sinks before she can dissolve on the little waves.
She dies with purpose. This is a truth she makes.
*
If she were sea foam, she thinks—and perhaps this is after and perhaps it is before or perhaps it is both things simultaneously—she could become the rain and patter down onto his windowpanes, trickle down the glass and watch him inside in his bright warmth. Or in a storm she could come to him riding, or walking, or anywhere unsheltered, and cut down through the air to strike his cheeks. She could fling herself at him and run down his body like sweat, down his face like tears.
She aches with it. It’s worse than the knives ever were. The witch never told her that the knives on which she danced would be the lesser pain.
Did she know? She must have. Witches know all the secrets of love; it’s what gives them the power to bargain with all its points and angles and gemstone facets.
If she were sea foam. But she is not. Before, she wants it. After, she wonders at what possessed her, but even in the cold heart of the water she still knows.
*
It takes her a long time to sink, a long time for the deep currents to carry her. Sometimes she thinks she can still hear the music. It works its way into her ears like droppers of poison, and though the cold water denies her rictus, she feels her teeth clench and grind.
As tiny fish nibble on her legs and toes—she still has them, even now, and hates them more every passing second though the knives have at least allowed her a reprieve—she wonders about death, turns the fact of it over in her mind. She is dead, she’s sure of that much, but either the witch lied, and that is why she is not foam on the waves—or something else has happened.
Her spirit is not free. And has not passed away.
Perhaps this is what rage does.
She has never felt rage like this, all-consuming, like the coals of deep-sea volcanoes in the core of her breast. She wanted. She reached for. She did everything she should have done. And him.
Him.
But if she’s still here, there are other options.
*
She whispers to the current. It still knows her, and carries her corpse to where she wants to be.
It sets her gently down at the mouth of the sea witch’s cavern and there she comes to rest against the rocks, the waving fronds of posidonia caressing her limbs. She waits.
“Why have you come back to me?” All at once, without any stirring of the water at her coming, the witch is looming over her, the rags of her twelve tails like surf-beaten kelp, the thin strands of her hair like ancient seaweed. Her eyes are like the coals that burn in the mermaid’s heart. “You should be foam on the waves, daughter.”
By the witch’s magic, the mermaid knows she’ll be heard, the voice of that coal as it burns higher and more violent. I’m no daughter of yours.
“No. At that, not. So, then.” The witch reaches down and lifts the mermaid under the arms, clasps her cold body close to hers, which is hot for a host of dark and unnatural reasons. “This tale has ended badly for you.”
You meant it to.
“I meant to exact a price. I would in any case. You must know how these things work. I don’t make the rules.”
The witch glides backward through the water, back into her cavern, carrying the little mermaid with her. It is an embrace, close and dangerous, not intending comfort, not intending any good, but the mermaid has suffered and is dead and
is now not afraid of anything. She has spent some of her time of sinking in wondering what might happen to her now, whether the witch might cut her into pieces and use her disparate parts for her magics, whether she might be skinned and used as a bag or a drifting blanket, whether her muscles and fat might be peeled away and eaten raw, her blood spilling down the witch’s chin and floating like red gauze in the little currents.
But now she doesn’t think those things will happen. Pressed to the witch’s bare, sagging breasts, she can sense the direction of movements. She can see way ahead with her blank, dead eyes.
The witch lays her down in a bed of kelp. The bones of whales hang from the cavern’s ceiling and make a soft clunk sound when the shifting water brings them into contact with each other. The water itself smells of blood, crushed plants, decay, dark things. The blood might draw sharks, but the rest keeps them away. Keeps everything away but the desperate.
And the dead.
The witch floats above her, arms loose at her sides.
I want to make a deal.
The witch cocks her head on one side. This close, the mermaid sees that tiny, pale shrimp are crawling through the strands of her hair, picking over her scalp. “Another? The way this one has ended? Be serious with me, girl. What could you offer me? And what would you want?”
You know.
The witch is silent for a time. Her fingers wander over the mermaid’s body. Perhaps she is learning humanity. Perhaps she has never touched a human woman.
“It would be difficult,” she says at last. “It would require much. Heavy magic. Dense and drawn from the core of the world, through the fire towers in the deepest of deeps. And that still leaves open the question of what you could give me in trade. What would be worth so much effort and such a cost to me.”
The little mermaid has had an answer for this ready since her body hit the water. She wishes she could smile.
Singing With All My Skin and Bone Page 13
