The Strange Case of Rachel K

by Rachel Kushner

  Ferdinand K figured she was probably not a prostitute, even if she seemed to come from nowhere, have no family, and gold coins hidden in her clothes. No one had followed them, no pimp or madam as far as he knew. A week after he found her wilting on a Prado bench, he ran out of money. She opened her hem, a savings account she withdrew with a seam-ripper. He made her a partner and changed the name of his company to Aloha Fantoscope. He and Aloha filmed more miniature sets, did things with mirrors, mirror facing mirror for a fake infinity (but what is “real infinity?” Infinity represented is still infinity). Sitting on the floor, cutting up film, they looked at each other, irises wheeling open. In between them was another infinity—the infinite distance, enacted by closeness, between two people.

  In the distance between paper ships and cigar smoke, and what Ferdinand K had seen from a hill above the bay while he frantically tried to repair his camera—American marines blowing up Spanish vessels, a forty-five mile path of destruction and lakes of burning kerosene floating on the harbor—a broad space opened up, a place to maneuver with no accountability. Between battleships and sonic war and miniatures in dyed-blue bathtub water. Between bridal bed and brothel beds. The mirror of Aloha’s eyes and the mirror above him on a water-stained ceiling, which he avoided by keeping his pay-pleasure missionary. And then there was his dream of projecting advertisements into the low fluffs of cloud that drifted over the city like tugboats. Aloha Fantoscope! There was the distance between it and the traceless reality of where the last of Aloha’s money, generously invested in his cloud advertising scheme, had actually gone: into the childlike hands of harlots, who advertised not on clouds, but the balconies of Calle Belga. He had a weakness. Aloha’s last gold piece was spent on a pockmarked girl who’d simply grabbed his arm and said you—you’re coming with me. There was that joke about what a man needs to survive: food, shelter, papaya and strange papaya. In a world where papaya isn’t a fruit but the damp, warm syncline between a woman’s thighs.

  * * *

  Poor Aloha had believed him when he said the clouds above the city were like a film screen, but one that everyone could see. Penniless, she went to a bank to try to get a loan. She had nowhere to turn, and now she’d be having this child—The banker interrupted her. Why not just project your advertisements on the moon, hmm? He didn’t care about her sob story or any child. It was out of his hands, he said. The banks were American-owned now, decisions were made in New York and she should ask her own government to help. What could he do, if she had no collateral, no credit, no cosigner? She left in a hormone surge, weeping.

  When she’d first seen him on the Prado, Ferdinand K’s cobalt eyes, twinkling and dark, had lured her to his room, unchaperoned. Now, they were turning a curdled yellow. His irises were frozen, hatches stuck in one position. Then he had oozing sores, one directly between his congealing cobalt eyes. His heart beat so violently that his fingertips pulsed in sync. A doctor came. He diagnosed the unmistakable symptoms of Flâneur’s Curiosity. She paid the doctor by breastfeeding him. There was no milk yet, it was a pantomime (but a pantomime of breast suckling is breast suckling, as a picture of infinity is infinite). When she returned to the room, Ferdinand was dead.

  If you’re American, the banker had said to Aloha, then go to an American bank. The last Spanish dominion of the new world was supposedly erased by the war, by the end of slavery, the American marines, the newly consolidated sugar companies. But if the leaseholders were in New York, the banks themselves were Old World ornate, with silver doorknockers, gilded lobby mirrors and plush upholstery. Havana was a Paris of the Antilles, complete with colonnades, call girls, and French pornography. Gaming parlors, lobster palaces and luxury suites. The Prado was even lit by Parisian-style papillon, butterfly-shaped gaslights. But Paris transplanted to the tropics, with its humidity, deluges and brine, was an organ partly rejected. The scrollwork on the colonnades was crumbled and eroded by the Caribbean air sweeping through the porticoes. The glassined voluptés bizarres moldered on the display stands from dampness, and the butterfly lamps were caked with brine. Saltpeter turned all the doorknockers green. Silver sweated and a black lace of mold edged in around the mirrors. The plush collected bucketfuls of dust from the dense and chaotic streets. It clung to the creamy white satin and flocking in the luxury suites, turning all the walls a brick-powder pink.

  People shut their windows against the pinkish dust and the incessant sound of African drumming coming from the slums. Where just-freed blacks sacrificed chickens for Our Lady of Mercy and hung voudoun trinkets over an iron lawn jockey with a face like their own. The prostitutes, mostly Spanish and French, were all stricken with Flâneur’s Curiosity. To mask the pocks, they powdered their complexions so heavily that they all looked like spooked biscuits, ill and fanning themselves on the balconies of Calle Belga.

  Aloha walked aimlessly with her K-child, in her penniless, sweat-stained clothes. She was American, but barred from entering the American Telegraph Company and wiring a message. No money, and no one to wire it to. The Americans who weren’t just abstract leaseholders were mercenaries and AWOL factotums left over from the war. They lurked along the streets in their uniforms, unable to assimilate but with nowhere else to go. Farmers came into town on foot, headed for kangaroo court to lose their land to property registrars with life appointments. Across from the ports, black hustlers leaned under the colonnades in torn shirts and rope shoes, with magnificent biceps and thighs, cigarettes dangling from their purple mouths. Chinese men—the few who hadn’t suicided themselves in hopes of making it back to the Orient—strolled with mulatta wives and Mongolian­-looking toddlers between them.

  Aloha wove amidst the black hustlers and the Chinese undead, pinkish dust in her eyes, blinking and misplaced. The only people who made sense were the melee of Spanish and local, a blend who might have fit in if it weren’t for doctrines and lending notes, and the perversions of the royal decrees that had brought about their race to begin with. Everyone here was lost, wandering under the balconies where the flour-faced beauties with raking coughs and rapid heartbeats fanned themselves and said you—you’re coming with me.

  DEBOUCHMENT

  “Our life here isn’t particularly violent,” the woman said, after the other woman made the comment that it was. This happened at the Pan-American club. In an era after the Spanish ate the parrots to extinction (while the natives stuck to grilled banana heart), and before the Russians came, with their Brutalist architecture and their smoked pig’s fat.

  “I’m not saying there isn’t violence,” the woman continued. “But violence and violent are different. It’s the difference between incident and intent.” Some features of this in-between time, at the Pan-American club: Black Forest-style castles in sugar cane fields, saltwater swimming pools reflecting tessellated rectangles of sunlight. And cinema palaces with love seats in the back row.

  Although there was the plantation boss, she remembered. A very decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he had done it, she remembered, that was the connection. But that was in Louisiana and a long time ago. Mr. Flamm, the paymaster, was killed, true enough. But that was the blacks, and their love of chopping people up with those horrific machetes they carry around. They really do look like savages and it’s the strangest thing to hear them speaking French—

  Also in this in-between era, after the Spanish, who cooked their parrots so slowly they remained alive as they were removed from the oven, and before the Russians, who took the scrubbers off the chimneys and let the red dust rain down: a dictator’s estate, with artificial waterfall and presidential barbershop, a divorcée’s mausoleum, with amber Lalique windows, and the addition of cheval-de-frise on the low walls of Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting.

  Those who hadn’t gone to the Pan-American club were at home listening to the faith healer on the radio. His was the only program, this time of night. Unless you wanted to listen to the bandits illegally broadc
asting from their camp in the mountains. Bearded ruffians instructing people to burn sugar cane, to tie a kerosene-soaked rag to the tail of a rat and set him loose in the cane break.

  Also in this in-between era, before the Russians and their Brutalist apartments, and after the parrots, who looked up from the dinner plates as their wings were sawed off with serrated knives: a supply of what are called black pineapple grenades—philological proof of destruction’s commitment to the Tropics.

  The woman had said loudly, for everyone in the club to hear, that she was sick of all the violence. “To here,” she’d slurred, and put her hand up to her neck. She was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time. She was not a person to be taken seriously. The type of woman who bleaches her hair and then dyes it dark again, in order to get that coarse, ratted, bedroom effect. After she said it she started an argument with her husband. Some women are very skilled at that. As soon as he started to fight back, she dropped her drink on the marble floor as a diversion.

  A constant in all three eras: syphilis, tobacco, and trees with fruit whose flesh is the pink of healthy mucus membranes. A fruit that smells like women’s shampoo.

  “Put a glass on the radio and my voice will serenade it,” the faith healer told listeners. Those who were lucky enough to go to the studio had their water serenaded with his flashlight beam. “Buy lottery tickets with numbers ending in six. In four. In zero . . . Drink the agua serenada before you go to sleep.” It was a procedure for winning the lottery. The week before, the finance minister had won the lottery, and used the money to buy a house in West Palm Beach. It seemed he expected to be relocating sometime soon.

  This was Christmastime, and there were humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence. She herself had a cheerful breadfruit sapling in the living room—the refrigerated shipment of Douglas fir had not been able to get through because the bandits had blocked the roads eastward. She hung the breadfruit tree with strings of tiny lights and hollow metallic balls, and sang Jingle Bells and other carols with the children.

  Local fragrances, in addition to the flesh-pink shampoo fruit: the feminine traces that lingered in the powder room of the Pan-American club (Arpège, Fibah, and boredom), and the fetid jungle breath beyond the club’s meticulous gardens (rot, rot, and rot).

  Like the bandits, the faith healer had to broadcast illegally. He had been condemned by the State, which accused him of feeding listeners fake hope. Passive hope, like baby food, like liquor, a set of baroque and empty promises. They didn’t realize he was working for them, in their favor. “All problems have a solution,” the faith healer said. “We all have a right to succeed in business, in study, in sports, in gambling, in love.” There were new laws. Palm readers, hypnotists and self-appointed gurus were all convicted. Also, vendors who sold magic powders, aphrodisiacs and remedies by mail. The state banned broadcasts on divination and the interpretation of dreams, on anything that stimulated beliefs opposed to civilization, under a federal sub-clause called “crimes of passion.” Only the lottery numbers were okay.

  The woman who dropped her drink had calmed down. She said to her husband in a defeated voice, “I wish everybody would just be quiet. It’s too much. All this talk of phosphorus and ammonia. I can’t keep it straight—what we have, what they have. I’m not a goddamned chemist.” Her husband was scooping up the remains of her drink, which was now just the base of a glass, surrounded by cheval-de-frise.

  “Those who wrong me will meet grave misfortune,” the faith healer announced on his illegal broadcast.

  “They’ve got the phosphorus,” her husband said. “And we’ve got the ammonia.”

  “But what the hell does it matter?” she asked.

  “Because phosphorus is a weapon. They drop it from planes.” He set the remains of her broken glass on the bar, gesturing to the bartender to make her a new one. “And ammonia is a target. Those tanks next to the nickel factory across the channel—they’ll explode.”

  “I know God’s deepest secrets,” the faith healer said. He was not a religious man.

  The chandeliers swung, in the rooms where the ceilings hadn’t simply vaulted and then collapsed. There was a rip of pops from somewhere inside. Women who had been in the powder room when the explosion occurred reeled straight into the enormous mirrors that were mounted on the walls of the powder room lounge. In their disoriented panic, they mistook the silvered glass for open space. (Euclid still applied, if not to history, to at least the layout of the Pan-American club). The mirrors crashed to the floor. The women wandered aimlessly, sliced up, blood batiking their faces. “It’s broken,” one of them said, holding her hands over her nose, which flumed garnet down to her chin. The first woman in this story was found wandering in the foyer, glass crunching under her heels. There was music in her head, jangly and instrumental, with a high-pitched and chimy after-trace. Music you’d pump out of a hand-crank organ, she thought to herself, but pictured no monkey. The monkeys here didn’t work—they hung from their cages, blinking at you with their moist, human eyes. The music was getting louder, more high-pitched around the edges. Blood flooded her vision. She said, “Can someone please turn that down?” She said it as loud as she could, but the music drowned her out.

  THE STRANGE CASE

  OF RACHEL K

  The blue lights flipped on. Smoky haze drifted above the tables.

  “Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

  The marquee said Rachel K, French Variety Dancer, but the French Nazi had known immediately she wasn’t French. Whatever she was or wasn’t, she looked like a liar and he liked liars. He imagined there was someone for whom honesty was a potent seduction, but the French Nazi was not that sentimental someone. Seduction, he knew, was a slew of projections, disguises, denials. What could you claim to accurately know about anyone, much less a stranger to whom you were attracted? And yet you could claim, accurately, that a person was evasive, and that their evasions interested you.

  He’d watched her show several nights in the Cabaret Tokio’s Pam-Pam Room, when he finally decided to break the wax seal on their silent conversation of glances. He stared coolly, continuously, wearing a colonial dictator’s eyeglasses, with heavy tortoiseshell frames and aubergine-tinted lenses. In her cycle of periodically eyeing him, Rachel K was eventually forced to meet his gaze. He nodded almost imperceptibly. She came toward him and plopped onto his lap like a child.

  “Are you an ambassador or something?” she asked. She thought his suit looked expensive. His crisp, white shirt cuffs seemed somehow dignitary-quality.

  The French Nazi said yes, exactly, an ambassador, but they both knew it was a lie. That ambassador was a code for something complex and possibly unspeakable, a word they both saw with quotes around it. Rachel K was wearing black fishnet stockings. He could see their pattern, even in the dim blue light. He liked the diaphanous allure of fishnets. They were an enticement in the guise of a barrier, like a beaded curtain hung over a doorway says “come in,” not “stay out,” its beads telegraphing that what’s inside is enchanted and special. He put his hand on her knee. Her skin felt slightly cool, bare and smooth. He ran his finger up the inside of her thigh carefully, as though drawing a line on dew-frosted glass, leaving a skin-toned smear in the cross-hook pattern of her fishnets.

  “An illusion, a painting,” he said, and looked at her with a bemused smile.

  He had a vague memory of Parisian women wearing paint-on stockings during the war. But that was all over. This was 1952. The girl had made her own perverse style out of scarcity, and he was impressed. And what was supposed to be an enticement, a fine membrane of netting that begged not just “’remove me” but “rip me to shreds” could not be ripped to shreds. It could be removed, of course, with water and soap, but such a ritual without the purpose of gaining sexual access, would have no meaning. Why bother, when he could have her as she was? Her stockings were as material as the sun-shadow of chain-link on a prison wall. He thought of Inge, the German girl with who
m he’d toured the Rhineland before enlisting in the Charlemagne Division. Little Inge who insisted he tear through her intricate cat’s cradle of garters and stays, girdle, corset and underwear. He would burst through snaps and panels, and tug tight-fitting elasticized garments down around the German girl’s knees, dismantling underwear fortifications in order to penetrate the frontier of her pretend-virginity. Sometimes he became impatient, pried his hand into her underwear and simply jerked the crotch panel to the inside of her thigh, to clear the way. The tearing sound of unforgiving fabric would cause Inge to let out a little moan, as if the fabric itself were the delicate folds of her innocence. With paint-on stockings, there was nothing to burst through. No garters, stays, or snaps. Only flesh.

  Rachel K nodded yes, that she’d painted them on. “They were perfect too—until you marked me.” She extended her legs to survey her work. “They took me all day to finish.” She’d used a sable cosmetic brush and a pot of liquid mascara, drawing lines that crossed at angles to make diamonds, her foot lodged on the windowsill of her kitchenette. Like prayer, it was a quiet, obliterative meditation that opened up an empty space in her thoughts, a not-her. But it wasn’t prayer, and she wanted the space of not-her to remain empty, rather than fill with the presence of god.