Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (19 page)

“Then it is true?” he asks, trying not to sound surprised and failing. “About your name, I mean.”

Salmagundi Desvernine pauses, the lid of the box already half open, and she glances sidewise at him, not using the dressing mirror as a middle man this time, but looking directly at him, instead. Then she glances back at the box as if she hasn’t
really
looked at it in a very long time, and maybe it’s not only a tin box after all, but something more that she pretends is only a tin box.

“It was my mother’s,” she says. “It was my grandmother’s, and she gave it to my mother.”

“And that’s where she got your name, off that tin?”

“It used to really make my sister laugh, that I was named after a box of candy.”

And then she opens the box the rest of the way, and he can see there’s a small plastic baggie of white powder inside, a razor blade, and a samll mirror that might have been popped out of a compact. Other things too, crammed in there, but she closes the box before Elgin can see what they are. She untwists the rubber band holding the baggie closed and carefully pours cocaine onto the little mirror, minces it with the razor blade. Elgin looks down at his notepad, trying hard to remember what he was going to say next.

“You were asking me about the film project,” she says, and “Yeah,” he replies, “
…Between the Gargoyle Trees,
why didn’t you finish it?,” embarrassed but relieved to be reminded, relieved to get on with it. The tall, pale boy in leather and sunglasses is watching him now, and Elgin imagines the kind of eyes those glasses might hide, intent and predatory eyes, jealous eyes the color of jade idols or a stormy autumn sky.

“I saw a clip last year in Montreal, a very brief clip, but it was definitely – ”

“It was bullshit, Elgin,” Salmagundi says quickly, finishing his sentence for him, and she’s made three neat lines of the coke. She uses a shortened bit of straw to snort the first two. She closes her eyes then, fists clenched, jaw clenched and a hint of her white teeth. Thirty seconds, forty, and “It was a mistake,” she adds and wipes her nose with a Kleenex from a box on the dressing table. “A lumbering, pretentious mistake. I’m just glad I figured that out before I wasted any more time on the damned thing. “Tt was worse than the poems. I thought maybe I could explain these ideas with film, explain them visually, since they’ve killed poetry.”

“Who’s killed poetry?”

She looks at him a long moment, wry hint of a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth like fishhooks; Salmagundi shakes her head, and her sapphire eyes sparkle.

“
They,
Elgin. They. Everyone since fucking Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Jesus, whatever all these fuckers call themselves today.
They.
The ‘poet-citizens.’ You can’t really touch people with poetry anymore, because it’s been taken apart, deconstructed, eviscerated, and no one even
half
remembers how to put it back together.” And then she snorts the third line and closes her eyes again.

Elgin nods uncertainly; he wants a cigarette so badly it almost hurts, thinks about lighting one, but there are no ashtrays anywhere in the room. “The stuff that you’re doing now is so reminiscent of Mark Pauline,” he says, instead, and tries not to think about the boy named Jimmy.

“Yeah, I saw
Male/Female Relations
last August, and then I talked with Mark afterwards. He showed me how to build a lot of the things I’m using, got me thinking in the right direction, anyway. Organic machines, reanimation.”

“But you’re still dealing with the same fundamental issues you were speaking to in
…Between the Gargoyle Trees
, right? The post-industrial landscape.”

She puts one hand to her forehead, one finger pressed between her eyes, “Jimmy, put on some music, okay?”

“What do you want to hear?” he asks her without moving from his chair in the shadows. 

“Anything. Anything at all. I can hear the cars. Anything so I can’t hear the goddamn cars and the people talking upstairs.” So Jimmy gets up and goes to an old reel-to-reel on a shelf near the door leading back out to the tangerine hall, hits a switch, and the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” blares from the speakers.

“I hate that phrase,” she says. “I loathe it,” and before Elgin can ask what she means, “Post-industrial,” she adds. “As if there’s nothing left now but the aftermath, like post-modern, as if there’s no way that we can possibly define ourselves except in relation to…Fuck, Jimmy, is that the only tape we
own
?”

“You said it didn’t matter,” Jimmy sighs, sullen voiced, returning to his chair. “And your hour’s up, Mr. Murray,” he adds. “It was up five minutes ago.”

“Yeah,” Elgin replies, and he checks his wristwatch. “Just a couple more questions, okay, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

“I said, your hour is
up
,” and Jimmy is speaking deliberate and threatful now. He leans forward, leans towards Elgin, and his eyebrows rise slowly into dark arches above his black shades. “Mr. Murray, I won’t repeat myself again.”

Elgin looks to Salmagundi for support, but she’s laid her head on the dressing table, eyes closed, one hand resting on the antique candy box as if for comfort. Her damp hair hides most of her pretty face.

“You really should go now, Elgin,” she says, not unkindly. “You only asked for an hour.” 

And so he closes his pad, has learned not to push these things; surely he has enough for the article. Jimmy stands and opens the door for him. 

“Thanks,” Elgin says. “I really do appreciate your time.” He looks back once, just before the door closes and locks behind him, and he sees her face framed in the mirror, that porcelain face still stained by the Hudson Valley money it came from, watching him leave, and her gemstone eyes are bright and weary. Something tiny and white like a single living grain of rice falls from her forehead and lies wriggling on the dressing table by the Whitman’s tin.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

      W. B. Yeats, “The Gyres” (1938)

Such things I hear, they don’t make sense.

I don’t see much evidence.

I don’t feel. I don’t feel. I don’t feel.

      Sisters of Mercy, “Lucretia, My Reflection” (1987)

Salmagundi

Peter Straub has called Salmagundi Desvernine “Caitlín’s avatar.” He called her that in 1999 or 2000, whenever he wrote his afterword for
Tales of Pain and Wonder
. I know it was true back then. She was, just as Jimmy DeSade was my shadow. In the nineties, I was seized by a longing for lost Victorian and Edwardian ages, but that soon faded and died. Salmagundi also faded and died, and, shortly thereafter, Jimmy DeSade was no more than ashes. New avatars have come and gone. I’ll not name them.

Postcards from the King of Tides

Here’s the scene: The three dark children, three souls past twenty, but still adrift in the jagged limbo of childhoods extended by chance and choice and circumstance, their clothes impeccable rags of night sewn with thread the color of ravens and anthracite; two of them fair, a boy and a girl and the stain of protracted innocence strongest on them; the third a mean scrap of girlflesh with a black-lipped smile and a heart to make holes in the resolve of the most jaded nihilist, but still as much a child as her companions. She sits behind the wheel of the old car, her sage-grey eyes staring straight ahead, matching their laughter with seething determination and annoyance, and there’s the bright, seething music, and the forest flowing around them, older times ten hundred than anything else alive.

The winding, long drive back from Seattle, almost two days now, and Highway 101 has become this narrow asphalt snake curving and recurving through the redwood wilderness, and they’re still not even as far as San Francisco. Probably won’t see the city before dark, Tam thinks, headachy behind the wheel and her black sunglasses because she doesn’t trust either of the twins to drive. Neither Lark nor Crispin have their licenses, and it’s not even Tam’s car; Magwitch’s piece-of-shit Chevrolet Impala, antique ’70s junk heap that might have been the murky green of cold pea soup a long, long time ago. Now it’s mostly rust and Bondo and one off-white door on the driver’s side. Countless bumper stickers to hold it all together.

“Oooh,” Lark whispers, awe-voiced, as she cranes her neck to see through the trees rushing past, the craggy coast visible in brief glimpses between the trunks and branches. Her head stuck out the window, the wind whipping at her fine, silk-white hair, and Tam thinks how she looks like a dog, a stupid, slobbering dog, just before Crispin says, “You look like a
dog
.” He tries hard to sound disgusted with that last word, but Tam suspects he’s just as giddy, just as enchanted by the Pacific rain forest, as his sister (if they truly are brother and sister; Tam doesn’t know, not for sure, doesn’t know that anyone else does either, for that matter).

“You’ll get bugs in your teeth,” Crispin says. “Bugs are gonna fly right straight down your throat and lay their eggs in your stomach.”

Lark’s response is nothing more or less than another chorus of
ooohs
and
ahhhs
as they round a tight bend, rush through a break in the treeline, and the world ends there, dropping suddenly away to the mercy of a silver-yellow-grey sea that seems to go on forever, blending at some far-off and indefinite point with the almost colorless sky. There’s a sun-bright smudge up there, but sinking slowly westward, and Tam looks at the clock on the dash again. It’s always twenty minutes fast, but still, it’ll be dark long before they reach San Francisco. 

She punches the cigarette lighter with one carefully-manicured index finger, nail the color of an oil slick, and turns up the music already blaring from the Impala’s tape deck. Lark interprets that as her cue to start singing, howling along to “Black Planet,” and the mostly bald tires squeal just a little as Tam takes the curve ten miles an hour above the speed limit. A moment in the cloud-filtered sun, blinding after the gloom, before the tree shadows swallow the car whole again. The cigarette lighter pops out, and Tam steals a glance at herself in the rearview mirror as she lights a Marlboro: yesterday’s eyeliner and she’s chewed off most of her lipstick, a black smear on her right cheek. Her eyes a little bleary, a little red with swollen capillaries, but the ephedrine tablets she took two hours ago, two crimson tablets from a bottle she bought at a truck stop back in Oregon, are still doing their job and she’s wider than awake.

“Will you sit the fuck down, Lark, before you make me have a goddamn wreck and kill us all? Please?” she says, smoky words from her faded lips. Lark stops singing, pulls her head back inside and Crispin sticks his tongue out at her, fleshpink flick of I-told-you-so reproach. Lark puts her pointy black boots on the dash, presses herself into the duct-taped upholstery, and doesn’t say a word.

They spent the night before in Eugene and then headed west, following the meandering river valleys all the way down to the sea before turning south towards home. Almost a week now since the three of them left Los Angeles, just Tam and the twins because Maggie couldn’t get off work, but he told them to go, anyway. She didn’t really want to go without him, knew that Lark and Crispin would drive her nuts without Magwitch around, but the tour wasn’t coming through LA or even San Francisco. So, she went without too much persuading,
they
went, and it worked out better than she’d expected, really, at least until today. 

At least until Gold Beach, only thirty or forty miles north of the California state line, where Crispin spotted the swan neck of a
Brachiosaurus
towering above shaggy hemlock branches, and he immediately started begging her to stop, even promised that he wouldn’t ask her to play the PJ Harvey tape anymore if she’d Please Just Stop and let him see. So they lost an hour at the Prehistoric Gardens, actually paid money to get in, and then spent a whole fucking hour wandering around seventy acres of dripping, wet trees, listening to Crispin prattle on about the life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs and things like dinosaurs, tourist-trap monstrosities built sometime in the 1950s, skeletons of steel and wood hidden somewhere beneath sleek skins of wire mesh and cement.

“They don’t even look real,” Tam said, as Crispin vamped in front of a scowling stegosaur while Lark rummaged around in her purse for her tiny Instamatic camera.

“Well, they look real enough to
me
,” he replied, and Lark just shrugged, a suspiciously complicit and not-at-all-helpful sort of shrug. Tam frowned a little harder, no bottom to a frown like hers. “You are really such a fucking geek, Crispy,” she said under her breath, but plenty loud enough the twins could hear.

“Don’t call him that,” Lark snapped, defensive sister voice, and then she found her camera somewhere in the vast blackbeaded bag and aimed it at the pretty boy and the unhappy-looking stegosaur. “A geeky name for a geeky boy,” Tam sneered, as Lark took his picture. Crispin winked at her, then, and he was off again, running fast to see the
Pteranodon
or the
Ankylosaurus
. Tam looked down at her wristwatch and up at the sky and, finding no solace in either, she followed zombie Hansel and zombie Gretel away through the trees.

After the Prehistoric Gardens, it was Lark’s turn, of course, her infallible logic that it wasn’t fair to stop for Crispin and then not stop for her, and, anyway, all she wanted was to have her picture taken beside one of the giant redwoods. Hardly even inside the national park, and she already had that shitty little camera out again, sneaky rectangle of woodgrain plastic and Hello Kitty stickers. 

And because it was easier to just pull the fuck over than listen to her snivel and pout all the way to San Francisco, the car bounced off the highway into a small turn-around, rolled over a shallow ditch and across snapping twigs. Lark’s door was open before Tam even shifted the Impala into park, and Crispin piled out of the back seat after her. Then, insult to inconvenience, they made Tam take the photograph: the pair of them, arm in arm and wickedsmug grins on their matching faces, a mat of dry cinnamon-colored needles beneath their boots and the boles of the great sequoias rising up behind them, primeval frame of ferns and underbrush snarl all around.