The Glass Ocean(12)
• • •
What can it mean, this collecting of my grandfather’s, all of it, any of it? These creatures in their sullen, half-rotted profusion represent not the multiplication of knowledge but instead its opposite—the impossibility of knowing anything at all. Many things, dead; corpses, carapaces, shells; collected, catalogued, cut open once, then cut again—flayed—essence gone, destroyed in the cutting, if it ever was there at all.
• • •
They are no different, these four. Grist for the mill. As they know. Anxiously sipping their soup through clenched teeth. And him, too, the servant with the Asiatic features who stealthily slips in, lights the lights, departs again. Him especially.
Objects in the collection of.
• • •
Lacking only the ether, the scissors, the arsenical soap, and the pin.
• • •
There is one thing living, though. It is the sound of my mother’s voice. A trill of laughter, musical, soft, is coming from somewhere in that place, from some unseen room or unknown corridor (filled, no doubt, with other carcasses, other carpets, other artifacts). My mother, alivest thing in that cabinet of mummies, living and dead, is laughing.
Leo hears her. His eyes are round, startled, his spoon suspended in dense midair. What’s that look on his face? It’s not surprise; it’s something else. Something like surprise. Apprehension, that’s what it is. Apprehension, bordering on fear.
• • •
He knows already, of course. He already feels the trouble she will be. It’s there, in her voice, for he who has ears to hear it. Attraction and repulsion. He wants to run away, but he can’t. It’s too late already.
• • •
What can Harry Owen think, glancing up from his soup, seeing the fear on my father’s face? And then, too, seeing the cayman grinning at him from behind my father’s shoulder. Grinning confidentially, with something like a wink.
He hears her, too, of course, this Harry Owen. My father isn’t the only one with ears.
• • •
Dash! cries Felix Girard. Open another bottle of ’28!
Alcohol does help sometimes, it’s true.
• • •
They are waiting for her to appear again, Harry Owen and my father both. If the truth be told.
But she’s hidden herself. She, the desired one. She’s plaiting her long golden hair, tucking herself into bed with lizards and vultures looking on, so that in the end, when my father and Harry Owen can bear to wait no longer, it’s the bell suspended above Petrook’s shop door that bids them a cheerful good night, not she. Despite their hopes. The man himself is still sitting there, hunched like a spider over his desk, with a sallow cup of tea at his elbow, tepid, grassy liquid gleaming dully in the well of the saucer; when he sees them he pauses in his work for a moment, glances up with those dark, feral eyes, then quickly away. Not much of a leave-taking this. They two will part disappointed on the pavement, Leo Dell’oro, Harry Owen, two friends well met, one turning left, one right, into that stinking garbage tip of a city. The night air heavy, hot, black; thick with cinders. A red glow on the horizon, sulfurous stench. Analogy to hell artlessly implied. Thick guttural vibration, this is the life of the city, its arteries pumping, darkly, warmly, all the engines turning over, then turning again. The vital essence sparked. It is a place on the verge of the future. Upstairs, oblivious to all, my grandfather and his friend Hugh Blackstone will go on, and on, the exotic servant opening another bottle, then another. Behind that lighted window. There are so many lighted windows in this city, curtains drawn, a scrim descending, shutting out, shutting in; and so much is going on behind them, who knows what. Vertiginous thought. Best look away. These two are done anyway, for now.