The Ape's Wife Part 17

I see a pattern here, or I see no pattern at all. A pattern exists, or no pattern is here. Too much to drink, so little sleep, and a woman with eyes that are green and blue, and I cannot find my beau garcon Gautier.

30/7/98.

I sit on my stool before the easel. My hands are stained, acrylic stained, bleeding in reverse, and I sit on my stool and rage at this haunting, this abomination jokingly [Christ]ened Last Drink Bird Head a few days back. Now I know it wasn't a joke, even if and though all the various connotations the t.i.tle may summon allude me. Just as I am eluded by its completion. It's a stillbirth, or placental afterbirth expulsion, postpartum blood only in countless avocado gangrenous black-greens instead of crimson and meat shades. All an avocado standing on a hill, also an avocado hill, roiling labyrinth sky, no in and no out, and HIM, whoever HIM might be. HIM. Ibis-crown'd daemon from a dream I can't recall to lord over this f.u.c.king canvas. I know HIM, I know HIS name, but I will not speak it here. I dab camel's hair to napthol crimson and there you motherf.u.c.ker, you deal with that hanging in your squirming G.o.dd.a.m.n sky. There. One dab or two or a third, but all a single body slumped in that worm welkin vault. Sturmischer Himmel don't know why there's no sun up in the sky but my red d.a.m.n'd splotch or even if that is Himmel.

Go to the kitchen drawer for a paring knife, and be a slasher.

Precedent the First: 15 June 1985, the young man who slashed crotch and then splashed concentrated sulphuric acid across Rembrandt's Danae, and there was little chance for restoration.

Precedent the Second: Munch's The Scream, vandalized with a felt-tip marker. And too, too true, the scrawl, "Could only have been painted by a madman."

Precedent the Third: 10 March 1914 and Mary Richardson's meat-cleaver savagery against Diego Velazquez's Rokeby Venus. Seven slashes. Slashes seven. She said later, "Because the way men visitors gaped at it all day long."

Precedent the Fourth: Repeated attacks against Rembrandt's Night Watch (1642).

Precedent the Fifth: Twice decapitated, "The Little Mermaid" in the harbor of Copenhagen. 24 April 1964, "sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the Situationist movement, amongst them Jrgen Nash." Then, only five (or six?) months ago, 28/1/98, decapitation again, perpetrators returned the head, but were never apprehended.

Too many examples, and these only those of which I am aware.

BUT.

Precedent the Sixth (and most Relevant to the Case at Hand): Claude Monet, April 1903, an exhibition of his work, and this time it was the artist himself who entered and took blade and paintbrush spatters to his own work.

This is all fair f.u.c.king warning, you Thoth-headed avatar f.u.c.k of my undoing perched there on your too-ripe avocado hill. I am your G.o.d, and not around that Other way. I have knives. I can part delicately curved beak from cranium, jaws from quadrate, skull from almost human shoulders, etcetera. You do well to remember that, afterbirth.

31/7/98.

Bad night last night. Faithful Dorothee came round to find me hung over and puking sick. No lasting damage done, to myself or the execrable (or excremenitious painting).

1/8/98.

"Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them...there is nothing."

1938, Sartre, La Nausee 1/8/98.

It may be a dream. Hardly matters. I meant to write this hours ago, but scuttled off to Sartre, instead, being lowly, loathsome coward that I am. Being coward. Hiding in history and words not of my own devising. Words not even wholly suitable, but pilfered stolen appropriated pirated nonetheless. Privateering as avoidance. I meant, instead, to write this what might have been dream and this what might have been waking, or this WHAT might have been liminal s.p.a.ce straddling the two mythic kingdoms, SLEEP and AWAKE. I walked la Rue Saint-Denis, so crowded with prost.i.tutes and those paying supplicants seeking out the ministrations and sordid deliverances of their services, but so many, so many, walking la Rue Saint-Denis was to thread a needle. I cannot prove I wasn't actually there. I can't prove I wasn't. My head choked, eyes choked with memories of bright lurid brothel signage: Club 128, "s.e.x Center" Projection Video, Top s.e.xy, s.e.xy Center, generic Peep Show. Video 121, generic s.e.x Shop; La rue Saint-Denis est surtout const.i.tuee de s.e.x shops, yes and fine and true, but almost or no signs that were not in f.u.c.king English. Oh, but half times half a memory of stopping to purchase a pear at a fruit stand called la Palais du Fruit. Make of that what you G.o.dd.a.m.n will and pardon my murdered Francais. In my head, the recollections are of cobblestones sticky with c.u.m, gutters running silver-white with c.u.m. This cannot be actual. Delusion or dreaming delusion. Faces all around like carnival masks, that painted and bright and plastic. Those faces, but also others of an entirely different breed. Filthy waifs and gaunt women with tarry blobs for eyes, jaundiced walking skeletons lurking in back of neon and cheap, sleazy glitz. The lure of an anglerfish comes to mind, or the tongue of a snapping turtle. Fakeout. I am asking everywhere after lost Gautier, whom I have come to believe stole something of me away when he left my studio. Same as the transvest.i.te left the ring. My c.o.c.k so hard I barely can even walk, but the thought of hands and knees in the s.e.m.e.n-wallow gutter, no way, no way. Hands on me, hands of every comprehendible gender, and at first my polite refusals, and then I was shouting for them not to touch me, because I felt the microbes slithering from skin to skin, transepidermal, them unto me, and it might be, though I, not bathe ever again, (what?) but infection so deep I'll be bones in the s.e.m.e.n by dawn. Do not f.u.c.king touch me. Only show me the way to Gautier. You must know him, that face and shyness, and if I'd had a photograph I would have shown them all. See? This, this here, right here, is the very man or the boy child I am seeking. And I did find him. That's the miracle of it. The loaves and fishes, manna from the sky, pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21-22; Exodus 14:24; Nehemiah 9:19, & etc.), bleeding statues, falling frogs, stigmata, Fatima (13 October 1917), miracles of modern G.o.dd.a.m.n medicine. He was standing in an alley near the intersection with rue de la Cossonnerie (a street, supposedly, with a far more savory character). It struck me in no way a surprise to see him on his knees, blowing a fellow with a wolf's head, which soon after my arrival became, instead, the head of an ibis. I was even less surprised when the man sprouted wings and flew away into the streetlight-tainted nighttime sky. Gautier stood up, wiped his mouth, and tucked his thirty pieces of silver into a front pocket of his tight, tight jeans. Don't think I don't know I was meant to see each act in its turn and interpret their meanings for precisely what they were. "Miss me?" he asked (though, didn't he not speak English?), and I shrugged and stepped into the alleyway, glancing first over my shoulder at the way I'd come. I wanted no followers. I wanted to be certain a line hadn't formed, impatient for the boy wh.o.r.e's favors. There was nothing back there but the neon and throng. Relief. How often do I ever feel relief these days? But in that moment I did feel relief, and I turned back to Gautier. "Do you think I missed you?" I replied, t.i.t for tat, and he raised his eyebrows and spat into a pile of wet cardboard boxes. "I dreamed of your painting," he said, oh so very softly he said that, and by then I was sweating, and if I'd not been, that would have done the trick. "I dreamed you finished it, and then gave it to me. I dreamed I sold it to an American for a great deal of money." And I said, "You have good dreams," and he said, "Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. What about you, peintre. What are your dreams? Does an incubus come and crouch on your chest when you sleep?" I saw, then, that as we'd been speaking, his eyebrows had grown so that they met in the middle, and it occurred to me a contagion had been pa.s.sed from the wolf/ibis-headed john. If I cut fair Gautier, would I find a second skin turned inside out? If I cut him, would I find fur? There was plenty of s.p.a.ce in even that narrow, stinking alley for a trial, an inquisition, and, quick as thieves, I weighed the wants of my c.o.c.k against my interest in the Truth, and, too, the fact that I could have both. But the contagion might be catching, might it not? Did I wish to join Gautier in this lycanthropy of the soul? Why, if I chose that route, I could go to Gevaudan, after all. I could pick up where Marguerite and her unnamed compatriots had left off more than two hundred years before, yes? "Can't stand here all night," Gautier said, and he said it with a haughty, impatient air that made up my mind then and there. I drew the paring knife from my belt and, stepping quickly towards him, moving fast and leaving only inches to spare, drove the blade into his chest to the hilt. He didn't scream, so all the better. I twisted the blade, as I've seen done in action flicks. His blood spilled so warmly it was almost hot over my right hand, near to steaming, and I considered the possibility all over again. Maybe I'd be numbered among the infected, despite my sloppy caution. I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine. I twisted the blade again, and he only looked a little disappointed before slumping to the ground at my feet. His descent was in no especial way different from the position he'd have a.s.sumed were I then a paying customer and not an executioner. "Does he know my name?" I asked the dying boy. He answered, words death rattling from his slight and violated chest, "All our names are known to him, Sir. 'I am thy writing palette, O Thoth, and I have brought unto thee thine ink-jar. I am not of those who work iniquity in their secret places; let not evil happen unto me.' Thought you were Monsieur Myth Savvy. Thought you'd know that for sure." For good measure, I kicked him, and turned to walk away in the same instant I became quite convinced I'd never drawn the paring knife. I stood with my back to the living Gautier, and he was saying that he was available, if I was interested. Why would I have sought him out, were I not interested. It was a nasty trick (adianoeta noted and no pun intended), turning the tables on me like that. Dying at my feet and condemning me with the taint of wolf and ibis blood, then my having never even pulled the knife, much less plunged it into his jaded heart. "Will you come home with me," I asked, but he inquired, "Do you have a home, Monsieur?" So I put the question to him a second time. "If you have the cost of my company," he said. Which is to say, he said no. And I recalled the Hag of Montparna.s.se: "You smell very much of a lonely man..." I stared at a flashing sign promising LIVE GIRLS (supposing the dead ones are unpopular or in short supply), and eventually I said to him, "Not what I had in mind, Gautier." Car horn. Beat for emphasis. Sharp intake of breath. "You know I'm your money's worth." And I replied, "No. Wait here, and I'm sure you will attract the attention of some other pantheon. A forgotten G.o.d or G.o.ddess will come along, sooner or later." He said not another word, and I left him standing there. I'll never go looking again. A black dog followed me almost all the way back to the flat, though I took a taxi. I glimpsed it now and then. It wore many faces. Many G.o.ds and many voices.

3/8/98.

Found, today, pinned to the door of my flat (unsigned; provenance unknown; we shall not think on that): Mater luporum, mater moeniorum, stella montana, ora pro n.o.bis. Virgo arborum, virgo vast.i.tatis, umbra corniculans, ora pro n.o.bis. Regina mutatum, regina siderum, ficus aeterna, ora pro n.o.bis. Domina omnium nocte dieque errantium, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, ora pro n.o.bis.

Which I translate as: Mother of wolves, mother of walls, star of the mountains, pray for us. Virgin of trees, virgin of desert, horned moon's shadow, pray for us. Queen of changes, queen of constellations, eternal fig-tree, pray for us. Mistress of all who by night and day wander, now and at the hour of our death, pray for us.

The piece was t.i.tled "The Magdalene of Gerandan."

4/8/98.

This morning I read in Le Monde of the death of a young male prost.i.tute in an alley off rue Saint-Denis. He was stabbed repeatedly in the throat and face. His genitals were missing. The paper didn't give his name.

The painting is finished.

I put in a call to Manhattan.

Dear Tannahill, So, I am going to Gevaudan, it seems, to the granite bosom of the Margerides. I cannot say what I will find there, or what shall find me. The bronze statue of a girl fending off a simultaneously wolf- and lion-like creature with a spindle. La foret de la bete, a wood darker than any wood I've ever seen, outside a soundstage. And I'll see other things. I've told Dorothee, and she seemed genuinely disappointed that I'll soon be gone, and that I don't expect to return to this residence.

I reminded her this was never meant to be permanent. "Just pa.s.sing through. Only a place to finish a painting."

"Ah, well," she said. "The countryside is beautiful this time of year. The pastures will all be bright with marguerites. Promise you'll send me...un carte postale, oui?

"Of course. Of course, I will."

Mailing these pages off to you, Tannahill; make of them what you will. I'm done with them, as I am done with you. I've rented a motorcycle, and I've only one stop to make before departing Paris. I want this city behind me, no matter what lies out before me. Go now. You're free to leave. Turn the page.

Albert Perrault 5 August 1998 19 rue Fauvet Excerpt from Baillargeon, Gautier. Gilded Thomas Art Review (Vol. 31, No. 7, Fall 2006; Minneapolis, MN): "...certainly, far stranger things have been suggested regarding both his life and his works. And given the particulars of his short career, his involvement in the occult, and his penchant for cryptic affectations, it does not seem to this author so outlandish to ascribe to Albert Perrault a morbid sort of prescience or to believe that his presentation of Last Drink Bird Head upon the eve of his fatal motorcycle accident on the rue Cuvier was a carefully orchestrated move, designed to preserve his mystique ad finem. Indeed, it almost seems outlandish to believe otherwise."

As to the painting itself (currently on loan to the Musee National d'Art Moderne), Last Drink Bird Head is one of Perrault's largest and most thematically oblique canvases. After his disappointing experiments with sculpture and multi-media, it harks back to the paintings that heralded his ascent almost a decade ago. Here we have, once again, his 'retro-expressionist-impressionist' vision and also a clear return to his earlier obsession with mythology.

A lone figure stands on a barren hilltop, silhouetted against a writhing night sky. However, this sky does not writhe with stars or moonlight, as in Van Gogh's Starry Night, but rather here the very fabric of the sky writhes. The canvas itself seems to convulse. The blackness of a firmament which might well reflect Perrault's conception of an antipathetic cosmos, and might also be read as the projection of the painting's central figure and, by extension, the artist's own psyche. There is but a single red dab of light in all that black, contorted sky (recalling his earlier Fecunda ratis), and it seems more like a baleful eye than any ordinary celestial body. The distinctive shape and thickness of the brushstrokes have rendered this sky a violent thing, and I have found that it's difficult not to view the brushstrokes as the corridors of a sort of madman's maze, leading round and round and, ultimately, nowhere at all.

And if the sky of Last Drink Bird Head could be said to form a labyrinth, then the figure dominating the foreground might fairly be construed as its inevitable 'minotaur' that is, a malformed chimera trapped forever within its looping confines. The figure has previously been described by one prominent reviewer as representing the falcon-headed Egyptian sky G.o.d Horus (or Nekheny). Yet it seems clear to me that Perrault's 'Bird Head' avatar cannot accurately be described as 'falcon-headed.' Rather, the profile presented a small skull and long, slender, decurved bill is more strongly reminiscent of an ibis. This, then, brings to mind a different Egyptian deity entirely Thoth, scribe of the G.o.ds and intermediator between forces of good and evil."

The Ape's Wife Neither yet awake nor quite asleep, she pauses in her dreaming to listen to the distant sounds of the jungle approaching twilight. They are each balanced now between one world and another she between sleep and waking, and the jungle between day and night. Dreaming, she is once again the woman she was before she came to the island, the starving woman on that other island, that faraway island that was not warm and green, but had come to seem to her always cold and grey, stinking of dirty snow and the exhaust of automobiles and buses. She stands outside a lunch room on Mulberry Street, her empty belly rumbling as she watches other people eat. The evening begins to fill up with the raucous screams of nocturnal birds and flying reptiles and a gentle tropical wind rustling through the leaves of banana and banyan trees, through cycads and ferns grown as tall or taller than the brick and steel and concrete canyon that surrounds her.

She leans forward, and her breath fogs the lunch room's plate-gla.s.s window, but none of those faces turn to stare back at her. They are all too occupied with their meals, these swells with their forks and knives and china platters buried under mounds of scrambled eggs or roast beef on toast or mashed potatoes and gravy. They raise china cups of hot black coffee to their lips and pretend she isn't there. This winter night is too filled with starving, tattered women on the b.u.m. There is not time to notice them all, so better to notice none of them, better not to allow the sight of real hunger to spoil your appet.i.te. A little farther down the street there is a Greek who sells apples and oranges and pears from a little sidewalk stand, and she wonders how long before he catches her stealing, him or someone else. She has never been a particularly lucky girl.

Somewhere close by, a parrot shrieks and another parrot answers it, and finally she turns away from the people and the tiled walls of the lunch room and opens her eyes; the Manhattan street vanishes in a slushy, disorienting flurry and takes the cold with it. She is still hungry, but for a while she is content to lie in her carefully woven nest of rattan, bamboo, and ebony branches, blinking away the last shreds of sleep and gazing deeply into the rising mists and gathering dusk. She has made her home high atop a weathered promontory, this charcoal peak of lava rock and tephra a vestige of the island's fiery origins. It is for this summit's unusual shape not so unlike a human skull that white men named the place. And it is here that she last saw the giant ape, before it left her to pursue the moving-picture man and Captain Englehorn, the first mate and the rest of the crew of the Venture, left her alone to get itself killed and hauled away in the rusty hold of that evil-smelling ship.

At least, that is one version of the story she tells herself to explain why the beast never returned for her. It may not be the truth. Perhaps the ape died somewhere in the swampy jungle spread out below the mountain, somewhere along the meandering river leading down to the sea. She has learned that there is no end of ways to die on the island, and that nothing alive is so fierce or so cunning as to be entirely immune to those countless perils. The ape's hide was riddled with bullets, and it might simply have succ.u.mbed to its wounds and bled to death. Time and again, she has imagined this, the ape only halfway back to the wall but growing suddenly too weak to continue the chase, and perhaps it stopped, surrendering to pain and exhaustion, and sat down in a glade somewhere below the cliffs, resting against the bole of an enormous tree. Maybe it sat there, peering through a break in the perpetual mist and the forest canopy, gazing forlornly back up at the skull-shaped mountain. It would have been a terrible, lonely death, but not so terrible an end as the beast might have met had it managed to gain the ancient aboriginal gates and the sandy peninsula beyond.

She has, on occasion, imagined another outcome, one in which the enraged G.o.d-thing overtook the men from the steamer, either in the jungle or somewhere out beyond the wall, in the village or on the beachhead. And though the ape was killed by their gunshots and gas bombs (for surely he would have returned, otherwise), first they died screaming, every last mother's son of them. She has taken some grim satisfaction in this fantasy, on days when she has had need of grim satisfaction. But she knows it isn't true, if only because she watched with her own eyes the Venture sailing away from the place where it had anch.o.r.ed out past the reefs, the smoke from its single stack drawing an ashen smudge across the blue morning sky. They escaped, at least enough of them to pilot the ship, and left her for dead or good as dead.

She stretches and sits up in her nest, watching the sun as it sinks slowly into the shimmering, flat monotony of the Indian Ocean, the dying day setting the western horizon on fire. She stands, and the red-orange light paints her naked skin the color of clay. Her stomach growls again, and she thinks of her small h.o.a.rd of fruit and nuts, dried fish and a couple of turtle eggs she found the day before, all wrapped up safe in banana leaves and hidden in amongst the stones and brambles. Here, she need only fear nightmares of hunger and never hunger itself. There is the faint, rotten smell of sulfur emanating from the cavern that forms the skull's left eye socket, as the mountain's malodorous breath wafts up from bubbling hot springs deep within the grotto. She has long since grown accustomed to the stench and has found that the treacherous maze of bubbling lakes and mud helps to protect her from many of the island's predators. For this reason, more than any other, more even than the sentimentality that she no longer denies, she chose these steep volcanic cliffs for her eyrie.

Stepping from her bed, the stones warm against the thickly calloused soles of her feet, she remembers a bit of melody, a ghostly s.n.a.t.c.h of lyrics that has followed her up from the dream of the city and the woman she will never be again. She closes her eyes, shutting out the jungle noises for just a moment, and listens to the faint crackle of a half-forgotten radio broadcast.

Once I built a tower up to the sun, Brick and rivet and lime.

Once I built a tower, Now it's done.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

And when she opens her eyes again, the sun is almost gone, just a blazing sliver remaining now above the sea. She sighs and reminds herself that there is no percentage in recalling the clutter and racket of that lost world. Not now. Not here. Night is coming on, sweeping in fast and mean on leathery pterodactyl wings and the wings of flying foxes and the wings of ur-birds, and like so many of the island's inhabitants, she puts all else from her mind and rises to meet it. The island has made of her a night thing, has stripped her of old diurnal ways. Better to sleep through the stifling equatorial days than to lie awake through the equally stifling nights; better the company of the sun for her uneasy dreams than the moon's cool, seductive glow and her terror of what might be watching hungrily from the cover of darkness.

When she has eaten, she sits awhile near the cliff's edge, contemplating what month this might be, what month in which year. It is a futile, but harmless, pastime. At first, she scratched marks on stone to keep track of the pa.s.sing time, but after only a few hundred marks she forgot one day, and then another, and when she finally remembered again, she found she was uncertain how many days had come and gone during her forgetfulness. It was then that she came to understood the futility of counting days in this place indeed, the futility of the very concept of time. She has thought often that the island must be time's primordial orphan, a castaway, not unlike herself, stranded in some nether or lower region, this sweltering antediluvian limbo where there is only the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the long rainy season which is hardly less hot or less brutal than the longer dry. Maybe the men who built the wall long ago were a race of sorcerers, and in their arrogance they committed a grave transgression against time, some unspeakable contravention of the sanct.i.ty of months and hours. And so Khronos cast this place back down into the gulf of Chaos, and now it is d.a.m.ned to exist forever apart from the tick-tock, calendar-page blessings of Aeon.

Sure, she still recalls a few hazy sc.r.a.ps of Greek mythology, and Roman, too, this farmer's only daughter who always got good marks and waited until school was done before leaving the cornfields of Indiana to go east to seek her fortune in New York and New Jersey. All her girlhood dreams of the stage, the silver screen, and her name on theater marquees, but by the time she reached Fort Lee, most of the studios were relocating west to California, following the promise of a more hospitable, more profitable climate. Black Tuesday had left its stain upon the country, and she never found more than extra work at the few remaining studios, happy just to play anonymous faces in crowd scenes and the like, and finally she could not even find that. Finally, she was fit only for the squalor of bread lines and mission soup kitchens and flop houses, until the night she met a man who promised to make her a star, who, chasing dreams of his own, dragged her halfway round the world and then abandoned her here in this serpent-haunted and time-forsaken wilderness. The irony is not lost on her. Seeking fame and adoration, she has found, instead, what might well be the ultimate obscurity.

Below her, some creature suddenly cries out in pain from the forest tangle clinging to the slopes of the mountain, and she squints into the darkness. She knows that hers are only one of a hundred or a thousand pairs of eyes that have stopped to see, to try and catch a glimpse of whatever b.l.o.o.d.y panoply is being played out among the vines and undergrowth, and that this is only one of the innumerable slaughters to come before sunrise. Something screams and so all eyes turn to see, for every thing that creeps or crawls, flits or slithers upon the island will fall prey, one day or another. And she is no exception.

One day, perhaps, the island itself will fall, not so unlike the dissatisfied angels in Milton or in Blake.

Ann Darrow opens her eyes, having nodded off again, and she is once more only a civilized woman not yet grown old, but no longer young. One who has been taken away from the world and touched, then returned and set adrift in the sooty gulches and avenues and asphalt ravines of this modern, electric city. But that was such a long time ago, before the war that proved the Great War was not so very great after all, that it was not the war to end all wars. j.a.pan has been burned with the fire of two tiny manufactured suns. Europe lies in ruins, and already the fighting has begun again and young men are dying in Korea. History is a steamroller. History is a litany of war.

She sits alone in the Natural History Museum off Central Park, a bench all to herself in the alcove where the giant ape's broken skeleton was mounted for public exhibition after the creature tumbled from the top of the Empire State, plummeting more than twelve hundred feet to the frozen streets below. There is an informative placard (white letters on black) declaring it Brontopithecus singularis...o...b..rn (1934), the only known specimen, now believed extinct. So there, she thinks. Denham and his men dragged it from the not-quite-impenetrable sanctuary of its jungle and hauled it back to Broadway; they chained it and murdered it and, in that final act of desecration, they named it. The enigma was dissected and quantified, given its rightful place in the grand a.n.a.lytic scheme, in the Latinized order of things, and that's one less blank spot to cause the mapmakers and zoologists to scratch their heads. Now, Carl Denham's monster is no threat at all, only another harmless, impressive heap of bones sh.e.l.lacked and wired together in this stately, static mausoleum. And hardly anyone remembers or comes to look upon these bleached remains. The world is a steamroller. The Eighth Wonder of the World was old news twenty years ago, and now it is only a chapter in some dusty textbook devoted to anthropological curiosities.

He was the king and the G.o.d of the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Curiosity killed the cat, and it slew the ape, as well, and that December night hundreds died for the price of a theater ticket, the fatal price of their curiosity and Carl Denham's hubris. By dawn, the pa.s.sion play was done, and the king and G.o.d of Skull Island lay crucified by biplanes, by the pilots and trigger-happy Navy men borne aloft in Curtis h.e.l.ldivers armed with .50 caliber machine guns. A tiered Golgotha skysc.r.a.per, one-hundred-and-two stories of steel and gla.s.s and concrete, a dizzying Art-Deco Calvary, and no chance of resurrection save what the museum's anatomists and taxidermists might in time effect.

Ann Darrow closes her eyes, because she can only ever bear to look at the bones for just so long and no longer. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum's former president, had wanted to name it after her, in her honour Brontopithecus darrowii, "Darrow's thunder ape" but she'd threatened a lawsuit against him and his museum, and so he'd christened the species singularis, instead. She'd played her Judas role, delivering the jungle G.o.d to Manhattan's Roman holiday, and wasn't that enough? Must she also have her name forever nailed up there with the poor beast's corpse? Maybe she deserved as much or far worse, but Osborn's "honour" was poetic justice she managed to evade.

There are voices now, a mother and her little girl, so Ann knows that she's no longer alone in the alcove. She keeps her eyes tightly shut, wishing she could shut her ears as well and not hear the things that are being said.

"Why did they kill him?" asks the little girl.

"It was a very dangerous animal," her mother replies sensibly. "It got loose and hurt people. I was just a child then, about your age."

"They could have put it in a zoo," the girl protests. "They didn't have to kill it."

"I don't think a zoo would ever have been safe. It broke free and hurt a lot of innocent people."

"But there aren't any more monkeys like it."

"There are still plenty of gorillas in Africa," the mother replies.

"Not that big," says the little girl. "Not as big as an elephant."

"No," the mother agrees. "Not as big as an elephant. But then we hardly need gorillas as big as elephants, now do we?"

Ann clenches her jaws, grinding her teeth together, biting her tongue (so to speak), and gripping the edge of the bench with nails chewed down to the quick.

They'll leave soon, she reminds herself. They always do, get bored and move along after only a minute or so. It won't be much longer.

"What does that part say?" the child asks, so her mother reads to her from the text printed on the placard.

"Well, it says, 'Kong was not a true gorilla, but a close cousin, and belongs in the Superfamily Hominoidea with gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-utans, gibbons, and human beings. His exceptional size might have evolved in response to his island isolation.'"

"What's a super family?"

"I don't really know, dear."

"What's a gibbon?"

"Another sort of monkey, I suppose."

"But we don't believe in evolution, do we?"

"No, we don't."

"So G.o.d made Kong, just like he made us?"

"Yes, honey. G.o.d made Kong."

And then there's a pause, and Ann holds her breath, wishing she were still dozing, still lost in her terrible dreams, because this waking world is so much more terrible.

"I want to see the Tyrannosaurus again," says the little girl, "and the Triceratops, too." Her mother says okay, there's just enough time to see the dinosaurs again before we have to meet your Daddy, and Ann sits still and listens to their footsteps on the polished marble floor, growing fainter and fainter until silence has at last been restored to the alcove. But now the sterile, drab museum smells are gone, supplanted by the various rank odors of the apartment Jack rented for the both of them before he shipped out on a merchant steamer, the Polyphemus, bound for the Azores and then Lisbon and the Mediterranean. He never made it much farther than So Miguel, because the steamer was torpedoed by a n.a.z.i U-boat and went down with all hands...o...b..ard. Ann opens her eyes, and the strange dream of the museum and the ape's skeleton has already begun to fade. It isn't morning yet, and the lamp beside the bed washes the tiny room with yellow-white light that makes her eyes ache.

She sits up, pushing the sheets away, exposing the ratty grey mattress underneath. The bedclothes are damp with her sweat and with radiator steam, and she reaches for the half-empty gin bottle there beside the lamp. The booze used to keep the dreams at bay, but these last few months, since she got the telegram informing her that Jack Driscoll was drowned and given up for dead and she would never be seeing him again, the nightmares have seemed hardly the least bit intimidated by alcohol. She squints at the clock, way over on the chifforobe, and sees that it's not yet even four a.m. Still hours until sunrise, hours until the bitter comfort of winter sunlight through the bedroom curtains. She tips the bottle to her lips, and the liquor tastes like turpentine and regret and everything she's lost in the last three years. Better she would have never been anything more than a starving woman stealing apples and oranges and bread to try to stay alive, better she would have never stepped foot on the Venture. Better she would have died in the green h.e.l.l of that uncharted island. She can easily imagine a thousand ways it might have gone better, all grim, but better than this drunken half-life. She does not torture herself with fairy-tale fantasies of happy endings that never were and never will be. There's enough pain in the world without that luxury.

She takes another swallow from the bottle, then reminds herself that it has to last until morning and sets it back down on the table. But morning seems at least as far away as that night on the island, as far away as the carca.s.s of the sailor she married. Often, she dreams of him, mangled by shrapnel and gnawed by the barbed teeth of deep-sea fish, burned alive and rotted beyond recognition, tangled in the wreckage and ropes and cables of a ship somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He peers out at her with eyes that are no longer eyes at all, but only empty sockets where eels and spiny albino crabs nestle. She usually wakes screaming from those dreams, wakes to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d next door pounding on the wall with the heel of a shoe or just his bare fist and shouting how he's gonna call the cops if she can't keep it down. He has a job and has to sleep, and he can't have some G.o.dd.a.m.n rummy broad half the bay over or gone crazy with the DTs keeping him awake. The old Italian c.u.n.t who runs this dump, she says she's tired of hearing the complaints, and either the hollering stops or Ann will have to find another place to flop. She tries not to think about how she'll have to leave soon, anyway. She had a little money stashed in the lining of her coat, from all the interviews she gave the papers and magazines and the newsreel people, but now it's almost gone. Soon, she'll be back out on the b.u.m, sleeping in mission beds or worse places, whoring for the sauce and as few bites of food as she can possibly get by on. Another month, at most, and isn't that what they mean by coming full circle?

She lies down again, trying not to smell herself or the pillowcase or the sheets, thinking about bright July sun falling warm between green leaves. And soon, she drifts off once more, listening to the rumble of a garbage truck down on Ca.n.a.l Street, the rattle of its engine and the squeal of its breaks not so very different from the primeval grunts and cries that filled the torrid air of the ape's profane cathedral.

And perhaps now she is lying safe and drunk in a squalid Bowery tenement and only dreaming away the sorry dregs of her life, and it's not the freezing morning when Jack led her from the skysc.r.a.per's spire down to the bedlam of Fifth Avenue. Maybe these are nothing more than an alcoholic's fevered recollections, and she is not being bundled in wool blankets and shielded from reporters and photographers and the sight of the ape's shattered body.

"It's over," says Jack, and she wants to believe that's true, by all the saints in Heaven and all the sinners in h.e.l.l, wherever and whenever she is, she wants to believe that it is finally and irrevocably over. There is not one moment to be relived, not ever again, because it has ended, and she is rescued, like Beauty somehow delivered from the clutching paws of the Beast. But there is so much commotion, the chatter of confused and frightened bystanders, the triumphant, confident cheers and shouting of soldiers and policemen, and she's begging Jack to get her out of it, away from it. It must be real, all of it, real and here and now, because she has never been so horribly cold in her dreams. She shivers and stares up at the narrow slice of sky visible between the buildings. The summit of that tallest of all tall towers is already washed with dawn, but down here on the street, it may as well still be midnight.

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't take it serious; it's too mysterious.

At eight each morning I have got a date, To take my plunge 'round the Empire State.

You'll admit it's not the berries, In a building that's so tall...

"It's over," Jack a.s.sures her for the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth time. "They got him. The airplanes got him, Ann. He can't hurt you, not anymore."

And she's trying to remember through the clamor of voices and machines and the popping of flash bulbs Did he hurt me? Is that what happened? when the crowd divides like the holy winds of Jehovah parting the waters for Moses, and for the first time she can see what's left of the ape. She screams, and they all think she's screaming in terror at the sight of a monster. They do not know the truth, and maybe she does not yet know herself and it will be weeks or months before she fully comprehends why she is standing there screaming, unable to look away from the impossible, immense mound of black fur and jutting white bone and the dark rivulets of blood leaking sluggishly from the dead and vanquished thing.

"Don't," Jack says, and he covers her eyes. "It's nothing you need to see."

So she does not see, shutting her bright blue eyes and all the eyes of her soul, the eyes without and those other eyes within. Shutting herself, slamming closed doors and windows of perception, and how could she have known that she was locking in more than she was locking out. Don't look at it, he said, much too late, and these images are burned forever into her lidless, unsleeping mind's eye.

A sable hill from which red torrents flow.

Ann kneels in clay and mud the colour of a slaughterhouse floor, all the shades of s.h.i.t and blood and gore, and dips her fingertips into the stream. She has performed this simple act of prostration times beyond counting, and it no longer holds for her any revulsion. She comes here from her nest high in the smoldering ruins of Manhattan and places her hand inside the wound, like St. Thomas fondling the pierced side of Christ. She comes down to remember, because there is an unpardonable sin in forgetting such a forfeiture. In this deep canyon molded not by geologic upheaval and erosion but by the tireless, automatic industry of man, she bows her head before the black hill. G.o.d sleeps there below the hill, and one day he will awaken from his slumber, for all those in the city are not faithless. Some still remember and follow the buckled blacktop paths, weaving their determined pilgrims' way along decaying thoroughfares and between twisted girders and the tumbledown heaps of burnt-out rubble. The city was cast down when G.o.d fell from his throne (or was pushed, as some have dared to whisper), and his fall broke apart the ribs of the world and sundered even the progression of one day unto the next so that time must now spill backwards to fill in the chasm. Ann leans forward, sinking her hand in up to the wrist, and the steaming crimson stream begins to clot and scab where it touches her skin.

Above her, the black hill seems to shudder, to shift almost imperceptibly in its sleep.

She has thought repeatedly of drowning herself in the stream, has wondered what it would be like to submerge in those veins and be carried along through silent veils of silt and ruby-tinted light. She might dissolve and be no more than another bit of flotsam, unburdened by bitter memory and self-knowledge and these rituals to keep a comatose G.o.d alive. She would open her mouth wide, and as the air rushed from her lungs and across her mouth, she would fill herself with His blood. She has even entertained the notion that such a sacrifice would be enough to wake the black sleeper, and as the waters that are not waters carried her away, the G.o.d beast might stir. As she melted, He would open His eyes and shake Himself free of the holdfasts of that tarmac and cement and sewer-pipe grave. It could be that simple. In her waking dreams, she has learned there is incalculable magic in sacrifice.

Ann withdraws her hand from the stream, and blood drips from her fingers, rejoining the whole as it flows away north and east towards the noxious lake that has formed where once lay the carefully landscaped and sculpted conceits of Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Vaux's Central Park. She will not wipe her hand clean as would some infidel, but rather permit the blood to dry to a claret crust upon her skin, for she has already committed blasphemy enough for three lifetimes. The shuddering black hill is still again, and a vinegar wind blows through the tall gra.s.s on either side of the stream.

And then Ann realizes that she's being watched from the gaping brick maw that was a jeweler's window long ago. The frame is still rimmed round about with jagged crystal teeth waiting to snap shut on unwary dreamers, waiting to shred and pierce, starved for diamonds and sapphires and emeralds, but more than ready to accept mere meat. In dusty shafts of sunlight, Ann can see the form of a young girl gazing out at her.

"What do you want?" Ann calls to her, and a moment or two later, the girl replies.

"You have become a G.o.ddess," she says, moving a little nearer the broken shop window so that Ann might have a better look at her. "But even a G.o.ddess cannot dream forever. I have come a long way and through many perils to speak with you, Golden Mother, and I did not expect to find you sleeping and hiding in the lies told by dreams."

"I'm not hiding," Ann replies very softly, so softly she thinks surely the girl will not have heard.