Shuteye for the Timebroker Page 26

  And the proprietor.

  Greasy salt-and-pepper beard, disheveled mop of jaundiced silver hair. Coarse features, shabby, cast-off clothes. Fingerless gloves more moth holes than fabric. Awkwardly hunched armature of his short frame. Repellant, but somehow rendered less so by the appropriateness of his environment, like a hermit crab in a particularly apt adopted shell.

  The proprietor fixes her with a sly, obsequious wink. A potential customer hooked.

  “Did you—did you call my name?”

  “’Fraid not. Couldn’t very well, could I? Strangers, you and me. No, just asked, Taney a pie, mum?’“

  “Oh.”

  Tansy makes to move on. Eating. A pointless activity now.

  The gnomish proprietor reaches below Tansy’s sight to bring up a small pie in a tin plate. Crust still uncooked white. Edges neatly crimped. Two slits in the top like nostrils.

  “No. I have to go—”

  A friendly leer. “Ah, now, why off so fast? You’ll never have another pie like this. Best in all of London. No one else makes them like old Murk.”

  Senselessly, irrationally rooted to the spot somehow. First time anyone’s talked to her in days. Stomach suddenly awakes noisily. A macabre thought arises, born from tawdry television viewing: won’t the coroner have an easier time dating her demise if there are remnants of a meal in her gut ? Her last selfless contribution to the ease of others, after a life devoted to such one-way gestures.

  “What—what kind of pie?”

  “Ah, mum, best to show you.”

  Pie in gnarled hand set down on shelf. Murk’s face prideful beneath warty brow. Bending forward like a broken toy. Hoisting strongly two-handed an antique wooden bucket chest-high. Sets it on the counter, where it slops a scant rill of water over its rim. Bucket obscures the dwarfish man.

  “Have a dekko then, child. C’mon, naught’ll happen to you.”

  On tiptoes to peer into the bucket.

  Tansy’s first impression: a single braided whip in constant coiling motion, a flux of silver and black. Then: separation into component parts: heads, eyes, bodies, flukes, gills.

  A bucket of writhing eels, sinuous, muscled, constrained.

  Their weavings seem to scribe watery ideograms in perpetual flicker, transiting from one half-perceived meaning to another.

  And at random moments, as their serpentine bodies open a clear view to the bottom of the bucket, millisecond impressions of something piebald, gold and blue, beneath them. Like a queen or king guarded by courtiers. A sport or mutant brother to the mundane sea-snakes …?

  Tansy expects to feel revulsion. But does not. The anticipated antipathy fails to arise. No gorge in her throat. Instead, a penultimate hunger increases, ironically supplanting for a moment the ultimate hunger for extinction.

  Around the side of the bucket, Murk’s face appears, all huckster-eager. “Freshest of the fresh, mum. Caught right here in the river. Clean as a whistle these days, the water is. Heads and tails make a fine stock. Rest diced up bite-sized. Lemon, parsley, shallot, pinch of nutmeg, that’s all it takes. Real butter in the crust. You won’t be sorry.”

  “Well … why not?”

  Quick as an eel himself, Murk hoists the bucket off the counter, paddles the pie onto the live coals. Almost immediately, a sweet wholesome fishy scent pervades the booth, sending out tendrils to capture Tansy’s senses.

  “How—how much?”

  “Fifty pence.”

  Tansy fumbles out some coins, among her last, and lays them on the counter. Murk scrapes them off the surface with the edge of one hand and pockets them.

  The ceiling of leaden sky seems to sink lower while the pie bakes, as if the box of her life is compressing even further.

  Pie in the oven, Murk has no more attention for his customer. Serious as a jeweler faceting a gem. All is reserved for his creation. Fusses with the coals. Spins the pie at intervals for even baking. Anoints its top with a clear glaze from a misshapen mug, employing a crude animal-bristle brush.

  Finished at last. By what sign or omen or chef s intuition, unknown. Delved from the oven’s depths and deposited on the countertop.

  “Grab a utensil, mum. Careful, now, it’ll be hot.”

  Bone-shafted spoon in hand. Bending forward to catch up-gust of victual-richness. Arc of spoon biting into layered flaking crust, bubbling upwelling of rich broth along the narrow trench. Scooping a heaping serving onto the spoon. Raised to lips, invited in.

  Ambrosial pastry. Oniony, herby savor. Warmth coating her throat. Lemon. Sweet ichthyous flesh melting, melding into taste buds. No bones? Rendered into intangibility? A second spoon, a third—

  Within scant minutes, Tansy has gulped down the whole pie, scraped the tin shell clean.

  Murk proudly attentive and approving throughout. Upon completion, still solicitous.

  “Had enough then? Knew you’d appreciate this. Had you pegged, Murk did.”

  “I—thank you. But now I have to go. Good-bye.”

  “Never good-bye, mum. Just see you later.”

  Yards beyond the stall, the meal seems a dream. Pleasantly inconsequential, but fading, one of the few typically minor bright spots in a wearisome life, now replaced by the dreary reality of her situation. Except for the weight in her stomach, a greasy film on her lips and palate. Not enough to tip the scales in favor of existence.

  Night arrives. Gaps between the isolated streetlights dark as the abyss. Warehouses, abattoirs. Solitary, unobserved. Easy to find an adequate spot. Straight drop of a dozen yards from the top of the wall to the plane of the river below. Never learned to swim. No one to teach, no one to care.

  Stones from the weather-shattered wall ballasting her pockets. Scramble atop the wall. Scraped knees and palms irrelevant. Stand up, swaying.

  Push off without a twinge of hesitation, falling forward into the embrace of the air.

  Smash the water, more a solid interface than a liquid curtain.

  Stunned. Sinking so easily. Sensation confused with flying upward. Vision limited to the end of her nose. Chill stabs coreward. No need to inhale yet. Further down will do fine. Drop, drop. Lazy currents finger all her surfaces and holes. Bubbles ascend, a Morse code message to the world left behind. Then the released airstream stops at the empty source.

  Now. Breathe deep …

  No pain in her chest, just an overwhelming heaviness.

  Consciousness persists long enough for Tansy to feel the face-first embrace of the muck bottoming the Thames. Silken silty scarves caressing her cheeks, pillowing her thighs, clasping her ankles. Gone from sight now, totally mired. Still plummeting in slow motion. Yet soon the expected terminal solidity of the riverbed beneath the silt, a final bier …?

  But no. Still ever downward. Still retreating from the world above.

  Still conscious.

  Still alive?

  How?

  Resignation gives way to a minor consternation. Is even death to be robbed from her?

  Still sinking, Tansy awaits extinction, a final solidity.

  Time elongates, accumulates uncountably.

  Her slow serene fall through the accumulated miles of powdery snowed-down organic debris continues. Like a flake herself, a cast-off diatomaceous shell, she drifts ever deeper.

  Tansy’s mind dissolves into a kind of banked nescience. A spark heaped with char.

  A tugging at her feet. No strange entity with claws, but just a new, reorienting gravity. If she has been descending like a skydiver with ventral surface presented flat to the earth, now she is rotating slowly through ninety degrees, so that the soles of her stockinged feet—shoes lost in the first impact with the river—are presented to whatever draws her onward.

  The absence of enfolding silt was felt first around her feet and ankles, as if they had broken through a crust, were protruding through a sky crust of muck into a less curdled atmosphere. The sensation of being disencumbered moved slowly up her legs, to her groin, then waist, then sternum, then chest—
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br />   Her face came free, and she could see.

  Within a small compass. Dimly. As if in an opalescent terrestrial fog at dusk.

  Standing now at rest on a gritty featureless plain, as if in some bubbled environment. Tansy emptied her lungs and breathed. But what? More water? Air? Some more subtle ether? She moved her arm through the medium that surrounded her, attempting to feel its nature. Nothing familiar. Yet she drew in lungfuls of an invisible, weightless substance, expelled same, but could assign it no name.

  Tansy took two steps forward in the random direction she found herself facing. The curved surface of the bubble in front of her receded equally. A glance behind told her that the rear wall had come forward with her steps. Experiment soon proved that no matter which direction she stepped in, her volume of space remained constant, centered around her.

  Pointless to discriminate. Tansy strode forward.

  The plain extended for miles and miles. So it seemed. Hours upon intuited indistinguishable hours she walked, without sustenance or refreshment or need for same. Nothing varied.

  Her belly still cradled her last meal.

  Tansy’s mind fell into a stuporous equanimity. So much inexplicable strangeness attendant on her dashed self-extinction afforded no purchase for fear or speculation.

  Blue smote her eye like a revelation. Even this much color after an eternity of none precluded instant identification of shape. She quickened her pace, bringing more of the object into her sphere.

  One bare leg, then another. Enamel blue like cloisonne, solidly planted on the nothingness. Then golden limbs somehow intermingled with the blue. Then two forms nestled together.

  A naked blue man stood upright. Large-muscled, well-formed.

  Legs wrapped around his waist and locked at the small of his back, a nude golden woman clung to his neck. Heavy ripe curves.

  Facing Tansy, the man cupped the gold woman’s buttocks. The pair were joined in coitus, but unmoving. Still: not statues, but flesh, however oddly toned.

  Their faces indiscernible, because pressed against, melted, into the flesh of each other’s shoulder.

  Tansy stopped.

  Sound as of ripping cloth, and the male and female faces pulled away from their epidermal interknittedness, whole and unbloody. The man’s eyes opened, lips parting for speech.

  Tansy’s parents had died in an auto accident when she was eight years old. Yet here was her father, whole and youthful, recognizable as if in an old photo, despite the transmogrification of his skin.

  “Tansy, you’re here.”

  “Am I dead, then?”

  The hairy back of her father’s head flanked her mother’s face on the left. Had they turned, or had Tansy moved around them without volition?

  “I don’t know, dear. Are we?”

  Her mother’s loving eyes and immemorial smile eased somewhat Tansy’s sheer horrified confusion, gentled the whole mad experience.

  “What—what is this place?”

  “A land for becoming.”

  “Becoming what?”

  Her father grinned in the old manner. “Whatever you have in you to become.”

  “Nothing. I’ve nothing inside me. I’m empty. Always have been.”

  “Is that so? What about your last meal?”

  Tansy placed a hand on her stomach. Was it larger? Something seemed to stir within her, behind and below her belly.

  “I don’t understand. That pie? What could that do for me? One meal changes nothing.”

  “If you say so …”

  “Don’t mock me! How can I possibly accomplish something in this place when I couldn’t do anything right in the other world?”

  Golden laugh lines crinkled. “By following your destiny all the way to its end, then beyond.”

  “Will you help me, Mother?”

  “No. We can’t. But your brother can.”

  “Brother? I don’t have any brother.”

  Even her father’s teeth were blue. “He was to be your older sibling. But he couldn’t stay. He died when he was born—or was born when he died. He’s here now. His name is Mercator.”

  “Where is he? How do I find him?”

  “Just keep on.”

  Heads lowered into shoulders, blue melding seamlessly into gold, gold into blue.

  The pair dwindled, shrinking rapidly, verging toward microscopic invisibility.

  “Mother! Father! Don’t leave me!”

  Empty bubble of personal space. Neither cold nor warm. Faint saline lilt to the air. Nothing for it but to trudge onward.

  Time and space played hide-and-seek.

  The marketplace was empty this early in the morning. Shabby stalls shielding goods behind rope-lashed canvas fronts. Cobbles wet with morning dew. Organic trash, rinds and crusts and shells. The smell of human urine from a puddle in the corner of two walls. A dog appeared, red from tail-tip to snout, like a new brick. Sniffed the puddle, then lifted its leg to add its commentary.

  Tansy dropped, suddenly exhausted, to the cobbles. Rested her back against the timbered side of a stall. Head sagged forward, chin into chest. Eyes closed.

  Sounds of the marketplace coming alive around her. Shuffling feet, bantering among merchants, children playing tag, crockery clinking, cartwheels trundling.

  No one accosted her. Something like a sun rose higher in something like a sky, its heat evidenced across her slumped form.

  “Tansy. It’s me, your brother.”

  Eyelids snapping open.

  A handsome man in his thirties, red all over like the dog. Crimson eidolon. Bare-chested, loincloth around his middle, sandals laced up his legs. Smiling. Hand extended to help her to her feet.

  Siblings almost the same height. Eyes on the same level. Searching his face for resemblance to her own. Uncertainty. Yet a sense of having encountered him somewhere before.

  “Sorry I’m late. I was busy with another. But you must be famished! Let’s get you something to eat. Then we can go home.”

  “Home?”

  “Your home here.”

  The young girl who served them bowls of hot porridge was colored the same as Mercator. So were all the teeming inhabitants of this low-built, diffuse city. A tableau of devils.

  Spoon poised halfway to her lips, Tansy noted her own unchanged flesh, anomalous in this strange city.

  “Won’t I stand out here?”

  “No one will mind. But perhaps it’s best if you stay mostly indoors. You can be useful without leaving home.”

  “All right.”

  There was always something to sew. Humble garments and bedclothes in need of repair, dropped off by a steady stream of citizens, all incarnadined, tracking dust and unintelligible allusions to the life of the city into the adobe apartments to which Mercator had brought her.

  Tansy developed callouses on her thumb and index finger after the first few weeks. The coarse thread and crude needles, the heavy fabrics, the misshapen buttons. Piles of unwashed garments redolent of their wearers’ body odors. These were the constants of her days. Along with the shifting infall of roseate sunlight through the glassless window, the parched heat, the simple meals of bread and olives, eggs and beans, honey and crisped locusts, delivered by Mercator.

  Her brother?

  If so, in name and attitude only. They hadn’t been raised together, in any life she recalled. Had no long-term bonds or familially inculcated taboos delimiting their relationship.

  Naturally she thought of having him sexually: during their meals, or when he slept on his mat of woven river reeds next to hers. But never made any advance, for fear of rebuff. Nor did Mercator ever exhibit toward her any such impulses.

  And her belly. That got bigger every day.

  But how? She had never. Not anywhere, any when.

  One day a new patron, a bearded merchant with a withered arm, came with robes to mend. Having gone through months of similar visits, Tansy thought nothing much of the man at first. But after he left, his image troubled her. When Mercator returned
to their apartments at eventide, from whatever errands occupied him during the daylight, with small piquant tomatoes and salted fish for supper, Tansy inquired about the man.

  “He was your lover in another life. You wronged him. Now you must mend his clothes.”

  A momentary stasis blanked her mind. “All—all of these men and women and children who have come—”

  “Yes, of course. The entire city, in fact. You were intimate with them all, down the millennia. Didn’t you know?”

  “I—did I hurt them all?”

  “And they you. It was inevitable.”

  “And their redress to me?”

  “Yet to come. Or already obtained. Or otherwise obviated.”

  Tansy had a hard time falling asleep. Her mind turned over Mercator’s words ceaselessly. But also her gravid, unbalanced body contributed its own discomforts.

  One day every week Mercator took her out of their quarters for a stroll through the city, always ending at a favorite park, ripe with shade, where clownfish swam through the pod-strewn boughs of acacia trees. There, a peace descended on Tansy and she could momentarily forget her expiatory drudgery.

  The twinges came one morning. Hardly commensurate with the enormous swell of her belly. Not what she had expected from all she had heard. More like imagined sexual tremors than splitting pains.

  “Mercator, help me. I think it’s my time—”

  “Of course. Step into the tub.”

  A stone trough occupied one corner of their two rooms. Bamboo pipes brought rainwater down in a gravity feed from a tank on the roof.

  Naked, Tansy climbed awkwardly into the tub. Her own pink flesh looked alien to her now. Seismic tremors propagated outward from her center. She drew her legs up, knees to chest. Mercator kneeled by the trough and stroked her brow, murmuring wordless assistance.