The Curator, page 30
Zil, who had drawn the correct conclusion from the combination of the fancy clothes, the dress, and the diamond on the quick boy’s pinkie finger, burst out, “I pray she says yes!”
* * *
To Ike’s disappointment, none of the handful of pedestrians with whom he crossed paths on his walk from Joven’s factory to the National Museum of the Worker seemed to notice his attire. Most were heading south, in the direction of the So Fair and the Lees, several at a run. A red-and-white-striped hospital carriage passed by Ike, horses at a gallop, the second man on the box whacking his bell with a hammer and screaming, “People hurt! Clear out-the-way! People hurt! Clear out-the-way!”
At one stage of his short journey, a woman was weeping in the arms of a friend in the middle of a narrow sidewalk. Ike had to press close to a wall to get by and actually brushed the hem of the distressed woman’s skirts, but she didn’t react.
“All dead,” she was saying through sobs to her friend, “every soul in the place. Slaughtered. Blood everywhere.” Her friend immediately blamed “that son-of-a-bitch dockman Mosi”; he had vouched for them university rich boys and for Crossley’s soldiers, and it had resulted in butchery.
It was worrisome talk, to be sure. Since that day in the Fields, when he’d spied the old bones in his scarf and the horrible Misses Pinter and the soldier with all his high-ranking badges, Ike had sensed something was amiss in the state of things. He’d mused on it some: it was the waiting. The waiting for an official peace, for new rules, for new constables. That was why the revolution didn’t feel real.
When Ike had been a little fellow fresh from the Lodgings, he’d made a penny one morning lugging a bucket for a clamdigger with a bad back. After the digger paid him, Ike squatted in a court and spun his penny on the stones, just taking pleasure in the shine of it. A lady had come over.
The lady told him she could get him a bag of sugar drops from her sister’s house for half a penny and he gave her the coin eagerly. She promised to be right back with the candy and his change. Ike kept to the spot, waiting until dark for the lady to return with the treats and his halfpenny, before he finally went home to the Still and, crying, told Rei.
A dockman at the bar overheard, laughed, and bellowed, “Lovers’ Promises!”
Rei had tousled Ike’s hair and pinched his cheek and cheerfully observed, “You’ll never get robbed that way again, now will you, Ikey?”
It was like that, how it felt: like the moment before you came around to realizing you’d been done a nasty cheat.
If the Provisional Government collapsed, he and Dora would have to be careful. That was all right. Ike knew how to be careful, and he had an idea that she did too.
He didn’t stop to inquire for specifics about the nature of the current crisis. If it was as big as it sounded, the news would soon be everywhere, and the details clearer.
His current mission lay elsewhere—and he looked damn smart too! Even if everyone was in too much of an uproar to pay him any mind.
* * *
Ike let himself in the unlocked door of the museum and called out for Dora. There was no answer, and his stomach, which he hadn’t realized was triple-knotted, relaxed. She must be out fetching supplies. In the future, Ike resolved, she’d be able to stay put because he’d bring whatever they needed.
He took the dress from his satchel, concerned that it was getting wrinkled, and smoothed it across the desk in the small office. Beside it, he set down the pouch of glass eyes.
There was nothing else to do but have a look around.
He pushed the oversized gears. The way they turned each other was very satisfying, and he stepped back and forth through the central gear.
On the second floor, while studying the wax baker, he had an idea. Ike got down on his hands and knees to peek under the baker’s skirts to see what it looked like between her legs, but an attack of embarrassment overcame him, and he jumped to his feet. Ike apologized to the statue and told her he was just looking for something he thought he’d dropped. “Not that you care, because you’re wax,” he said, walking away and not looking back at the figure.
At a window, he viewed the ruins of the building that had burned. Three or four cats were climbing on the mounds of brick, and another three or four were slinking amid the high grass out front. He couldn’t see Dora as a worshipper, but he’d make vows at an altar if she wanted. Ike enjoyed the little critters—how could you not?—he just didn’t think they protected people from evil.
Up on the fourth floor, he fiddled with the wooden box with the lens and had no more success than on the previous occasion. “It’s really busted, fella,” he informed the snake-eyed wax man who was supposed to be in charge of it.
When his exploration finally brought him to the fifth floor, he stopped for a couple of minutes to contemplate a peculiar mining exhibit he’d somehow overlooked on previous visits. A miner in a white suit carrying a pickax stood on one side of a barrel filled with bright-yellow sand, and a wax lady in a startlingly tight skirt stood on the other. What sort of strange sand had the miner dug up? What was the lady’s role here? The woman in the tight dress appeared positively gleeful. Was she buying the stuff? What did her husband think about those clothes she was wearing? Ike could see how maybe he’d like them, the wax woman’s husband, but also how maybe he wouldn’t, at least when other men were around.
Ike could not decode the scene at all, and he wished Dora were there to help him understand.
More than an hour had passed. He hoped she would not be much longer. He felt anxious again. It was such an enormous space that it almost seemed like the building was bigger inside than it was outside, though that was nonsense; and the wax people, the way they stood there in the corner of your eye, you had to fight the urge to glance in one direction and look back suddenly to catch them moving, which was obviously nonsense too. Ike declared to himself that he wasn’t afraid, just “antsy.” At the thought of that word, the bare skin at the backs of his hands felt ticklish and he had to wipe at them.
“I don’t know how you sleep alone here, Dora,” Ike said aloud, and the sound of his voice made him feel better.
Some of the yellow sand had escaped the barrel and lay scattered across a glass stream. Footsteps were tracked in the sand. Ike followed them to where a wax prospector in a raggy hat was fixed into the glass water, pawing through a metal screen full of shiny rocks. The prospector’s wife was hanging raggy clothes on a line. This exhibit he did recall.
Ike doffed his hat to the prospectors. “Good day, country folk. I’m Ike, Dora’s future husband.”
The clothesline stretched from a shack. The shack had a pair of cane chairs out front. Its door was closed.
He thought Dora might be sleeping in the shack—maybe it had a bed—so he knocked on the closed door. “Dora?” There was no sound from within. Ike put his hand on the latch, but hesitated. She might be shaking off a drowse. He did not want to be intrusive and catch her half awake and undressed.
What if he opened the door and she told him to get out, screamed at him to get out?
What if she rejected his proposal?
What if she laughed?
You can’t cry, he told himself. You can’t cry, you can’t cry, you can’t cry.
His lifted his fingers from the latch. He stroked the cool silk of the white scarf. He was just winding himself up: How could she say no? He had brought her everything she’d asked for.
Ike steeled himself with the thought that if she did say no, he would still serve her. He would serve her for as long as it took to win her. He would serve her until he fell, if that was what it came to.
“Dora?” he asked. “It’s me, Ike. May I come in?”
* * *
The man who lived in the embassy and who was not named Anthony was awakened by Ike’s voice greeting the wax prospectors. He quietly sat up from his nap in the bed inside the shack and crept barefoot through the curtain that served as the shack’s fourth wall. Each small, soft step made an ache that went from his crotch through his torso and into his tongue, but he swallowed the pain that Sergeant Van Goor had given him as easily as a raw egg.
“Dora? It’s me, Ike. May I come in?” the young man asked as the man from the embassy slipped along the outside of the shack’s wall. He was well-spoken. It was a mark in the young rascal’s favor.
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony circled around behind the young man, who was prettily dressed too. What to make of it? Her husband-to-be, he called himself!
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony had been up for hours with Van Goor and had only taken a short rest, but his curiosity was freshly piqued. A thorough interview would be necessary.
He surveyed the near figures—the prospector, the prospector’s wife, the fruit picker, the miner, the miner’s happy friend, the farmer, the farmer’s dog—to see their reactions. But all were turned away, as if by not looking they could maintain their innocence.
The young rascal, this Ike, stiffened. He had felt breath on the back of his neck.
“I’m sorry,” said the-man-who-was-not-Anthony into Ike’s ear. “She’s away somewhere. You’ve got me, though. Perhaps I can help you.”
A Dream of Three Days
She emerged from the Vestibule into a hot, overcast afternoon. Inching her way between the banks of wreckage and blinking at the brightness of the muted sky, D stepped through the empty doorway to the expanse of the overgrown Society lawn. Across the street the dark-blue manse of the Archives for the Study of Nautical Exploration and Oceanic Depth squatted sullenly, the frayed gold rigging on the door like a big loosened bow tie.
D moved forward. The uncut grass swished around her skirts and a yellow poplar leaf, tangled in the grass, caught in a fold of the fabric. She brushed it away. D felt refreshed, but dazed.
In the Vestibule, she had fallen asleep and had a night of wild, vivid dreams:
There had been sweet hills, a great blue sky, and a window that made it possible to change her face, to transform herself into the most beautiful woman imaginable. But D had realized that she was blindfolded, and she took the blindfold off. With her real eyes she saw it was night, the moons glowing with an infected shine, and the hills were actually the famous columns on the plateau above the Great Highway. She’d walked to a mountain pass. Plinths lining the path held globes and a few of the globes contained lights. D looked closely into one and saw a tiny man burning, skin puckering and bubbling, even as he stared at himself in a tiny glass, wherein the same man wore a blissful expression and was unharmed. Imprisoned in the other lit globes were other hypnotized men and women in flames, but the majority of the globes contained only cinders, as if their tiny inhabitants had burnt away. Throughout all this, D’s comprehension was muffled; she had felt gauzily obliged to explore; and at one dark globe, where the remains of someone’s soul lay in ashes, a powerful awareness of Ambrose came to her, a certainty that he was nearby. Part of the gauze around her mind tore. At last! He was so close! She became desperate for help. At the bottom of the path, in a natural bowl formed between ridges, there had been a massive open-air temple with a hundred or so stone chairs. In perhaps a dozen of the chairs, elderly men and women lolled, asleep, dressed in golden robes, their long gray hair spooling onto the rocky ground. More fiery globes burned on ledges that encircled the temple, and cast their lights on the sleepers. D had retraced her steps to a tattooed crone who was seated on a stool close to the door she’d come through, revealed by her true eyes as a triangular portal.
D frantically told the crone that near a globe of ashes she had sensed her brother’s closeness; a teenage boy with a cap pulled low and a toothy smile, had madam seen anyone of that description?
“Do you need your face changed?” the crone asked, and with a humongous sewing needle—as large as a carving knife—pointed to a guillotine.
D said no; she was looking for her brother, Ambrose. Hadn’t madam seen him?
“Your eyes are cleared, woman. If he came here, and he’s not one of them, and he’s not burning, you can see for yourself what’s become of him. They soaked themselves in his light. They drank him up. You should have kept your eyes covered if you didn’t want to know. Do you want a face or not?”
When D hadn’t replied, the old woman had snarled and jabbed the needle in D’s direction, and D had staggered away through the portal.
* * *
“Ah! There you are!”
She saw a driver in white-dusted work clothes standing in the street beside a wagon that was stopped in front of the museum. He was waving his wide-brimmed hat to her. The two horses yoked to the wagon were nibbling the weeds that grew in the gaps between the street cobbles.
“I’ve got your lime!” he called. “I apologize for the delay!” The man flapped the hat in front of his face. “Not a minute too soon, I can tell! Potent! Latrine, is it?”
The driver had soft middle-aged features that seemed made to smile, swelling cheeks, a broad mouth, and a bulbous nose. There was nothing dangerous about him. His room was a thatched hovel, D saw. A sunken mattress and a kettle and a rocking chair to relax in, its runners squeaking happily in the accumulated carpet of dust that had accompanied him home from his lime pit, that was enough for him. But the driver had come to the wrong place.
“I didn’t order any lime, sir. I’m sorry.”
He tilted his chin in a demonstration of perplexity. “But the feller that made the order said to bring it to the corner of Little Heritage and Legate, and I was under the impression Legate’s all empty now. I took the order myself. Tall feller, a military man.”
On the other side of Little Heritage, in front of the offices of the Association of the Brotherhood of Tram Workers, a scatter of maroon in an oak tree caught D’s eye. She glanced back at the Society wreckage: thin veins of yellow leaves twisted through the poplars’ green bells.
There hadn’t been any autumn colors when Robert had walked her home from the pond. She’d been sunstruck and wanted a drink, and she’d gone into the museum and… there had been a new exhibit—no, not new, obviously, but one she hadn’t noticed before. It had been a soldier… a female soldier with a weapon that D couldn’t understand.
…And she had gone to sleep in the ruins of the Society, and dreamed.
D looked at her skirts, torn from crawling through the hedge and climbing the piles of shattered masonry, and stained black from the ashy debris of the building—where she had run to hide from the sergeant, who had come to hurt her. There was a dirty, scabbed cut between her thumb and forefinger from the drill bit.
“Maybe no one told you. Is your master here?” the driver asked.
“She doesn’t have a master.”
Her neighbor had appeared a few feet behind the driver, dressed in his full uniform. Captain Anthony’s hands were pressed palm-to-palm before him and he was bent slightly with his shoulders turned up. In the daylight, there was something shy and apologetic in his bearing; the reflexive embarrassment of a giant in a human world. He indicated D’s building. “She’s the one that keeps that place there, the museum. I’m on Legate at the corner.”
“Oh,” the driver said, and his expression was confused as he glanced again at D in her soiled clothing. “What do you know? Legate’s not empty. Beg your pardon, miss.”
“If you lay the bags out front there on the sidewalk at the corner, I’ll bring them through to the back,” Captain Anthony said to the driver.
“Are you sure? That’s a lot of lifting for one feller. I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself.” There were at least a dozen dusty sacks piled in the wagon bed. “What have you got, anyhow? Latrine overflow? It’s rotten, I’ll tell you.”
“A mess,” D’s neighbor said.
The amiable driver seemed to expect more, but after a moment the bearded man’s grinning silence defeated him and he nodded. “Right, right, I’ll lay them out for you, you know how you want them,” and started to unload the sacks of lime from the wagon, stacking them on the sidewalk.
D remained at the door of the museum. It had not occurred to her to go inside. She’d been fixed. To see him was like seeing a stone gargoyle lift off its cornice at the top of a building and smoothly flap down to the ground. To see him was like seeing all the wrecks at the bottom of the Fair burst up from the water as one to float once more, a mucky, coruscating ghost armada, bound for the open sea. To see him was like seeing a gore-caked wolf standing on its hind legs and dressed in a soldier’s uniform to receive a large supply of lime to cover the scent of the festering corpses of the people he’d tortured to death and stored in the stables behind his lair.
Captain Anthony approached her. His head was angled so that he seemed to address her left elbow, and he moved with a new, noticeable limp, his left leg dragging after the right. “Captain Anthony, miss.” Her neighbor bowed to her. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to introduce myself earlier. As you know, I’ve been busy with my work.” His eyes flickered up to her and the corners of his contrite smile turned down, indicating the sadness and the disruptiveness of it, of his nightly labor murdering human beings. She supposed that she had already known that he must be mad, but she saw it in his expression then. His lips were like a pair of red worms in the black brush of his beard.
She curtsied. “Dora, sir.”
He redirected to her elbow. “I was worried about you.” He spoke in a gentle, stroking voice. “You’ve been away for three nights. I thought something might have happened to you.”
“I fell asleep in the ruins of the Society building,” D said. She couldn’t imagine lying to him.
“In those ruins there?” Captain Anthony gestured at the wreckage with an expression of amusement. “That was a funny thing for you to do.”
“Yes, sir,” D said, and the full implication of his words settled on her. “Did you say three days, sir?”
