Swamp Foetus

  Andrew pulled in a noseful of air. The full, wet smell was there again, under the fruity odor of the wine and the tangy, private scent of their sweat. Andrew nodded. Lucian shrugged. “I can’t do anything about it. It’s too hot to close the window.” He grew brisk. “There. You’ve had your music. It’s late; go home. I’ll see you tomorrow night.” He pushed Andrew toward the door.

  Andrew knew Lucian would undress and lie in bed with the orange juice bottle next to him, drinking until the needling heat became a faraway thing, beneath notice, and sleep was possible. At the door Andrew turned back, not sure why he was doing such an unfamiliar and faindy embarrassing thing, and put his arms around Lucian. Lucian stiffened, surprised; then he decided to go along with it and slipped his arms awkwardly around Andrew’s neck. It was a brief, clumsy hug, but when it was over, Andrew felt obscurely better. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  A car ground by outside and in its shifting light a band of shadow slid across Lucian’s eyes. Lucian’s lips curved in a forlorn smile.

  Andrew picked his way down the stairs. Lucian held the door open to give Andrew whatever light could be had; as he ducked under the curtain Andrew heard the door click shut. He stood in the dark shop for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the light filtered and masked by Mrs. Carstairs’ heavy black draperies. When he took a step forward, his shoe struck the corner of the long wooden box. The glass shivered. He sensed something shifting inside, settling. If he pulled aside the draperies, let in the hazy moonlight, he would see—

  He didn’t want to. He headed for where he knew the door was, and had one bad moment when his hand found instead the thick, moist velvet of the draperies; then he was outside looking up at Lucian’s window, which was as dark as any other window in the sprawling block of buildings.

  Back in his clean studio apartment, with a fan whirring at the foot of his bed and a street light glowing comfortably outside his window, Andrew brought his cassette player to bed with him and was lulled to sleep by a cascade of shimmering notes, the one tape Lucian had allowed him to make of their music. The notes swirled around Andrew’s room looking for a crack, a hole, a route of escape. Eventually they slipped under the door and floated away on an eddy of wind toward the river.

  The next day was hotter and more humid; people gasped in the streets like swimmers, and flies swarmed in glistening blue-green clouds above piles of garbage. The day smelled of coconut suntan lotion and seafood being deepfried in hot oil. As the shadows in the streets lengthened and the colors of the day deepened into smudgy blues and violets, Andrew made his way back to Lucian’s room. The brown river smell had begun to creep back into the air. As Andrew nudged through the empty shop and climbed the stairs, the smell deepened and grew soft around the edges.

  Lucian was still in bed. A sheet was twisted between his legs and pulled up across his body. Its corner touched one of his pale pink nipples.

  Andrew knelt beside the bed. A warm dampness soaked through the knees of his pants, thick and sticky. He was kneeling in a puddle of vodka and plum wine. The fruity odor had grown sour in the heat. Lucian’s long eyelashes were poised just above his cheeks, ready to sweep down. Andrew touched Lucian’s hand. The fingers were stiff; he heard the clean sharp nails scratching delicately against the sheet under the pressure of his own hand. A bright cardboard package lay on the floor next to the bed: DozEze. Sleeping pills. Only two were gone. Lucian had not meant it, then.

  Andrew buried his face in the sheet, smelling cotton, a ghost of detergent, old sweat, all edged with the brown smell of the river. Neon patterns that swelled and burst behind his eyelids, resolved themselves into Lucian’s face. The silky dark lashes, the dulling white glimmer behind the lowered lids, the parted pink lips were too lovely, too alone.

  Andrew squeezed his eyes more tighdy shut. How could he leave this room now? How could he give the proper authorities the signal to descend on this lonely little body with scalpels and death certificates and jars of formaldehyde?

  After a few minutes he gently pushed Lucian to one side and lay down next to him.

  This was a warm night, but they were beginning to cool off; there would be no more sweltering sheetless midnights, no more parched red days. Andrew rubbed at the smeary glass of the window and peered out. The man with the saxophone was still there, bending and writhing under the broken street light. Stupid place for a street musician. No one ever passed by here. Andrew had shut the window so he wouldn’t have to hear the dying-cat wailing.

  He switched on the Juno and poked tentatively at a few keys. The sounds they made were pretty, but there was no crystalline waterfall of notes, no undercurrent of magic dust. Still, he was getting better, already was better on the keyboard than he had ever been on the guitar.

  He crossed the room and sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, resting his forehead on the comer of the long wooden box he had constructed. The edge of the glass top dug into his eyebrow.

  Andrew didn’t have to remember to breathe shallowly any more; he did it without thinking about it. He had none of the secrets of the woman downstairs, the witch, and the smell up here was very brown, very wet. That would pass in time. Lucian would be clean again; at last he would achieve a primal state of purity. Andrew thought of sticks of ivory, of dry perfumed husks.

  He raised his head and looked into the box.

  (1985)

  Footprints in the Water

  Dru sat at his desk for hours, hunching his bony shoulders, never bothering to push the childishly fair hair out of his face, staring until he still saw the roundabout in front of his eyes when he blinked. When he closed his eyes, a bright phantom roundabout swam in the pinpricked phosphorescent darkness behind his eyelids. When he opened them, the roundabout was tauntingly solid and still, a needle stuck in a cork, a folded triangle of paper balanced on the tip of a needle. He squinted at it, stared without blinking, visualized the piece of paper beginning to turn as the author of the book on psychic power had said to do. He willed it to turn. He blew on it to see what it looked like turning, then tried to keep it turning by the force of his mind. He vowed he would not close his eyes again until the paper began to turn. He touched it with the tip of his finger and made it turn, pushed it with his mind, forced his will upon it. It sat still, a pale brown creased slip of paper balanced on the tip of a rusty needle. It would turn. It would turn. It had to turn. He knew he could harness every scrap of power that nestled in every corner of his brain if only he could make that roundabout turn. He pushed at it with his mind. He would not close his eyes. His eyelids were stretched open. His eyeballs were dry, burning. If he blinked now, the lids would scrape against his eyes. The roundabout swam and began to dissolve, fading into a field of light that crept in from the edges of his vision. The slip of paper was absolutely still, stirred by no breath, no current. It would never turn.

  In disgust, Dru squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away. The needle shot up out of the cork and skimmed past his face, just missing his eye, scratching his cheek deeply enough to make him need three stitches. Bright and vital drops of blood spattered the roundabout, soaked into the tipped-over cork.

  Dru was fifteen then. After that, he knew, the earth was his.

  Nineveh. Pacing through the crop of stones, the only pale thing in a black night. Nineveh always dresses in white now, white silk jacket, white shoes with soft white soles, hair of the palest silver-blond falling like wings of light along his pale, pale cheeks and forehead. He moves through the yard. A brittle slice of moon gives off a cold light, fluorescendy harsh, in which Nineveh nearly disappears. He cannot live in harsh light. Harsh light is for the electric white ceilings of morgues. The stones glitter and he moves among them, paler than they are and less sharp-edged. The moonlight paints the stones, runs off them and soaks the ground; at the base of each stone is its black reflection. The mirror image of a gravestone. But there can be no more mirror images. All is lost. Your mirror image only dazz
les and sinks as you stare into his eyes, his eyes obscured by black water. The moon is not Nineveh’s twin.

  He stops and stands over a stone, his eyes hidden under a wing of silvery hair, but perhaps glittering, painted by the moon. His feet are hidden in the black pool at the base of the stone. The shadow melts over his ankles. He stands there until the moon, no longer hard-edged, fades into a delicate yellow-pink sky that becomes whitely hot by midday. The sun bleaches the grass and the stones. It cannot burn Nineveh’s pale, pale skin: his cheeks never show a tinge of rose; his lips are translucent. The sunlight, hot as white metal, burns a sheet of fire into the gravestone of his twin brother.

  The house of Frixtons, Dru’s mother and father, began to be plagued. Records, books, random desirable things appeared on Dru’s bed, things he had seen in shops but hadn’t been able to stretch his pocket money to buy. His parents made him return them to the shops, but they kept coming back. Water and a slightly thicker, clear substance drooled from the ceiling, but the plaster was always found to be dry to the touch. Often the walls shook with invisible raps, and objects—antique chairs, marble eggs, small Chinese statues—flew about like heavy wingless birds. When Dru told the disturbances to stop, they ceased, but would begin again within a few hours.

  Dru still sat hunched at his desk over the roundabout, his hair hanging in his eyes, a long, slender tail of a braid snaking halfway down his back. Sometimes he pulled the braid up over his shoulder and sucked absently at it, staring at the roundabout, staring, willing. He still could not make it turn. He could slam doors without looking at them; he could make an empty glass fill up with water; he could make a small truck roll up a hill and stop, but that tiny, creased piece of paper stayed still. Now and then a breath of air stirred it, and his heart leaped. He turned sixteen, seventeen. His fair hair darkened two shades.

  Dru was interviewed, tested in laboratories. He bent spoons, emerged from empty locked rooms. They put a paper-and-cork roundabout in front of him, but he could not make it go around. He produced living snakes out of the air; they were albino, and their eyes were always red. Two books were published, a scholarly journal study, and a glossy paperback with a mystic eye on the front. Both featured the name Dru Frixton prominently on their covers. When Dru was eighteen, he caused a mouse’s neck to be broken by an invisible blow. After the mouse had been examined and pronounced dead, Dru restored it to life.

  Headlines glared off the newspapers. Nineveh’s pale hand rested on the glossy cover of the paperback. His finger sought the address of the publisher, whereby this boy might be found, and hovered indecisively: he could not write the letter.

  Nineveh’s twin brother Dylan had been dead three years.

  Dylan is laughing. The inside of his mouth is dark pink and his eyes are wet and happy. He was never as pale as Nineveh, never as colorless; now he seems a warm andjoyous blaze of color, with his bright hair, with his pink laughing mouth. He shakes his head and his mouth opens wider, and he beats his hands on his knees helplessly as he used to do when he couldn’t stop laughing, back when he and Nineveh were children. Now he is laughing at himself for laughing so much, and his laughter is breathy and jagged. He must ache from so much laughing. His hand is in the air, messing Nineveh’s hair, entwined there. He teases Nineveh for being so neat, so pale, and a smile touches Nineveh’s lips. Nineveh’s only smiles are for Dylan. They are floating together in water, water as warm and thick as the sea they must have shared before they were born. Dylan’s mouth is closed now; open, closed on Nineveh’s, wet. And the water is black. Black under an electric white sky. Dylan is being sucked into a glittering black vortex of water. His mouth is open, gulping for air, and Nineveh wants to shout not to do that, not to swallow the water, that the black water is bitter, bilious, poisonous. Nineveh cannot hang on to his brother’s hand. Dylan is pulling away, screaming for Nineveh to let go, not to get sucked in with him. He is screaming for Nineveh to save himself. His voice is choked, gulping. Dylan is strangling on the black water. It is seeping into his lungs, covering his head. And with the last semiconscious effort he can make, he pushes Nineveh away from the vortex, wills him with smooth, strong strokes toward the white shore far in the distance. When Nineveh has made it halfway there, Dylan’s face floats up in the water beside him, still under the water, under the glossy black film, and Dylan’s eyes are open and full of water and his mouth is open, gaping, letting the water fill him—

  Nineveh surfaces from the dream screaming, floundering in the white sea of his bed. The sheets twine over his mouth and he spits them out; they are dry. He reaches for Dylan’s hand, tries to touch Dylan’s face before he remembers that the dream is real. Drowned. Drowned on holiday, far out in the water where no one could see them, not parents, not even God. Nineveh’s idea to swim out there with Dylan. Drowned. All Nineveh’s smiles, drowned. His love gone into the black water.

  Nineveh’s trailing hand touches the cover of the glossy paperback on the floor, next to the bed. His fingers pause over it for a moment; then he strokes it gently and takes it into bed with him, flipping through the pages again.

  Dru has taken to wearing black eyeliner when he and Nineveh meet. They sit in the coffeeshop, ignoring the afternoon outside. Dru’s fingers pull the braid over his shoulder and twist it, play with it. Several times he brings it to his lips and takes it away again. He is dressed in black. Nineveh, luminescently pale in the coffeeshop gloom, stirs sugar into his tea.

  Three years, says Dru.

  Nineveh is quiet.

  Transfer of energy into matter, says Dru. Infusion of the life force into inanimate matter. Transport of an entity from place to place through another dimension. Restoration.

  Nineveh will not meet his eyes.

  Dru becomes ashamed of his cheap mediumistic babble. He makes Nineveh’s tea cup slide away, dance on its rim around the edges of the table, and return to rest primly between Nineveh’s outstretched hands on the tabletop. Not a drop of tea is spilled.

  Nineveh smiles. His lips are very pale. Glory, he says.

  It is a night of drooling rain and sluggish, dim flashes of lightning. Dru is in Nineveh’s house, in the bed where Dylan once slept. The sheets are white and cold. On the couch, Nineveh pretends to sleep.

  Dru is concentrating, willing, pushing his mind. The tip of his braid is in his mouth; he sucks fiercely without being aware of it. Behind Dru’s eyelids, the field of stones spreads. The stones glisten with moonlight filtered through clouds and the wetness of the viscous rain. A stirring. A rupturing. Dru gasps; his black-rimmed eyes fly open. Glory wasn’t worth the price.

  Minutes later, the mud outside the front door sucks with footsteps. Nineveh darts to answer a knock at the door.

  Dru huddles under the cold sheet, trying to disappear into the sea of white. The smell is not what he had expected. No corruption, no gray-green fluid rot. A dark, wet smell, this, a smell of earthworms, of soggy leaves disintegrating and falling away under the ground.

  I could have loved bones, says Nineveh’s voice.

  Independent of his brain, Dru’s fingers twist the sheet away from his face. Two shapes are in the doorway. No shadows-and-bars framework of bones. A mass far softer and darker. A black smiling mouth with black gums. Somehow he had expected the eyes to be red, like those of the snakes he materialized. But they are dark, softly, deeply dark, far darker than they could be if there were anything in the sockets. The shape shifts in the doorway. Nineveh is holding its hand.

  You are glorious, says Nineveh to Dru.

  So you are, says another voice, a wet, gulping parody of Nineveh’s. The shapes move toward the bed.

  How can you harm me? asks Dru. His voice quavers. The tip of his braid slips out of his mouth and streaks his cheek with spit.

  Harm you? says the gulping voice. I love you. You gave me back my life.

  And mine, says Nineveh.

  Two figures slip into the bed, one so pale it seems to fade into the sheets, one dark and seeping. Their hands are
touching Dru. His skin is streaked with darkness. On his lips is the taste of rot, soft and dark and sweet. He realizes that he is being kissed.

  Dylan’s mouth is open now. Open, wet.

  (1986)

  How to Get Ahead in New York

  Consider this scene:

  Four a.m. in the Port Authority bus terminal, New York City. The Port Authority is a bad place at the best of times, a place where Lovecraft’s wrong geometry might well hold sway. The master of purple prose maintained that the human mind could be driven mad by contemplation of angles subtly skewed, of other planes where the three corners of a triangle might add up to less than a hundred and eighty degrees, or to more.

  Such is the Port Authority: even in the bustle of midday, corners do not appear to meet up quite right; corridors seem to slope from one end to the other. Even in full daylight, the Port Authority terminal is a bad place. At five a.m. it is wholly soulless.

  Consider two young men just off a Greyhound from North Carolina. They were not brothers, but they might be thought brothers, although they looked nothing alike: it was suggested in the way the taller one, crow-black hair shoved messily behind his ears, kept close to his fairhaired companion as if protecting him. It was implied in the way they looked around the empty terminal and then glanced at each other, exchanging bad impressions without saying a word. They were not brothers, but they had known each other since childhood, and neither had ever been to New York before.

  The corridor was flooded with dead fluorescent light. They had seen an EXIT sign pointing this way, but the corridor ended in a steel door marked NO ADMITTANCE. Should anyone find this message ambiguous, a heavy chain had been looped through the door handle and snapped shut with a padlock as large as a good-sized fist.