Angora Fix, Chapter Twelve: Morning After
Jan. 30th, 2009 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakfastofchampionsIt's kind of weird how the AFix dream scenes hint a little at things I was to write later in The Reddest Flower.
Also, sometimes I change things in these chapters that necessitate going back and altering details in previous edited chapters, which was the case with Mal's accent in this chapter.
Twelve: Morning After
Sunlight filtered through the leaf canopy. He moved to stand, realizing only at the last possible moment that he was seated not on the ground, but on a high branch of a great, dark tree. Realizing that in the act of rising to his feet, he would fall. There was nothing beneath his feet; they dangled above a distant forest floor. The branch he sat upon was festooned with flowered vines as though bedecked for a festival with streamers and paper blooms. There were bees and hummingbirds buzzing all around him. The sound the insects and the birds made together was a low drone, which by some miracle was not monotonous, but rose and fell as by design, birds counterpoint to the bees, as though it were a piece of music: Suite Number Five for Bees and Hummingbirds.
This was the jungle. From his vantage point, just above the canopy, he could see the wet forest stretching out in all directions, a never-ending sea of green that has consumed the land. Now that he knew where he was, he could stand safely. He had to balance himself carefully on the tree limb; it was not a mere matter of rising, it was an art. He rose, and Suite Number Five for Bees and Hummingbirds shifted in tone, became ominous, nearly alarmed. He realized he was no longer a boy. He was a black jaguar. He padded across the branch. Suddenly all branches were roads to him. Suddenly the jungle was his own. He leapt, and bees and hummingbirds scattered. Their music swelled in affront.
"This is a dream," a voice from somewhere said.
"No, it isn't," another replied. "It isn't a dream."
He knew, in a distant fashion, that both voices were his own. He leapt again and again, from branch to branch to branch, hardly needing to see the branches before he leapt to them, more nimble and far more deadly than a squirrel.
There was someone, he was aware, in this jungle with him. Someone was following him. He moved faster, jumping from tree to tree with such a quickness, the leaves and tree trunks were a green-brown blur. But he could not shake his silent pursuer, and the faster he moved, he sensed, the smaller the distance between them grew. At last he turned with a snarl, tensing his muscles for a pounce, an attack. Sunlight warm on his twisting body. How good the sun felt on his fur; how good his body felt, with its exquisite timing and perilous strength. He was ready to fight. He was ready to kill or to die.
There was no need. He found himself facing a small boy, hardly a threat. There was not even a weapon in his hand. A brown-skinned boy, a native of this forest, black eyes blinking impenetrable among the smooth planes of his face. "Peter," he said to this boy, and suddenly he was cat and boy at the same time, both bodies existing in the same place inside each other.
"Connie--" Peter reached out to him, but Peter could not touch him. Peter's hand passed cleanly through his boy-cat body, and then Constantine lost his footing. Then he was falling, breaking branches as he fell, plummeting like a stone towards the forest floor that will snap his back like a twig when his body meets it. "Connie!" Peter's cry came drifting from far above, and at that distance, blending with the other sounds of the jungle, it sounded like part of Suite Number Five for Bees and Hummingbirds.
He kept his eyes open as he fell, and in spite of the fearfulness of that descent, he was glad he did, for as he plummeted past, he caught a glimpse of something spectacular amidst the foliage: a jaguar as white as he was black, watching him with strange, pallid eyes. Then his body struck the ground, and then he woke up.
#
Constantine was in a bed. It was not his own nor any that he knew. The unfamiliar bed made him uneasy, but as it was a wide, clean, sweet-smelling bed, his unease was not as great as it might have been otherwise. Slowly he raised himself up onto his elbows, testing his body as he moved, asking it if it was ready to carry him if he needed it. It was ready. He felt some soreness, a few sharp aches, but no real pain. He did not know what had happened to him since leaping from the roof of the building. Whose bedroom was this and why was he in it? Connie examined the room.
The cop's bedroom? No, he suspected it wasn't. The decor was simple, elegant. On the walls were a few framed black and white head shots of women from the 1920s with fantastical hats and lacquered lips. The floor was hardwood, covered in part by a red and black area rug with a design of concentric squares. One wall boasted a perfect, round mirror in which he saw himself, wan but for his bruises. No stray clothes were visible; if there were clothes in this room, they must have all been folded away into the tall chest of drawers or hung in the closet which announced its presence with enormous wooden folding doors. Near the closet was a bookshelf packed with books. There was no feature of the room that seemed to speak of the man who twice now had chased him with a furious intensity down all the streets of the city at night. No, this was someone else's room.
Constantine, still conscious of the condition of every muscle in body--how they moved for him, how far he could push them--sat upright. His old bandages had been replaced by new ones. Bright white in color as the old ones had been. He sniffed at them. They smelled like flowers. Slowly, he rose from the bed, stood. He looked down at himself. Someone had dressed him in blue silk pajama pants, although his bandaged upper half was bare. The pajama bottoms were too short, leaving a wide expanse of ankle exposed. They were snug, also.
He padded in his bare feet across the floor to the closet, sliding the doors open. Inside was an array of hanging clothes. One half of the closet had been dedicated to dresses, the other half to various shirts and slacks. Neatly paired shoes reigned over the closet floor. Constantine pawed through the clothes, seeking more information about the usual occupant of this room. All the time, his ears, his eyes, his nose were alert to the world beyond the closed bedroom door, sensitive to any cue that might indicate that someone was coming.
Connie's search through the clothes told him that only one person lived here. The clothes were all the same size, reflected the same taste. The sleeves of the older shirts were all worn in the same way, suggesting that their owner had a nervous habit of chewing or picking at shirt cuffs. The signs of this odd little habit endeared Connie to the owner of the shirts. His unease was ebbing, and as he turned to examine the dresses, it disappeared completely. Somehow, he had stumbled upon a great wonder, or at least a coincidence of wondrous proportions.
He slipped one of the dresses from its hanger. He stepped out of the silk pajama pants and stood naked but for his bandages, then slipped the dress over his head. He had to struggle into it, because it was too tight for him, especially through the shoulders, but the fabric was forgiving, and at last he was wearing it. Red, it glittered along his body. He ran his hands down his torso. He turned to look at himself in the mirror. He was hardly a convincing female as he was, but with some makeup and a better fitting dress, he might be able to make something of himself. He had dressed in women's clothes for johns before, but he had never tried to make a true woman of himself. He considered it now, what it would take. He could disguise himself. Camouflage, another trick of the prey for slipping from the hunter's claws.
It was his nose that first warned him of the approach of his host as he stood considering such matters. He smelled a shift in the air, a sea change, smelled motion: a subtle aroma. It was only after his nose brought him these tidings that his ears told him of the footfalls in the corridor outside, and it was after that that his eyes told him the door was opening and someone was coming through it. Then with his sense of touch, he felt the vibrations that person's movement sent through the air. Then he tasted something faintly acrid, yet not unpleasant, like unsweetened black tea.
His host saw him standing in the red dress and smiled, a smile without teeth shown, a smile to crinkle the nose for an instant. "That color looks well on you, but I don't think the style suits you."
"Hello," said Constantine.
"I'd ask you to make yourself at home, but you already have." This was said without resentment, with a kind of sly, sardonic pleasure.
"You're Mal," Constantine replied simply. For it was. Mal of the Star Bar was standing before him, although in somewhat altered form.
An unassuming nod admitted this. "That's right. I found you this morning on my walk through the park. You were lying in the bushes as though you'd fallen from the sky. I remembered you from the club. I thought you were dead."
Mal looked different in the daylight, out of her stage costume of red dress and makeup. Her face, washed clean, was washed out, revealed as too long as well as too pale. Was she albinistic? Although not frail, she was indistinct: light and air. It was like the scene in a movie when the main character wakes up in a hospital. At first they do not know where or who they are. All they see is a bright light in their eyes, and, standing somewhere between them and the source of that light, an indistinct shape, a figure, blurred, fading in and out of the light. That figure was Mal.
Mal regarded him only through sidelong glances, not directly as they had last night. She seemed, in this state, dressed in trousers and a striped, collared shirt, strangely sexless. If he had not known who she was--for even with the differences in her appearance, her identity was unmistakable--he would have have been uncertain whether she was male or female. She could easily have passed for either sex. Only when she moved in such a way that the loose fabric of her shirt was pulled against her chest, revealing the swell of her small breasts, did she reveal a definite characteristic of any gender.
"You look different," he said. Different yet the same, he did not say.
His bluntness did not trouble her. "What, this?" She passed her hands over her body as though it were nothing, a prop which with a magician's trick she might cause to disappear. "No one notices me like this."
Connie did not know how this could be so, as he found her as noticeable now as when she she was onstage. More noticeable, because it was an unexpected noticeability. Noticing a performer on the stage was understood. Noticing someone who was no one in particular, wan-faced and plainly dressed, was extraordinary.
"You're lucky I recognized you," Mal continued her tale, "and that I was on the way back from the hospital with a friend." She paused, added with another close-lipped smile, "You're heavy."
"Yes, I am." Constantine agreed with this statement as though it were a great and incontestable truth. Then, remembering his manners, he added, "Thank you."
Mal laughed. Her laughter was brief and wary, but not insincere. "You're welcome." She sidelong looked him over, his musculature straining against the fabric of the red dress. She crossed to the closet and looked through the dresses. The dresses. The dresses which were all red: red of blood, red of lips, red of the body's secret caverns. Those dresses he had seen from the audience so many times. From her store of scarlet garments, Mal withdrew a different dress, this one of a freer, more flowing design. "Here. This one will fit you better."
Without hesitation, Constantine took the dress and changed into it, feeling no twinge of modesty at the nakedness of his body between dresses; it was Mal who averted her eyes. Mal had been right. The second dress did fit him better; the flowing lines of it masked the masculine severity of his body, creating a false impression of softness. He spun in the dress, and it flared about him, a display of plumage. "There you are," laughed Mal, smiling her quick, secretive quirk of a smile. A girlish smile, the smile of a shy child living within the woman.
He marveled at how she seemed to trust him. Was it because she had found him lying helpless in the park, like a prince fallen from a star? Was it because, last night, he had tried to stop her bleeding? "Who are you?" she asked him as he danced in her red dress, asking the question as though it was the first time it had occurred to her to wonder this.
He paused in his dancing. "I'm Connie Cat," he answered. The nickname came to him quicker than his real name.
"I know that name."
This surprised him. How could she know?
She seemed to sense his surprise. She had not been looking directly at him, but now she shifted her peripheral vision away, turning her gaze upon the room's far wall and the windows there. The dark, wooden blinds were shut, slats closed like closed mouths. Mal went to the windows and opened the blinds. Constantine stepped backwards, an upflung hand protecting his eyes from the sudden influx of light. Only when his eyes had adjusted, his pupils dwindling to pinpricks, could he see again. He looked out the windows. Ivy City. A silent city, though whether it was silent in truth or silent only to his changed eyes, his eyes which had been able to see but a certain few of the living last night, he did not know.
From the clean grace of the apartment, he would have guessed it was in a wealthier quarter of the city, but what met his eyes was not the refined brownstones and forbidding apartment buildings, the tree-lined boulevards where women walked their dogs fearlessly. No, a jumble of structures met his eyes, as many inhabitable as not. Boarded-up windows, strung clotheslines, bright bursts of graffiti. This was not unlike the neighborhood that held his home. His home: the inexplicably abandoned high rise of low income apartments he thought of as his own, although it was in fact home to other squatters: rats, pigeons, cockroaches, and a rotating population of human derelicts, none of whom he had ever glimpsed clearly. Mal's apartment was high up, looking down on the slum, and he realized, belatedly and distantly, that he loved this city, if only because, like his abandoned high rise, he could call it his own. He did not say anything about it, about this city, this love. Some things were beyond words.
"How do you know my name?" he asked.
"I didn't know it was yours," said Mal. "I've only heard it."
"Where?"
"I've heard children singing it in the streets. While they jump rope or clap their hands together. It's in a children's rhyme, although it must be a new one, since I've only started hearing it recently. Haven't you heard it?"
Connie shook his head. Children singing…. He hadn't heard the voices of children raised in song in a long while, not since his own voice had been a child's too, singing among them. It told him something about Mal, that she listened to children's songs. "How does it go?" he asked. A flicker of fear. He was afraid to know. Yet it could not be about him. He was a whore. Children did not sing songs about whores, did they? He tried to remember all the songs he'd sung as a child, managing to conjure only a few strange images: bridges falling down, babies plummeting from trees, lazy rivers drowsing on forever, women swallowing flies and spiders, roses and ashes. How odd that these were the songs that were given to children to sing.
"I don't know it all," said Mal, and he sensed her reluctance. As if, like a child, she had heard the words without knowing what they meant and was wary of what meanings they might hold.
"What do you know?"
She must have decided the words could have no ill meaning, for she recited for him, in a soft yet clear voice:
Connie Cat went out to play,
And Danny Dog came after
Now the cat's gone down the well,
Dan's hanging from the rafter.
She sensed it. He knew she sensed it, as his body tensed and his stomach cramped into folds of pain. She sensed it, because he could tell she was someone who paid attention. When he'd been a child, would she have listened to his song of ash and roses? He suspected she would have. Now all he had was a song of wells and rafters, but she had heard that too, and she had listened. Who was she, who could hear and also listen?
"Bathroom--" he gasped.
She showed it to him. She waited with him as he vomited into her toilet, immune to the smell, the ugliness of it. He did not have hair long enough to hold back, but she placed her slight hand on his shoulders, not to hold him, but to reassure. Connie couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten, but somehow there was something inside him to throw up. He heaved the last of it violently, until he was heaving nothing. Meaningless spasms shaking his body. "Stop," said Mal at last.
Surprising himself, he stopped. He had not known he was able to stop. He turned to Mal, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A smile like a white butterfly fluttered across her face. "Thanks," he said. He stood and flushed the toilet. The water roared away, taking his vomit with it. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Ask me anything you like."
She was too open. He knew he should warn her against that, but he did not warn her. "Is Mal your real name?"
"Yes, oddly enough."
"What does it mean?"
"In French, it means evil."
He laughed humorlessly. "That doesn't seem fitting."
She shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Is Connie Cat your real name?"
"No. It's Constantine."
"Is that Roman?"
"Maybe. But on me, it's Russian."
She nodded. "That accent, yes."
Constantine shifted, a little uneasy at that. So she heard it. No matter how long since he had last been home, since he last heard Russian spoken or spoken it in his turn, it did not leave his voice, haunting his words like--yes, the comparison was obvious: like a ghost. He doubted he would ever be able to free himself of that faint reminder.
He knew there were others, born in another country, or the children of immigrants like himself, who were able to lose their foreign accents, to attain that unaccented way of speaking that was at once like all accents and none, the accent of the outcast. Mal, he realized, as soon as he formed this thought, had just that accent. He and Mal stood in the bathroom talking, Mal in her clear, unaccented English, himself in his tainted English, shot through which, like an arrow wound, was the memory of another language, another people, another history.
Specks of vomit dappled the tile walls, floor. Out of the corner of his eye, Connie saw himself and Mal reflected in the bathroom mirror. There was something about the bones of Mal's face… some quality. "Are you a man?" he asked her.
She shrugged again, and he realized he didn't know what her shrugs meant. Her gestures were slightly skewed, their meanings different than if they had been gestures made by anyone else. "I'm not a man. Do I seem like one?"
"No, you don't, really." He looked down at the dress Mal had selected for him. He found no vomit staining the red fabric, and he was relieved. He turned away from Mal, to the sink beneath the mirror. He washed his face, and when he was done, toweling the water from his cheeks and forehead, he began to ache for a cigarette. "Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Not at all."
"Where are my cigarettes?"
She took him to them. There were his cigarettes and lighter, in her living room, lying motionless and apart on the coffee table in front of her couch. They reminded him of all that was motionless and apart in the world. Like himself. But unlike himself, they would be brought together. They would be used to create fire and poison, sweet poison. He didn't know why so many people objected to the poison in cigarettes when the food, the earth, the very air had grown poisonous. What was a little more poison? He lit a cigarette and offered one to Mal. She declined with a shake of her head, lowering her body into the couch. Of course, she didn't smoke. There were no ashtrays anywhere in the house. He sat down in an easy chair separated from the couch by the long coffee table, facing her.
"Can I--ask you a question?"
He decided to use her earlier words to answer this question. "Ask me anything you like." It pleased him to be so generous.
"What were you doing in the bushes this morning?"
Connie had expected this. He had an easy answer ready. "I was high. I don't remember anything. I must've stumbled into the park."
Mal gave no indication of whether she believed his answer. Constantine didn't know why she wouldn't believe him; it was the most likely explanation. It was partially true; he didn't remember anything. He had been high--high up, and after the leap from the building, there was a gap, a gaping void in his memory. He had shut his eyes, after all. Mal crossed her legs, folding her hands in her lap.
Constantine, meanwhile, had come to a point in his cigarette where he needed an ashtray. Instead of asking for something he might use, he cupped his scarred hand and tapped the ashes into that. It was already burned; what was the difference? Mal widened her eyes but made no comment. She did not ask what had happened to his hand, although he knew she must find it ugly. It was ugly, the ugliest hand in the world. He did not know what degree the burns had been, as he had received no medical attention save for the monster maker's own ministrations, but he knew if they had been much worse, he might not have had a hand left. He would have been obligated to chew it off, like a cat in a trap.
"I should go soon," said Connie.
"Where will you go?"
"Home."
There was an awkwardness between them. He could see the other questions in her eyes. Where did he live? What did he do for a living? Why had he reacted as he had to the children's rhyme? But she did not ask any of these questions. She asked, "Your friend--who was with you at the bar--who was she?"
"Her name's Petra. She's a waitress."
"Do you work with her?"
"No. I'm a whore." He smiled.
Mal accepted this information without a visible measure of surprise. "I see." A pause. Constantine tapped more ashes into his hand. Those that still held fire glowed like rubies on his palm. He didn't feel them. He knew he could put the cigarette out on his palm, and he would not feel it. In fact, that was what he intended to do. "It's rude, but can I ask you--" began Mal softly.
"You want to hire me?" Constantine looked up from the rubies in his hand hopefully.
"No, I'm afraid not." For once, Mal colored. "I wanted to--ask you--" She broke off, as though his question or the question she wanted to ask had embarrassed her.
"Ask me."
"Who is Danny Dog?"
Constantine said nothing.
"He is--a real person, isn't he? The rhyme is really about you, isn't it?"
Constantine pressed out his cigarette on his palm, which made Mal wince. For a moment, he was determined not to answer her question, to rise and leave, without changing clothes first, to leave this apartment in the red dress and never return to it. But the image came to him, of Mal and her friend carrying his body through the park like nurses on a battlefield, so he did not leave. "Yes, he was a real person. But I don't know why there's a rhyme … a children's song about us. Who would write it and teach it to children to sing?"
Who did write those children's rhymes anyway? Constantine did not know. He had never heard them attributed to anyone other than Anonymous. Who wrote them, and how did they spread, from child's mouth to child's mouth, like a virus, across cities and countries? Were those fatuous rhymes written at all, or did they rise up from the ground, like water, like myths?
"I don't know," said Mal, shaking her head, setting her pale hair swinging. "I apologize for asking. It was rude."
"It's all right." He held up a hand to ward off her apology, realizing too late it was the scarred ashtray, the monster, he'd raised, letting the ashes fall. They drifted to the ground like dirty snow, and Constantine laughed. They were beautiful. If ashes were what you became when you died, ghost and ashes, it wouldn't be so bad. "I'll tell you everything."
Also, sometimes I change things in these chapters that necessitate going back and altering details in previous edited chapters, which was the case with Mal's accent in this chapter.
Twelve: Morning After
Sunlight filtered through the leaf canopy. He moved to stand, realizing only at the last possible moment that he was seated not on the ground, but on a high branch of a great, dark tree. Realizing that in the act of rising to his feet, he would fall. There was nothing beneath his feet; they dangled above a distant forest floor. The branch he sat upon was festooned with flowered vines as though bedecked for a festival with streamers and paper blooms. There were bees and hummingbirds buzzing all around him. The sound the insects and the birds made together was a low drone, which by some miracle was not monotonous, but rose and fell as by design, birds counterpoint to the bees, as though it were a piece of music: Suite Number Five for Bees and Hummingbirds.
This was the jungle. From his vantage point, just above the canopy, he could see the wet forest stretching out in all directions, a never-ending sea of green that has consumed the land. Now that he knew where he was, he could stand safely. He had to balance himself carefully on the tree limb; it was not a mere matter of rising, it was an art. He rose, and Suite Number Five for Bees and Hummingbirds shifted in tone, became ominous, nearly alarmed. He realized he was no longer a boy. He was a black jaguar. He padded across the branch. Suddenly all branches were roads to him. Suddenly the jungle was his own. He leapt, and bees and hummingbirds scattered. Their music swelled in affront.
"This is a dream," a voice from somewhere said.
"No, it isn't," another replied. "It isn't a dream."
He knew, in a distant fashion, that both voices were his own. He leapt again and again, from branch to branch to branch, hardly needing to see the branches before he leapt to them, more nimble and far more deadly than a squirrel.
There was someone, he was aware, in this jungle with him. Someone was following him. He moved faster, jumping from tree to tree with such a quickness, the leaves and tree trunks were a green-brown blur. But he could not shake his silent pursuer, and the faster he moved, he sensed, the smaller the distance between them grew. At last he turned with a snarl, tensing his muscles for a pounce, an attack. Sunlight warm on his twisting body. How good the sun felt on his fur; how good his body felt, with its exquisite timing and perilous strength. He was ready to fight. He was ready to kill or to die.
There was no need. He found himself facing a small boy, hardly a threat. There was not even a weapon in his hand. A brown-skinned boy, a native of this forest, black eyes blinking impenetrable among the smooth planes of his face. "Peter," he said to this boy, and suddenly he was cat and boy at the same time, both bodies existing in the same place inside each other.
"Connie--" Peter reached out to him, but Peter could not touch him. Peter's hand passed cleanly through his boy-cat body, and then Constantine lost his footing. Then he was falling, breaking branches as he fell, plummeting like a stone towards the forest floor that will snap his back like a twig when his body meets it. "Connie!" Peter's cry came drifting from far above, and at that distance, blending with the other sounds of the jungle, it sounded like part of Suite Number Five for Bees and Hummingbirds.
He kept his eyes open as he fell, and in spite of the fearfulness of that descent, he was glad he did, for as he plummeted past, he caught a glimpse of something spectacular amidst the foliage: a jaguar as white as he was black, watching him with strange, pallid eyes. Then his body struck the ground, and then he woke up.
Constantine was in a bed. It was not his own nor any that he knew. The unfamiliar bed made him uneasy, but as it was a wide, clean, sweet-smelling bed, his unease was not as great as it might have been otherwise. Slowly he raised himself up onto his elbows, testing his body as he moved, asking it if it was ready to carry him if he needed it. It was ready. He felt some soreness, a few sharp aches, but no real pain. He did not know what had happened to him since leaping from the roof of the building. Whose bedroom was this and why was he in it? Connie examined the room.
The cop's bedroom? No, he suspected it wasn't. The decor was simple, elegant. On the walls were a few framed black and white head shots of women from the 1920s with fantastical hats and lacquered lips. The floor was hardwood, covered in part by a red and black area rug with a design of concentric squares. One wall boasted a perfect, round mirror in which he saw himself, wan but for his bruises. No stray clothes were visible; if there were clothes in this room, they must have all been folded away into the tall chest of drawers or hung in the closet which announced its presence with enormous wooden folding doors. Near the closet was a bookshelf packed with books. There was no feature of the room that seemed to speak of the man who twice now had chased him with a furious intensity down all the streets of the city at night. No, this was someone else's room.
Constantine, still conscious of the condition of every muscle in body--how they moved for him, how far he could push them--sat upright. His old bandages had been replaced by new ones. Bright white in color as the old ones had been. He sniffed at them. They smelled like flowers. Slowly, he rose from the bed, stood. He looked down at himself. Someone had dressed him in blue silk pajama pants, although his bandaged upper half was bare. The pajama bottoms were too short, leaving a wide expanse of ankle exposed. They were snug, also.
He padded in his bare feet across the floor to the closet, sliding the doors open. Inside was an array of hanging clothes. One half of the closet had been dedicated to dresses, the other half to various shirts and slacks. Neatly paired shoes reigned over the closet floor. Constantine pawed through the clothes, seeking more information about the usual occupant of this room. All the time, his ears, his eyes, his nose were alert to the world beyond the closed bedroom door, sensitive to any cue that might indicate that someone was coming.
Connie's search through the clothes told him that only one person lived here. The clothes were all the same size, reflected the same taste. The sleeves of the older shirts were all worn in the same way, suggesting that their owner had a nervous habit of chewing or picking at shirt cuffs. The signs of this odd little habit endeared Connie to the owner of the shirts. His unease was ebbing, and as he turned to examine the dresses, it disappeared completely. Somehow, he had stumbled upon a great wonder, or at least a coincidence of wondrous proportions.
He slipped one of the dresses from its hanger. He stepped out of the silk pajama pants and stood naked but for his bandages, then slipped the dress over his head. He had to struggle into it, because it was too tight for him, especially through the shoulders, but the fabric was forgiving, and at last he was wearing it. Red, it glittered along his body. He ran his hands down his torso. He turned to look at himself in the mirror. He was hardly a convincing female as he was, but with some makeup and a better fitting dress, he might be able to make something of himself. He had dressed in women's clothes for johns before, but he had never tried to make a true woman of himself. He considered it now, what it would take. He could disguise himself. Camouflage, another trick of the prey for slipping from the hunter's claws.
It was his nose that first warned him of the approach of his host as he stood considering such matters. He smelled a shift in the air, a sea change, smelled motion: a subtle aroma. It was only after his nose brought him these tidings that his ears told him of the footfalls in the corridor outside, and it was after that that his eyes told him the door was opening and someone was coming through it. Then with his sense of touch, he felt the vibrations that person's movement sent through the air. Then he tasted something faintly acrid, yet not unpleasant, like unsweetened black tea.
His host saw him standing in the red dress and smiled, a smile without teeth shown, a smile to crinkle the nose for an instant. "That color looks well on you, but I don't think the style suits you."
"Hello," said Constantine.
"I'd ask you to make yourself at home, but you already have." This was said without resentment, with a kind of sly, sardonic pleasure.
"You're Mal," Constantine replied simply. For it was. Mal of the Star Bar was standing before him, although in somewhat altered form.
An unassuming nod admitted this. "That's right. I found you this morning on my walk through the park. You were lying in the bushes as though you'd fallen from the sky. I remembered you from the club. I thought you were dead."
Mal looked different in the daylight, out of her stage costume of red dress and makeup. Her face, washed clean, was washed out, revealed as too long as well as too pale. Was she albinistic? Although not frail, she was indistinct: light and air. It was like the scene in a movie when the main character wakes up in a hospital. At first they do not know where or who they are. All they see is a bright light in their eyes, and, standing somewhere between them and the source of that light, an indistinct shape, a figure, blurred, fading in and out of the light. That figure was Mal.
Mal regarded him only through sidelong glances, not directly as they had last night. She seemed, in this state, dressed in trousers and a striped, collared shirt, strangely sexless. If he had not known who she was--for even with the differences in her appearance, her identity was unmistakable--he would have have been uncertain whether she was male or female. She could easily have passed for either sex. Only when she moved in such a way that the loose fabric of her shirt was pulled against her chest, revealing the swell of her small breasts, did she reveal a definite characteristic of any gender.
"You look different," he said. Different yet the same, he did not say.
His bluntness did not trouble her. "What, this?" She passed her hands over her body as though it were nothing, a prop which with a magician's trick she might cause to disappear. "No one notices me like this."
Connie did not know how this could be so, as he found her as noticeable now as when she she was onstage. More noticeable, because it was an unexpected noticeability. Noticing a performer on the stage was understood. Noticing someone who was no one in particular, wan-faced and plainly dressed, was extraordinary.
"You're lucky I recognized you," Mal continued her tale, "and that I was on the way back from the hospital with a friend." She paused, added with another close-lipped smile, "You're heavy."
"Yes, I am." Constantine agreed with this statement as though it were a great and incontestable truth. Then, remembering his manners, he added, "Thank you."
Mal laughed. Her laughter was brief and wary, but not insincere. "You're welcome." She sidelong looked him over, his musculature straining against the fabric of the red dress. She crossed to the closet and looked through the dresses. The dresses. The dresses which were all red: red of blood, red of lips, red of the body's secret caverns. Those dresses he had seen from the audience so many times. From her store of scarlet garments, Mal withdrew a different dress, this one of a freer, more flowing design. "Here. This one will fit you better."
Without hesitation, Constantine took the dress and changed into it, feeling no twinge of modesty at the nakedness of his body between dresses; it was Mal who averted her eyes. Mal had been right. The second dress did fit him better; the flowing lines of it masked the masculine severity of his body, creating a false impression of softness. He spun in the dress, and it flared about him, a display of plumage. "There you are," laughed Mal, smiling her quick, secretive quirk of a smile. A girlish smile, the smile of a shy child living within the woman.
He marveled at how she seemed to trust him. Was it because she had found him lying helpless in the park, like a prince fallen from a star? Was it because, last night, he had tried to stop her bleeding? "Who are you?" she asked him as he danced in her red dress, asking the question as though it was the first time it had occurred to her to wonder this.
He paused in his dancing. "I'm Connie Cat," he answered. The nickname came to him quicker than his real name.
"I know that name."
This surprised him. How could she know?
She seemed to sense his surprise. She had not been looking directly at him, but now she shifted her peripheral vision away, turning her gaze upon the room's far wall and the windows there. The dark, wooden blinds were shut, slats closed like closed mouths. Mal went to the windows and opened the blinds. Constantine stepped backwards, an upflung hand protecting his eyes from the sudden influx of light. Only when his eyes had adjusted, his pupils dwindling to pinpricks, could he see again. He looked out the windows. Ivy City. A silent city, though whether it was silent in truth or silent only to his changed eyes, his eyes which had been able to see but a certain few of the living last night, he did not know.
From the clean grace of the apartment, he would have guessed it was in a wealthier quarter of the city, but what met his eyes was not the refined brownstones and forbidding apartment buildings, the tree-lined boulevards where women walked their dogs fearlessly. No, a jumble of structures met his eyes, as many inhabitable as not. Boarded-up windows, strung clotheslines, bright bursts of graffiti. This was not unlike the neighborhood that held his home. His home: the inexplicably abandoned high rise of low income apartments he thought of as his own, although it was in fact home to other squatters: rats, pigeons, cockroaches, and a rotating population of human derelicts, none of whom he had ever glimpsed clearly. Mal's apartment was high up, looking down on the slum, and he realized, belatedly and distantly, that he loved this city, if only because, like his abandoned high rise, he could call it his own. He did not say anything about it, about this city, this love. Some things were beyond words.
"How do you know my name?" he asked.
"I didn't know it was yours," said Mal. "I've only heard it."
"Where?"
"I've heard children singing it in the streets. While they jump rope or clap their hands together. It's in a children's rhyme, although it must be a new one, since I've only started hearing it recently. Haven't you heard it?"
Connie shook his head. Children singing…. He hadn't heard the voices of children raised in song in a long while, not since his own voice had been a child's too, singing among them. It told him something about Mal, that she listened to children's songs. "How does it go?" he asked. A flicker of fear. He was afraid to know. Yet it could not be about him. He was a whore. Children did not sing songs about whores, did they? He tried to remember all the songs he'd sung as a child, managing to conjure only a few strange images: bridges falling down, babies plummeting from trees, lazy rivers drowsing on forever, women swallowing flies and spiders, roses and ashes. How odd that these were the songs that were given to children to sing.
"I don't know it all," said Mal, and he sensed her reluctance. As if, like a child, she had heard the words without knowing what they meant and was wary of what meanings they might hold.
"What do you know?"
She must have decided the words could have no ill meaning, for she recited for him, in a soft yet clear voice:
Connie Cat went out to play,
And Danny Dog came after
Now the cat's gone down the well,
Dan's hanging from the rafter.
She sensed it. He knew she sensed it, as his body tensed and his stomach cramped into folds of pain. She sensed it, because he could tell she was someone who paid attention. When he'd been a child, would she have listened to his song of ash and roses? He suspected she would have. Now all he had was a song of wells and rafters, but she had heard that too, and she had listened. Who was she, who could hear and also listen?
"Bathroom--" he gasped.
She showed it to him. She waited with him as he vomited into her toilet, immune to the smell, the ugliness of it. He did not have hair long enough to hold back, but she placed her slight hand on his shoulders, not to hold him, but to reassure. Connie couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten, but somehow there was something inside him to throw up. He heaved the last of it violently, until he was heaving nothing. Meaningless spasms shaking his body. "Stop," said Mal at last.
Surprising himself, he stopped. He had not known he was able to stop. He turned to Mal, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A smile like a white butterfly fluttered across her face. "Thanks," he said. He stood and flushed the toilet. The water roared away, taking his vomit with it. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Ask me anything you like."
She was too open. He knew he should warn her against that, but he did not warn her. "Is Mal your real name?"
"Yes, oddly enough."
"What does it mean?"
"In French, it means evil."
He laughed humorlessly. "That doesn't seem fitting."
She shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Is Connie Cat your real name?"
"No. It's Constantine."
"Is that Roman?"
"Maybe. But on me, it's Russian."
She nodded. "That accent, yes."
Constantine shifted, a little uneasy at that. So she heard it. No matter how long since he had last been home, since he last heard Russian spoken or spoken it in his turn, it did not leave his voice, haunting his words like--yes, the comparison was obvious: like a ghost. He doubted he would ever be able to free himself of that faint reminder.
He knew there were others, born in another country, or the children of immigrants like himself, who were able to lose their foreign accents, to attain that unaccented way of speaking that was at once like all accents and none, the accent of the outcast. Mal, he realized, as soon as he formed this thought, had just that accent. He and Mal stood in the bathroom talking, Mal in her clear, unaccented English, himself in his tainted English, shot through which, like an arrow wound, was the memory of another language, another people, another history.
Specks of vomit dappled the tile walls, floor. Out of the corner of his eye, Connie saw himself and Mal reflected in the bathroom mirror. There was something about the bones of Mal's face… some quality. "Are you a man?" he asked her.
She shrugged again, and he realized he didn't know what her shrugs meant. Her gestures were slightly skewed, their meanings different than if they had been gestures made by anyone else. "I'm not a man. Do I seem like one?"
"No, you don't, really." He looked down at the dress Mal had selected for him. He found no vomit staining the red fabric, and he was relieved. He turned away from Mal, to the sink beneath the mirror. He washed his face, and when he was done, toweling the water from his cheeks and forehead, he began to ache for a cigarette. "Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Not at all."
"Where are my cigarettes?"
She took him to them. There were his cigarettes and lighter, in her living room, lying motionless and apart on the coffee table in front of her couch. They reminded him of all that was motionless and apart in the world. Like himself. But unlike himself, they would be brought together. They would be used to create fire and poison, sweet poison. He didn't know why so many people objected to the poison in cigarettes when the food, the earth, the very air had grown poisonous. What was a little more poison? He lit a cigarette and offered one to Mal. She declined with a shake of her head, lowering her body into the couch. Of course, she didn't smoke. There were no ashtrays anywhere in the house. He sat down in an easy chair separated from the couch by the long coffee table, facing her.
"Can I--ask you a question?"
He decided to use her earlier words to answer this question. "Ask me anything you like." It pleased him to be so generous.
"What were you doing in the bushes this morning?"
Connie had expected this. He had an easy answer ready. "I was high. I don't remember anything. I must've stumbled into the park."
Mal gave no indication of whether she believed his answer. Constantine didn't know why she wouldn't believe him; it was the most likely explanation. It was partially true; he didn't remember anything. He had been high--high up, and after the leap from the building, there was a gap, a gaping void in his memory. He had shut his eyes, after all. Mal crossed her legs, folding her hands in her lap.
Constantine, meanwhile, had come to a point in his cigarette where he needed an ashtray. Instead of asking for something he might use, he cupped his scarred hand and tapped the ashes into that. It was already burned; what was the difference? Mal widened her eyes but made no comment. She did not ask what had happened to his hand, although he knew she must find it ugly. It was ugly, the ugliest hand in the world. He did not know what degree the burns had been, as he had received no medical attention save for the monster maker's own ministrations, but he knew if they had been much worse, he might not have had a hand left. He would have been obligated to chew it off, like a cat in a trap.
"I should go soon," said Connie.
"Where will you go?"
"Home."
There was an awkwardness between them. He could see the other questions in her eyes. Where did he live? What did he do for a living? Why had he reacted as he had to the children's rhyme? But she did not ask any of these questions. She asked, "Your friend--who was with you at the bar--who was she?"
"Her name's Petra. She's a waitress."
"Do you work with her?"
"No. I'm a whore." He smiled.
Mal accepted this information without a visible measure of surprise. "I see." A pause. Constantine tapped more ashes into his hand. Those that still held fire glowed like rubies on his palm. He didn't feel them. He knew he could put the cigarette out on his palm, and he would not feel it. In fact, that was what he intended to do. "It's rude, but can I ask you--" began Mal softly.
"You want to hire me?" Constantine looked up from the rubies in his hand hopefully.
"No, I'm afraid not." For once, Mal colored. "I wanted to--ask you--" She broke off, as though his question or the question she wanted to ask had embarrassed her.
"Ask me."
"Who is Danny Dog?"
Constantine said nothing.
"He is--a real person, isn't he? The rhyme is really about you, isn't it?"
Constantine pressed out his cigarette on his palm, which made Mal wince. For a moment, he was determined not to answer her question, to rise and leave, without changing clothes first, to leave this apartment in the red dress and never return to it. But the image came to him, of Mal and her friend carrying his body through the park like nurses on a battlefield, so he did not leave. "Yes, he was a real person. But I don't know why there's a rhyme … a children's song about us. Who would write it and teach it to children to sing?"
Who did write those children's rhymes anyway? Constantine did not know. He had never heard them attributed to anyone other than Anonymous. Who wrote them, and how did they spread, from child's mouth to child's mouth, like a virus, across cities and countries? Were those fatuous rhymes written at all, or did they rise up from the ground, like water, like myths?
"I don't know," said Mal, shaking her head, setting her pale hair swinging. "I apologize for asking. It was rude."
"It's all right." He held up a hand to ward off her apology, realizing too late it was the scarred ashtray, the monster, he'd raised, letting the ashes fall. They drifted to the ground like dirty snow, and Constantine laughed. They were beautiful. If ashes were what you became when you died, ghost and ashes, it wouldn't be so bad. "I'll tell you everything."
