K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

“I don’t know.” In their near-silence, the images of the falling men seemed like those of sleepwalkers, lost in the nightmares from which they couldn’t awake. “That all happened so long ago… before I was born…” Everything that happened up there, in that world of light and shadow, seemed like a dream to her. When she had first seen her own face transformed into radiance, she had wondered who the girl was, and if she had dreamed the Marte that watched her in the darkness. “I don’t know about those things.”

“Ah, that’s all right. I didn’t really expect you to.” Wise stood beside her for a moment, gazing at the action on the screen. “I don’t even know if we’re gonna go ahead with this one – it’s not really making a lot of sense to me any more. You know what I mean?” He glanced over at her. “There’s a war going on over there right now; why should anybody be interested in what happened in the last one? People are just glad we’re staying out of it this time.” His face grew heavier, brooding. “I should be making more comedies. Right? Get people’s minds off their little problems for an hour or two. Or romances.” He smiled at her. “That’s where you come in.”

“Yes… if you still think I would be…” She couldn’t find the word in English. “ Praktisch? Suitable?”

Wise laughed, tilting his head back. “That’s really sweet. You know, I’m glad you didn’t get our complete Pygmalion number – you still got a little bit of your accent. That’s good, I want you to keep some of that exotic quality about you. It always plays well, at least with blondes. Dark-haired, you want to go the other way, tone it down.”

She hadn’t followed everything he had said. “I could dye my hair -”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “We’re not gonna touch a thing about you. Perfect the way you are.” He smiled, then leaned closer, as if he were about to kiss her. “Believe me. You’re going to be very suitable.” He drew back, gesturing toward a sofa barely visible under the bright beams from the projection booth windows. “Have a seat. Let me get you something – we really haven’t had a chance to celebrate your arrival.”

He came back from the bar with two glasses. In the darkness, she couldn’t discern what was in the one he handed to her; she took a sip and found it to be well-aged brandy. She had learned to drink things like that, expensive things, even to tell one apart from another. She let the thread of its warmth ease down her throat.

“You fixed up okay?” Wise settled down beside her, sinking back into the soft leather. The battle scene continued unreeling across from them. “How’s the little house?”

“ Es ist so schon…” She found the English words. “It’s lovely.” That had been where the boxes from the shopping expedition had been delivered, to a Spanish-styled bungalow on a winding road in the foothills. The glazed tiles set into the walls and floor were real, not just daubs of paint like those on the lot’s fake Taj Mahal.

“You really like it?” He seemed surprised by how quickly she had answered him.

“Oh, yes. It’s so… so much sun. So bright.” After the driver had brought in her luggage, she had stepped out the house’s back door and been dazzled by the tumble of flowers over the garden wall, big exotic-looking ones – exotic to her; she supposed they might be as common as Ganseblumchen in this wonderland. She didn’t even know what the flowers were called, bursting like soft explosions from their creeping tendrilled vine. She had closed her eyes as she had brought her face close to the flowers, drinking in the warm, vanilla-ish scent. Like a piece of some bright heaven, that she could cup in her hands.

Bright…

Maybe here was that heaven, where the sweet flowers came from, their home. Before she had left Berlin, everything had come to seem so dark there. Even when she had stood beneath the glare of the studio lights, their heat drawing a rivulet of sweat through the makeup slathered upon her skin – even then, when she had barely been able to squint past them to where Ernst sat leaning forward, next to the whirring camera, even then she had known it was night outside the Babelsberg walls, or a grey daylight of scudding clouds and rain-shimmered puddles at every street corner.

“Well…” Herr Wise shrugged, looking away from her, as though to hide a blush of embarrassment. “We want you to be happy here.”

“Oh, but I am sure I will be.” She reached out and touched his arm. “You have been so kind to me.”

He stood regarding her from the corners of his eyes, rubbing his black-stubbled chin with the tips of his long, delicate fingers. A musician’s fingers, the hand of a violinist.

“We’ll have to get down to business soon,” he said at last. “But not right now.” She had seen a decision click into place behind his eyes, like a coin falling through the slot of a vending machine. He nodded toward the screen. “Relax, make yourself comfortable. Why don’t we just watch the movies for a while, okay?” He smiled with perfect white teeth, the smile of one of his actors. “Take a look at this.”

He signaled to the projectionist by pushing one of the buttons on the little console near the sofa. She turned and looked up at the screen, and saw her own face. In black and white; a girl stood on a street in Berlin, her empty, hungry gaze reflected in a shop window.

“That was the first time I saw you.” Wise looked at the screen, studying the girl carefully. And then back to the one beside him, the smile rising on his own face again. “I mean, the first time I saw one of your films.”

Marte closed her eyes as she leaned back into the embrace of the sofa; she could still make out the turning and fall of the shadows and faces on the screen across the room. She heard the soft clink as Wise refilled the glasses on the low table before them. She had been holding her breath, as though she were a quiet, invisible thing, not really in this room at all, or anywhere. While she had waited for that coin to fall, for that decision to be made. The one that she already knew, that she had come to expect when men looked at her. That made her real. That made the woman with her face, up on the screen, even more real, as all the men in the darkened theater gazed up at her in silence.

“Here you go…”

She opened her eyes and saw him holding a glass out to her. As she took it, her fingers touched his for a moment. That didn’t end. He raised his gaze to hers; in the darkness at the center of his eyes, she saw the girl’s face, the woman’s face, her face. On the tiny screen of his vision, the shadows and light from the larger one played across that image. Which one was real? She didn’t know. She didn’t know, even as he leaned forward and kissed her, their fingers still touching.

She didn’t see, but heard the glass strike the floor, the brandy spilling across the rug. But she knew where she was now, inside the annihilating embrace of a man’s arms, her head tilting back as he pressed his face into the taut angle of her throat.

All the other worlds, the bright ones and the dark, vanished as she fell.

The radiance from the screen turned her skin to silver, as though she were one of those figures of light and shadow.

Marte drew away from him and sat up at one end of the couch in the little alcove. His skin caught the reflection from the screen as well, brightened by the sheen of sweat across his shoulders, lost in the tangle of dark hair on his chest. David – as he had told her to call him; he didn’t want her to say ‘ Herr Wise’ anymore – hadn’t moved when she had slipped out of his embrace. He was still asleep, or pretending to be.

She looked down at her own arms and breasts, wrists crossed against her knees. The shadows moved across her skin. The projectionist, in his small chamber above her head, had gone on running film, reel after reel, all the time she had been here with David. Perhaps the man behind the flickering beam of light was blind, or deaf, or perhaps it didn’t even matter. They had been as private here as though in a bedroom with the door closed; the soundtracks from the films had swallowed up the things he had whispered to her, his lips brushing her ear.