Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

Even the skin of the woman in its center was not as she first perceived it to be: thin and transparent, misted with a fine scintillance like lavender spiderwebs, it allowed the viewer to see through the woman’s surface to the millions of swarming, teeming, multiplying cells and legions of bacteria-like clumps within. There was an odd, damaged beauty to the sight, a vague impression of transcendence, of the human becoming the elemental, then the infinitesimal, and Amanda found herself drawn toward it but, at the moment of communion, something in the image seemed to pull back and become cold, alien, unreachable, leaving her to stare into exhausted eyes too much like her own, eyes that were balanced atop dark crescents. They were lifeless eyes, lightless and unfocused, beyond caring. They were her own eyes. The woman, she realized then, was herself as she used to be, Old Amanda, not Sparkle Eyes, and her mouth was curved downward, trapped somewhere between a pout and a groan, but as she moved a little to the side a parallax effect—aided in part by the small spotlights the museum had installed to help night viewing—took place; viewed from the right, this image of her was a sad, dark, twisted thing, but viewed from the left, she appeared to be beckoning a lover to her bed, her mouth teasing, her eyes filled with promise.

She reached out to touch her flowstone face and suddenly the upper portion of the curtain erupted with other faces, some angry, some gloomy, others insane-looking or hideously deformed, and a few that were not even close to being human; with mandibles clacking or antennae twisting in the air, these last faces, the inhuman ones, were in too-close proximity to that of her own image, threatening to fall on it and chew away her features. Far above them, their not-quite-formed eyes looking down, more faces moved in the deepening shadows, their fossilized skin covered in cracks and swarming with tiny things she couldn't bring herself to look at too closely.

She stumbled backward, the curtain of liquid stone rising higher, revealing more sick-making details: One of the faces near her own—this one little more than a skull with an impossibly large cranium encircled by two serpents—had a carving of a rose on its side, a most delicate rose, and its ghostly beauty rather than being out of place seemed right and proper, buried as it is in the terrible image, soft hints of red trickling outward into her hair, tingeing it in blood. She touched the rose, then pulled her hand away and saw that it was, indeed, blood. She looked back to the bench where the sketch pad lay on the ground. She looked at her new hands, and knew who’d been screaming, and why.

She looked back; all of the faces—her own included—opened their mouths and began to speak, words that she herself had said before, or thought, or heard others speak, others that she has thought of as her sisters, the plain-faced who are simply left alone:

"...he calls me out of the kitchen to admire a lovely actress on the television, then points to a Miss America-type and says she's a little too fat, you know, and her face isn't as pretty as it ought to be, and he never once thinks about how that makes me feel..."

She was aware of shadows moving from the darkness toward her.

"...I can't stand to look at my whole face, so if I'm combing my hair, it's only my hair that I see; if I use a mirror to put on lipstick, I hold it so close that I don't have to see my cheeks..."

The voices were coming from both the sculpture and from those shadowy figures slowly surrounding her.

"...never look at my naked body, and I'd rather walk out of the house without checking my clothes than look at myself in a full-length mirror because there's always that face on top, making a mockery out of the pretty clothes below it..." Her sisters, nameless and lonely. "...my face embarrasses me, it's so flat and dull; I can't even make it better with makeup..." Each one clutching a jar to her chest. "...and I never, NEVER let anyone take my picture because when I look at myself in a photograph I cringe inside...." "Stop it," she whispered, then shouted, "STOP IT!"

The voices ceased, the faces faded back to their still, sculpted shapes, and her image suddenly, violently, rolled up out of sight, a window shade snapping closed. Silence and murkiness. Then a pair of glowing eyes, somewhere back in the shadows embedded in the piece. "Who are you?" asked Amanda. "I am what you once were. You are what became of me." "Are you...me?"

"No. And yes. I am the First Woman—not Eve or Lilith —though some have called me by those names. I have also been called Shekinah, Metrona, Shine, Isolde, Old Roses, Bright Hands, and a million other names. I am the only woman, and all women. Even the last.

"You know me."

"No, no I—"

"You've seen me before, in certain faces you glimpse in restaurants, in the lobbies of movie theaters, standing in the checkout line at the grocery or wandering the aisles of video stores, waiting alone for something that will never come along, looking toward a place not imagined by the so-called beautiful or ugly, though I am in those faces, too. You know me. You came from me. I know you hurt. So ask me one question and I will answer you with the only truth there is; perhaps it will help your sadness."

Amanda did not hesitate: "Why are some of us plain and others so beautiful?"

A picture appeared in the wall, a framed print of M.C. Escher's The Waterfall . Amanda stared at it, then shook her head. "I don't understand." Silence. She stepped closer to the picture. The water in the picture began to move.

The voice of Metrona, who was also Shine and Bright Hands, joined now by the Jar Sisters standing behind Amanda, sang: "' Mirror, mirror, tell me true/Am I pretty or am I plain?/Or am I downright ugly?/And ugly to remain? '"

Amanda watched closely, her eyes following the path of the water around the loop again and again and again, quite fast at first, then much slower. The path of the water seemed perfectly normal and natural to her—until she found herself right back where she started from. She blinked, sighed, took a deep breath, and followed the water's path once again, realizing at the halfway point that the entire loop, when taken as a whole, is manifestly an impossibility, yet at no point on the path going around the loop did anything go 'wrong'; she was able to go from point A to B to C and so on, all the way back around to A but she shouldn't have been able to! She decided to break the path up into sections and, taken by themselves, they were fine, but holistically they remained an absolute impossibility.

"What's wrong with this picture? It makes no sense."

The water turned silver and bright, then Shekinah, who was Isolde and Old Roses as well, said: " 'Mirror, mirror, tell me please/Is this my face I see?/So plain and ugly and pretty/One face made from three.'

"The water doesn't know it's following an impossible path, Amanda; it's just water, flowing along. It doesn't care about what goes 'right' or 'wrong' in the loop, so long as it goes . There is no manifest beauty, no ugliness, no plainness or any kind of imperfection which lessens; there is only One, who once was Me, and now is Many, including You. There is only Woman; anything else is a lie.

"And Woman shouldn't care about lies like Beauty and Ugliness and Plainness. Just remember: As forgettable as you think your face is, there is someone out there who envies what you have; to whom you , as you are, are the ideal."

And with those words, the sculpture froze again, just a haunting bas-relief in flowstone at the back of a museum late, late at night.

She turned to confront the women with their jars but found she was alone.

She looked at the blood on her fingertips, then wiped them against the surface of the sculpture and half-walked, half-ran back to her car.