Katherine Dunn - Nightmare Carnival

I open my robe and pull the nightgown up. If there is a demarcation between fabric and flesh, mercury and air, the creature and me, I cannot see it. I search for the familiar black triangle between my legs. Even that has vanished. I am no different than the bare, cream walls around me. Outside of us, nothing can be seen. Yet within — a carnelevare of the numinous, waiting for release. Everything I need will come out of me.

— What are you doing? the Grand calls out from the living room. — Are you up? As she speaks, I hear her sniffing me out, and my blood runs peppermint hot and cold. She likes it like that.

I let my nightgown drop, and shuffle and squint my way around the corner. Morning presses against the thick curtains, to no avail. Everything glows, but dimly so. Against the far corner of the couch she curls, a fragile mound of bones and skin dressed in soft, flowery clothes. The open newspaper obscures the upper half of her body. I see only legs and knife-sharp fingers, the leaves of dark print flapping back in between. Her feet are small and perfectly formed, with nails like mother-of-pearl. She hasn’t walked in a hundred and fifty years. She hasn’t needed to.

— Give your great-grand a sweet breakfast kiss, she says, floating up from the cushions. The newspaper flutters to the floor.

— It’s time, my sister said. Her voice poured out of the phone like poison.

— No. Not yet. No.

— The Grand is sending for you, she continued over me, as if she couldn’t hear my voice.

— I don’t want to go.

— You don’t have a choice. Check your e-mail — I sent the plane ticket to you already. You have a month to pack up and say goodbye.

— I have a life here.

— I had a life, too. And now I get it back. But only if you come. You know what happens to me if you don’t. She’ll use me up until there’s nothing left.

— You know I’d never let that happen. But why so soon?

— She’s tired of me. I don’t please her anymore, or so she says. At any rate, I’ve done my time. It’s your turn now.

— This is wrong. You know that.

— It doesn’t matter. We can’t change it. This is why we were born.

It was late summer, back then, and my city was a volcano of bright life. I took her call at work, in an empty corner office. I gave an obfuscated answer that pleased us both and hung up. Outside, day was racing down into the shimmery fires of night. Twenty floors down, clogged streets were transforming into long-running strands of rubies and diamonds, winding around buildings slick with coruscated light. I pressed my hand against the glass. Hard and hot. When I took my hand away, a thin film of perspiration remained, outstretched against the avenue as though trying to grasp it. The ghost hand of a ghost girl. Within seconds, it disappeared.

I said my goodbyes at work without telling them I’d never return, and bought boxes on the way home, just enough to ship a few piles of books and clothes. My small room in the SRO building didn’t hold that much, anyway. I’d always known this moment would come, and so my decisions had already been made, years ago, how I would live my life and how I would defend it. I was more prepared than my sister could imagine, and more ruthless than the Grand could ever be. Desperation made me so. In a way, I was no different than her.

The next morning I settled my account at the SRO, made a stop at the post office, then walked twenty blocks south, down through my beautiful city. Past blight-tinged gentrification, past markets and parks and coffee shops and wide bustling avenues; and then west, over to the edge of the river, to block after block of monolithic warehouses and factories, moldering in shadowed silence and brick dust until their moment in history came again. It was like I’d walked this path just yesterday, even though a decade had passed. — When you’ve made your decision, be it tomorrow or a million tomorrows from now, you’ll find us, he had said with his yellow-teethed smile as I looked over his exhibits and wares. — You won’t ever need a map.

She leans into me in the queer morning light for her kiss, and my mouth slackens and my head lolls back. Every day is the same, and night no different than day. Darkness, rain needling against the rooftop and windows, wind thundering through distant trees. She never sleeps. Her need keeps her running hot and constant, a nuclear reactor of hunger that can never be shut down. — It’s not so bad, my sister said, the few times I spoke with her until she stopped taking my calls. — She takes from you, but she gives you something back, in a way. It’s almost an even exchange. — What does she do, what is she, how can she be? I asked over and over again. — Is she a vampire? A ghoul? An insect? Why do we submit?

— I don’t know, my sister always replied. — Who can say?

Sometimes, at night, I awake in the dark and feel her hovering over me, a weight and emotion I sense but never feel or see. Paralyzed, I breathe all my damp terror and fear into the emptiness of my childhood room. Above, mote by mote she sucks it in. Sleep itself is no refuge. In my dreams I rise to the ceiling, my skin brushing against the faded outlines of spiraling galaxies my mother painted for me long ago. And then the ceiling, the stars, soften and yield — her arms are around me, mouth against mine, while in the waking world, my body moans and shivers, ten feet above my bed. The days are worse. I can’t hide in my room forever, and so I venture out into the house, wandering like a restless ghost of myself through the still rooms. Everywhere, vestiges of the life I had before, of my sister and me as children, of my mother and the father I too briefly knew. Cobwebbed tableaus of toys and dishes. Photos of distant summers, succumbing to speckled mold. A faint scent of my mother’s perfume rising from a dresser of musty clothes. Old folders of school homework, boxes of books my aching eyes could no longer read in the ever-dim light. And I, always never knowing where she is, in what room, squeezed into what tight corner or closet or crack. Never knowing when she will ooze out and ignore me, or play with me, or pounce.

— You’re different, she says this morning, her vulpine face hovering just above my head. — I don’t like it. I smell animals. I smell fire and sugar and rust. The words wash over my face like gasoline fumes, and tears dribble out of my eyes into my mouth. My flesh grows heavy and prickly-numb. Her face is an amorphous stain, a blur. I open my mouth to speak. All that comes forth is a burp, loud and wet. Bile dribbles down my lips and chin. It tastes like rotting grapes.

The Grand recoils. — You’re sick, she hisses. She hates any hint of illness or disease.

— No, I’m not, I garble. Thin pine needles slide out of my running nose and onto my tongue. — It’s the carnival.

— You’re delirious.

— It’s coming.

— What are you talking about?

A slow, long tremor erupts throughout my belly. My tearing eyes shut tight, and I smile. I am horrifying and new. She leans back into me, curious. Lips and breath against my cheek, mouth open, seeking, seeking. — Tell me everything, she whispers. — Fill me up with everything.

I lift my wet nightgown. — Stay with me, and you can take everything you need.

I drop to the floor, back arched, thighs apart. The second contraction rips through me, and I howl. The barker said there would be pain, and he didn’t lie. He said it would be the eighth wonder of the world.

The barker stood where I had seen him a decade ago, as if he had never moved from the spot: on a wood-planked platform in the middle of a vast dirt and sawdust-covered warehouse floor, surrounded by rows and rows of broken and abandoned caravans and carousels and fair rides in fading pastels, painted canvases depicting creatures and humans of sublime beauty and deformity, statues and stuffed beasts, tanks and cages, carts and costume-choked trunks. It took an eternity of footsteps to walk to him. The musk of animal and tang of sea creature and the green of chipped wood filled my lungs — none of it had moved in ten years, none of it had changed. Bits of jewel-colored glitter floated through the smoky, popcorn-scented air. Antiques, it said on the crumpled brochure I’d found blowing about on the street that spring day so long ago, and had carried in my purse ever since. Rare Circus Items Curated from America’s Golden Age of Entertainment. Powerful Carnival Artifacts Rescued from Civilizations Lost Forever in the Mists of Time. A Veritable Cornucopia of Wonders, Mesmerizing and Terrifying. This Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Only for You.