Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

This time, she caught passage with a group of anthropologists on their way to study a remote island, where the natives tattooed their bodies and faces with a sharp shell and a paste made of coconut ash. The scientists had traveled there to study the rigid caste society, and the way the tattoos reflected each individual’s place in the group. Inge took photos of the beautiful, intricate designs; no straight lines, only curved and swirling marks, dark circles opening to spirals. Each body was a universe, marked by many galaxies.

The scientists were older, Dutchmen, and they ignored her and spent evenings smoking in their separate camp. She was much more interested in the people of the island, and they were intrigued by her. They touched her hair and asked questions and, according to the interpreter, they called her Cloud Woman. Cloud Woman, they asked her, why is your skin so blank and empty? How did you drain the color from your hair? What is a photograph? She showed them the photographs after she’d developed them, told the people they would read like dreams to others. They told her the tattoos were maps, so that after they died, their spirits would know how to find their homes in the afterlife.

Cloud Woman, the women asked, where are your children? Where is your man? When she laughed and told them she had neither, they looked at her gravely, disapproving. You must find them, they said.

Before she sailed, she let them tattoo a small black cloud on her foot. This way, they told her, you will always know yourself. Perhaps it was the fermented island drink, but that warmed her somehow. Despite the pain, she felt a strange sense of comfort in the mapping of her own skin.

Set liked it here in the sun, and these picture people forgave him his own reserve, mostly because he was friendly and graceful and of course, so very pretty. He’d never known he was before; it made him a little selfish and a little sad, too, because the brightness covered up the dark pull down he often felt. He wondered that no one else could see it. He laughed, often, not because he was joyful but because it was easy to let your mouth fall open here. Ease was easy to fake. Hollywood attracted the strange, anyway — Set was in a sense just one more sideshow attraction, the beautiful man with a hole where his soul ought to be.

But Cedric stuck out like a relic. He seemed drawn in different, drabber paints, a strange figure against the bright Los Angeles landscape. People here lived fast, but easy — just the opposite of meticulous Cedric. He could spend years on a dig; he’d spent decades just mapping the Antarctic. He didn’t understand this place, so new and full of cheerful ruthlessness. Set was hardly surprised when one day he returned to their rented bungalow and found Cedric on the porch, his bags at his feet, his frozen expression a thousand miles away.

You’re going away, Set said. He’d expected it.

We’re going away, boy, said Cedric. Go and get your things together. We must be at the station, in one hour sharp.

Set envisioned sitting on the train in defeat, winding through the San Gabriel Mountains, watching the bustle recede and fade into landscape. Why? he asked.

Cedric grinned. My city, he said. My city has been discovered at last!

I don’t know what you mean, said Set.

The lost Arctic city, said Cedric. The one the Innu spoke of.

I thought that was a myth, Set said. Just a story.

Myth is often something more, said Cedric, and he laughed. Whale bones, boy! The coastal natives found an entire pitful, at Point Hope. Point Hope! It begs the impossible, does it not? I received the telegram just this morning.

Set sat down slowly on the porch swing. He rocked, and rocked, and did not look at Cedric; felt the cold disapproval rolling over him just the same. I’m not going, he finally said. There was a long, long silence.

And after, though Cedric shouted at him for a quarter of an hour, though he called him all sorts of rude and unfilial names, though he threatened and cajoled and pleaded, Set would not be moved. In the end, Cedric went to find his lost city alone, and Set stayed and took over Cedric’s film. He chose to stay, in the sun, out of the shadow of Ced’s obsession. For the first time in his life, he was finally free of his family. Free, or adrift. He wasn’t sure which.

On her twentieth birthday, Inge received word that her sister Clara had died. She did not attend the funeral. She had written to Clara, at the beginning of the sisters’ separation — some small concession to the blood they shared — but Clara never replied. Inge was hardly surprised; they were like strangers to each other. And so she wrote to Hannah instead: dull, disapproving Hannah, who could not resist writing sanctimoniously back. She enjoyed the victory of virtue. I am in lovely, lively Rio , Inge would write to Hannah, and Hannah would write back, You are in the lap of mortal sin . That sort of thing. Hannah did not approve of Inge’s hand-to-mouth existence, of her vocation. It was 1920, Inge wrote her, prickly. Perfectly acceptable for women to have careers of their own. Father’s money had long since run out, and how else was she expected to eat? She could marry, wrote Hannah, and Inge laughed to think of such a thing. Who on earth would she marry? And why, when she could travel alone with all the freedom she liked? When she could document the wilds of the world?

So instead of dutifully heading to Finland, where Clara had died in childbirth like their mother, or slinking off to Hannah in Newfoundland, sins unrolled before her — Inge made her first dirigible flight. She’d read about this miracle, this new weightless ship in the sky, and though there were no commercial flights yet, she managed to make herself very charming to a military pilot taking a test run, from Rio de Janeiro to Friedrichshafen. She shared his cabin, and she was happy to be a Hure for the chance to fly, to skip from shore to shore like a gull. Once on land, she decided to find her mother’s people, but when she wrote Hannah from Germany, her sister wrote back that she had no idea how to find them. Her beloved aunt had left Berlin after the War with no forwarding address, just disappeared, and the relatives in Ludwigshafen were all dead or dispersed. Hannah wrote that it was just the two of them now, but it might as well be that she had no sister at all, so slight was Inge’s sense of filial duty.

Inge sat at a café on the Bodensee and read the letter three, four, ten times. The other patrons cast suspicious looks her way — there was a deep distrust of foreigners in Germany after the War, and though she looked the part, her German was poor and marked her out.

When they were children, Hannah sometimes brushed Inge’s hair until her younger sister’s scalp bled. She’d scowl, as if it were Inge’s fault that she was born with her hair in knots. But then there was this, also. When Inge was six, she dreamt her father had become a vulture, was waiting for and willing her death. His red eyes reeked of ugly, carrion thoughts. She woke, crying, and crept down the hall to Hannah and Clara’s room. Clara put the covers over her head, but Hannah invited her in. You may stay with me tonight, she said, and tucked her arm around the young Inge as though she were a well-loved doll. And Inge was warm, and — so briefly! — happy.

We are, thought Inge, such a strange series of beings. No constancy among us. Tomorrow she would develop her zeppelin pictures — surely National Geographic or Travel would snap them up — and try to scrape together passage for the first ship she could find. But now, she sat and watched the wind roll over the Bodensee, rippling the waters and moving restlessly on.