Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

I’ll save you, said Inge. I’ll find a way. We’ll get away from here, go to Kenya. We’ll film a lion pride, live in a house by the lake there. I’ll build it for you with my own two hands. Your Faerie Queen will never find you, and she kissed him, threw her ridiculous little arms around him, and he found himself kissing her back and he didn’t know why but he kept on kissing her— Praise the lord —and she tasted like strawberries and yes, honey, manna from heaven— Praise the lord, praise the lord of heaven above —and Lana would set fire to his bed if she knew— Praise and glory to the highest —and he wondered, wildly, if maybe she actually could save him, impossible Inge. He wanted so much to let her try.

Dearest Unbending Hannah ,

There are no anchor points here in Hollywood. I do not understand why we try to describe this fixed place, this telescoped speck in the universe — why we try to drape this world in words, as if that could hold or encompass it. I suppose we must try because how else to say what we long for? And that is perhaps what is hardest of all: to be full of such longing — for stone, for onions, for soap, for dawn, for familiar skies, for the dreams of others. Don’t you yearn, most desperately, to know if other people’s dreams resemble yours? I dream sometimes of an ash, an oak, and a hawthorn, circling a bright green patch of overgrown grass. The green is brilliant, dazzling, like emeralds, yet no sun shines — the light comes from within. What does this mean? Is it something I saw in childhood? Is it some vision sent by the daoine sídhe? A secret mound of the faerie folk?

Do you have such dreams, Hannah, when you close your eyes, your children down for the night? Do you dream of the land, of that strange thing they say we Irish all share? Do you dream of something like home?

I remain, forever yours in blood, Ingeborg

Curiosity #145: Stuffed albino crocodile, origin unknown. Glass eyes. Some scales missing or damaged on underside and left rear leg .

The museum was short on money for its new African hall, and so they sold some of Set’s films to an eager young businessman who planned to set up his own picture business, specializing in what he called “animal adventure pictures.” Set had no idea until the eager young businessman called him, demanding more. I want a picture shot in Kenya, he said. Charging elephants, lions, crocodiles on the riverbank, all of that.

Tanganyika, thought Set. Paradise Lake. Where the great African explorers went looking for the source of the Nile.

He told the eager young businessman, yes. Yes.

Let’s make this picture about the lions, said Inge, between bites of corned beef.

You can’t go, said Set. You know that.

She frowned at him. You mean you don’t want me to go.

Well—

Is Lana going? She held her breath. He had never broken it off with Lana, in part because he didn’t see why he should. They were all having fun, weren’t they?

Alone in her rented bedroom, Inge sometimes cried to think of all the fun they were having. She thought of leaving again, hitching a ride on a packet boat to someplace exotic. But the thought made her head ache and her heart lurch about in her chest.

After all those unanswered letters, Set knew better than to write to Cedric again, but he wished his brother could come along. He wished he could ask Cedric what to do about Inge. Set thought about calling Pru, but he didn’t suppose he should bother her with his worries. Still, he was worried. Cedric had always included him in his adventures. And here he was keeping secrets from him. Set didn’t know what to make of it. In the end, he called Constance instead, who seemed thoroughly annoyed. Leave Cedric be, she told him. Attend to your own life, your own future.

But what about his lost city? said Set.

Look, I’m not trying to be unkind, said Constance, but I’m telling you, don’t make Cedric’s mistakes. Go forward. There’s no flying back to the far-gone past.

Set and Inge are dancing in Inge’s rented bedroom, lurching into bed and table and making lopsided, monstrous shadows on the walls. They stomp out a rough waltz to the three-four time of the landlady’s polka music playing below. Laughing, breathless, half-drunk, they careen around, Inge attempting to mimic Set’s easy grace. She finally stumbles, sinks to the ground in gasping mirth. He sits on the bed and shakes his head. Your landlady will be up any moment, he says, and then you’ll be in for it.

But you’re such a good dancer, Inge says. I’d never have believed it.

And you, says Set, pouring two more glasses of whisky, you are the lousiest dancer I’ve ever taken the floor with.

Inge snorts. It’s these huge feet, she says. They’re like great bloody bricks! What can I do with them but fall all about the place? She begins unlacing her boots. Set, slightly more sober, kneels to help her. She grabs his wrist. Don’t think, she tells him, that I’m undressing for you. She is solemn, holds his eyes; her hair is a bright halo over her round Madonna’s face. Then a smile splits it in two, ruins the effect. She purrs with laughter and flings herself onto him.

You’re part animal, he says, just after. You’re a wild creature. He leaves through the window, climbing down to the porch from the second floor. She watches him go. He waves merrily from the street and jumps in his car, no doubt off to meet Lana for a late dinner. She can tell it costs him nothing to leave, and she wonders if she is the stupidest person alive for giving herself away like this. Is he really a ghost, she wonders, or just a cad with a convenient excuse? But she has also watched him sleep, and she has seen the way his face goes blank and smooth, the way his eyes go so unfocused. It seems much too easy for him to slip out of life, Set. She worries that one day he’ll forget to slip back in.

Since the bear, Set has always been nervous around large animals on his expeditions. Even the ponies worry him. Their teeth are so big and they give off such an obvious odor; he isn’t used to anything that smells and makes no attempt to mask it. And everything smells here in the jungle. The heat creates aggression, even in the smells themselves. They attack, they twist round one and squeeze, insidious, like the vines and other creeping things.

Inge laughs when he tells her this. She has grown up around animals. Horses, dogs, sheep, pigs — their musty earthiness mingling with the smell of fat sizzling in the kitchen, with the heavy smell of the hanging damp in the walls, the sharp wet of the dung in the hay, the sweet heather on the heath and the dark smoke of wood on the fire.

Odor is geography, she says. And it’s the same in the city — but not natural smells, not such animal smells. More people, more soot, more smoke, more smells that get into the lungs and burn the eyes and the throat.

We never lived that way, says Set.

Of course you didn’t, she tells him. Your people are wealthy.

Set knows this is true. He feels it is unfair of Inge to be constantly pointing it out, when her people were wealthy once, too. Just because they squandered it didn’t mean she could cast it off like a dirty old coat. It followed her around the world, the sweet, decayed smell of the genteel poor. Like the dried flowers Pru put in clothing drawers.