Elizabeth Hand - Cleopatra Brimstone

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2024-12-19 0 0 231.45KB 35 页 5.9玖币
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This one just kept growing and growing . . . When Liz Hand first talked to me about "Cleopatra Brimstone" (isn't
that a neat title?) she thought it would come in somewhere around eight thousand words. Then it began to grow. The
next time we chatted (this is e-mail I'm talking about; which, as I've said before, is equivalent to the Victorian postal
system—you can get "mail" in the morning, again at noon, and yet again in the late afternoon), she said it would
come in at about fourteen thousand words. By that time I was getting tight for space in the book but thought fourteen
thousand would be just fine—then the story landed on my doorstep (with a solid ka-thump!j and I noted with horror
that it had grown to almost twenty thousand words!
As things were really tight by that time, I thought about asking Liz to cut the story—but I just couldn't. Her writing
(as in her novels Black Light and Glimmering) is so full-bodied and evocative that I had to present it as written.
Cleopatra Brimstone
Elizabeth Hand
Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a
black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her, and the sunlight made them
glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling
to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upward to grasp them but could not: they were
too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.
Could they ever have been real?
For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten she
went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner beneath
a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny fuzzy
jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memory of
whatsoever.
And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted out of
shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colors faded and their
wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representations of
monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulphur, an unnaturally elongated skipper and
Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that any
child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long since
broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal.
The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to the
window, a shaft of sun broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, bloodred, ivy
green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her entire
being were burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butterflies
and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her eyes
scored by wings.
As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when she
was thirteen: she started bumping into things and found it increasingly difficult to concentrate
on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pains,
her mother thought; but after two months, Janie's clumsiness and concomitant headaches
became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious, and
took her to the family physician.
"Janie's fine," Dr. Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. "She needs to see
the opthamologist, that's all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty." He gave her
mother the name of an eye doctor nearby.
Her mother was relieved, and so was Jane—she had overheard her parents talking the night
before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumor figured in their hushed
conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd physical
manifestation, one that no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstruating
several months earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned the
usual things—mood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair.
But nothing was said about eyebrows. Janie first noticed something strange about hers when
she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a good
half hour reading an article in Nature about oriental ladybug swarms. When she finished the
article, she got out of the tub, dressed, and brushed her teeth, and then spent a minute frowning
at the mirror.
Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her chin
broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair color? Her teeth? She leaned over
the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection.
That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. At the
inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remarkably
long. They furled back toward her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had not
noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the hairs did not
arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine twines
around a branch.
Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to notice.
She found her mother's tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs, and flushed them down the toilet.
They did not grow back.
At the optometrist's, Jane opted for heavy tortoiseshell frames rather than contacts. The
optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. Janie
was not one of those homely B-movie adolescent girls, driven to science as a last resort. She
had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long slanted violet-blue eyes; a small rosy
mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had the
periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.
When she hit puberty, all of these conspired to beauty. And Jane hated it. Hated the
attention, hated being looked at, hated that the other girls hated her. She was quiet, not shy but
impatient to focus on her schoolwork, and this was mistaken for arrogance by her peers. All
through high school she had few friends. She learned early the perils of befriending boys, even
earnest boys who professed an interest in genetic mutations and intricate computer simulations
of hive activity. Janie could trust them not to touch her, but she couldn't trust them not to fall in
love. As a result of having none of the usual distractions of high school—sex, social life,
mindless employment—she received an Intel/ Westinghouse Science Scholarship for a
computer-generated schematic of possible mutations in a small population of viceroy
butterflies exposed to genetically engineered crops. She graduated in her junior year, took her
scholarship money, and ran.
She had been accepted at Stanford and MIT, but chose to attend a small, highly prestigious
women's college in a big city several hundred miles away. Her parents were apprehensive
about her being on her own at the tender age of seventeen, but the college, with its elegant,
cloister-like buildings and lustily wooded grounds, put them at ease. That and the dean's
assurances that the neighborhood was completely safe, as long as students were sensible about
not walking alone at night. Thus mollified, and at Janie's urging—she was desperate to move
away from home—her father signed a very large check for the first semester's tuition. That
September she started school.
She studied entomology, spending her first year examining the geni-talia of male and female
scarce wormwood shark moths, a species found on the Siberian steppes. Her hours in the
zoology lab were rapturous, hunched over a microscope with a pair of tweezers so minute they
were themselves like some delicate portion of her specimen's physiognomy. She would remove
the butterflies' genitalia, tiny and geometrically precise as diatoms, and dip them first into
glycerine, which acted as a preservative, and next into a mixture of water and alcohol.
Then she observed them under the microscope. Her glasses interfered with this work—they
bumped into the microscope's viewing lens—and so she switched to wearing contact lenses. In
retrospect, she thought that this was probably a mistake.
At Argus College she still had no close friends, but neither was she the solitary creature she
had been at home. She respected her fellow students and grew to appreciate the company of
women. She could go for days at a time seeing no men besides her professors or the commuters
driving past the school's wrought-iron gates.
And she was not the school's only beauty. Argus College specialized in young women like
Jane: elegant, diffident girls who studied the burial customs of Mongol women or the
mating habits of rare antipodean birds; girls who composed concertos for violin and
gamelan orchestra, or wrote computer programs that charted the progress of potentially
dangerous celestial objects through the Oort cloud. Within this educational greenhouse, Janie
was not so much orchid as sturdy milkweed blossom. She thrived.
Her first three years at Argus passed in a bright-winged blur with her butterflies.
Summers were given to museum internships, where she spent months cleaning and
mounting specimens in solitary delight. In her senior year Janie received permission to design
her own thesis project, involving her beloved shark moths. She was given a corner in a dusty
anteroom off the zoology lab, and there she set up her microscope and laptop. There was no
window in her corner, indeed there was no window in the anteroom at all, though the adjoining
lab was pleasantly old-fashioned, with high-arched windows set between Victorian cabinetry
displaying Lepidoptera, neon-carapaced beetles, unusual tree fungi, and (she found
these slightly tragic) numerous exotic finches, their brilliant plumage dimmed to dusty hues.
Since she often worked late into the night, she requested and received her own set of keys.
Most evenings she could be found beneath the glare of the small halogen lamp, entering data
into her computer, scanning images of genetic mutations involving female shark moths exposed
to dioxane, corresponding with other researchers in Melbourne and Kyoto, Siberia and
London.
The rape occurred around ten o'clock one Friday night in early March. She had
locked the door to her office, leaving her laptop behind, and started to walk to the subway
station a few blocks away. It was a cold, clear night, the yellow glow of the crime lights giving
dead grass and leafless trees an eerie autumn glow. She hurried across the campus, seeing no
one, and then hesitated at Seventh Street. It was a longer walk, but safer, if she went
down Seventh Street and then over to Michigan Avenue. The shortcut was much quicker, but
Argus authorities and the local police discouraged students from taking it after dark, Jane stood
for a moment, staring across the road to where the desolate park lay; then, staring resolutely
straight ahead and walking briskly, she crossed Seventh and took the shortcut.
A crumbling sidewalk passed through a weedy expanse of vacant lot, strewn with broken
bottles and the spindly forms of half a dozen dusty-limbed oak trees. Where the grass ended, a
narrow road skirted a block of abandoned row houses, intermittently lit by crime lights. Most
of the lights had been vandalized, and one had been knocked down in a car accident—the car's
fender was still there, twisted around the lamppost. Jane picked her way carefully among
shards of shattered glass, reached the sidewalk in front of the boarded-up houses, and began to
walk more quickly, toward the brightly lit Michigan Avenue intersection where the subway
waited.
She never saw him. He was there, she knew that; knew he had a face, and clothing; but
afterwards she could recall none of it. Not the feel of him, not his smell; only the knife he
held—awkwardly, she realized later, she probably could have wrested it from him—and the
few words he spoke to her. He said nothing at first, just grabbed her and pulled her into an
alley between the row houses, his fingers covering her mouth, the heel of his hand pressing
against her windpipe so that she gagged. He pushed her onto the dead leaves and wads of
matted windblown newspaper, yanked her pants down, ripped open her jacket, and then tore
her shirt open. She heard one of the buttons strike back and roll away. She thought desperately
of what she had read once, in a Rape Awareness brochure: not to struggle, not to fight, not to
do anything that might cause her attacker to kill her.
Janie did not fight. Instead, she divided into three parts. One part knelt nearby and prayed
the way she had done as a child, not intently but automatically, trying to get through the strings
of words as quickly as possible. The second part submitted blindly and silently to the man in
the alley. And the third hovered above the other two, her hands wafting slowly up and down to
keep her aloft as she watched.
"Try to get away," the man whispered. She could not see him or feel him though his hands
were there. "Try to get away."
She remembered that she ought not to struggle, but from the noises he made and the way he
tugged at her realized that was what aroused him. She did not want to anger him; she made a
small sound deep in her throat and tried to push him from her chest. Almost immediately he
groaned, and seconds later rolled off her. Only his hand lingered for a moment upon her cheek.
Then he stumbled to his feet—she could hear him fumbling with his zipper—and fled.
The praying girl and the girl in the air also disappeared then. Only Janie was left, yanking
her ruined clothes around her as she lurched from the alley and began to run, screaming and
staggering back and forth across the road, toward the subway.
The police came, an ambulance. She was taken first to the police station and then to the City
General Hospital, a hellish place, starkly lit, with endless underground corridors that led into
darkened rooms where solitary figures lay on narrow beds like gurneys. Her pubic hair was
combed and stray hairs placed into sterile envelopes; semen samples were taken, and she was
advised to be tested for HIV and other diseases. She spent the entire night in the hospital,
waiting and undergoing various examinations. She refused to give the police or hospital staff
her parents' phone number or anyone else's. Just before dawn they finally released her, with an
envelope full of brochures from the local Rape Crisis Center, New Hope for Women, Planned
Parenthood, and a business card from the police detective who was overseeing her case. The
detective drove her to her apartment in his squad car; when he stopped in front of her building,
she was suddenly terrified that he would know where she lived, that he would come back, that
he had been her assailant.
But, of course, he had not been. He walked her to the door and waited for her to go inside.
"Call your parents," he said right before he left.
"I will."
She pulled aside the bamboo window shade, watching until the squad car pulled away.
Then she threw out the brochures she'd received, flung off her clothes and stuffed them into the
trash. She showered and changed, packed a bag full of clothes and another of books. Then she
called a cab. When it arrived, she directed it to the Argus campus, where she retrieved her
laptop and her research on tiger moths, and then had the cab bring her to Union Station.
She bought a train ticket home. Only after she arrived and told her parents what had
happened did she finally start to cry. Even then, she could not remember what the man had
looked like.
She lived at home for three months. Her parents insisted that she get psychiatric counseling
and join a therapy group for rape survivors. She did so, reluctantly, but stopped attending after
three weeks. The rape was something that had happened to her, but it was over.
"It was fifteen minutes out of my life," she said once at group. "That's all. It's not the rest of
my life."
This didn't go over very well. Other women thought she was in denial; the therapist thought
Jane would suffer later if she did not confront her fears now.
"But I'm not afraid," said Jane.
"Why not?" demanded a woman whose eyebrows had fallen out.
Because lightning doesn't strike twice, Jane thought grimly, but she said nothing. That was
the last time she attended group.
That night her father had a phone call. He took the phone and sat at the dining table,
listening; after a moment stood and walked into his study, giving a quick backward glance at
his daughter before closing the door behind him. Jane felt as though her chest had suddenly
frozen, but after some minutes she heard her father's laugh; he was not, after all, talking to the
police detective. When after half an hour he returned, he gave Janie another quick look, more
thoughtful this time.
"That was Andrew." Andrew was a doctor friend of his, an Englishman. "He and Fred are
going to Provence for three months. They were wondering if you might want to house-sit for
them."
"In LondonT' Jane's mother shook her head. "I don't think—"
"I said we'd think about it."
"I'll think about it," Janie corrected him. She stared at both her parents, absently ran a finger
along one eyebrow. "Just let me think about it."
And she went to bed.
She went to London. She already had a passport, from visiting Andrew with her parents
when she was in high school. Before she left there were countless arguments with her mother
and father, and phone calls back and forth to Andrew. He assured them that the flat was secure,
there was a very nice reliable older woman who lived upstairs, that it would be a good idea
for Janie to get out on her own again.
"So you don't get gun-shy," he said to her one night on the phone. He was a doctor, after all:
a homeopath not an allopath, which Janie found reassuring. "It's important for you to get on
with our life. You won't be able to get a real job here as a visitor, but I'll see what I can do."
It was on the plane to Heathrow that she made a discovery. She had splashed water onto her
face, and was beginning to comb her hair when she blinked and stared into the mirror.
Above her eyebrows, the long hairs had grown back. They followed the contours of her
brow, sweeping back toward her temples; still entwined, still difficult to make out unless she
drew her face close to her reflection and tilted her head just so. Tentatively she touched one
braided strand. It was stiff yet oddly pliant; but as she ran her finger along its length a sudden
surge flowed through her. Not an electrical shock: more like the thrill of pain when a dentist's
drill touches a nerve, or an elbow rams against a stone. She gasped; but immediately the pain
was gone. Instead there was a thrumming behind her forehead, a spreading warmth that
trickled into her throat like sweet syrup. She opened her mouth, her gasp turning into an
uncontrollable yawn, the yawn into a spike of such profound physical ecstasy that she grabbed
the edge of the sink and thrust forward, striking her head against the mirror. She was dimly
aware of someone knocking at the lavatory door as she clutched the sink and, shuddering,
climaxed.
"Hello?" someone called softly. "Hello, is this occupied?" "Right out," Janie gasped. She
caught her breath, still trembling; ran a hand across her face, her finger halting before they
could touch the hairs above her eyebrows. There was the faintest tingling, a temblor of
sensation that faded as she grabbed her cosmetic bag, pulled the door open, and stumbled back
into the cabin.
Andrew and Fred lived in an old Georgian row house just west of Camden Town,
overlooking the Regent's Canal. Their flat occupied the first floor and basement; there was a
hexagonal solarium out back, with glass walls and heated stone floor, and beyond that a
stepped terrace leading down to the canal. The bedroom had an old wooden four-poster piled
high with duvets and down pillows, and French doors that also opened onto the terrace.
Andrew showed her how to operate the elaborate sliding security doors that unfolded from the
walls, and gave her the keys to the barred window guards.
"You're completely safe here," he said, smiling. "Tomorrow we'll introduce you to Kendra
upstairs and show you how to get around. Camden Market's just down that way, and that
way—"
He stepped out onto the terrace, pointing to where the canal coiled and disappeared beneath
an arched stone bridge. "—that way's the Regent's Park Zoo. I've given you a membership—"
"Oh! Thank you!" Janie looked around delighted. "This is wonderful."
"It is." Andrew put an arm around her and drew her close. "You're going to have a
wonderful time, Janie. I thought you'd like the zoo—there's a new exhibit there, 'The World
Within' or words to that effect—it's about insects. I thought perhaps you might want to
volunteer there— they have an active decent program, and you're so knowledgeable about that
sort of thing."
"Sure. It sounds great—really great." She grinned and smoothed her hair back from her face,
the wind sending up the rank scent of stagnant water from the canal, the sweetly poisonous
smell of hawthorn blossom.
As she stood gazing down past the potted geraniums and Fred's rosemary trees, the hairs
upon her brow trembled, and she laughed out loud, giddily, with anticipation.
Fred and Andrew left two days later. It was enough time for Janie to get over her jet lag and
begin to get barely acclimated to the city, and to its smell. London had an acrid scent: damp
ashes, the softer underlying fetor of rot that oozed from ancient bricks and stone buildings, the
thick vegetative smell of the canal, sharpened with urine and spilled beer. So many thousands
of people descended on Camden Town on the weekend that the tube station was restricted
to incoming passengers, and the canal path became almost impassable. Even late on a
weeknight she could hear voices from the other side of the canal, harsh London voices echoing
beneath the bridges or shouting to be heard above the din of the Northern Line trains passing
overhead.
Those first days Janie did not venture far from the flat. She unpacked her clothes, which did
not take much time, and then unpacked her collecting box, which did. The sturdy wooden case
had come through the overseas flight and customs seemingly unscathed, but Janie found herself
holding her breath as she undid the metal hinges, afraid of what she'd find inside.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. Relief, not chagrin: nothing had been damaged. The small glass vials
of ethyl alcohol and gel shellac were intact, and the pillboxes where she kept the tiny #2 pins
she used for mounting. Fighting her own eagerness, she carefully removed packets of stiff
archival paper; a block of Styrofoam covered with pinholes; two bottles of clear Maybelline
nail polish and a small container of Elmer's Glue-All; more pillboxes, empty, and empty
gelatine capsules for very small specimens; and last of all a small glass-fronted display box,
framed in mahogany and holding her most precious specimen: a hybrid Celerio harmuthi
kordesch, the male crossbreed of the spurge and elephant hawkmoths. As long as the first joint
of her thumb, it had the hawkmoth's typically streamlined wings but exquisitely delicate
coloring, fuchsia bands shading to a soft rich brown, its thorax thick and seemingly feathered.
Only a handful of these hybrid moths had ever existed, bred by the Prague entomologist Jan
Pokorny in 1961; a few years afterward, both the spurge hawkmoth and the elephant hawkmoth
had become extinct.
Janie had found this one for sale on the Internet three months ago. It was a former museum
specimen and cost a fortune; she had a few bad nights, worrying whether it had actually been a
legal purchase. Now she held the display box in her cupped palms and gazed at it raptly.
Behind her eyes she felt a prickle, like sleep or unshed tears; then a slow thrumming warmth
crept from her brows, spreading to her temples, down her neck and through her breasts,
spreading like a stain. She swallowed, leaned back against the sofa, and let the display box
rest back within the larger case; slid first one hand and then the other beneath her sweater and
began to stroke her nipples. When some time later she came it was with stabbing force
and a thunderous sensation above her eyes, as though she had struck her forehead against the
floor.
摘要：

Thisonejustkeptgrowingandgrowing...WhenLizHandfirsttalkedtomeabout"CleopatraBrimstone"(isn'tthataneattitle?)shethoughtitwouldcomeinsomewherearoundeightthousandwords.Thenitbegantogrow.Thenexttimewechatted(thisise-mailI'mtalkingabout;which,asI'vesaidbefore,isequivalenttotheVictorianpostalsystem—youcan...

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