[Him] Some stories have a beginning. This happened first. Some stories unspool as if you were unraveling the world, as if you were unraveling the word. Sometimes you wake in the middle of the night, a dream like a memory fading in the back of your mind, something urgent, something necessary, something raw-as-unspun-silk and you have to spin yourself back together, remember the warp and make up the weft until morning. This story does not have a beginning, but this is where it starts.
Last night, a coffeehouse in Evanston. Right? A coffeehouse with an open mic and warm art on the walls, some kid singing about a tree. Some kid singing about his lover and a tree and the crowd had this shifting voice, this sort of organic thing overarching the individual sounds - not many-as-one but many-as-many - this chattering symphonic thing and she looked at him, looked at him looking for him, the taste of the sky in the back of her mouth, the night sky laced with the bitterness of myrhh and the sweetness of orange blossom.
Look and look: the boy is a boy, and the girl with him is a girl, and they sit close, leaning into their microphones, that elegant familiarity of long association. She's smiling, looking out into the crowd. He's watching her smile. This is how things start.
The boy and the girl and the song and the dream she cannot remember, back of the throat thing, that, except for the stars. Everything tells her to look and look and morning, and sunlight.
The next day, the day after that - three days, this sense of watching-wanting-waiting is alive under her skin, makes everything else, every thing real seem noisome, permeable, wrong, makes shadows or lights at the corners of her vision. Makes her look for new streets, dream of new stars, pour her morning tea into the saucer rather than the cup, dip her biscuit in cottage cheese rather than clotted cream.
--
The place has blue painted window frames. They're a bright, nearly turquoise blue - but darker, really, not so pastoral, not so western. There's a chandelier visible in the window, above a white-painted, antique chair upholstered in white, and a stack of portaits of girls, nineteenth century-style, staring out of the darkness, all long black hair and bright red cheeks. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind, sees the girls eyes, this expression that lives more in the bloom of color in her cheeks than in the neat little moue made by her mouth, sees her own eyes, which are different.
The sign in the window says: open.
[Girl] This is what people would see: the young woman, slender, reserved, poised -- almost carelessly so; her hair as red as autumn's dying and her expression when she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror [solitary (where?)] behind the canvas portraits a thing that kins itself to inscrutable. The quirk of her mouth, a touch wry - self-chiding, un-selfconscious, paradox-thing - when she draws differences out've the paint-girls and flesh-and-bone girls. The look in the eye.
But mirrors are tricks. They're clarity, and clarity's unyielding; they're bad luck for breaking. Kage knows a man who's driven by fear, who calls her Cage, but fond, who was dragged across the gauntlet by a crow, and who wears mirrors in the palms of his gloves, in his tattered, seams un-stitching jacket, and uses them to interact with a world he finds terrible. He's in the back of her mind, somewhere; she saw him, just last week, the beginning of the week. Saw him, because she heard about the crow, saw him, because she reached, and saw him bloody, fearful, fretting, surrounded by such things as'd make the mind want to un-ravel were it weaker. She tried to pluck him out [was it right (maybe it was a test)]. Couldn't. Mirrors, mirrors are her sisters: never jostling, but always claiming, always staking out borders of their Empire, oldest first, youngest next, sometimes. Mirrors are sight, they're look-far-far-away, they're smoke. There's a dream she cannot remember, and her mind starts to slip that way.
This is what people would see: young woman, casual in jeans, a demure white blouse buttoned up to her throat, five hematite rings on one hand, a silver ring on the other, pockets. Not fancy. Easily mistaken for a college student -- except, no. That presence. Kage is sizing the place up. Kage is sizing herself up, Kage is wondering, where oh where, where is He, why hasn't He come around to bother her these last days, when she can almost taste --
There are stories. The sign in the window says: open. And Kage, who is a creature driven by curiosity as much as anything, decides to give in to whim: she steps across the threshold. She has no idea what kind of shop it is, and the quirk is still there, half-wry, giving lie to the expressiveness of her eyebrows, because she knows she's just trying to scrape out've whatever mood it is that has her wanting to scratch off her skin. Melancholy, just held at bay. Maybe that's it.
If a bell rings when she enters, she doesn't look up or over toward the sound. Kage looks for people. And Kage, who's a sharp eye when it comes to details, putting them together into a picture that uncovers a mystery, is looking at this place she's in, with the paintings. And maybe they're for sale, and maybe she'll buy one, put it up in her study half-hidden by a tapestry, or behind a bookshelf. Secret.
[Him] "You have to come down from your summit, so why climb in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below. But what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees, and one descends. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by what one has learned higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least know."
There are bells. There are always bells, right? Something to announce a new presence in the room. Some sort of prescience – music from movement, a song from a push against a wall-that-opens, which means: door. So the door opens and the bells ring like so – they aren’t small, these bells. There’s this resonance in them that strikes chords beneath her skin. Like this: like her organs recognize the waves of the sounds in them. Like the way her blood moves, as if it had a voice.
Kage in the mirror. The core of her is the girl, painted in a circle of darkness. The core of her is obscured by a girl, who is younger, and a girl, who is slighter, and a girl, whose hair is brown and whose eyes are black like the night sky. Around the girl, the crown of Kage’s head, the impression of her arms, the glimpse of a hand with its hematite rings, and its silver rings.
- hey. There’s a person. There’s a person here, leaning over a glass display case, his arms folded together, pressed between his body and the silvered edge of the gleaming thing. He is fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and ignores the gleam and sparkle of the contents of the case in favor of the comic book he has open on top of the case. His shoulders are hunched over, his body large – not just gone-to-fat, but big-framed, comically so in room that is white and blue and black, crystal and carved wood.
He looks up when she enters and smiles – this flashing look – and though his hair is stringy black and everything about him is wrong, she almost, almost expects to see the stars in his eyes.
They are amber instead, warm brown flecked with yellow and green, bloodshot too, the right more than the left. “Hey,” he says, straightening. The comic remains open on the display case. The contents, the contents glitter and gleam, crystals arrayed against a white backdrop take her apart and remake her, a thousand times over, the way a prism breaks down like into its constituent parts and lets you see the pieces of everything.
His voice is even and pleasant, maybe rusty from disuse. This place is out of the way and Kage is the only person here. It looks more like a photograph than a store, like a photograph of a store you might take for Paris Vogue. He doesn’t fit in here, but here he is, smiling at her. “ – how’s it going? Can I help you?”
Then a moment where he’s looking at her more closely, frowning kinda, this expression at the corners of her mouth the way her awareness is flayed and raw, living at the corners of that dream she cannot remember.
[Him] (the way a prism breaks down light. ahem!)
[Girl] The bells are like a sieve and the human body's made of a lot of water. That's what textbooks say, and as it is written, so it must be true? They're also a little like that moment in a kitschy 50s movie; something about angels or witches, elevators opening up to the underworld. You know: that moment things go just a little bit aslant, knock just the slightest bit askew. The chandelier is made of water, or stars; or glass, which is of neither of those elements, although it pretends - visual alchemy -
Her voice is smooth, easy. A moon and shadow thing, but soft. Has weight. Has knowing in it. "I don't know yet. Not sure this is where I mean to be." Kage tells the truth, even when she misrepresents it: re-defines it; makes it imply something else. Doesn't like to lie, outright. See? She doesn't think about it. She just does it. There's no awkwardness, no stutter, no hesitation - socially awkward, she's not. "What's this place called? Named, I mean?" Kage is a steady, steadying creature, but she feels off-balance. Sharpens her, that - and her eyebrows draw together, briefly, studying the man when he's kinda looking at her more closely. Her eyebrows flick upward.
Beat. " - And hey, I'm sorry," that note of un-directed wry, courtesy, "If I'm interrupting your work. But what were you reading?"
[Girl] ooc: Ahem. 'Her eyebrows flick upwards, after a moment.' Is how that should read!
[Him] "This place?" the man asks. The man, the boy. He's one of those people who is written between the two words. He doesn't have a name there. He means both, he means neither. The smile he flashes Kage is sudden and wide. It's boy-ish, but there's an ish on it that makes her pause. His hair is stringy and dark and his t-shirt is black. It fits his bulk awkwardly. He bulges in strange places. " - heh. It doesn't really have a name. I mean, it's one of those places that's better without a name. Even the business cards, they're just blank where the name should be. The owner says that the right people always find it."
His hands are large and meaty, splayed out over the display counter. Beneath she expects - what, antique broaches and tie-pins, cuff-links made from beyrl or whale-tooth or the woven hair of the dead, memento mori, cameos blushing pale against the inner heart of a pink shell, a girl in profile, demure, looking down and away - not at the sky.
Instead, there are diamonds. There are half-a-hundred diamonds, some the size of an egg, some the size of a mote of dust, of a Who in Whoville, set out on gleaming white fabric.
"I'm reading the Amazing Spider-Man +1," he says with a grin, gesturing to the comic. " - I found it in the back. It's not as good as you'd guess, though. I guess my work is to answer your questions, eh? So you're not much of an interruption. Anyway, I already know what happens next. In the comic, I mean."
[Girl] "Yeah? How'd you find it?" She says that, but she's thinking - one of those. She's thinking - one of these. She's thinking - really, now. And she's thinking - ha. And she wants to know how this stringy-haired, bulky guy came to be hulking over diamonds, spangling bright as gravefrost 'neath the hunter's moon - she wouldn't have asked, otherwise.
Kage peeks at the diamonds. Then: pauses. Looks over her shoulder, toward the mirror; that white antiqued chair; the painting of the bright-cheeked, dark-haired girl [lamia (maiden)], the blooming roses in her cheeks, the chandelier, snow-frozen - her look is disconcerted. "I wouldn't actually think the Amazing Spiderman +1 was that good. A hero with that kind've charm - well, he's got to grow that way, you know? And maybe get flung through a couple of alternate realities before he can make do."
Her eyes, back on the diamonds, set out on white. Snow, she thinks again - winter, and maps. A word for that. Enochian: language of angels.
[Him] "How'd I find it?" he says, he's grinning, you know, grinning like that is a silly question, like that's easy, like he's about to ace this little quiz. So: grin. His face is round like some dime-store Buddha's and there's a bristle of whisker on his cheek and a stupidly twee whisp of a mustache just growning in. Kage looks at the diamonds on white, like salt-crystals on snow, and the boyish man stands back, lets her look, lets her browse. " - well, that's easy, you know?"
"I just - " wait, stop. Shift. He's frowning now, it's faint, that look you make when the word you need has slipped away from your seeking tongue. When you're trying to identify an elusive taste from the last bite of a nameless morsel. "I mean, I guess - I - I just - " and whatever it is that is troubling him, he holds it in, keeps it in the core of his body, makes it an egg, makes it a glass ball, contained but enlivening, but unstable, a liquid that wants to be permeable, free-floating, like one of the noble gases. " - I just walked in. I parked and turned the corner and - walked in. I'm pretty sure about that."
--
Kage says something about heros, and the storekeeper, the man behind the counter, he's deflated, somehow, something leaked out of him, concerned about the answer to the question, the question to the answer, gathers up Spider-Man Number 1 and looks up at her, wry. Says, quiet. "I guess that's why we keep reading."
Then, she's looking down at the diamonds. And he, he taps the glass with a meaty finger, not to interrupt, but to indicate - that which is below. "You can see those? Really actually see them?"
His voice is quiet. There's something contracted about him. Fear as a function of awe.
[Girl] The change in his voice draws her attention up out've the glass. Her gaze is direct, expressive without being eloquent; eloquent without being expressive. There's a speck of warness, now; sifts, behind the glance, like dust motes in a slant of light. Not everybody can raise one eyebrow; it's difficult. That asymmetry, the lilt of it - but Kage manages. "I can see them?" she echoes. "Really actually see -- ?"
There. A look. And a blankness, a place for him to write in his answer. Fill in the blanks, sir.
[Him] "The peradam." He says, watching her. The slightest gesture downward, to the case, full of glittering diamonds, faceted and brilliant, gleaming in the light. They are, she must think, impossible not to see. " - in the case." His voice is soft, is quiet, it occurs to her that he is whispering, that there are secrets at work here. That there is someone he does not want to overhear.
He leans closer, he is nameless, in a nameless place, and he leans closer and smells like liverwurst and bergamot. He smells like a hidden sigh. In his anxiety, he has rolled up the precious Amazing Spider-Man into a cylinder, which is another shape a flat plane can take. The beginning touches the end, and then where do you start.
"The peradam in the case." His voice like a flatline. Eeeeee. The tension is underneath. "can you see them?"
[Girl] "You mean - the 'peradam' in the display case? Wherein things are," a beat, and in another story, she'd look him up and down, she'd raise both her eyebrows, and it'd be so subtle as to be a dictionary of tone, precise, poise, this, "displayed," a beat, "for people with eyes to look?" That was a little cruel. Her voice is even, though - almost takes away the sting, if any. The sardonic inflection: the emphasis, disbelieving - and cautious. "You mean - the diamonds?"
[Him] "Yeah - " he says, waves his meaty hand thoughtlessly below him, at the display case. Where things are displayed. "I've been here," pause, stop, estoppel on the thought. There's this moment where he's thinking about how long he's been here, about time and space and the definitions of the same where things go wrong. Not for Kage, but for the Spider-Man fan, where he gets troubled, looks lost, as if he couldn't find his way from second to second without getting caught in some rather frightening - " well, I've been here, and you are the only customer who's been able to see them."
An irritable shake of his head, when she names them all wrong. His stringy hair goes flying. One thinks, in that moment: snakes. The gorgons, who were lovely women before they changed. Before they were changed. Before the world changed.
" - right, see, they look like diamonds, but they aren't. They're called peradam, and if you can see them, it's for a reason. It might mean you're - " he looks up, confusion chasing itself across his features, as if he were looking at both tomorrow and yesterday. And if she looks up, she sees that there are two doors here. There are two Doors here. She can in through one. It is open to the street, and she can see herself reflected like a ghost in the window. The iron-work is painted blue, and everything shines white. The second Door is in the back, worked into the paneling which is all chased woodwork, elaborate and European, painted white like the chair and the tables, like the walls, like the watered silk beneath the peradam. She hadn't noticed it before. There's no handle. There's no lock.
There's no indication where it goes.
" - well, it means you can take one. It means you can take your pick of them. You get one like everyone else. Since you see them, I can tell you what they are. Or, you can not-Know. Knot-know. It's a choice you get to make: take one, know it. Take one, don't know it. Leave them, and walk away. Right?"
[Girl] The nameless man in the nameless shop isn't careful and the red-haired Orphan (without Tradition) watches him as he speaks, confusion chases itself - lost - across his features, unwrites him - a faint frown between her eyebrows; it isn't a bright thing. Her eyes are cool, though -- seem cool, albeit dark. Her eyes are just: steady, still direct. "What's a nice guy like you," she says, "doing here?"
Maybe she's stalling. Think, Kage, be thoughtful. This whole place: it's got a feel to it. And there's a choice, and it's a little like a deal, like tying oneself into a thread, like - she steps back from the counter, slides her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, lets her eyelashes sweep downward in a blink, thoughtful. This, too: the Door, the back-door, the interesting one, there's no indication what might be back there [the backroom, wherein Amazing Spider Man +1 resides?], and Kage - Kage focuses, for a second, calls up a formulae, imagines an occult drawing, the lines would go here, and here, and uses that to jump off, uses that instead of pure-instinct, to Reach, Reach around for Space, just testing the edges.
If she were normal, or even another willworker, she might be walking away now, walking through the front door, whatever. "That door," she says, lifting her chin to indicate the lockless thing, "or that one," and she tilts her head, to indicate the door-by-which-she-came, and then - " - and three choices, hunh." She wasn't stalling, though. Says - " - are you okay? Is there anything you want?"
He was afraid, wasn't he? Of her. No.
[Him] He gave her three choices. Take and know. Take and not-know. Leave them behind, wash her hands of it, leave without something, without knowing, without touching. There are two doors. Here is the third.
"You can stay here." The look he gives her is nervous, it tastes like truth. There is something utterly fucking naked about this kid when he says it, with the rolled-up Spiderman in his hand, between-places. His eyes are stark and his mouth is slack and he's still, not deer-in-headlights still, but still, aware of her and the doors and the place, like he remembers something he has always forgotten.
- a twitch of his mouth, upward. That's a smile, as real as the naked look he gave her, stark with shame. The smile is real, it is soft and it is quiet, it is sweet and bittersweet, like honey and pith, white, peeled away from the flesh of the fruit. Like an appleseed. "It's not so bad. There's always something to read, the hours are decent - and - and - " a frown compresses his brow. "Really. There's a rhythm to it. I like the rhythm. The days move and it is like so. And the comics are pretty good. The light comes in and it is lovely." He catches her look toward the door, the back one, when she indicates it.
"I've never been back there," he says, quiet. "I - I don't know what's on the other side. I wouldn't go through. And I couldn't go back. I'm okay, yeah. I mean, everyone can come and go, eh? So. I wouldn't mind it if you stayed here with me. Like I said - it's not that bad here. It's - it's fine, really."
[Girl] "I don't think so," Kage says, and the frown has become (brief) more pronounced. "That's - you can't wouldn't or couldn't yourself - well." Here, a self-aware, self-directed curl of her mouth: "Shouldn't use the contraction 'can't.' Not in this context, hm?" A beat. And then, repetition - because repetition is mantra, is easy: "I don't think so. Doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm going to look?"
- so she'll, careful still, walk around the table the nameless man's hulking over, bittersweet, quiet, the display case with the peradem, glistering like a white road, like milk, dreaming itself into grandeur -
and that's where she'll go. That door. But she's not ignoring him; she's still paying attention.
[Him] "It's up to you," he says, that shines in him, bright, like he means it. " - you know? I hope you make it through."
--
She walks through the shop, which is done just so. It reminds her of Paris, this place, in artful disorder. Here is a door, in the woodwork, in the white-painted wainscotting. There is no handle and there is no lock and there is no key. She opens it. There is no back room. There is no back room full of comic books.
There is the shadow of a garden beyond. The trees are huge and enshadowed. It is night. She can see the stars.
--
"You sure you don't want one?" The shopkeeper says, from behind the display case. Sunlight cuts through the wide windows of the storefront, casts him in brilliant light. His eyes are tawny and sad and his mouth is slack, wistful beneath the twee suggestion of a mustache. "It's up to you." The peradam wink and gleam in the sunlight, like dew in the first light of dawn.
[Girl] Before she opened the door, she watched the nameless man; she listened to what she could hear, through the door. And he reminded her about the peradam, and she thinks, Diamonds are a girls best friend, the thought curdles through her blood like smoke, like the children's rhyme it isn't, like the crooning songstress's wise-eyed, knowing advice, tongue-in-cheek, and she also thinks - They just look like diamonds. They look like stars, but they're not. False-things, lovely, but - unmarked.
"I don't think I want one - " is what she says, and then " - they look look expensive. Keep your stars," because Kage's weakness is poetry, sometimes. "I know where to look for them if I need to." Because that: that's one of the things, one of the Knacks, she just knew when she was first-Awake, when the world was dark, and dangerous, and she was going mad, but not really - knowing things, finding them, feeling them like an ache in her tooth.
And that's when she, thinking that, really, she should be a little more cautious [ - but she feels like - ], walks through the door without a lock. Out've tumble-antiqued carefully-arranged Parisienne sophisticate, and into some garden - shadow-thing, shadow-place.
[Him] The door closes behind her -
She's in the garden and it is night, the air is rich with scent. Something is dry on the ground beneath her feet - leaves, she thinks, leaves falling - and but no, no, the earth is damp and new-turned, she smells that too, fertility sunk into the soil, simmering under the star-strewn sky. There are trees here, which are tall, and which whisper in the wind. There are willow branches and there is water, someone, singing its quiet song, running over stones, the bones of the earth.
- and someone grabs her by the shoulders.
He smells the world sounds after the first snowfall - dampened, distinct, like the night sky. He smells like an interrupted shadow, like a crossroads on some lonely moor, heather and bog-water, the secrets that live underneath the shifting ground. The ground that gives way underneath you. He smells like bone left out in the wind and rain until it is clean of all flesh. He smells like the memory of water in a long-dry well.
He kisses her like the falling rain, gentle, and then it is a raging storm - pelting hard droplets a fractional degree from being or becoming ice. He kisses her like winter kisses spring, like summer kisses snow - melting into her and filling her senses and she cannot breathe without breathing him and she cannot scream without screaming him. His hands are on her cheeks, on her shoulders, on her breasts. His hands are on her hips, ghosting her body, dreaming it like he made it, Pygmalion, this inverse sort of lie. He pushes her into the dim, dark shape of a tree climbing into the sky. It's evening now, it's dark. She remembers the shape of daylight through the picture windows, remembers the way the world pushes itself into being, the shadows through the iron, the white chair gleaming in the sunlight.
Now it is dark and it is night and he kisses her mouth until it is bruised and swollen, until she is breathing the air from his lungs, which tastes like cold flame, fills her up with the dark, churning sense of creation, some essentialism, some fundamental processes, the star that consumes itself.
She knows Him. Knows Him before he touches her. Knows Him before she tastes Him. The stars can dissolve from the sky. She will find them again in his eyes.
She knows Him. And when he has drawn her up, turned her not into a pillar of salt but a pillar of flame-seeking-oxygen, he breaks away from her, sets her forcibly free and turns and stalks a great circuit of the walled garden, the shadows of the walls, the shadows of the trees, the shadow of the sky - shaking his head like a thing apart, the horned god who cannot be contained by walls, who cannot be stopped by spells, essential.
He is laughing. "I knew you'd come."
[Girl] [pauseypausepausecreditsroll]
[Him] transcript!
to Him
Last night, a coffeehouse in Evanston. Right? A coffeehouse with an open mic and warm art on the walls, some kid singing about a tree. Some kid singing about his lover and a tree and the crowd had this shifting voice, this sort of organic thing overarching the individual sounds - not many-as-one but many-as-many - this chattering symphonic thing and she looked at him, looked at him looking for him, the taste of the sky in the back of her mouth, the night sky laced with the bitterness of myrhh and the sweetness of orange blossom.
Look and look: the boy is a boy, and the girl with him is a girl, and they sit close, leaning into their microphones, that elegant familiarity of long association. She's smiling, looking out into the crowd. He's watching her smile. This is how things start.
The boy and the girl and the song and the dream she cannot remember, back of the throat thing, that, except for the stars. Everything tells her to look and look and morning, and sunlight.
The next day, the day after that - three days, this sense of watching-wanting-waiting is alive under her skin, makes everything else, every thing real seem noisome, permeable, wrong, makes shadows or lights at the corners of her vision. Makes her look for new streets, dream of new stars, pour her morning tea into the saucer rather than the cup, dip her biscuit in cottage cheese rather than clotted cream.
--
The place has blue painted window frames. They're a bright, nearly turquoise blue - but darker, really, not so pastoral, not so western. There's a chandelier visible in the window, above a white-painted, antique chair upholstered in white, and a stack of portaits of girls, nineteenth century-style, staring out of the darkness, all long black hair and bright red cheeks. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind, sees the girls eyes, this expression that lives more in the bloom of color in her cheeks than in the neat little moue made by her mouth, sees her own eyes, which are different.
The sign in the window says: open.
[Girl] This is what people would see: the young woman, slender, reserved, poised -- almost carelessly so; her hair as red as autumn's dying and her expression when she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror [solitary (where?)] behind the canvas portraits a thing that kins itself to inscrutable. The quirk of her mouth, a touch wry - self-chiding, un-selfconscious, paradox-thing - when she draws differences out've the paint-girls and flesh-and-bone girls. The look in the eye.
But mirrors are tricks. They're clarity, and clarity's unyielding; they're bad luck for breaking. Kage knows a man who's driven by fear, who calls her Cage, but fond, who was dragged across the gauntlet by a crow, and who wears mirrors in the palms of his gloves, in his tattered, seams un-stitching jacket, and uses them to interact with a world he finds terrible. He's in the back of her mind, somewhere; she saw him, just last week, the beginning of the week. Saw him, because she heard about the crow, saw him, because she reached, and saw him bloody, fearful, fretting, surrounded by such things as'd make the mind want to un-ravel were it weaker. She tried to pluck him out [was it right (maybe it was a test)]. Couldn't. Mirrors, mirrors are her sisters: never jostling, but always claiming, always staking out borders of their Empire, oldest first, youngest next, sometimes. Mirrors are sight, they're look-far-far-away, they're smoke. There's a dream she cannot remember, and her mind starts to slip that way.
This is what people would see: young woman, casual in jeans, a demure white blouse buttoned up to her throat, five hematite rings on one hand, a silver ring on the other, pockets. Not fancy. Easily mistaken for a college student -- except, no. That presence. Kage is sizing the place up. Kage is sizing herself up, Kage is wondering, where oh where, where is He, why hasn't He come around to bother her these last days, when she can almost taste --
There are stories. The sign in the window says: open. And Kage, who is a creature driven by curiosity as much as anything, decides to give in to whim: she steps across the threshold. She has no idea what kind of shop it is, and the quirk is still there, half-wry, giving lie to the expressiveness of her eyebrows, because she knows she's just trying to scrape out've whatever mood it is that has her wanting to scratch off her skin. Melancholy, just held at bay. Maybe that's it.
If a bell rings when she enters, she doesn't look up or over toward the sound. Kage looks for people. And Kage, who's a sharp eye when it comes to details, putting them together into a picture that uncovers a mystery, is looking at this place she's in, with the paintings. And maybe they're for sale, and maybe she'll buy one, put it up in her study half-hidden by a tapestry, or behind a bookshelf. Secret.
[Him] "You have to come down from your summit, so why climb in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below. But what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees, and one descends. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by what one has learned higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least know."
There are bells. There are always bells, right? Something to announce a new presence in the room. Some sort of prescience – music from movement, a song from a push against a wall-that-opens, which means: door. So the door opens and the bells ring like so – they aren’t small, these bells. There’s this resonance in them that strikes chords beneath her skin. Like this: like her organs recognize the waves of the sounds in them. Like the way her blood moves, as if it had a voice.
Kage in the mirror. The core of her is the girl, painted in a circle of darkness. The core of her is obscured by a girl, who is younger, and a girl, who is slighter, and a girl, whose hair is brown and whose eyes are black like the night sky. Around the girl, the crown of Kage’s head, the impression of her arms, the glimpse of a hand with its hematite rings, and its silver rings.
- hey. There’s a person. There’s a person here, leaning over a glass display case, his arms folded together, pressed between his body and the silvered edge of the gleaming thing. He is fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and ignores the gleam and sparkle of the contents of the case in favor of the comic book he has open on top of the case. His shoulders are hunched over, his body large – not just gone-to-fat, but big-framed, comically so in room that is white and blue and black, crystal and carved wood.
He looks up when she enters and smiles – this flashing look – and though his hair is stringy black and everything about him is wrong, she almost, almost expects to see the stars in his eyes.
They are amber instead, warm brown flecked with yellow and green, bloodshot too, the right more than the left. “Hey,” he says, straightening. The comic remains open on the display case. The contents, the contents glitter and gleam, crystals arrayed against a white backdrop take her apart and remake her, a thousand times over, the way a prism breaks down like into its constituent parts and lets you see the pieces of everything.
His voice is even and pleasant, maybe rusty from disuse. This place is out of the way and Kage is the only person here. It looks more like a photograph than a store, like a photograph of a store you might take for Paris Vogue. He doesn’t fit in here, but here he is, smiling at her. “ – how’s it going? Can I help you?”
Then a moment where he’s looking at her more closely, frowning kinda, this expression at the corners of her mouth the way her awareness is flayed and raw, living at the corners of that dream she cannot remember.
[Him] (the way a prism breaks down light. ahem!)
[Girl] The bells are like a sieve and the human body's made of a lot of water. That's what textbooks say, and as it is written, so it must be true? They're also a little like that moment in a kitschy 50s movie; something about angels or witches, elevators opening up to the underworld. You know: that moment things go just a little bit aslant, knock just the slightest bit askew. The chandelier is made of water, or stars; or glass, which is of neither of those elements, although it pretends - visual alchemy -
Her voice is smooth, easy. A moon and shadow thing, but soft. Has weight. Has knowing in it. "I don't know yet. Not sure this is where I mean to be." Kage tells the truth, even when she misrepresents it: re-defines it; makes it imply something else. Doesn't like to lie, outright. See? She doesn't think about it. She just does it. There's no awkwardness, no stutter, no hesitation - socially awkward, she's not. "What's this place called? Named, I mean?" Kage is a steady, steadying creature, but she feels off-balance. Sharpens her, that - and her eyebrows draw together, briefly, studying the man when he's kinda looking at her more closely. Her eyebrows flick upward.
Beat. " - And hey, I'm sorry," that note of un-directed wry, courtesy, "If I'm interrupting your work. But what were you reading?"
[Girl] ooc: Ahem. 'Her eyebrows flick upwards, after a moment.' Is how that should read!
[Him] "This place?" the man asks. The man, the boy. He's one of those people who is written between the two words. He doesn't have a name there. He means both, he means neither. The smile he flashes Kage is sudden and wide. It's boy-ish, but there's an ish on it that makes her pause. His hair is stringy and dark and his t-shirt is black. It fits his bulk awkwardly. He bulges in strange places. " - heh. It doesn't really have a name. I mean, it's one of those places that's better without a name. Even the business cards, they're just blank where the name should be. The owner says that the right people always find it."
His hands are large and meaty, splayed out over the display counter. Beneath she expects - what, antique broaches and tie-pins, cuff-links made from beyrl or whale-tooth or the woven hair of the dead, memento mori, cameos blushing pale against the inner heart of a pink shell, a girl in profile, demure, looking down and away - not at the sky.
Instead, there are diamonds. There are half-a-hundred diamonds, some the size of an egg, some the size of a mote of dust, of a Who in Whoville, set out on gleaming white fabric.
"I'm reading the Amazing Spider-Man +1," he says with a grin, gesturing to the comic. " - I found it in the back. It's not as good as you'd guess, though. I guess my work is to answer your questions, eh? So you're not much of an interruption. Anyway, I already know what happens next. In the comic, I mean."
[Girl] "Yeah? How'd you find it?" She says that, but she's thinking - one of those. She's thinking - one of these. She's thinking - really, now. And she's thinking - ha. And she wants to know how this stringy-haired, bulky guy came to be hulking over diamonds, spangling bright as gravefrost 'neath the hunter's moon - she wouldn't have asked, otherwise.
Kage peeks at the diamonds. Then: pauses. Looks over her shoulder, toward the mirror; that white antiqued chair; the painting of the bright-cheeked, dark-haired girl [lamia (maiden)], the blooming roses in her cheeks, the chandelier, snow-frozen - her look is disconcerted. "I wouldn't actually think the Amazing Spiderman +1 was that good. A hero with that kind've charm - well, he's got to grow that way, you know? And maybe get flung through a couple of alternate realities before he can make do."
Her eyes, back on the diamonds, set out on white. Snow, she thinks again - winter, and maps. A word for that. Enochian: language of angels.
[Him] "How'd I find it?" he says, he's grinning, you know, grinning like that is a silly question, like that's easy, like he's about to ace this little quiz. So: grin. His face is round like some dime-store Buddha's and there's a bristle of whisker on his cheek and a stupidly twee whisp of a mustache just growning in. Kage looks at the diamonds on white, like salt-crystals on snow, and the boyish man stands back, lets her look, lets her browse. " - well, that's easy, you know?"
"I just - " wait, stop. Shift. He's frowning now, it's faint, that look you make when the word you need has slipped away from your seeking tongue. When you're trying to identify an elusive taste from the last bite of a nameless morsel. "I mean, I guess - I - I just - " and whatever it is that is troubling him, he holds it in, keeps it in the core of his body, makes it an egg, makes it a glass ball, contained but enlivening, but unstable, a liquid that wants to be permeable, free-floating, like one of the noble gases. " - I just walked in. I parked and turned the corner and - walked in. I'm pretty sure about that."
--
Kage says something about heros, and the storekeeper, the man behind the counter, he's deflated, somehow, something leaked out of him, concerned about the answer to the question, the question to the answer, gathers up Spider-Man Number 1 and looks up at her, wry. Says, quiet. "I guess that's why we keep reading."
Then, she's looking down at the diamonds. And he, he taps the glass with a meaty finger, not to interrupt, but to indicate - that which is below. "You can see those? Really actually see them?"
His voice is quiet. There's something contracted about him. Fear as a function of awe.
[Girl] The change in his voice draws her attention up out've the glass. Her gaze is direct, expressive without being eloquent; eloquent without being expressive. There's a speck of warness, now; sifts, behind the glance, like dust motes in a slant of light. Not everybody can raise one eyebrow; it's difficult. That asymmetry, the lilt of it - but Kage manages. "I can see them?" she echoes. "Really actually see -- ?"
There. A look. And a blankness, a place for him to write in his answer. Fill in the blanks, sir.
[Him] "The peradam." He says, watching her. The slightest gesture downward, to the case, full of glittering diamonds, faceted and brilliant, gleaming in the light. They are, she must think, impossible not to see. " - in the case." His voice is soft, is quiet, it occurs to her that he is whispering, that there are secrets at work here. That there is someone he does not want to overhear.
He leans closer, he is nameless, in a nameless place, and he leans closer and smells like liverwurst and bergamot. He smells like a hidden sigh. In his anxiety, he has rolled up the precious Amazing Spider-Man into a cylinder, which is another shape a flat plane can take. The beginning touches the end, and then where do you start.
"The peradam in the case." His voice like a flatline. Eeeeee. The tension is underneath. "can you see them?"
[Girl] "You mean - the 'peradam' in the display case? Wherein things are," a beat, and in another story, she'd look him up and down, she'd raise both her eyebrows, and it'd be so subtle as to be a dictionary of tone, precise, poise, this, "displayed," a beat, "for people with eyes to look?" That was a little cruel. Her voice is even, though - almost takes away the sting, if any. The sardonic inflection: the emphasis, disbelieving - and cautious. "You mean - the diamonds?"
[Him] "Yeah - " he says, waves his meaty hand thoughtlessly below him, at the display case. Where things are displayed. "I've been here," pause, stop, estoppel on the thought. There's this moment where he's thinking about how long he's been here, about time and space and the definitions of the same where things go wrong. Not for Kage, but for the Spider-Man fan, where he gets troubled, looks lost, as if he couldn't find his way from second to second without getting caught in some rather frightening - " well, I've been here, and you are the only customer who's been able to see them."
An irritable shake of his head, when she names them all wrong. His stringy hair goes flying. One thinks, in that moment: snakes. The gorgons, who were lovely women before they changed. Before they were changed. Before the world changed.
" - right, see, they look like diamonds, but they aren't. They're called peradam, and if you can see them, it's for a reason. It might mean you're - " he looks up, confusion chasing itself across his features, as if he were looking at both tomorrow and yesterday. And if she looks up, she sees that there are two doors here. There are two Doors here. She can in through one. It is open to the street, and she can see herself reflected like a ghost in the window. The iron-work is painted blue, and everything shines white. The second Door is in the back, worked into the paneling which is all chased woodwork, elaborate and European, painted white like the chair and the tables, like the walls, like the watered silk beneath the peradam. She hadn't noticed it before. There's no handle. There's no lock.
There's no indication where it goes.
" - well, it means you can take one. It means you can take your pick of them. You get one like everyone else. Since you see them, I can tell you what they are. Or, you can not-Know. Knot-know. It's a choice you get to make: take one, know it. Take one, don't know it. Leave them, and walk away. Right?"
[Girl] The nameless man in the nameless shop isn't careful and the red-haired Orphan (without Tradition) watches him as he speaks, confusion chases itself - lost - across his features, unwrites him - a faint frown between her eyebrows; it isn't a bright thing. Her eyes are cool, though -- seem cool, albeit dark. Her eyes are just: steady, still direct. "What's a nice guy like you," she says, "doing here?"
Maybe she's stalling. Think, Kage, be thoughtful. This whole place: it's got a feel to it. And there's a choice, and it's a little like a deal, like tying oneself into a thread, like - she steps back from the counter, slides her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, lets her eyelashes sweep downward in a blink, thoughtful. This, too: the Door, the back-door, the interesting one, there's no indication what might be back there [the backroom, wherein Amazing Spider Man +1 resides?], and Kage - Kage focuses, for a second, calls up a formulae, imagines an occult drawing, the lines would go here, and here, and uses that to jump off, uses that instead of pure-instinct, to Reach, Reach around for Space, just testing the edges.
If she were normal, or even another willworker, she might be walking away now, walking through the front door, whatever. "That door," she says, lifting her chin to indicate the lockless thing, "or that one," and she tilts her head, to indicate the door-by-which-she-came, and then - " - and three choices, hunh." She wasn't stalling, though. Says - " - are you okay? Is there anything you want?"
He was afraid, wasn't he? Of her. No.
[Him] He gave her three choices. Take and know. Take and not-know. Leave them behind, wash her hands of it, leave without something, without knowing, without touching. There are two doors. Here is the third.
"You can stay here." The look he gives her is nervous, it tastes like truth. There is something utterly fucking naked about this kid when he says it, with the rolled-up Spiderman in his hand, between-places. His eyes are stark and his mouth is slack and he's still, not deer-in-headlights still, but still, aware of her and the doors and the place, like he remembers something he has always forgotten.
- a twitch of his mouth, upward. That's a smile, as real as the naked look he gave her, stark with shame. The smile is real, it is soft and it is quiet, it is sweet and bittersweet, like honey and pith, white, peeled away from the flesh of the fruit. Like an appleseed. "It's not so bad. There's always something to read, the hours are decent - and - and - " a frown compresses his brow. "Really. There's a rhythm to it. I like the rhythm. The days move and it is like so. And the comics are pretty good. The light comes in and it is lovely." He catches her look toward the door, the back one, when she indicates it.
"I've never been back there," he says, quiet. "I - I don't know what's on the other side. I wouldn't go through. And I couldn't go back. I'm okay, yeah. I mean, everyone can come and go, eh? So. I wouldn't mind it if you stayed here with me. Like I said - it's not that bad here. It's - it's fine, really."
[Girl] "I don't think so," Kage says, and the frown has become (brief) more pronounced. "That's - you can't wouldn't or couldn't yourself - well." Here, a self-aware, self-directed curl of her mouth: "Shouldn't use the contraction 'can't.' Not in this context, hm?" A beat. And then, repetition - because repetition is mantra, is easy: "I don't think so. Doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm going to look?"
- so she'll, careful still, walk around the table the nameless man's hulking over, bittersweet, quiet, the display case with the peradem, glistering like a white road, like milk, dreaming itself into grandeur -
and that's where she'll go. That door. But she's not ignoring him; she's still paying attention.
[Him] "It's up to you," he says, that shines in him, bright, like he means it. " - you know? I hope you make it through."
--
She walks through the shop, which is done just so. It reminds her of Paris, this place, in artful disorder. Here is a door, in the woodwork, in the white-painted wainscotting. There is no handle and there is no lock and there is no key. She opens it. There is no back room. There is no back room full of comic books.
There is the shadow of a garden beyond. The trees are huge and enshadowed. It is night. She can see the stars.
--
"You sure you don't want one?" The shopkeeper says, from behind the display case. Sunlight cuts through the wide windows of the storefront, casts him in brilliant light. His eyes are tawny and sad and his mouth is slack, wistful beneath the twee suggestion of a mustache. "It's up to you." The peradam wink and gleam in the sunlight, like dew in the first light of dawn.
[Girl] Before she opened the door, she watched the nameless man; she listened to what she could hear, through the door. And he reminded her about the peradam, and she thinks, Diamonds are a girls best friend, the thought curdles through her blood like smoke, like the children's rhyme it isn't, like the crooning songstress's wise-eyed, knowing advice, tongue-in-cheek, and she also thinks - They just look like diamonds. They look like stars, but they're not. False-things, lovely, but - unmarked.
"I don't think I want one - " is what she says, and then " - they look look expensive. Keep your stars," because Kage's weakness is poetry, sometimes. "I know where to look for them if I need to." Because that: that's one of the things, one of the Knacks, she just knew when she was first-Awake, when the world was dark, and dangerous, and she was going mad, but not really - knowing things, finding them, feeling them like an ache in her tooth.
And that's when she, thinking that, really, she should be a little more cautious [ - but she feels like - ], walks through the door without a lock. Out've tumble-antiqued carefully-arranged Parisienne sophisticate, and into some garden - shadow-thing, shadow-place.
[Him] The door closes behind her -
She's in the garden and it is night, the air is rich with scent. Something is dry on the ground beneath her feet - leaves, she thinks, leaves falling - and but no, no, the earth is damp and new-turned, she smells that too, fertility sunk into the soil, simmering under the star-strewn sky. There are trees here, which are tall, and which whisper in the wind. There are willow branches and there is water, someone, singing its quiet song, running over stones, the bones of the earth.
- and someone grabs her by the shoulders.
He smells the world sounds after the first snowfall - dampened, distinct, like the night sky. He smells like an interrupted shadow, like a crossroads on some lonely moor, heather and bog-water, the secrets that live underneath the shifting ground. The ground that gives way underneath you. He smells like bone left out in the wind and rain until it is clean of all flesh. He smells like the memory of water in a long-dry well.
He kisses her like the falling rain, gentle, and then it is a raging storm - pelting hard droplets a fractional degree from being or becoming ice. He kisses her like winter kisses spring, like summer kisses snow - melting into her and filling her senses and she cannot breathe without breathing him and she cannot scream without screaming him. His hands are on her cheeks, on her shoulders, on her breasts. His hands are on her hips, ghosting her body, dreaming it like he made it, Pygmalion, this inverse sort of lie. He pushes her into the dim, dark shape of a tree climbing into the sky. It's evening now, it's dark. She remembers the shape of daylight through the picture windows, remembers the way the world pushes itself into being, the shadows through the iron, the white chair gleaming in the sunlight.
Now it is dark and it is night and he kisses her mouth until it is bruised and swollen, until she is breathing the air from his lungs, which tastes like cold flame, fills her up with the dark, churning sense of creation, some essentialism, some fundamental processes, the star that consumes itself.
She knows Him. Knows Him before he touches her. Knows Him before she tastes Him. The stars can dissolve from the sky. She will find them again in his eyes.
She knows Him. And when he has drawn her up, turned her not into a pillar of salt but a pillar of flame-seeking-oxygen, he breaks away from her, sets her forcibly free and turns and stalks a great circuit of the walled garden, the shadows of the walls, the shadows of the trees, the shadow of the sky - shaking his head like a thing apart, the horned god who cannot be contained by walls, who cannot be stopped by spells, essential.
He is laughing. "I knew you'd come."
[Girl] [pauseypausepausecreditsroll]
[Him] transcript!
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