Dash made a stoic face. The window above the sink filtered in light that accented his mother’s long, coiled black hair, which clung to her thin frame like thick ropes of seaweed about some sunken statue. The birthmark between her eyes was obscured and only her full lips and chin were visible in the marine shadows. Even without a smile, Dash thought that she was beautiful, some enchanted waterborne species. He nodded. “I’m back.”
“Thought I’d make some fried fish for dinner. I know it’s your favorite.”
“Sounds good. Do you want me to wash off the carrots?”
“After a while. Better start your homework, if you got any.”
“No homework today.”
“Really? Then come sit and help pick out the bones.” She brought a tray of cleaned fish over to the table.
Dash pulled out a chair and sat down.
Amber handed him a slippery rockfish that was already halved. Dash held it in the light and looked at the skeleton sunk into the flesh. The splayed fish, with its delicate vertebrae, not yet seasoned and crispy with cornmeal, reminded him that it had once been a living thing. Now, like everything else in the house, it had been taken over and would be turned into something else.
“Just pull out the big bones,” his mother was saying. “I’ll come behind you and get the little ones.”
Dash got into the rhythm of pulling away fins and skin and bone from the fish and dropping the flesh into the tray. But he knew the solace would soon end. Because he could feel the doom forming again, the enigma at the heart of everything between them: the dream. He braced for the ritual to begin, one of many.
“How was school?”
Dash didn’t look up. “Ma’am?”
“I said was school okay today?”
“Yes.”
“Was the walk all right? You came straight home, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Nothing different?”
Dash dropped a piece of fish on the tray with the expressionless face that years of having Amber Kinwell for a mother had wrought. There would be more questions if he didn’t keep his answers short. Nothing in his response could be out of place, the unmentionables kept hidden. The suspension and the letter. The mystical danger of Nephthys Kinwell’s chamber. But more than that, as hard as it was to quarantine it at the edges of his mind, he had to shroud what he saw (imagined?) at the end of the school corridor. Behind that door in that other dimension. But if he’d imagined that, then he feared that he was also imagining the River Man, and he was not prepared for what that could mean or not mean. “Nothing, Mama.”
VESSEL
Nephthys set out over the longitudes and latitudes of the Great Mystery, the ironclad vessel her only means, the shifting fog her only guide …
In the archipelagic dawn, Nephthys sat at the steering wheel of her car parked under a broken streetlamp outside of her apartment building. For the past three days, she’d been in her living room letting time slip by, drinking and raging at memories, searching for missing bottles and finding them again. She fell into slumber and came to, and in between she thought about the visit from Dash, which was difficult because that meant she had to think about Amber. They hadn’t spoken in so long—she and her niece—and even though she lived just on the opposite side of Anacostia, it might as well have been the other side of the galaxy. Nephthys never had made up her mind about how to deal with the canyon between them, a divide that started with dreams and death. And she splashed and swam in what she’d been drinking to ease her feelings of guilt and the unbearable inertia of one.
Now she turned the key in the ignition and the steel beast sputtered to life. She opened a little container of Vaseline from her bag and dabbed a bit on her lips. She took out the flask from her pocket and looked at it, saying what she always said to herself before lifting it to her lips: Biddy taste. Just a biddy taste. She sipped and put the flask back in her pocket. Shouldn’t be drinkin’, she said to the dashboard as she’d said a thousand times before. She turned on the headlights, startling a rat in the street that quickly skittered back into the shadows. Someone turned on the light by a window in an apartment above and the silhouette stood frozen and then the light was turned out. She looked into the darkness and shrugged. Her services were needed. She charged what she wanted and people paid what they could. She never had to make what she was providing known, since anyone who required special transport knew who she was, what her car looked like, and what she did with it.
Nephthys watched a police cruiser speed by and turn into the mazes of the alleys and disappear. She took another drink from her flask and heard the familiar thump of the white girl in the trunk. Then she rolled the window down and waited for it to happen. And after a while, as always, the fog drifted into the car and Nephthys had that feeling once more. The feeling that made what she did with the Plymouth possible.
* * *
It started with the stillness, an arthritic feeling that had settled into her at the sight of her twin’s body at the morgue. She stiffened bit by bit from that day forward and she found it harder and harder to move, as if her joints were calcifying. There were mornings when she awoke and thought that she was paralyzed. Her body creaked as she went about, and she felt wooden and brittle. Her blood thickened and her cells flagged as she tried to live as one in the world and not two. And every time the image of her brother’s body flashed in her mind, she felt like she was slowly turning to stone, struck as she was by the unbearable inertia of one.
That was when the drinking started. She could find relief from the stillness; she could drift and float away. All the while she watched Amber grow and spread through the house on her own, without her, for the watery realm of the dwelling seemed keyed to the girl’s every want and whim, and she germinated like some unknown underwater species and did what she wanted of her own accord. Nephthys struggled through the affliction of stillness as the days went by. She fed Amber from the feral garden and sent her up the hill to school. But each time Nephthys looked at this strange child of her brother, she’d fought back the question of how the girl could know and yet not know of her own father’s demise. And she had stared out to the fearful unknown, wondering what they were going to do. They needed money. Her brother’s income was gone and she’d left one island without the skills to function on another. Gotta do, she’d thought. Gotta move.
That was when the wandering started. And it was on one of her long walks, excursions to cope with the unbearable inertia of one, that Nephthys ended up on the edge of the southeast quadrant at Earl’s Scrapyard. And in accordance with constellations, circumstances, and events, she roamed and rambled about the debris, until she came across a lanky man called Find Out.
He was tall—nearly seven feet—and grossly underweight. He was completely bald, and his dark and leathery skin wrapped about his skeleton like some bizarre jerky. The cartilage and joints in his body seemed fused as if by cement, and he walked unnaturally upright, his head bobbling atop his spinal cord. He wore black excrement-spattered rubber boots that came up to his knees, and in the firelight and shadows of the high stacks and spires all about, he looked like an embalmer, a great Anubis guarding some vast plain of pyramid graves. And it was said that he could find anything in the entire world. He brought Tahitian pearls to high-rolling poker games in basement bars on U Street. He delivered a blue boa constrictor to a blind woman living in the clock tower of the Old Post Office Pavilion (she wanted a pet to match the eyes she could no longer use).
As Nephthys approached, Find Out glared with the dark and sunken eyes of some creature drawn in a comic book. “What you want?”
Nephthys looked into the countless piles behind the tall man. There were massive stacks, tunnels of scrap that seemed to lead to other tunnels, and she wondered what it might be like to enter and move through yet more places and spaces. Gotta move, she thought. She looked back at the imposing man. “Somethin’, maybe.”
“Lady,