Swanny shuts the door. Her mother lights candles on the table as if she’s performing a séance. Swanny takes the seat across from her and watches the flames.
“I hope this isn’t the sort of place you frequent,” Pippi says. “A man won’t take you seriously once he’s seen you dance.”
“Women in general, or just me?”
“That applies to all women, darling, even the ones who dance well.”
Pippi flicks her ash off into the air, but it evaporates to nothing before it sprinkles the tabletop.
“Mother, I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I didn’t use to. It’s like we always used to say at McGuffin: ‘You can smoke when you’re dead!’?” She laughs brightly. “We had such gallows humor about it all. Scavengers feeding on a corpse. ‘Content will be the last industry to go,’ we said, and we were right. But it all goes eventually. It all goes, so you have to snatch it while you can.”
“I suppose so.”
“That’s not advice, Swanny, that’s a statement of fact. You don’t merely want to survive. You must do what it takes to thrive. Always. My mother was a survivor, and I can tell you that woman had nothing to teach me. Do you know what’s the best cure for dishpan hands? Suicide.”
“Grandma committed suicide?”
“No, but I would have if I were her. Or rather, I would have killed my stepfather and made it look like an accident.”
“You’ve never really talked about them before.”
“You’re a grown-up now. All bets are off.”
“I don’t think I’m so very grown up.”
“Nonsense. Of course you are. You’ve taken charge of your own life, and that’s more than most women do at any age.”
“I’m a traitor to everything I once believed.”
“You’re a risk taker.”
The question comes out in a rush, without preamble: “I hope Howie didn’t kill those little boys. Can you tell me if he did?”
“Sharkey is safeguarding his reputation, which is entirely sensible, given his line of work. One can’t allow all kinds of nonsense to keep circulating; it’s a PR disaster. And my personal differences with him aside, I think you should respect his privacy. You’re not responsible for what he does.”
“I know he killed you.”
“That’s between him and me, dear. I appreciate your concern, but don’t go poking your head in where it doesn’t belong.”
“Do you mean you’ve formed…some kind of alliance with Sharkey?”
“Who made the chaw you chewed tonight?”
“I…”
“Oh come now, Swanny, I know you’re on drugs. I saw you dancing.”
Chastened, Swanny looks down at the table. There she sees a series of images from her childhood depicted, via the swirling candlelit wood grain, in etching-like detail. In one, little Swanny discovers a half-dead rabbit, caught in a trap amid the high grasses. In another, she and her mother play a hand of Guillotine at the dining table while Corona serves them after-dinner Sauternes. In a third, sick and delirious, she clings on tight as her bed floats out the window into the night sky.
“You’re having a drug experience right now.”
“I suppose I am,” Swanny admits. She stares into her mother’s face. The features are all there, even the tune-up scar, yet they’re also sharply absent. Through Pippi’s translucence, Swanny can see the stage set’s backdrop, a dusty canvas painting of an antique, lamplit street. “Mother, I miss you. I never thought I would, but I miss you so.”
“Keep tempo,” says Pippi. “Don’t get distracted. You were born for great things, Swanny. I know you won’t disappoint me.”
Swanny looks back down at her hands and watches them moving upon the klangflugel keys. She hadn’t even realized she was singing:
Take me up, Mother, to your kingdom of the sky
My wings are beating and my fire won’t die
I don’t need a machine to fly
I don’t need a machine to fly
I don’t need a machine to fly
Into the sky—ohhh
Your kingdom of the sky…
The music moves through her hands, her throat, with such force that it seems like it could never stop without destroying her, but then at long last, she raises her trembling fingers from the keys and she’s still there, she’s still standing, and where the stage’s curtain used to be there are a hundred sooty-sweaty faces gazing up at her from the dance floor, silent, waiting to see what she’ll do next.
* * *
Sharkey is waiting for her at the stage door in his endless top hat, that long tunnel of satiny dark. Chewing.
“Have a nice visit?” he asks, in the tone of voice he uses to answer his own questions.
“You’re a sorcerer.” She takes a step nearer. Gravitating toward him. She hasn’t forgotten the names of colors. His eyes are Caviar, Inkwell, Black Magic. “A necromancer. You kill, yes, but when you cook the chaw, you bring back what you took. Your art—it isn’t just a drug. It’s access to the beyond. You have that power.”
“You say that like you’re surprised.”
“I didn’t understand before, but now I do. That’s why death has no meaning for you, isn’t it? Because you’ve risen above it.”
“Dead still means dead, Swanny. Nothing you see is ever gonna change that.”
Swanny has always been attracted to Sharkey, from the very first moment his hearse pulled up at the curb beside her, when he was just a faceless voice in a death car. Only now, though, does that attraction insist upon itself as a basic human need. She melts into him, pressing the words into his zoot suit lapel: “But you made me see.”
“Yeah. That’s what I do.” He helps her on with her coat; the fur is so welcoming it’s as though he’s tucking her into bed. “You’ve got a secret power yourself. Who taught you to sing like that?”
“I always wanted to.” She thinks back to the klangflugel lessons of her childhood, the dreaded tock of the metronome, her mother checking off missed notes on the score. She caresses his chest. Inside, his heart is keeping its own kind of time. “Take me home, Howie.”
Then they’re in the limo. Swanny is shocked at her own behavior; desire has seized her, turned her body into its shuddering puppet. Before the vehicle even moves, they paw and tongue and yearn, crushed against each other on the banquette.
“Kiss me, oh, kiss me.” Utter surrender may be violent, but sometimes violence is the only solution the fallen can know. Damn the whole vexatious torment of the last fortnight. “How can I want you so badly when I’m already in your arms?”
“?’Cause that ain’t all you want.” She has to admit, he’s absolutely right.
Dragons: if they didn’t exhale, would their heat sizzle them from the inside? Just as the limo pulls away, the old theater explodes behind them.
“I left something behind,” Sharkey says. “Just for you.”
Roman candles and bottle rockets and jumping jacks unnerve the blackened sky. Former untorchables run out, on fire, screaming. Swanny can’t tear her eyes away from the window. It’s just like her vision the day she arrived in Torchtown: people made of magma, dissolving and consuming one another constantly.