Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

THE CITY OF BLIND DELIGHT by Catherynne M. Valente

There is a train which passes through every possible city. It folds the world like an accordioned map, and speeds through the folds like a long white cry, piercing black dots and capital-stars and vast blue bays. Its tracks bind the firmament like bones: wet, humming iron with wriggling runnels of quicksilver slowly replacing the old ash wood planks, and the occasional golden bar to mark a historic intersection, so long past the plaque has weathered to blank. These tracks bear up under the hurtling train, the locomotive serpent circumnavigating the globe like a beloved egg. Though they would not admit it and indeed hardly remember at all, New York and Paris and Tokyo, London and Mombasa and Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Seattle and Christchurch and Beijing: nothing more than intricate, over-swarmed stations on the Line, festooned and decorated beyond all recognition.

Of necessity, this train passes through the City of Blind Delight, which lies somewhat to the rear of Ulan Bator, and also somewhat diagonally from Greenland, beneath a thin veneer of Iowa City, lying below it as the bone of a ring-finger may lie beneath both flesh and glove, unseen, gnarled and jointed ivory hidden by mute skin, dumb leather. The Line is its sole access point. Yet in Chicago, a woman in black glasses stands with a bag full of celery and lemons and ice in her arms. She watches trains silver past while the cream and gold of Union Station arches behind her and does not know if this one, or this, or even that ghostly express gasping by is a car of the Line, does not know which, if any of these graffiti-barnacled leviathans would take her to a station carved from baobab-roots and papaya rinds, or one of mirrors angled to make the habitual strain of passengers to glimpse the incoming rattlers impossible, so that the train appears with its headlight blazing as if out of thin air, or to Blind Delight itself, where the station arches and vestibules are formed by acrobatic dancers, their bodies locked together with laced fingers and toes, stretching in shifts over the glistening track, their faces impassive as angels. It is almost painful to imagine, how close she has come how many times to catching the right one, but each day she misses it without realizing that she has missed anything at all, and the dancers of Blind Station writhe without her.

She will miss it today, too. But he will catch it. He will even brush her elbow as he passes her, hurrying through doors which open and shut like arms, and it is not impossible that he will remember the astringent smell of cold lemons long afterward. She has no reason to follow him—this train has the wrong letter on its side, and he is running too fast even to look at the letter, so certain is he that he is late. But she longs to, anyway, for no reason at all. She watches the tails of his blue coat slip past the inexorable doors.

The car this man, whose name is Gris, enters is empty even at five o’clock. An advertisement looms near the city map, a blank and empty image of skin spreading across the entire frame, seen at terrible closeness, pores and hair and lines beaming bright. It is brown, healthy. There is no text, and he cannot think what it is meant to sell: lotion? Soap? Perfume? He extends a hand to touch the paper, and it recoils, shudders. The hairs bristle translucent; goosebumps prickle. Gris blinks and sits down abruptly, folding his hands tightly around his briefcase. The train rocks slowly from side to side.

He does not worry about a ticket-taker: you use your ticket to enter the station these days, not the train. Once within the dark, warm station, which is not unlike a cathedral, all trains are open to the postulant. He is a postulant, though he does not think in those terms. He once took an art history course in college—there was a girl, of course, he had wanted to impress, with a red braid and an obscure love of Crivelli. The professor had put up a slide of Raphael’s self-portrait, and he remembers his shock on seeing that face, with the projector-light shining through it, that face which had seemed to him disturbingly blank, vapid, even idiotic. He is like me, Gris had thought, that is my face. Not the man who was a painter, but the man who was affectless, a fool, the man who was thinner than the professor’s rough mechanical light. I am like that, he thought then, he thinks now. Blank and empty, like a child, like skin.

He falls asleep and does not hear the station call. But the Line is patient. The doors wait, open into the dark, a soft, sucking wind blowing out of the tunnels and across the platform. The Line has determined the trajectory of its passenger. He stirs when the skin-advertisement shivers above him, and bleary-limbed, steps off of the silver car, into the station-shadows.

The sun filters in a pink wash through the lattice of bodies. Gris thinks of Crivelli’s angels, how sharp and dour they were on the walls of the girl with the red braid’s bedroom. These people are like that, the top-most ones staring down at him, their hair making strangely-colored banners, fluttering with the train-generated winds. He is grateful the floor is plain tile, that he does not have to walk on stomachs and thigh-bones. He gapes—do not all tourists gape? He gapes and his chin tilts up to the banners of hair, ignoring the rush of those for whom the human ceiling is no more unusual than one of glass and iron. They swarm around him; he does not notice.

Across the gleaming floor, a calf clicks its hooves. Gris shifts his gaze numbly, the smell of the calf beguiling—for it is roasted, brown and glistening, its ears basted in brown sugar, its skin crisp and hot. There is a long knife in its side, and with clear, imploring eyes, the calf looks up at him, turning its pierced flank invitingly. It swishes its broiled tail. A girl runs up in a blue smock, knocking Gris’s briefcase down, and pulls the knife out, cutting a pink slice of veal and chewing it noisily. She thrusts the blade back in towards the calf’s rump, a tidy child. He feels his mouth dry, and though he has found his way to the City of Blind Delight in place of the woman with the black glasses and the lemons, he is lost as she would not have been.

Near the apex of the ceiling, a woman with long red hair like sheeting hensblood and black eyes detaches herself from the throng, smoothly replaced by a young man with hardly any hair at all on his legs. She climbs down the wall as nimble as a spider dropping thread, and in no time at all slaps her bare heels on the clean floor, retrieving a green dress and golden belt from a darkened booth and covering her skin, chilled from the heights. Barefoot, she strides towards the conspicuous tourist as the calf wanders off, holding her hand out in a nearly normal gesture of the world to which Gris is accustomed. This woman is called Otthild, and she was born here, in Blind Station. Her mother was a ticket-taker, a token-changer. She kept her hair bobbed and curled like a silent movie gamine, her uniform crisp and red, even when it was stretched by her belly and the buttons uttered brassy cries of protest. When the time came, she shrugged off her blazer and trousers, hung her hat on a silver peg, and climbed up the wall of limbs, helped along by a crooked knee here and an elbow there, until she reached a rafter of long, thick torsos clasped together leg by arm, and on this she lay, and gave birth to her child in mid-air, a daughter caught by the banisters and neatly deposited at the gleaming turnstile by an obliging windowsill with a yellow beard. Otthild was thus the darling of the Station. She had never taken the Line out of the City of Blind Delight, nor desired to.

There are many words for what Otthild does. They have little meaning in the City, but she collects them like seashells from the tourists. Of all, she prefers fallen woman, since this describes her birth perfectly. Most of her customers are tourists—she prefers them to locals, and the pay is better. She shakes the stranger’s hand, and he is absurdly grateful. She guides him to the door of the station, a gorgeously executed arch of four women, standing on each other’s red shoulders—the topmost pair held their children outstretched, and the youths clasped hands in a graceful peak. She instructs her bewildered charge to purchase a return ticket from the coiffed man in a glass booth before they leave, and again he is grateful for her. The arch winks as Otthild passes beneath them, her polished hair shining against her dress.

Outside the Station, the City of Blind Delight opens up in a long valley. No road in its heart connects to any road which might lead into a long avenue or highway by which, traveling quickly, a man might reach the smallest town on any map he knows. The Line is entrance and exit, mother and father. There are lights down there, in the vale, as there are lights in any city. But here the light comes from strange lamp-posts, faceted diamonds, each face as large as a hand, and more like bowls than lamps, full of clearest water. Within, black fish circle, their luminous lures dangling green and glowing from thin whisker-stalks. Otthild ticks the glass of one near her with her fingernails, and the light swells up, washing her cheeks.

“Come down,” she says, “come into the city, down to the river.”

Gris goes. He does not know why, though he suspects it has something to do with her hair, and his blankness. She leads and he follows and he wants to be surprised that he is not hanging his clothes up in a half-empty closet and drinking scotch until he falls asleep in his computer chair, but she is walking before him down a long road to a long river, and the late sun is on her scalp like Crivelli’s annunciation.

The river that flows through the City of Blind Delight is filled with a rich brandy, and all folk take their sustenance there. It has no name, it is simply “the river.” Other cities have a need for names. It floods its banks regularly—there is a festival, but then, there are festivals for everything here. The river inundates its shores and fields of grapevines sprout in the swampy mud without the need of vintners to tend them. In the fall, the purple fruit drops off and rolls back into the water, and the current is so sweet on that day. But now it is summer, and the vines loop and whorl, and some few lime trees bend over the water, their branches heavy with green tarts.

There are women by the river when Gris and Otthild arrive, knee-deep, but they are not washer-women—the profession is unheard of here. They splash playfully in the red-gold surf with long ladles the size of croquet mallets, scooping up the redolent water and serving it to each other. Otthild takes a ladle from the grassy park which leads into the current, one with a red and gold flecked handle, and dips it deep, offering it to him.

“My name is Gris,” he says. She tilts her head.

“Grey? How odd. I found a man in the station once called Vermillion. He was shaking and hiding his eyes in the vestibule—he wouldn’t even come out of the train. He looked up at me from the steel floor like a calf, imploring, uncomprehending. He said he came from the north, from the City of Quaint Despairing, and he could not bear to look outside the doors of the carriage. His mother had been an agoraphobe in pearl earrings, his father a claustrophobe in iron cufflinks, and between them he could hardly move for terror. His brothers had dragged him to the train, but he could do no more than huddle and quiver and hide from the light. I kissed him so many times! I let my hair fall over him, so that he was neither exposed nor shut away, and against the rocking walls of that little vestibule I wrapped my legs around his waist. He paid me in his mother’s earrings.”

Gris starts. “Are you a whore, then?”

She smiles. “What profession could remain in a city where the river makes one drunk and the trees bear cream and crust? Even still, I am not anyone’s for the taking, I am not a calf. I am not a lime or a grape. But here we are impatient with all that is not readily available, and so in the province of ease, all things are simplified. There are two occupations in the City of Blind Delight—the Station dancers and the prostitutes. I am both.”

Gris rubs his forehead and drinks from the proffered ladle. It tastes harsh and he coughs a cough of burnt grapes. “Why am I here?” His voice is so small. He cannot even now remember what sort of scotch he has at home, or how far it is from Union Station to his apartment.

“The Line must have wanted you. It has its own reasons. Like anything that lives in the earth it dreams and becomes restless, curious, even morbidly so. What would happen if this substance were added to that one, even though it says expressly not to on the label? There is a Conductor, I have heard that. Perhaps she has brass buttons on her uniform like my mother. Perhaps she has circuits on her eyelids. Perhaps she saw your blue coat and your briefcase and thought: ‘Otthild is lonely.’ Perhaps she was hungry for lime tarts and you stumbled onto her train because you could not be bothered to check the track number. You can go and wait for the evening train if you like. It makes no difference to me.”

He looks at her, and it is a look she knows. No one is hungry in the City of Blind Delight, except those who look at Otthild that way.

“I used to know a girl who looked like you.” He mumbles, looks at the girls splashing each other in the murky river. “She had your hair. She loved this old painter that no one has ever heard of, a painter obsessed with perspective who could never get it quite right, but he painted these cities, these cities like cut jewels, terrible and crisp and clear, with a woman in the corner, sometimes, full of the light of God like an afterthought.”

“Most men knew a woman who looked like me.” Otthild laughs.

“What would I have to pay, in a city without want?”

She frowns, looks at him seriously, her dark eyes fixing him to the riverbed. She opens the top three buttons of her emerald dress and takes his hand, gently, guiding it to her breast. She feels like the advertisement. “We are not without want.” She whispers. “No one is without want.”

Her house is made of brown cakes. It reminds him of the house in the fairy tale, but there are no red candies glinting in its cornices. Bricks of solid cake and barley sugar mortared in cream-icing the color of an old woman’s hair stack sedately into a small cottage, at the end of a prosperous street—but all streets are prosperous here. Her street is paved in bread. There are no doors or locks. Fat citizens lie about in the road, telling jokes about the size of their bellies. She leads him to a bed which is mercifully of the linen-and-wood variety, and lies down on her back, toes pointed downward. All around the bed are intricate boxes of gold and silver and ivory—he does not ask. She indicates the buttons on her dress, black jet with tiny engravings of peasants carrying water, and wood, and tilling fields decorating each one. Gris undoes each one carefully—her dress is a simple thing, with buttons from collar to hem. Beneath it she is as naked as the ceiling of the Station, and he thinks of the annunciation, the slender golden light penetrating the grey belly of Mary. But she is not grey, he thinks, he is, he is grey and blank, he is the Raphael of idiot features. The Line was not looking for him, how could it look for him? Perhaps it wanted the woman with the black glasses, and he only slipped by because she was burdened with her fruit and her ice.

He leans in to kiss her, but Otthild stops him, and indicates her sternum. He sees there as he had not seen before, when she was a rafter swaying high above his head, four knobs of bone. She smiles encouragingly, and he slips each one loose like buttons. Her skin opens, soft as cloth, and her bones, and her lungs, peeling back like gift-box tissue. Beneath all this is her heart, and it is golden, gleaming, bright at the bottom of her body. A good part of her blood is gold, too, flowing out from the metallic ventricles. She is terrible, and crisp, and clear, a Jacobean diagram of womanhood, her heart burning, burning, burning golden as God. Gris begins to weep, and his tears splash on its hard, glittering surface.

“I told you,” she chuckles. She does not move to fasten her chest. “There was a man a long time ago, when the City was new, and the Line had only just come through—the tracks just unfurled here, like a wet fern, and where there are tracks there eventually is a city. The edges of the railroad curl out into the valley, and drag up a town from the earth, whatever town the Conductor dreams of that day, whatever city the tracks long to see. And so there is a river of brandy, and the lime-tart trees, and roads of bread. The Line brought folk, and they stayed. There was a man with a hand of gold, being the son of a jeweler and having lost the flesh one in a factory which pounded out ice by the thousand cube load. When he left the Station and saw the river winding thick along the vale, and the roads with their brown crust, he wept, for nothing here freezes, and resolving never to leave pounded his hand into a railroad tie to honor the Line. Now the train comes to rest precisely on the golden tie, and that man, long dead, holds the City to the Line.

“My mother grew up working in the Station beside her mother and her grandmother, and she saw the tie glitter at the bottom of the tracks every day. She thought it the most beautiful of all the things in the City of Blind Delight, chiefly because it was so often hidden, down in the dark of the tunnel. She thought often of the ice-pounder whose fingers lay thus across the track, and came to love this thing in her mind which was less than a memory, and more than a dream. One night, after the train had sped down the tunnel, she crept across the platform and scrambled down to the gleaming tie. She lay down upon it, and felt it warm against her cheek. She wept for the dead man, and for a thing called ice which she had never seen. When I was born, she said I was so heavy, because of the gold, because of my father, and she polished my heart every night for me before bed.”

Otthild touches Gris’s face, his smooth, blank cheeks. “You see? We are not without want. But we are peculiar and refined in our ways of wanting, since vulgar food necessity is satisfied.”

Gris cannot bear to look at her heart with its slow, clanking beating. He closes up her chest with shaking hands and sits on the edge of her bed.

“Would it help,” Otthild says, “if I had a knife in my side?”

She draws his face down to hers, and he feels the hard bone buttons beneath him. He looks at her red hair coiled on the pillow as he presses into her, and thinks of the girl with the braid whom he had only loved once, who had, afterwards, stared at her stucco ceiling and told him that Crivelli sometimes used chalk rendered in glue made from rabbit-fat to make the tears of his Pieta. It dried hard and clear, so that if you could touch one of his paintings, you would feel the tears falling beneath your hands, falling like tiny stones of grief, like little buttons of bone.

It is properly always dark after sex. Gris wants to feel guilty, but he feels nothing. After all, a businessman and a prostitute are as near a thing to an archetype as he can think of these days. A salaryman and whore walk into a bar—stop me if you’ve heard this one. He stops. He looks over his naked shoulder at her, at her four small buttons. Her hair falls over one heavy breast. She pulls a strip of drywall-pastry and chews it thoughtfully.

“What can I pay you?” he sighs. “What do you want?”

She rolls onto her stomach and smiles softly, her lips without paint, pink and thin. “Most of us in the City are collectors,” she says. “Some are monomaniacal, like my mother. But when the sun is always warm and your house is made of food, desire curls in on itself and finds other objects. I know a woman by the butter-pits who collects calf’s tails. She has a whole coat of them. I collect tickets.”

Gris’s mouth opens slightly. He pulls his creased return ticket out of his discarded coat’s pocket.

“But if I give it to you, I can get another, for the morning train, can’t I?”

Otthild shrugs. “You buy a ticket to enter the station these days, not the train. But the glass booth is well within the arch. Maybe they would sell you a new one. Maybe they would let you inside. Maybe not. We are often perverse. Maybe the Station is full of Midwesterners trying to buy a ticket home with everything they own, even flesh, even bone. Perhaps that long-dead man did not lose his hand in an ice factory, but to buy a ticket here, or a ticket back. All of that is your business, curious histories, and I do not collect those.”

She kneels beside the bed and clicks open the jeweled boxes, one by one. Gold, silver, ivory. Opal, onyx, lacquer. Inside them all are countless tickets, old and new, with magnetic strips, without. Some have the City of Blind Delight as a destination, others are simpler: New York to St John’s, Odessa to Moscow, Edinburgh to Glasgow. But there are carefully inked and stamped tickets from the City of Envious Virgins to the City Without Roses, from the City of Variable Skylines to the City of Mendicant Crows. There is one, almost dust, from Venice to the City of False Perspective. She opens a box for him, of polished steel, tableware melted into a cubical shape.

Gris reaches out and strokes her sternum, his eyes sliding closed. He feels her fastened chest, the buttons like hardened tears. He lets his ticket fall into the box. Shadows drift over the neat printing: The City of Blind Delight to Chicago, Midnight Express.

There is a train which passes through every possible city. It folds the world like an accordioned map, and speeds through the folds like a long white cry. Of necessity, this train passes through Chicago, the City of Winds, a city which was once a lake-bed, and even now, if you were to dig far enough beneath the railroad tracks, you would find the thin, translucent skeletons of monstrous fish with fins like scythes.

A woman in black glasses stands with a bag full of strawberries and wheat-flour and frozen trout in her arms. She watches trains silver past while the cream and gold of Union Station arches behind her, as she has done every day since she moved here from California. A long, pale car screeches into the platform before her; she does not look at the track number, or the arcane code of the letters blazing on the side. With only a small hesitation, as she shifts the weight of her groceries from one hip to another, she steps through the doors that open and close like arms. Light shines through the glass ceiling and illuminates the spot where she stood just a moment before, like an afterthought.