Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

6. The Water Doesn’t Know

Taking a shortcut through town in order to get to her pub before it closed, Amanda was driving down the side street which served as the location of the Altman Museum when she thought she heard someone scream—

—and knew she saw a figure running from behind the museum.

Later, she would remember feeling frightened yet oddly detached from herself—much like the state she’d been in after fleeing the church earlier.

She knew this wasn’t the safest area of the city, even during the day, but she nonetheless watched from a place outside her body as Sparkle Eyes pulled into a parking space beside the museum, got out of the car, and walked toward the small plat at the back of the museum that served as an ersatz-park where artists whose work was too big for indoor exhibition often displayed their pieces. Sparkle Eyes walked up to a bench that sat near the park’s entrance. Sparkled Eyes looked down at the thick sketch pad that was lying face-down in the grass. Sparkle Eyes kicked the pad over with her foot to see what the artist had been sketching—

—and that’s when Amanda found herself firmly reunited with her new body, because the pages facing her were covered not with drawings but with wide slashes of blood—as if whoever had been sketching had suddenly had their throat cut—

—or lost their hands, she thought.

She looked around, nervous, and only then realized that the sculpture of the grieving women that had been such a crowd-drawing showpiece for the Altman was gone.

In its place, a new bas-relief piece had been incorporated into the museum’s outside back wall.

Looking once more at the blood-drenched sketch pad lying at her feet, Amanda approached this new piece.

For a moment she forgot to breathe, she was so stunned by what she saw.

A massive curtain of bluish-gray flowstone hung before her, its surface shimmering and shifting like sand beneath incoming waves at high tide. She had no choice but to think of it in terms of liquid, for everything about the image embedded in the curtain seemed to ripple.

The piece was of a woman, lying on her back, naked from the center of her chest upward, her hair cascading to the left as if draped over a pillow. Her arms were crossed over her center, the right slightly higher than the left, and her hands, their fingers slightly bent as if about to clutch at something unseen, unknown, were pressing down against the rest of her body, which was hidden underneath a wide sheet.

She stepped forward, peering, and saw that the sheet was composed of smaller stones and slates and sculpted shapes of uncountable fossils: toads, lizards, prehistoric arachnid crustaceans the likes of which she’d never seen, praying mantises, eels and serpents slithering over faded, ancient symbols and primeval drawings.

Even the skin of the woman in its center was not as she first perceived it to be: thin and transparent, misted with a fine scintillance like lavender spiderwebs, it allowed the viewer to see through the woman’s surface to the millions of swarming, teeming, multiplying cells and legions of bacteria-like clumps within. There was an odd, damaged beauty to the sight, a vague impression of transcendence, of the human becoming the elemental, then the infinitesimal, and Amanda found herself drawn toward it but, at the moment of communion, something in the image seemed to pull back and become cold, alien, unreachable, leaving her to stare into exhausted eyes too much like her own, eyes that were balanced atop dark crescents. They were lifeless eyes, lightless and unfocused, beyond caring. They were her own eyes. The woman, she realized then, was herself as she used to be, Old Amanda, not Sparkle Eyes, and her mouth was curved downward, trapped somewhere between a pout and a groan, but as she moved a little to the side a parallax effect—aided in part by the small spotlights the museum had installed to help night viewing—took place; viewed from the right, this image of her was a sad, dark, twisted thing, but viewed from the left, she appeared to be beckoning a lover to her bed, her mouth teasing, her eyes filled with promise.

She reached out to touch her flowstone face and suddenly the upper portion of the curtain erupted with other faces, some angry, some gloomy, others insane-looking or hideously deformed, and a few that were not even close to being human; with mandibles clacking or antennae twisting in the air, these last faces, the inhuman ones, were in too-close proximity to that of her own image, threatening to fall on it and chew away her features. Far above them, their not-quite-formed eyes looking down, more faces moved in the deepening shadows, their fossilized skin covered in cracks and swarming with tiny things she couldn't bring herself to look at too closely.

She stumbled backward, the curtain of liquid stone rising higher, revealing more sick-making details: One of the faces near her own—this one little more than a skull with an impossibly large cranium encircled by two serpents—had a carving of a rose on its side, a most delicate rose, and its ghostly beauty rather than being out of place seemed right and proper, buried as it is in the terrible image, soft hints of red trickling outward into her hair, tingeing it in blood. She touched the rose, then pulled her hand away and saw that it was, indeed, blood. She looked back to the bench where the sketch pad lay on the ground. She looked at her new hands, and knew who’d been screaming, and why.

She looked back; all of the faces—her own included—opened their mouths and began to speak, words that she herself had said before, or thought, or heard others speak, others that she has thought of as her sisters, the plain-faced who are simply left alone:

"...he calls me out of the kitchen to admire a lovely actress on the television, then points to a Miss America-type and says she's a little too fat, you know, and her face isn't as pretty as it ought to be, and he never once thinks about how that makes me feel..."

She was aware of shadows moving from the darkness toward her.

"...I can't stand to look at my whole face, so if I'm combing my hair, it's only my hair that I see; if I use a mirror to put on lipstick, I hold it so close that I don't have to see my cheeks..."

The voices were coming from both the sculpture and from those shadowy figures slowly surrounding her.

"...never look at my naked body, and I'd rather walk out of the house without checking my clothes than look at myself in a full-length mirror because there's always that face on top, making a mockery out of the pretty clothes below it..." Her sisters, nameless and lonely. "...my face embarrasses me, it's so flat and dull; I can't even make it better with makeup..." Each one clutching a jar to her chest. "...and I never, NEVER let anyone take my picture because when I look at myself in a photograph I cringe inside...." "Stop it," she whispered, then shouted, "STOP IT!"

The voices ceased, the faces faded back to their still, sculpted shapes, and her image suddenly, violently, rolled up out of sight, a window shade snapping closed. Silence and murkiness. Then a pair of glowing eyes, somewhere back in the shadows embedded in the piece. "Who are you?" asked Amanda. "I am what you once were. You are what became of me." "Are you...me?"

"No. And yes. I am the First Woman—not Eve or Lilith —though some have called me by those names. I have also been called Shekinah, Metrona, Shine, Isolde, Old Roses, Bright Hands, and a million other names. I am the only woman, and all women. Even the last.

"You know me."

"No, no I—"

"You've seen me before, in certain faces you glimpse in restaurants, in the lobbies of movie theaters, standing in the checkout line at the grocery or wandering the aisles of video stores, waiting alone for something that will never come along, looking toward a place not imagined by the so-called beautiful or ugly, though I am in those faces, too. You know me. You came from me. I know you hurt. So ask me one question and I will answer you with the only truth there is; perhaps it will help your sadness."

Amanda did not hesitate: "Why are some of us plain and others so beautiful?"

A picture appeared in the wall, a framed print of M.C. Escher's The Waterfall. Amanda stared at it, then shook her head. "I don't understand." Silence. She stepped closer to the picture. The water in the picture began to move.

The voice of Metrona, who was also Shine and Bright Hands, joined now by the Jar Sisters standing behind Amanda, sang: "'Mirror, mirror, tell me true/Am I pretty or am I plain?/Or am I downright ugly?/And ugly to remain?'"

Amanda watched closely, her eyes following the path of the water around the loop again and again and again, quite fast at first, then much slower. The path of the water seemed perfectly normal and natural to her—until she found herself right back where she started from. She blinked, sighed, took a deep breath, and followed the water's path once again, realizing at the halfway point that the entire loop, when taken as a whole, is manifestly an impossibility, yet at no point on the path going around the loop did anything go 'wrong'; she was able to go from point A to B to C and so on, all the way back around to A but she shouldn't have been able to! She decided to break the path up into sections and, taken by themselves, they were fine, but holistically they remained an absolute impossibility.

"What's wrong with this picture? It makes no sense."

The water turned silver and bright, then Shekinah, who was Isolde and Old Roses as well, said: "'Mirror, mirror, tell me please/Is this my face I see?/So plain and ugly and pretty/One face made from three.'

"The water doesn't know it's following an impossible path, Amanda; it's just water, flowing along. It doesn't care about what goes 'right' or 'wrong' in the loop, so long as it goes. There is no manifest beauty, no ugliness, no plainness or any kind of imperfection which lessens; there is only One, who once was Me, and now is Many, including You. There is only Woman; anything else is a lie.

"And Woman shouldn't care about lies like Beauty and Ugliness and Plainness. Just remember: As forgettable as you think your face is, there is someone out there who envies what you have; to whom you, as you are, are the ideal."

And with those words, the sculpture froze again, just a haunting bas-relief in flowstone at the back of a museum late, late at night.

She turned to confront the women with their jars but found she was alone.

She looked at the blood on her fingertips, then wiped them against the surface of the sculpture and half-walked, half-ran back to her car.