thing is, but it refuses to die. It’s like a fucking cockroach.”
The enormous hand overhead clenched into a fist and the giant’s face contorted.
“It wanted to control me, to take me to its house and imprison me, just like DeMario,” said Aida. “Despite the fact that it bungled the job, I think it might be God.”
The giant groaned again, louder this time, and the accompanying stench grew more fecal, as if the noise had been dredged up from its bowels; it looked to be trying to push itself forward into the room.
“Every year it manages to move a few inches,” said Aida. “At that rate it might break free in a century or two. It’s not very bright, but you can’t kill it. At least I can’t. I’ve tried everything … even kissing it.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big, stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal. Of course…” She flicked her eyes toward Hugo. “You probably think it’s a fake. And you may be right. But even if you’re right, you’re wrong, you know.”
Hugo wet his lips.
“Watch this,” she said. “It’s terrified of me.”
Aida approached the giant—its nostrils flared, and it yielded a keening noise and thrashed about, resulting in a heavy fall of plaster dust. She backed away and the giant’s struggles subsided.
“Now maybe it’s a robot, but no one else gets that reaction. Just me. Go on. You try.” She turned to Hugo. “Are you okay? You look feverish.”
She stretched out a hand as if to feel his brow, and he flinched to avoid her touch.
“I have a bad stomach,” he said, trying to cover his alarm. “Is there a bathroom I can use?”
“Not down here. Why don’t you use the one in my apartment?”
“Thanks.” He hesitated. “I won’t be long.”
“Take your time,” she said. “I want you to be sure.”
“What do you mean?”
She adopted a concerned expression, but her voice had a sarcastic lilt. “Your stomach. I want you to be sure it’s all right.”
He walked away, forcing himself to keep a measured pace, and was almost at the door when she called out, “I’ll be waiting!”
Again he hesitated, uncertain what would happen when he stepped through the door. The giant made a ghastly noise, half a shriek, half a grunt, as if straining against some internal agony. Aida stood close by its face, threatening to touch it. Sweat blurred Hugo’s vision, and for a moment she looked like a thin black spike driven into the stone.
“Hurry!” she cried. “The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll come back to me.”
Of his escape Hugo recalls very little, only that the two men were no longer guarding the stairs and that the streets of Barrio Tepito, into which he fled, were packed and filled with demented noise and fractured light and the smells of frying meat, and that while making his way through the crowds, he was shoved against something hard and glanced up to discover it was a statue of Santa Muerte bolted to the sidewalk, her skull face shrouded in an indigo robe—he was trapped in a rough embrace between her scythe and her bony fingers clutching the earth’s blue globe. For months thereafter he tried to slip back into his old habits, but he was unable to deploy the nets of faith and logic that had sustained that life. When photographing the dead, he saw Aida Chavez in every crowd of onlookers, in every group of mourners, in the shadowy depths of police vans and the hotly lit interiors of EMT vehicles. He recognized her postures and attitudes in the vacant faces and akimbo limbs of his subjects. He lost his taste for taking pictures of mutilated corpses; he had seen death made into life and the bodies were merely life made into death, a poor substitute. She was remorseless and cruel, so fearsome that even God trembled before her, but he could no longer deny his attraction to her, an attraction that had always been visible to others (though not to him) in his work.
Nowadays he dreams of returning to the mansion in Tepito and he anticipates the rite of communion, sipping the giant’s hot blood, marveling at the apocalyptic images on the magical TV, and debating the character of Aida’s destiny with the other suitors in her anteroom, not because these things have significance, but because their flavors accent the consummation he yearns for, the time he will share with her. It’s not so much fear that keeps him from returning. What is there to fear, after all? He understands that he has failed at living (as do all men), his days have been empty, his promise unfulfilled, and only in her arms will he learn whether or not his existence has meaning. No, it’s rather that he has yet to reach the point where life tips over into death, where the need for what she offers (be it surcease or something more graspable) outweighs everything else. He tells himself that once she is free of her doubts, the last of his restraints will dissolve and he will come to her like a young man on his wedding night, eager to penetrate the secrets of the woman for whom he has waited his entire life, a woman who rouses in him a passion like none other. Each morning and evening he kneels before a statuette of Santa Muerte that he purchased in the Sonora witches’ market and has been drenched in ritual perfumes and spices. Above it is pinned a photograph of Aida naked on her sofa, gazing into the camera with an insensate look, as if she has been struck dead, with her eyes half lidded and lips parted, fingering the folds of flesh between her legs. Each tendon string, every ligament, is taut and articulated. Her erect nipples cast more of a shadow than do her breasts. And yet she is beautiful. He lights red candles and spits rum on the flames and smokes part of a Faros cigarette, the brand she favors, before leaving it burning at her feet, and he offers up a prayer.
“Beloved Death,” he will begin. “Be swift in your deliberations and open yourself to me, for I would be your consort and companion.”
He will likely falter, then—he has never been a religious man and he’s embarrassed to see himself this way —but he fights through the moment, pressing his forehead to the base of the statuette, allowing the coolness of the stone to pervade and calm him as though it were
The Colliers’ Venus (1893)
BY CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning
1
It is not an ostentatious museum. Rather, it is only the sort of museum that best suits this modern, industrious city at the edge of the high Colorado plains. This city, with its sooty days and dusty, crowded streets and night skies that glow an angry orange from the dragon’s breath of half a hundred Bessemer converters. The museum is a dignified yet humble assemblage of geological wonders, intended as much for the delight and edification of miners and millworkers, blacksmiths and butchers, as it is for the parvenu and old-money families of Capitol Hill. Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy, both founder and curator of this
