Mona, of course, heard him enter. She heard the rustle of his hammock, the soft wheeze as sleep took him over and the odour of harvested mildew filled the cabin. She knew that smell and she wished him well with it.
The spice, the gum, the glue, the sap, the resin, the mildew, whatever the correct word for it, and there was, in the end, no proper word for it. there were things before there were words for them; there was emotion before the mildew; there was the void before there were things to fill it; there was the gasp before the void and the gasp filled it. The gasp was the breath and the breath was the mildew and the mildew was the spice and the spice just was.
She would one day have to tell him all she knew. But then, as she lay there in her unrocking hammock, what did she know? The mildew was, she knew or thought she knew, the only remnant of the breath that made them. Why it congealed in those wafer-thin, undulating fungal layers of stuff, as if one had spun a mushroom or a toadstool in those drums that spun the candyfloss, she could never tell. Perhaps carnies knew once, but the race itself has been spun so many ways – mingled with the snatched and the changed, not to talk about the cousin and mongrel carnies from other parts – that if they knew, they had long ago forgotten. So, like most of the rules and rituals that governed their lives, it was left unexplained and all that was left was the habit, the need to harvest it wherever it gathered, and it gathered in the strangest places. Beneath the bleachers and the circus stalls, underneath the rollercoaster, in the floors of the ghost-train cars and like a fine-spun spider’s web around the pole that kept the big top afloat. They all knew that laughter, terror, shock and fear and awe and joy – emotion, in a word, human emotion – left the mildew as its residue, which is why, in effect, the carnival existed. But how to explain its presence under the table on which Dorothea read her fortunes, clinging, like a diaphanous web of furred parchment, to the dragon claws of the table legs? And how to explain Virginie, who would wake some mornings covered in it? Was it because Virginie dreamed sometimes, with such astonishing intensity, of the Land of Spices? The only remnants of those dreams would be the webbish accretions of the mildew that clung to her naked body, wrapping her like a cocoon to the hammock beneath her? She would ring the small bell that hung from the rope above her and Mona would gather her ancient bowl and brush and harvest that precious gossamer of mildew while the coffee boiled. And having gathered each atom of the sacred crop, they would sometimes spice their coffee with a few filched strands of it, which undulated in the brown liquid before they finally disappeared.
Maybe Virginie should tell him, instruct him in the carnie mysteries, since Virginie knew more. But then they were changelings, both of them. Mona’s inductor – her mother, in effect – was an original and could have enlightened her before the Fatigue took hold. And she herself had that carnie idiom of talking in evasions, diversions, stories that entranced and enchanted, but the enchantment took over and the point, if point there was, was never arrived at, let alone explained. Why they had to hide their essential natures, why so much had to be forgotten, erased, hidden in webs of obscurity, why clarity was a vice, never a virtue, why things were as they were. To know nothing, to her, seemed to be the sweetest thing. And carnies, on their best days, seemed to relish knowing nothing. On their worst, they knew some great reality had to be hidden, some truth that itched them like a scab they knew they should not scratch, lest the wound beneath revealed itself. As if to live, it was necessary to forget. But all of that they did, and here was the rub, was a form of remembering.
Ursula, the only mother Mona remembered, her carnie original, who always seemed younger than her, with a never-ending spring in her step, woke up one day tired. The Fatigue, she answered, when Mona questioned what was wrong, and if anything was to be explained to her it should have been that. But no, the Fatigue, like most carnie things, just was. And if there was one memory Mona wished she could erase, it was the memory of her stepping off that cliff into the churning seas below. The body that fell was as young as it always had been, but the body that plunged through the water and was tossed back up, only minutes later, was that of an ancient, wizened crone. As if age had been kept in abeyance and would only take its tribute when the Fatigue took hold.
She had gone, Mona knew, to the Land of Spices. That place that carnies sometimes dreamed of, always whispered of as a place of return, when the Fatigue took over, a homecoming, which didn’t make sense, since none of them, even the originals, could ever claim to have been there. Even Jude, Jude who could well be the last original, with no memory of anything other than a carnie life; Jude only knew of it as a rumour, the ghost of someone else’s memory, familiar to her only from occasional dreams, or from whatever tinctures of the mildew she allowed herself. And Jude remembered as far back as the first scattering, long before the Hunger, when the Adzed Heads came over the Eastern Sea with their hollow-headed cloaks and their curved staffs. They chanted false religion, as the carnie lore went, sat on stones facing east, with their cries of amen. So be it. And so it was, as the old world turned grey with their chanting and the new, disenchanted world took over. So the Fatigue claimed, not one, not several, but whole clans of carnies and they took the leap that legend had it would bring them back to where they had once belonged, their Land of Spices. It was a communal Fatigue that Jude described and Mona could only imagine the terror, having seen just one take the leap. Whole swathes of her kind, with their perfect bodies, walked to the edge of that huge, curved cliff and didn’t hesitate at the sight of the churning western waters so far beneath.
One by one they stepped off the cliff and consigned themselves to the waves. They knew what awaited them once they had pierced the water; the sudden splash, the rush of foam, the explosion of brine up the sinuses and then life would hit them, make a kind of return, with all of its delayed anger intact. The years, which had been waiting, like those coiled dimensions string theorists go on about, exploded inside them in a pure rush of interrupted time, compacted into microseconds, and old age withered them before their downward plummet had been interrupted by the brine. And Jude, on the cliffs above, who had neither the courage nor the inclination to take the leap, suddenly knew that carnie life was what she would learn to call, many centuries later, an oxymoron; it was life suspended, with all of those inchoate longings held in check. She saw body after body bob up in the uncaring foam; ancient, twisted, convulsed by more years than any human had to ever live through. And she hoped against hope that their carnie selves had made it to the promised Land of Spices.
But of that Land of Spices, even she had no memory. It was one of those rumours, heard about so often, told of in tales round a rath or a fireside and of late round a carnival bonfire, that one felt one knew, one felt one should know, one never thought or dreamed of questioning. In her dreams she seemed to know it, and she couldn’t deny her dreams. Nor could she deny the mildew that all their carnival delights and terrors gave rise to in humans. They left it behind them, quite blissfully unaware of their leavings, like snails leaving a gossamer trail. They didn’t need it, carnies did. And if carnies harvested it, carnies gathered it, carnies hoarded it in their ancient carnie jars and left in tribute at the sacred places on the sacred equinoxes, surely there must be a land that was worthy of all of this spice? Jude was the oldest, and perhaps her memory was faulty. And how could the others, the half- and quarter-blood ones who over generations attained pure carnie characteristics, the changelings, the snatched and the thatched; how could they deny a homeland which they were told was theirs but which none of them had ever directly ex-perienced? But what none of them could deny was the effect of it, the heady odour, the rush and the transport back to somewhere which should have been, must have been, and must still be. When they imbibed, inhaled, tasted on their carnie tongues on the ritual occasions allowed (and on those odd times they indulged in an illicit tincture), they could glimpse the hazy outline of their lost paradise. The mildew did things to them, the purified spice did more, so the Land of Spices, by that strange logic, surely had to be?
Mona breathed deeply then, into the odour of mildew the boy had brought with him and felt herself falling back, once more, into a delicious, familiar dream. She must explain things to him, she thought, as the warp of sleep took her over. She remembered Walter, the wannabe carnie, with his ink-stained fingers and his sad copybooks. Walter the Unfortunate, who never made the grade. Walter, who would have explained nothing and everything.
In the beginning there was two, Walter would have said. There was two, oddly enough, before there was one. In the beginning was a reflection, one of another, which made two. In the beginning, therefore, was a mirror, which reflected a world which didn’t know it was reflected . . .