Look around you and look welclass="underline" this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.
But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariat outside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.
After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?
Snow
Day
GUDRUN HATED HER NAME, her mother, and bad art. She loved her house, a wild turkey called Murray who had decided to live out his sunset years in her garden, and Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea, which, by the time the rest of everything started up, had been off the shelves for sixteen years, its manufacturer bankrupt, its overseas contracts liquidated, and its remaining inventory burned to exquisite ash on the banks of the Min River in Fujian Province as a helpful illustration of the myriad benefits to be found in punctually presenting the correct money to the correct people. Gudrun had not stockpiled. Why should she? Her lifeblood had waited loyally for her in Mr. Abalone’s shop since the first time her mother dragged her into the village for a guilty relapse into cigarettes and beef jerky, stacked in delicate tins with white peonies embossed on the mirrored metal like aching frost. It always would wait for her. Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea was a fundamental element underlying the known universe. Until it didn’t, and it wasn’t, and then it was too late to do anything but curl her face into a ferocious, animal sneer when the black-eyed man behind the counter suggested Lipton instead, it’s all the same, you know, plants is plants.
Gudrun wanted a color television, to live forever, and to have a child. But she was about to turn forty and all of human civilization was about to end, so only one of those seemed vaguely realistic anymore.
GUDRUN’S MOTHER WAS a professional politician’s mistress, named Ruby, and long dead. Intraocular cancer. Practically, what that meant was that sometime between autumn and spring 1964, black nebulas burst open in Ruby’s eyes. Dark, glistening masses, inky veins snaking out over pupil and iris and white, milky star-muck filming over the last green smears of the world outside her own head. Gudrun stared into the abysses, asked how many fingers, brought whiskey, shut up about the doctor, for Christ’s sake. For awhile, Ruby wore sunglasses, and then the nebulas burrowed down into her skull and she didn’t need to wear anything anymore and that was that. Gudrun was old enough by a minute and a half to get the house, the red Studebaker, and a savings account full of the apologies of powerful men.
Ruby never planned to go into her particular line of work. She had wanted to be a travel writer when she grew up. But she was just desperately beautiful and congenitally unhappy and fluent in Hungarian. There never was any hope for her. Ruby met the state governor on the campaign trail and, two years later, when he was done with her, she couldn’t find a door that led back into the plainspoken universe of men who had never been inaugurated into anything. She circulated through a closed loop of hotels she could never review and men in dark sunglasses with no interest in the amenities of local beaches and redacted names on receipts she would never turn into a magazine for reimbursement. State senator (Virginia), two real senators (junior from Maine and senior from Minnesota), Secretaries of Agriculture, Energy, and Defense, and, she claimed, the Vice-President, though Gudrun never quite bought it. Their circumstances seemed right about Secretary of Agriculture level. If Mums had bagged the VP, the Studebaker would probably be new enough to start more mornings than not.
Minnesota was Gudrun’s father. That was how Ruby referred to them all, her erstwhile oligarch sweethearts. She wouldn’t let them keep their names once they’d taken what they wanted from her. Maine, Minnesota, Virginia. Aggie, Ennie, Deffy, Vice. And Minnesota was the one who managed to leave evidence. It wasn’t any mystery. Gudrun could turn on the television most days and see just exactly what she would look like if she were a boy, and surrounded by microphones. The senior senator from the Land of 10,000 Lakes was coming up in the world and fast.
The first and last thing Minnesota ever bothered to do for his daughter was strap on her name, her stupid, terrible German name that fell on your ear like a boot. A family name, without a family attached. Then, Gudrun, too, became redacted. Turned out Ruby’s specialized industry had an early retirement age. If enough kingmakers smuggle you in and out of the palace, the king gets to know your face. You can’t just stand adoringly in the crowd anymore. The camera sees. It wonders what you know. After the whole business in Dallas, most everybody in the palace cashed out and scattered like crows.
So, when Gudrun was twelve, Ruby packed them up and over and out, here, to Hawaii, and then further still, to a teak and tile house in the Ko’olau Range and some fuzzily demarcated acreage full of hibiscus and frigatebirds and sweet potatoes growing in the wet dirt. The village, which in Ruby’s personal glossary never had a name important enough to remember, was ten miles of mud cliff roads there and gone. A few feral pigs and chital deer saw their telltale faces. No one else. No one cared who they’d been before, or even who they were now. Sometimes it felt like they lived at the bottom of the world.
People on the bottom of the world mind their own business, mostly.
THE HOUSE HAD been previously owned by one Jack Oskander, a vaguely successful coffee grower who lost it all, to the last bean, in the crash and sold his summer place (furnished) to the first disgraced Capitol Hill courtesan to walk through the jungle with cash in hand. Gudrun always thought Old Jack must have been a real cut-up, because he’d named the place Pemberley, and nothing in this angel-abandoned world looked less like Mr. Darcy’s grand and ancient estate than their four mildewed rooms on pylons over a thin rushing creek and clotted forest spitting passionfruits like black tumors into the eye of a pond sixty feet down the cliffside.