The world's rarest
dust lies in a small room with walls made of stone.
There used to be an open doorway where you could stand and look into the
room. You could stick your head in, which people would do. Afterwards
they often claimed they heard a sound vibrating from the center of the
room, though when asked what sort of sound, their answers varied. This
is because the sound is an illusion. What prevails in this room is actually
an aggressive lack of sound. It works like a sponge, taking sound out
of the air, so that even the small ambient noise of one's own body —
blood pulsing in the ears, teeth clicking — are immediately absorbed.
This vacuum is so foreign to our daily experiences, that our mind invents
a sound to erase the unnerving silence: a hum, whirl, or chirping that
just isn't there.
The gesture of writing my lover's name in this dust, hidden away in a
little corner where the visitors would never see it (but I would know
it was there) appealed to me. It's strictly forbidden however, and for
good reasons; the dust is dangerous. Just as labels on prescription drugs
warn against mixing the medications with alcohol, the old signs leading
towards the small room warned against mixing human dust with the special
dust.
I volunteer afternoons and evenings at The Museum of Special Dust. This
is something I took up when my lover went away on a work-related sabbatical.
My lover is a man who, when he is present, is extremely present. So naturally,
now that he's away, there's this gap in my life. You see, he has a rare
medical condition. He's one of five known humans in the history of man
to have a skeleton that, as he grew into adulthood, turned to lead. He
looks normal enough, though you notice right away that his walk is very
deliberate. At least I did when we first met. It was one of the things
that attracted me to him.
Between 3 and 4 in the afternoon is when I leave my regular office job
to drive across town where I grab a quick bite in the museum cafeteria
before starting work there. Visitors recognize me by my bright red name
badge and ask me questions about the various displays. During slow periods
there's a list of chores to attend to, like changing the clip-in letters
in the sign board that announces our upcoming film and video programs.
That's what I did this evening, but we ran out of a couple of letters;
'D' for example, and I had to use an upside down lower case 'p' even though
the 'D' should have been capitalized. The whole day went like this, little
obstacles that shouldn't have bothered me, but the sum of them left me
feeling drained. By the en of the day I was cursing under my breath, the
way homeless people on the subway sometimes do, and one of the other volunteers
noticed. He asked if I would be all right getting home. It caught me off
guard and I was embarrassed when I realized how I must have appeared.
I forced a smile and waved him off saying, "Sure, sure." It
would've been smart at that point to grab a cup of coffee, but instead
I hopped directly into my little car and started the long drive home on
a twisting mountain road.
While fighting to keep my eyes open, luminous gray bodies threw
themselves against the windshield. This wasn't the first time it happened.
They're not solid bodies, but something like will-o'-the-wisps, or maybe
just the invented phantoms of a mind exhausted after a long day of directing
tourists. As soon as these bodies hit the window, they dissipate in flashes.
I'm not the only one who has seen them either, but know from my work at
the Museum that this doesn't make them any more real. The most logical
explanation is that they're some sort of group hallucination, but local
folklore gives a much more gothic solution; the stories going round say
that these glowing shapes are the ghosts of victims of a satanic killer
who lives deep in the woods. I did some research however and while, yes,
there are a few accounts of people having died in these woods, none of
them was murdered. They're just the typical cases of backpackers falling
off the side of a mountain or getting hopelessly lost.
Regardless, the fact that I don't believe in ghosts doesn't make these
apparitions any less unnerving. As I pulled up the gravel drive, my
knuckles were white and I was in such a hurry to get into the house I
didn't even take a moment to lock the car. As soon as I was inside I turned
on all the lights. The scare had me wide awake again so I searched the
place, which is sort of a mess at the moment, for something to read. Then
I brewed some herbal tea and curled up in bed.
In one of these stacks there's a fifty's cocktail book which I bought
at
the antiquarian book shop down the road. That place is a little dust museum
itself, including the proprietor, a man with yellow gray hair who appears
to have been perched behind his counter since the shop was built. I'm
there often enough on weekends that he sometimes gives me a good deal
on my purchases, as he did with the cocktail book — which is what
I wanted to look at, but instead I'm here with a copy of last month's
Art and Antiques. The cocktail book is a real
collector's item. I don't think the book dealer noticed that it's signed
by the author, an author as famous for her beautiful prose (normally she
writes fiction) as she was for her suicidal tendencies. On top of that,
she also suffered from paranoia, which no doubt contributed to her depression,
and if you read the cocktail book backwards you'll discover it's really
her diary.
The drinks from this book, the ones that are possible to make--many
consist of fruits or liquors that no longer exist in our time--these drinks
can produce strange effects. Not that I've tried them, but I read about
it in the except of her biography that was printed in last June's Town
and Country. That issue is buried here somewhere as well,
but I've been too Busy lately to go through everything ... and of course
I have no way of knowing which books and magazines M__ might have taken
with him. M__ is my lover. Did I mention that he's Algerian? Well, he
is. He has the most beautiful speckled eyes, green and brown, under one
thick and pensive continuous eyebrow. But I doubt he would have taken
that book. English isn't his first language and it's hard enough for him
to read it forwards ... plus hedoesn't drink. That's my vice.
Anyway, one of the most infamous cocktails in the book, Redrum Schnapps
(phonetically, 'Spanish Murder' spelled backwards), leaves the person
who drinks it feeling like their body is leaking down through floorboards
into a cartoon dungeon, or so it said in Town and Country.
The people who sample the drink become convinced that their feet and then
their legs and so forth are spilling down over the head of Porky Pig or
one of the Muppet Babies or whatever their favorite childhood cartoon
character was. The Cartoon is strapped down in a room hung with cartoon
instruments of torture, and the person who is dripping down upon the Cartoon
is laughing and afraid all at once.
The diary entry that corresponds with that drink is about a terrible
unrequited longing. This author was a miserable romantic, and the people
she fell deepest in love with were always the ones who were least available
for her. She'd throw herself at them, unable to think about anything else.
Once, she even dug a tunnel under the house of a woman who had already
rejected her many advances, just to hear that woman's footsteps. She would
swoon if by chance this woman's heel landed somewhere on the floorboard
just above her cheek, literally. Once she fainted dead away, though naturally
there was nowhere to fall in the narrow crawl space, and so she awoke
sometime later in this claustrophobic dark, unsure for the longest while
where she was. Feeling the wooden floorboards closing down above her,
she became convinced she had been buried alive and started to scream and
pound on what she thought was her coffin lid.
It's sad to give yourself so wholly to someone who is really only
bothered by your attention. One can only wonder how that woman's life
would have been different if she had found someone who could match her
passion. Maybe she wouldn't have written such stirring and beautiful stories,
but she probably wouldn't have swum out to the center of that lake near
her summer cottage dressed in all her Sunday finery either. Though who
can say really? I read recently that people who suffer from depression
find reasons to be too bleak no matter how many good turns they're given
in life. It's a chemical thing, locked into the blood.
I've considered suicide at times as well, but I always knew I would
never really do it. It was more like a game, trying to imagine how exactly
one would go about it, and what people's responses might be. If I killed
myself at home, it would be a long time before anyone would find my body,
and that's better avoided. You read about cases like that in the papers;
it's always the horrible stench that first alerts someone, some
passing neighbor who carries on as if the stink you left were just one
last example of the sort of person you were. Imagine if the main thing
people talked about after you left this world was the repugnant odor of
your decay. That cocktail book author had the right idea swimming out
into a lake. Though they say she didn't leave such a pretty corpse either.
It's so conceited of me to think about how I will look once I am dead,
but maybe that's what keeps me from being suicidal in the first place,
the illusion that someone, even if it is only myself, cares about me putting
on a good face. The absence of that seemed to be at the core of this author's
suicide; she eventually came to think that she was so awful a person that
no one could stand to be around her, that no one cared. A solitude that
is imposed upon you must be terribly crushing: a sort of vacuum of affection
where you are forced to invent humanity in order to stay halfway sane.
My own love is a sweet and considerate man. Before he left, he reminded
me how important I am to him. He has had a lot of lovers, but he said
he never felt such a deep connection with any of them as he does with
me. Then he made a gesture as if he were wiping a tear away. Algerian
men don't cry easily, and M__ is no exception. He did not cry that day,
but I was touched anyway. This gesture of his, the whipping away of a
tear that wasn't there, was his way of saying that if he were the sort
of man who could express his emotions more openly, he would probably cry
over the sincere connection he felt with me. "I would never abandon
you," he said, "but I must do this for work. It's top secret
and very urgent. I don't know when I'll be back, but I'll think of you
always."
The apartment where he's staying while on sabbatical was reinforced with
steel beams and a floor of poured concrete. This he also told me before
he left. He could describe the place, but not reveal its location in the
world. Of course I worry about him, but have to believe he's in good hands.
That's why he told me about this customized apartment, to put my mind
at ease and show me that the people he's working for have only his best
interests in mind. My lover's skeleton is so heavy, that even though he
is thousands of miles away (I assume thousands, and they might as well
be), I can still feel the weight of him. I wake in the mornings with the
print of his hand pressing down on my chest. At my regular office job
(the place I work from 8 AM till three or so in the afternoon), I sit
at my desk and can feel his jaw bone resting on my shoulder, the breath
of his sigh through lead teeth.
November is high season for secret sabbaticals, and I appear to run in
a circle of friends whose work is very valuable to their mysterious employers.
OK, honestly, all of my friends are actually M__'s friends, so no surprise
that they work in similar vocations. If I could handle the stress, I might
be right there with them, but I'm the sort of worker whose selling point
is simple dedication. If you need someone to work an extra shift when
everyone else has the flu, I'm your man. If you need someone however whose
genius in the field of XYZ is undisputed, that would be M__ and his pals.
All of them, this small group of people in the world who care about me,
are away right now... working on their guarded projects. They think about
me often and send love through the vapors, but of course I still feel
lonely and distracted without them. That's why I started volunteering.
Polishing the plastic donation box gives me something to do while waiting.
We volunteers joke about that, how we have to clean away the regular dust
so that the visitors don't become confused and stare in wonder at something
ordinary, something they could easily find in their own homes. The work
keeps me distracted, and being at the Museum makes me feel nearer to my
love at this time when contact with him is forbidden.
You see, the rarest dust in the world comes from one of the other five
humans known to have this condition of a skeleton turned to lead. The
son of a nobleman in the English court in the 1600s had such a condition,
and the nobleman convinced his King and fellow-noble people (or
whatever they're called ... I have to look this up again in the pamphlets
because, of course, it's my job to know) that this boy was a Godsend who
would lead armies to victory because of the tremendous strength his increasing
weight gave him. But the Queen wasn't buying it. She could see the boy
was lazy and furthermore, much too self-involved to have what it takes
to hold the confidence of a legion of soldiers. The boy was always down
at the pub bullying the men there while coercing their women into giving
him blow jobs (he didn't dare to masturbate himself, everything he picked
up was crushed in his grip). When the King died, she convinced the council
that the boy's condition was actually a result of witchcraft, and that
it was not God who sent him, but Beelzebub. Both the boy and his father
were burned at the stake, and when the flames died, the red hot glowing
skeleton was taken as proof that the queen had been right; this was
a demon! They had the skeleton pulverized, and left the lead dust
in the boy's room which was then sealed off for ages.
Eventually of course it was recovered and brought to the Museum. All of
the artifacts are still there: books, spectacles, bed pan and slippers,
all of it, coated with the dead boy's core. Recently they sealed off this
room with a glass wall an inch thick, which is why you can no longer stick
your head in and listen to the total absence of sound. Installing the
glass wall followed an incident where someone's three-year-old passed
under the old velvet rope barrier. The little girl got footprints in the
dust and may have endangered her own health (we're all praying that the
mother won't sue). Those footprints are the first and only marks in a
room that had remained untouched (even during the difficult and costly
move) for over three centuries. Otherwise, the objects in there are pressed
flat and utterly still. They're colored a drab, bluish gray by the lead
dust which never
stirs.
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