Uncanny Magazine Issue 39 Page 7

  We can’t afford a honeymoon but we both manage to get Monday off work and we spend the entire day holed up in our apartment, newlyweds basking in the joy of being together after spending so much time apart.

  It isn’t until I leave for work Tuesday morning that I see what has happened, sprawled across the top of the Chicago Tribune at a corner newsstand: ATOMIC BOMB STORY! The news is a stark and chilling white—the flash of the weapon itself, the coldness of a headline that speaks not of the people killed but of the power the American country now wields.

  I let the white consume me. I transform into mist and careen through the streets of Chicago, then out over the vast ultramarine depths of Lake Michigan. Yet even here I cannot escape the war, for I find myself sharing the sky with warplanes from the naval air station, pilots training to fly in formation and land on aircraft carriers. Pilots not unlike the one who flew the plane that dropped the bomb.

  What right do I have to feel this pain, I, so distantly removed? I feel guilt for being free instead of interred, for being American instead of Japanese, for failing to connect with my mother’s country. Her country, never mine.

  And then, Nagasaki. The city where my mother was born.

  There are no words to describe the horror. I am only at peace when I transform into mist, mingling with the clouds above the city. It would be so easy to remain this way, to disperse in the atmosphere, to thin into nothingness. I am immortal, yes, but only so long as I choose to endure.

  If not for Joshua, I might never have returned to human life. He is my anchor in the endless sea of time, my shelter from the nightmare storm of mushroom clouds. And I, in turn, am his calm harbor when the flashbacks hit, his comfort from the pain. We fight together against our demons from the war, stronger for being able to lean upon each other.

  I paint Nagasaki in abstract, a monstrosity of crimson and white. It is passion and anger without form, in a style I have not mastered, and the result is garbage. I destroy canvas after canvas, unable to paint but determined nonetheless to try.

  “Would it help to talk about it?” Joshua asks.

  I’m painting over a ruined canvas, making it ready for my next attempt. I stop partway through, leaving streaks of color in between the broad stripes of white. “They’re the only ones who start with a blank white page. Their story is the default, invisible, a crisp new canvas. Our stories, our history, our pain—that’s color already on the page and we have to work around that, we have to explain why there’s a burst of crimson seeping through where our people bled, why there’s a vermillion rage underneath the calm surface of white.”

  “And then they’ll tell you that they don’t want your explanations because it complicates the story, sullies the art. They’re always erasing the past—that’s how they get that fresh white page they like to start with.”

  “Like snow covering the filthy streets of Paris,” I say, remembering the time so long ago when I looked out the window of my immortal artist’s studio. I wonder where he is right now, where he’s hiding from the war, for that has always been his way, to withdraw when the world of mortals was too intense or dangerous. “The memories are harder to visualize now, there are so many of them and they blur together. I suppose I wasn’t meant to remember more than one lifetime.”

  “You should write it down,” Joshua says. “Tell your story.”

  “I thought they didn’t want my explanations.” I study the canvas, partially repainted.

  “Since when do you care what they want?” he replies.

  “Never. And always.” I leave the canvas to dry, my previous failed attempt still showing in the gaps. It is better this way, somehow, with white to cover the things too horrible to bear. Pain avoided and erased. There is truth to that, in the things we hide, the things we omit, the things we do not even think to include. Words unwritten.

  I title the painting History and sign it white on white, nearly invisible, erasing myself before anyone else can.

  EMERALD GREEN

  For thirty years I live an almost human life. I can’t bear children, but after the war there are so many orphans, and particularly unwanted are the mixed-race children, the children most like me. We adopt Midori when she is four years old and Joshua is forty and I am one hundred and six.

  They grow and change and age and I—well, I don’t age but having them as a family alters me forever. I learn more about Japan, my interest spurred not by my past but by Midori’s future. She looks like I did when I was young, and I want her to have the connection to her birth mother’s country that I have always lacked. I try to give her a sense of belonging to both places instead of neither—and it strengthens my own connections as well. Maybe what I needed, all this time, was an excuse to explore a culture that never felt like my own. But it seems fitting, somehow. As a tree grows, so too do its roots.

  It trickles into my paintings, as everything always does. Art has a way of absorbing all that I am—in its content and technique, but also more literally, for ever since that ultramarine night of losing Victorine I always leave a fragment of myself in the paint. In one color of each painting, as the emphasis, a focal point. When I paint my family, I am in the crimson, the color of love and passion.

  The mortals around me begin to see the truth in my paintings. It is the most miraculous of things, for as I pour myself into the paintings they begin to sustain me, stealing brief moments from the audiences that study them, only the tiniest sliver of time from each but adding up to eternity as my popularity grows.

  Three precious decades, vibrant like springtime, warm as summer, beautiful and fiery even in the autumn, when I know that Joshua’s eternal winter is near.

  He is laid to rest in Graceland Cemetery. Whatever my immortal artist might say, Joshua is no less for being one lover of many, our marriage no less meaningful to me for being a smaller fraction of my existence than it was of his.

  On a sunny spring afternoon, I go to visit Joshua’s grave. I’m sitting in the shade of a cherry tree, reading the latest John le Carré novel—Joshua had developed a fondness for spy stories in his later years and sharing a book seems more fitting than leaving behind a bouquet of wilting flowers—when my immortal artist finds me.

  “I tire of the endless cycles,” he says without preamble, “the constant turmoil of the world.”

  We’ve exchanged the odd letter here and there over the years, but I haven’t heard his voice since we’d shared an exhibit at the Art Institute, for he travels widely and hides from mortal society for years at a time. He can’t stand such newfangled technology as the telephone or the ever-present cars, never mind flying from one place to another in planes. No, he travels by shifting into mist, he communicates only by post, and hearing him again for the first time in so long I am struck by how thin he sounds, almost hollow. Like an echo of the immortal artist I once knew.

  “Hello, old friend.” He hates when I call him old, and I love to tease him. As usual, he doesn’t take the bait.

  “There’s an impatience in the mortals now, as they rush through their fleeting little lives, and all I desire is a peaceful time to paint. To retire to a garden, perhaps, as Monet did in his final years.”

  “Then find a garden, or make one.” I remember something Joshua once told me. “If you wait for the perfect moment, you will wait forever. Even we immortals paint in stolen bits of time, for the demands of the world expand to fill whatever time there is, no matter how vast. We must fight for it. For art. For time. Even when our lives are endless.”

  “I am weary of the fight.”

  I realize that I can’t remember the last time he’s exhibited a new painting, and his more recent letters have not mentioned models or even lovers, only his travels. “You’ve stopped painting.”

  “You’ve finally won them over to your way of seeing things, your muddled mix of influences, that complex stream of new ideas and techniques.” He stares at a mausoleum in the distance, and I wonder if the pillars remind him of ancient Greek ruins.

&nb
sp; “I’m persistent,” I tell him.

  “Stubborn.”

  “Yes. And I’ve learned to care less what others think.” I run my fingers over Joshua’s headstone, letters and numbers cut deep into the granite, shadowed in ultramarine.

  “Is that the man you married?”

  “Joshua,” I say. “He died a few years ago. I miss him dearly. But I’m glad he’s here and not in one of those crowded city cemeteries like the ones in Paris with graves practically stacked one atop the next. He loved plants. Trees. Gardening was one of his many attempts to escape from the horrors of war. We had a beautiful garden out behind the house. It looks a mess now because I’ve never been able to create plants from anything but paint.”

  “He was also a painter?”

  I shake my head. “No. A musician, a composer, a civil rights activist, and, for a time, a soldier. He was the one who suggested I take control of my narrative, preserve my memories in writing. I haven’t quite the knack for prose that Émile did, of course, but I want to have a record of my past.”

  “You’ve kept your connection to the mortals,” he says, his voice wistful. “Yours was the last generation that really moved me. The last to draw me in.”

  He speaks of my entire generation, but I’m better at seeing the negative spaces now, hearing the words that aren’t said. No one since me has moved him, there is no one but me in his heart after all these years…and I have well and truly moved on.

  I can’t help but think how far we’ve diverged. He is tradition, isolation, stagnation—all things I see within myself but which I fight so hard against. It leads me to think about duality, the way we often divide ideas so neatly into opposing pairs. Artist and subject. West and East. Life and death.

  When I return to my studio, I paint a canvas on both sides: one a lively picnic in Burnham Park and the other a funeral at Graceland Cemetery. The grass of both is a vibrant green, and instead of placing opposing elements on opposite sides of the canvas I jumble everything together. There are hints of death at the park, and life in the cemetery. Even the style of the painting is a chaotic mix of impressionism and realism, ukiyo-e and abstract expressionism.

  I call it Two Worlds, and it is what some consider my greatest masterpiece.

  TITANIUM WHITE

  The latest fashion in Paris is voluminous and flowing, with hidden pockets and hooded capes. A decade ago it was sleek minimalist cuts in patterns reminiscent of Rothko. It’s fascinating to watch the way trends disappear and return, the throwbacks and the updates, the new combinations and perspectives.

  The city itself follows a similar cycle, though far more slowly since a building is less easily changed than a frock. The arrondissement of my mortal youth is recognizable again, recreated as a historical preserve. They’ve managed to keep something of its underlying character, though the streets are far too clean, and the towering mid-millennium arcologies block the morning sun and make the light all wrong.

  The Café Guerbois is a museum—a static recreation of the buzzing artistic scene it once was—but there’s a dive bar around the corner called le Salon des Refusés where artists gather in their various groups and have heated discussions on the nature of art.

  I sometimes go on Thursdays.

  The new generation isn’t weighed down by centuries of history, the experience of how far we’ve come. Their basis of reference is the time of their childhood, not of mine. They are at once refreshing and infuriating, and they inspire me to push forward—in my paintings and in my life. My once-immortal artist would have liked this bar, for the nostalgia of it if not for the modern conversations. It is strange to think of a world that doesn’t have him in it.

  The Musée de l’Orangerie houses the last remaining trace of his existence—Woman, Reclining (Mari). The museum has continued to restore it for centuries, using the best technology and the most skilled conservators.

  On the surface, the painting is much as I remember it, faint though the memory is. But he is gone from it, the paint that he himself applied replaced bit by bit like a colorful Ship of Theseus until little of the original remains. His other paintings are lost, and have probably long since crumbled into dust. Poor Suzette. She’d thought herself immortal at least in paint, but that tribute is fleeting. History has forgotten her, even as a footnote. It’s hard to imagine that once upon a time I’d been jealous of the attention he’d paid her, so many lifetimes ago. And jealous of him for being an artist when I was a model. Now his painting is preserved, not because it was painted by him, but because it is the earliest known depiction of me.

  Time eats all things in the end. Entropy brings everything back to white—a chaotic jumble of all the colors mixed together, if you paint with light. Now even my once-immortal artist has succumbed to the unending white. An artist must struggle to find meaning, to put order to chaos—and he no longer wished to fight.

  He is a mist too thin to ever recohere; the strongest notion of him that remains is the splinter of his being that lives on in me. His model and his student, shining so brightly that I can never again be placed in his shadow.

  In honor of his passing I paint Entropy in a palette of colors I mix myself, using formulas from both ancient times and modern, carefully applying the colors so the painting will change as it ages—chrome yellow that darkens to brown, red lake pigments that quickly fade, an ordivant green that will darken through emerald and into a deep blue over the course of several hundred years. I put myself into the titanium white, mist into paint, adding nuance to the crisp bright hue.

  It is a self-portrait, though my physical likeness is not in it. It is a historical painting, though it does not depict any recognizable moment in time. Even the signature will shift, as mine has over the centuries—briefly it will read Mari before the rest of my name emerges. Mariko means truth, so this appeals to me conceptually: over time, the truth will be revealed. Then eventually the letters will fade until only the M remains. The details of history, given enough time, are mostly forgotten.

  I have the Musée de l’Orangerie display the painting in carefully specified values of light, with strict orders never to move it, repair it, or alter anything about the painting or the room. Its true glory cannot be appreciated within a single human lifetime, but mortals flock to see it nonetheless.

  And even now the doubt remains, the lingering fear that I will be forgotten. Perhaps the time has finally come to share my story. I’ve been writing it in dribs and drabs ever since Joshua suggested it, the words accumulating like dabs of color on a canvas. There are moments I choose to describe and moments that I omit, deliberately or otherwise. When you outlive everyone you’ve ever known, there’s no one to remind you of the things you’ve forgotten, and no one to contradict your version of events. I find myself always returning to white. Beginning, again and again.

  WHITE

  This is not the end. I’ll leave my mark on the blank page of history, and I’ll paint the world in colors so bold and bright they cannot be ignored.

  There is beauty in my truth, and I have so much to share.

  (Editors’ Note: Caroline M. Yoachim is interviewed by Tina Connolly in this issue.)

  © 2021 Caroline M. Yoachim

  Caroline M. Yoachim is a two-time Hugo and four-time Nebula Award finalist. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yoachim’s short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories and the print chapbook of her novelette The Archronology of Love are available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

  The Book of the Kraken

  by Carrie Vaughn

  Chapter the Eighth, in which the crew of the HMS Selene

  has an encounter of startling proportions.

  Halfway up the shrouds on the mainmast, where he’d been climbing to take the look-out, Matthew Vale spotted the approaching craft first. Fifty mi
les out from America’s mid-Atlantic coast, enemy ships and merchant vessels came in view almost every day, and their tonnage, rigging, and number of guns were recorded. The ships usually turned tail the moment they saw the HMS Selene’s colors.

  But this one was unusually small, and it didn’t turn away.

  Matthew called out the direction, and the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Vale, came to the rail with his spyglass. Thomas Vale was Matthew Vale’s older brother and his greatest source of annoyance, greater than below- decks pranks and stale bread and trousers that were two inches too short because he’d outgrown them, again. If Matthew got any sort of advancement on the ship, the crew said it was his brother doing him favors. If he made the least mistake, Tom never let him hear the end of it. Tom had gotten him the spot as midshipman on the Selene, the smartest 28-gun frigate in the service, he was sure, and he ought to be grateful. He supposed he was, except that Tom was so insufferable about it.

  Matthew hopped back to the deck and joined him, shading his eyes to peer out. The way the object moved against the waves, it was clearly a boat and not some trick of the light. He was nearly ready to ask Tom for the spyglass to better see for himself.

  A half-dozen sailors and younger officers gathered to see what the fuss was about. Then Captain Humbolt arrived, and they parted to make way. Perfectly turned out, dark hair in a neat tail and not a fleck of lint on his blue coat, Humbolt was a serious young captain. He stood now with his hands folded behind his back, frowning out to the horizon.

  “Trouble, lieutenant?”

  “A vessel of some sort, sir. A launch, I think. No more than twenty feet.”

  “What’s such a craft doing so far out at sea? How is she rigged?”

  Tom lowered the glass and looked out with his naked eye before trying the glass again, as if one or the other might be lying to him. “Not at all, sir. A single mast but no sails.”