The Unfinished World (27 page)

And so Set finally fled: he left London and the witches and the damp and the cold and traveled to sunny Hollywood, to make and sell dreams.

Curiosity #680: Magicienne pre-flint lighter, automatic match variety, circa 1891. French manufacture. Steel case with intricate, abstract engravings
.

When the war after the War came to County Antrim, Inge's home burned. First drums, then fire, then her father put Inge and her sisters on a ship and shot himself. He sent them forth with what he had; a small but serviceable sum for passage and a few months' food and shelter. The adult sisters now split from each other at
the first port of call. Hannah went west, Clara went north; and Inge took a sack of books and a compass and hitched a ride on a steamer headed south. At eighteen she had some vague idea of a warm wind and a bright smudge of horizon, and an undiscovered island littered with coconut trees. She dreamed of sleeping under the stars, of fleeing the damp chill of her homeland.

And so the Agnew sisterhood, never strong, dissolved like mist, and so the sisters were borne across vast oceans. The little figures moved over the waves, a tiny diaspora over the navy night of the seas.

Inge's full name was Ingeborg Adelaide Cecilia Agnew. The Adelaide was pure ornamentation, but the Cecilia substantive; it was after her English grandfather, Cecil. She wasn't sure how so much of a name could seep into the blood, but she had been astonished to learn about his history after she wrote to Hannah about her new life. He lost his mind while stationed in the Transvaal, and once home, ran off (wrote Hannah, disapproval dripping from her careful round script) with a bareback rider in the circus. He gave his lands and title up to his younger brother to follow her, and returned alone four years later without a word of explanation. He mostly took up where he had left off, a stranger to his furious wife and his now-nearly-grown son—Inge's father. He came back with nothing except a large black bag full of photographic equipment. He never said where it came from, and when his younger brother died, he moved the family to Larne to take over the family estate there as he'd been meant to do. But he remained passionately committed to photography for the rest of his life.

When Inge set out, she knew none of this. Her grandfather was merely a portrait in the hallway, bearded and pale and deadly
dull. She supposed she would be the same someday, and that some distant relation would be astonished to find this dry ancestor capable of acts of great passion. She was all long limbs and huge eyes, and she couldn't run fast enough or see far enough to take the world in as she wanted to. So she took up photography as memory; she bought her first camera, a folding Kodak Brownie. She got it at one of her first stopovers, from a one-armed ex-whaler from Portsmouth living in Portugal with his common-law wife and children. He would bring his fish to the market and quote Shakespeare quite badly to anyone who would listen. He was Inge's first friend, and though she knew he was mixing up Edgar and Edmund, still she loved to hear him pour forth Lear's melancholy in his greasy, grizzled tones. She traded him her copy of
The Collected Sonnets
for the camera—that and a ride on his boat to the next seaport town.

In Hollywood, Set loved to stand outside the studio and watch the chaos: beautiful women and men in costume, stagehands carrying backdrops and set pieces and props, cars and trucks and buggies, and especially the endless menagerie of animals: horses and bears and lions and tigers and cats and dogs and peacocks and orangutans and every kind of bird imaginable. Set even saw an octopus once, carried about in a giant glass tank by four men. It was rather small and sulky.

While Cedric was on set, Set spent long hours sitting at the commissary making sketches of the local wildlife. One of the studio executives sat next to him one day at lunch and leaned over to see his drawings. Might as well make use of you while you're hanging about, he told Set, and hired him on the spot as a captioner.
Set was tasked with writing and illustrating captions for the intertitles, those floating dialogue screens. He liked best to draw birds and other things with wings. He charmed one of the stars of Cedric's stable with a pair of origami swans, and twining from their beaks like ribbon, the words “You are as lovely and wild as the swans at Coole.” The actress, a vain, pretty thing, had never read Yeats but she murmured it like a mantra as he took her to bed that night. He took a fair number of women to bed. He was drawn to this new, bold kind of girl—these were brash, self-made beauties. And they were drawn to him, to his bright throwback beauty and his cool remove. Set had been shocked, almost, that he hadn't simply disappeared, dissolved like smoke, the further the train took him from his family home. But it seemed he was substantial, not quite spirit-stuff, not in body, anyway. And a fair number of women at the studio seemed concerned primarily with the body. A fair number of men, too. Adonis was the name that stuck at Polytone, half in flattery, half in farce.

Set quite liked California, in spite or perhaps because of it being so very different from New York. He liked the unsettled, seedy feeling of the place, the way the ground could actually shift under one's feet—he'd always liked literal metaphors like that. He liked how there was a strange and wonderful self-sufficiency to the small shops scattered along the highways into town—palm readers butted up against fruit sellers butted up against one-pump filling stations and two-bit diners with grass-thatched roofs, the whole thing dotted and crosshatched with garish billboards. The swaying palms suggested a lazy paradise, but this part of the world was full of hustle, because everyone—from the men picking apples in the Valley, to the old ladies selling chiles, to the bit players clustered and queuing up for the next walk-on—
everyone understood there was something new here, a second sort of gold rush for those willing to jump and run. Here, it was all flash. You could eat your dinner in a restaurant shaped like a hat. You could drink your Manhattan in a tiki hut. A sea of neon signs swarmed the airspace above the buildings, advertising dancing, girls, drinks, food, footwear, fashion, even faith; the religious revival shows that came to town would park in one of the big empty lots and throw up flashy signs with arrows pointing like the hand of god.

But Cedric still hated it. He complained that the people were loud and vulgar, that the heat made his bones hurt, that he felt he was falling off the edge of the world.

Set supposed it must look strange, the age difference between Cedric and himself. He was embarrassed by Cedric for the first time, and he was glad the people here didn't seem to hold his brother's behavior against him. Back home Cedric made sense. Old money was allowed its eccentricities. It was possibly expected of them.

They never spoke of the swimming pool.

Photograph: Snapshot of a pile of maps, folded and refolded and brightly colored. One shows elevation, one shows rivers and lakes and tributaries, one promises adventure: strange lands unseen by human eyes
.

For her nineteenth birthday, Inge got herself a new camera and a commission from
National Geographic.
In Buenos Aires, she'd met a photographer from the magazine who wanted to sleep with her, and—fascinated by the idea that one could be paid for one's
work—she took frank advantage. Sex in exchange for a leg up, so to speak. She began to make use of her novelty, as the rare female adventurer. It often gave her more access, more trust among the peoples she was photographing. The magazine saw her value, and kept her on. She wondered what the mustachioed governess would say, and smiled with no small pleasure at the thought.

This time, she caught passage with a group of anthropologists on their way to study a remote island, where the natives tattooed their bodies and faces with a sharp shell and a paste made of coconut ash. The scientists had traveled there to study the rigid caste society, and the way the tattoos reflected each individual's place in the group. Inge took photos of the beautiful, intricate designs; no straight lines, only curved and swirling marks, dark circles opening to spirals. Each body was a universe, marked by many galaxies.

The scientists were older, Dutchmen, and they ignored her and spent evenings smoking in their separate camp. She was much more interested in the people of the island, and they were intrigued by her. They touched her hair and asked questions and, according to the interpreter, they called her Cloud Woman. Cloud Woman, they asked her, why is your skin so blank and empty? How did you drain the color from your hair? What is a photograph? She showed them the photographs after she'd developed them, told the people they would read like dreams to others. They told her the tattoos were maps, so that after they died, their spirits would know how to find their homes in the afterlife.

Cloud Woman, the women asked, where are your children? Where is your man? When she laughed and told them she had neither, they looked at her gravely, disapproving. You must find them, they said.

Before she sailed, she let them tattoo a small black cloud on her foot. This way, they told her, you will always know yourself. Perhaps it was the fermented island drink, but that warmed her somehow. Despite the pain, she felt a strange sense of comfort in the mapping of her own skin.