Read The Unfinished World Online
Authors: Amber Sparks
Set liked it here in the sun, and these picture people forgave him his own reserve, mostly because he was friendly and graceful and of course, so very pretty. He'd never known he
was
before; it made him a little selfish and a little sad, too, because the brightness covered up the dark pull down he often felt. He wondered that no one else could see it. He laughed, often, not because he was joyful but because it was easy to let your mouth fall open here. Ease was easy to fake. Hollywood attracted the strange, anywayâSet was in a sense just one more sideshow attraction, the beautiful man with a hole where his soul ought to be.
But Cedric stuck out like a relic. He seemed drawn in different, drabber paints, a strange figure against the bright Los Angeles landscape. People here lived fast, but easyâjust the opposite of meticulous Cedric. He could spend years on a dig; he'd spent decades just mapping the Antarctic. He didn't understand this place, so new and full of cheerful ruthlessness. Set was hardly surprised when one day he returned to their rented bungalow and found Cedric on the porch, his bags at his feet, his frozen expression a thousand miles away.
You're going away, Set said. He'd expected it.
We're
going away, boy, said Cedric. Go and get your things together. We must be at the station, in one hour sharp.
Set envisioned sitting on the train in defeat, winding through
the San Gabriel Mountains, watching the bustle recede and fade into landscape. Why? he asked.
Cedric grinned. My city, he said. My city has been discovered at last!
I don't know what you mean, said Set.
The lost Arctic city, said Cedric. The one the Innu spoke of.
I thought that was a myth, Set said. Just a story.
Myth is often something more, said Cedric, and he laughed. Whale bones, boy! The coastal natives found an entire pitful, at Point Hope. Point Hope! It begs the impossible, does it not? I received the telegram just this morning.
Set sat down slowly on the porch swing. He rocked, and rocked, and did not look at Cedric; felt the cold disapproval rolling over him just the same. I'm not going, he finally said. There was a long, long silence.
And after, though Cedric shouted at him for a quarter of an hour, though he called him all sorts of rude and unfilial names, though he threatened and cajoled and pleaded, Set would not be moved. In the end, Cedric went to find his lost city alone, and Set stayed and took over Cedric's film. He chose to stay, in the sun, out of the shadow of Ced's obsession. For the first time in his life, he was finally free of his family. Free, or adrift. He wasn't sure which.
On her twentieth birthday, Inge received word that her sister Clara had died. She did not attend the funeral. She had written to Clara, at the beginning of the sisters' separationâsome small concession to the blood they sharedâbut Clara never replied. Inge was hardly surprised; they were like strangers to each other.
And so she wrote to Hannah instead: dull, disapproving Hannah, who could not resist writing sanctimoniously back. She enjoyed the victory of virtue.
I am in lovely, lively Rio
, Inge would write to Hannah, and Hannah would write back,
You are in the lap of mortal sin
. That sort of thing. Hannah did not approve of Inge's hand-to-mouth existence, of her vocation. It was 1920, Inge wrote her, prickly. Perfectly acceptable for women to have careers of their own. Father's money had long since run out, and how else was she expected to eat? She could marry, wrote Hannah, and Inge laughed to think of such a thing. Who on earth would she marry? And why, when she could travel alone with all the freedom she liked? When she could document the wilds of the world?
So instead of dutifully heading to Finland, where Clara had died in childbirth like their mother, or slinking off to Hannah in Newfoundland, sins unrolled before herâInge made her first dirigible flight. She'd read about this miracle, this new weightless ship in the sky, and though there were no commercial flights yet, she managed to make herself very charming to a military pilot taking a test run, from Rio de Janeiro to Friedrichshafen. She shared his cabin, and she was happy to be a
Hure
for the chance to fly, to skip from shore to shore like a gull. Once on land, she decided to find her mother's people, but when she wrote Hannah from Germany, her sister wrote back that she had no idea how to find them. Her beloved aunt had left Berlin after the War with no forwarding address, just disappeared, and the relatives in Ludwigshafen were all dead or dispersed. Hannah wrote that it was just the two of them now, but it might as well be that she had no sister at all, so slight was Inge's sense of filial duty.
Inge sat at a café on the Bodensee and read the letter three, four, ten times. The other patrons cast suspicious looks her
wayâthere was a deep distrust of foreigners in Germany after the War, and though she looked the part, her German was poor and marked her out.
When they were children, Hannah sometimes brushed Inge's hair until her younger sister's scalp bled. She'd scowl, as if it were Inge's fault that she was born with her hair in knots. But then there was this, also. When Inge was six, she dreamt her father had become a vulture, was waiting for and willing her death. His red eyes reeked of ugly, carrion thoughts. She woke, crying, and crept down the hall to Hannah and Clara's room. Clara put the covers over her head, but Hannah invited her in. You may stay with me tonight, she said, and tucked her arm around the young Inge as though she were a well-loved doll. And Inge was warm, andâso briefly!âhappy.
We are, thought Inge, such a strange series of beings. No constancy among us. Tomorrow she would develop her zeppelin picturesâsurely
National Geographic
or
Travel
would snap them upâand try to scrape together passage for the first ship she could find. But now, she sat and watched the wind roll over the Bodensee, rippling the waters and moving restlessly on.
Curiosity #84: Aztec volcanic rock sculpture, circa fifteenth century A.D., probably made for the temple of Tenochtitlan. An example of a traditional demon princess, or Cihuateteo, who escorts the sun from the underworld each morning, she wears a simple skirt, breasts bared, hair long and over her shoulders
.
The truth about Set is the truth about all ghosts: there is a weightlessness that keeps them fluttering, light as leavesâand in turn
they are drawn down to instability, to the volatile, to cracks that open and can split whole mountains. To the volcanoes. Specifically, in Set's case, to Lana Volcana.
That wasn't her real name, of course, or even her screen name. But it was what they all called her after her breakout picture,
Vera and the Volcano
âa two-reeler about an island girl that sent her star up and up.
LANA VOLCANA!
the picture magazines screeched, with accompanying photographs of a dark-haired vamp in a grass skirt and clamshell top. The
IT GIRL
, the papers called her, a new kind of girl for these daring times.
Filmstar Rag
said she was the girl you don't bring home to mama.
In Hollywood, Set found that alone among the beautiful people, his hollow place itched, emptier than ever. He had love affairs, of course, but he could find no way to feel love for the pretty young women he admired. Up close he found people attractive but flawed; there was an eagerness for closeness that repelled even as it attracted him. He worried that perhaps he could not love, and so he chose the fire that burned the brightest and he jumped in headfirst. Worry about scars later, he told himself. He needed to see if he could ever be warmed, if others could be warmed by him. Never mind his own emotions; was it possible to love a dead man?
Lana and Set first collided when Set was desperately searching for a leopard for a reshoot of a scene from his latest nature documentary,
In the Jungle
. Lana kept a pet leopard, Leopold, and she brought him in and ensnared Set in the first five minutes. Set had never seen a woman with a leopard on a leash, though he'd heard the stories. He'd heard, and soon discovered it was true, that her chauffeur drove her about in a black Rolls with white velvet interiors while her two Russian wolfhounds hung their
heads out the windows in a most undignified fashion. Set supposed she must love animals. But she loved one thing only: spectacle, and anything that helped her to make it. She was drawn to Set because he was pretty, and putty in her hands. That was all she ever needed of men. (It was whispered that her real fire was reserved for women, but it would not be until her lonely later years, doing film rag interviews for cash in her motel room, that she would admit the truth of this.)
Lana Volcana believed in self-improvement. She encouraged Set to quit the studio and set up his own production company. You need to be with the brightest stars, she would say, and he would think first not of Greta Garbo or John Barrymore, but of Cassiopeia, of Orion, of the gods and demigods of the prominent constellations. Lana herself was briefly the brightest star of them all, burning with a fierce intensity, given to passionate histrionics and an outsize sense of drama. She was famous for her fame even in a town where that was quickly becoming the rule, rather than the exception.
That winter, Lana bundled Set off to New York City and made him dance till 4 a.m. at the Stork Club's big bash. She was fried on gin when she introduced him to Carl Akley Jr., but he and Carl liked each other just the same. Carl had met Cedric years ago, and he made Set promise to come by the American Museum of Natural History, where he'd introduce him to the people who helped set up the expeditions. They needed a good director.
That year, Set surprised himself and everyone around him by moving forward, something he'd never done by himself before; he took Lana's advice and started his own company. The company lived and shot in Kenya that first year, and made four pictures for
the AMNH:
African Adventures, On Safari, Big Cats!
, and
Welcome to the Wild.
Set thought back to that nickelodeon theater and wished Oliver were still living and able to see what he'd done. Sometimes he dreamed of Oliver. He dreamed a great tall tree with a multitude of branches, growing far into the heavens. He dreamed he watched Oliver climbing, climbing, small and smaller still until he disappeared altogether into the city of the gods.