Vassa in the Night (23 page)

Somebody attached pairs of shiny black leather doll shoes to each and every oyster. Cute.

And, uh, somebody is polishing them.

He's about a foot tall. A distinguished-looking gentleman with short silvery hair, but his clothes are dark and rough as if he'd fallen on hard times and had to go to work shining boots in the subway. He's certainly working very hard, stooped over and buffing maniacally, his rags and waxes spread out beside him. He doesn't look at me as he finishes with one oyster and moves on to the next. “Um, hi?” I hazard. “Sir?”

He glances up in alarm. At least he can hear me.

“I'm, uh, my friends were supposed to meet me here, but I can't find them. Picnic and Pangolin? Picnic would be wearing a red-checked suit. Pangolin has scales. Have you seen them?”

The miniature man is backing away from me in terror. He collides with the cake behind him—it's taller than he is—and starts sort of insinuating himself into its frosting with a slow twisting motion. Like he could burrow his way inside it and I wouldn't have any idea where he'd gone. It's so ludicrous, and I'm so on edge, that I give in to an impulse to mess with him. Staring right at his face, I grab a plate off a nearby stack, pick up the ornate cake server lying there, and cut myself a big piece that just so happens to be the piece he's wallowing against. The blade slides down to his left, then to his right. His eyes go wide, but he doesn't stop squirming against the cake-wall. It has beautiful frosting, striped lilac and metallic gold, with clambering blue and purple vines. When I slide the server under his feet he jumps sideways and sits down with a thump in a swamp of crumbs and slippery fudge.

The slice falls in half as I carry it to my plate, burying his legs in a cakevalanche. An azure sugar rose lands right on his lap.

“So, as I was saying,” I continue, swinging a fork in midair. “Picnic and Pangolin. Have you seen them anywhere?” The cake, I have to admit, looks delicious, with fat cherries layered in custard and dark chocolate pastry. A forkful of it is halfway to my mouth even as the petite gentleman gapes at me. He's started shaking so violently the forks rattle. “Or a huge guy in black on a motorcycle? I'd like to find him, too.”

I stare at him as I open my mouth to take a slow, theatrical bite.

He's shuddering so hard that I can't see him clearly, but I can tell that his head is inflating and turning magenta. His arms spindle outward, suddenly flailing far across the table, and he bursts into an explosive scream that hammers at my eardrums. My hands fly up by reflex to cover my ears and the cake flops onto my chest, sliding down and adding a trail of custard and frosting to the bloody mess already covering my jacket.

Then I realize what a close call it was. It doesn't take a genius to know that eating the food here would be a very, very bad idea—even if I'm so hungry now that it's making me a little unbalanced. It's been a long time since I had a meal. Still, if that's all there is to the trap—
lay off the food, girlfriend
—then it's not nearly as tricky as I expected.

By the time I've recovered from the shock he's already tunneling deep inside the cake. It's my fault for being so mean, of course. What's wrong with me?

“Sorry!” I call softly, but he's gone.

The music, on the other hand, has come back, just as suddenly as it vanished. So has the chaos of laughing, chattering voices. I twist around in confusion and the sound shifts, too, traveling as I turn, so that it always seems to be coming from a spot directly behind my head. I spend a few moments jumping around like an idiot, trying to find the source of those voices, before I get a grip on myself: just because someone's playing me, that doesn't mean I have to act like a toy.

Just ignore them, Vassa. Then they'll get bored.
I make myself pretend I don't care and pace over to the painting, studying it with my head cocked sideways as if I'd never seen it before. I even fold my arms, looking at the ocher tidal wave engulfing a city, blurry abstract buildings toppling, and little purple Vassas being swept away.

It's actually kind of a beautiful picture, though. Maybe my mom was a better painter than I thought. The music and voices surge right behind me, trying to get my attention, but now I don't even want to turn around. Instead I forget all about pretending to be blasé and reach a hand out toward the swirling paint.

Zinaida.
I haven't seen one of her pictures in years. Iliana won't allow them in the apartment, not even reproductions, and maybe I tend to avoid them, too. Now that one is in front of me I feel like Zinaida's very close, watching me and maybe even smiling.
Mom?

I don't let myself say it, but my mouth feels thick with the urge to call out for her.

Once when I was eight she did my jet-black hair in elaborate curls, put me in a fluffy lace dress, and had me pose for a portrait holding a gun in my mouth. Red roses in the background suggestive of spattering blood. The gun was just a realistic-looking fake, but the painting still caused quite an uproar when she exhibited it. I think there was a congressman who had something to say about that, and
The Post
published a crazed denunciation, which my mom read out loud to me in her silliest bombastic voice. How could I have a problem with anything she did when she always made sure we were both on the same team, laughing together at the dorks who were uptight enough to be outraged?

See, like Lottery would say, Zinaida had
technique.

We both giggled like lunatics and the painting sold for a stupefying amount. I wonder if Babs owns that one, too.

Now that I come to think of it, I'm pretty sure she made my hair purple in that picture. How did I manage to forget that?

Now that I come to think of it, I really need to sit down.

All the sofas seem too far away—the room still appears to be growing bigger, and as it grows the sofas are getting dragged into the distance. After wobbling for a moment I give up and just splat down on the floor, the white hem of the tablecloth swaying in front of my face.

And that's when I see the missing party. Everyone is about the size of the shoe shiner, dressed in oddball hats with spiraling feathers, drapey silk dresses, eccentric spiny shoes. The men wear tuxedos in neon colors, some with shorts or even just polka-dot underpants. They're under the buffet table, all dancing frantically and getting wasted, lugging glasses of champagne half their own size. And there's a miniature piano where a scaled-down, elegant woman in a low-backed black dress is playing that song—always the same song—and singing so sweetly that it hurts to hear her.

Duh, Vassa.

Given the way the shoeshine man reacted to me, I decide not to say anything. I'm so dizzy that it feels like my head is filled with bursting bubbles, I'm almost nauseous from hunger, and my legs are quaking so horribly that I'm not sure I can walk. I might as well watch them for a while, then, and see if I can learn anything?

I lean my head in my hands, breathing much too hard. I find myself examining the women with special intensity, but for a while I don't admit to myself why I'm doing it. I mean, their fashion sense is pretty interesting, and their makeup is just insane: I see one whose visible skin is all pale green with crimson lines that make her look like a topographical map. After a few moments, though, I have to acknowledge the truth: I'm looking for
her
. Everything about this place screams
Zinaida
; it's baited all over with memories. So, I mean, what if she's right in front of me? What if death just made her very, very small, but she's still dancing?

What if I see her and I don't even recognize her?

When did I start crying?

“Pigsty, wombat,” the tiny pianist sings passionately, her hands like wind on the keys. Are those really the right lyrics? “Day-ay-ay of the week, oh washing machine on the street! Oh, how I don't know which way is blue, and who-hoo were you when the storms fell through?”

Her voice is so beautiful that even those absurd words bring a lump to my throat.
Who was I when the storms fell through?

Once I got wise to Zinaida—or, at least,
wiser
—then I didn't want to be like her anymore. Then there was no one left for me to want to be. I wanted to cancel everything, live as a negation: not-Zinaida, not-myself. What was
Vassa
after all but a pretty accessory for her wild mother? So who was I when the storms fell through? Why, nobody really. That girl with the purple hair. A noted kleptomaniac who didn't even steal. I try to calm down. I try to breathe deep to stop the tears coursing down my face, but I can't manage it. And Erg isn't here to order me to pull myself together.

In front of me I watch as one of those pint-sized people—this one an old, graceful woman wearing some kind of Elizabethan ruff with no shirt under it and a pair of poofy white bloomers on her bottom half—suddenly gasps, staggers, and then topples sideways. Partiers dodge her falling body and then go on dancing. Her eyes are as empty as quartz. Dead, she's obviously dead. Maybe she had a heart attack?

Then, toward the back, a weirdly slender man starts to pitch from side to side, his hand at his throat. His throat stretches out, getting queasily long, until it arches out over a nearby champagne flute with his head twitching upside down. He crumples, too. God, there's some kind of epidemic. I see a substance like silvery sand sifting out of his nose and open mouth. I see the grains lift up, hovering in midair like flies, and then start circulating purposefully among the dancers. Everyone's going to die. And I can't shake the idea that one of them might be her.

I lean forward, ready to grab armfuls of tiny spangled people, run with them somewhere, anywhere that they might be safe from the spreading contagion. My heart is drumming like mad as I stare around, trying to track every floating silver mote—if even one of the little people I try to save is already infected, I won't be helping at all. But my eyes can't move fast enough to follow all those specks, and I'm ready to scream from frustration. Glitter swarms in the corners of my eyes, specks invading laughing mouths and then gusting out again as the same mouths sputter and choke and lapse into horrible stillness. My breath has stopped, too. I lean deeper in, my forehead brushing the hanging tablecloth, watching as one dancer after another drops with brilliant tiny shoes kicking in midair.…

Someone grabs hold of my collar and hauls my head back. “Vassa,” a melodic voice coos. “Vassa! Don't go under there!”

“I have to save—
someone,
” I answer. “Anyone!” Then, without thinking what I'm saying, I give myself away in a failing murmur. “I couldn't save her before.”

“Not here,” the voice assures me. “Vassa, she's not here.”

“They're
dying.
” The plague is worse now, neon-suited miniature gentlemen gagging in pools of champagne, small women shredding their feathered dresses with convulsive hands.

“
They'll
be fine,” the voice tells me—in a way that distinctly conveys
and you won't.
“
They
are playing.” It's speaking from just behind my left shoulder now, so I catch my breath and look back.

It's the singer in the black dress, my view of her smeared by my tears. She's standing right beside me, and she's growing rapidly. Already she must be at least three feet tall. “Why do you care what I do?” I ask. I'd wipe my eyes with my sleeve if it wasn't so filthy; I settle for the back of my hand, which isn't much better.

The singer looks at me: she seems more cute than pretty now, with a button nose and curly brown hair, and apart from the trivial matter of her size she looks a lot more ordinary than her friends. “Zinaida,” she says at last. “I see her again in you.”

That name works on me like magic, as she must have known it would. Suddenly I'm ready to follow the singer—who's now a whopping three-foot-eight at least—anywhere she'd care to take me. When I glance toward the party under the table again I notice the old woman in white, the one who fell first, peering slyly at me out of the corners of her eyes. If I'd inhaled that stuff I wouldn't have opened mine again, though, I bet; my insides lurch as the realization sinks in. “Do—
did
you know Zinaida?” God, how it hurts to say that. I feel like my ribs might split.

The singer smiles at me, dreamy and speculative. She looks about twenty-two, but I'd guess that can't be her real age. “Who didn't?” Irrationally, the past tense comes as a terrible disappointment to me, but she doesn't give me time to dwell on that. “Vassa, Vassa Lisa, come with me. I want to show you something.”

I get up, still way too unsteady, and follow after her. My capacity for surprise is pretty well exhausted by now, so I feel only the vaguest possible wonder that she recognized me so easily. She seems to have settled on being about five foot three and her exposed back is pearly and freckled.

We wander through a messy but very fancy kitchen, all strawberry marble and chartreuse lacquer, then past an open bathroom with brass faucets in the form of impressively sinister swans with gaping maws. These swans really do resemble rats with wings, like Babs said, and probably with rabies to boot, but even so I wish I had time for a shower. Then the singer opens another door, and we're in a small parlor with stuffed peacocks on stands and so many brocade chairs and mahogany end tables that I can barely move; some of the chairs are even heaped on top of one another, and glass-fronted cabinets are stacked on top of the heaps, all the way to the ceiling in places. The singer doesn't have any problem navigating through the mess. She just kind of slices across the room and turns to face me, smiling wryly, beside a table supporting a dozen snapshots in glimmering frames.