The Third Part: Spring And Winter

Ambushed by roses, a pornographic hologram, and paying the ferryman

Time passed and winter melted. The city became warm.

Gerda finally rose from her nest on the floor, from her tear stained pillow, from the indentation beside her where Kay used to be, and she washed the grease and grief from her body. She gathered up all the glass bottles in the apartment, rinsed them under the broken pipe, and gave them to the children in the courtyard who made music out of trash. They reached out their hands to her. Gerda smiled at them. “Have you seen Kay?”.
“No,” they said.

“That’s okay, little birds,” she said, and she went out into the city.

At the neighbourhood shop Gerda asked, “Where is my Kay?”

The shopkeeper shrugged, and bagged groceries. “Ask the man at the mouth of the train station with the moon-gazer eyes. He might know.”

Gerda found the man with the moon-gazer eyes among street people, his wrists decorated with broken watches. “Have you seen Kay?”, she asked him.

He cackled in reply. “Don’t you know the time? It’s Spring already, and you are too late!” He continued to call after her as she ran away from him.

Gerda walked and walked, looking for signs, past the canals where the river flows, until she reached the place with the pink lights and the dream plugins, where the celluloid screens showed the Snow Queen in various guises, exposing her breasts, smearing her body in snowflake glitter.
Gerda approached the mermaid girls who stood on the riverbanks handing out beads and flyers and shots of jewel coloured liquid, their legs bound together in approximations of tails.

“You’re always with the river, right?” Gerda asked.

 “Yeah,” said the mermaid girls. “We’re always here.”

“You know the river’s secrets.”

“There’s nobody in this river we don’t know of, and a lot end up in it.”

“What about Kay? You would remember him because he had a shard of glass in his eye.”

One of the mermaid girls touched Gerda’s shoulder.

“Have you asked the Roses? The Roses you’ll find in the Green House down the street. The Roses will tell you where your boy has gone.”

In a club full of velvet and murmur Gerda found the Roses, who knew about lost boys, and flower girls, and madams and pimps and dream landlords. They wore necklaces of thorns and possessed labia like unfurled petals.

“We’ve been underground, and your boy isn’t there”, they said, upon hearing the sad story that Gerda told. “Honey, we got tendrils everywhere.”

What would Gerda do now that the birds, the, shopkeeper, the moon-gazer, the mermaids, and the Roses did not know?

Gerda collected her things from the apartment- in the bag, she placed the artefacts of their love- the art slides, Kay’s box of precious colours, her clothes, and her money, which Kay had once said did not matter, and she made her way to the river, where she rented a boat from one of the city’s underworld denizens.
The boatman leafed through her currency and licked it to check its authenticity.

“Where are you going, and is it likely you’ll come back?” he asked.

“I’m going to rescue my love from the wizard who made the Snow Queen- I’m going to the ice palace where the most loyal of subscribers go to plug in forever. To the castle of dreams at the end of the river. And I will come back.”

The boatman spat into the water. His saliva, and the water, were black. “You better put some coins on your eyes.”

He pushed her off from the thawing bank with a salute. Gerda started to row, and she did not stop.

She rowed until the lights were pinpricks in the distance, until the cries of animals replaced the roar of the biodomes, until the watery path twisted and undulated into a maze of grief. She rowed for many days, eating the gifts of birds, eating squirming, blind things, drinking river water. Until she could go no further.

INTERLUDE: WINTER

Maybe he followed the river upstream of his own volition, to the penthouse, to her snow-hill, her igloo, her freeze-smoke chateau, where it was very cold always amid the video screens and the white pelts of animals, vodka in cups made of ice at the mirrored bar, the huge beds silky pink like organs, the bathtub smoking with ice, the ornate mirrors dusted in white powder and strewn with razor blades and platinum cards.

Fucking a hologram would be like touching perfection, like having the formula that proved God’s existence. To slave all your life away in the city, to be born a man into fetid creation, and not ever having the chance to fuck perfection, was cruelty. And the wizard who created the hologram understood that. He understood the ugliness in the world and he created the Snow Queen to soothe the ugliness in the boys- to give them something perfect, something that dulled the pain, the shard of glass in their eye, that niggled always and all night forever. All Kay wanted was a taste. He deserved that.

From the Snow Queen’s domain he could see nothing.

The Snow Queen kissed him on his blue lips and thanked him for coming. She was wearing white;  a negligee, or a thong made from candy strung together with edible string, or fur, or nothing, nothing but her own blue skin stretched over her bones. She wore a necklace of hearts and lungs and penises like a shaman, taken from the boys who sought her and never came back.

The Snow Queen put her thumbs over Kay’s eyelids and pressed hard, to ensure the shard of glass that was lodged there stuck firm.

Afterwards, she led him to the room where naked blue boys lay, in shards and images. “It’s safe here, above the world,” she said.

Kay clawed at her. Please. The ache in his groin and behind his eyes was unbearable. He fell on her, pushing her onto a shag pile of white fur, sequin, silk, velvet, groaning in pain. He parted her shiny plastic perfect legs and shed his clothes, trying to push inside her, but he was soft and useless, his body shot through with loss and cold and pain. Between the Snow Queen’s legs there was nothing but smooth unblemished skin. Nothing human, nothing that bled or gave life or became wet with desire. She laughed.

She left Kay there on the floor, crouched beneath the silky pink bed, shivering, aching.

On the snow-covered floor beside him there was what had once been a beautiful and ornate mirror, shattered into thousands of glimmering pieces.
“If you can make it whole again, I will let you inside me, and we can be together.”