After the shock of the first revision, you decided not to go behind the door again. Interpretation had been the main trouble. Those god-damned readers, you can’t trust them.
You stare at the newest stack, the donut-shop stack. Soon you’ll have to read. But it’s best to approach these things deliberately. You select another cigarette. The pack is nearly empty. Soon.
So the new game had begun: the game of the master, played with the same goal as the first—perfect the story—but to a different purpose. No longer sanctifying a world below to prove yourself worthy to move upward to yet another sphere, but rather sanitizing the one below, to make it a worthy enough vessel for your ascended self to live comfortably within. The first thing was to stop all this nonsense of interpretation, this silly-string movement, this horrid spooky action. You’d devote all new issues of Cat’s Crib to spell out your intentions in exact language, no drawings, just plain words on the page. Each detail described, from the path of a bird crossing the sky to exactitude of facial expression, posture, gesture, the thoughts governing each action, authorial intent conveyed with inescapable specificity, down to the mite, the mote, the minim, the indivisible particle—you knew you’d need to start from the beginning, explain the book until every reader understood how to read it properly, and to keep at it until they couldn’t read it any other way.
The first issue you wrote in this new style came in at seventy pages of text, single-spaced—clearly this wouldn’t do. You made the type smaller. Smaller. Smaller. Six-point? No. That’s not quite it yet, get it down to 24 pages…perfect, a 5.5 will do the trick. As a sop to your partners at Universe Comics and the expectation of the form, you included pictures with the text: reproductions from previous books, stylized to suggest new, better meanings. The barbarians still complained, but you’d made careful study of all contracts and agreements, remained unconcerned: You owned the rights to these characters, you’d use them as you pleased. Don’t like it? Feel free to break our contract. Which is what Universe did, citing “artistic choices purposefully designed to sabotage the viability of the work,” along with some vague threats about further legal action based on onerous fine print…your lawyer droned on and on, but it was all such a bore—They had no soul; those philistine bean-counters couldn’t understand the life of the mind. You were doing the best work of your career. Nor were the suits at Universe the only unsophisticated sensibilities; subscriptions fell to ten percent of peak. No matter, you counted the loss as gain. Those who remained were the only real readers; the ones willing to read properly. You sold original artwork to keep afloat, and explained carefully to your concerned accountants about the singularity of artistic expression.
But there was no explaining Gordy, the kid sprung up unbidden out of those first revised pages, the ones you created by disappearing Neato; no explaining the kid with sure feet and perfect spatial awareness, who could run along telephone lines, leap from ledge to ledge along the Domino City windows, who always arrived whenever the day needed saving; the kid who would, according to the final pages in the revised stack, be the one to drop the safe upon the helpless head of Morris—the same unacceptable ending. No, there was no explaining Gordy, though the lesson he provided was a recognizable one. When you had been a character within the work, you’d known Gordys, hadn’t you? Semblants who refused to fall into their places and had the power to resist the doom they’d earned for their disobedience. No, there’s no explaining a Gordy. With a Gordy, there’s only one thing to do: Get rid of him. Not the bird for Gordy, but the spade. You knew you’d have to risk the door again. You’d have to risk generating pages.
You entered, jaunted to Gordy’s first appearance, issue 27, a flashback, Gordy still just a little kid bombing down the streets of Pigeon Forge, on his way to his meeting with destiny—You sonofabitch. What you do to me, I do to you.
Hey, kid.
Gordy stopped and startled when he saw you. Unsurprising; unless you consciously exercised your authority to modify your appearance, everybody on this side gets spooked by the sight of you.
Who are you, mister?
Look out for the safe, kid.
The…safe? What sa—
Too late. It landed on him, full force, a big square gray number the size of a Buick, ending the question unasked, smashing the boy into a mush of red-bone slurry-paste.
That one, kid. That one.
So much for Gordy. You returned to the door and passed through, already anticipating the pages awaiting you. Hopefully the revision wouldn’t be too bad.
It had been worse than “too bad.” It was unfair. The new stack stood thicker, a foot high, practically the entire run of the book. Flipping to issue 27, you saw Gordy still alive, saved from the safe by a chance tumble into an open manhole. But that wasn’t all; this new recapitulation had swallowed all your meticulous 5.5. point text-work; a year’s work gone, replaced with more panel art, and…turning to the final page…No!…again, the safe about to drop on the head of poor abused Morris.
Without pause you popped back through the door—I can’t kill you? Fine, friend. I’ll bury you. You can dodge a safe, but you can’t dodge an oubliette.