PART IV – SUBJECT TO INFINITE CHANGE
BENJAMIN HERRING COLMERY IV
Sometime in the afternoon of that day, a newly freed Tennessee entered Ralph’s General & Specific, and, for reasons known not even to himself, purchased a large sack of oranges, which he left propped at the entrance of the Fridge.
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
There are some who believe there is no coincidence, who hold that everything happens for a reason. There are others who hold that all is coincidence. Both notions are correct, to a point. It is correct to say there is a reason for everything that happens—not because everything happens for a reason, but because everything happens. Everything, real and unreal, possible and impossible, likely and unlikely—all of it happens. Hence, there is no coincidence. Even hence-er, everything is coincidence. This is the universe’s greatest secret, and its most terrible offense.
And the second is like it: No art ever came about but it was an act of collaboration. No creation without observance. No observance without creation.
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
Decapitation is a funny thing. We—collectively, that is—worry about it precisely the right amount, which is to say: not at all. If you take into consideration the totality of all life and all death, decapitation is a rounding error. Statistically, decapitation doesn’t happen. And, unlike many other statistical improbabilities, our species is preoccupied with it very little, to the extent that those of us who do worry about it exist in such small numbers, we actually don’t worry about it, collectively speaking. It’s for the best; we really needn’t bother. It’s worth noting: Unconcern isn’t humanity’s usual posture toward statistically unlikely things.
However, what does not exist in the collective can exist in the individual. Example: Marie Antoinette. Don’t tell her decapitation doesn’t happen. Or, again: Julius. Julius, as one might expect, thinks about decapitation frequently. But then, Julius is a special case, when it comes to decapitation. Gordy thinks of decapitation, though he doesn’t worry about it; he just thinks about it. Jane has considered it, but not as frequently as Gordy has. Bailey never thinks about it, nor does Donk. Andrew and Andrew, the tiny twin bodyguards, will eventually be decapitated in a way that does not happen, statistically speaking, even when set against the tiny statistically insignificant sample size of human decapitations throughout history. Until that moment, however, the thought of decapitation hadn’t once crossed the minds of the Andrews.
Were they surprised? You’d better believe it!
Their days as Morris’s bodyguards will have already expired by then, so no one will be able to accurately say: “Useless bodyguards. Fat lot of good they turned out to be.”
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
“It’s a book,” Bailey announces from the back seat. “But that’s not the crazy part.”
“It’s a what, now?”
“It’s just that the pages were reversed. The title page was on the bottom of the stack.” She holds up the page in question for him to see: Subject to Infinite Change, by Boyd Ligneclaire.
Tennessee’s at the wheel. Bailey boosted the car for them, but she wouldn’t drive. The novelty of her restored body posed too much distraction; she worried she’d run them into a ditch. Mile by mile, they put road between themselves and Loony Island, and Morris, and Donk. Tennessee in the driver’s seat, reciting again and again his litany of fountain and cavern and flight, of the boy who had been his and was now lost to him a third time, and how some clearly dangerous man has clearly acquired Gordy’s power, because Gordy’s disappeared, and Julius has…well, look at him. Bailey’s stretched out in the back, hearing but not listening, rediscovering the groovable feast of her movable meat, wiggling her toes in wonder, watching the play of her fingers in front of her face. Two refugees, crawling up the blacktop toward anywhere.
These are the things Tennessee brought with him in his satchel:
–Some snacks;
–A change of clothes, including a decrepit T-shirt, whose HELLO MY NAME IS sticker remained remarkably well-preserved;
–Father Julius Slantworthy’s handwritten memoir;
–A memory card, holding Father Ex-Position’s most recent twenty-four hours of audio;
–A thick sheaf of pages, which had been filling the OUT tray of Father Ex’s laser printer—and herein lay the surprise: Father Ex hadn’t had a laser printer before, much less an OUT tray. A mystery indeed, though greater mysteries remain.
For example, there remains the great mystery of Tennessee’s beautiful new sandals, which are, somehow, Julius, and which had, once afoot, informed Tennessee how he might make the extraction from Ex’s guts, and which had not failed to point out to him the mysterious stack in the mysterious OUT tray, and which had, moreover, compelled him to seek out Bailey, a near stranger, from her hospital room. Though they’ve barely met, Bailey’s known to Tennessee. Her injury at Morris’s hands, and the subsequent vengeance he’s therefore earned, has, over the months of Tennessee’s sequestration, been Donk’s nearly constant refrain, and Donk has been Tennessee’s sole companion—but they’d never been formally introduced. Indeed, they still haven’t been; between his fear of Donk and grief over the boy lost yet again, and her dazed wonderment at her strange restoration (and perhaps, though she hasn’t yet admitted it to herself, at her subterranean but well-founded premonitions regarding the Attic), they’ve existed in separate trances. Even now, as morning and noon have gone and the sun crawls toward the western horizon, as Bailey turns her attention away from her fingers and toes, she’s landed it not on her strange companion, but on the sheaf of papers in his satchel. Head propped against one door, feet on the opposite window, reading, reading. Tennessee wonders—Why did Julius want you to find her? He hasn’t said.
Another mystery: There remains some confusion over the fate of Gordy’s ticket.
For his part, Tennessee maintains that Donk probably has it, or Morris. “Somebody sure changed Julius into sandals,” he whispers in dazed awe. “Now tell me, how could that be done without magic?” And whether Morris has the ticket’s power or Donk does barely matters, claims Tennessee, because both are dangerous as demons, both are intent on harm and damage and vengeance, and besides, if it’s Donk, he’s going to be particularly livid at Tennessee, who escaped from his secret room and drew him off their scent with a sack of oranges.
For her part, Bailey has never heard of any ticket.
The Sandals Julius remain silent on the topic of the ticket, and on all other topics, too. Another mystery, at least for Tennessee, who insists the Sandals Julius speak to him: They gave many helpful and detailed instructions back in the Neon, but haven’t broken their silence since. “It’s not something others hear,” Tennessee says. “At least I don’t think so. It sounds in my head.”
“Voices in your head?”
“It’s not like that. And besides, the instructions were accurate.”
Anyway, there also remains the puzzle of the sheaf of paper, whose nature Bailey appears to have identified, even if the method whereby it came into being remains a total
disaster. But after the wave, what will be left but the empty page? A beautiful white empty space, full of nothing at all. Nothing to thwart you, nothing to restrain you, nothing (most important) for any goddam readers to interpret.
The game of the eraser will need some help to get started. You dare hope you might do it all in one last trip. Steeling yourself for the assault of interpretation, you pass through the door, come into the dank gray cavern, always the same place. Always the same time, too—look, there’s the author just where you left him, still unconscious, not yet woken up to take on the role you gave him. Down in the dim, the spooky action of interpretation proves more manageable; there is, at least, an iconic simplicity to a dark cave, granite steps, a door. But this is the wrong time and the wrong place. You move on, years forward, hundreds of miles, find Daniel “Donk” Coyote at the very apex of his rage. “What
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
I’d advise you, is avoid trusting overmuch to patterns, the sandals told Sister Nettles. You’ve chosen a brave and a fine course but a difficult one. The longer you remain, the more you’ll discover every pattern either breaks down or repeats. Eventually, every expected form will confound you. In this place there’s a great
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
mystery. “Anyway, it’s a book.” Bailey repeated. “A novel. It’s about what happened. And it’s about us.”
“Us?” Tennessee’s finger wiggles in the air between the two of them.
“Not just you and me—all of us. Me, Daniel, Julius, you, even Gordy. It’s everything that happened. But even that’s not the crazy part. The author has my last name—which is unusual, but not crazy. The crazy part is, I dreamed about him, right before I…got better. Right before you showed up. In the dream, he said he was my brother, and he said…” Bailey pauses. “He said he’d left pages in Father Ex for me. Which he apparently has.” To this, Tennessee finds himself uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Rain starts to spackle the windshield.
“How far along are you in this book, anyway?”
Bailey hasn’t heard. “It’s not just about us, either. It’s got these wild digressions; listen to this bit about decapitation.” The clouds release as she starts, haltingly at first, then with gaining confidence and amazement, to read. How does he know this, she wonders; how does he know so much about what happened? Tonight. I’ll look for him tonight, in the Attic, this dream brother. If I find him again, I’ll ask.
When they reach a city, they stop for supplies. Food, clothes and sneakers to replace the hospital gown, a backpack, some toiletries. Bailey cuts up her cards to the accounts shared with Donk—not Daniel anymore. Donk he’s chosen and Donk he’ll remain—or “the Coyote,” if that’s what he prefers. Despite Tennessee’s dire warnings, Bailey refuses to believe Donk poses a personal threat to her, no matter how far he pursues his obsessions. Even so, she has no inclination to return. The night of the Loony Riot, he made his choice. For years they’ve each been all the other had, an entire universe to each other, their love the only warmth they could count on, but he’s withdrawn himself from that warmth, and he’s done it for nothing more satisfying than chilled vengeance. He’ll say it’s justice, a principled stand against the cruelty of the world, but push aside that cart of bullshit, Bailey. Look at him, willing to steal a hospital full of the mentally ill, wipe their minds, dope them hyper, use them for his own ends. No, it’s nothing of justice anymore, whatever he tells himself. He’ll pursue the vengeance on his own behalf, now you’re healed, and he’ll pursue it to whatever grim ends he chooses. Even if you hadn’t been injured, it would have been over for the two of you. There’s grief in it, but the grief doesn’t change the truth; he’s made himself into something too cold, too hard and sharp, to ever share what you once were. Ignoring the truth of the loss can only lead to a tragedy even greater than the loss. Let him have the money and the revenge; give up your half of the funds in exchange for a clean break and consider it a bargain. Nevertheless, money won’t be an issue in the near term. Ever a manager, Bailey’s been a thrifty spender and a trusty saver. From her plump personal account, she withdraws as much cash as she judges they’ll need, stacks the cash in Tennessee’s satchel. “We’ll hit every bank we pass in the state until we’ve got all the dough,” she says, twangingly sidemouthed, mimic of a classic movie bank-robber. With the cash they purchase a nondescript used economy car and abandon the hot ride in a heavily populated parking lot in a nearby mall. Though Bailey provides him no budget, she notes with approval that Tennessee buys little—just the equipment necessary to extract audio files from a memory card, a device to play it, some cheap earbuds. At the same office-supply box store where these were procured, Bailey gets a hefty binder and has holes drilled into Boyd’s manuscript so it fits. On a whim, she has a copy made—or no, not a whim, she corrects, it’s just that apparently more’s been restored to you than your body. You see the possibilities again, and there’s too many ways this book might be destroyed, the sole copy gone and gone forever. Imagine a fire. Imagine a flood. Imagine the car window rolled down unexpectedly as you sleep, the wind of velocity sweeping pages out and down the highway. Better to have a backup. They choose a motel outside town and pay cash for a room with two queens, and use some of the change to have pizzas delivered. “Everything cash,” Tennessee says, smiling. “Starting to understand why Father Julius wanted me to bring you.”
Bailey shakes her head—talking sandals is a level of crazy best contemplated at some other time, perhaps never—and reaches for the binder. The idea is to read for hours, but the day’s been too much and in the middle of a discursive passage about apes she drifts into what
seems to be the problem, good buddy?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Donk screams, pointing his rifle right at you. He’s recognized you, and of course he’s pissed. To his mind, you just disappeared his circus—his big scheme—and left him holding the bag.
You smile and light a cigarette. No movement required; you just tell a cigarette to exist in your mouth, then you tell it to be lit. And so there is cigarette, and so it is lit, and you see that it is good. You judge this a useful way to go—with Julius you always approach cautiously and hidden, but Julius goes in for the whole God jive. Donk, he’ll respond better to a direct show of power. Thank God it’s an empty room. Even so, the dimensions lurch wildly from something like a large closet to a space the size of a warehouse. The walls are painted a thousand colors, they’re a hundred varieties of brick. The floor is carpeted and it’s bare. Donk looks like a million different people.
Donk, of course, has a multitude of problems, a constellation of complications. That’s why he’s got the rifle, which really isn’t his style. Think of all his problems. Start with the sack of oranges, which he’s still got with him—look—tossed in the corner of the room. Donk found those citric globes propped up against the doorway to the Fridge, and to him, in that context, they could only be a message from Julius, and from Julius, oranges could by mutual agreement only mean the compromise of their secret: the children’s room, a truly safe place, where food and toys and warmth and a comfortable bed can be found, built beneath-ground, the only entrance a hidden spot surrounded by a scrim of high grass, tucked between two of the projects of Domino City. Only when Donk rushed immediately to the secret door did he realize how utterly he’d been had. He’s never visited the children’s room; Julius had arranged the whole thing: contractors, payment, bribes, decorating, staffing, all. The idea’s always been to have complete arm’s-length separation, remembering all too well the danger Yale put everyone in. Gangs are as aware today as they were during Ralph’s rise of the extent to which abandoned children can be used as spies and soldiers; to be caught gathering them all in one place, as Yale had done with his greenhouse, can only ever be seen as an act of war—and Morris wouldn’t have paused, had he discovered Donk’s children’s room, from treating those unlucky kids the same way Ralph treated Yale’s.
So here’s Donk, getting the oranges and immediately rushing, certain beyond certainty he’ll find the whole place tossed, a charnel house of murdered kids…barging in only to find everything peaceful, fine…and he knew he’d been tricked, watched, tracked to the spot, his greatest secret exposed. So now Donk’s sitting in Domino City by a window in building 2, top floor, an unoccupied room he’s secured for himself with clear sightlines, vest on but jacket off, hair mussed though he doesn’t know it, watching the entrance through a rifle scope, waiting to see who it is who’s tricked him into revealing the door, and what they intend to do with the knowledge. While he waits, he’s already brooding over everything else—Someone’s got the drop on him, that much is clear. Nobody knows what oranges mean but Julius. Which means Julius has betrayed him…but under what duress? And who else is giving him up? He sent his loonies out and they’ve brought nothing but bad news. Tennessee’s escaped, door off the hinges. Bailey’s gone from her hospital bed. Julius missing, and most of the Neon brothers and sisters gone. Donk can only conclude this means Morris has everyone captured. And his deadline with Morris is tomorrow, and no Gordy to be found. There’s no better interpretation; the new boss has decided he’s failed and is getting ready to collect on Donk, hard, and he’ll take everyone Donk loves first, just to make it sting more…
You think: I could tell him it’s simpler than that. That the oranges were nothing but a feint, just Tennessee acting on my instructions, buying some time for those meddlesome muddlers I wanted safely out of town. But I won’t do that—goodness, no. I want Donk as angry as I can get him.
You’ve waited too long to give an answer; Donk fires. The bullet clips your cigarette, extinguishing it; passes into your right cheek and out through the back of your skull.
You smile and heal yourself slow enough so Donk sees it; you want him impressed—yes, a direct show of power will be just the thing.
“Who are you?” Donk asks, without lowering the rifle. “How did you take it from Gordy?”
Ah, you think. He sees your power, he thinks you have the ticket. He’s still obsessed with the thing. A logical conclusion. Still, he sees your power and doesn’t quail. Most people are scared just seeing you, but not him. Even when he’s seen he can’t hurt you, he stays focused on the task before him. It’s an impressive display of will and nerves. You need someone who will punish Morris to the breaking point; he appears to be an apt tool for the job. Just wait until you’ve
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
observed these behaviors across wide ranges of related species. For example: Apes hate little people. Science hasn’t done enough to study this. There’s a certain logic to it. Think of the pecking order. Think of living in an ape community, surrounded by jungle. Jungle on all sides—on all sides jungle! And in that jungle, the Things creep. Them. The Things. You, with your body of hair and sinew, without language, without words, lack even the rudiments of comprehension’s gruel. All you know is the jungle is out there, pressing all around, deep and dark and hidden, jungle forever and forever jungle. You can smell The Things in there, the unseen Things; you might hear them move but you don’t see them, until—with first a rustle and then, immediately thereupon, a horrendous screal of fang or coil or claw or spur—there bursts from the foliage like Satan’s dogs a dread beast, releasing massive deathly energy after long stealth to grab you if you are unlucky, or one of your cohorts if they are unlucky, to pull you into the darkness that surrounds and murder you loudly within earshot of the rest, eat warm bananacurry yoghurt from your intestines while you still live. Then there are the other ape tribes, competition for your territory and resources. They’re worse than the Things, because they leave nothing behind. If some other group wants your plenty and sees weakness in you, they’ll be all around you in an instant, grabbing you with powerful rough hands and smashing you against the rocks, teeth at your neck, clever strong fingers in your eyes. Every male and every child killed and eaten. Learn the smell of your tribe. Any ape from outside is a presumed advance scout and must be dealt with immediately.
So you learn to sleep in the trees. You forage on the ground in packs, you and your coterie of hairballs, picking and chewing each other’s curdling fleas. You stick close to your fellows, forgiving them their farts, for only when you cling together like dingleberries can you hope to live even one day more. The largest of you, the meanest, the strongest, he is your best friend. Not despite the fact that he is cruel to you, not despite the fact that he can (and does) hold you down and abuse you, screw your girlfriend while you watch, bully you, torment you, dominate you and at every turn remind you of that domination, not despite all this, but because of it. In the life of the jungle, bigness isn’t just good, it is goodness itself. If you are one of the whales in your midst, so much the better. All the best of the difficult ape life will be yours. But if you are small, then you, dependent on whales, love the brute for throwing his weight around. He’ll keep you from getting eaten alive, you see. But your love for him in no way mitigates your seething hatred of him—how could it? Outrages committed against you are outrages still. You remember each bite, each shove, each cuckolding, each time your food was snatched from you with a snarl—and not only you. Did you think you were the first weak ape? Oh no, you fool, genetics had its way with you long before any bully did; you are the product of a weaker strain. Centuries of generational submissive memories are packed into your poor cranium, highly pressurized, providing you each night with angry orgasmic dreams of chasing, of catching, choking, biting, screwing, killing…this pure naked compressed rage must inevitably find an outlet. It can’t go to your actual tormenter, distiller of your ire. Not only would this be suicidal, but it wouldn’t even occur to you. You don’t want to attack your tormenter. You love him. He’s the strength of your tribe. He’s your protection against The Things. He’s better than a bad death out there.
No, your anger goes to the smaller ape. The one you yourself can hold down, torment, cuckold, terrorize. The one who holds the food you can snatch. The one who, in turn, loves you with rigid devotion, all the while making his own daily microscopic deposits into his own storehouses of shame and hate. The smallest ape is a dangerous ape. Everybody knows it. Abused by all, abuser of none. Nothing but a powder keg. The rest of the tribe tolerates but does not trust him. He goes around, futilely showing his teeth at all times in gratuitous show of submission. Someday his mind will snap from the abuse and he’ll attack, and then he’ll have to be destroyed. It’s only a matter of time. The second-smallest ape dreads, without realizing it, this day of unwanted demotion.
Now: Apply ape logic to small people. You see? Remember, an ape can’t tell a person from an ape. Apes think everybody is an ape.
What then, in the eyes of an ape, is a little person? Why, to ape perception, a little person is the smallest ape there is. Smaller than has ever been imagined. He must represent eons of pent-up violence. Distrusted, hated, feared, abused. And from an outside tribe! In the presence of any small person, any ape will convert into a frenzied murder-salad. Any ape, any small person. And what if a small person should be unlucky enough to encounter the one ape whose spleen has found no vent, who has never had a target for his slow years of violent urges? What if some unlucky small person should chance upon…the smallest ape? This clearly observable phenomenon
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
can only be described as a disturbing disappointment: sleep but no Attic.
In the morning, Bailey, beginning to find the familiarity of her body, takes a shift at the wheel. She drives the longest roads they can find, and the most circuitous, and the farthest from the main. Tennessee pops in the earbuds and listens, eyes closed, while the tires eat horizon. His eyes pop. “It’s Gordy-Gord talking, all right!” he exclaims. “Like Julius promised.” Then he’s gone, listening to the confession of his son gone forever, learning to the whys and wherefores of Gordy’s great abdication, information Tennessee has long sought, and sought almost as fervently as he has his abdicating lad. Bailey relishes the silence; she needs the time to ponder her missing Attic, and the strange visitation she’d received from a stranger who said he was her brother. So much else strange has happened, what if it’s true? What if you have a sibling, lost to you on some other plane, some other room you only managed in all your exploration to discover once? And what was it he’d told you? To run. Yes. Run and you’ll find me, Boyd had said. You’ll have to jump, and trust your luck, he’d said. I was; now I’m not, he’d said. If you find me, I can be. Bailey looks out the window, seeing but not seeing the passing sameness of flatland, fixated on her reflection thrown weakly by the glass, which suggests a ghost hovering just inches outside, traveling alongside on a parallel course.
In the evening they stop some miles outside Iowa’s capital city, selecting their motel for its remoteness, but near enough to see the city’s modest skyline from the front porch, as well as the roadside distance marker: RACCOON RIVER 12 MILES “Once upon a time, a long time ago, everything changed for me,” Tennessee remarks, studying the sign. “I think this town was called something different back then.” The next morning, Bailey clutches her knees to her chest, weeping noiselessly so she won’t have to explain to her companion why she mourns. It’s even worse now. When she sleeps, she now knows the Attic will not be there. Her dreams are worse than empty, they’re full of nothing. She walks endless hallways of doors but when she tries the doors the entrances have been bricked. She’s been restored. She’s been banished. But she suspects she knows what she needs to do. “You’ll have to run,” Boyd had told her. Fine, Boyd, whoever you are. You want me to run? I’ll run.
Bailey laces up her sneakers, heads out down the long flat straightness, between the heights of cornstalk. Running out into this perverse sameness to reclaim her infinity of variance, running until she’s sun-baked, heaving herself back in time to fall asleep under the shower until woken by the water going cold, hauling herself aching and road-battered to the bed, too exhausted to remember sleeping, waking to find herself unchanged, the Attic still missing. Forcing herself back out in the morning to start again; letting the realities of motion, of pain, of balance, of dominion over her limbs, settle their physical benedictions wearily upon her.
Six days of this. For the first two days, Tennessee remains with her, seemingly unconcerned that they’d chosen to stop driving, seemingly incurious about his companion’s strange new routine, sitting on the low concrete slab that serves the motel as a porch, back to the wall, sandals stretched out, letting the sun shine on his face, listening unceasingly to his son’s voice.
On the third morning, Tennessee packs his luggage: the envelope, a single plastic grocery bag containing a change of underwear, a toothbrush, the device, and the earbuds. “I found my hopelessness,” he says. “Oh,” says Bailey. Not until evening, when she returns to find Tennessee gone, does it occur to her: She’d never thought to ask what he meant, or where he was going. He’s taken the car and a single stack of twenties from the satchel. Bailey finds herself unconcerned by the theft, even unclear about whether or not it was theft. Had she offered? She can’t remember.
Tennessee’s departure throws something ineffable but vital, previously balanced, out of skew. The world becomes drab but surreal, unfamiliar, as if illustrated by a vivid and tainted mind. Stranded in an island of corn in an unfamiliar land, each morning she puts the distant modest skyline of Raccoon River to her back and lets it melt away from her, step by step, sun on her left side until it beats down from above. Then she stops, turns and watches the skyline creep back toward her once more, sun crawling down toward the horizon, the sun always on the left; before long, the left side of her body perpetually feels several degrees warmer than the right. On the sixth day she can barely move from her bed and dares hope—in vain—this may be enough to open the Attic. But on the seventh day, rising from a sixth night dreaming of hallways and bricked doorways, she awakens to a new revelation.
Bailey puts the satchel with cash and manuscripts—the original from Father Ex and the copy she made not long after—into her backpack and stands on the motel stoop, watching the sun light the dawn sky. Everything grows sharp and clear for her; the world again becomes exact, comprehensible. The thought rises—I’m still in the Attic, or else this is the real Attic and I never considered it. Imagine: This is the room with all the corn. There are other rooms to find everywhere. It’s like Boyd said, you have to run. Run, and it will all reveal itself to you as it comes to meet you. The beauty of it makes her want to weep, and so she does. Two low concrete steps and off the motel porch, weeping and blissful, Bailey runs, but when she reaches the road the wind pushes her out of her usual course. Rather than struggle against it, she surrenders, puts her back to the wind and her face to the skyline, and watches the city of Raccoon River slowly rise up to meet her.
Her suspicion proves correct: Raccoon River is another room. It’s the room that has Raccoon River in it. A collection of high buildings that would not have overwhelmed Loony Island’s modest towers, spaced wide apart from one another, gaps in a child’s mouth, stones across a pond, a city at once urban and rural. They watch her beneficently, the buildings, as she passes in and out and among them, as she slows to a more observant pace, to a trot, to a walk, to a stroll, coming to rest at last in a greensward filled with sculptures. It is, Bailey sees, a smaller room nested within the greater room of Raccoon River. The room with the sculptures, within the room holding Raccoon River, which is itself contained within the room with all the endless gossiping corn. She wanders, captured by this new perspective, thinking—This changes everything. The paths leading to harm and doom are endless, so what advantage is gained in blockading against one or another of them? Choose one of the endless safer paths, and where do you find yourself eventually but in danger, beset once again on all sides by no fewer possibilities of harm and doom than before? But here is the room with statues on the lawn, a reality far worthier of contemplation than any catastrophic possibility. Here is the rangy skeleton of a horse described by driftwood. The sinister and contemplating statue of a rabbit posed in a parody of Rodin. The iron statue of a long coat standing with no visible wearer to support it. The blasted white tree. The steel girders, painted saffron, arranged at jutting angles. The two fat pawns, one black and the other white. The spider with impossibly long spindle-legs. An array of intriguingly shaped obelisks. White monkey bars nested in white monkey bars nested in white monkey bars.
Near the center of the display, a large hollow child crouches, its knees drawn against its chest. The child is twenty feet tall from rump to head, pure white in the places it exists—though these places are few, as the hollow child is primarily comprised of empty space. Its shape a hint, suggested rather than insisted upon, rounded at the borders of his existence but muddled by the jagged internal shapes of his sparsely spaced remains, as if it’s been artfully filigreed from paper and then expanded from a denser state, as if its cells have abandoned their structural bonds, and, caught in the act of dispersing like smoke or cloud, have been frozen before the final dissolution. You can see right through the hollow child to the sky and clouds and buildings beyond. As a result of its distention, it seems, from a distance, to be made of arbitrary shapes, spaghetti and tendril, but as Bailey nears, she realizes it’s composed of an assortment of alphabetical figures interlocked and artfully arranged. This is the largest statue in the park. There are gaps at the base, allowing entrance and egress. In the center of the interior space a man sits in a posture mirroring that of the hollow child. He looks up as she enters. They stare at each other in amazement.
“What are you doing here?” the man asks.
“What are you doing here?” she returns.
Gordy smiles, shows a pamphlet—a bearded lady flying through the air. On the schedule, a listing for Raccoon River. “I’m chasing a circus,” he said. “And I think I’ve finally
solved all his other problems, too.
“There’s no ticket. I don’t need any object to do what I do,” you say.
Donk fires again, again, again. It goes the same as before. You watch him accept the fact that you can take his bullets unharmed—and, again, it’s impressive, watching Donk receive the new information, almost immediately accept it, and adapt. He shrugs, tosses the rifle clatter to the ground.
“All right. And what do you do, exactly?”
You walk over to the rifle, heft it. “ ‘Whatever I want’ is what I do.” You balance it upright on your palm, barrel down. With your other palm you reach up to the stock. “I can do anything.” You press down and the rifle softens, collapses into your hands and you roll it like clay into a sphere. “Anything—except for one little thing.”
You wait for Donk to ask about one little thing. Donk keeps quiet and watches you. My God, you think, I have complete advantage—is he putting me off my balance?
“Except for one little thing,” you repeat awkwardly, “There’s a man I can’t go near, but I think you can. More, I think you want to. Hurting him might be the only thing you want.”
“Morris?”
“Morris.”
“And what makes him so special that you can’t go near him, if you’re King-Hot-Shit-I-Do-Whatever-I-Want?”
“Call it…the universe’s preference,” you say, still rolling, rolling the clay sphere that had been a rifle, rolling it smaller and smaller in your hands, thinking with the slightest defensiveness—Of course I can. But when he dies, or he calls it, then the wave comes. And the wave is like the ticket—it comes from other levels, from heights I’ve yet to attain. How fast might it come? Faster than I can escape? It’s certainly possible. And why risk it, when I have one such as this to do my work for me? “And…” a dramatic pause for effect “The universe’s preferences are my preferences.”
“That’s sort of nonsense, but have it your way,” Donk says. He loosens his necktie. “What’s your game with me?”
“You sought Gordy for the power he holds. You want to harm Morris. I know why.”
“I want justice for Morris. He deserves it.”
“Indeed he does. All you have to give and more. So tell me.”
“Tell you…what?”
“Tell me what you’d have done with Gordy’s ticket if you’d gotten it. Convince me you’ll do it right.”
And so Donk does. His plans for Morris, describing it in lingering detail. Bit by bit, piece by piece, moment by moment, pain by pain. When he’s done, you pause and regard him. Extraordinary. His inventiveness may even surpass your own. The clay sphere between your palms is tiny. You harden it into a diamond. You give the diamond a setting. You give the setting a chain. You say:
“And then, the amulet had All Power. And it was so.”
Then you toss it to him. When he’s put it on, you disappear, folding in half, then half again, then again, reducing to nothing. It’s the damnedest thing. But before you go, you can see Donk has become aware of his new limitless abilities, that he has
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
understood. That’s all I ever wanted: to understand.
Tennessee shut off Gordy’s confession and sat in the quiet. Nothing but the wall of a motel at his back and the stillness; no wind. The corn standing in the sun made low crackling sounds as it warmed, and the man who had been Sterling Shirker pondered his son’s words: command and door and edict and wave and voice. And think of Julius’s beautiful words, his last and only sermon, about fools and hopelessness. No wonder it moved you so; after all, your boy’s found a hopelessness bigger than the world. That’s why he ran. He’s out there, somewhere. He’s playing out the line for us, as far as he can take it. Disobeying the command. Waiting until that wave finally comes and takes Morris and this whole Pigeon Forge mess away. You should take on a hopelessness of your own. It feels right, with Gordy taking on such a massive hopelessness, that his father should take up one of his own. So what hopelessness could you choose?
You could go back to the Neon—no end to hopelessness in Loony Island. Julius has informed you that Nettles stayed behind; you could go help her. Or you could head out over the sea, find one of those desert lands you hear about on television, those kids with the spindly arms and bloated bellies and teeth escaping from their faces. If ever there was a hopelessness, that would qualify. Or, do the near thing instead of the far thing, wander over into the nearest town, into Raccoon River, find some hopelessness there. No doubt one would present itself. Here’s a tempting one—go and find Gordy, join him in his own hopelessness. The boy could use another set of eyes, another pair of hands. Or go buy a giant map and play a game of “pin-the-tail.” Go where my pin stuck. Or go itinerant; walk the land, hopping from trouble to trouble as I found it, like a hero from a TV show.
But you know where already, said the Sandals Julius. Sterling, haven’t you realized yet?
There was no sense of searching for a disembodied voice. Never any question it was the sandals talking. Tennessee didn’t even open his eyes. It was as if he’d been waiting the whole time to hear from them.
Tell me then, Tennessee answered back. Where’s my hopelessness. Well, Sterling, they asked, where do you never want to go again? and he answered, with growing excitement and horror and joy, Why, you know where I’m never going back to. As if I haven’t told everybody a thousand times. Well then, said the Sandals Julius, you have your answer. Don’t you.
There must be something else, Tennessee said, there must. But the Sandals Julius lapsed into silence. The corn crackled in the sun.
It’s funny, Sterling thought, but since I put these sandals on, I haven’t stammered even once. Maybe I’m not “Tennessee” any more.
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
Artists, a word to you now—whispered in your ear: Your art is not about you. To be more precise, it is not about you alone. It is about you no more (and no less) than it is about every other consciousness encountering it.
—Unknown
begun already to suspect what he’s capable of.
Within an hour, it’s no longer anything so uncertain as suspicion; it’s certainty, and Donk is gone. For whatever it’s worth, he’s the Coyote now. Not just what they call him anymore but what he thinks of himself. He’s spent the hour in the unfurnished Domino City room, testing the limits of the abilities the stranger gave him. There don’t seem to be any meaningful ones.
This room is the one. The very One. Ever a man of compartments, Donk long ago secured for himself an unoccupied room in every tower of Domino City to use, as needed, for surveillance (or, for example, in the case of Tennessee, for storage), and in this tower, he selected this specific room precisely for the sentimental weight of it. As a boy he sat here—right here—hour upon creeping hour throwing a rubber ball tub tub tub tub into a cup. The Coyote thinks of the ball and cup, and they appear on the floor. He spends long minutes holding them, these long-gone artifacts of childhood.
Using his mind, he opens and closes, locks and unlocks, the apartment’s front door.
He gives himself muscles of comical proportions, shredding his suit. He deflates himself again, restores his suit back around him as he does.
He floats himself a foot above the floor.
There’s a shell casing on the floor. He turns it into a potato. He turns the potato into a ferret. He turns the ferret into mist. He turns the mist into a fine filigree of platinum.
He could turn the platinum into a rifle to replace the one that became his amulet, but he has no need anymore of a rifle. The rifle was only ever a tool.
He goes to the window. It’s open; it’s the one he’d been watching from, surveying the entrance to the children’s room in a panic through his rifle scope. A laughable worry now. The Coyote gives himself ultraviolet and infrared senses—Look, there the children are, subterranean, safe. They’ll keep safe forever now, he thinks. I’ll see to it.
Out the window spreads a cloudy sky. He pushes the clouds away. He turns the sky purple. He turns the sky yellow. He turns the sky black. He turns the sky back the way it was. Here and there, he hears the sudden screams of those attentive souls who had been, at that moment, watching out their own windows, who without warning had seen this inexplicable atmospheric display.
He casts his awareness out, guided by unerring instinct, locates his friends—amazed to discover how far they’ve scattered without his knowledge—how? When was Bailey healed? It’s a miracle, but miracles, it seems, are thick on the ground these days. He’s briefly shocked into anger and something like fear to see how apparently loose was his grasp upon this puzzle’s moving pieces, but then he remembers that it no longer matters; that grasp has become infinite, so let them run. Gordy’s chasing the vanished circus, sleeping on a bus out of Elk River traveling to Buckeye. He locates Tennessee and Bailey driving circuitous roads toward nothing, running from Morris, but also…ah. They’re running from you. They fear you; they think you’re a hard man, consumed only by thoughts of vengeance. They’ve misunderstood you badly. You’ll teach them a better lesson in time; at least they’re clear and safe. He can’t find Julius. This is unfortunate, and suggests that perhaps Morris has ended the life of at least one of his comrades. So be it: one crime more to make the bastard answer to.
The Coyote thinks—Pragmatism won’t be necessary any more, nor secrets. These were never anything but tools. There won’t be any more lies to keep track of, there’ll be no more compartments. These were your cruder tools, your defenses against power, but now you have the power to make obsolete any need for defense; it will be all plain dealing from here, and nothing but dealing plain.
The Coyote returns to his home, pours a drink, picks up his book, then quickly sets it down again. Thinks—reading isn’t necessary anymore. Reading was only ever a tool. To know a book, now, you simply have to think about knowing it and you know it. He steps out his window, rises high, higher, higher, hovers over the city. Tells himself: Neither is a home necessary. Home, too, was only ever a tool. Now you can be all the tools you ever needed. Descending slowly back down to the roof where the twisted remains of the greenhouse stands, he begins to understand the new forms he’ll need to mold for himself.
The Coyote thinks—Consider the weight a place can take on. How many children disappeared that day? Perhaps a dozen. He threw Yale off this roof, Ralph did. You and Bailey watched him fall, and then you ran. You never saw what happened to the kids, but you always had your suspicions. Let’s keep the math simple. An average weight of a hundred pounds. Twelve hundred pounds of life. For each day gone by between then and now, this is the weight of unpaid wrong that lands upon that roof. Visit it; you’ll feel it. The greenhouse isn’t gone; you just wouldn’t know it had ever been a greenhouse. Scattering of glass shards, twisting metal framework rusted out and rain-riven, monkey bars for a malicious gnome. This is where you’ll start your new republic, the centerpoint of a new reality. The weight of the place expunged at last—no, not expunged, but rather fully invested, converted, redeemed.
They’ve understood you so poorly—your enemies and your friends. The bricks of cash you stored, the prestige you gained, whatever small influence you managed to accrue—all meant to be spent in restoration. You never thought you’d gain such a power as this, but it will be spent wisely and well. A fully restored greenhouse atop HQ, and all the children invited from their hidden secret room. The gangs purged, their slaves freed, their quarreling silenced, the narcotic spike pulled from the social arm. Do they truly think you never intended to finish your quest? Did they think you’d be satisfied once you’d sent Ralph to a fitting and deserved end? As if Ralph were the start and the finish of the problem. As if even the five gangs were. What of the police, who failed to make even a cursory investigation of the sad end of what were, to them, nothing more than a dozen public nuisances? What of the city’s entire population, whose practiced disinterest was so complete it gave license to the authorities for their apathy—who with tasteful aversion and willful blindnesses, were the source and the wellspring of that apathy? No, Loony Island is only the beginning of your work on the world, even as the greenhouse will be only the beginning of your work on Loony Island. From the greenhouse, from the Island, it will spread—a quickly growing sphere of order, restoration, peace, and safety, cresting out from you in rapidly expanding concentric circumferences…
But first: Morris. You’ll make him pay a slow debt, then you’ll block his tunnels and empty his oubliettes, then heal his prisoners, bring them back to themselves, return meaning to their lives. Once you’ve finished with Morris, you’ll go to Bailey, and make her understand. She’ll apologize when she understands…but first, there must be a reckoning, some unspecified time for her, of reflection and penance. For her to have understood you so badly, to have healed herself and used her good fortune to run from you…There must be some form of redeeming punishment.
But—it occurs to him—you can allow yourself the fun of one last deception. Your deadline is tomorrow, and you haven’t found Gordy. Morris will send for you. Be subordinate Donk another day. He’ll find you easily; you’ll be
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
all over the country. And who’ll replace them? Sister Nettles gazed around the emptiness of the Neon Chapel; without any of the brothers and sisters to share it, the space, once charming and cozy, felt garish and vast. Wanting to glare at Julius the way she was accustomed whenever he was being annoying, but most annoying of all, Julius had left, his only goodbye his sermon.
Brother Tennessee, having only recently arrived, had done nothing. At least his absence left no gap. But the rest…
Father Julius, of course, had scoured the city, locating need, folks hungry, things broken, noting it, bringing the list to his proxy for funds
And Dave Waverly, the secret proxy with reserves of moxie, he’d released the funds.
Sister Biscuit Trudy had hauled sacks of fresh-baked rolls to those Julius found.
And Jack and Brock, they’d fixed what needed fixing.
Sister Mishkin, she’d done the baking, then followed Trudy, carrying the excess sacks.
Brother Pretty Trudy, himself only recently escaped from a hard life selling ass, had brought medical and emotional aide to all the pretty girls and pretty boys, and those not so pretty, and those aged out and discarded, all those who had found their young bodies bought them first attention and flattery but then rough treatment and bad use.
And Sister Winnie had tutored in the secret room Donk kept for abandoned children, the only other entrusted with knowledge of that location.
Now none of them did any of that—but still, the expectation would remain, just as she had. She thought about leaving. She wondered why she hadn’t yet. She decided to leave.
She stayed. She tended her garden.
Weeks passed. On Sunday mornings, meat arrived for the weekly barbecue. The Slantworthy Trust in perpetuity. She tried to send it back, but it was already sold, so she had it stuffed in the rapidly filling freezer.
“How on earth, Jules,” she asked the emptiness, “could you leave all this to me alone?”
No answer, of course. Julius had left, just as he said he would.
She tried not to think of the sandals.
There had been two pairs left when she’d arrived the night Father Julius had gone. One had her name embossed in the leather of upper sole, and the address of the Neon Chapel. The other had Gordy’s name embossed, that and a Knoxville address. Yesterday she looked it up; it’s a motel. What on earth. She didn’t want Gordy’s pair, so she mailed them to the motel.
She didn’t want the other pair, either, even if they did carry her name. Determined not to wear them, ever. They bothered her. Something about them; a feeling she had about them. An instinct she’d had, a foolish one, that she’d had the moment she saw them there on the floor. Who are those sandals? she’d wondered. Not “what” but “who.”
A foolish notion. She wouldn’t entertain it. They could sit there in the middle of the floor forever, as far as she was concerned.
Nettles brought them with her to the garden, too piqued to putter. Left the sandals on the grass at the garden’s edge. She attacked the earth with the trowel, pulled the early shoots of weeds out of the turned soil with the meticulous care that her shortened digits required of her.
The sandals warmed in the sun. Beautiful construction. Handmade craftsmanship, by the look.
She moved down the rows, gathering cucumbers, eggplant, tomatoes. And who’s going to deliver these, she thought angrily.
In the sun, the sandals positively glowed.
There was no reason to put them on.
No reason in the world.
Sandals are inappropriate footwear for gardening.
She put them on. There was some difficulty with the buckles but she managed it with the dexterity she’d learned knifing at the sardine sluice, knitting at the Neon.
That was a foolish thing to do, she thought. Why’d you do such a foolish thing?
Not alone, said a voice. She heard it in her head.
Nettles stood and walked away, as fast as her feet could carry her, back toward the Neon. I’m not answering that, she told herself. I’m not. I’m not.
No no no.
Not alone, the sandals said, again. They’re all wearing me, too. They’re
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
easy to find. The cardinals come to collect Donk in the morning, at Ralph’s, during office hours. He doesn’t argue, just deflates a bit, tries to look defeated and frightened as he trots meekly in their company, guarded behind and before, tries not to smile or show his anticipation. He can feel the amulet under his shirt. As expected, they bring him down into the tunnel, to the all-white antechamber. Still disconcerting to be in that long white sameness, even now that he knows the secret of the tunnels’ carving; it was good ol’ Gordy with his godlike power. The now-familiar round steel door rises up; not a safe after all but the entrance to the strange Tunnel CAT, the bullet-shaped tank Morris uses to traverse the tunnels. Soon, Donk knows, Morris plans to ride the Pigeon Force–facing one, head back to the home office for his little bird-and-spade ceremony. And yes, Morris is waiting in the antechamber, crutch in armpit. Soon his leg will be as healed as it can be, and he’ll discard the crutch, but he’ll always limp. He knows it enrages Morris; to be forced to carry a permanent defect, this diminishment, this constant reminder of his failure to control his reality. It’s delicious to anticipate how much worse it’s going to get for him, how many more intolerable indignities he’ll be forced to endure.
In the center of the room, an oubliette waits. There’s a gang of cardinals in the room with them; the muscle. They’ll be tasked with forcing him into the box. The little ones are there—the Andrews. Morris looks expectantly at the man he still thinks still works for him. Donk pauses to savor the moment—with Ralph it was over too quickly. This time you’ll let it last, perhaps forever. He’s momentarily confused—hang on a minute, you wanted to do this for Bailey’s sake, and Bailey’s healed—but then he pushes it aside. Even if the effects weren’t permanent, he still hurt her. And were you doing this for Bailey alone? Not at all. Think of yourself. Look at that thing, that box. It’s for you. It’s here he’d entomb you. He’d torture you there forever. He means to. Think of those he’s done it to, the hundreds who even now scream in their oubliettes. Think of those he’s shipped off around the world. Think of those in his prisons. He steals months and years, steals memories, converts them into cash and credit. Think of how he’s profited from them all. And Julius, your poor priestly chum. What has he done to Julius? Something unimaginable, no doubt. No, with Morris there can be only plain dealing, and you’ll deal with him plain.
“I gave you all the time you asked for,” Morris says. A glance over his shoulder.
“Yep,” Donk says, and sees his enemy’s eyes narrow, enraged at the effrontery of one who refuses to be cowed. The smoke from his cigar smells like shit. Donk tells the cigar to stop burning, and it winks out.
“And have you succeeded?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“I can’t say you have either,” Morris snaps. He tries to draw on his extinguished cigar, examines it, finds it dormant. “No Gordy.” He produces a lighter. Donk—just toying with him now—tells the lighter to have no fluid, and so it is empty. “No goddamn Gordy…” trying without success to produce flame…still trying without success “…and all this time…” he gives up, curses, throws cigar and lighter against the wall. “All this time goddamn wasted!”
“Quite true. I’ve wasted your time. I wasted it.”
“No use complaining to me that you meant well.”
“I agree. But you see, I didn’t mean well.”
Morris stares at him, dumbly shocked. Donk continues: “Julius is—was—a good friend. I wanted to protect him, and help him, and I did that. I did it by wasting your time.”
Morris opens his mouth and closes it. Donk’s never seen Morris flustered before. He likes it. But enough ruse; time to begin. Donk says: “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t I tell you what’s going to happen to you, instead?”
Donk snaps his fingers—an unnecessary fillip, but he wants to make sure the point is unmissable—and the oubliette turns into an equal volume of eggs, dozens and dozens and dozens, cartoned in molded blue foam, stacked by the gross, shrink-wrapped on new pine pallets. The cardinals all cram back up against the wall in shock and religious awe.
He watches the awareness crash onto his enemy’s face; first by bits, then all at once, Yes. Now he finally knows.
“Give it to me. Give it to me right now.” Morris commands.
“There’s no ticket anymore, boss,” Donk says, spitting the last word. “Maybe there never was. There’s only me.” At a sign from Morris, half the assassins step forward; they fall to the ground as a synchronized corporate entity, each of their hearts converted, within their chests, mid-beat, into a single white rose; their suddenly untethered arterial tubework filling their chests with lifeblood as they lie silently twitching on the scarlet carpet. Donk sees the little ones, Andrew and Andrew, ever calmer than their fellows, exchange meaningful glances.
Now. Show this shit of the world who you really are.
“You’re going to give it to me,” Morris says again, quiet and firm, as though the saying will, by confidence, make it so. The effect is muddled somewhat by two glances he gives over his shoulder. The Coyote says nothing, but smiles.
“I am Continuity. It is mine. Give it to me.”
The Coyote smiles wider, amazed—The more failure this man absorbs, the larger his certainty in himself grows. A spongiform prophet, filled like a tick, feasting on delusion. Look at his eyes, burning. Look at the zeal. And listen—he’s not done. “You’re denying reality itself. Taking what isn’t yours. Save yourself.”
“I want all of you to hear this,” the Coyote tells the echoing room. “What’s going to happen to this man next is, I’m going to take him. I’m going to replace his eyelids with sandpaper. Then I’m going to bring him back to you. That’s who you follow now.”
Morris says: “You can be a sign to me of cooperation or you can be a sign of rebellion. Give it to me now, or I won’t protect you from the consequences.”
You have to hand it to the man for pluck, the Coyote thinks—he truly believes he is all there is. That you are not, and neither are the trees, nor the mountains, nor the sun, nor anything else, either. The Coyote steps closer to his prey, who doesn’t fall back. You’ll regret not running, the Coyote thinks. It wouldn’t make any difference if you had, but you’ll still regret not at least trying. Come here, old son. I’ll show you how real I can be.
Later, when he’s carried Morris out of the tunnels, flown him far above the clouds, the Coyote reminds him: You won’t know when I’ll come. Might be in the morning, or a minute before midnight. You’ll never know when. But it will happen every week. And it will never stop. When he returns Morris gently back to his room and streaks up up and away, soaring once again into the clouds, he has taken the first thing. He’s enhanced his own hearing, so he can still for a long time hear the
two smallest of Morris’s bodyguards—longest serving, most trusted—glance meaningfully at one another, then at their unfortunate leader, then instruct their subordinates to fetch the abandoned wheelchair, to wheel him quickly toward a place where something—salve, saline, soothing drops—might be procured for a person in Morris’s entirely unique situation. Morris doesn’t notice—he’s holding his eyes open with exceeding caution, propping them with his fingers against any chance sandpaper blink—but in those glances can be read the slow and ominous blossoming of doubt in soil that has never before produced such a flower. He holds very still and unblinking, but presently he must blink, and when he blinks he
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
screams.
The Coyote’s hands curled and relaxed. He found himself calmly birthing new revelations to himself. There will be no reason for the innocent to fear you, he told himself, but for the guilty…children disappeared on a bright sunny morning have, over time, accrued a mass greater than can be borne. Given suitable mass, any material collected in one place will collapse into infinite conflagration, self-generating, self-sustaining, a fusion with fuel enough to burn a trillion years. It can be terrible to consider, but think of the applications. The sun can burn, yes, but the sun gives light and warmth, growth and life. The vengeance you brought Ralph, the vengeance you’ll bring to Morris—that was only the start. The weight of children, taking on greater speed and inertia, reaching critical mass as they go, faster, faster. They’ve never stopped gaining momentum. The structures that failed to bring order to their lives, or justice to their deaths—I’ll knock down every last one of them and build them back better. Children still alive today will be able to observe and learn the art of virtue. They’ll learn to fear harming one another, by observing my punishment of those who have broken that great law. Vengeance upon all, on behalf of all. Which of them hasn’t deserved it? Even justice was ever only a tool. The world doesn’t need justice anymore. Now it has me.
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
It is wise, therefore, to begin with art. Yes, and to end there, too. Don’t trouble yourself with the artist; art is sufficient comprehension of the artist, and the only comprehension available to you, the only one ever intended for you. The substance of the artist, the presence of the artist, the knowledge of the artist, is the art.
—Unknown
caught it.”
But he hadn’t caught the circus, and he still hasn’t; he’d merely found it. Bailey knows the difference between finding a thing and actually catching it, actually having it—pride of ownership, you might call it. It’s been over a month now since she realized the world is just a room in her Attic, but she still feels the loss of the mindspace. More than once she’s thought, despairing: My whole life I’ll be chasing it, and finding it. And then, with joy: I’ll be chasing it forever. But there’s no rush anymore. There is only seeking and finding, and then, someday, the end. Or—who knows?—not the end. Perhaps death is another room. For the last weeks, there’s been Gordy, and the road, and a string of motels, and laying low. It’s what they have. Someday there will need to be more, but for now it’s enough.
The Circus of Bearded Love had arrived in Raccoon River two days after their chance reunion. By then they’d fallen together, Gordy and Bailey, into their present arrangement. They’d left the sculpture park to find a place to eat and try to piece together what they knew about what had happened back on the Island; Gordy explained his end of things; it seemed around the time Bailey had been lying in a hospital bed wiggling her toes in amazement, Gordy’d been materializing way out in Elk River, Washington, in yet another park, lying flat on his back in the predawn dew of a tulip bed. Clothes on his back and nothing more. And normal for the first time since boyhood—normal. Fully visible with nary a flicker, memory restored…and other things, too, but those he’d only explain later. The Voice was gone, for one, its dreadful command dormant at last. Now he can wait for the wave to come and wash away Gordy’s enemy, his pursuer, his anxiety for himself and the world. What will it be like when it arrives, this wave? The mechanics of the thing confuse her. Will it be precise or indiscriminate? Will it flood the basin of Pigeon Forge to the treeline of the Smokies, washing it all away, both the evil and the innocent, or will it be prehensile in its judgment, selecting only offenders for a watery grave? When will it actually, finally, finally, finally arrive—and how can we be sure it ever will, given the apparent relativistic speeds involved? What if Morris isn’t in town when it hits? How will it reach him if its source is a doorway below ground? She suspects Gordy doesn’t know. The closest he has come to explaining is to say, “It’s bigger than that.” That’s one thing that hasn’t changed, he claims: the wave. It’s still there, a part of his vision, something seen but not yet realized.
He hadn’t been disoriented in the Elk River tulip bed, despite the seeming randomness of his new location. “That part was clear right away,” Gordy had explained, “the circus was still there.” Except it wasn’t there, exactly, only the ghost of it, the remaining pieces not yet packed up from the previous night; the rides half-deconstructed, detritus of the carnival, two laggard tents. Still, what little remained Gordy recognized from its recent but brief appearance in Loony Island, and from boyhood. And he found a prize, balled up beside a nearby overflowing trash bin.
“It’s a modified tour schedule—one without Loony Island listed,” Gordy said, wolfing food—obviously famished, the poor guy had been living rough. He’d nearly wept with joy when he saw Bailey’s stacks on stacks of crispy cash. He produced the schedule, slid it over the table to her, where she noted the tour’s final destination: Pigeon Forge, TN. “Cities and dates. After that, the hard thing was just getting where I needed to be.” Destitute, he’d had to panhandle for the bus ticket to Buckeye, Colorado. “Nobody who heard my shuck and jive really thought they were paying for an actual bus ticket,” Gordy sighed, “I guess they never will.” Gordy, having never learned the trick of approaching strangers in ingratiating fashion, proved as bad a bum as he’d been in Brasschaat. “It took me days to raise enough,” he mourned. “The bus I caught wasn’t scheduled to get me there in time to do anything but catch the tail end of the closing night. And that was before the traffic jam.” A jackknifing semi struck another semi, which spun out, jumped the median, and landed upside-down on the oncoming side. All four lanes backed up for hours. For a second time, Gordy arrived to the phantom of a circus, and was forced to shake his ass for spare change yet again. “I was more practiced at it, and I lucked into a tender soul who dropped me a ten-spot. And here I am,” he concluded.
So that was Gordy explained. Bailey, for her part, did what she could do to bring sense to what he’d left behind in Loony Island. Realizing just how strange her story would sound, she made a muddle. “Julius is sandals, I guess? Your dad said so. He thinks either Donk or Morris did it to him, but this book seems to suggest otherwise.” Slowly, haltingly, even ashamedly, she explained Boyd to him. “Anyway, the book came out of Father Ex, according to your dad. And he’s missing again, too—your dad. He stole my car.” But by then Gordy was waving his arms, begging for mercy; the follow-up questions were piling up too fast to remember. Once they’d picked through all the strands, Gordy became more philosophical. “I think the ticket’s gone. If it still were around, I think I’d know.”
“The book I told you about agrees. I skipped ahead; it says Julius got it and then he disappeared and so did the ticket.”
“When I saw you healed, I presumed it was Julius’s doing.”
“I still don’t know how, and I’m not trying to understand. It’s enough that it happened.”
“Maybe it was Julius,” Gordy mused, picking at the final crumbs on his plate.
“Sure. And maybe Julius really is ten pairs of sandals or whatever.”
“Anything’s possible,” Gordy said, with deliberate sincerity. He’d already explained to her about Landrude and the doughnut shop and the alleged Cat’s Crib. None of it made sense to Bailey, but then again, much that made no sense had proved true in recent days. Gordy returned to the schedule. “This says she’s part of the freak show and the circus—Jane. She dances, then she’s on the trapeze.”
“We’ll go to both.”
“Are you coming along?”
“I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“They’ll be watching for me there. For me specifically. It’s going to be dangerous.”
Bailey nodded, pride of ownership returning. “That’s why I’m
in the corner of the tent waiting for her—God, had it only been yesterday when he first set eyes on her? No. It had not. He’d first set eyes on her years ago, a boy at the circus. And then again, years later, in the cavern of oubliettes, he’d seen her again for the first time. And then later in Färland, he once again had set eyes on her for the first time. Each time, he’d died, caught in amber, pressed against the timeless perfection of instantaneous love. This meeting to come had to him the dramatic feel of a last breathless encounter, as though they were ancient lovers chosen by destiny, doomed by fate to this cycle of near and far, attraction and separation. This notion appealed to Gordy’s romantic nature, and he soon found himself in an elegiac frame of mind. Would this meeting, too, be the first time? Would he still see with new eyes? Would this be another gorgeous and crushing death?
They’d opted to disguise him, or rather Bailey, cautious and canny, had decided. Nothing fancy—a disguise that calls attention to itself is worse than none—just a scarf, some thick-rimmed glasses with non-prescription lenses, and a quickly administered close-cropped haircut that made Gordy rub his hand absently over the bristles. Posing as a couple, arm-in-arm, just a couple of carefree kids, off to see the see—and what a see! Morris had invested heavily in the freak show since the last visit. Krane is barking the names of the big stars: Wembly, the Card-Playing Gorilla, Eddie the Eyeball, the Chuckleheads, as well as the assortment of other distractions and attractions: the inextricably conjoined, Leatherskin, Potato-Face, Shirley Tattoo, three-leggers, crab-handers, Donny Two-Dick, Hottentots, half-ladies, Germans, baby-grandfathers; there’s a pig-boy, a monkey-girl, a salamander-man, an ostrich-woman—to say nothing of the displays, offshoots within the main tent where long shelves hid, dimly lit, holding deformity and relic most novel: tumors shaped like former presidents, history’s most famous formaldehyded penises, shrunken heads, Sigmund Freud’s cigar, Hitler’s moustache trimmer, Lincoln’s last shit, mummified Aborigines, a stuffed dodo, even an array of the most perfectly preserved pickled punks, packed into beakers and jars and sometimes even nestled jowl to jowl like sardines. And there, at the end of the row, the painted sign:
JANE THE DANCING BEARDED LADY
The light dimmed, and the sounds of a sitar snaked the air. The show was going to begin. Gordy and Bailey made their way in, selected seats as near to the front as they could manage. Gordy sat in a welter of anticipation…
The curtains lifted. Gordy died.
She danced obscured by a translucent scrim, backlit, only the shape of her form visible. Such lissome movements, the dance flowing from one shape to another, tantalizing, seeming even to shape the parabolic chords of the sitar playing on the speaker, while in turn being shaped by them. She moved, and the sinew of the music supported, supplanted, surprised, she made herself supplicant to it, then suddenly she surpassed it, moved in time until she seemed almost out of time. And then—no warning—the thin barrier lifted and the graceful promise of silhouette lay fulfilled, as they saw in flesh things previously guessed at in shadow.
The beard; her chosen shield, her chosen armor, her chosen sword.
Yes, chosen.
Gordy died, but a different death this time. I haven’t known anything, he thought. I haven’t known anything at all.
Then the curtain dropped and the crowd, groaning their disapproval at the sudden lacuna, stood, stretched, quickly dispersed. But Gordy crept to the stage and lifted the curtain leading to the
small dressing room. The room, a chamber adjacent to the dance’s stage, itself a chamber within the room that has been set aside for her act within the freak show, which in turn is contained within one section of the outer ring of the larger tent, which is itself a roped-off portion of the fair. Here, in her dressing room, Jane is as “within” as she can be, the smallest matryoshka. She’s alone except for her attendant—the two are weaving her beard. Jane’s attendant is the circus freak show’s other bearded lady, the one who was here first. She’s shy, the poor girl, but that’s for the best, since as a result of shyness she welcomes her displacement. If her temperament were otherwise, she might be inclined to compete to keep her position and rank, and there truly is no competition. Krane had been so delighted to have his rare flying bird returned to him, he’d immediately drawn up a new marketing campaign featuring her, made subtle changes even to the name of the circus itself. She’s found victory, has Jane’s attendant, the first bearded lady, simply in not desiring the fight. Now her hands work through Jane’s beard—shaped for the dance—making it into a less obtrusive shape for the coming acrobatics. She works quickly on the left side, while Jane, already wearing her green spangled body sleeve, attends to the right. It’s faster when they work together, and speed is called for—less than an hour remains before the flying bearded lady needs to appear on the platform…from behind, an unexpected voice makes the attendant squeak and jump.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
The globe lights in rows on either side of the mirror obscure their reflection, but she recognizes the voice. Gordy. Abandoner. He’s got someone with him. She lets her fingers work, makes him speak first. It’s possible to become stillness itself.
“You dance beautifully.” Gordy says, voice thick. He is, as always, an idiot. An idiot as always, and—again, as always—a lucky bastard. Morris’s goons were thick as marmalade for weeks, crawling all over the circus, swinging wooden swords, watching for Gordy to rise to the bearded bait, but a week ago there must have been some emergency back at the home offices; suddenly most of them were called away, leaving only a skeleton crew as rearguard. These men, though watchful and dangerous, haven’t nabbed him, and she understands why: They haven’t recognized him. They’ve never seen his face, have they? They’re looking for flickers and shimmers, but he’s disguised now in full visibility. Morris set the trap but he never considered…then she realizes—he’s counting on you to turn Gordy in. He knows you’ll want to, and you do want to—you’ll tip any canoe, including his, that comes into grappling range. All you have to do is call for the guards, and they’ll have it.
You may as well do it.
You may well.
“It’s dangerous for you here,” she says.
When Gordy smiles, he looks weary and sad. “We’d worked that out, yes.” A nod toward his companion, a pretty cat with wary eyes, wearing a simple suit of black. Her head, recently shaved, now grows around her head almost in a helmet, lending her a martial aspect that belies her slight size.
“Morris’s men are here. They’re bound to catch you if you stay long.”
“We’d better not stay long, then,” the pretty cat says in clipped tones. Jane, suddenly much more interested in this young woman than she is in her unworthy former lover, watches her in the mirror; she stands by the pinned tent-flap entrance on the balls of her feet, calm and very present. Her hands clasped behind her back, likely near some concealed weapon. Jane knows her type from living around Morris’s semblants and trustees: always prepared for a fight, always expecting one. How oddly practical of Gordy to have picked up a bodyguard.
“I could call and the guards would be here in a second,” Jane says. “In fact, that’s exactly what I’m instructed to do.”
Gordy and the bodyguard share a nervous glance.
“Can you help me think of a reason not to? If they catch you, I’ll be well rewarded.”
“I didn’t think you’d be the type to be swayed by reward.”
“But people change all the time, don’t they? You should know—you change them.” He stiffens at this but says nothing, so she continues: “And perhaps I’ve been offered a reward that entices me.”
She saw it come to him then—the understanding. “Finch. Your reward is Finch.”
Jane said nothing; her silence would have to be answer enough for him to puzzle it out. Yes, Finch. Always Finch. It’s been Finch guiding me even before she was born. Finch when I tried to warn you under the bleachers. Finch when I tended to you in your oubliette. Finch when I treated with you in the caverns to overthrow Morris. And for Finch I offered myself as sacrifice to you in Färland. And Finch now. I get to see her whenever the circus ends its tour in Pigeon Forge. Morris has not lied in that, at least. They bring her up. We sit by the fountain. She doesn’t know me. I weep. She tries to be kind to this weeping stranger. It’s the most awful thing in the world; it’s all I have. Yes, you Abandoner, you living void, you hole empty even of yourself, yes, it’s Finch, who you left behind, who you never thought to return to save, yes, it’s Finch, and if I deliver you to them then Morris says he’ll give her back to me for good, and of course he’s lying about that, but what else do I have but that?
“He really did it to her, didn’t he?” Gordy’s face undergoes a fascinating sequence of realizations; no less painful than he deserves: Yes, since you abandoned us in the Vault; yes, that moment in Färland; yes, in your righteous rage you hid knowledge from yourself of your unintended consequences; yes, and as you enacted your righteous punishment too; yes, you drowned yourself to escape the storm you brought and then gave no thought of who else might have been washed overboard to be swallowed by the sea. Gordy sits heavily and puts his head in his hands. She observes him in the mirror, her first clear look at him since Färland. He’s aged—how strange to think he would age, nothing left of the boy in him. Nothing dramatic to the shift: a slight tracery of lines on the forehead, prominence of nose, a slight diminishment of the density of his new-cropped hair. She’s always thought him such a boy, even though he was full-grown back in the cavern days. Even later, in Färland, being with him always carried with it a suggestion of the perverse. Now there’s a care about him, a wariness, a weariness, as if something essential and destructive has at great price been drawn out of him and expunged. Look at him. At last he’s coming to terms with what he’s done, and what’s been done because of him, but still he’s making it—realization, grief, supplication—all just another part of his story. He’s here to save you from whatever it is he imagines you need saving from. He’ll patch it up, put things to rights, be the champion, the protector. He’ll recede the beard he bestowed upon you, he’ll erase that long-ago-deemed punishment without considering how you’ve reshaped yourself to fit it, without a thought to the underlying suppositions made when he furnished you with it. He’ll take it in the same way he gave it, without asking, and as a part of his great hero’s journey. His redemption. His reconciliation. He thinks he’s come to set things back to rights. He doesn’t understand he’s just asking you to be compliant with him as he restores you back to a more comfortable place within his narrative. And then he’ll expect thanks and praise—yes, that will be your role. To thank him for smoothing your face once again, for restoring and putting right, never considering that for you to accept such a gift would be to accept his framing of it as punishment, which is something you’ve never done. No, you’ve never accepted a punishment—he sprouted shame on you and you bearded yourself with a shield of beauty and power. And now that he knows about Finch, he’d do the same with her. Bring her up out of the oubliettes, yes—but only as one of his great heroic works. Gordy the powerful, the wise. Gordy the good. But Gordy the abandoner? No, never that. It couldn’t be that. No, here’s what he’ll do: bring her back up, restore her mind if he can, wind the string back onto the spool into the exact original shape—machine-precise, factory new—re-encase it in its packaging and set it back on its shelf. He’d erase his own part in it, blot out his own original sin so he can go on being his own protagonist. But first, Gordy, be sure to spend a little time on your cross, make sure to pierce your own side—but not too deep—and then you’ll forgive us, all of us you’ve harmed, for we knew not what we did in doubting your innate goodness. Put on the hair shirt. Blubber before the bearded lady, so when you enact your gallantry, she’ll be sure to thank you properly. Jane watches him, his head in his hands weeping, and imagines what he might do if he let himself see, as clearly as she does, how he plays his own part for himself.
“No,” Gordy said, looking up, at last. “I can’t think of a single reason you shouldn’t call. Go ahead. Call them. I won’t fight it.”
She turns to face him. For a long time, she stares.
“You’re not going to call them.” Gordy’s bodyguard says; not as threat, merely as observation. And of course—damn it—this is correct. There’s no hope in trusting to Morris for reward, any more than in trusting Gordy to put things back as they were. Disruption is the only remaining hope. Disruption and destruction, and Gordy may someday yet create some of that—who better to do so?
“Why are you here?” she asks, thinking—You’d better not say it. If you say those words, I really will call the guards. What good is “sorry”? What is “sorry” but another burden you’re asking me to hold for you?
He sags. Everything about his aspect indicates surrender. “No idea. Not anymore. I’m just here.”
She makes a slight ironic sound. “You know why.”
“I used to know. I suppose now I’m here to tell you some things.”
“No. You’re here to decide what I want, and then to do it. Use that ticket of yours. Take something else away.”
Gordy turns his palms up. “There is no ticket. I gave it to somebody I trusted. Now it seems it may be completely gone.”
“I can’t believe it.” But even saying it, she understands: This solves the mystery of his diminishment. He gave it up. She supposes this news should bring something like despair—Hadn’t getting it been your whole plan? Apparently not; apparently, on deeper levels, you’d never believed in its existence, or at least you’d never believed it would be your path.
“He’s not lying to you,” the bodyguard says, in a way that amuses Jane. Some interest, some protectiveness, extending beyond the professional. Ah, yes—you’re the new one, or you’re about to be. And how is he with you? Has he started trying yet to absorb you? Does he cling to you like he clung to me, like you’re the life raft, like you’re the last unbroken rope? What will it be like for you, honey, when you don’t meet those hopes? What happens when you don’t make yourself porous enough to draw as much of him into you as he expects, when you’re insufficiently buoyant and he sinks, when you’re not tied to an anchor stable enough to hold his weight, when he falls? What will he do then? Blame physics for its properties, or himself for his position? No—when you fail to hold him, he’ll expect you to hold the blame. But now it’s become confused—he’s given it up; he can’t do to you what he did to me. He’ll need to find other tools now. How did he give it up? Why?
Gordy climbs down from his chair and sits on his heels. Eyes on the sawdust. “I know my danger, and I’m here anyway. That’s all the proof I’ve got. I came as soon as I found out where you were. Once I thought I’d come to heal you, but that’s done.” He speaks as someone realizing the truth even in the midst of saying it. “Now…I think…I’ve just come to give you the power to decide what to do with me, and the chance to decide what that is.”
So, Jane realizes, he can still surprise you after all. She turns back to the mirror, returns her attention to the braiding. “If you have things to tell me, you have five minutes. I can’t be late for the trapeze.”
“I want you to know that I’ve wronged you.”
“Oh really? Thank you. Thank you for that information.”
“I mean I want you to know that I know it. I intended some of what I did to you. I never intended for…for Finch, but my intentions don’t matter. I had my reasons for some of it, and some of them were even good, but my reasons don’t matter. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it differently, and that doesn’t matter, either. It’s happened, and it’s happened to you and your little girl, and that’s what matters.”
“And you just…needed me…to know that.”
“I had this thought, that you needed me to tell you I knew. That’s probably all wrong, I don’t know. I’m an idiot, just like you said. That’s all I should have said: I’m an idiot. I did my best, except—” he looks meaningfully at her beard “—except when I did my worst. I’ve learned how terrible the result can be when an idiot does his best.”
“And yet here you are. Still trying your very best.”
“I gave up my power, but I haven’t given up trying. I don’t know how to do that.”
“So you run away. Again.”
“I suppose so. I’ve been running since I was a boy. It’s all I know to do.”
They sat in the silence of spoken truths. Later, as the implications of what he’d told her seeped into her histories and recolored them, she would hate him for taking away simpler perspectives and replacing them with swampwater. Now she would have to understand his actions; not to condone—never that—but to see the whys and wherefores, to remember the complexities, to know why a scared man would act without regard for the fate of those he’d led to believe in him. And even the atrocity of Färland. This is what he thrust back upon her: the first memory of him. A boy hiding, spying on the Assizement, peeking between the slats, taking in spade and bird and fountain, the sight of which can make you crazy with fear. That had been him, not yet Abandoner, only a teenaged boy gone tharn from the wonder of the darkwater white fountain, a day later trapped in an oubliette, staring for a decade at nothing but his own simultaneous growth and desiccation in relentless light and mirror. And even after all that, he’d had compassion in him. He’d tried—hadn’t he?—in his failed way, to heal. Yes, later he’d given himself over to corruption, run away from responsibility, pumped himself full of the pustulent lessons of the red light in Brasschaat, stuffed himself like a tick with a boy’s sense of romance and a pimp’s sense of ass. He’d given himself a licentious license, but even in his self-degradation there was still much of that boy left in him. She hates him so much more now that he’s forced one charitable memory of himself past her armor. Oh, he did an evil thing to her in Raccoon River, eviler by far than the scorn and the beard in Färland: He’d made himself understandable. Now, when she thinks of him, she still sees what she’d seen before—Abandoner, blamer of the innocent, punisher of the scapegoat, shirker of duties, fool of the world—but now when she thinks of him, she sees—can’t help but see—Finch herself. The night after Raccoon River, sleepless on the sleeper car as it plunged through darkness to the next show, she thought—If only you had said something terrible like “I’m sorry.” Then I could keep despising you.
But all that came later.
Now she says: “You wanted me to hear you. I’ve heard you.”
If he’d hoped for more out of her, he didn’t reveal himself. He looked at her with what she took for gratitude.
“I want you to go, now.”
Quickly Gordy rises. At the door, he pauses.
“Sometimes even when an idiot does his worst, the result is still beautiful,” he said. “Or maybe that’s taking too much credit. Maybe your beauty is simply stronger than my stupidity. In any case—your beard…it’s beautiful.” Then he leaves. But the bodyguard
Bailey—peeking out the tent flap to ensure Gordy hadn’t strayed—tarried, seemingly on the verge of confession.
Jane said: “Well? Do you have something you want to ask me?”
“As a matter of fact, I have something to give you. I think I just found out I have a brother I never knew about.”
“I see,” Jane said, though she didn’t.
“It’s not the usual situation for those sorts of things,” Bailey said.
Jane waited.
“He’s a writer.”
Jane waited.
“I have his book here…” Rummaging through her backpack.
“I don’t read much these days.”
“I haven’t read most of it yet, either.”
“Then keep it.”
“This is a spare. I think you need to have it.”
Jane smiled. “And why is that?”
“Because,” Bailey said, producing it at last. “He dedicated it to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t, either, until today. But it’s got to be you. See for yourself.”
She opened the book—really just pages in a binder. On the back of the title page, she found it:
For the flying bearded lady. The door’s always open
Studying the title page, she said: “I don’t understand. I don’t know this Boyd Legging-clear.”
“I don’t know him, either. But still I think he’s…real.”
“And if I read, what will I find in this book your maybe-brother maybe-dedicated to me?”
“I don’t know.” Bailey seemed suddenly younger, the bodyguard no longer. Bashful. Embarrassed. Her words came out in a tumble. “The things in this book really happened. Or at least my parts in them did. In any case, I think you should have it.” Jane studied the cover. On her way out, Bailey paused at the portal. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Doing his dirty work. You’re amazing. You could go anywhere else.”
Jane smiled, terribly weary, terribly sad. “Sweetie, I could give you the same speech. All I know is I’m
going with you.” And so she had. Bailey returns to reading Boyd’s book, but keeps catching herself strayed from the page, drifting, thinking back on their strange circus interview, the singular woman who had given it to them. Bailey thinks—Silly girl. You left the bearded lady’s presence as obsessed with her as Gordy ever was.
When the scrim had dropped, Jane had seen Gordy immediately. She’d been expecting him—she must have been, she knew she was meant as Gordy bait—but Bailey still marked her shock, caught between the abstraction of expecting something someday and the reality of the expected moment suddenly arrived: a widening of those almond eyes, a visible start, mouth slightly agape. She’d recovered; likely the rest of the crowd presumed the startle on her face was a dramatic flourish, part of the act and nothing more. They’d all been wearing their own various expressions of awe or revulsion or entrancement, and might easily have assumed she’d been making brief satirical commentary on their own flustered faces. Then, afterward, her eyes had been cast first to Gordy, then to her, and then back, and then that beautiful beard had risen and fallen in a gesture too subtle, too enigmatic, for Bailey to discern if it represented true approbation or the parody of it. Yes it matters, and you’d better figure it out, her eyes had seemed to say, dancingly.
So here you are, Bailey thinks. Exchanged a single Iowa motel room for a series of identical ones across the country. Exchanged as companion a weird old loony for his even weirder son. And yes, there’s Gordy, sitting on the floor on a pallet he’s made of cushions, back against the foot of the motel room’s lone bed, reading the other material Tennessee had brought along: Julius’s memoir. He’s being a gentleman, he never even asked who’d get the bed, just made that pallet and made himself comfortable. He’s even cute…Bailey, curious, peeks a prospective toe out from beneath the coverlet and—the room is small enough to allow it—tickles Gordy’s ear. Gordy barely registers; after a minute he swats at it, without looking over, as if it were no more than a fly—which may be, Bailey realizes, what he thought it was. There’s no further acknowledgment.
I suppose it’s just another dreamless night, she thinks with resignation. Tragically, the Attic remains absent without leave. She can reassure herself all she wants by way of regained physical control and sensation—wiggling fingers and toes, jogging the streets, lifting food to lips, stretching, standing, sitting, maybe sometimes sex…all these are fantastic, but the loss of the Attic still leaves her emotionally rawboned.
“This is interesting,” Bailey murmurs, later. Half-serious, but she senses opportunity, too. Gordy hasn’t moved. Bailey toe-nudges him again in the ear. “We’re famous. Boyd wrote about our visit to your bearded friend.”
“What?”
“I’ll read it if you like,” Bailey half-teases. She pokes Gordy again with one stockinged toe. “According to Boyd, you found her dance very…stimulating.”
“It’s only a book,” Gordy mumbles. “Doesn’t mean it happened that way.” Bailey smiles playfully. Something about the book is nagging at her, but it’s ignorable, a slow leak. And…does Gordy at last seem to be coming out of himself? Why, yes he does. Time to try for a bit of fun. “But the shadow part was real,” she says, poking again. “And she was lovely. A girl could get jealous…”
Gordy finally registers. He glances her way, sidelong, and tosses his pages on the floor. His smile, still mostly quizzical, now has its own playful glint. “Could a girl, now?”
“A girl might already have.”
“And what might a girl do about it?”
“Come on over here,” Bailey says, “And a girl might show you.”
Later, with Gordy asleep on top of the coverlet, Bailey fishes the flashlight out of her duffle and creeps back to the book. There’s a problem. Until now, Boyd’s book had been an accurate account, fictionalized, to be sure, but generally accurate: a Boydish chronicle of all that’s happened—but this passage of beard and shadows has a new and concerning quality, the implications of which have only recently begun to dawn on her. She whispers into the dark. “It’s not just about what happened. It’s about what’s happening. Everything that happened to us after I
took flight on the trapeze, after the leap and catch and roar of the crowd, Jane retires to her sleeper car and begins to read Boyd’s book; obligingly at first, but with growing absorption, until by the end for her there is no sleeper car, no hoot of train, no racket of track, no moon outside, only words and page and page and page and page. The book does indeed describe things that happened, things that the author couldn’t have known. Jane never concerns herself with questions of how. It is; “how” is an irrelevance. She finishes at break of dawn and falls immediately into turbulent sleep. That night, a secretly furious Colonel Krane expresses his regrets to the disappointed crowd on behalf of the flying bearded lady, who has unexpectedly taken ill. Jane keeps to her dressing room, cross-legged, book in lap, making notations, filled at last with something like hope, waiting, anticipatory, for the day the Coyote might begin to perform his good vengeance upon Morris, thinking back on the book’s dedication—Yes, this is why news of the ticket’s destruction didn’t bother you; it was never your target. There’s a leap available with a much better hope of a catch: Boyd’s reminded you, whoever he is. The door’s always open for the flying bearded lady, he claims. You’ll be in Pigeon Forge soon enough, Jane. It’s time to find out if what Boyd
says is even true?” The Sandals Julius said nothing in reply to this for a long time—hours—and Sister Nettles began to wonder if she’d offended him. Or them. Or…oh, balls. Now you’re worried about offending footwear. And you’d promised yourself you wouldn’t even answer when he talks.
This is no business, Nettles decided, for someone who deals in the tactile. Father Julius used to be a kindred spirit in focusing on the physical over the metaphysical, or so she’d thought. And still there remained the work of the Neon Chapel to do, and only her left behind to do it.
You haven’t offended me in the least, said the Sandals Julius. I’d be happy to tell you what’s happening with the others. They’re wearing me the same as you are. We’re all still together.
Nettles wandered the empty cavern of the Neon, futilely straightening, rearranging chairs that needed no rearranging, repeating to herself the advice she gave herself constantly, and which she constantly ignored: Don’t answer your shoes. Do not answer your shoes. Do not.
The sandals said: Tennessee is back in his home state, for example.
Sister Nettles couldn’t help herself. “After all the times he said he wouldn’t go? What on earth?”
I’ll help him, Nettles, the sandals said. Don’t worry. I’ll help.
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
The physical laws of the universe are indifferent to your struggle. Certainly, they make no special dispensation for your desires or needs. Still, it would be an error to presume the indifference of the universe’s laws represent the universe’s indifference. The briefest glance at a great painting belies the notion.
—Unknown
He might have returned to Pigeon Forge any number of ways: by car, train, private jet—but after the Coyote’s betrayal, the CAT seems safest. There’s been precious little sense of safety in the weeks since the Coyote revealed himself. They’ve rigged up a system for him, and he lies on his back and submits himself to it as the CAT rumbles uphill, just minutes away from its destination. It’s a simple contraption, really; some clamps to hold his sandpaper lids, a tank of soltion hooked up to a drip. Every ten seconds precisely, another moistening drop obscures his vision. Traversing the tunnel in the CAT’s guts, Morris, enclosed on all sides, feels at last unfindable, unharmable. Finally he’s been left free to consider what he’ll do when he finally puts his hands on the ticket.
What shall we do with the Coyote? Your trust was falsely placed, but now that you know him to be dishonest, he is more knowable and you trust him more, you’ve learned the handle by which to grip him. He will come, drawn to you, and you will have prepared for him…something. He thinks himself greater than you, but he’s drawn to you just like anything else. All things are drawn to you: The signs of your Allness are so clear. And the thing behind you is still behind you. In much the same way, the circus will soon return to Pigeon Forge to join you. Soon you will see Jane again, still beautiful, ruined as she may be. A greater attraction now she’s been bearded than ever before, so Krane claims.
The CAT halts; you’ve arrived.
Look, the Andrews have been made alert to your approach. Sent ahead to prepare the ceremony on the Pigeon Forge side, they attend you as you emerge from the CAT’s vaultlike back hatch, but you wave them off and make your way with the cane. You’ve practiced and are quicker with it now. They share a sour look, which they imagine you didn’t see. They still doubt you, the Andrews; sensitive they are, able to detect disloyalty in the quiver of a whisker—oversensitive to it, and without doubt jealous. Closely, closely, they watch status and position. There are rumors about them and there are truths. You remember when they were three—triplets standing before you beneath the circus tent, child-sized but fierce, caught up by Krane’s freak show for the Assizement, the troika exuding unnerving calm in the pen amidst the rest of the chattel, who rattled the bars begging and fearful or else stood catatonic staring at the sawdust. Throughout the ceremony you had a growing awareness of them, watching and waiting, listening to the liturgy, the presentation of bird and spade, of water and box. When they were called forward the middle one interrupted you, strong-voiced: There is no need to remake us; and you: There is, you must be made perfect, and he: We are perfect already, we will prove it to you, and then without hesitation the two behind him twisted with impossible quickness, loosed the grips of the guards and snatched the guards’ weapons—not the swords but the quick long knives hidden deeper in the folds of ceremonial red—spun about and without hesitation plunged the lovely blades deep into their brother, their third, their spokesman, who smiled and said: Now you see, and fell, quietly dying, as his brothers threw the pilfered bloody knives with expert precision juddering into faraway beams, then bowed to you their obeisance. The puzzle of the Andrews, the one who died and the two who lived. You ponder it frequently; every day you sift the memory, searching for clues. When did they decide? How did they choose among them the sacrifice? The one who died went willingly. There was no sense of betrayal when he saw the handles sprouting from his body. Yet still, alone among all the thousands to ever pass through the Assizement, only the Andrews never saw spade nor bird. They alone selected their own baptism. The unnerving intensity of their devotion, the sacrificial nature of their arrival, unexpected and unexpectable. As a result you are never entirely comfortable in their presence. These tiny pieces of yourself, lessons you gave yourself about the power of will, about the unpredictable nature of what you choose to bring forth into the world. Reflections of your own fierceness. Reflections of your own ruthlessness. Most others among the trustees avoid the Andrews, fearful of offending them by failing to tell one from the other. Any fool can detect the difference merely by noticing behavior. In truth they couldn’t be less alike. Andrew is typically taciturn, watchful, waiting, offering nothing not directly asked of him, while Andrew, on the other hand, speaks without cease when given cause. He is at it now, brisk and assiduous: updates on the circus; how many runaways collected according to Krane’s report; when the circus is expected to arrive; preparations for the ceremony; dossier of the unworthy, blue tickets already delivered; quarterly earnings from the prisons, revenues down overall though the new facilities in Missouri are a bright spot and lobbying efforts for stiffer mandatory penalties are sprouting results, new bills coming to the floor after the recess to help drive future revenues, less inmate turnover and more opportunities for resident extensions, requiring gaudy government contracts to build new facilities necessary to hold new inmates, whose habits are not yet being punished with requisite severity…also the sex trade: New infusions to the red-light districts in EU are showing a fast uptick, expansion to ASEAN is on track with Thailand set to open in quarter two next year…You feign attentiveness—if your interest flags, Andrew will take offense and then of course Andrew will also be offended on his brother’s behalf—but your leg aches from long hours in the CAT, and your eyes yearn for the comfort of the drops. You seek and in short order find home and bed, the skylight directly above, and you gaze out into a clear night sky, stars and constellations wheeling high above, unreachable for now, their cold light traveling for aeons before the birth of civilization or even species to meet you here, now, the stars a bleak stark lesson to yourself of the distances you have yet to attain. All of this you call your own. You will soon have Gordy in hand, you’ll take back the power he stole, and then you will know each star through each moment of its existence, balls of gas forty thousand times the size of this planet, each particle, each photon, for hundreds of millions of years, all of it you will call your own. All of it is yours it springs from you and yet you have distanced yourself from it locked it hidden it behind a door, spirited it away in the hands of a thief, but you will have it, you will possess it control it understand it break free of this so-called matter and this so-called time, restore all things to the rightful ways and the rightful places, unmake all who resist. The thing behind you is still behind you. All things you call your own and you own all things, all things you call your own, you own all things you see and all you see you call your
best available path, in his slow and deliberate way: down a foothill, along a ridge of trees, down a long two-lane road; a sign declares PIGEON FORGE 3 MILES. Sterling Shirker follows it. Stumbles down the main strip in early morning light. Finds a bench and sits himself down, tired down to his liver and kidneys, not knowing whether to laugh or cry—You’ve only just realized, old man, how forehead-slapping stupid you are. You haven’t got the slightest idea where this damn fountain is. Gordy found it, sure, but they’d captured you and brought you to it blindfolded.
Just stay here I guess, Sterling thinks, it’s as good a place as any other. Either they’ll pick me up or they won’t.
But you know how to get them to take you there.
The old man groans. “Yes sir,” he says. “Yes, I suppose I do know.” Sterling reaches into his satchel, draws out the toothpaste-striped robe of a Wales loony.
He’s wearing it when the morning crowds begin to arrive. Sterling stands on the bench, starts to speak in a loud voice, proclaiming it all, the old litany: fountain and ticket, bird and spade and cavern and door and oubliette by the row.
It doesn’t take long.
They come in the guise of police, but Sterling never doubts he’s going beneath the fountain, and there it is again: the door at the top of the ledge, the long slope opening up onto the cavern, the high wall of oubliettes. He’s held there at swordpoint until Morris arrives. The two of them stare at each other, two old beat up tom-raccoons negotiating over a trashcan lid. Morris looks a mess. His eyes are a bloodshot wonder. He glances over his shoulder unceasingly, almost manically.
“So you’ve returned to me,” Morris says. “Did you decide you deserved your punishment and come back to get it, or have you gone the rest of the way crazy?”
“Oh, I’ve been crazy a long time,” Sterling answers, truthfully enough. “Gone so crazy I looped back round again to sane a couple times. I guess I got tired of talking crazy and wanted to start doing crazy.”
That puts an atmosphere in the room. Morris’s lieutenants’ hands creep toward sword pommels. They think you’re strapped with a bomb or gun, Sterling realizes, and laughs. He can’t help it; it just bursts from him.
“And what crazy thing are you planning to do?” Morris asks, real quiet and real soft.
“There was a woman used to live here,” Sterling says. “She took care of the people in your prison. You let her do that, so I assume you saw some value in it once upon a time.”
It’s Morris’s turn to laugh. “You’ve…what? Come to apply for her job?”
Sterling salutes, bathrobe arm flapping. “No, captain, no sir. I’m not asking permission to do it; nothing like that. I’m just going to do it until somebody stops me.”
In the moments that follow, Sterling has no idea what Morris might be thinking, but under that owlish gaze, he feels as if he’s being watched and measured by something mechanical and precise. At the end of this scrutiny, Morris looks at his guards and barks: “Well? Show him to his room.” It’s a nice enough place, despite being at the far corner of a prison cavern. Bedroom. Living room. Kitchenette. The only real complaint I can think of, he thinks, is that every inch of the walls is covered in writing: I did not run away with the circus, the circus ran away with me.
“Wondering if I might ask for some paint,” Sterling says, without much hope of
a meaningful role. Under the fountain in Pigeon Forge, caring for prisoners. It was tricky for the first few weeks, but now he’s got the hang of it.
“What about Biscuit Trudy?” Nettles asked, as much for distraction from her present task as out of curiosity. The meat had arrived as it did every week. She’d woken with no intention of doing anything other than tend her garden and read, like every other day since Julius had apparently become…but today, the deep freeze couldn’t hold any more, and Nettles simply couldn’t countenance the waste. Nothing left to do but to try her best; haul the heavy steamers out to the front yard and get started. Nettles could see it was going to be an absolute bitch, and no Brother Brock to man the tongs—and even if you figure that one out, who’s going to make his secret sauce? Nettles cursed and muttered. You wanted me to find a hopelessness, Jules? Here’s a hopelessness: the Neons without its members.
Biscuit Trudy’s made her way to Florida.
“And what’s she doing there?”
What she’s always done. Only she’s doing it there.
“And where’s Jack?”
Still heading west. Walking. His preference, obviously.
“Be better if he headed back east,” Nettles snarled, wrestling the first steamer onto the lawn. “I’m going to need the recipe for his sauce in about an hour.”
I’ll ask him, the Sandals Julius said.
“I…what?”
We’re all together now. I’ll ask him for
his perfect and complete order. As night falls, the Coyote finds beauty in the metropolis. The precise lines of the skyscrapers, arranged in regiments like sentinels of order and justice, assure him of human intentionality and regulation. Ferries patrol the harbor, displaying to their cargo of tourists and commuters the ranks of skyscrapers set against the dusk autumn sky—their unbending majesty, their testament to the ingenuity of engineering, to technical exactitude, to imagination and toil, to their own illusions of permanence. He’s surprised how easy it’s been, maintaining order in a territory so glutted with humanity, but perhaps, he muses, this should not be surprising; these people have been optimized for order. They know each train route, they’ve memorized the times of arrival and departure, they have an almost genetic sense of the grid of streets, and their own specific rules of engagement with body and machine. Here, in the metropolis, they’ve even shaped and ordered the horizon.
The Coyote rests in his perfect control.
He need only think of a skill apt to his need to possess it; each day he gifts himself with new abilities. At first, he swooped down from the air to stop a crime in its moment of execution, but this soon proved tedious—far more efficient to hover above it all at a remove, raining justice down upon each perpetrator. His laser eyes produce most of the desired effects in the pettier cases: sudden loss of a hand or head or leg for the purse-snatcher, the carjacker, the rapist. His ice-breath freezes the arsonist solid, freezes even the stream of gas leading from floor to red plastic jerrycan. His hearing can catch the quieter thefts—graft, corruption, vice, bribery—in their various inceptions, and he whispers warnings with his super-targeted whispering power, fomenting a paranoia in the white-collared overworld, aborting misappropriation, terminating usury, strangling fraud in the crib of intention. Occasionally, he descends from the clouds to put the fear of himself into some still-saucy kingpin, pimp, or drug lord, some uncowed banker, financier, or broker, who still believes him nothing but rumor. They know him well by now, but soon they will know him better. They recognize the stylized crimson C he wears on his powerful chest and on his cape, the diamond amulet he’s removed from the chain and embedded into his forehead. In the minds of the evildoers awareness of him has grown. They whisper about him now: the Coyote. With his super-hearing, he hears this. He is everywhere, and everything. He cannot be evaded, nor bought, nor is he neutered by legal tricks. Pleading doesn’t work. There remains only one successful strategy, they think, which is to wait for the Coyote to go away. How amusing—compliance isn’t even considered. Poor fools. It’s so simple, really it is. Obey. Be quiet. Harm none. At times, briefly, he feels sorry for them, little big men still clinging to their filthy engines of misery—foolish like children, covering their eyes, thinking you can’t see them if they can’t see you; foolish like babies crying about the filth they’ve created for themselves to lie in; foolish like dogs ashamed of an infraction they barely understand and remember only vaguely—almost innocent in their misunderstanding of how the world has already changed. Life won’t go on as it has. That was the old order. Man’s inhumanity can breed itself out, now that he is here to teach them justice.
But now the hour has come, and there is a weekly promise to be kept. There is one in particular—Morris—who requires a more attentive justice, whose worst impulses require a slower extermination. Today you’ll take his feet, replace them with something new and inappropriate. This will seem to him a punishment, but the day will come, when you have taken every original part of him, when you will begin to replace even the replacements, exchanging them again with something yet worse, and then he will long for the return of the lesser torment. Over the years you will make an example of him to pierce the dullest awareness—the suffering due to any who ever again dare cause the suffering of another being.
Over the city rolls a reverberating cannonade of exploding air, a flash like lightning, and then the Coyote is gone—miles away already, flying, faster than sound, fast almost as thought, over the mountains toward
Pigeon Forge that morning, the train having stopped in Knoxville the previous night. She’d come in with the rest of the circus people—Jane the Flying Bearded Lady. Later she came to the cavern to visit her daughter’s creche, saw you at work on the scaffold. No, Sterling thinks: not the scaffold. Her scaffold. After all this time, for her to see the oubliettes have another caretaker. The confusion on her hirsute face, to see you, vaguely familiar from years before, fulfilling her old office, living in her suite. You’d taken the scaffold downward and she’d leaned in, smiled as if you were an old chum, gone in for a hug. “I’m here to tip canoes,” she whispered. “Get me behind that door if you can.” There hadn’t been time for more talk; she’d been well-guarded—but not as well-guarded as Morris’s door. How, wonders Sterling, does she expect you to help her do that?
Now they’ve taken the girl Finch out of her shelf and gotten her presentable to meet her mother. Finch waits patiently until it’s time for her to climb the stairs, take her turn out in the sun beside the fountain, keep a promised appointment with a mother she can’t remember. Sterling, not knowing what else to do, has brought her back to his apartment, which used to be her apartment, of course. The place smells of fresh paint, a pleasant eggshell matte, which Sterling laid on himself over the course of his first day, rolling it over I did not run away with the circus and the circus ran away with me, until he came to the last uncovered iteration, at the center of one wall, which he couldn’t bring himself to paint over. She’s reached her full growth down there in the awful bright, has Finch. She doesn’t remember that time either, for the moment they took her out screaming they dosed her again with the fountain water. Now she’s friendly, alert, and completely blank. Sterling, not knowing what else to do, serves her tea, and tells her of his time on Loony Island. “They cut all the loonies loose,” he explains. “They never told us why. And if they told any of the loonies why, no loony ever told me. Which wouldn’t be
unbearable, Jane thinks. It’s absolutely unbearable.
The girl with no memory sits on a bench, facing the turtle’s stone eyes and yawning mouth. From the turtle’s massive back the fountain’s bleached, cherubencrusted extremity launches, rising above white basin and black water. The turtle screams stone anguish against the unfairness of its burden. The girl is placid, indifferent, as if she were waiting for a bus.
At a slight remove stand two tiny men dressed all in red. On the topmost of the stairs leading into the cavern beneath the fountain stands the new caretaker—a skinny, skittery-looking man wearing a bathrobe and pajamas and sandals. Jane sits beside her girl, occasionally touching her lightly upon her nose with a single finger. “Finch,” she says between sobs, “Finch. Finch.” But it isn’t Finch—that’s the cruelty. It’s not her. Finch is gone. This is the girl with no memory. “I’m sorry,” says the girl, presently. “I don’t know a ‘Finch.’ Is that my name? I don’t remember.” Jane thinks of the hours Finch spent, reading books, filling her life with stories, the years they spent together making their own story—all washed out of her now. The girl turns to the bearded lady. “It’s funny, don’t you know? I don’t remember anything at all before this. But I get the sense this is a magical place. So quiet. So still. Have I been here before?”
No prisoner save Finch has this routine. Each day they disinter her from her oubliette for her communion of obliterating water, the cleansing of her memory. Each day she is wiped fresh. Morris told Jane this on the return trip from Brasschaat. To him, it is a mercy. “You know better than I, dear,” he’d said. “What they’re like down there. You wouldn’t want to meet her if she were like that.” Each day, she is tortured with internment in the oubliette, but without the memory of the previous days, months, years preceding it. Each day begins anew without the horrific realization. Morris credits this to himself as an absolution, as he does these visits, which comprise the main part of her negotiated payment in exchange for compliance—and, to her surprise, Morris has not yet reneged. He gave her three visits, one a day, before she headed out with the circus for the dance and the stage and the leap and the catch. Yesterday was the fourth. Today makes a fifth. After the Assizement will come a final visit, and then she will go back on the road with the circus once more. She feels the coming wrench of departure, a different grief than the grief of presence.
“Yes,” Jane murmurs. “You’ve been here before.”
The girl takes this fact in without appearing to ascribe any value to it. “What a lovely beard you have. Did you braid it yourself?”
“You did,” Jane says. “Yesterday. I taught you how.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I know, I know, I know, I know.”
“Will you teach me again today?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you crying?” Finch asks, but they’re interrupted by Morris, risen from his morning meditations below ground.
“We’re close now,” he says. He’s stubbornly made his way up the steps unassisted, crutches shoved into armpits, eyes propped wide, and the…other alteration. “These are all lessons of my coming ascendance.”
Jane glares at him, then away. From what source does his unaccountable belief in himself spring? She’s heard the whisperings. Yesterday the Coyote found Morris in his home, turned his feet into something difficult to look at. The Andrews share a glance whose significance Jane can read: blossoming apostasy of two of Morris’s truest believers, for if this can happen—if this can be done to him—if these outrages can be permitted to be committed against him…then what is he, really? Explanations for past setbacks no longer align with the plumbline of received doctrine; when this sort of thing happens, future setbacks seem increasingly likely. It’s a question of worthiness, along lines of proof Morris himself has established within their orthodoxy. Now they’re unsure of his inevitability, unsure of his promised coming apotheosis. It seems everybody except Morris is meant for power. But Morris persists: “Possession of power is working its way toward us. Possession running from the hands of those farthest from me to the hands of those closest. Soon it will be in my hands.”
“That poor man,” says the girl.
“That’s no ‘poor man,’ ” Jane says.
“Who is he?”
“He’s the man who keeps you in prison.”
“Am I in prison?” asks the girl. She wonders this with the same polite interest as she wonders anything else.
“Yes, dear. You are.”
“Will I get out?”
As soon as I can manage, Jane thinks. Her fingers curl around those of her daughter and she squeezes—As soon as I can manage. And if I can’t manage, I’ll try to tip it all over.
“Yes, dear. You will get out,” Morris says, clumbering over the grass. “Your release, sweet girl, is a certainty. They all will get out. All of them. All imprisoned, both those below here and those who crawl the earth out there”—he waves his cane—” all of them are imprisoned. The mercy I have given those below is revelation: They know they are prisoners. The rest have no conception. But they too will be set free. I will set all the captives free. I will draw all men to mys—”
They see it in a flash and it is done—the flying figure of the Coyote striking like a bolt from the blue sky, straight downward, as if he had fallen from a cloud with ankles connected to a tether gauged to exact precisions of length and elasticity, hands reaching open, grasping closed, pulling Morris back up with him again. Keeping him there, twenty feet up, suspended, holding Morris close in his embrace, close, close as love, close as pain. He is whispering something to him.
“No fair,” Morris screams. “No fair. No fair.” And then he isn’t screaming words at all.
The Andrews look up in astonishment, observing the new harsh forms their lord has been instructed to inhabit, observing that he has no choice but to obey. Hearing the wordless chuckling screams. They leave their posts, move together to a spot beneath the floating atrocity, and look at each other with fresh understanding and new resolve. From beneath the fountain, the other red-clad guards race up, investigating this unexpected commotion, and they too see, in the sky, their leader’s woeful wordless tale.
“That man can fly!” the girl says, surprised at last. She’s risen from her seat, looking up, hands shading her eyes against the sun. Jane is enjoying watching events foretold in Boyd’s book come true when she feels a hand on her shoulder. The old guy, the new caretaker, come from the open stairway to meet her. “If you want to get behind that door,” he whispers, “I don’t think you’ll get a better chance.”
Jane runs for the stairs.
Everything that’s happened to us after I got my hands on this ridiculous book has happened, too, exactly the way it says. Which means…beneath the covers, Bailey gazes up from the flashlight-lit pages in wild wonder. It’s not just what’s happened, or what’s happening. It’s what’s going to happen. It’s as if it’s all coming together…As Gordy snores insensible and sated beside her above the duvet, Bailey, no longer feeling the tug of slumber, reads on through the
wordless chuckling screams. “No fair,” screamed Morris. “No fair. No fair.”
“Oh but a week is so long to wait,” laughed the Coyote. “The rule has changed. It’s every day now.”
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
fair, no fucking fair.
You smoke and read the latest revisions. It’s so unfair.
All that work enduring the nightmare of interpretation, setting everything up just so, and now Jane goes behind the door to cock things up? You course through the revision, the doughnut stack, back and forth, reading its woeful report. Even Donk, the mighty Coyote himself, vested with all power, fails you. The problem with a comic is, what it shows you, it shows you unmistakably—pictures on a page—but what it leaves out is just as unmistakably out, lost, and unguessable. Example: Here, on this page…close to the end…You flip to the page…yes, here: Julius takes the ticket. The priest turns to sandals, and the ticket turns to water. It’s gone. It’s gone.
How then—how—do you account for this unexplained and inexplicable final page?
You decide to brave the interpretation. Once more through the door, dear friend. Go to Morris yourself, face to face, and push him to the breaking point yourself. You’ll have to risk his wave. No choice but that your work be done on the other side; it’s the only way you can see behind the panels, the only way to know.
—Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change
How redundant, to lard a book with epigraphs and quotations. Every book you read is itself already a quotation.
—Unknown
Sterling brought her back below the fountain again, back to the apartments, thinking only to keep her safe from the chaos above: the howls of tortured Morris, returned from the sky, set down by the Coyote upon the fountain lawn, a civil war that his followers have been fomenting now broken out around him, a schism not between loyalists and traitors, it seemed, but between various tribes of apostates, deciding the final fate of their defeated boss, determining among them the new order of dominance and dominion. It was only a matter of hollering when he scuttled her below-ground, but it looked apt to turn to blood any minute.
The girl remained friendly, alert, and completely blank. What the hell am I supposed to do now, Sterling wondered, heating tea for no reason other than to have a thing to do. I’ve already told her my story. I suppose I could tell her about my experience of
reading until dawn lit the room and she could rest the fading flashlight batteries. It’s all here, all in the book, captured not with exacting fidelity, true, embellished in ways, yes—but certainly correct in a general sense, certainly rendered in more detail than might be expected from even a first-rate parlor diviner. No, never-known brother Boyd’s prognostications go beyond the talents of the corner mystic; as soothsayer, his sayings are sooth from surface to sump. Page to page to page to page, curiosity curdling to fear, fear fulminating to dread, Bailey flips forward. And—can it be?—here at the end who is it, anyway
wearing the Sandals Julius? What’s it like? Oh, my. Nobody’s ever asked me that before. You’re in good company, in not asking me, is what I’m saying. But there’s something so polite in the way you don’t ask—so, since you haven’t asked me so nicely, I’ll tell you. Wearing the Sandals Julius. Well. It’s an interesting sensation. They’re real nicely padded, for one thing. Cushiony. Like walking on clouds or on the surface tension of water, or deep-pile carpet. But still supportive in the arch. You get a real nice balance there. You can’t usually run in sandals, but you can run in these better than tennies. I think there’s something in the soles. Then there’s the uppers. Look at this. Just feast your eyes. Blond leather, connected to the lowers by what looks to me (I’m no expert, now) like hand-stitching, tight loops, very sturdy. Look at the pattern of the stitchwork. Look at the etching on the buckles. Look at the tang—see there at the tip of it, where it’s crimped back just a bit for maximum hold to the buckle? See the way the uppers are serged into the soles? Tucked in. That’s craftsmanship. This isn’t some slipshod slipper-shoe, these aren’t the cardboard foot-bags they gave us in the Wales, this footwear’s been constructed with intention and purpose. They don’t talk as much as you might want—considering who they are, I mean—but you can’t deny the craftsmanship. And they don’t wear out. At first I wondered, but at this point it’s damn near undeniable. Take a look. Not a scuff, not anywhere, no wear on the tread, not a single stray thread or popped stitch, nothing—and after the miles I put on them, too. That used car I borrowed from Bailey didn’t last all the way to Pigeon Forge. Some people may have cars last the whole trip, but not me—I promise you I’ll never have that good of luck. Threw a rod right through the engine block in the western tip of Tennessee over the Kentucky border. I had to hoof it.
“Here’s the tea, sweetheart. Careful, it’s still too hot. Just blow on it a bit and take it easy.
“So. What I’m telling you is, to get here, I walked the length of Tennessee, most of it—walked when I wasn’t running. It’s odd. I’ve never been one to run, and if ever there’s been a trip a fellow might want to consider dawdling on, this would have been it. All the same I kind of felt the running itch as I went; a sort of feeling there was something ahead that might be better seen to sooner than later. So, I’d get into a kind of a trot, and then I’d get into a sort of a gallop. Then I’d walk when I got tired or the hills got too steep. And so when I say I find it singular—noteworthy—that these sandals haven’t taken on a bit of wear, that’s what I’m talking about. Was there precipitation? Does a bear shit in the rain? It poured on me most of a day. That sort of thing is hard on leather sandals, or at least that would be my expectation, but have a look—not a stain, not a blot. And, as far as I can tell, there never will be one. And I’ll tell you another thing, which is harder to prove. These sandals are as lucky as I am unlucky. I can see by your silence you’re confused. I’ll explain to you what I mean, and I agree explanations are in order. When you make a claim to have lucky sandals (not ‘lucky’ sandals, in the sense of a preference or a superstition, you know: ‘I always wear my lucky sandals on game day,’ but, in a more literal sense: ‘These sandals are, as a part of their nature, lucky, filled with luck and exuding luck and providing luck to their wearer’), well, any fool will tell you, that’s a claim you have to back up with explanations and evidence.
“By way of explanation, a question: Are you clumsy? No, I can tell looking at you you’re not. You’re more like my boy, he could run a fence-rail the long way, post-to-post, and never slip or slurry. You met him years ago, but I daresay you don’t remember. Don’t get offended at the question, now. I’m not asking out of a sense of superiority, only it’d be easier for you to empathize with me if you were clumsy. You have to understand me, it’s a particular type of luck I’m speaking of here. Not the sort of luck that will win me the lottery someday. Not even the sort of luck that can keep my car from a breakdown. It’s all to do with finding the next step. Clumsy versus adroit is our dialectic. Me, I am an irredeemable stumble-crumb. Trip over my own feet. Over the feet of others. Over small creatures and their leashes. It’s a documented fact I’ve fallen off a curb on more than one occasion. I’m a terror in a public park, a menace in a library, and it’s an inescapable fact: Since putting on Sandals Julius, I haven’t fallen or even tripped—and not for lack of opportunity or increase in my own nimbleness or grace, neither. A good piece of my statewide stroll was cross-country work, you understand. The backwoods around here aren’t above throwing up a tree root or a shrub in the grass for you to stumble over, and the Smokies have no end of scrub and steepness to scramble up, loose stones and shale waiting to turn under a fellow’s ankle, hidden holes, sudden drops camouflaged by scrims of weeds, and on and on and on. Given my particular lack of aptitudes, I should have broken a leg and died out there. But these sandals, they always find a firmness in a slough, a flatness in the midst of a skid. They miss the hole. They masticate the miles without misadventure. They never skip a step. I bet they could safely dance a minefield. I can tell you with authority they can cross a field larded with cowflop and never catch a squish. They’re the reason I’m here with you, in more ways than one. Without them I couldn’t have made it here all in one piece. Without them, I’d have never come in the first place.
“Hush. Hush. Did you hear that? Are they coming? I thought I heard somebody knocking.
“No, it’s passed. We might dare hope they’ve forgotten us in the commotion. They’re scared. Look what’s being done to their great leader. Something’s falling apart, and they know it. Hopefully your mama can find something behind that door. Maybe she’ll bring us a
hint of memory. Finch, perched on a chair she doesn’t recognize as having once been her own, doesn’t feel from this loquacious stranger any expectation that she should speak, and therefore she does not speak. She sips tea and listens, restful in silence. She likes to hear his voice. She likes the way it goes. Occasionally she takes note of the words and their meanings, and sometimes she drifts, enjoying the music and the rhythm of his sounds. Then she tries to experience and enjoy each individual sound of each word, as if each articulation were its own distinct presentation; each glottal, plosive, fricative, and glide encased in velvet, placed behind glass, attributes and contexts authoritatively delineated by handsome placards. All modes of listening are equally pleasurable to her, as is shifting from the one to the other.
In time the words halt. She opens her eyes and sees that the kindly bearded woman from before has come again, whose name is Mother. When they were beneath the sky, she was sorrowful. Now she looks different; her eyes have gone wide and urgent. Sterling has gone to her. This is interesting. Finch keeps her eyes open and decides to do the listening where you follow the meanings of words.
“What did you see?”
“Everything. There isn’t much time.”
“Did you see a…a wave?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“Is it close?”
The woman makes an indistinct and impatient noise. “It’s the wrong question. We’ve been thinking about that wave all wrong. We’ve been thinking about everything all wrong. We have to find Morris. He’ll need our help. And we have to find—”
“But Gordy said we’re waiting on the wave. Is it coming soon?”
“Wrong question. It might be here any second. It might never come. We need to find Gordy. Do you know where he is?”
“Even better. I know his motivations.” The man rummages in a bureau drawer, procures from a travel-battered rucksack a large brown envelope, unopened, as well as a device and a set of earbuds. “Now that we’ve got a bit of time to ourselves, I’ve got something you really ought to
know better than that. Page to page to page to page, curiosity curdling to fear, fear fulminating to dread, Bailey flips forward…Yes, just now, as she’d been reading, the Ex-Position pages had shimmered, flexed, changed. Most of it was…yes, mostly the same, but now it’s got more at the end…but this ending…
The crowd fell into a deadly hush. The two lay together on the ground, one atop the other, broken past repair. Ah, Jane, the thing that had been Morris thought. My only confidant, my constant betrayer. It’s good of you to be with me at the end. You’ve given me this at least. You’ve let me catch sight of my last intention. As Morris watched he saw the wave lurch forward to take all—everything. It’s right over his shoulder, the wave, sardine-sized no more; it’s the size now of a gorilla charging. Soon it will be the size of a train, of a mountain, of a planet. Soon it will extinguish sun and stars. Soon it will be the size of the everything, and then there will be the nothing, and, in the nothing, only a oneness. Only Morris could see it but he knew soon everybody would see, and all the nations of the world will mourn as they see it forever—but forever will be no more than the flit of a pigeon’s wings, for this wave is large enough to destroy even time itself…
Hang on, Jane begged. Her final breaths, she spent on him. Don’t. Hold it back.
It’s too late, Janey, Morris said. He felt so calm and so free. Aware Jane couldn’t understand the sounds his empty mouth made; they weren’t even words. He said them anyway, and looking into those beautiful almond eyes as the light went out of them forever, he thought: She did understand. It’s the last thing she ever did. She knew. I’ve called it already. It’s done. It’s done it’s done it’s done.
THE END
Done? Bailey thinks, closing the binder. Done already? Done forever?
“The hell it is,” she mutters to herself, getting out of bed. “Nothing’s done.”
As soon as you do it to Morris, you return quickly to the door, fearing the oncoming wave. In moments, you find yourself back in the study on the author’s side. Lying on the table, thicker than ever before, the expected stack of pages. Come, wave, come, you think, almost beg, nearly pray.
Then, reading: This ending…it’s perfect.
He calls it. It comes.
No safe dropping.
No Gordy giving Morris any ticket.
You want to weep with joy and relief. Showing yourself to Morris worked—and you’d been so frightened to do so. Still, you waited until the moment was right to get this ending. It’s perfect.
But…wait…no. This is the game of the blank. The ending’s perfect but the story’s still there. There’s still a story.
Why isn’t the story gone?
“Gordy, wake up. Wake up.” Gordy’s gone, out cold, lost in platinum unconsciousness; he requires a rougher jostle. “We have to go right now. We have to get to Pigeon Forge.”
“Blmmmph?” Gordy inquires.
“Boyd’s story just changed. Something’s terrible is going to happen. Jane needs us, soon.”
Gordy, still pushing sleep from his mind: “Did she…call to tell you that or something?”
But Bailey is already up and packing.
It may seem brave to abrogate this notion, to face squarely the inevitable realization: There is no pattern to be found in the universe, no sense, no meaning, only dust. Yet if we are braver still, we may come through this realization to a further realization. Of course there is meaning, of course there is pattern, of course there is sense. We created it ourselves: first by imagining it, and then by naming it. And, in naming, causing others to imagine it, too.
—Unknown
Nettles finds that once you’ve accepted your old friend has somehow become your talking sandals, accepting their pronouncements is a less complicated matter. She finds herself in possession of a great and sudden belief, and a terrible dread. “But if…if everything’s going to end, Jules…shouldn’t we go there, too?”
The sandals keep quiet so long she thinks they may have embraced sandal-ness and given up talking completely. Just when she’s stopped listening for an answer, they speak. Whether it ends or not is their business, they say. Our business is what happens after. We have
a knife, but he hasn’t used it yet. Here, in the straw in the main-tent freak show in the Circus of Bearded Love, chained to a stake near Wembly’s gorilla cage, sits the greatest freak the world has ever known. Most freaks are born to it, but not this one—he’s a recruit, a novice, a greenhorn. Even so, he’s a main attraction. There’ll be a hush when he’s displayed, a great intake of breath, an understanding that in this freak, a culmination has been attained. Here at last is the Ur-freak, a freak who keeps enfreakening.
He calls himself Goop-Goop. He doesn’t know what else to call himself. It’s what the hateful sign above him says. The sign is wooden, and hand-painted, and hung too high to reach, to tear down and smash to bits. It reads: THIS IS GOOP-GOOP OF PIGEON FORGE, FREAK OF THE FREAKS. Below this, a hasty scrawl: Beware! Danger! Keep Your Distance! A desultory ring of paint around Goop-Goop’s stake demarcates the zone of peril, Goop-Goop’s range of motion. It’s a wiser precaution than they know, Goop-Goop thinks; they’re unaware of his knife. Colonel Karl T. Krane, author of this message, visits regularly, overweeningly proud of this new addition to his freak show. “They’re going to go nuts for you, my lad,” Krane propounded this morning with false avuncularity, smacking Goop-Goop on one cheek, his preposterous moustache taking the liberty, it seemed, of twirling itself, his patois slipping momentarily into his carny-barker shuck and jive: “THEY will be AB-so-LUTE-ly AWE. STRUCK. for you.” Goop-Goop muses upon Krane, who has betrayed him, as did all others. He thought of using the knife on Krane, but Krane isn’t anything more than a messenger, a barker. He’ll save the knife for the Coyote. Fat old Krane breaks away from his barking at the tent entrance every ten minutes or so to peep over, his expressive face full of naked hope for the moment of revelation—What is the next modification going to be? The Coyote’s come every day, just as he promised. He hasn’t arrived yet.
Occasionally, Goop-Goop sneaks a glance over his shoulder. The wave is still there, a comfort to him. The proof he’s always had; this at least cannot be taken away. But everything else is gone, gone. He lists the things the Coyote has
taken Finch and Sterling away from Jane. The Andrews have promised both will be processed in the Assizement. Already they’ve been sent to the cages. It seems to Jane natural it would be the Andrews, truest of believers, to fill the void of leadership Morris has left behind, naturally they’ll continue the traditions for which they have such zeal. They haven’t stopped believing in Morris’s vision, they’ve only stopped believing in Morris specifically. Now they have a new god, one who floats down from the sky and daily proves his worthiness by seizing their old god and unmaking him. The Andrews have taken to looking skyward for him. It’s on the Coyote’s behalf they will continue the old ways, bird and spade, fountain and cavern. Besides, there’s no stopping this ceremony; the tickets were delivered already, days ago, to every Pigeon Forge resident. Blue if you’ve been chosen for the Assizement, green if you’re invited to the show, a distraction as those left behind are collected: carnival and circus, freaks and fun, the flight of the acrobats, the caper of the clowns, the roar of the lion, the dance of the bearded lady.
But today there will be no dance, the crowd will leave disappointed. Jane has neglected to tell Krane, or the Andrews, or anyone else. It’s her decision; one they won’t like, but by the time they know, it will be too late to correct. There’s no time to dance, not with Gordy’s confession to listen to. The confession was Sterling’s first gift. His second gift was a promise of hope, the only hope remaining.
It feels like a year ago. It hasn’t even been a day.
“We need Gordy. And we need him immediately. Gordy’s been given a command he needs to fulfill. Gordy’s the only chance.”
Sterling’s eyes widened. “The ticket’s gone,” he whispered. “Julius turned it to water. It’s gone.”
She shakes her head. “The ticket’s beside the point. The ticket only matters because your idiot son thinks it matters. Gordy can be miracle enough. But he has to get here soon.”
“Gordy is coming!” Sterling had yelped, with almost comic relief. “In fact, Gordy’s on his way here as fast as he can get.” This had been Sterling’s gift of hope, though Jane had to admit he’d tarnished the gift significantly by the next thing he said, which was this: “My sandals told me so.”
She’d wanted to ask him more, but that’s when the Andrews had burst into the caretaker’s apartment and captured them. “I’ll keep her safe,” Sterling shouted as he and Finch were bustled away—another promise of hope, though an empty one. Nor would there be any safety, not if Gordy didn’t arrive. Braiding her beard for the trapeze, Jane filled her ears with Gordy’s voice and waited for him to come. It has to be soon, she thought. It has to be soon. If it’s not soon, it won’t matter.
Jane listened, then rewound and listened again. How typical. Naturally, Gordy had seen everything behind the door. Just as naturally—for Gordy at least—seeing had not brought understanding. Gordy had been
stolen from him. First, the eyelids, replaced by a chitinous substance resembling fingernails; forcing him into a terrible, careful, never-ending awareness of his blinks. It’s easier to simply keep the lids closed, opening them only at need.
Then, a week later—last week—Goop-Goop lost his feet. Legs neatly replaced from the knees down, the shins tapering grotesquely into prehensile pink boneless worm-squid nubbins.
Next the Coyote played his terrible trick. He’d vowed to come once a week, but he’d lied. After the legs, he returned the very next day, duded up as a caped superhero, his diamond of power set in his forehead, and changed Goop-Goop’s tongue. It belongs to some rougher beast, this tongue. The only order it can give is Goop. Along with the tongue, he lost his authority. The Coyote made his modifications in the bright of day, right where all Goop-Goop’s followers could see, then set him down once more on the grass. Goop-Goop had crawled for his crutches, but the Andrews moved faster, knocking his props away, pinning him with prods as he rolled legless and mewled wordless on the turf, making for the first time the hated goooop noise—guttural, epiglottal, the baboon of rage within him finally given full throat. Meanwhile his lieutenants fought each other for dominance, and the Andrews prevailed.
The next day, the Coyote took Goop-Goop’s name.
He wishes he could remember it—his own name. No other memories have yet been stripped from him, but his name is…is…no. It’s empty there. He remembers the moment it went, but he can’t remember what it was, only that it’s now gone. He lost his teeth next. They still work somewhat; the sand is dense and hard, making a shred of the unfortunate tissue of the inner lip. Then the hair, turned to a horrendous tin filament you can feel extrude from the scalp with the excruciating slowness of hair’s growth. Losing his name is more maddening than any of the physical disfigurements. To search within your mind and not find it. To be compelled, for lack of a suitable alternative, to take the name bequeathed by the lout Krane.
Goop-Goop grinds his teeth, bringing a fine dusting of sand to his tiny, inarticulate, salamander tongue, and he stops, mindful; he can’t allow his teeth to disintegrate, he needs to parcel out their use now, just as he needs to ration his blinks to spare his eyes as long as possible. This is the cruelty and the genius of the Coyote: He doesn’t take away, he transmutes. If you simply remove something, then it is gone and you can begin to learn to live with the lack, but if you replace something correct with something unsuitable, a torturous maintenance and constant consideration of your predicament becomes necessary. So it is with the name: Goop-Goop’s learned you can’t not name yourself, there must be some signifier, some placeholder. But worse than the maddening itch of the misplaced name is the terrible notion that a piece of one’s internal furniture might be removed. The time may come, Goop-Goop knows, when he will remember only that he once occupied a better state and a more commodious form, but not what that state or form might have been. Even the idea of Continuity will someday be stripped away. Why, might he even take away the—a quick glance over his shoulder—no; it’s still there—the wave.
The stake that holds him is a thick wooden tent peg, a four-footer used for the big top, driven deep into the ground and affixed to a heavy buried concrete slab. A series of chains are merged by welds to a heavier chain, which is wrapped around the stake, and the smaller chains are themselves welded to the iron collar and shackles around his neck and wrists. Carefully, Goop-Goop closes his eyes—Yes, these are your dividends. You’ve got nothing else, except for
the flight in. If you want an indicator of what sort of a froth Bailey’s been in since reading the end of Boyd’s book, Gordy thinks, look no further. For the sake of speed, she was willing to buy an airline ticket, which means she was willing to appear on the grid—and Boyd’s book has taught her things about Donk’s new powers and cruelties that have made subtle living less a preference and more an obsession. It was the late flight into Nashville, then a rental to another motel in Knoxville for a rest ahead of the circus, both of them judging it wisest to roost at a reasonable remove from Pigeon Forge proper.
The wave is coming, according to the book. Morris is being tortured past endurance—Donk’s been up to this horrific work. Gordy doesn’t see the trouble with that. “That wave is exactly what I’ve been waiting for,” he’d sputtered, “and now you want us to go and be there when it…?” But no, Gordy, stop it, you’ve followed this line of reasoning, and it only leads to another squabble. If we’re going to do the unimaginably stupid thing, it’s better to do it quickly and silently, and then be gone.
And, it must be admitted, the book also has it set down that Jane will die; a fate Gordy would gladly risk himself to prevent. It must be further admitted, the book has proved…unnervingly predictive, enough so that basing your actions on its prognostications no longer seems entirely insane.
The idea is to sneak to see Jane, and get her clear. It makes sense to find her in any case; she’s the only person who might not attack them. Also, Gordy does have to admit that Jane, with her insider’s knowledge of Pigeon Forge’s subterranean politics, is likely to be authoritative regarding the question of whether Morris really is being replaced piecemeal by a hyper-powered Donk, and what to make of that. And Jane will be in town, if the circus schedule’s still accurate. Gordy knows exactly how to find her, as long as Morris is still using the circus as cover for his fountain shenanigans. Crumb’s ’Mazing is still open; it stands to reason the maze will still contain the secret entrance, and Gordy can still remember the trick.
“There’s a gross coffee machine in the gross lobby.” Bailey emerges from the bathroom dressed in her customary black. She’s ripping a flimsy motel towel into strips. “Want some gross coffee?”
Gordy smiles. “I’ll live without.”
Bailey’s got a heavy-duty flashlight she intends to use as a baton, her preferred weapon. Now she works the strips of towel into a makeshift holster. “Think we’ll find our way in?” she asks, absently.
“One way or another,” Gordy answers, truthfully. No doubt if they can’t sneak in, they’ll be captured and brought in.
Bailey takes the meaning. “Stay behind,” she says. “Tell me how I can get in; I can take it from there. You’re not wrong; it’s dangerous. But it’s more dangerous for you.”
Gordy looks at her, and feels a rush of emotion; here’s someone whose instinct is always to run toward the danger, never away from. Not because she loves danger, but because she refuses to dismiss the way it reaches for others. He shrugs, says: “We’ve come this far already. Let’s go put our minds at ease if we can.”
And that’s it, in the end, isn’t it, Gordy realizes, as Bailey leaves for the coffee. That’s the whole mission: putting a single lovely mind at ease. It’s insane, but it’s enough. Gordy can find peace in it, if not logic—and anyway, there’s not much logic in anything, is there? What do you expect from the world? Salvation? Justice? Sanity? This course may doom us, but the risk is our own. If it leads to a world ruled by Morris, so be it; those are global concerns. I’m finished shouldering the burden of a world that allows someone like Morris to rise. Worse, a world that insists on the success of its Morrises. He and this world are hand and glove, so perfectly matched, it’s difficult to know if it created him or he created it. He works the way the world does: Give the useful enough slack in their reins to let them imagine they run free, take the useless and make a use of them, herd them together and make money from the consumption of their bodies, profit from their poon, lucre from their labor, or (if they are especially incompatible) interest from their incarceration. If you’re killed, then the world will end—for you at least. Let such a world end. Or, let Morris rise to take control of it, so we may at least be honest about how we are dominated. For those of us on the margins, there won’t be much difference either way. Meanwhile, if there’s a scrap of comfort to be found, let’s make a try for it. If there’s a chance for a modicum of hope, pursue it. Where can you find even the hint of sanity or clarity in a world like this, hold it. Wrestle what you can away from the world, dodge and scrape and pull a scrap to sustain you from between those eternally grinding teeth that exist only to consume, for whom you are nothing more than a catholic particle of the fuel allowing them to continue their grind. Here is a hint, a scrap, a chance: to settle Bailey’s mind about this apparently existential danger rising up in Pigeon Forge, and maybe find her never-was brother. It’s not logical, but Julius is (if Boyd is to be believed) many pairs of sandals, and you were only partially visible for years, and somewhere nearby hundreds or thousands linger in mirrored boxes, screaming their lives away at their own images, so screw logic or sanity or justice or certainly salvation—none of that foofaraw for you. Here is love, Gordy-Gord, riding alongside, somehow discovered, unlooked-for, invested in you without any wheedling or clinging or wishing. It might be love for the first time, friend, and you don’t just stroll past love. Nor does love stroll by every day. Nor, perhaps, does it always last. Perhaps sometimes love is nothing but a momentary ray of sun, the most precious gold there is. How foolish not to bask in it, while it shines.
“Gordy…?” It’s Bailey, in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee and wearing a trepidatious expression. “Look at this.” She brings a large brown envelope into view.
“What is it?”
“Mail. For you. Somehow somebody’s found us.”
She tosses it to Gordy. The return address is a familiar one—the Neon. Sister Nettles.
“What is it?”
Bailey gives him the fish eyes until Gordy realizes there’s really only one way to get the answer; he opens the envelope, extracts the sandals.
Sandals. Gordy whispers it: “Are these…?”
“What else could they be?” Bailey asks. “Or should I say ‘who?’ ”
“What do I do?”
Bailey looks at him like he’s the imbecile he supposes he is. “Well, Gordy,” she says. “I think what you do is, you put them on your feet. And then maybe you’ll get
the inexplicably restored loyalty of the bearded lady.
Jane’s recent transformation is the one pleasant lesson Goop-Goop’s mind has provided him throughout this ordeal: a restoration, at the precise moment all others have fallen away, of his greatest disciple from pure apostasy and opposition to accommodation and renewal of allegiance. She’s arrived each day—she’s here now—with cool water and a sponge. A comb, a razor. Some food. Drops for the eyes. Her expression inscrutable, but in these actions, he divines an impending return of his singularity—She understands that harm was never your intent. All these people, projections of your distracted mind; they harm themselves, they’ve spilled from your wire’s plastic jacket like wayward filaments. When was the original sin, the breach of the casing? When did they escape your perfect Oneness? It must have been some time in the deep past, before Isaac, even before memory. All you’ve ever done has been to tease them all back into their original configurations and seal the breach. It was your great work, as the world’s only consciousness, to trace each of them to their source, to reconnect the links, to restore the connections. No wonder, thinks Goop-Goop, your entrepreneurial mind gravitated toward prisons: some way of holding people and keeping them properly ordered, so perfect unity might be reached—What, then, is the lesson of this present suffering? Is this the end of your being, or some other beginning? Jane has cast her lot with you. Is it possible she represents the part of yourself that holds the deeper consciousness? She may have an understanding of you greater than your own. This seems to be one of only two possible conclusions. The other is that both you and she have gone mad—a distinct possibility. “Hold the wave,” she says. “Please. Don’t call it.”
The water from the sponge is blessedly cool. But wait, she’s gone—When did she go? His eyes were shut; he hadn’t noticed.
Goop-Goop realizes—Jane isn’t insane, she’s a prophet. She even has a prophet’s beard. More has been revealed to her than to any other. She knows about the wave. He’s never told any other about the wave—the great certifier of his position—of this he is sure. But she knows. It’s always there, in the periphery of his vision, over his shoulder, kissing his awareness. Never in his recollection has it been absent. Through his life he’s tried not to think of it if he can help it; accessible to him at any moment, the ability to call it and end the entire struggle, wash it all away until nothing is left but a great blankness and himself—unless it were only the blankness left; unless he would be the blankness, or the blankness would be him. It’s there for him, the relief of a criminal about to surrender, the haven of the fox who lies down at last to await the baying hounds. He could call it now, a trillion trillion tons of cresting water, and end this. Bring an end to this pain in a great cleansing deluge. Each day, as another thing is taken from him, he contemplates it. If he’s honest, he’s been thinking of it more than he likes. Lately it calls to him powerfully, and, more frequently, he returns the call.
Goop-Goop spares himself a peek around the tent before shielding his vision once more beneath the jaundiced translucence of fingernail lids. He allows the world to become a thing captured in glimpses.
He can hear telling sounds of early arrivals to the circus. It’s all these others, thinks Goop-Goop—all their fault. Why can’t they see that any power—all power—must be given to you? Why won’t any of them understand it? This pain all stems from their universal stubbornness. But look here—their stubbornness is your stubbornness, for they all came from your mind. This realization is good; it simplifies. No need to waste any time on mercy even for yourself. This, then, is your lesson: to reach your apotheosis, it has become necessary to divest yourself of those things that are not truly you. Even your name. Even that. Strip away all illusion until only the essential character remains. Nothing but undistilled self. The Coyote is the tool for this perfection, and your punishment for the stubbornness of your consciousness, as well—yes, punishment. Even you have failed to entirely become yourself.
For a moment, Goop-Goop entertains the notion that Continuity, having been offered no fit offspring from him into which to house itself, has passed from him and moved to another…but who? A vengeful hypersteroidal skygod in cape and spandex? A pair of midgets? It’s an atrocity either way. An aberration. A mockery. Why even consider it? Since the onset of his torments, so many strange and false notions have been pressing their noses against his window. It’s maddening—Continuity passed down to the Andrews? To Donk? No. Whatever lesson this is, it isn’t that. It’s a hard lesson you’ve given yourself, but the difficulty prefigures great significance, so you must resolve to learn it well. A test of your own faith in yourself. No. This, too, is nonsense. Or perhaps it isn’t? It’s all become so unbearably muddled. Goop-Goop throws back his head and brays a single howling
Half a minute it stretches, gaining in volume as it moves from sorrow to rage. The gorilla Wembly doesn’t even attempt an echo of it, but merely looks up from his solitaire game and blinks. Goop-Goop allows himself another glimpse at the fairgoers who’ve wandered over to the freak show, meandering among the mutants, walking with the confident posture of the overlooked elect, the passed-over chosen people, the unmarked elite. Do they know of the others, even now being corralled into cages behind the big top curtain? Yes, they do. On some level, they know it. And I know they know it—why else would I have arranged matters this way? The perfection of it. The unlucky chosen paying the price for inherent inadequacies or purposeful rebellions. The well-pleased compliant masses, distracted by nonsense. Oh, they know what’s behind the curtain. Never once has a Pigeon Forge circus commenced without friends and neighbors, husbands and wives, parents and children divided, some on one side and some on the other; never once has Krane announced the clowns and the lion tamer, tumblers or bumblers or jugglers or elephants, without each of them fitting themselves for a suit of well-tailored ignorance. If the curtain weren’t there to hide the view, they would raise one. What, after all, is more important than the comfort? And what is more comfortable than ignorance?
Another glimpse; the crowd has swelled. Across the room—at a far remove from Wembly to avoid the natural bigotry of apes toward little men—Andrew and Andrew, the Fighting Midgets (not too proud to take their usual part in the freak show, even now that they run the show) enact their choreographed combat. There’s also a sizable crowd now around Goop-Goop himself, but despite his novelty and the extremity of his deformations—or as a result of them—a distance is kept. The gawkers and looky-loos debate whether the chains are indeed necessary for their safety or are merely an effective bit of showmanship, but none of them ever come within grappling range to test the proposition. Jane’s dance begins in ten minutes, and, as this is announced over the loudspeakers, Goop-Goop sees many of the crowd peel away from the other freaks, hopeful for a seat.
Another glimpse; Goop-Goop sees that only one of his onlookers remains—an unnaturally vivid man in a powder-blue suit, his face wreathed in
smoke and waited for the creature Goop-Goop to become aware of him. Landrude didn’t mind; he appreciated having time to acclimate himself to this side of the door. It was best to be slow and deliberate. What he couldn’t do was stabilize how the ape looked. Blink. Six hundred pounds of bruising muscle. Blink. Four hundred pounds of sad wastrel mangy depredation. Playing solitaire, as was his wont, but now the cards have disappeared; somebody’s forgotten that’s what Wembly does—how does one forget that? It’s his whole act. It made Landrude mad—Are you readers not paying any attention at all, or are you just ignorant of gorilla physiology? Haven’t you ever been to a zoo? I wrote it all for you. Four paragraphs describing the ape: the shape, the size. Why won’t they see it that way?
Morris, meanwhile, was a mess, interpretation or no. Donk had proved most creative. Landrude watched, confounded by the arrival of Jane Sim, who ministered to his pustules, moistened his eyeballs, spoke gentle and soothing words—another sign of how disgraced this world had become, how in need of eradication. There’s no reason for mercy from Jane Sim, it wasn’t even in character for her, it made no sense. Think of what he’s done to you, Juanita. There’s no call to show any kindness whatsoever, it’s barbaric, it’s objectionable…Finally, when she had gone, Landrude emerged and slowly made his surroundings aware of him. Presently the creature noticed him and froze, startled. Landrude spoke:
You look terrible.
GooooooooooooOOOOOOP!
You don’t look “just like me,” anymore. Not at all.
GOOP! Goop! GOOP! Goop!
Landrude murmured: This won’t do. I’m going to give you yourself back. Remember what you once were. Remember it all.
Goop-Goop shimmered, warped, changed. In his place, chained to the stake, a man on the taller side, a man in middle life with a full head of upswept salted hair, rangy features tamed somewhat by a well-scrubbed look and a recently developing belly; portrait of the once-starving artist in the comfortable repose of satisfactory success, wearing a filthy suit whose color might once have been powder blue.
The smoking man who had once been something other than Landrude moved closer; I want to see it happen, he thought. I want to see him understand. Do you see? he whispered to the chained figure. Do you see that you are the fallen strain, and I am the ascended? Never call me usurper. Never suggest I stole yourself from you. Your only remaining power is the eraser, but after you’ve used it, I will create.
Now do you see?
Imagine you could speed time to view the passage of millennia in a matter of minutes, so you could see the slow degrees by which a river claims a mountain: carving it, taking it by bits and then, in an instant of release, taking it all. It was like this with the prisoner’s face, which fell by pieces into despair and then abruptly crashed, as he experienced for the first time the horrors inflicted upon him, stolen from his world and inserted unnaturally within another, the blasphemy of squid feet and sand teeth and painful screw hair, of what was yet to be visited, of his long abandonment, and—worse—of how cruel he had been made to become, what he in false persona had inflicted upon his own creations…He howled, then wailed. Author once again, he fell boneless like meat to the ground and shuddered, each memory now reinterpreted away from him into something false. It’s done now, Landrude thought. He’s finally understood.
Why, the chained author moans, why, why did you, why—as if he didn’t know. Even in his utter defeat, even now, still he clings to his folly, his false ignorance of any crime? It fills Landrude with the old fury he’d had, back when he was Morris. You made me a minor character, Landrude screamed. You wrote me as a villain. Nothing of my motives. You never let them see me. And then you dropped a fucking safe on my head.
Coming back in close, Landrude said: Now I’m going to put you back the way you were. First your body. Then, memories. You’ll be Morris again, my friend. You’ll be Morris. Do you see? You won’t remember my visit. But the despair I’ll let you’ll keep. The knowledge of how wrong you are, how utterly beaten—that is your keepsake forever and ever, until the day you decide to end all this. Until that day.
As soon as he’d done it, Landrude returned quickly to the door, fearing the oncoming wave. In moments, he found himself in the study. Lying on the table, thicker than ever before, was the expected stack of pages. Come, wave, come, he thought, almost begged, nearly prayed. Then, reading—This ending…it’s perfect. But wait…no…there’s still a story. Why isn’t the story gone? Landrude wanted to
rest his haggard head for a moment, and Goop-Goop’s mind wanders out of conscious thought. Then it comes, from nowhere, unlike anything ever before experienced: a dark plunge into icy soul blackness. Unexpected, uncalled-for, a despair darker than any he has ever known comes washing over him; there is no end to the pit, no end to the falling. There is no questioning, only a certainty—You’ve failed. You must see that. No door opens for you, no ticket comes to you, always you are passed over, always you are thwarted. The lesson you’re teaching yourself is this: You are nothing. There is some other from whom reality springs. You aren’t the center. You’re not even a point on the map. You thought yourself the fulcrum, but you’re not even a figment. You are beyond zero, un-nothing, failure’s failure, ah God!—
He almost calls it then. It’s still there, but he can’t take comfort in it—The wave isn’t a sign of your power. All it represents is your ability to end your sad struggle in the damp fizzle of a dud squib. It’s not the failsafe; it’s the only move remaining. He almost calls it. He’s about to do it, but then, in the crowd, he sees…Gordy. Gordy?
Yes, there he is, Goop-Goop tells himself—Gordy beyond doubt, despite impossibility. You’ve spent too much time studying that face to mistake it for any other—it is him: the man you pursued around the worlds. Gordy, the Flickering Man flickering no more; Gordy, back from the dead; Gordy on a mission, accompanied by a pretty cat who seems vaguely familiar. She carries herself with a certain slow ease and perfect control; only her eyes are quick. Gordy, less quick, more foolish, though, isn’t reading any warning signs; he’s charting a meandering course that looks likely to cross into the white circle of DANGER. Goop-Goop reaches into his hiding place and brings knife to hand—Gordy. I’ll never kill you enough, boy. Come here.
The flippers that had been his feet are bad for balance but they are powerful, and the suckers on the underside provide sufficient traction even in the straw. Goop-Goop lunges, but the pretty cat has seen, reached out with both paws, grabbed his knife-hand on the downswing and pulled, leaping with the force of her own action and then landing with full weight on his back. She never releases the arm, either—it’s pulled behind him in untenable repose. The knife skitters under the straw and Goop-Goop howls in a turbulence of frustrated vengeance and torsion of aggrieved tendons, and GOOP-GOOP GOOOP GOOP GOOOOOOP goes his rage and GOOOP goes his impotence and GOOOOOOOP goes his pain and frustration and sorrow. The whole crowd turns toward the chaos.
“I’ve still got it,” she says, with a certain pride of ownership. Goop-Goop can hear them perfectly well; the tent is hushed, stunned by this display.
“We’re drawing a crowd,” Gordy says, nervously. It’s true. Goop-Goop rages; though his mind is now cold and precise, he cannot stop his horrid fishwife of a tongue from releasing a stentorian metronomic gooping. Confused, Wembly quakes; he’s attuned to the brume of animal rage filling the tent, susceptible to it, and his handlers hastily drape his cage with a decorative tarpaulin in hopes of staving off the ape’s empathy-wrath. Cage or no, gorilla strength mixed with gorilla rage is frightening, like malign industrial machinery knocked off its tracks.
Ouickly, efficiently, the pretty cat releases him and steps clear, and the two retreat to Jane’s tent. The crowd returns to other distractions, makes their way circusward, climbing to their seats in the swaying bleachers. All the freaks return to their acts—no, not quite all. The fighting Andrews, all the way across the tent, safely clear of the midget-hating rage of Wembly…they’re making their way over. Have they recognized Gordy? It’s possible; Andrew and Andrew have ever been among the most observant…yes, here they come. They sneak to Jane’s tent and stand by the portal, one at each side, waiting for Gordy and his bodyguard to emerge. They can afford to wait; the tent backs up against the big scrim of the big top; the portal by which they stand is the only way in or out of the sub-tent holding Jane’s act. Goop-Goop pulls himself from the straw, enraged, runs the chains again, and again they pass the test he sets to them—pulling him back, making him goop idiotically at the tent roof, which in turn compels Wembly to answer with confused chuffs from beneath his tarpaulin. The Andrews turn and favor Goop-Goop with a scornful glower, which he returns—Gordy’s mine, you bastards. They move farther in, toward Jane’s inner sanctum, passing out of Goop-Goop’s sight, then one of them re-emerges and runs off, no doubt for reinforcements. Goop-Goop can see the knife, but it’s well out of reach. The stake has a three-inch diameter, buried four feet into a plug of concrete. A fine dust coats the inside of his poor shredded mouth. His teeth are made of compacted composite grit plugged into soft pink gums like a set of rotary bits, extraordinarily abrasive and mercilessly hard. If used, they will slowly disappear…but they can be used.
Goop-Goop lies recumbent beside the stake, inspecting it closely. How interesting, this stake. How interesting. There’s a fine dusting on his tongue. He spits, and moves closer, closer, discovering…Yes! Just barely!…he can fit his mouth around its girth. Goop-Goop goes to work, his teeth lessening. Dust fills his mouth, making him pause at intervals to spit. The same thoughts, but pitched at a new frequency, once placid, now frantic, once proclaimed in assurance of fulfillment, now howled in desperation for survival—Yes. You are the Continuity of all. All of it. The Everything. There is pain and the pain is your teacher—but not all teachers are good. Soon you will take your power back, and your name, too. You will restore all things. And—glancing over shoulder—if you fail this time, you will end all things. A singularity either way.
Goop-Goop’s teeth quickly recede as he works, but the stake also is attenuating. Which one, he wonders, tooth or stake, will come first to an end?