Continued, The Revisionaries

There comes a point in one’s life when one senses—all at once—the profound instability of everything once believed stable and secure, a moment when one understands how the universe’s architecture sways and creaks, ever on the verge of collapse. In this moment, one becomes dangerous and unpredictable. Imagine, then, the advent of that unlikely yet inevitable alignment, when every living person shares this epiphany simultaneously.

—Unknown

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 whispered, “I don’t think you’ll get a better chance.”

Jane ran for the stairs. What

I’d advise you, is avoid trusting overmuch to patterns, Julius tells Sister Nettles. You’ve chosen a brave and a fine course but a difficult one. The longer you remain, the more you’ll discover that every pattern breaks down or repeats. Eventually, every expected form will confound

you should know: A dance is nothing like a leap. When you leap, every movement must be in service to the plan. The clowns throw the bars with precision, but they need to know where you’ll be. Even the seeming mistakes must be practiced for weeks and woven into the fabric of the whole. During a leap, Jane’s mind needs to become rigid and exacting, her thought must become a single thing, a gear engineered to fit without margin of error into the teeth of another. But in a dance, she waits for the music—whatever the music might be each night—and then moves within the surprise and the sinew of it, her body becoming the trance and flow of the sitar, or perhaps the crystalline percussive insistence of electronica, or else the athletic leaps of jazz trumpet, or the recursive adagios of Spanish guitar, or any of a dozen, a hundred, a thousand other possible forms. Her mind can become many rather than one, it can become the moment, the epiphany, the water that finds its path. Rather than becoming rigid, she melts. The dance is not a leap, because no catch will ever be needed. There is a shimmer in the air, as of heat, but there is no heat. There is only perfection.

But tonight, Jane refuses the dance. On the other side, sensed by her but unseen, the audience begins to gather. Ears full of Gordy’s confession, she returns to the

stairs. What it was like to run for the stairs, trusting to the distraction of the guards, was this: a leap without a plan for a catch. The caretaker was correct, Jane saw; this was indeed their awaited moment. Normally the stairs would be guarded by two trustees, but they had abandoned their posts, distracted like the rest by the horrified sounds coming from directly above them.

The steps were made of the same material as the rondure of black stone encircling the fountain, and cunningly concealed. Jane was upon them nearly before she spied them, sharply checked her speed to avoid a stumble, and then she was descending, down in the dark, safe and unnoticed, her leap finding the catch yet again, but now on its heels another leap, please god, please let the door open, please let me find the

manuscript she received from Gordy’s bodyguard Bailey, the one whose dedication assured her the door would open for her. Mae stays quiet; helps her braid her beard. She takes the left side while Jane takes the right. Mae is a skillful braider. Each night Jane secretly races her to finish her side of the beard first, and each night she loses. Tonight, the race isn’t even close; Jane’s distracted by the mutter of Gordy’s confession, by Boyd’s book, by her anticipation of Gordy’s prophesied arrival. Jane laughs. Of course Gordy’s coming—after all, a lunatic’s sandals said so.

He’d better arrive soon if he’s going to arrive, Jane thinks. There’s precious little time left. His recorded voice is in her ears, and she thinks—You knew, you son of a bitch. Back in the cavern while you were running things, you knew. You weren’t lying about the wave being real but you were lying about what it was—to me and to yourself. Think how much trouble I’d have saved if you hadn’t made me pity you. Think how much trouble we’d save now if I’d called the guards to have you killed. Then we’d be completely doomed and I wouldn’t have to waste time worrying.

Jane braids the beard and listens to Gordy’s voice and reads in the manuscript the report of her own doom. Sterling says Gordy will be here soon. Everything depends on him coming, but she can think of no reason to hope she’ll

find the door open please let it open for me and then she was past the stairs and there it was; the simple door affixed in the clay, looking less like a relic and more like the sort of standardized mass-production item you’d buy at the nearest home improvement center. Here Morris spent long hours in ancestral echo, holding vigil, trying to unlock it with his mind, or to make it vanish, or to transport himself to the other side. Here Gordy had stood, hand on knob, turned, opened, entered, discovered. Jane could see the doorknob. She reached for it, time

out in taffy of adrenaline, rubbery fear and elastic hope, anticipation of capture, expectation of discovery—then snapping back, jumping her forward from eternity to instant. She would never reach the door; she had reached it already. There was nobody to stop her. Hand met knob, knob gave way to query of rotation. Latch clicked, hinge creaked.

She entered, and then

Jane finds herself in a strange place. It would perhaps be more accurate to say: ‘Janes find herselves in strange places.’ If this paradox troubles you, take comfort in knowing that Jane was similarly troubled.

Perhaps it will help if I describe what Jane saw.

and then Jane saw the endless beach, and the infinity of its ocean gathered up into a crushing tidal wrath, suspended against the field of stars—unless it was so monstrously large that it encompassed the stars, submerging them.

And she saw the study, and the desperate struggle of the two men who occupied it.

And she saw the small room at the end of a short hall, and, in it, someone familiar.

And the voice said:

be successful. Everything’s gone upside-down after the door. One of the secret cruelties of life is its tendency to deliver your desire to you only once it has devised the means by which it might withhold your enjoyment of receipt. The Coyote’s torturous transformations of Morris came daily, with each change compounding Morris’s just and delicious misery—that is how she saw it at first. But this had been before she’d been past the door and learned deeper and crueler truths. Jane yearns for the simplicity of the earlier perspective, but she doesn’t have Gordy’s knack for self-deception; there can be no return for her to the Eden of her previous ignorance. She knows too well how each of the Coyote’s modifications pushes matters excruciatingly closer to the

voice, who says:

—Watch them well.

Jane watches the identical men in their struggle. Watches the one overcome the other. Watches what the victor does after. What he does to the woman named Juanita Neato, and to the round man named Paddington, and to others.

—Do you see?

“Yes.”

—And now the boy.

She watches the boy stand and struggle and split into multiple copies of himself, each holding the slim green scrap of paper. Watches one copy go, watches one stay.

—And now the wave.

Jane gazes at the wave. The blasphemy of its size.

“Gordy made it.”

—Yes, from him and of him; but also from those who contend: the author and his usurper. Tell Gordy it will soon come, if he does not do that which has been laid upon him. When it comes, all he calls his own will be destroyed with him.

“That’s what we’ve been hoping for,” Jane said, weeping: unfair, unfair.

—The hope is a false one. You know the reason now. He must do that which has been laid upon him.

“Gordy can’t obey you anymore,” Jane said, despairing. “He doesn’t have it. He gave it up, and now it’s gone.”

—Look again. Look at the one who stayed; who stands on the

brink. The Coyote provides Morris a torture more perfect than any she might have devised; the ruin of the body, combined with—far worse—the denial of his spirit’s great conviction. He’s spent his life believing all things spring from him; now, every day, the Coyote teaches him the lie of that belief. She sees the signs of Morris’s resolve weakening, evidence of load-bearing pillars of his internal cosmology beginning to crumple—things he says, rawness in his voice, a desperation in his brutalized eyes she’d never seen before. She should be drunk on the pleasure of it, but instead of a glutton she is a tantalus, strung taut, reaching for succor but unable to grasp it. All she can think when she watches him is: Will the next one be the one to finally collapse him? How much longer can he hold? The Coyote doesn’t understand what he’s doing; it’s desperately important to stop him, but she can’t think of any way to reach him. He keeps no timetable, his arrivals have no forewarnings, his movements are faster than thought, his visits are brief and filled only with the incoherent ululations of his victim. And, even if a message could be delivered, would the Coyote stop? She thinks not; he’s as blind to any possibility outside his own beliefs as is Morris. For the Coyote, as with Morris, the universe is a graspable thing, a realm of study he believes he’s apprehended perfectly and entirely.

If the Coyote can’t be stopped, all that remains—unless Gordy truly is on his way—is the desperate, useless task: Provide what comfort can be provided; plug the dam of Morris’s suffering and try, from restricted vantage, to reach the other leaks that spring up daily. Sterling’s offered his assistance, but in truth there are none better suited to the task than she, who has known Morris longest and best. Her servitude, more than any other, can be for him a bulwark against despair. He’ll see it as a lesson to himself, encouraging him into subhuman acts of persistence and endurance. This is the cruelty of the universe, she thinks: to hope for revenge, and watch another enact it; to see the enactment, but be compelled to prevent it; to come to the man who took away what is yours, even your selfhood, who used you however he chose, who took from you your bird, who replaced a mother’s constant flow of simultaneous goodbye and hello with an inescapable series of goodbyes. This now is the man you must comfort. She had hoped there might be found behind the door some trick or tool or knowledge to further throw him into hazard, but the trick was on her. Behind the door she found, not a tool to sever him from her, but rather knowledge of a great and unforgivable inter-connectedness. Jane knows Gordy hasn’t understood the full truth of it; that much is clear from the flawed understanding he delivers in his confession. How can anyone be so surprisingly right and yet so entirely wrong? Again, the terrible wickedness of the universe, that it can lend such great understanding, and for that privilege enforce such a perversely high interest, this usurious empathy. How unfair, after hoping so many years for this man’s bad end, to be made to look upon even him and feel for him such depths of pity. That she should look upon that hateful face and see in it her daughter’s, and her own—even an hour ago, when she last visited him. “Shush, shush,” she said, as the creature scrabbled at the ground with its approximation of feet and mewled. “Shush, shush. Shush shush.” Slowly the creature soothed. Slowly the sponge moved from face to bucket, from bucket to face, the water darkening with filth removed. Pity, like suffering, like mercy, all draws from a common pool.

She’s braided her beard for the trapeze with time to spare. Jane sits alone in the dim of a single candle and prepares herself. There’s been some sort of disturbance outside, in addition to the occasional agonized “Goop” and the gorilla’s miserable echolalia. It’s drawing nearer; she can now hear some indistinct voices, and, louder, angrier, some shouting, including some impassioned screeching from the Morris-thing. It’s been quiet for a minute now. He hears their approaching familiar voices. Gordy and Bailey.

So. Sterling was right. A second meeting, and then whatever happens next. We’re all spinning down the neck of this funnel; everything narrows from here, attenuates and distills into singularity. In the final quiet moment before they come in, Jane, who has been beyond the door and returned, sits in this infinite handful of remaining seconds, hand upon the dog-eared manuscript, and prepares herself for flight.

When they’d visited her in Raccoon River, she’d never looked at them: back turned, purposefully detached, purposefully remote, snatches of reflected eye contact, head wreathed by the halo of globular lights. Now she swings to face them as they enter, leaning forward, as if she expects something from them.

Gordy grins weakly at Jane, begins the speech he rehearsed on the way: “I suppose you’re wondering why we’re—”

Jane interrupts: “Shut up. We don’t have much time. We may only have minutes. And—” premonitory finger to Gordy’s already-opening mouth—“no questions. If you have a question that doesn’t get answered by what I say, it means your question is stupid and the answer doesn’t matter. You have to obey the command you were given. The Coyote is torturing Morris past despair. I assume you saw him out there.”

“Saw…who?”

“So-called Morris. What’s left of him. These days they call him ‘Goop-Goop.’ ”

“That was Morris?”

“He’s holding on by his fingertips, but the wave’s coming. We don’t have much time if we’re going to stop it.”

Gordy laughs. “I don’t want to stop it. I’ve been waiting for it to come for years.”

“I know you have, you idiot. That’s why we’re in this mess.”

“You’ve got this all wrong.” Gordy hopes he sounds patient, not pedantic: “The wave is going to destroy him. It’ll bring an end to all this. We’re just here to save you first.”

“You’ve read Boyd’s book,” Bailey says gently. “You’ ’ ’ you die at the end of it.”

“The book only goes so far, and it can change. I’ve been on the other side of the door.”

Gordy stupidly repeats: “The door?”

“It’s not a place inside time. I saw what you saw. I heard what you heard.”

“Then you know the choice I have is no choice at all.” But then Gordy realizes. It’s so clear what he’s up against: a mother’s love—Of course. You’ve been too calculating, he admonishes himself, thinking of it as a mercy—the wave flooding out the prisoners along with their jailors, killing them. A grim mercy to be sure, but an end at least to suffering—an unfortunate but unavoidable cost—but for Jane, it would be something else entirely. Her only daughter…of course. You haven’t rehearsed for it, but you know your part. Here’s a chance to do one fine thing before the end. A sacrifice, no doubt, but a worthy one. You ought to have known it; there was never a good end in this for you. It’s better this way. Look at Jane, the poor thing, sick with worry. She’s been carrying all this weight alone. Gordy smiles sadly at her. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Before it comes, I’ll get Finch to safety.” He rises and steps around Bailey, takes Jane’s shoulder in what he hopes is a friendly and reassuring grip. “I promise you, I’m not leaving until we get Finch out of the oubliette first. I’ll get her safe or die trying.”

She looks up at him hatefully. “Oh, you unbelievable asshole…‘Safe?’ There’s no ‘safe’ if the wave comes.”

“Hey—” he’s pleased with himself, that he can still be magnanimous in the face of her understandable but misplaced anger. “It’s all right. I understand.”

She brandishes a listening device and earbuds. “I know everything you understand. I know how you think of it. But I was there when you got the ticket—I watched. You understand? I was there. I heard what the voice said to you. ‘He and all he calls his own will be destroyed.’ “Think of Morris. You know him. Listen to the actual words. It will destroy him, this wave. It will destroy him and all he calls his own.”

“Oh,” says Bailey, sinking to the ground. “Oh.” Gordy gives her a quizzical look. She seems to have understood something—but what? Is it some sort of her concern for her missing Attic? Does this somehow make her mistrust the book’s hope of a long-lost (or is it never-had) brother floating to the top of the narrative when all is finished? Or is it only that Bailey, who shoots every angle, realizes the devastation to Pigeon Forge, the tragedy, the death of the prisoners, population, tourists, all? Yes, it must be that. Bailey hasn’t had as much time as you to consider this quandary, she can’t know how fathomlessly impossible it all is to stop, she hasn’t yet comprehended the immensity of the gears of this horrendous machine. Against this, a single Appalachian town is a tragic but needful sacrifice. He turns back to Jane.

“Look, if I could save all of Pigeon Forge, I would. If I could save all the prisoners, I would. I tried and failed. It’s too big. But we might save Finch if we—”

Jane grabs him then, pulls him close, snarling: “Listen. To the words. All he calls his own. All he calls his own. All he calls his own.”

“Oh,” Gordy says, then: “Oh.”

It’s dawning on him: Not all I call his own, but all he calls his own. What did Landrude say, back at the doughnut shop? Imagine an Everything of Everythings. Can you? Can you even imagine imagining it?

There’s a kind of falling that feels like flying.

Gordy feels he’s being swallowed up by some mythic subterranean beast—All this time spent walking on dry land, he thinks, but it wasn’t ever land at all, it was only the face of the beast, who waited, patient as Moses, for you to meander close enough to its mouth, until it could open up and eat you without effort, let you tumble down, down, all the way down, into pitch-black digestive realization…A dream logic is taking hold—You’ve returned to Pigeon Forge, to the circus, and Bailey is here, and Jane. Around here somewhere are your dad and Finch, according to Boyd’s book. Morris is a nightmare freak, and Donk did it to him. Julius is here, and there, and everywhere: He’s sandals, at least in part he’s the sandals you’re wearing now, he’s spreading through the country like yeast being worked into dough. Stories are converging, overlapping, buzz of feedback from competing realities. You thought you were in your own story, and now you’re in somebody else’s. How do you climb back into your own?

“Oh,” Gordy says. He wishes he could argue. Instead he says: “Oh.”

“Oh,” he says. He sits down next to Bailey on the floor. There is grass here; Jane has cut away the canvas flooring in a rectangle; apparently, she dances with her feet on the turf. He hadn’t noticed before. How interesting. It’s all so worthless now. The world destroyed, or the world saved. No, not the world—more. Much more. Larger than the scope of imagination.

Somehow in his distraction he hears the sandals speak.

Hello, buddy, the sandals say.

“Hello, Julius,” Gordy mumbles.

How are things?

“They’ve been better,” Gordy says. It’s hard to breathe. Oceans. Land. Species. Stars. Galaxies. All he calls his own. And more. Morris’s claims upon reality are omnivorous, extending not only across the totality of the present but also into the past. Not only the past but also the future. Not just what is, but all possibilities that might be or could have been. Morris has seen Färland, so Morris will have claimed that as his own.

The old familiar thought arises—Let it come, then. What kind of universe is it you would save, which would elevate such a creature as Morris, which would enforce such grotesque mercy upon one so little deserving, which would stack the deck, rig the dice to make a winner of the worst before the first throw? What God would make sport of his creatures and bolster the worst delusions of its own cruelest creation? Submersion is preferable—isn’t it? To be carried away, to allow the swirl of flotsam over billions of millennia to find some more suitable order. Better to throw existence itself to that uncertain fate than to defer such richly deserved punishment.

Gordy reaches out and takes Bailey’s hand. Lost in her own shock of discovery, she numbly accepts it. From far away, he can hear Jane: “Don’t tell me you didn’t see what I saw. You knew all along what the wave was. Who made it. Who could call it.”

“I thought…. I thought I had called it by myself. The Voice told me to.”

“You’re just like him. You think it all springs from you. But how can you; you saw the two of them, like I did.”

“I didn’t see anybody but myself.”

“They were right there. Did you at least turn to look around you?”

“I…”

“How typical. How very you.”

“I looked out at the ocean.”

“Yes, that’s right. I remember; that’s exactly what you were doing. You never saw them, or me, or any of the rest you’d have seen if you just looked around. You didn’t even see Morris and Landrude. Unbelievable. You’re the least curious cat I’ve ever known.”

“I just—”

“Never mind. You made it wrong, but you can make it right. You have to do what you should have done from the start. The Coyote is coming soon. Whatever he’ll do to Morris next won’t be nice. He’s disturbingly creative.”

“The Coyote,” Bailey moans. “Oh God, Daniel. Oh God.”

“You’ve got to hurry. Use the ticket since you still seem to need it. Use it to take the Coyote’s power away—it’s in his diamond whatsit on his forehead. Then, give it to Morris. I’ve tended to him as best I can, but he’s near the end. He’ll die soon, or he’ll give up and call it. Either way, the wave will come, and if it does, who can stop it then?”

Gordy sighs. “What does it matter, though? You’re forgetting, I don’t have it. I gave it away. Now it’s gone. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Jane sets her hands on her head and rubs her temples. She breathes in once, slowly and deeply, then out. Finally, she says, “You’re going to make me take you by the hand and walk you every step.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes you do, you chickenshit. You let yourself not understand just as much as you need to, so when it all finally ends, when you simultaneously get your sweet oblivion, and Morris gets his punishment, you can still say to the rest of us: ‘But I didn’t know.’ Won’t we just have to forgive you, then? Too bad you won’t have any excuse soon—I’m telling you all of your own secrets. Why do you think you take so easily to invisibility? Why do you suppose you keep hearing the Voice, seeing the wave, even after you returned from the other side?”

“You’re not making sense.” But the dread is rising now. Gordy can feel a cork, long ago inserted deep and sealed against the hazard of poison bottled within, about to be wrested out of the neck.

“You know the trick you always used to play, back under the fountain, in the vault you made of the oubliette prisons—back when you played at being god, taking care of all the freed prisoners? The here and there trick, where there’d be multiple versions of you? You’d use it to visit us all simultaneously.”

“I hope your plan doesn’t rest on me doing anything like that again.”

“You’re still playing it, dummy. You never stopped.”

He holds out empty hands. “Impossible. No ticket.”

“You have it. You don’t need it, but you can’t not have it.”

“I don’t!”

“Not here. But I’ve seen; in there, you still have it.”

“There? Where is th—”

But then the tent fills with the scarlet tunics of cardinals. Time has run out.

His teeth ended before the wooden stake did. In time, he realized he was merely bloodying his gums on the splinters. Goop-Goop allowed himself a count to ten, breathing heavily, in the dust, then put his hands on the post. He’d ground it down significantly; perhaps his arms could complete the job his teeth had sacrificed themselves to begin. He pulled, dimly aware of the red cloud of adjuncts and trustees gathering outside Jane’s inner tent, then entering it. The Andrews were taking no chances; they’d mustered the full force. You can’t possibly break through them, Goop-Goop told himself—there’s so many of them and there’s only one of you. You’ll need to create a distraction. Immediately, the answer came. Ah yes, Goop-Goop thought, this won’t be a problem at all; you’ve always been able to find the most useful available beasts. This is your lesson to yourself. But now this inner voice was unsteady, desperate, no longer in possession of its own convictions, nothing remaining in the words but the saying—and the striving of hands on post, hoping without expectation to hear creak and snap and splinter of wood.

He pulled, and screamed. He screamed, and pushed. Within his cage, from beneath his tarpaulin, Wembly returned his pain, howl for howl. Scream away, friend, Goop-Goop thought. Fill yourself up with my rage. I owned this circus once. I know where to find your key.

The dressing-room tent is crowded now with ceremonial red. Gordy still hasn’t risen, nor has Bailey—though standing is no longer a matter of choice for them. At the directive of the Andrews, they’ve been tied up, back to back.

“Let them go,” Jane insists. “Or I’m not flying the trapeze.”

The Andrew on his right beckons with one hand: Bring it in.

A skinny old man is led into the room, fresh blood spilled down his nose onto his shirt. Behind him walks a young woman Gordy knows he’s seen before. “That poor man was hungry,” the young woman says, pointing back the way she’s come. “He was eating wood.”

“I fought them as much as I could.” Sterling Shirker gasps. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was inevitable,” Jane says. She sounds like an unskilled actor, speaking memorized lines by rote. “They learned that one from Morris, too. There’s always somebody willing to pull the dirtiest trick.”

Suddenly the old man notices Gordy; without preamble he leaps, and Gordy is hauled into his embrace. “Gordy-Gord,” Dad chokes. “All we get is moments, boy. All we get is scraps.”

Gordy lacks the will even to answer. He can feel the shakes of his daddy sobbing, and then they pull him away. He can’t bring himself to speak. All he wants is to disappear, to not be, to un-become. If I had the ticket, he thinks, I could make us all so small they couldn’t see us anymore. If I had it, I could fade us all away and let them gnaw on each other for a change.

Every member of this patchwork outlaw band has an overeager cardinal’s sword-point at the ready, warning against sudden movement or aggressive action, while every spare blade is directed at Finch’s neck. The Andrews return their quizzical carrion-bird gaze to Jane. It’s clear what is intended: The show must go on. There will be an Assizement, bird and spade, and also a circus; the Andrews will see to it that all is done as it must be. It’s as if Morris has crafted tiny clockworks of his own will to carry forth his edicts in his absence. If ever Morris had a Continuity, he has found it in them, the Andrews, a self-broken triumvirate.

“Put your swords down, you win,” Jane says.

The cardinals crowd around her. They take her by the arms to compel her outward. They’ve forced Gordy and Bailey to their feet. Jane is nearly to the exit now. She digs in her heels to resist them, and, twisting suddenly, she falls from their hands and lands right on the rope-conjoined couple, knocking them all to the grass in a clutch and tangle. In the moments before they regain her to pull her up and away, she whispers: “The here-and-there trick. You never stopped playing it. You’ve been playing it ever since you opened that door. I saw you in there. You’re still there, Gordy. Behind the door. You never left.” Then they have her again, and she says, louder, so they can still hear her even as she disappears from sight and is carried away: “You still have it, back there. I saw you holding it. I saw you. You never left. I saw you…”

Gordy disappears. It’s the second-damnedest thing. The first-damnedest thing is that, by the time he disappears, nobody takes notice. The gorilla has attacked.

Into the dressing room bursts a howling hairy pandemonium, tearing down the privacy flap and stomping it flat. It screams, swinging long black arms scythelike in the cramped space, upsetting trustee and adjunct, knocking red-clad attackers and prisoners alike to the ground. Espying the brace of little people near its knees, it doubles-redoubles-trebles the yawp of its red-eyed rage, and, without pause or presentiment, takes the head of an Andrew into each of its purposeful paws. There is in Wembly’s simian screams the frustration of decades of captivity, of the cage, of years gone flaccid playing solitaire with a filthy deck missing the four of hearts, all now distilled and focused upon new objects of aggression and hate, focused with inerrant primordial instinct upon the smallest apes he can find. He raises them like clubs and swings them; with these tiny cudgels he demolishes furniture, wrecks mirror, dressing table, desk, lamp, and then, still howling his song of righted wrongs, still swinging bone-broken midgets like bats, bursts through the opposite canvas divider and passes out of sight. They hear him howl as he goes, and then the tumultuous ejaculations of the crowd as he lurches, presumably, into full sight of the circus beneath the lights of the three rings.

For a moment they all abide in the silence and the detritus of the ape’s passing. Former foes lay united, dazed and wounded equals in the devastation that had come and gone. Jane scrambles back into the tent and makes her way to Finch.

“Are you all right, baby?” She searches for a wound to tend.

“That monster was angry.” The young woman, unhurt, confused but untroubled at this desperate pawing, says. “It hated those small men.”

“Goooooooooop!”

Into the space that had been a dressing room lurches a thing that had been a man: tin nails for hair, eyes a bloodshot roadmap, legs attenuating to grotesque pink flipper-flaps. Attempting to speak, it reveals a mouth bloody of gum and empty of tooth, a void lined with fresh sawdust. “Goop,” it says, searching the floor. “Goop-Goop Goop gah Goop-Goop gally gall Goop. Goop-Goopy Goop gow.” The stunned and surviving cardinals attempt to obey as best they can, while Bailey scans the tent for Gordy. Where he’d been, there remains only a tangle of ropes.

“The gorilla must have him,” Bailey mourns. “It’ll tear him apart.”

“No it doesn’t,” Sterling replies. “He’s elsewhere.”

After another minute’s attempt at communication, Goop-Goop throws up its hands in frustration and commences drawing with its finger in the dust on one of the shattered mirror’s larger shards. Trustees and adjuncts, worshipful once more, crowd around to observe the creature’s efforts, the better to divine from him some sign or instruction.

“Come on,” Bailey says, struggling out of her newly loosened bonds. “While they’re distracted.”

Sterling demurs. “We’re going to need to stay close to Morris now, you and me. He’ll need whatever help we can give him. Donk’s coming soon.”

“But…” Bailey points at the creature in the center of the knot of redbirds. “That’s Morris, isn’t it? He’s dangerous.”

“He’s even more dangerous if Donk gets him again,” Sterling whispers. “Even one more time. Jane told you, I expect. We got to stick to him like butter on rice, keep him from going even one more toe over the line.” Any question of escape has, in any event, become moot; the trustees have recovered well enough to secure their prisoners. Somebody produces a notepad and a pencil for the gooping thing; it now furiously scribbles its directives.

“But…Morris is insane,” Bailey protests. “He thinks it all came from him. That all of us sprang from his mind. He thinks he created everything.”

“That’s the problem,” Sterling says. “Didn’t Jane tell you? That’s the exact problem. He isn’t Morris, not really. And he did create everything. He did.”

Perhaps it would be helpful if I explain what the Gordys saw.

Gordy stood on an endless beach. Behind him, the door: same as it ever was.

Gordy stood in the tiny room. In many ways the only chamber onto which this door has ever opened. Four square gray walls. Nothing to report.

Gordy stood in the room where two identical men contend. Did I see this before, he wonders? Was this here last time? Did I force myself to forget? Did I simply fail to turn and see it? He watches their struggle unfold, watches the sea rise into a wave as the loser makes one last desperate act.

Oh, God, Gordy thinks. I think that I know what I haven’t known yet.

Gordy stood on the endless beach, clutching a shining green ticket in his hand. The wave no closer now than ever before. Thrumming throughout his being, he heard the Voice:

—I desire mercy, not sacrifice

–Damn you. Do your own dirty work, why don’t you? Damn you for giving me this thing.

—Who told you I gave it to you?

–I…

—He has called it. It is Time.

Suddenly, immediately, at a speed immeasurable, the wave lurches forward. It will arrive in minutes or seconds. Possibly it has arrived already to devastate all he calls his own.

Gordy has the ticket in his hand. He leaps for the door.

Story is entirely subject to authors.

But authors are entirely subject to readers.

And readers are subject to infinite change.

—Unknown

At night, he finds beauty in the metropolis.

Downriver a prison lurks, one of thousands across the planet, teeming with degraded men and women. Most of them, the Coyote knows, are guilty and deserving of their state. Still, the day will come when those walls can be destroyed. No good comes of those places. The Coyote hangs in the sky, listening to the city wail and murmur and thrum.—You’ll do more than free their bodies from the degradation of cruelty; you’ll free their minds. An untended river cuts an unruly path, but it can be channeled. So, too, with the mind. Your control over your super-telepathy power is crude, but you’ll learn the mastery of it. When the time is right, you’ll open their minds and punish their bad impulses until their rivers run straight. Each man and woman will become as precise as architecture. In time, the people will obey because they won’t remember any other state but obedience, but first, they will obey because you will teach them this new truth: The only other option is to burn. Now they’re ruled by fear, but you’ll harness their fear, use it, turn it to better ends. Soon their fear will set them free.

But now the hour has come, and there is a daily promise to be kept. There is one who requires a more attentive justice, whose worst impulses require a slower extermination. Today you’ll take his skin, and replace it with something new and inappropriate. This will seem to him a punishment, but the day will come when you have taken every original portion 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 older, 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, flying toward Pigeon Forge.

Three spotlights light the three rings. Somewhere in the dark beyond, the crowd knows, the tumblers and clowns wait to entertain; to leap and fall and catch, to thrill them to breathlessness and draw them to their feet. The tapestry is hung from the tent roof, and on the other side, the entertainers await their cues. Somewhere there, behind the tapestry, readying themselves, backstage, are the…Here the line of thought fades into imprecision and distraction. Something’s happening back there, though—something exciting and preparatory.

Beneath the tent roof, overpopulated bleachers toss and roil in a welter of anticipation, fear, and hope. Vaguely aware of the Assizement, yet at the same time purposely unaware, the crowd is already given to giddiness and a rather specific form of denial. The men, women, and children filling these rickety bleachers are all local employees of Love Forgeworks—an amalgamated corporate empire of various concerns: amusement parks, food manufacturing, military contracting, metalworking, prison management and supply—though this connection is not a thing talked about. There’s a vague understanding that the home offices of Love Forgeworks are located in Pigeon Forge, that everyone who works in any part of Pigeon Forge draws their checks from this parent company. Ask any member of this crowd, they’ll tell you: Oh, I’ve been living and working here a long time, since, since…oh, always, really. How long you’ve been here is not a thing that’s talked about. On occasion—back on the cul-de-sac, back in the apartments, back in the trailer park, back at the motel that rents by the month—the concept of the before-time will drift into the conversation, only to dissipate, unreleased, into a suddenly charged atmosphere. The past? I don’t ever think about that, what did happen before, anyway, I came here from, from…why, I swear (here a wry chuckle), I swear I’ve been here my whole life. How funny, you’d think I’d travel more, but I suppose that’s just how it goes. But it’s a good life. Food on the table. Heat in the register. Clean water in the tap. A little extra to spend on the nicer things. And the circus is coming—how exciting! Every six months a private circus, who gets that? Not everybody, I’ll tell you. We’re lucky. It’s not a bad life…

The tickets arrive in the mail a few days before, green and green and green and green and green and green and green and green and…blue. The blue tickets are backstage passes. The blue tickets aren’t discussed. There’s a tacit and catholic lack of interest regarding the blue tickets and their recipients, and the reason, or lack of reason, for having received one. There’s a counterfeited jealousy, overenthusiastic congratulations offered the beneficiary, unacknowledged relief at having been spared receipt. Some people get blue tickets, and they get to go backstage, that’s all—how fun, how lucky, to see the circus from inside the circus! Yes, we’ll see those folks again. Lord, what a thing to say. I don’t know why I said that. They’ve been chosen for a special privilege, land’s sakes. Lord, I must be tired. More coffee?

But today there begins to edge into the already-nervous hum a new energy, a concern, an idea of some crossbeam gone, however incrementally, out of skew on the treadle. Colonel Krane stands center-stage, top-hatted, his tuxedo striped in vermilion and pink, but for whatever reason he isn’t bellowing the commencement into his microphone. Instead he stands, awkward in silence, looking off into the dark as if expectant for some inexplicably delayed signal. The idea grows: Something’s gone awry. The circus always begins promptly, always. Something has gone fishy backstage. Backstage—this brings to mind thoughts of the blue tickets, but those thoughts are squelched before they lead to other thoughts, which are better not to have, and best not to share.

Just then, a roar goes up—but not from the spectators. It begins from somewhere out in the darkness, as if from an adjacent room: an animal howl, followed by angry and fearful shouts, shrieks, scuffle, tumble, clatter-bangcrash—and then Colonel Krane hops in comic terror and scampers out of the limelight. Immediately, this vacated space is filled by an immense nightmare of black hair and white fang, a naked beast with an immense pointed skull, bare chest, tiny eyes. When it screams, they can see the teeth, sharp and white. In each paw it clutches a stuffed rag doll, child-sized, dressed all in scarlet. Raising its hideous face to the heavens, it screams confusion or triumph; then, with its long arms, it swings the mannequins round once, round twice, round thrice, until the dolls’ bodies pop off of their heads and fly out, sailing into the dim hidden corners of the tent, emitting two red streamers projecting behind themselves as they fly, as if each is being propelled outward by its own crimson tail. Still howling, still clutching the doll heads, the beast rushes out of the blinding light, into the dark, unseen for a matter of seconds until it tears a hole in the tent wall, admitting a freshet of night air, and then it is gone, its protestations diminishing as it flees.

The breathless crowd sits mute in shock. Then, as a single entity, they begin to applaud, hoot, stomp, and howl in tumultuous approbation of this new distraction, this bold and daring opening act. The Circus of Bearded Love has begun.

Bailey’s in the wrong room. She’s not sure how she fell into it, but this is the room with nightmare in it. In this room Gordy has either been murdered by a gorilla (if correlation can occasionally be buddies with causation) or else (if Sterling is to be trusted) has disappeared completely.

This is the room in which Morris was right all along, if Jane is to be believed. Where his death dooms the world, and so does any eventuality that fails to end with his triumph. Jane has also disappeared completely, in a way—she was ordered to the platform by the salamander-tongued thing that is Morris, to twist and jump and fly, and, with one last desperate look at her daughter, compelled by weaponry, she went. Look at Morris. Daniel did that to him—your Daniel. This is Pigeon Forge, and Pigeon Forge is the room in which Daniel has become some grotesque god of vengeance. This is a bad room—the worst room.

This is the room with the fountain in it.

The fountain, white as a gorilla’s tooth but deadlier, looms beside the cage. It makes a high and wheedling sound in your brain, a sound of hardness destroying hardness in seven synchronal but discordant squeals, of toenails on the chalkboard of perception, of a diamond lath cutting steel. Looking at it makes you feel as if you want to vomit but lack a stomach from which to do so. Looking at it is like looking at a paradox of blasphemy, as if it were simultaneously three mutually exclusive concepts of evil.

This is the room with the cage in it, and Bailey is in the cage.

This is the room with the stage in it, and the thing is on the stage.

The thing. Morris. Earlier this year, this thing had been the cat who had, with a flick of his arm, set her head free of her body. He’s making himself understood by way of pantomime and scrawl; somebody’s procured a chalkboard for him. On the chalkboard, Morris has commanded them to bring the guns, all the guns. This is the room where Morris has amazed everybody, overthrowing a coup by the Andrews that had heretofore been presumed successful. He is ascendant once more, and his remaining servants huddle around his grotesquerie, wearing red ceremonial garb. They’re scrupulous and attentive and dazed and terrified. One trustee has made her way forward, advancing while bowing, presenting to him a velvet-lined box. From the box, he removes two placards carved from dark wood, one bearing the image of a shovel and another the image of a bird. With ostentatious deliberation, he selects the image of the bird, and, borrowing a nearby sword, with slow and ceremonious strokes, hacks it to bits.

The man in the corner of the cage moans. He’s a tall cardinal, this man in the corner—or a former cardinal, to be accurate. It seems the man in the corner has been deemed more collaborative in the coup than the rest. The man in the corner’s costume is gone to tatters, his face and body pulped by his fellows, who, each relieved not to have themselves been elected scapegoat, punished him with zeal before caging him. “That’s bad,” the man in the corner mumbles through broken teeth, indicating the destruction of the placard. “That’s really bad. Nobody gets the bird?” Bailey has no idea what this means, nor does she ask. What do details matter? She can read clearly enough the sign of a man prepared to wield the spade: This is the room where everybody dies. For a season, Bailey tells herself, you even let yourself think you’d found your Attic—you believed the world was full of rooms, each as fascinating as the next—but that was a lie, too. Where are you now, Boyd? None of this was in your book.

The cardinals have brought the guns. They’ve made a circle around their leader, and they watch the tent roof. “The Coyote always comes from the sky,” Sterling murmurs. Bailey, tired of listening, decides the tall redbird has the right idea—solitude—and hutches up in the far corner. She thought if she fought long enough and hard enough she could keep them all safe, get them all free, but it was a lie. You can ignore a lie if you live with it long enough, but the lie led to this room, which, like all other rooms in the world, lies. This is the room with death in it, and so are all the rest of them, all of them hiding death within; despite all other enticements and wonder, underneath is only death and death and death. This whole wide world is the room where all those years ago we should have simply let Ralph kill us with the rest of the kids, end the pain before it could get started. Now Yale’s dead, and soon you will be. Daniel’s not dead; not dead, but something worse. Soon he’ll be shot dead by the waiting redbirds, or else he’ll survive to become something even graver than a corpse. Daniel got everything he wanted, which is the worst thing he could ever have gotten.

But—Bailey can’t stop herself wondering—what if there’s still something in him left to save? He’s not dead, not yet. Just look for a chance, one chance. There was a time when we were young and hungry and alone. There was a time when all we had was each other, and that was real. Two pieces of flotsam lashed to each other in the wide ocean, forehead to forehead, hands on each other’s ears. I’d have died if not for him. He’d have died if not for me. We don’t owe each other anything and never have; it’s past anything like debt. We are what we are to each other, and that’s all; we’re the original lost children, we’re survival itself. And what if—what if, in fighting for him, you might find some new possibility, one where there is and always was a brother? What if somehow you can run through rooms until you find Boyd, lost and writing to you from the never-was? What was it he told you, back in the Attic?

You’ll have to run, Boyd had said. You’ll have to jump, and trust your luck.

Bailey sneers at herself—Stop it. You’re done fighting. This is the room with death. Maybe there will even be a wave, if crazy bearded Jane’s right. The end of the world—wouldn’t that be nice? To let it happen and then everything will be done and over, and you can stop thinking about it?

Sterling has picked his way over to her, careful not to step on any of the huddled prisoners. He’s removed his sandals and dangles one from each thumb. “Got a feeling you ought to put these on,” he says, tossing them onto the sawdust beside her. “I’m going back to tend to Finch.” Obediently, with nothing better to do, Bailey exchanges shoes for sandals, watches Sterling retreat once more to the far side of the cage near the door. Next door, on the other side of the partitioning tapestry, she can hear the great roar of the crowd, thrilling to the trapeze. The next room over is the one with the circus in it.

Hi, there, the Sandals Julius say. There’s going to be a scuffle soon. We might dare to hope that in the commotion they’ll forget to close the door to our cage.

In the aftermath of the beast’s rampage, the ovation swells and carries, it fills the tent and holds them, suspends them, lifts them, exalts them. A new thing has happened, something wholly unanticipated, something never previously conceived; this is why they celebrate. Not just for the distraction of it, not just for the spectacle, not even for the violence, but for the novelty, the originality, the innovation. It’s a harbinger of change, an indication that—for the first time—there may be some hope, some possibility, of a different outcome than the one they’ve so long unconsciously prepared themselves to accept. They applaud the very idea of change, hoping without fully allowing themselves to know why they hope; they rejoice and clap and jubilate, triumphant as if they, having witnessed innovation, have also been the cause; they celebrate what they have seen until it feels as if they celebrate themselves.

Then, just as the extended plateau of their tumult has begun to seem awkward, two of the spotlights blink out. Music builds as the remaining center light rises, rises, rises, finding at last the bearded lady atop the platform in her bright-green singlet. She is utterly alone. Deaf to their acknowledgment. Blind to their entreaties. Like a high priestess of flight, she raises her hands in ceremonial flourish, and, as the music reaches crescendo, she leaps into the air.

Most folk in the cage huddle on the floor or lean on the bars, as if their fate and numinous fear of the fountain has robbed them of strength sufficient to hold their own weight. Finch stands near the cage door, watching the thing that had been Morris with a concerned expression. Sterling Shirker hurries back to keep watch beside her. He’s eyeing the semblants and trustees, watchful and nervous—You hoped to finally protect your boy, but Gordy’s like water, you can’t hold onto him more than a second or two. If you can’t watch over your own child, you may as well look after another’s. Look at them, prowling, guns pointed skyward, watching for the Coyote. Nervous as unshorn spring sheep. Dangerous as winter wolves. They don’t know who to side with no more. They don’t know what to do. Gordy never attacked with his power, he only defended—his big trick was to run away. But what to do with the Coyote? The cardinals have learned the toady’s game; befriend the meanest dog in the yard and ride his mangy back. They’d take the Coyote’s part if he’d have them, but he won’t mess with them. They took up with the Andrews when they could, but now their old boss is back. They’re clinging to him the best they can, but what do they do when he loses? What do they do when the Coyote finally gets bored with Morris and switches his blood for lighter fluid, then flicks his Bic? Then who will the Coyote fix his attention to? They know who; it’ll be them. Or—here’s a worse thought—what if Morris somehow, someway, beyond any hope and any sense, wins this battle? Is he apt to forget his servants didn’t take his part during his torment, when he was tied up like an animal, being rearranged piece by piece? No. The Coyote might spare them, however thin the chance may be, but Morris never will. He’s using them now only because they’ll let themselves be used. They’re all dead men and they won’t let themselves know it.

“That man is scared,” Finch says. She’s pointing at Morris, who is strutting about on the stage, using an axe as a makeshift cane. He’s got a revolver and he’s fervidly scanning the tent roof, waiting for the Coyote to come bursting through. For now, he seems content to wait for his tormentor, but he’ll soon begin the proceedings, for reasons of continuity and decorum if nothing else. Sterling puts a hand on her shoulder, but the gesture feels foolish, and he withdraws it.

“Yep,” Sterling says. “He’s scared all right. He’s the biggest scaredy-cat in this joint. But then, we all ought to be scared right about now.”

“I’m not scared,” Finch says.

Yes, thinks Sterling, you aren’t scared; that’s my problem. You’re your mama’s girl. I best stick close. From the front side of the tent, he hears the exaltations of the crowd, lately on the decrease, reach new heights of enthusiasm. Jane must have started flying over on the other side, catching and tossing and catching herself, bearding gravity in its lair; Jane Sim, defender of prisoners, artist of the page and the stage and the wire. The bravest girl in the world.

Sterling is glad of Finch, who provides some focus for his fear—I reckon if Jane’s girl weren’t here to protect, I’d pick someone at random. It’s fool’s work. We’re trapped in this cage. Protect her, how? With yourself? To save somebody’s life for how long? A minute extra? Useless. Fool’s work, but I’m just the fool for the job. Wish I hadn’t given my sandals away. What made me do it? Some impulse. Idiot thing to do; now I’m all alone.

Morris has for now stopped ruminating over the danger from above. He’s turned his livid, chitin-lidded eyeballs to the cage. With the hand holding the chalk he jabs emphatically at Finch, and then, for good measure, he scrumbles to the board and scrawls:

THE GIRL FIRST.

Sterling sighs for Jane’s sake—It’s like you figured. He’s going to go for the throat. A final lesson about crossing the boss. No thought to the mercy Jane showed you in your pain now that you’ve crawled back to power. Certainly no thought for the fact that this is your own daughter. Jane returns from sky-dancing for the yahoos and finds her bird already crushed. Then the rest of us. Then he’ll empty out the oubliettes and shear his sheep. He’s done trying to cajole us; now he only wants to end us.

Two cardinals step forward, weapons at the ready. One of them has the cage key. All the others have plastered themselves against the back of the cage, as if they hadn’t read the instructions, but the girl doesn’t fluster or flinch. She watches them come, not unafraid but calm and still, as curious as any bird. Sterling chuckles at her bravery in spite of it all—She’s her mama’s child all day long. As they swing the door out, he slips smoothly in front of Finch.

The trustee puts his gun muzzle an inch from Sterling’s nose; Sterling goes cross-eyed for a moment in an attempt to track it. Not such a bad way to go if that’s going to be it. Nice and fast and then it’s done. Sterling spreads his arms out and grabs the bars on either side of the door.

“Not the girl first, captain. Me first.”

The trustee looks dumbly back at the board, points to the instruction written there.

“The girl first,” he says, dumbly comic in his confusion.

“No, cousin. Me first.”

“Girl first,” the other trustee snaps.

“Step aside,” says the first trustee in a schoolmarmish wheedle.

“There’s no moving me,” Sterling says, more confident—If they were going to shoot they’d have shot already. No way these two want to get on Morris’s worse side, breaking the protocol of the ceremony with freelance killing. “Me first. Him next. You next-next. You next-est of all.” They don’t like this. His babble is incomprehensible to them, but they know some sort of fun is being made. The first trustee makes a quick stab with his gun, popping Sterling in the nose with the muzzle. There’s a burst of pain, a rush of blood, but his hands on the bars steady him and he finds he can manage through it. Sterling says, loudly, so all of them can hear:

“I’m going up there first, and you’d better believe you all are going to be next. Boys, your best move is to take off those fancy red jimmy-jams and walk away, quick as you can.” He looks at Morris, a nightmare goulash clustercake: his mouth toothless, his matted beard a glut of gore. “If ever a man got on the losing end of a tangle, it’s that boy right there. And you’re betting on him? He got his ass wrapped in a tamale and handed to him in a paper bag every round of this fight. You want be wearing his uniform when the Coyote comes?”

Morris has made his way from the platform during this speech, as quick as his foot-flails and gamy leg will allow. It’s hard to read his expression; Sterling assumes it’s fury, but with his eyelids altered, he’s going to look furious no matter what. As Morris shoulders between his trustees, Sterling smiles—Ah, Jane. I’ve learned a trick or two from you, lady. I ain’t scared of this chicken-buzzard any more, either.

He steps from the cage to meet whatever’s coming. “Howdy, captain. We never did finish our old conversat—” But Morris has put his right fist on his own left shoulder, and then, swift as a diving swallow, has passed it across his chest; now he points at the sawdust. Somehow he’s holding a short sword, or else it’s a long knife, how interesting, what is the difference, where do you draw the distinction, when does a knife become a sword? What a funny thought. There is a burning and a pulling. A smell of burning whiskers, a smell of fresh sardines, a smell of peaches, a smell he can’t place that puts him in mind of his childhood. There is a deep and growing pain lower down his midsection. How interesting. Sterling smiles at Morris, because he can see they are finally thinking the same thing about his weapon’s categorization: knife or sword, or swife or or, nord? You see, Morris? You see it too, it’s funny, yes? Yes.

There is a tremble in the ground, a premonitory subterranean approach of something large. He looks downward for its source.

His belly is smiling, too—smiling wide and friendly. Everybody’s in on the joke.

Oh, Sterling thinks. I get it now.

His belly is smiling, and his belly’s smile sticks its gray-gut tongue out at him.

Gordy-Gord.

Ah, Gordy-Gordy-Gord. Ah Finch. Children, I didn’t have too much help to give you, did I. Hope it was enough. Probably it wasn’t even close.

Ah. Here we go then.

The subterranean rumble grows and then there’s a nearby explosion upward. Quite a lot of shouting, and what sounds like firecrackers. Sterling intends to turn his head to take a gander, but it’s too much right now, he’ll look at the commotion tomorrow—Remember, tomorrow you should turn your head to the left to see the…the

Jane’s audience has become a mass, a collective, an undifferentiated tissue of apprehension and sensation. There is the ever-moving spotlight upon her, and a flood of lumens bathes each of the clowns on their poles who throw and catch the bars for her, but the largest spotlight is trained on the ground, to show beyond conjecture there is no net. None but the long-timers have seen the act—it’s been years since Jane has performed to this crowd—thus they are unmindful of the high wire suspended below, able to convince themselves there is nothing but the leap and the catch, flip and somersault, jackknife, spin, one-handed grab, and if any one catch should go awry, there will be nothing but the fall.

They are with her now; almost they think they are her. They lift with her, they soar. Jane flies, so they fly. No more thought to the worry of the day, fear of the week, terror of the year. Here it is, a moment of perfection, a reality past their own, which can transport them from the thought of what is being done to them in their midst. After will come the usual distractions: animal trainers, the forced hilarity of clowns, and a few other oddments—unicyclists, tumblers, the strong men in their gray sweatsuits, jugglers, prestidigitators—but this is the real show, restored as it used to be, as it always again will be. The opening masterpiece, the transport of the flying lady…

Suddenly, without preamble, like a magician’s trick, like a guillotine blade, the backing tapestry falls, and the circus confronts them with its innerworkings, without mask or prevarication, spilling its evil guts for the audience, who, rapt already, find it impossible to dissemble any longer away from it. They see the cage, and all of their own meticulously unremembered sons or daughters or husbands or wives—lucky recipients of backstage passes—packed within. They see the stage. They see the armed trustees dressed in scarlet, pointing their weapons in chaos, bewilderment, indecision. Beside the cage, there’s a hole in the ground. Beside the hole, an older fellow kneels in a growing puddle of blood. He smiles at them like a child with a drawing, and, with a flourish of his arms—ta-da!—he reveals the spill of his belly. Still and staring, he crouches in the quickly reddening straw as the crowd, still a single entity, falls into a hush. But their sudden quiet is not for the disemboweled man, nor for the cage of prisoners, nor for the red-clothed army and their guns. All of this they see, but barely. Their attention is terrified into diligence by two other spectacles.

First, there is the fountain, the evil white fang, the cherubs pissing darkwater into the abyss of the basin, the turtle’s eternal alabaster stare. They’ve known about it so long and so deeply they’ve forgotten how much of themselves it has become necessary to spend in order to deny their knowledge to themselves. Now here it is, and no expenditure of the soul will put it off. Face to face they are with its claim upon them all, its radiating malignancy, quelling them into fear, hurling them into submission.

Then there is the floating man. He’s a wonder to behold. Seconds ago, he burst like a rocket from the ground, emerging from a spot close to the gutspilled man, and dropped the curtain with well-aimed eye lasers. A cluster of men in scarlet seem to be shooting him, but that can’t be right, because they have no weapons—are they janitors? They hold brooms and mops pointed at the floating man in pantomime of gunplay, like children aping the posture of soldiers in war movies. The floating man hovers over all this scene, nearly to the top of the tent’s ceiling, duded out in a cape, a diamond on his forehead, his muscles poured into a skintight outfit of blue and red. In one strapping arm he holds a creature—Why, it’s that Goop-Goop fellow, the freak, what’s he doing up there?…

It’s so strange, thinks Sterling, because now the crowd is all around. They’ve dropped the curtain. You’ve been given the spotlight, have you? Well that’s fine. They aren’t applauding, but they’re interesting. No, not interesting—interested. Interest, Ed. Now you have their attention, Ed. Yes. His belly has a joke to tell, goodness look at it grin. It would be good to lie down somewhere. Right here would be good. Steady as you go. You don’t want your belly to tell its joke too fast. It’s sort of a dirty joke, but this is a hip crowd, they can take it; nevertheless, you have to time it right. First one knee. There we go. Now the next. Let’s settle onto our side. Steady as she goes—whoops! Well, there’s the joke told, and you flubbed it. They’re not laughing. Just a sort of shocked silence. At least it’s made an impression on them. You could hear a pin drop, if you had a pin, and a dropper to put it in.

I never meant to come back to Tennessee ever again. I promised myself every day I wouldn’t. Now look.

Do you see?” the floating man announces. His voice, super-magnified, fills the tent. With his free hand he indicates the fountain, the cage. “Do you understand?” He shakes the freak. “Citizens of Pigeon Forge, I say to you now: This is the man responsible for your pain. He’s stolen your selves away from you.” The floating man holds the freak out to them, arm’s length, a display piece. Goop-Goop is writhing now, twisting and warding, anticipating some terrible and fast-approaching development: a child about to be spanked, a dog foreseeing a kick.

“You see what I’ve done to him already, on your behalf. Citizens, since I find you all gathered together, I wanted you to see what happens to him next!”

Below the floating man, the show goes on. The bearded lady, all but forgotten, still flies, flips, swings, grabs at every last chance presented her. Do any in the crowd understand? Is even one of them still watching the lady? If they are watching her, are they watching her? Not her actions, but her intent? Are they watching what she’s watching? Do they even for a moment consider her hopes, her plans? It seems unlikely. It’s too much to ask of a crowd already distracted past comprehension.

Still the lady skips past gravity with a wink and a flip, flies agile around their awareness, eschews pretensions of grandeur by locating grandeur itself, an Icarus who discovers the sun, then boldly flies straight at the center of its dazzling eye.

They tell her it looks effortless from the stands. From there, they don’t hear the grunts, creak of rope, slap of hand on bar, labor of breath. From a safe distance, she looks like a feather on the breeze. Here, up close, where she can hear herself, she is as real as any carcass on any butcher’s block. From the stands, a spectator might be fooled into thinking the acrobat is an angel, someone who has transcended physical law, but the acrobat on the trapeze knows she is only certain associated pounds of solid meat and bone, subject to gravity’s original sin, not defeating gravity but wrestling against it, pulling gravity’s bleeding fees from its jaws with her bare hands. For all flesh, falling is the natural state. Every catch takes its own toll upon the tendons and ligaments. Every leap pushes you down. Even as you rise, what you feel most is not the lift, but the hand of God pushing against you, gently but remorselessly slowing you, slowing you, stopping you, forcing you down.

It’s glorious. She tries to lose herself into it: leap, catch, spin, flip, the inertia and inevitability, the knowledge and the skill. Best to enjoy it. It is certainly her final flight, whatever comes: Succeed or fail, sacrifice or wave.

The Coyote has come. She didn’t see where from, but he’s there now, floating directly above, addressing the crowd. He’s got Morris in one hand by the scruff of his shirt, shaking him like a naughty pup. He’s about to deliver some new deserved atrocity. He’s so certain of his correctness, the Coyote, so taken with his self-perceived moral authority. Having targeted the worst person he’s ever met, he’s bestowed license upon himself to bestow the worst punishments ever yet devised. Puffed with power, he wallows in the justification with which he’s gifted himself, and imagines he’s coating himself with righteousness rather than a different ordure—But you’re nothing but a new Morris, asshole, another dummy who thinks because you’ve put his hand on a bit of power it’s a sign you deserve to wield it. Worse, you think you are the power. You think you know what you’re doing. You don’t have the slightest idea. You’d do well to learn the trapeze. The trapeze would teach you necessary lessons about what must happen to everything that goes up. It would teach you not to be so proud of your rise. It would teach you that you are not justice, cannot bring justice, it would teach you there is no justice, only physics. When you’re in the air, the solid ground is all the justice God will ever deliver. Here’s the great blindness, the great ignorance, what none of these little men or prospective gods understand: We’re all in the air, all taking any catch we can find. You’ll feel every catch, pay every toll, just to stay in the air. How cruel, how cruel, how cruel—but that’s the inescapable condition, Coyote. Would you cut the strings to each bar and attach them to your fingers, as if your hands had the strength to support all our weight, as if you weren’t falling, too?

There isn’t much time now. There’s precious little hope in Gordy—all he’s ever done is run. Even if he understood your meaning, there’s not much hope in his return. Even if he does return, you can’t be sure it will have the effect you intend. There’s no reason to trust in your version of the metaphysics; it’s up to you, and you only. You’ll need luck. Morris can’t possibly sustain himself against another replacement of his physical being, even though he’s probably telling himself otherwise. He’s puffed himself with false confidence, like he always has before. His cosmology is a rubber ball: compact, self-contained, impenetrable. Every setback for him has only ever been an opportunity to rebound. She knows him. Suffering is no teacher of his; he’s learned nothing from it. The fool. Even now she’s forced to chance herself for him. No more rubber left in his ball, not another rebound left in him. The Coyote is going to do something to him, then return him to his stake and tether. Whatever comes next will certainly be the end, the tipping point, the event horizon of despair. He’ll call the wave, and in so doing he won’t think he’s risking anyone but himself. He thinks because he’s invented all of us, that means we’re not real.

It will come soon; the Coyote won’t be content much longer with presenting him to the audience. You’re going to have to snatch Morris from him before he does it. And what then? Where will you run? It doesn’t matter; these questions are too far ahead to answer; they are catches after the one immediately before you, and you’ll seek them when you need.

Jane knows exactly how high she can leap. She knows it to the inch. The Coyote’s lowering slowly, sinking almost into range. The diamond on his head holds his power. If she can reach him, perhaps she can snatch it away. Just fly a little lower. Just a little lower. Just a little lower.

But then, without warning, everyone is falling.

Sterling Shirker blinked. Then he blinked.

He didn’t blink again.

I remember…oh, everything. Everything.

Gordy-Gord. Gordy. Is that you?

I remember you

I remember our last

Our last breakfast

Is that you, coming up the fountain steps.

Gordy-Gord.

I almost think I see you.

The floating man dangles the struggling freak, then brings him near, whispers cruel instructions to him, and it happens: The freak’s skin blurs and shimmers and changes, and an involuntary sympathetic moan goes out from the crowd. Then, improbably, the diamond on the floating man’s forehead bursts into a spray of water, and he changes, too: Muscles deflate, chest collapses, coif loses its perfect forehead curl—and gravity, long denied its due, once again exerts its claim. He and his captive fall, but the crowd has only eyes for his captive, the Goop-Goop, that most unfortunate thing. It has happened to him, the bad thing, the worst thing ever to happen to anybody. If ever this audience has felt pity, they feel it now for this awful translucent thing.

The Goop-Goop begins its descent to the earth, and the crowd knows its fatal landing will be the only mercy it will ever receive in life. They scream in unison, rise to their feet, and, as they rise, there is something audible beneath their scream, deeper, darker, vibrating far beneath their feet and coming on impossibly fast, rushing toward them with the speed of rage. The Goop-Goop has only begun to fall, but what can stop the fall? They could look away, but their curiosity or duty won’t allow it. They are the witnesses; it all will happen and they will see it, not because they want to but because they are meant to. They’ve become the eyes of the world, the memory of the universe, a jury without a verdict to deliver. Then they gasp—the flying lady has swung vertical on her bar, let go at the absolute apex, and, releasing, launched straight upward to catch the poor falling thing, to gather him up, catch him tight by the crook of her knees beneath his armpits, her beard caught in the spotlight like a wreath of flame, a holy hirsute halo. For less than a fraction of a second before they’re both carried downward, the two of them are emblazoned into eternity by her audacity. A stunt beyond any she’s yet shown them—but to what purpose? She has no handle, nothing to grasp, she’s connected to nothing but him. What possible catch could there be after such a heedless leap?

Forgive the crowd a slight lapse of attention. During these impossibly fraught moments, none of them has marked the slight figure climbing swiftly up the ladder, wearing sandals, scrambling up the rungs to gain the high wire.

Goop-Goop thought—Even now, you’re calm. That’s good: These are decisions that should be reached rationally, not emotionally. We’d been watching the air for him. We should have been watching the ground. The Coyote used that old tunneling trick of the original burrower, Gordy. Burst from the straw and earth, he scattered your men. Their bullets bounced off him until he converted their guns to brooms. He has you now. He’s lowered the tapestry, exposed the Assizement. They all see you. Every pair of eyes on you. It was Sterling Shirker, he distracted you in the crucial moment—isn’t it always the way? Every pattern broken, each expectation confounded, every victory impregnated with defeat. Now this idiot has the power you sought so long. He shakes you and pontificates. It’s a failed world; there’s no good in it. You’ve given it your best, you’ve given it all you had. To it, you sacrificed your leg, feet, teeth, tongue, name, more. Methodically, you’ve created systems to help your unruly parts find themselves, but it’s a failed world, one you now have no choice but to regret creating. In a way, the Coyote is the kindest part of you; through him, you are teaching yourself the futility of continuance; through him, you are finally giving yourself permission to release it. You are calm now, done with fighting, and that is enough. You can relax into the relief of surrender, knowing that soon, seconds from now, you will end it all.

There it is, over your shoulder—the wave. Your proof to yourself that you are what you say you are. Frequently you’d catch others noticing your peculiar affect, your tendency for the over-the-shoulder glance. None of them ever guessed what you were looking at, for none could see it. It’s a tiny thing, so small, a wave the size of a pickled fish, but in truth, it’s small only if you don’t look at it. It’s when you look at it direct, take it in, that it unfolds and unfolds and unfolds, and you realize you’re seeing it inverted, looking down the wrong end of the telescope. It isn’t small; rather it’s the totality of everything else that exists that is small: planets, even galaxies, even systems of galaxies, all are dwarfed by the wave perched over your shoulder. Ah. This was your lesson you gave yourself, about the midgets, so much larger than their stature, so much more destructive than initially imagined. So many lessons! It all connects when you think about it. As wicked as the universe has been, as uncooperative, as painful, still what a shame to wipe it clean…The Coyote is done speechifying. He draws you near and whispers, and you feel your skin go into something else. The pain is beyond horror, but still you are calm—it’s good, it’s right. You want to kiss the Coyote, for making it so easy for you. The crowd howls in revulsion and pity, as if they were your missing tongue—which is what they are. If only you could comfort them, hold, caress, soothe—no, hush-hush, hush-hush-hush, it will be over soon. Soon you will see my sign coming, and then you all will mourn, and then it will be over. All it takes is a thought.

Come. Come, wave, come.

Yes. In an instant it’s already twice as large as it was the moment before. Ah. The atmosphere is pregnant with the coming momentum. Everybody in creation will see my sign coming. All the nations of the world will mourn. Suddenly falling—I see your plan, Coyote, dropping me, thinking to kill me before it reaches us, and to thereby escape it. Fool, it’s all the same effect—my death would have brought it on as easily as my thought did. I can remain calm, but—What’s this? The descent intercepted before it’s begun, Jane, coming flying up from below to catch you. She’s taken hold; feel the tightness in the axes of your axillae, feel the momentum of her upward thrust trying to halt your fall—but then gravity reasserts its authority upon you both. Here comes the earth, and—no!—a gut-surging loop, then another…and you’ve been halted somehow. Caught up in the high-wire line. It’s a whole tangle up there, a moaning shudder of torn tendon and dislocation. Jane has you still, you dangle beneath. Ah, Jane. 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, to see the wave as it takes us all. It’s right over my 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 I can see it now, but soon everybody will see it, and at last they will know. They’ll see it forever, and forever will be no more than the flit of a pigeon’s wings, for it will destroy even time itself….

Hang on, Jane begged. You hang on. Don’t do it. 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 wishing he could see those beautiful almond eyes one last time, he thought: She does understand. She knows. I’ve called it already. It’s done. It’s done it’s done it’s done.

—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change

All at once they see her, a slight figure, running, top-speed, down the tightrope. The long-timers know about the tightrope—stretched from flet to flet, the high-wire, always incorporated into the trapeze finale. But this lady…she carries no pole to counterbalance. She doesn’t even go barefoot, as any tightrope-walker knows to do, the better to sense every vibration of the line, the better to grip with the toes—but she makes no concession to balance, shod in soles of rubber and strap of leather, running the thread, pell-mell and heedless, gatling-kneed and holler-betsy, never missing a step. You don’t know what you’re seeing as you see it, it would be impossible to understand, it’s all-at-once, it’s too much, you’re a part of it now. Only afterward, when you talk about it, will you piece together these events, and you’ll wonder, all of you together, what could conspire to create such a singular confluence of action. Everybody is falling now—the man in the cape, the bearded lady, the freak she holds by her legs—save only this one, this last hope, this impossible sprinter. The caped man has deflated somehow, lost his muscles and his flight. The ruin of a man, the creature, the Goop-Goop…is he smiling as he heads toward his inevitable skin-sack explosion? The bearded acrobat has him, but to reach him she’s abandoned all hope of a catch. And the sandaled cat running the tightrope, what does she hope to accomplish? Running the line in sandals, she’s already a scofflaw of physics, is she going to attempt…a catch?—No! —Yes! The fool!

She’s skated on the line two or three yards, slid on it, feet sideways, burying the line between foot and sandal sole, then leapt, and in leaping, she’s spun, she’s tangled the twanging tightrope into her sandal straps, eaten up all the slack it’s been given to accommodate an acrobat’s surprise landing…reaching out her arms to the plummeting bodies like a supplicant mother who doesn’t know which half of her severed baby she should beg Solomon to first return to her, she’s, she’s—oh no she is NOT, she’s going for both of them?…. The bearded lady knows how to make the catch, hand on forearm—success!—but the other one, with the C on the chest…he hadn’t been expecting to fall and has no control—no! she’s missed his grasping hand by an inch…the crowd’s groan goes from defeat to exhilaration as they see it: nnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAYEESSSSSsss!! SHE HAS HIM BY HIS CAPE BY HIS CAPE BY HIS GOD-THUMPING CAPE! The momentum swings them all the way looping around, 360°, as they come at last to rest, still swinging, groaning and torn, hanging from the tightrope, sandals and line in an unfixable tangle, the sandaled savior inverted, feet caught in the line, the no-longer-floating man dangling by his cape, bearded lady beside him, and, suspended from the bearded lady’s legs, the chuckling freak show.

It’s all happened. There’s been no time to process it. All they can do is stand on swaying bleachers, cheeks wet, and stomp, clap, pound, scream: What have we just seen? But they cut their own enthusiasm short—something is amiss. There is a thrum, an edge, a subterranean current, a pre-emetic sense of rushing and ineluctable doom. It settles upon them all, a barometric warning, known if not felt, like the foreboding of dogs before a tornado. A sudden understanding of mortality, usually visited only singly, only at night, now comes to them all collectively. They’re weeping, but they don’t know why. The living hang yet suspended from the ropes, while below, the kneeling man with the opened belly gently falls, almost in portions, onto his side, and lies, still and peaceful, in his pile of guts and blood and straw.

From granite steps cunningly cut into the black stones ringing the fountain—they hadn’t even noticed the steps before—a figure has risen, holding something small and green and gleaming.

Listen: You are Gordy.

You stand for a moment, taking it all in.

There is a man lying unpeacefully on the ground, his unblinking face turned to you.

I’ve failed you again, old man, you think—haven’t I? At least I finally know you. I can give that much to you, even though you can’t receive it any more. I’m sorry, Daddy. I was given a promise the wicked would perish if they weren’t warned. I did my best to not warn them, but I misunderstood the promise; it was crueler than that. I ran as long as I could. I can’t run anymore. The wave’s coming—can you see it yet? There’s always a final move the losing king must take before the winner can declare his checkmate. A formality, you understand. I see you do—you’ve already fallen onto your side. Time for me to fall onto mine.

The crowd is full of silent weeping women and men and children. You want to explain to them: It’s not my fault, there was a promise of justice if the wicked weren’t empowered. That’s what I thought, but it’s not that way. There’s only a promise to let the wicked play with all of you, again and again. I’m sorry.

There are others, men mostly, wearing scarlet, clustered in the area near the cage. They’re holding brooms and mops as if they were guns. Seeing you, they swing them around to cover you—Somebody’s done a switcheroo on you, boys, and you’ve not realized it yet.

In the corner of the tent, you see two tiny decapitated bodies. A funny thing.

In the center of the tent, hanging like laundry, you see them: loved ones, hated ones. The one you need is the lowest-hanging fruit. He’s a shambles, a wreck, a chuckling skinless organ bag, a marvel of pain. You’re grateful—At least you made him sing for his supper, Donk. At least you made him suffer.

There’s no reason to hesitate. Look how large the wave has grown; there can’t be more than a few moments left. You walk the air, rising on invisible steps, until you face him, eye to bloodshot eye. For a moment you daydream one last time about letting it come—the wave and the simple end—but you reject the false promise of oblivion. It wouldn’t be simple, you now know nothing is ever simple. He’s making noises at you, Gooping japes as if he thinks he can talk. His eyes a feast of madness. Beneath this unholy ground is dug his cavern. Hundreds—thousands—of the most cruelly imprisoned beings time and man have yet devised. All at his hand. And this is God’s favored one. So be it.

It’s is in your hand. Trembling, you thrust it onto Morris’s forehead—Take it, you bastard. Take the full measure. Take it. Let God talk to you for a while and see if you like it. You deal with it now if you can. Run all you want and see where it gets you.

Divested of power, praying for oblivion, you fall.

Listen: You are Landrude. You’ve been Morris, then Goop-Goop. At last again you are Landrude.

It’s on your forehead, crawling into your mind. You wanted it. Why did you want it? It’s shredding into you, tearing away false contexts and replacing them with true, destroying your I-Am. It’s all rolling at you, cascading through you, every action you’ve taken wearing this wrong self, every sin you’ve committed crashing into you, memories of what you’ve done.

Crashing through like waves.

The wave. It’s still coming.

A voice speaks, soft and persistent.

—There’s little time now.

You know what to do. You have the ability now to do it. It’s so easy, in a way. It doesn’t matter what it will do to you. First, there are smaller remedies you can enact. Most of you hanging together on this line are badly injured. Torn connective tissue in shoulder wrist elbow and knee, distended pelvis; poor Jane’s spine has been badly twisted. All this is easily healed; gently, you reknit them, lowering them back, along with yourself, to the level earth, as you go restoring the parts of yourself the Coyote took: skin, hair, teeth, feet, eyes.

The fountain stairs await. Racing, you feel the rage of the surging wave growing all the closer. All your work, all your dreams, visions, so close to extinction—but never mind your own concerns—think of all of them, those in the spotlight and those on the margins, real to you at last as they’ve never been—it’s them to whom you are everlastingly accountable. They hang in the balance. You are the most important person in this universe, the key, the linchpin. You know what this means now; it means you don’t matter at all. It’s not fair, you want to say, I didn’t know, I was replaced. I called the wave because he wanted me to—the usurper—don’t you see how he orchestrated it all? He wants the blank canvas to draw on, not me. All my grasping was only a blind seeking, casting about for home. I was both wrong and not wrong.

But who did, or who knew, or why, or even guilt or innocence, are unimportant. I’m sorry, you might want to say, but your sorrow doesn’t matter. There isn’t time. The wave once called cannot be stopped. The only thing to do is to make yourself large enough to meet it. You throw open the door—using your power restored, you throw open all the doors—and there it is, filling everything, no more beach, nothing else, rushing at speeds unseen since the first velocities. You say it anyway, even though it doesn’t matter—I’m sorry—and then you bring it all into yourself, let it finally crest and crash into you and throughout you. You’ve swallowed the wave, and it’s swallowed you. You’ve contained it, you’re lost in it. You’re caught up in and among it now, it’s filled you up until nothing else is left, you’re swimming in it along with all the other everythings, the infinities of possibilities all enmeshed together with one another, the fullness upon which you have drawn, from which you always did draw, without which you never could have begun, without whom you could never now effect this great and needed convergence, drawing all things into yourself, making all things new.

Oh, you think. That’s right. Everything old is new again. Everything new is old.

Oh, you think—that’s right. All of you. Readers, all the way down. You’re all at the center, too. You’ve all been here all along.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

Once, long ago, Daniel Coyote found Bailey Ligneclaire and hid her, just in time, from an approaching monster named Ralph, as Yale flew over the side of the building on the way to meet the earth. Bailey thinks: You saved me that day, Daniel. You and me, the ones from the beginning. You saved me that day, and abandoned me on another. This is the room where we settle up and leave the ledger balanced. We’ll never be what we were, but we can bury the old debts here under the tent, and then when they pack the tent away, they can take the debt with them. You were right, Boyd. I had to run. I had to jump, and trust my luck. Even then I almost didn’t make it.

It all went out of me at once, Daniel thinks. All power, gone. Now how did that happen, how, how. Bailey is saying something to him but he can’t hear. He’s over-aware of his slack superhero pajamas. He feels foolish; this spandex was meant to cover a much more powerful frame. They sit together, Daniel and Bailey, side by side, somehow not dead. Crawling toward each other, they lie together in their customary strange and intimate posture, forehead-to-forehead, uncertain of the needed reckoning of any future, holding only the moment; clutching each other’s ears, sharing a wordless communion. Still there seems to be someone missing. There are two; there should be three.

My God, Bailey realizes: I can remember Boyd again.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

From far below, rushing up the underground fountain stairs comes the howling sound of a newly freed multitude. Soon the tent is filled with the exonerated, mingling with the erstwhile circus audience. All around the three rings, many long thought missing are being found. The first to reach the top step is a gray cat dressed in denim and leather, a third wheel looking for his tricycle. He’s got a book under one thin arm, and by the way he’s holding it you can tell he regards it with a certain pride of ownership, as if he wrote it himself under significant pressure, a narrative wrested from literature’s broad sky at great personal risk.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

Rupert Paddington stumbles about the tent, caught betwixt and between; there’s himself and there’s Colonel Karl T. Krane. Who has he been? And, whoever that is, why should he stay? He’s seen at least one of his freaks hopping about without deformity, rubbing his suddenly unblemished forehead and grinning—it’s probably happened with the rest, too. There’s been a universal healing. It would be AX-io-MAT-ic to say the circus has run its course. It’s been such a strange dream, but the time has come to wake…and he knows how. He has a compass’s dumb but unerring sense of a door nearby, which he suspects will lead him home…

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

Gordy lies on the straw, looking up. Not dead after all. Something’s broken his fall, or healed him—No matter. Soon it will all be destroyed, and you can stop thinking about it. There’s so much excitement in the world. Nothing to do with you; you’ve discharged your duty. You can hear all the noise, so many people milling around. It’s all happening, but why bother to look? Suddenly he sees something pierce the striped canvas tent roof, producing a glimpse of the starry night sky. Something large has fallen to earth. The sky, Gordy thinks. I could leave here and look at the sky. That would be nice. He rises and stumbles through the crowd, exiting the tent through the hole torn in the canvas by the fleeing gorilla.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

The last fellow to stumble up the fountain steps has a face they all recognize and fear. They know him as Morris, but is he Morris? He holds an uncertainty in his expression they’ve never seen before, which makes him seem oddly unfamiliar. He holds a tiny ticket of green and sits by himself in one corner of the tent. The rest, unsure of him, keep their distance. Suddenly, for no discernable reason, an enormous safe falls like a meteor from the sky, ripping the tent roof, hitting the ground with a massive thump audible even over the din of the gathered crowd; its impact splatters the lonely familiar

man in spludding mud, leaving a crater whose diameter began only inches from his feet.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

Of all the prisoners, Finch comes first out of the cage, stepping past the kindly dead man who fell on his side. She’s sad about him, but now there’s something else to which she must attend. The main acrobat is over there, the pretty lady with the beard, the one they call Jane. She’s lifting one leg, then another, flexing her newly re-knit spine in wonder. There, among the milling crowd, they face each other. Once there had been a girl, and a woman, and nobody else in all the world.

Now Finch reaches out, and with her finger gently brushes her mother’s nose.

“Mama?” she asks.

As they watch each other, hardly daring to embrace, the fountain’s never-ending supply of dark water springs out, for the first time, clean and clear, and many people discover things once forgotten are now remembered.

Oh yes, Juanita Neato thinks. I’ll stay. Yes, I’ll stay.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

You should go to the door, Sandals Julius says. They’re waiting out there, afraid to knock.

“Who’s out there?” Sister Nettles asks.

They’ve seen you working to make the barbecue for them.

“They who, Jules?”

Go and see.

Muttering, Sister Nettles rises, crosses the empty floor of the Neon Chapel to the door, which she opens, and she’s astounded by the collection of gathered loonies and gangsters, civilians of Checkertown and denizens of Domino City, the lost and the losing, the helpless and the dangerous and the deadly and the hurt. They’re waiting on the porch and spread across the lawn, captured by the sight of a fingerless lady who still somehow intends to try to work the barbecue tongs. They’ve come, hoping some good work might be set before them, waiting expectantly for her to speak.

Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

Three days later, it was more of a stupor than a meltdown Gordy finally pulled himself out of.