by Joseph Fink
“But we haven’t seen it,” said André. “I want to see it.”
“Me too,” I said. Once, I had the idea of destroying a vicious noblewoman. Success is not in the idea, but the execution, and here, finally, was that execution. Next I would bring down the Order of the Labyrinth and those who killed my father. If I could take down Lady Nora, the Order was within my reach.
Lora shook her head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” She left the crowd. Rebekah didn’t say anything, but she followed Lora away. And so André and I stayed alone to watch.
I wish I could say I felt something other than complete satisfaction. I won’t lie to you.
“She deserved this,” André said, and I don’t know if it was a question. But either way, I didn’t answer him. The moment came. The moment went. The body that had once been a person was taken away, and the crowd separated and turned back into individual people, a little ashamed of themselves for having watched. I left André behind and walked through the city. I heard footsteps behind me, and I turned to tell him that I needed a few hours on my own, but the person following me was not André.
“So accomplished for such a young age,” said Señora Bover, no longer speaking Catalan but a smooth and fluent Luftnarpian. In that moment I knew that neither was her native tongue.
It was only by her face that I could recognize her. She was not stooped over some odd job as she had been every time I had seen her outside of my Edmond’s home. At her full height, I appreciated how tall she actually was, and saw for the first time that she was also quite muscular. How had I missed all this for so many years? But of course, that was what she had intended. She had turned herself into a person I would overlook, and so I had obliged, as easy a mark as any.
“Come, this way,” she said, and we started on the gentle sloping boulevard down toward the docks.
I must have looked stunned. She smiled. “Yes, I am not merely an old woman sweeping steps and darning cloth. There is a power in being unremembered, in being overlooked. You should remember that power. People who aren’t seen can see and hear all.”
“You’ve been watching me, all of these years.” It wasn’t a question, just a fact I now knew.
“Yes. Who would have suspected and so on. Come, I have something I must show you.”
The woman I once knew as Señora Bover and I approached the docks, and, as we did, the deaths of Lord Fullbright and Lady Nora played again and again every time I blinked. Memory lives inside the eyelids. To distract myself, I tried to concentrate on the simple sounds of the city. The shouts of merchants, the conversation of simple citizens living simple civilian lives, the click of heel upon stone, the trod of hoof upon straw. I tried to listen carefully, because I felt that my life as I had known it was over, and some other life was starting, a life so completely different that the person I was now was, in some ways, about to die. My body would still be alive, but it wouldn’t be the me within it. Or maybe not a death. Maybe it was a birth.
Señora Bover led me past where the boulevard ended onto the planks of the docks themselves, where cargo was carried by men with hard voices and hard lives, to a small ship tied at the quietest end of the busy waterfront.
“There,” said Bover.
“What is it?” I said, trying to understand. As I asked, from some signal of Bover’s I had missed, as I had missed so many things, the ship ran its colors. A black flag with the white symbol of a labyrinth rose up the mast. Seeing the sign of the Order of the Labyrinth, I heard a bell toll deep within my body, a vibration in my bones and blood. Acid washed through my mouth and I hoped it was what victory tasted like.
“That,” said Señora Bover, “is your ship.”
Craig
2015
I take care of you, but you refuse to take care of yourself, Craig.
I can whisper ideas in your ear while you sleep. I can pay off your debts. I can cause a perfectly responsible and considerate woman to wreck her car to bring you into her life. I can create scenes, leave cryptic notes, punish your enemies, reward your friends. I’m in your house. I’m in their houses. I am everywhere. All the time. Right now.
But those thoughts of yours. Or lack thereof. I can’t do anything about that. You have to make your own choices. I can certainly urge you toward better options, but you have to make the decisions, Craig.
You’ve been seeing Amaranta for three and a half years. You’re twenty-eight years old. She’s thirty-two. All your hopes of raising a family are quickly passing you by. If you could hear me, you would say I sound like a controlling mother, wouldn’t you? I’m aware of this, and while I don’t disagree, I would argue that there’s no reason to gender that statement. Men are far more controlling than women.
Mothers might put pressure on children to do well in school. To get married. To call their families. To be respectful to others. Men, on the other hand, hide the money, carry the weapons, direct the narrative, argue like they’re in a Most Correct competition. Men rely on women to assist them, but they don’t like it when we want to be collaborators.
Do you know the expression, “fish or cut bait”? Most people think it means you either need to commit to something (cast your fishing line), or you should just let it go (cut your bait loose). But there’s another meaning. When fishers are preparing to cast their lines, they cut bait. They literally cut large chunks of fish meat into smaller bits to use as bait.
So to fish or cut bait means you can do what you came to do (fish) or you can put in preparation to do what you came to do (cut bait). It’s not an either/or situation. You do one to be ready for the other.
You’re doing neither. You’re not preparing anything. You go to work. You eat lunch. You buy books or music or games. You go out on dates with your girlfriend.
Amaranta asked you what you want to do with your career. You’ve held the same assistant-level job editing press releases and marketing copy for the Ford dealership on Route 800. “Ford. Our cars are built strong. Our cars are built out of bones. Weird metal bones that we found buried in a meteor. Ford: Drive Weird Bones.” That was your copy! That was good. A catchy and relatable marketing campaign that drew huge sales, but it was your boss who earned the raise. You’re creative and indispensable to your company, but where are you going in your own career? That’s what she wants to know. She cares about your life, sure, but she also cares about her own. If you have no direction within yourself, you’ll have no direction with your relationship.
I want to take this time to point out—once again—that Amaranta wants a family. She wants to be happy, and to achieve that she wants you to be happy for longer than the present moment.
She loves you, and you’re behaving like that love is a piece of art to be hung on a wall. A thing of beauty to behold each day, to revel in its colors and strokes of oil. But love is not a piece of art. Love is a tree that grows roots and needs sunlight and water all the time. Love experiences seasons. Seasons of lush leaves, of scorched branches, of starving insects, of brutal cold, and of sugar sweet fruit, which, when eaten, streams stickily down your chin. You’re unable to take it all in.
A tree needs everything around it to contribute to its well being. And its environment is constantly changing. If you don’t understand that, then the tree will die. Beetles will eat it. Or the blight will. Or larger trees will block its sun, overpower its roots.
Which brings me to Jennifer. You talk to Jennifer a lot. You work together, and your relationship is completely platonic, I know. I’ve read all of your emails and texts to her and listened in on your conversations at the dealership, as I crouched under the counter that holds the Keurig.
I’m not accusing you of infidelity, but why have you never mentioned Jennifer to Amaranta? She’s met Julius and Brian and Orlando, all of your male friends. Is this a relationship you’re hiding, not out of guilt, but out of protection? You’re storing Jennifer away like a rainy day fund? Jennifer is a human, not a wad of cash, or a buried treasure. The problem is not that you’re
friends with a woman. The problem is how you treat that friendship. Either she’s an open part of your life, which includes Amaranta, or she’s not.
I’ve done what I can to help with this. Jennifer quit her job last night. You won’t see her at work anymore. She stayed late to finish up paperwork, after everyone had left. In the middle of her task, all of the lights went out. In the first moments of a light turning out, before the eye adjusts, the darkness is absolute. She couldn’t even see the desk in front of her. She tried shaking her arms in the air, but the office doesn’t have motion-sensing lights. Her breathing sounded unusually loud to her, like it wasn’t only her that was breathing.
“Who’s there? Craig? Is that you?” she called. She thought of you, Craig. How nice. Footsteps circled her, a spiraling path in the dark closing in. She realized she had been holding her breath that whole time. Then who had she heard breathing? She scrambled back from her desk and ran for the break room, bumping painfully against furniture and walls as she went. There she fumbled for a knife from the kitchen. It is a miracle her hand found the handle and not the blade. Or maybe a friendly interloper turned it at the last second because that interloper wanted Jennifer terrified, not maimed. Jennifer poked the blade tentatively in front of her, announcing, “I’m calling the police.”
But we both knew she had left her phone at her desk. She knew this because she saw her touch screen light up from across the office. I knew this because I had taken her phone from her pocket. She heard the sound of a bird, specifically a dove. “Coo Cooooo,” the sound came lightly from the tiny phone speakers. “Coo Coooo,” it sounded almost like an owl. Her ring tone had been “Party in the USA,” but this was so much nicer. More elegant.
Now that the phone had drawn her attention, she saw, against the window behind her desk, a shadow of a person, hunched and elderly, crawling across the wall like a roach. Jennifer screamed. The woman on the wall screamed too, a perfect mirror of Jennifer’s scream. As we screamed, the lights clunked back on, and Jennifer was alone. Or at least she couldn’t see anyone else.
Jennifer walked to her desk and to her phone still ringing with a dove’s repeating coo. Next to it, an actual dove, one of its wings missing and its head removed. (Likely by a feral cat. A coyote would have eaten the bird rather than mutilating it and moving on.) She picked up the phone. It was showing her mother’s number. She answered the call. “Mom?” she said. A dry throated voice responded, a voice that was hundreds of years older than her mother: “YOU ARE NOT SAFE HERE.”
Jennifer called her manager on her drive home and quit her job, effective immediately. Anything that she wasn’t able to take on her first trip out of the building, she left behind. So, I suppose you won’t be able to visit with her at work anymore. These things happen.
Although there is something even I don’t understand about this story. As I’ve said, I don’t breathe anymore. So who was that breathing? Ah well, Night Vale keeps its mysteries, sometimes even from me.
I’m sure you’ll be saddened to lose Jennifer as a friend, but perhaps your mind is elsewhere these days. You’ve been seeing things lately. Things you are certain you have never encountered before, yet things that felt undeniably familiar. Last Monday morning, before leaving for work, you leaned in toward the mirror to examine a pimple on the side of your nose, and you saw something else. You saw someone behind you.
There’s a thin line separating humor and horror, and this was that line. You were on the horror side. I was on the humor side. Your eyes got so large; your mouth dangled open. It felt like minutes, but was probably only five seconds. At first you thought it was a towel hanging from the door, or a trick of the light, or the sleepy remnant of a dream, but you knew. Your subconscious always knows, well before the rest of you. There was someone behind you. You attempted to find her face, but you couldn’t quite make it out. Yet you felt her stare.
You jerked back and grunted. And no one was there. You ran out into the living room. No one there either. You shouted but I think you heard me giggle, because you stopped making any noise. You searched your apartment, checking closets and cabinets. You even looked in dresser drawers. Think, Craig. Who would be able to fit into a dresser drawer? (I can. I can fold myself wonderfully.)
When you returned to the bathroom, you sat down on the closed toilet, your towel still around your waist, and you breathed with your face in your palms. They were beautiful, cool mint toothpaste breaths. They felt wonderful on my own hands, hovering half an inch from yours.
I don’t know if I’ve told you this before, you have pleasant breath. Even when you’re sleeping. You’re lucky. Or Amaranta is lucky, I suppose.
Craig, you’re starting to hear a voice when you’re alone, and it is the same voice that sometimes comes into your dreams. You think you are stressed and overwhelmed, yet Amaranta is so understanding, so patient. Maybe it’s your job. Maybe Amaranta is right. You should find a better career with better pay, more scalable, a career you can support a family with. I know you’re out of debt, but what if you started investing? I left a brochure detailing some nice investment opportunities, locally based companies, environmentally friendly and fair to their workers, in your mailbox. I think you could find real stability and real happiness if you weren’t so stressed about money.
Just think of poor Stuart in apartment 413, whose unit caught fire last month. He lost everything. You went over to help him out even though you’d never met him before. You are a good person because you do good things. A person is only what they do. Having someone to cry with definitely relieved Stuart for a bit. It relieved you too.
In the process of consoling a neighbor, you also learned about Stuart’s difficult life. His wife left him five years ago. Then he was laid off from his community relations job with the CIA. Then someone hacked his bank account a year and a half ago and stole $15,417.71. And now this fire.
He still remembered that exact amount too. $15,417.71. He just couldn’t get over the seventy-one cents part. So specific, that amount. Maybe someone bought a used car with it, or got an all-inclusive vacation package, or paid off a debt.
“Paid off a debt?” you asked him.
“Such a specific amount,” he said. “Could be.”
And you said . . . well, you said nothing for a long time. Stuart actually had to ask if you were okay.
And you said, “The bank covered the theft though, right?”
“According to their records, I withdrew the amount myself. They have a withdrawal slip with that amount and my signature on it.”
“And you don’t remember . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Stuart looked annoyed. That was his old tragedy. He faced a new tragedy now.
If you could have seen my face, I would have looked annoyed too.
Focus, Craig. See how focused Stuart is? You are free from tragedy, and yet you don’t savor the good fortune you have. You’re free of debt. Now take charge of your future, of your family’s future. Assert yourself. Don’t look back. The only thing back there is regret. Also resentment. Also anger. Vengeance too.
You can’t change what has already happened. You can only make things better moving forward. Amaranta loves you.
Cut bait. Then fish.
The Captain
1814–1829
1
André cut open the pomegranate with his dagger. The red juice pooled along the heavily stained wood counter in the galley. He quartered the fruit and, with his thin fingers, pried out seeds in quick bursts from the pith.
He dropped them into a bowl in front of me and I ate them. I savored each small pop of the soft skin, the burst of tart juice. André found pomegranates too sour. They made his tongue hard and the insides of his cheeks feel fuzzy, but these seeds quenched my dry mouth, a splash of juice on each gentle crunch of their core. Squish, squirt, scrunch.
In the hold were five hundred pounds of pomegranates. We had stolen them from an orchard in Malta. We were not ordered to steal the pomegranates
. We stole them out of the goodness of our hearts.
Nine years earlier, Señora Bover, on behalf of the Order of the Labyrinth, had granted me this small cutter called The Wasp, along with a crew of about twenty men. I didn’t love the name of the ship, because of my distaste for that particular insect, but it was fitting for a quick little vessel that could make life miserable for others. Bover told us we were to report to a man named Holger in Ca’Savio, near Venice, for all details of operations.
I had collected my little band of thieves, and told them the good news, that we could go back to a life of banditry and profits, and they had gladly joined me for the adventure. I didn’t tell them the whole truth, of course, that I would never leave behind vengeance, that perhaps there was nothing else for me. Only Rebekah sensed what I was hiding, and she loved me too much to pick apart my reasons.
Our new boss, Holger, a sometimes likable but mostly dull misanthrope, enjoyed my predilection toward picking pockets and expert knife-work and had, at first, put our ship to work on small smuggling jobs in small port cities. The meager coins and modest swords I swiped were easy work but hardly the daring adventures I thought the Order would be involved in.
During our first four years aboard The Wasp, we ran many such small jobs for the Order. I needed time to get used to running a ship and a crew, but a few years for a revenge-minded young woman felt like a few decades. Plus, my induction into the Order happened so swiftly, I wrongly expected that my next several promotions would happen rapidly as well.
The Order of the Labyrinth was purposefully opaque, and our lack of upward movement was starting to dull the thrill of our adventures. “Revenge ages like wine,” Edmond wrote me once in a letter. “The longer it waits, the richer the taste.”
Edmond had also expressed reticence about me and my friends joining such a ruthless and unstoppable organization, and my desire to bring down the Order of the Labyrinth from within. But I was no longer a child. My choices were my own to make, and my consequences were my own to face.