City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  (6) In the Hours After Death. X tore this story by Nicholas Sporlender out of last month’s Burning Leaves, the creative journal enjoyed by so many of our patrons. I can confirm that the pages did indeed originate with our library copy. Several other pages had been ripped from the journal, but none of these pages remained in X’s room. I want to discuss the absent pages first because they perplex me. In comparing a complete copy of Burning Leaves with the torn one, I found that X may have absconded with an advertisement for women’s underthings, an article on the origins of water puppetry, a caricature of the current Truffidian Antechamber, a short, experimental (and completely incomprehensible) fiction by Sarah Beeside entitled “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo,” and yet another advertisement for women’s underthings. (Sticking to the letter of your instructions, I have not included these items since you specifically asked for what X left behind, not what-he-didn’t-leave-behind-but-had-torn-out-at-some- point-from-a-creative-arts-journal. I must note that we often follow the letter of instructions due to lack of funding; anything that deviates, other than our incarcerated deviants, costs money.) “In the Hours After Death” itself sheds no enduring light on X’s condition. It points to a simple death wish, by which wish we would expect to have found X’s corpse, not the absence of his corpse, in his cell that very interesting morning when I decided, on a whim, to talk with X before the appointed hour.

  (7) Encrypted story. Several pages, folded and stuck inside City of Saints & Madmen, consisted of a long series of numbers. Rather than bore you with them, I took an amateur’s stab at deciphering what appeared to be a code, even though we are really not prepared here at V.B.M.M.I. to interpret encrypted materials. (You will recall that we lost our funding for even such a basic necessity as a frenziologist last year; perhaps you could put in a word with Flauntimer?). After much tortuous experimentation, I discovered that each number series referred to a page, paragraph, line, and word in X’s book. I then decoded the manuscript in some haste, keeping in mind the urgency of your request for the materials to be examined by your investigator at Central Records. Some of the words I have translated seem to make no sense--in my haste I have made errors--but the last paragraph has escaped my efforts completely. It seems to draw on some other type of decryption. What seems clear from what I have decrypted, however, is that X seeks to make a parallel between the gray caps and us, his “captors” at the Institute. Such a crude comparison is spurred on by a childish need for revenge. I am sure your expert will have his own theories.

  (8) The Exchange. This festival story by Nicholas Sporlender has been in X’s possession for some time, but he did not arrive with it. Someone handed it to him, I believe. He has scrawled some notes on the envelope the booklet came in, specifically, “Sporlender hated Verden by the end. But I don’t yet hate Eric. I wonder if that ‘echo’ will ever appear, or if it’s simply not a one-for-one resonance.” X then carefully cut the pages out, glued them to larger sheets, and added his own typewritten notes. (I am also intrigued by X’s insinuation that he met Madnok while in this institution. Again, I don’t see how this could be--no patient by that name ever stayed with us.) Clearly, I should have given X more to do in his spare time.

  (9) Learning to Leave the Flesh. Although I took this story from X at the beginning of his sojourn in this delightful place, I include it as an item of potential interest, having carefully cut it from X’s collection. I have read the story several times in hopes of deciphering it. It, I feel, far more than even the typed numbers, holds some clue to X’s whereabouts. The story is luminous--it almost seems to glow as one reads it. I must admit to sending it to you mostly to be rid of it.

  (10) The Ambergris Glossary. This item, received by X via mail the week before his disappearance, is a strange alliance of the original entries from Duncan Shriek’s The Early History of Ambergris and X’s added entries, so intertwined that it will require a detailed comparison to determine the extent of X’s changes. I will leave this analysis in your capable hands since mine are full of such interesting decisions as which sub-department to shut down due to crumbling facilities: farkology or incrementology.

  The facts in this case remain the same, my good Simpkin: X gone with no trace of how he accomplished the feat and no sign of where he might have sought refuge. The most telling clue is that he left his beloved copy of City of Saints & Madmen behind. But we’ve certainly made no further progress in our investigations. (Some wags among the long-suffering kitchen staff--who last week resorted to poaching from the nearby zoo for supplies--have noted that X took all pens but one and conclude he must have “written his way out.” It’s as good a theory as any at this point.) It seems of little use to note that most of these written materials deal with some form of transformation, a common enough concern of those who wish to leave their insanity behind.

  As soon as I can buy a new typewriter ribbon, I will of course submit a full report to the Board. For now, however, the Strange Case of X, as it might be termed, remains open.

  Sincerely,

  Dr V.

  P.S. I said the notebook I kept is blank, and it is, but on the inside back cover, I found scrawled the following words: “Zamilon,” “convergence,” and “the green lights of the towers.” Could they be a clue, I wonder? The words mean nothing to me in this context.

  P.P.S. When possible, please return X’s possessions--for my display.

  NOTES

  -A writer who is having difficulties with his masterwork--too old or just unmotivated? Read H’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, first.

  -A writer in a prison. The prison is his own story. How can he make himself free?

  -Ask the attendant for a better night lamp, not to mention another typewriter ribbon.

  -Tonsure kept two journals, one that he wanted to be found. Why, really, would it be important for a fake account to be found?

  -Always exercise when you first get up in the morning!

  -Could easily write a biography of Voss Bender while in here. Start with childhood. Picture him this way: in the Truffidian Cathedral, surrounded by people yet utterly alone, sitting in the place of honor at the head of the altar, his left leg crossed over his right, an arm and fist supporting his head--a wild shock of black hair that goes to his shoulders, the olive skin, the darkness under the eyes, accentuating the darkness of the eyes themselves. These are eyes that see a lot without seeming to. The thick lips, the hint of a smile on those lips, while all around the congregation continues to chant. His foot is tapping. But the tapping foot is not a sign of boredom. Inside his head, he is already, at 12, composing an opera. Beside him--shriveled, white-haired grandfather, vacant sad-eyed mother, a father to whom everything in the world is cause for indifference. As the ceremony progresses and each of the relatives comes up to say something, most stress that he should “use his skills for good.” He looks up at them from beneath the wall of black hair as if they were all made from scraps of paper. Throughout it all, his foot is still tapping. And as he receives the benediction with his parents, their hands placed gently atop his head, he stands with his arms behind his back, his hands clasped together as if he has been shackled. . . and still the foot taps to the great swelling of symphonies in his head. . . He will always be this way--half in the real world, half in the next. (How, then, does he go from this idealism to despotism of old age?)

  -Don’t forget that the director needs a letter to his superiors about funding.

  -In the future, the gray caps will probably have taken over the city no matter what I write--how might the city change as a result? What will be the dangers of writing in such a milieu? Simple incarceration or something much worse? Is it worth the risk? Is it a good staging ground anyway?

  -Ask for new books, even if theoretically you wrote them all.

  -An encoded message from the future, itself with a message embedded in it?

  -Is there more to the Martin Lake story? Later years?

  -Oxygenated squid blood is blue, not red.

  -“His
dreams will rise to the surface like bubbles of air, and when they pop open, he will finally remember the one thing he had hoped to forget.” Bad B-movie material?

  -Nightmares lately. I’m not quite sure what to make of them. They suggest answers to some questions about the gray caps. It is always underground. And it is dark. There is a machine. The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Images of jungles and swamps inhabited by strange birds, strange beasts. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen them or heard mention of their existence. Ever. . . After several days, your eyes stray and unfocus and blink slowly. You notice, at the very bottom of the mirror, the glass, a door. The door is as big as the machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so small that you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent--the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely-perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a non-existent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. You cannot think. You cannot breathe. You dare not breathe. Your head is full of blood.

  There is something behind the door.

  There is something behind the door.

  There is something behind the door.

  The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You run you run you run you run from that place as fast as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while you drown in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hatdoesnwor atdoeswor tdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door . . .

  Patient 19-9-18-9-14

  Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute

  1314 Albumuth Boulevard

  Ambergris I13-24

  THE RELEASE OF BELACQUA

  The shade of the composer Voss Bender himself might have passed Belacqua in the back corridors of the opera house; the aging critic Janice Shriek might have half-noticed the stoic humor of his performance, just not thought it important enough to mention in her review.

  Much about him cried out for attention. Above the black shoes: the long red socks, matched only by the outrageous pink-blue chessboard buttons of his jacket, mimicked in lazy rural fashion by the green eyes on his yellow shirt. His hair—in a twisted red braid (frayed at the end)—hung down in front like the fuse to the bomb of his head. His made-up face reflected a certain forethought mirrored in the shrewd miscalculation of his clothes. The eyebrows (more than one opera-goer may have thought, attention wandering momentarily from the major players) had been stolen from the flourishes on the body of a violin: they overpowered the small, terrified eyes, melted into the lines of the long, garrulous (fake) nose, which itself loomed over the parrotfish mouth (flanked by vertical lines like gills) and sometimes slid down in mock surrender to gravity by performance’s end. This farce was pigmented with sow-pink skin, paler above the rarefied heights of the dueling eyebrows, as overdone in description as in life.

  But we would know all of this if we had attended a performance, his costume blaring at us like a bawdy horn. Belacqua, Belacqua, the horns blared—this is Belacqua. See him move across the stage. See him briefly speak, and turning burn his image across our eyes. We could never know that he lives on the fifth floor of a hideous old hotel, in a cramped apartment with indifferent lime-green wallpaper. Neighbors who move around above and below like blunt objects with a dulled sense of direction. Children who cry in the dark like ragged ghosts. A flutter of wings at the windowpane, delicate as eyelashes, and then gone. The repeated banging of a bedpost like some erotic gunshot aimed at his heart. (Next door, for ease of transition and translation, a necropole awaits those who grow cold in the hotel’s embrace.)

  On weekend mornings, he sits on the balcony, an unlit cigar between his lips. Dressed in a plain white robe, renouncing all make up, he feels the wind move through him as if he does not exist. He watches the people who pass by on the street below and anoints them all with secret lives, breathes into them qualities to match the golden light that filters down between the rooftops.

  Sometimes, his gaze blurs upon the filigreed balcony railing as he remembers his dreams. His dreams are all disturbing jokes with obscure punchlines. In one dream, he sees his father: a dark figure at the far end of an alley, briefly illuminated by the glare of a bulb that cuts through the murk. He hears the sound of running water or beer poured from a bottle. Shards of glass lacerate his feet as he runs across the cobblestones. But the joke is, no matter how fast he runs, he can never come close enough to read his father’s eyes. Motionless, frictionless, his father glides ahead, continually twenty, thirty feet beyond his grasp.

  The filigree of the balcony at first seems like protection from the dream, not protection from falling. He drops the cigar, stands up, goes back inside, dresses in subdued pants and shirt, descends the stairs, walks out onto the street, loses himself there, glad to be anonymous. He leaves his opera persona behind him like an abandoned skin: a husk that has as little to do with him as his clothes.

  As he walks toward Albumuth Boulevard (possibly to buy a book at Borges Bookstore, possibly just to wander), a black flame burns inside of him—it lights up his eyes and lends his speech (a word to the fruit vendor, a brief exchange with a more talented but unemployed actor) a subdued yet incandescent fury. Each word arrives burnt around the edges, consumed. His mother used to talk that way, as she let her life be created by his father. The Great Actor. The Drowned Man. The Drunkard.

  Even now, he cannot completely forget his role in Bender’s most popular opera, the last written before his death and staged posthumously under a one-word title: Trillian. The opera recounts, in six raucous acts lasting four hours, the reign of Trillian the Great Banker, leaving out nothing, presenting every scene as a painting of the sort in which a thousand brightly-colored details battle for the viewer’s attention. His role, as the Great Banker’s gray cap advisor Belacqua, consisted of four lines and two hours of pratfalls.

  The part was based on hearsay, heresy, and innuendo, for no history he had ever read mentioned Trillian’s advisor. Bender had made it up, and he had played the falsehood for ten years now, the opera’s undiminished popularity both blessing and curse. His father would never have taken such a role, but he had no choice. He had always recognized both the limitations of his acting style and that he lacked any spark of talent in other trades. Belacqua he was and Belacqua he would always be. Thus doomed to replay this other self nig
ht after night, while his father’s ghost hooted and howled, besotted, from some upper balcony seat.

  The role, though small, required work, if only because the directors could require work of him without complaint. They told him exactly where to stand, and he stood there. They told him when to make absurd little motions in time to the main players pouring out in perfect pitch and tone the words that now to his ears had no meaning, much as any repetition reduces function and content to a void. He also studied gray caps when he came upon them slumped in alleys or, from a distance, at dusk as they began to waken—observed their hunching gait, their distinctive clothing, their deep, unknowable eyes. He even took lessons on how to project small upon the audience, making his five-foot-six-inch height look like four-foot-four (this last a precaution against getting the boot).

  In his pocket, he kept a crumpled piece of paper. On the paper he had scribbled stage directions and The Lines.

  BELACQUA approaches the front of the stage, holding the bloody knife. When he reaches TRILLIAN, he sternly sings:

  What you cannot know and will not trust

  Will find you here because it must—

  I fly away now, the night to bring

  Down upon Trillian’s head, and then?

  No-thing.

  Below this, he had written what he thought Belacqua felt in that moment: “Everything that had been building up for so long—dissipated in the pool of blood bubbling up from X’s body.”