by David Payne
“The drape is very flattering. This Italian wool has such a lovely hand.” The little man went on.
Ransom tried with all his might to avoid his own reflection in the mirror. When he failed, a reanimated corpse stared back, blue and sweating, desperately in need of a shot of human blood or whatever alchemical elixir it might be that would make him finally, fully human like the little clerk, like Claire, his wife, like all the other people flitting through the store, like all the other people flitting through this life.
“Didn’t like them?” Claire asked, with a light arch of the brows.
They left Saks holding hands that day, but Ransom’s palms were sweating, Claire’s as dry and crisp as the autumn sky they walked into on Fifth. A sky like this one outside Charleston, where dusk was creeping from the horizon upward toward the zenith, away up there where it was still day, a profound ceramic blue, with a first star twinkling like Cupid’s arrowhead dipped in magic fairy dust. And the new moon was his bow, strung and bent, aimed straight for Ransom’s chest. And wasn’t that what he had loved in Claire—her blithe unawareness—even if he’d hated her for it as well? Somewhere deep inside, he’d hoped Claire’s confident belief that life would bring her all good things would rub off somehow, would compensate his secret shame, the sense that he deserved no better than the shotgun shack where he’d grown up and the swift and unappealable correction of his drunken father’s fists. He’d hoped, in short, that Claire might save him from himself. And Ran was forty-five and knew full well that people don’t save other people from themselves. Yet in that secret, childlike place, you see, never fully challenged or expunged, he’d still not quite surrendered the hope that, due to extraordinary need or merit, the gods might grant a small exception in his case. Was it too much to ask? Apparently so, because in all these years it hadn’t happened. Was it too late to think that it still might?
It was. The verdict suddenly came down.
They were on a bridge now, crossing water. Was that the Ashley or the Cooper? Ran didn’t know or really give a shit.
“Life’s not fair, is it?” The voice—poisoned, unctuous—was speaking, like a red-garbed demon with a pitchfork and a tail, into Ran’s right ear, coming from the speaker of the DVD.
“Who’s that?”
Neither Hope nor Charlie answered, their little faces anesthetized as they gazed upward in the rearview, transfixed by what was happening on screen.
“Hope, who’s that talking?”
“That’s Scar, Daddy. Shhh!” She glared and put her finger to her lips.
Well, he’s right, isn’t he? said the voice. Life isn’t fair.
“He does make a certain point,” conceded Ran, as the development began to thin. There were marshes ahead and to the left. The sun in the rearview was bloodred. They must be headed east, he realized, toward the ocean.
It was that unfairness that he and Shanté, once upon a time, had meant to run away from and leave behind. They were going to New York City, where it didn’t matter if your skin was black or if you lived in Bagtown and your name was Hill…But in the end, Delores found them out and shut the kitchen door. When push came, finally, to shove, Ran’s beloved teacher—who fought for civil rights, who got her daughter a full ride at a good northern prep school, the first person who made Ransom Hill believe that there was something in him worth an effort on another human being’s part—Delores could extend Ran her largesse, but accept him as her daughter’s lover, she could not.
In the end, you weren’t even good enough for them, were you, Ran? the voice proposed, not even good enough for your nigger girlfriend or her nigger mom.
“Shut up!” he shouted.
“We didn’t say anything, Daddy!” Hope and Charlie cried in protest.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“No one.” He avoided Hope’s query in the mirror. “Myself.”
Do you understand? the voice went on, growing ever bolder now. Do you begin to see why Harlan did it now?
There was a new voice coming from the speaker now—Mufasa’s. His deep-chested, manly baritone seemed familiar somehow. What was the actor’s name? Briefly, Ran tuned in. Mufasa was explaining the Pridelands’ extent to little Simba. Everything the eye could see would one day be his to rule. All except for a shadowy region in the farthest distance. That place, Mufasa said, Simba must avoid at all costs.
He’s wrong, though, isn’t he? the voice said. Don’t you have to go there, too?
Resistant, Ransom clenched his jaw, but what the voice said now seemed true.
They were crossing another, older bridge onto what appeared to be an island—for all Ran knew, it might have been Sullivan’s as easily as Kiawah. Expensive homes on immaculately groomed lots stood side by side by shacks with jungle yards. A hippie girl attired for a night out in Haight-Ashbury in 1968 was talking to a haggard homeless man with a fright wig of silver hair. Surfer dudes in wet suits filed off the beach, where a fabulous party roared beneath a pier. Unusually large numbers of dogs and cats wandered near the public road, like aboriginals on walkabout.
Beside a run-down shack that looked suspiciously like Ran’s old house on Bane and Ninth, an ancient lady in a rocking chair sat hunched beneath a crude hand-lettered sign: “Fried Popcorn Shrimp.”
Pulling into the dusty lot, Ran got out, leaving the children fixated in back.
“Popcorn shrimp,” he said, examining the gray specimens she was heading in her lap. “Bait, in other words…”
“You got it,” she conceded, cheerfully enough. “Don’t let that stop you, though. They’re good. Here, try one.” She offered him a greasy paper plate.
He picked one off the mound. “You’re right.”
“Even better hot. Can I fry you up a batch?”
“What I really need is ice cream for my kids.”
She wiped her hands and put the basket in the fryer. “There’s a shop in town. Or I got some Ben and Jerry’s in the house.”
“I guess it would be asking too much for you to have some cones…”
“Well, you are pushing it a bit,” she said. “But, guess what, it’s your lucky day.”
“I could argue the point,” he said. “But I won’t. Two double scoops to go. I’ll make it worth your while.”
The screen door slammed behind her, and he listened to the sizzling of the oil, the whisper of breaking surf.
In the van, Scar was telling Simba that the shadow region was only for the bravest lions.
Scar’s right, isn’t he? said the voice. However wise and good Mufasa is, he doesn’t really grasp the total picture. You have to go there, too, don’t you, Ran—to where the shadows are? Isn’t that trip, in fact, the one that really counts?
“That’s where we’re going now, isn’t it?” asked Ran.
And the voice said, Already there.
“Mind if I ask a question,” he asked the old woman as he paid.
“Shoot.”
“Where exactly am I?”
“Folly Beach.”
Ran expelled a shrimp, projectile-style, as he began to laugh. “And I suppose that once you get here, you can never leave.”
“I might not be the person you should ask,” she said. “Been here forty years myself.”
“Okay,” said Ran, “okay, the Folly part is evident, so where exactly is the Beach?”
She jerked her head. “’Bout a hundred yards that way.”
“Would you object if I let my children stretch their legs?”
“It’s a free country.”
“Who told you that one?”
The woman smiled at this, and Ransom, cheered by the exchange, took the cones back to the car to find a herd of wildebeests plunging down a sheer rock scarp with hyenas snapping at their heels. Ahead of the stampede, the little lion, Simba, ran, weaving and slipping.
Ransom, like the children, watched, entranced, as black-maned Scar informed his golden, nobler brother, Mufasa, of
the peril in the gorge.
Scar and Mufasa traversing down a rocky mountainside…Mufasa plunging into the stampede…He runs against the herd and gets knocked down…He grunts and struggles up…little Simba’s clinging to a tree limb…Now it breaks, he’s flying through the air…Mufasa catches him in his mouth…He puts Simba, safe, on a high rock. The herd sweeps him away, and Simba screams.
Suddenly Mufasa reappears. He lunges, claws his way up the rock face. Above, Scar waits, looking down at him, strangely calm.
Mufasa whispers, asks for help. Scar lunges, digs his claws into Mufasa’s paws. His chartreuse eyes are lit up now; Mufasa’s golden ones go shocked and round with awful prescience. “Long live the king!” says Scar.
Mufasa, screaming, falls and falls.
The thunder of hooves abates.
Ashen, Ran reached up and turned the picture off.
“Daddy! It’s not over!”
“Yes, it is,” he said, unbuckling them brusquely.
“What about the movie?”
“Here’s your ice cream,” he said, handing them their cones. “Come on.”
He took their hands and hauled them to the beach.
“Look!” said Charlie, running toward the ocean as it came into view.
Hope, less easily diverted, frowned at Ransom.
“What?”
Warned off by his tone, she followed Charlie. “Wait for me!”
Alone, Ran fell to his seat and pressed his throbbing temples with both hands.
“Scar, help me, brother!”
In the final moment, just before Mufasa fell, Ran recognized the voice. The actor was James Earl Jones, but that wasn’t it. The connection was to Cell. Cell was Mufasa. Their voices possessed a similar timbre, similar depth. Hope had recognized it, too.
Guess who that makes you.
“Silly, Scar’s my real daddy….” Ransom suddenly realized his daughter was defending him against Claire’s preference. In Hope’s fantasy, the bad lion was supposed to win. And why? Because in real life, her daddy wasn’t.
Do you think Mufasa ever struggled before a three-way mirror? said the voice. Do you think it ever cost him any anguish to buy a pair of pants? Sure, you hit that poor schmo in Charleston, but he was just a stand-in—we know who you’d really like to give the old bangzoom. And if it felt that good with a stranger, Ran, think how good it would feel to give Marcel the TKO, to give both him and Claire a dose of the same hurt they’ve given you. Think how good it’s going to, when you finally do.
It was night now. The incoming wave broke, white as the evil lion’s teeth. Hsssssssss, it said, in just Scar’s tone of voice.
“A. H. D. with J., Wando Passo, Aug. 1865.” The thought popped suddenly into his head, and Ran said, “Holy shit.”
Starting to get it?
“Wait…You don’t mean…”
Yep, you’re very warm.
“Wait! It isn’t him? It isn’t Harlan in the grave?”
Took you long enough.
“Holy shit! So he came home after the war…”
Destitute and bitter, from a Northern prison…
“And found out…”
A. H. D. with J.
“She was having an affair?”
And Bingo was his name-o.
“So he caught them, right? Harlan caught them, and then…And then…What happened then?”
You know what happened then. What had to happen happened, just like it has to happen now, again.
“So he…?”
Say it.
“Wait, no, wait,” said Ransom, cradling his splitting head, having this highly animated two-way conversation, solo, on the beach.
Come on, Ransom, say it.
“No!”
You know you have to.
“All right, he killed them! He fucking killed them, okay?”
Huh, Good Got! Say it, say it again! the voice exulted, doing a mean James Brown.
“So what?” said Ransom, crying now. “So fucking what? Just because it happened then doesn’t mean it has to happen now.”
Of course not! it laughed. This all happened a long time ago.
“Over a hundred years!”
A hundred and forty, actually. What does any of it have to do with you? Or Claire? Or Marcel “Cell Phone” Jones?
“We’re talking murder here,” Ran said, pathetically imploring now. “Murder. This is me. Me.”
That’s the mistake, though, Ransom, don’t you see? the voice said, not without compassion. People think murder’s something high and hard and deep. It isn’t. How hard is it to pull the trigger of a gun? Any harder than, say, checking your wife’s underpants?
“Hey, I didn’t do that!”
You were close, though, weren’t you? All we’re talking here is capability. And you did knock down a total stranger because you didn’t like his tassel-loafers or his pants. If you ask me, a knuckle sandwich, a fist in someone’s face, flesh to flesh and bone to bone, is a good bit more up close and personal than a gun. And braver, too. Give yourself some credit. That was a pretty gutsy move. Your old homeboys at Bane and Depot would certainly approve. And you know why hitting him felt good?
“Why?”
Because it was the first true act you’ve taken in…How long has it been, Ran? Years?
“But it’s against everything I believe in.”
Come on, Ransom, face it, when you get down to it, you don’t really believe in all that much.
“It’s uncivilized,” he said.
So what? the voice replied. Civilization isn’t where it ends—you at least know that much, don’t you? Didn’t you just agree with Scar that Simba has to journey to the shadow place?
“That’s true, I did,” said Ran, impaled on his own point.
Beyond the border, past the defended gate, there’s a whole wild wilderness out there—in here. That’s where Simba had to go in order to become king. And you do, too, Ran. That’s where you’ll finally find the thing you’ve been seeking all these years.
“What’s that?” he asked, suddenly needing help remembering.
Your True Self, the voice obliged, remember? It’s waiting for you there. You know, and I know, you have to take the trip. It’s foreordained. You’re already on the path. There’s no way back, no way out but on.
“But, murder,” Ran protested. “Not murder, though. This can’t be where the journey leads. I’m not capable of that.”
Remember Chinatown? “Under the right circumstances, Mr. Gittes, a man is capable of anything.”
“Yeah, I remember. So, what’s your point?”
The same one Sneeden made this afternoon—if you’re so innocent and squeaky clean, why did it jerk your chain to be treated as a suspect? If you’re so confident you’re incapable of murder, THEN WHY THE FUCK DID YOU HIDE HARLAN’S GUN?
“I didn’t, though!” Ran protested. “Did I?”
Having reached an angry pitch, the voice maintained a contemptuous silence now.
“I really don’t remember!”
Yeah, right. And Buh Rabbit doesn’t remember the path out of the briar patch.
“You never believed in me,” Ran said, with a note of wounded, childlike petulance.
Au contraire. I’m the only one who ever did. It’s you who always undermine yourself, and me who has to go behind you cleaning up the mess.
Pondering this statement, Ran came to now, as he previously had before the creel of dirty clothes, and for the first time didn’t answer. In the quiet, he could hear his children laughing. Night had fallen on the beach. A wave came in. He stood.
“Who are you?” he said, aloud, but quietly, speaking toward the sea. The sudden bristling along his spine was like the ridge of hair that rises on a dog the moment it first senses an intruder, not yet seen. “Who the fuck are you?”
Me? I’m no one, Ransom. Isn’t that who you told Hope you were talking to?
“No one, as in…”
Pleased to meet you, can’t you guess my name?
“Nemo,” Ransom said.
The voice laughed. You can call me Captain, or mon capitaine. Just remember to salute.
Ransom, now, did not reply. Looking up, he saw the stars out in their billions, and it struck him that Van Gogh painting The Starry Night had not been rendering a visual conceit, but painting what he saw in the night sky over Arles, something that was really there. And Ransom knew because he saw the same thing now, a swirl above the drawn bow of the moon, a vortex spinning slowly in the sky above the South Carolina coast.
“Hope! Charlie! Come on! It’s time to go!”
“Just another minute, Dad!”
“Right now!” he roared into the night.
“Again! Again! Again!”
So this is where the journey leads…this is where the journey leads….
“I need help,” he said aloud then, not to them, or to the voice, but to the painter of the canvas overhead, the author of the world, in Whom, even then, Ran only indifferently believed. Yet he had nowhere else to turn except himself. And his self, Ran realized, was no longer something he could trust.
That was the moment when it finally dawned on Ransom that the little voice, the familiar one that helps out in the morning when you hesitate between the blue shirt and the red, had stopped being his, stopped being him. At some point, it had become the voice of something other, not himself, not aligned with Ransom Hill and not his friend. And what point was that? The moment Ran dug up the pot.
This is where the clues were leading all along…. And what do you do then, when you’re already on the path, in the moment you finally realize where it leads…?
“What do I do now?”
The first part of the answer—but the first part only—came to Ransom as he carefully (oh, so carefully) strapped the children into the car and started off with them again.
THIRTY-NINE