I noticed him straining to look at the ledger and I told him, “Just some sketches.”
“Can I?”
He accepted the book, gentle and expectant and timorous, as if it were a newborn. He took a while, studying it, holding the book at different angles, before he opened it and turned the page. But soon his excitement took over and I could see him flipping the pages quickly, returning to a previous page, murmuring to himself, nodding and casting glances at me. Then he was finished. “The source of everything. Divine wisdom.” His squeaky voice sounded almost reverent. “Creation and destruction in the same act. Dancing gods lying low and peeping with their hidden eyes. Then jab after jab after jab. Bam! Kidney punch followed by a thumping clout. I don’t know what to say,” he said, his squeak so hushed it seemed as if he were whispering through a closed door. “Just when I felt you were incapable of doing so, you have delivered a knockout punch. Floored me plain and simple. It will take some time to completely digest all of this.”
He closed the ledger, placed it on the table with exaggerated reverence and reached for his knapsack. I told him quickly, “I need that ledger.”
“I must admit that I am completely befuddled. Did you not set forth all these parables for us to decipher?” He looked genuinely confused. “If I am free to opine, I will have to say that I find this most unusual. Most discourteous. What would the others think?”
“What others? The producer? The cinematographer? The –”
“C’mon, don’t be doing me that.” His voice held a slight lilt and I wondered if he was imitating some other actor. “We have gone through this, let me see, a hundred times.” He stared at my outstretched hand. “I must admit that you are a slippery pugilist. Bobbing and weaving and playing possum on the ropes. The only thing that prevents me from plugging you is the worthy thought that a being of your calibre must have a righteous reason for these gambits.”
He returned to the ledger and began murmuring something about acolytes. I could not recall a religious angle in the storyboard and I asked him, “Are there acolytes in the team?”
“Amazing. That word adds everything. Amazing Acolytes. Without this pejorative, we would be like everyone else. Maudlin and jabbering, as you yourself said.” He tapped his head. “I mostly remember the things I am supposed to forget. Do you know why? Because I operate on instinct. I have a sixth sense about most things. People look at me and see a rank savage, but little do they know that inside the mind of this savage, there is always a sweet melody. It’s what preserves me. And preserves them, too, I must add.” He motioned to the others, who were looking at me intently. “Do you know how long we have been waiting? Thought at times they were delaying tactics or, worse, setting things in motion like a callous Timekeeper and coolly walking away from the decompression. But the brute within knew you were hitching and coupling everything. Waiting for the pitch perfect moment to reawaken your team.”
I told him quickly before he verged into another ridiculous tangent, “I, too, have been waiting. Now I need the ledger.”
I assumed he would put up some resistance, but he gingerly pushed the book across the table with his fat thumb. “It would be derelict of me if I did not point out that an idle army can become very fidgety. What is the point of allowing your Golem to sleep till the end of time? Or your brute, for that matter.”
I shoved the ledger into my coat pocket. “Very well. When is the scheduled date for the first shoot?”
“The first shoot. I like that.” He offered his broad grin. “No one’s going anywhere. We will all be here waiting.”
“Where do you all rest?”
“Each man chooses his own bed?”
“A different carriage?”
“Each man chooses his own bed. Free will, if I may opine.”
I decided to find a suitable carriage, possibly not too close to the others. I recalled your note stating that the actors had been practising forever and I felt they were too close to their roles. Dangerously wound up from waiting. (For your appearance, perhaps?) I got up. But before I left, I asked Balzac, “Do you have any idea of the script? There is little continuity and to be frank, a fair bit makes no sense. There seems to be too many stories here. Too many voices.”
His grin widened even further, threatening his ears. “I can oblige you by attempting an honest answer, but I will most likely be far off the mark. My perusal of your notebook was too swift for even an erudite man to assess, much less a brute. That was a joke, in case you didn’t notice. Here’s another joke. If you put a gun against my head, I may tell you that we were reassembling for the most dangerous mission of all. The Origins issue. That split second between creation and destruction when everything is in perfect harmony and when gods are formed. One second off and we will be somewhere else. Someone else, I must also add. Do you remember what you told us? That parables are God’s puzzles. His little gifts to us. Like scattering matchsticks before an ape.” He smiled almost sweetly.
I tried to force a requisite smile as I got up. I spoke loudly, addressing the entire group. “It was nice meeting everyone. I have to consult the storyboard to see how it all fits together. Oh, and the sketches you left with me. Shall we meet here tomorrow, then? The same time.”
“What time?” the woman who referred to herself as the Countess Conferrer asked. They all glanced at their bare wrists.
I remembered the stuck clock in the terminal and I told them, “I will be here in the morning.”
Toeman said, “Each universe has its own time. We have to be careful because one can scuttle the other. Who knows what will happen when parallel dimensions collide?” He seemed to be reflecting on this crazy possibility. “Face to face with your doppelgänger and wondering who is real. Sometimes I feel I have stumbled across that barrier, you know. Did I tell you that my double is a man of incredible strength, honesty and beauty?”
“You all have had enough practice for the time being,” I told them in a joking fashion. No one seemed amused.
I pushed open the door at the rear and as I walked from carriage to carriage, I wondered if among the group were stuntmen and boom operators and costume designers and sound technicians and prop makers and so on. To be honest, they all appeared to be extras with leading-men delusions. As I walked on, I thought of other tasks and I realized that my memory of functions and facts had been untouched. It was only my autobiographical memory that had been short-circuited. I wondered if this deficit pointed to some more serious problem and moreover if I had been similarly affected previously. I wished I were closer to some medical institution rather than in an abandoned terminal.
I decided I would finally get a good night’s rest and think of these issues in the morning. Nine carriages down I took off my jacket, hung it on the back of a seat and prepared to rest. But when I lay down, I heard a voice from the seat at the back. “Lolo need a cuddle.” I got up in a hurry and saw a little man stretched out, his feet curled up like a baby’s.
15 THE REST OF THE CAST
Before I could apologize for my mistake in assuming the carriage was empty, Balzac walked in and hugged the man, at the same time lifting him off the seat and depositing him onto a narrow table. He seemed to coo as the brute was transporting him although it may have been a suffocating sound. “At this moment in time, I present the Stenographer,” Balzac said, rather formally.
The man began some sort of finger-dance but I soon saw that he was pretending to transcribe something onto an invisible tablet with an invisible pen. “I didn’t see you earlier,” I told him. “Are you part of the team?” He pointed up and the brute gazed in that direction. Both men seemed to be studying the patterns on the carriage’s roof. After about two minutes or so, I asked them, “Could you explain what we are doing?”
Balzac looked down and said, “Lolo is the Stenographer. The only man to write an entire epistle on the surface of a lake. Water is his canvas.”
“Are you quoting someone? It sounds very poetic in an old-fashioned –”
“There you g
o again, my friend. Words are power and the Stenographer can write five hundred a minute. His epistles are complete before the dissolving begins.” I noticed the so-called Stenographer trying to demonstrate this ability by swishing his hands through the air like a martial artist. When he toppled over, Balzac scooped him up, replaced him on the table and peered between the man’s spread hands. “Amazing,” Balzac said. “How can anyone provide an answer to a question not fully framed, Mr. Stenographer? It is most befuddling.”
“What is the question?” I asked. “And the answer?”
“I find your own question most impetuous. It’s the sort of question only a gangrenous miscreant who tried to hide from his acolytes would ask. But I will bite. The question in question is what peculiar advantage do you possess? And the answer is they know what they are searching for but cannot recognize it.”
Balzac seemed clearly annoyed, but when his friend began to chuckle with deep-throated trills, he pitched in with his own ringing giggles. At this point, I was forced to consider a possibility that had been nibbling away at the corners of my mind. The crew seemed to be seriously unhinged and I wondered, briefly, if the mass hysteria, or whatever it was could be, connected with my own amnesia. So when he told me that it was time to meet the rest of the team, I felt it would be best if I knew, one way or the other, exactly what I was dealing with. On the bright side, I might also get an idea of the nature of the proposed film. I wanted to make clear that I was not too keen on wasting time with men and women who appeared more confused than I was, so I told him, “After you. I can spend a few minutes.”
Immediately, the pair stopped laughing. Balzac said, “Impatience, my friend, is no lesser vice than pride because they both spring from beings who believe they breathe a purer air.” His friend began to swish and Balzac offered his translation. “Better to have a brute as your companion than a man who tries to jump ahead before the path is properly cleared.” He was talking his usual nonsense but when the Stenographer struck him lightly with his rod, he calmed down and added, “I, too, once operated at this altitude so there is nothing to be ashamed of. Did I mention that I was once a raging brute who could chomp through wire like if it was raw chicken?” He scooped up the little man from the table and walked through the carriages until he came to one that was locked. “Mister Kurt, number one and top of all. Step forward.”
The door opened and I saw a man standing by the window. His slouch was so severe I assumed that it was to offset his striking height but then I noticed his twitchy fingers, his manner of looking at the ground and, even through his bulky overcoat, the slump of his shoulders. He looked like leading-man material and I felt that he was best suited to play someone who had lately endured some traumatic event that had shot through his confidence. When we approached, I noticed that he towered over Balzac. “I am not sure anyone can help me, but I am willing to help everyone.”
“You, my friend, are too modest,” Balzac told him. His friend began to swish and Balzac, watching him closely, added, “When we are in the centre of the storm we assume there is no way out of the turbulence because we begin to think like a mindless brute rather than noticing the calmness just behind. So we plough forward.”
“Not if it’s a solar storm.” I was surprised by the man’s scratchy voice and his choice of disturbance. “Each day I feel my energy sapping away.” He pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses, brushed an errant curl from his forehead and shot a swift glance at me. “In the mornings, I awaken alone and in the nights, I fall asleep by myself. People like me are no longer needed. We are meticulous, plodding and old-fashioned. We operate under strict codes of justice so we are constantly pushed aside to make way for more popular saviours.”
I could not decide if he was describing his role or the details of his life as he spoke with an unusual gravity about the region in which he had spent his boyhood, once idyllic but now littered with abandoned farms and derelict manufacturing plants. “I come from a burnt-out world.” He gazed around and I could see his eyes narrowing. “I was born in a place that no longer exists and sent here as a child. My foster parents are long dead and I am alone in this place. Useless and idle. Without purpose. How can a man with no purpose maintain his virtue? How can virtue be salvaged when its distinctness is constantly changing? How can I be a saviour when I do not know who I am?”
He was talking utter nonsense, even for a B film, but Balzac said in a respectful voice, “I do not blame you, my friend. We all have these brute thoughts because we have been waiting for eons for the button to be reset. But your destiny is about to change.” The Stenographer did an elaborate swishing act and Balzac added, “There are multiverses awaiting us just behind the door.” I assumed Balzac had mistranslated but his friend smiled and nodded.
“When you encircle your mind with the completion of small acts, you can accomplish nothing more.” Kurt smiled nervously and added, “I need one final mission to rediscover my purpose.” He said this in an apologetic manner but the words seemed quite dramatic, possibly because he had straightened during his little monologue but as he turned to leave, I noticed his slouch had returned, his stature diminished once more.
While we were walking to another carriage, Balzac said with some admiration, “When that being rediscovers his purpose no one in the universe will be safe. I hope you know what you are doing by reactivating the team, my friend.”
I was about to remind him that it was he who had suggested this when the Stenographer bawled out, “Fingers!”
The carriage before us seemed empty, then I saw a boot and a man literally jumped through the back door as if he was caught in the momentum of a sprint. He stopped just before he crashed through the opposite wall and levered his head through the small window. “Quite a view here,” he said in an almost disinterested manner. “It must be gentling to stand here at the end of a hard day. Particularly during nights as stormy as this. The view is quite spectral. Like peering into another world. I’m sure there are bats roosting in all the abandoned tunnels. Now, why have you summoned me?”
“The team is being reactivated,” Balzac told him.
He turned quickly, his coat whirling around his legs. “I operate alone and I need no one.” His stance suggested a midway pause in some untangling flourish and I felt that in his pose, there were both recklessness and evasion. “My job here is done.”
I thought of something. I had assumed that Balzac was the film’s villain but it was most likely this Fingers character. And Kurt was undoubtedly the hero. “What is your expertise?” I asked Fingers.
“The black arts,” he replied sternly. “I can locate the connections between everything. I am an untangler unparalleled. A cosmic detective. A rippler, a rappler, a ruckus-maker. I can disappear at will.” He ran through the door. A few seconds later, his head pushed through the doorway and he added, “And reappear, too. I can also decode echoes.”
After he had left, I asked, “So this is the team? What about the technical people?”
“That’s a very pertinent question you have asked. It shows you have been keeping your ear to the ground so I will reward your inquisitiveness by stating that we have half a dozen applicants waiting in the sidelines. Some you have met and others have held back because of their shyness. They are all worthwhile if this is what you are thinking.” He scooped up the little man. “Follow me, please.” I followed the pair three carriages down. Balzac said, “I present to you, Mr. Christof Crimpola. Please rise.”
“There is no need for this formality,” I said.
But the man was already up, one eye blinking uncontrollably, the other as stark and unmoving as a monk’s. He set his stable eye on me and said, in a jarring monotone, “Nothing is hidden from an arithmetician. Do you know why? It’s because we can calculate the distance between reality and trickery. Danger! Danger! It does not compute.” He folded his arms before him and added, “I am a human cryptographer, constantly decoding the intervals between infinity and erasure.” Balzac, who seemed to be enjoying hims
elf, applauded once more and Crimpola continued, “I am the disentangler of perplexities. The issue is the path I should take. Should I assemble the future through algorithmic computations and Kalman derivatives or should I tack all the carefully sloughed bits of the past on a display panel. In the end, it’s all the same. When we awaken, nothing will have changed. We will be just as before.”
“I take it you are the accountant?”
“I am an arithmetician,” the man said firmly, his eye blinking furiously. “There are worlds beyond worlds and only I can know of those we have left and those we are hurtling toward.”
Balzac told the man, “I must apologize for our friend’s bold statement.” To me, he said, “The accountant is one carriage down. Or maybe he’s an auditor.”
Once more, I followed the pair. When we entered, a little man got up with a slouch so severe I assumed he had been partially paralyzed by spondylitis. He stared at the floor as if hypnotized by the steel studs. This gave him the air of an elderly man deep in concentration; and when he did speak, his voice had the gravelly, rustic quality of an asthmatic poet. “When one lays out a clutch of bills and receipts on a table, one encounters a life exhibited. Most people would see arbitrary purchases on the crumbled paper but when I look carefully, a sweet-sweet tapestry begins to emerge.” He spread his gnarled fingers like an absent-minded conjurer and I noticed that his heavily veined hand was a pale ghostly blue. “One will never find more soulful music than the rustle of paper unfolding. I am the Auditor and I can see sweet-sweet connections.”
The man resumed his examination of the bills. I asked Balzac, “Is there anyone else? A cook or a chef or caterer? What do we do about meals?”
“The canteen is stocked with tins of sardines and beans and we hunt rabbits in the tunnels. But I assume you are referring to Tiffin.”
I followed the pair. “Tiffin!” I jumped as the Stenographer had shouted right into my ear. At the far end of the carriage, a man got up and a woman with him. He was walking rather quickly as if he was trying to evade the woman who, as they drew closer, I saw was quite elderly. The woman had an apelike look of bewildered despair and the man was very skinny, his clothes hanging around his body loosely. “State your role,” the Stenographer barked, startling the woman.
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