If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  An old black man washed the floor. Chris tried to move an arm. The bailiff unlocked the cuff from the bar.

  Chris’s eyes focused for a moment. “That jacket . . .”

  He stopped trying to speak. His voice was slurred and hoarse.

  The bailiff nodded and said, “Don’t worry. On your feet.” He held the open cuff and pulled the kid along to the restroom. Chris held up his pants with his free hand.

  Ordinary-enough looking, Chris sensed the bailiff thinking, but headed down a very wrong road.

  Down a very wrong glass bridge, Chris added.

  The Dewares, Bill and Alice, both wore car coats and expressions of anxious concern. Bill was writing a check at the front desk.

  When the room steadied again, Chris found the cuffs off. He had his shoes and belt in one hand, and his valuables in a manila envelope in the other.

  Alice turned. “Honey! You OK? We were so worried.” She embraced him. “Oh, you’re cold! Where’s your jacket?”

  “Right here.” The bailiff came out of the office, reading the label. “’Made in Maxee, the Well Upholstered City.’ Never seen anything like this.”

  “Peru,” Bill said. “Picked it up on a business trip.”

  He tried to get Chris to put the jacket on. Chris shrugged him off. He was seeing clearly, all of the sudden.

  “We need to have a talk, son,” said Bill.

  The bailiff, with a chuckle born of having heard many such talks, saw them out the door.

  The Deware’s Country Squire station wagon sat parked beside the ragtop.

  Chris, the jacket held in one hand, put his face back to absorb the warm sun, then looked around. No one else stood in the lot.

  “I saw it,” he said, his voice still unsteady and hoarse. “I saw Maxee, City of Steel Lace. Saw it. And then,” he said, almost laughing, “I played it like a piano.”

  “Oh, shit, Bill,” said Alice. “His eyes.”

  “What the hell happened, sir?” Bill asked the jacket.

  The reply was no more than a distant tinkling.

  “Honey, what’s happened to the jacket?” said Alice.

  “Thing tried to kill me,” said Chris. “It wants to control me, but I don’t trust it. Especially now.”

  “It must have had reasons for whatever it did,” said Alice. “It’s saving the City. So are you. The jacket said so. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

  Chris carried the jacket by the collar, and tugged the car door open. “I need to shave and shower, and get my stuff.”

  “What do you mean?” said Alice.

  “I’m leaving. Taking the jacket back home. For good, this time,” Chris said. “Before it kills me or I rip it apart.”

  “To Maxee!” She wailed. “But we’ve never even seen it!”

  Chris reached into his jeans pocket, drew out three blue capsules, handed one to each of them and kept one. He finally smiled, seeing how the Dewares’ eyes glistened.

  “One bite and you’re on the road to Maxee, City of a Million Busted Metaphors.” He said, “Just ignore the part where the inside of your mouth tries to climb onto the top of your head.”

  15.

  On the approach to Maxee, City of Cosmic Brain Waves, Chris drove slowly, keeping his mind blank.

  Nothing around the car changed. He wanted it that way, this time.

  “You did what Seth Jackson wanted,” he said to the jacket. “Your job’s over. This way’s best.”

  The only sound then from the jacket was the faint humming of an ancient skip-rope song.

  Chris stood by the blue ragtop, at the outskirts of the City Without End and waited.

  They came as metal fish, swimming slowly above the pavement. One was huge and green. The second, red. The third, tiny and silver, hovering behind the other two. The three floated where the Crystal Road met the Boulevard of Ancient Dances, an intersection Chris had created on his last visit.

  In the distance, looming above a Day-Glo minaret, the Clockmaster stood faced in another direction, motionless save for the ant-like priests and soldiers marching up and down his shoulders.

  “I am Tomkin of the Tomkins, former Flux-Agent of Maxee,” said the green fish. “And this is Red Pauline, a local agitator. And now I see,” the fish said, turning so one bulbous eye could gaze backwards, “We also have Simmoo, the Last Teacher. He would insist on coming. ‘An eye on the present is an eye on the future,’ he is always saying. Hello, Simmoo.”

  The fish to the rear folded inwards, and became a slender man with hair white to one side, golden to the other.

  At the transformation, a sigh escaped the green fish. The scales of its sides trembled and then became panes of glass, and then air, leaving Tomkin of the Tomkins standing in the street.

  Laughter escaped the fish that shrank into the bright splash of hair atop the head of Red Pauline.

  “Chris Brown,” said Chris.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Simmoo, staring intently.

  “Chris,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins. “I have much for which to thank you. Having the jacket will complete me. It embodies what Jackson knew, and what he denied the Clockmaster.” Tomkin of the Tomkins smiled and held out his hand. “Please. I do appreciate it. You are so kind in coming.”

  “It is for her,” Chris said. “Not you.”

  “Alas, she can do nothing with that jacket. She is a creature merely of the city, thus of mine, as new Clockmaster.”

  “This intersection needs a traffic signal,” Chris said. Tomkin of the Tompkins stood rooted in place and began to flash green then yellow, then red then yellow.

  Beside the door of the ’54 Dodge, Pauline kissed Chris: fire on ice.

  “Hello,” she said then to the jacket. “I think we need to take up your sleeves a little.”

  The skip-rope song changed to a single oboe note of quiet despair.

  Simmoo laughed and followed them back into Maxee.

  Then Chris stood alone beside his ragtop, blinded by the vision of beauty wrapped in flame from the edges of the sky. One sun rose while another set. Blue Maria bitterness was in his mouth.

  A fast U-turn, and away.

  In moments, the Dodge rolled down an early-morning street full of mid-Twentieth Century ranch houses. Its driver was a young man in a really beat up car with no home to go to.

  He was happy.

  And chilled. Reaching into the duffel bag stuffed with notebooks and clothes, he drew out an old denim jacket.

  Before he reached the highway, he remembered the sight of the Clockmaster rising above the buildings of Maxee, the Terminal City.

  Before that could fade like a dream, Chris stopped and wrote a few lines.

  16.

  In a Western city, some years later, a young editor named Will Clark listened to the clang and honking of metal works and traffic coming in a window. Stupid-ass place for a bookshop and publishing house, Will had thought a hundred times. He planned to think it a hundred times more.

  Will liked it here.

  “That crazy kid publishing those City Bright things out East, you know him? Real name’s Chris something. But calls himself Jacket Jackson, right?” said Will, settling in the chair in front of Marty Stein’s desk.

  “Sure,” said the publisher.

  “Look at this.”

  Stein looked at what seemed to be and then did not seem to be a hand-written manuscript.

  “What the hell is this, and where the hell from?”

  “Supposed to be like a tourist guide to that city, Maxee, the kid writes about. Someone I know introduced me to this couple, the Dewares. Seemed nice and straight, at first.

  “Then they started talking about a leather jacket that was like a god and that now some lady in Maxee has dyed it red to match her hair. Said they were Jacket Jackson’s adoptive parents, which is crazy. But they had this picture, mug shot actually, from some DWI bust. Could be of him when he was real young. The I.D. says ‘Christopher Deware.’

  “Anyway, they’d been grooving
to Maxee for years. Before the kid began publishing or anything. Finally got up courage to go there themselves.”

  “To a make-believe city?”

  “Right. That’s what they said. And then they said this is the tourist guide everybody carries there. I just laughed, then I read it. Wingy as all hell, but really well done. Holds your attention, too.”

  “Same stuff as what that kid’s writing, you say.”

  “Right.”

  “But nothing he’s published?”

  “Nope. Checked.”

  “They want royalties?”

  “Not really. Don’t even claim to have written it. Someone in Maxee did, according to them. They just want the world to know. I can’t say it’s bad work. Might go somewhere.”

  “What are you thinking? Getting in touch with him?”

  “Him? Why?” Will Clark picked at his fingernails for a while. “I see it this way. We do a run. Sell some copies. Then when someone asks, you say, ‘Oh, heck, you know, now that we have this published, people are telling us this stuff has something to do with that kid who’s getting famous out east.’”

  “Got you.”

  In a few months it sold enough to pay for the lease for the shop, a year in advance.

  A New York house, the one that picked it up from the agent who dropped the lawsuit and then looked the other way as Stein finished selling out his run, saw the book through thirty printings.

  Some years on, when neither were kids anymore, Will Clark had a chance to meet Chris ‘Jacket’ Jackson, who was on a reading tour across the West and was in the city for two nights.

  The first night and day’s readings were bookstore events. Jackson was a cult writer, so cultists turned out, hanging on every reference to Maxee, the City Of Hornet-Nest Hearts. The second night Jackson read in a local art bar.

  “I wrote this for a woman who kissed me once, many years ago. Haven’t seen her since,” he said, introducing a recent poem.

  “I came back broken from the guerre

  and all I wanted is a red-headed woman

  said Apollonaire

  while worms danced upon the stair.

  Her tin-tin-tintinnabulation’s

  swirled whichever way they chose to go

  said Edgar Poe.

  Now where the clock-hands point will rise

  into endless skies a night that will not fall

  says no one at all.”

  “When he finished he said, “Maybe she and I will meet again. In Maxee, City of Retirees.” He looked a little surprised the line got a laugh.

  Will Clark stepped up to the bar afterwards and introduced himself.

  “Good to meet you,” Jackson said. “Call me Chris. Only part of my original name that’s still good.”

  Jackson had a beer and a bourbon in front of him and was puffing on a cigar. This guy’s leaned on a lot of rails, Will thought

  Later, while leaning on the third or maybe fourth brass rail of the night, Chris blew a fat smoke ring and said to Will, “You met the Dewares. My ‘foster parents.’ I never knew my real father. All my mother ever told me was he smoked cigars and liked to tinker around. They hitched up in the war.”

  Will was not sure what to say.

  “My guess is that his name was Seth Jackson and that he designed the sentient leather jacket. The one that took me to Maxee. Like in the poems. Maybe we’ll meet up when I go there. I hear it’s real easy, now, to go.”

  Jackson’s eyes looked glassily at Will.

  “I think they’re great poems.” Will regarded his beer uneasily. “As poems, you know.”

  “You think I’m crazy.” Jackson finished off his beer and ordered a bourbon. “You’re entitled.”

  He drank and smoked for a while, then said, “You know, with all the dancing stairs and singing fleas I put into Maxee, not to mention all those goddamned tourists, the thing I remember best is a hairbrush beside the road.”

  Will listened.

  “I got out of this car, an old ragtop that the jacket and I had almost managed to wreck, and there it was in the grass. Why the hell should there be a hairbrush there? In a perfect world, no one would lose a hairbrush. To me it means hope. A space between the cracks.”

  “Sure,” said Will.

  “So now,” said Jackson, “if I see a hairbrush by the road, I say, thank goodness for a little goddamned glitch in the inexorable wheel of fate.”

  Poor guy, Will thought, after he got back home and before he passed out. Haunted by the early works that had made him famous, and not able to separate reality from imagination anymore. The poor fucker called himself Jacket Jackson and believed his own stories. Not that he was alone in that. Someone was even building a monument to him in the desert somewhere.

  Will fell asleep thinking of that, and dreamed about a place that glittered and twirled through the falling leaves of a torn-apart book of poems.

  “. . . because of the poetry, we have the movies, the books, the music that celebrate Maxee, City of A Thousand Cuts. The city we see beneath us as we stroll around the brim of the Clockmaster’s hat is there because of him. All who walk these streets still read his words with their feet, and ears, and eyes.”

  —City Too Bright: Simmoo’s Guide to Maxee,

  City of Satisfied Tourists (Tenth Edition)

  “

  The Mask of the Rex ” was the story I’d written just before 9/11 happened. I don’t recall that I changed anything in the story. It was sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction later that year. It was the cover story in May of 2002—one of the strongest issues of any magazine or anthology I’ve ever been in. Jeff Ford’s magnificent short story “Creation” got nominated for every award and won the World Fantasy Award. “Mask” got a Nebula nomination but didn’t win.

  Write spec fiction and eventually you’ll use everything you know along with everything you’ve imagined or dreamed. By the time I started writing “Mask” I’d already come to the understanding that my Time Travel/Alternate Worlds novel From the Files of the Time Rangers would feature ancient gods, mainly Greco/Roman. The deities’ squabbles carry them, their servants and their pawns all the way into the 21st century.

  For this I re-read the old classics: everything from the Iliad and Odyssey to Livy and Thucydides and the Letters of the Younger Pliny. In English translation even Virgil’s “Aeneid,” which in its original Latin had been high school torture, was bearable, and “Caesar’s Commentaries” read like action adventure.

  My guidebook was Betty Radice’s Who’s Who in the Ancient World. Spritely and entertaining, it mixes biographical information with examples of visual art and modern adaptations. In Radice’s book I found an entry about the temple of Diana at Aricia on the shore of Lake Nemi and its priest, the Rex, an escaped slave. Radice quotes from Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome:”

  “The trees in whose dim shadow

  The ghastly priest doth reign

  The priest who slew the slayer

  And shall himself be slain”

  In Radice and Robert Graves I became reacquainted with the pagan sensitivity to place, the idea that certain locations are sacred. Through the generosity of my sister Lee Bowes, I enjoyed summer vacations on Maine’s Mt Desert Island back in the ’70s and early ’80s.

  Thinking about it in the days after the towers fell, this place of crystal light and air seemed the perfect spot for a pagan shrine and for the home of an American political dynasty favored by the gods.

  THE MASK OF THE REX

  1.

  The last days of summer have always been a sweet season on the Maine coast. There’s still warmth in the sun, the cricket’s song is mellow, and the vacationers are mostly gone. Nowhere is that time more golden than on Mount Airey Island.

  Late one afternoon in September of 1954, Julia Garde Macauley drove north through the white shingled coastal towns. In the wake of a terrible loss, she felt abandoned by the gods and had made this journey to confront them.

  Then, as she cro
ssed Wenlock Sound Bridge, which connects the island with the world, she had a vision. In a fast montage a man, his face familiar yet changed, stood on crutches in a cottage doorway, plunged into an excited crowd of kids, spoke defiantly on the stairs of a plane.

  The images flickered like a TV with a bad picture and Julia thought she saw her husband. When it was over, she realized who it had been. And understood even better the questions she had come to ask.

  The village of Penoquot Landing on Mount Airey was all carefully preserved clapboard and widow’s walks. Now, after the season, few yachts were still in evidence. Fishing boats and lobster trawlers had full use of the wharves.

  Baxter’s Grande Hotel on Front Street was in hibernation until next summer. In Baxter’s parlors and pavilions over the decades, the legends of this resort and Julia’s own family had been woven.

  Driving through the gathering dusk, she could almost hear drawling voices discussing her recent loss in same way they did everything having to do with Mount Airey and the rest of the world.

  “Great public commotion about that fly-boy she married.”

  “The day their wedding was announced marked the end of High Society.”

  “In a single engine plane in bad weather. As if he never got over the war.”

  “Or knew he didn’t belong where he was.”

  Robert Macauley, thirty-four years old, had been the junior senator from New York for a little more than a year and a half.

  Beyond the village, Julia turned onto the road her grandfather and Rockefeller had planned and had built. “Olympia Drive, where spectacular views of the mighty Atlantic and piney mainland compete for our attention with the palaces of the great,” rhapsodized a writer of the prior century. “Like a necklace of diamonds bestowed upon this island.”

  The mansions were largely shut until next year. Some hadn’t been opened at all that summer. The Sears estate had just been sold to the Carmelites as a home for retired nuns.