by Felix Gilman
I once wrote a piece for the opera, in fact.
What do you think happened? They banned my opera and burned the sheet music and put me back in the Iron Rose.
I am suddenly very tired. Have I mentioned the drug? It takes its toll. Let us retire. You look quite exhausted, too. Mr. Basso! Show our guest to a room. No, I insist. My Creatures! I sleep alone tonight for the drug leaves me flaccid—but any pretty thing that wishes to curry favor may attend me in the morning. I include you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is-Ar/^w-is-it, in my offer. No? Shame.
Go, sleep. Do not let me catch you talking to Ivy. Remember there are always a thousand watchful eyes in Brace-Bel’s house. I have been too long in prison and I have become a kind of warden myself.
Are you awake?
Yes?
Splendid!
I cannot sleep. Is the bed acceptable?
No, no, don’t worry; you need fear no assault from me. I take no one against their will. An unfree choice is useless for my purposes. Mine is a liberatory philosophy, a liberatory art, a science of escape!
Shush, shush. If you would be more comfortable I will sit on the chair, and leave the bed to you.
It is the small hours of the night. I keep no clocks in the house because my devices interfere with their workings, but you can tell time by that horrid yellow moon. The moon in these last days is like the stub of a cigarette, the skull of a rat, the pus in a blinded eye.
Now my story becomes strange; better told at night. I will tell you how I came to this place and this time.
So, then—in and out of gaol. I grew pale. In Mensonge’s custody I grew fat, like a eunuch, for what other pleasures but gluttony did I have? I scribbled by candlelight and discussed my ideas with rats. Though the Rose was my most frequent residence, I saw a great many other gaols. I recall when Mass How held me in the clay cells beneath their Parliament. They sent pious back-benchers to slobber for precious drops of repentance, which I denied them. I observed that ours was a city of a thousand Gods, and great antiquity: there were places where my practices were sanctified, and those of my interrogators were thought foul and unnatural. I told them of the followers of the Wasting Queen, who dwelled in the east in their narrow towers, and considered increase of persons to be blasphemy, a theft of souls from the storehouses of the Gods, and a practice that crowded the city and invited disease; those excellent people favored only barren pleasures; why should not I? So the Parliament concluded that I was in league with foreign powers; this did not hasten my release, or gentle my confinement. You saw the stripes on my back, did you not? Over the years some were administered with love, but others, so many, were administered in spite, or fear, or the wicked self-denied lusts of torturers and priests, and …
In and out of gaol. Your lover Olympia did much work on my behalf, begrudgingly but …
Do you remember her? You do? You do not? What a cold man you are!
It must have been shortly after your arrival that I was confined again in the Iron Rose. Its vast and dark twisting capillaries were like home to me by then. Arrested for blasphemy under Seal of the Duke of Baltic Street, no thanks to Olympia, no thanks to her—she was, perhaps, too busy with you, and neglecting her duties. Eh? Eh?
They deprived me of human contact.
They had a most ingenious method of driving me mad. They allowed me writing implements, and paper, and so every day—I had no window, but one knew when it was day and when it was night; one sensed it; a fresh sadness sank over the prison every morning, and fresh horror broke every night—every day I wrote. Letters; a novel; a treatise.
Every evening they took my work away. When they returned it in the morning it was subtly changed. My ideas were subtly disordered. Affirmations were made negations; sharp contradictions twisted into spineless agreement; paradoxes unknotted. Characters who had taken part in my fictional debaucheries with openhearted glee now only pretended pleasure; one could tell that underneath they suffered. Can you imagine any torment more terrible?
How was it possible? How did my gaolers find the time? I wrote all day, every day, from the first moment the torches were lit to the moment they were snuffed. How was there time in the day’s remainder for even the most skillful forger to produce such subtle parodies? There was not. I concluded that there must be a doppel-ganger in the cell next to mine, writing as I wrote, hour for hour, a constant evil mirror of my own scribbling hand—a creature that was almost but not quite my double. Perhaps, I thought, they gave him my work every morning, and he underwent the same torments as I; never knowing which were his thoughts and which were mine, which mine and which his. At last they silenced me. Me! At last I was unable to write, not trusting my own thoughts. My thoughts were taken from me. They were all I ever had. It was never truly about the flesh, never truly, no one understood that …
I sat in silence for I know not how long. I became less than a worm, turning under the earth; a fat pale grub.
One day there was a terrible sound of riot and alarm. No, first there was the distant smell of fire and smoke. The clatter of knives. Distant screams. There were often screams in the Rose, but they were the screams of prisoners, they had a tone of resignation to them, they spoke their lines of agony like practiced players; now I heard the screams of gaolers, full of outrage and surprise and offense. There had been an escape, somewhere in the endless corridors above me. The screams of my gaolers were the sweetest sound I had ever heard. In the inviolate privacy of my cell I began to masturbate.
I expected the noise to quieten, to last no longer than my own pleasure in it, to be put down. Instead it grew, and grew. They came closer—those children.
They came down the corridors of my cell like a fresh wild wind. They were laughing and shouting. A flash of bright silk … Then they were gone. They moved faster than any natural human person; I believe they were touched by some God. In those days the city was full of talk of those children, the Thunderers, and Silk their leader, and their gaol-breaking enterprises; but for all my long experience in gaols that was the only time I saw them. For all my long study of the Gods and for all my many rituals I never broke the barrier between man and God, but those ragged children had been touched by some miraculous effortless grace.
They were gone before I could call out. They were not there for me.
My cell door hung open.
I quickly found that all the doors on my floor were open; Silk and his cohorts must have tripped a switch somewhere, or broken a chain. All the prisoners of the Duke of Baltic Street milled around in their nightshirts or nakedness, in the unguarded hallways. My doppelganger was not among them. I attempted to assert order, to offer leadership or at least advice, but some thuggish criminal— some vulgar burglar or murderer—recognized me as the blasphemer Brace-Bel, and it seemed that the first order of business for these newly free men would be to punish the deviant in their midst, and so, cursing mankind, I fled.
I fled down dark corridors, in the wake of the miraculous Silk. Everywhere was in disarray. I passed free men struggling toward the light, carrying the lame and the sick on their backs; and I passed creatures that could think of no better use for their freedom than to rob and plunder each other in the darkness.
I should have fled upward to freedom but my curiosity drove me down, and down, in Silk’s path. Soon I was lost.
How much do you remember of the workings of this city, Arjun?
I see. To have forgotten so much! It must be agony.
Suffice it to say that the Rose is an unusual place—a place of unusual density—of suffering, of history, of hope and fear and power— and in this city, certain things follow from that. Just as the moon may perturb the tides, so the weight of the Rose and places like it perturbs the city’s cartography, distorts its time and its space.
In these last days, when there are no Gods, people have forgotten that the city is a living thing.
Pressing further into the Rose I found myself lost in alien places. There were signs on the walls in alien languag
es, and I am a learned man and yet there were soon languages and letters I did not recognize, some of which frankly made me uneasy. I lost myself among people who spoke strange languages; people who had strange eyes; people who seemed unaware that they were in prison at all, who made pale and ragged societies for themselves in the hallways, with their savage kings marked out by the keys hung around their necks; people who had strange anatomies, as if someone yet more daringly perverse than I ever was had fathered by-blows on cats, or dogs, or birds, or snakes, or animals I could not name, or even flowers; people who were scarcely people. I developed a familiarity with electric light; at first it made me wonder if I had a fever. There were places where the corridors contracted, smaller and smaller, to house prisoners scarcely larger than dolls. There were places where the ceiling was so high it was lost in darkness, and vast imprisoned men shambled in the torchlight—and I thoughtIhad grown fat on prison food and no exercise! This took many days, yes? Many weeks. Some days I drank water from cracks in the ceiling, and fed on moss and mushrooms; some days I starved. I traveled many miles beyond the walls of the Iron Rose as it stood in my city, our city.
I wish I could see your eyes. Do you remember the Rose? Damn this feeble moon! In the old days the moon was bone-white and cast a wild light. Poets worshipped it. The moon in these years is only fit for pity.
Sometimes, during my, my rituals, in the moment of ecstasy, I saw what I saw when I lost myself under the Rose. I saw the world falling away. I saw the real breaking like a mirror. I could never hold on to it; a few brief shimmering gasps and there I was, back in the world again.
Let’s go for a walk in the garden. The traps will not touch us. I am master here. I need to be in the open air.
Only you can understand me. We are lonely ghosts, out of our time. It is a great pleasure to talk. The flesh is a fine thing but words are my greatest pleasure.
Lost under the Rose, I wondered if I had gone mad. I had often been called mad. Once the priests of Tiber tried to exorcise mad spirits from me, a process that involved fire, for Tiber—do you recall it? — was a God of avenging fire. These burns, here and here, remember it for me. The pain did not make me less mad. The electrical therapy was the latest thing, in those days; one of our colleagues on the Atlas, Dr. Hermann, invented it. May he be damned for it. Never mind. I was not mad.
You’re curious about my devices, my traps? That one, in the branch above your head, places a sickness in the lungs. Hold your torch a little closer: you’ll see the coal in its heart. Go on, it will not harm you while I am here.
What? Shay gave it to me.
You start as if you know the name. I am not surprised.
Shay, then. Bear with me a little longer.
I was thoroughly lost, and despairing. I’d seen enough of miracles. I desired nothing more than to return to my little flat in Foyle. To dally with my favorite girls and boys. To dispute philosophical abstractions with my friends of the Atlas, about whom I had grown sentimental. Even to return to my comfortable little cell, and my writing paper, and the company of my doppelganger. Perhaps he, I thought, my doppelganger, had been released in my place— Olympia would surely have procured my release by then, I thought, at Sessions or Assizes or Common Pleas or Oyer and Terminer; the rattling rusty wheels of Law would have turned. And my doppel-ganger would have gone out into the city in my skin, to enjoy the simple pleasures of my life, while I had taken his place among the unreal creatures of the uncanny prison that spawned him.
Yet where was the way back? Where was the way forward? I pressed on, hopelessly lost.
I was fleeing when Shay found me. There was a place where white-coated men and women moved slowly, silently, dutifully through the corridors, making notes, communicating in curt nods that all was to their satisfaction. Slope-browed and red-eyed! So long as you passed among them slowly, head down, in silence, and gave no cause for alarm, they seemed not to notice you as an intruder. If your nerve or your patience broke and you stepped too quickly, they turned on you in sudden savagery; beneath their white coats they carried sharp instruments of surgery. Do not disturb the silence of those doctors!
I was not patient, or quiet. I have always lacked self-government.
They pursued me silently through white-walled halls. I have never been a strong man. I wheezed and sweated. I was close to despair, close to lying down and letting them work their corrections upon my flesh, which I could hardly deny was imperfect—when Shay appeared before me.
He was short, and thin, and strutted. That laughing young man—his hair long, and white, and bound in a vain tail, thick and greasy. Sheep’s wool snagged on a wire fence. His thin smile—his dreadful pride.
He came stalking past me, past where I knelt gasping. At first I took him for one of my pursuers, and I thought they had flanked me, and I hung my head and submitted to the stab of his instruments; but his long coat was black, not white, and bulged with his various devices.
I closed my eyes, and I heard him converse with my pursuers. The sound was like insects’ wings; like mathematics; like the scrape of knives on bone.
I did not hear them go. But one moment the corridor echoed and buzzed with their conversation, and the next all was silent. I lifted my head to see that strange young man close and button his coat; in its lining I saw the sharp glitter of certain instruments.
“A fellow explorer,” he said, and helped me to my feet. He was short, a little plump—older than at first I had thought, but vigorous. The strong sure hands of a burglar or grave robber. “The Doctors of Marfelon are dangerous but they don’t mind doing business. Fresh knives! I once learned some very useful techniques from them. I bought you, too, but don’t feel obligated to me.”
I disliked his sneer; I mistrusted him.
A golden-black monkey ran around his feet. A singed and scarred little thing. Extraordinary claws clattered on the tiled floor. It had uncommonly intelligent red eyes and it seemed to whisper. He picked it up as he had me, as if it were weightless, as if it were a toy; and all together we went down the hall.
See? This, here, in the grass, is another of his toys; a little piece of devilish circuitry. Hah—that’s a word I was not born to know! If you step on it it will burn off your foot. You, too, are a very determined explorer to have come through my garden unharmed.
We walked together, just as you and I are walking.
Shay was a vigorous man; a man of animal spirits. The monkey curled round his shoulder and burdened him not at all. I scurried to keep pace with him.
He led me on a path through doors I’d hardly noticed, each of which opened to his touch, up ladders and down stairs and through tunnels in between walls, and he led me out into the fresh night air.
No delight in this life has ever compared to those first breaths of cold air.
“That,” Shay told me, “is the last free thing I will do for you.”
He pointed out over the city. From where we stood—atop the Rose’s topmost tower—I could see the Mountain, in the far north, squatting over the horizon like a beast over its felled prey. That was where he pointed.
“Come work for me,” he said. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “I like your style, but you’re going nowhere the way you’re going.”
A barbaric and insolent manner of speech!
“You’re nowhere near strong enough,” he said, “for what’s under the Rose. Not alone.”
He gave me to understand that he would show me the secret ways under and behind the city, if I would be his servant, his admiring servant. “It’s a lonely business I’m in,” he said. “There’s a lot of lonely years ahead of me. I like the way you keep house, Brace-Bel. Come work for me.”
He wanted me, in other words, for his majordomo, his butler; his pander; as they say here, his pimp. He maintained a number of properties, here and there, about the city, and they were in disrepair; and perhaps he was lonely. I would serve him, and in return he would show me how to master those properties of the city that had so nearl
y devoured me. He would show me the Mountain. Of course, he said nothing in so many words. He made implications, and smiled his teasing smile. I told him to go to Hell! Brace-Bel is no man’s servant, except in play. I would find my way to the other side by my own methods or not at all. It would be my triumph; I would not haggle for it. I said other proud foolish things.
He simply shrugged. “If you change your mind,” he said, “you know my name.” He lit a cigarette, and he stepped behind a chimney.
I followed, of course. The smoke lingered; he had vanished.
Don’t ask how I got down from the tower. Don’t ask. I had no fear of heights before that night; now I shudder to climb the stairs.
I returned to my home. At the time I lived in Faugere; you could see the lights of the Arcades from my library windows, a constant temptation away from reading and toward drink and laughter, just as I liked it. I kept few servants. Respectable servants would not work for the notorious Brace-Bel. My butler was a man I met in gaol, who once strangled his wife. Enormous hands; like a brace of squid. He welcomed me home; my servants were used to my long absences and sudden returns. I slept in silk sheets. I sent Hands to market to buy coffee and tobacco.
In the morning I went to visit my colleagues of the Atlas. I’d seen wondrous things; I wished to discuss them. I feared, I think, that I might forget what I’d seen if I did not share it. It might vanish like a dream. Holbach, I thought: if a thing’s shared with him it cannot be imaginary; it must be very much a part of the workaday world. He will publish the wonder in the learned journals and pin it like a butterfly to the stuff of the real. Good old dull Holbach. But I found his house deserted.
I made inquiries.
Does none of this refresh your recollection?
Holbach had been arrested, I learned, and held in the Iron Rose. There were rumors that he had escaped and fled north. The rest of our colleagues had been arrested, also, on the orders of the Countess Ilona, or forced into hiding. Liancourt the playwright they had beheaded. That silly musical play had got him into trouble. The Atlas was constantly in trouble, of course, with censors or priests or angry mobs, because this city has always feared free thought; still, this had the air of finality. Maine had returned from exile and was dead, perhaps poisoned. There were riots. There were rumors that the whole ugly business was the scheme of some rival of the Countess—Red Barrow, perhaps, or the Parliament, or Mensonge, or Cimenti. I don’t know. I hoped you might … ? No?