by Hal Johnson
“You forgot the speech,” she said, stepping forward over the pages.
Myron felt, along with everything else, extremely uncomfortable because she was naked. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, perhaps wishing he had taken the club after all.
“You won’t.”
I have hitherto failed to belabor the unfortunate truth, which the perspicacious reader will already have appertained: that Myron was in fact shorter than Florence. She outweighed him, as well, and had a superior reach. She was unconstricted by a Fauntleroy three-piece suit. There was every reason to assume she was the stronger, too. Myron, in desperation, tried—if it had been a punch, it would have been a pretty sissy punch, but really it was a just a one-handed push. Florence quickly shifted her weight, and Myron went right past her. He thought for a moment he was home free, but then she kicked him in the back of the knee and he went down. She jumped on his back and pinned his shoulders with her hands. He was lying half on, half off the tiger-skin rug.
“Emanuel will be here soon,” she said. “Just relax and wait it out.”
Myron gasped something out—“Tapeworm,” it sounded like. He flailed his arms backwards, trying desperately to claw at Florence. She easily avoided the clumsy attempt, of course, but then Myron gave a particularly mighty heave, straining the arm in the socket, and his hand slipped up through the leather thong Florence had around her neck. Florence jerked backwards, but the thong was caught on his wrist, and she couldn’t pull away.
At first Myron thought Florence has seized his hand in some kind of judo wristlock, and was just torturing him. But in trying to escape the hold he wrapped the thong around his wrist again, and the biting of the thong into his flesh was a distinctive enough sensation that Myron caught on and repeated the motion. He moved his arm in a circle until the thong was wound painfully tight around his forearm. He could hear Florence gagging behind him. Suddenly the weight was off him, and there was a moment of crisis, as a lemur attempted to draw its tiny head through the loop; but Myron jerked his arm forward, bringing the small creature with it, and he was able to use his other hand to tighten the noose. The lemur scratched, but she could not bite him, and her scratches were feeble. Then she tried to turn into a human again, but that was a bad idea—her throat was too large, and the constriction must have been terrible. She managed to get on top of his prone body, and grabbed his face with her hands and went for his eyes, but before she got any further she grew limp and fell forward, onto Myron’s head.
Myron slithered out from underneath her. He carefully unwrapped the thong from his arm and her throat. The knotted handkerchief on the thong, he removed it to confirm that the shape was there. When he left Florence breathing shallowly, in one pocket he had the shape, in the other the key ring. His arm was bleeding in several places, and his hand was slowly fading from purple.
And he was running again, back toward the room. He took a detour through the defunct pinball arcade to avoid passing right by the grand ballroom. He wasn’t taking any risks.
The first key he tried, when he reached the forbidden door, didn’t fit the lock, and the second one was too small and rattled around inside the keyhole. The third one slipped in partway, got stuck, and then with a rip slid home. It fit snug, but before Myron could turn it, a wave of nausea and confusion washed over him. He shook it off and, as he took a deep breath and steeled himself, he heard a voice down the corridor: “Don’t open that door.”
To no one’s surprise it was Mignon Emanuel, striding slowly and purposefully, with Oliver scurrying along ahead of her. Oliver ran right past Myron and kept going, but Mignon Emanuel stopped a few yards away when she saw that Myron had the key poised for turning.
“Please, Myron. The conference is waiting for you. For you!”
Suddenly Myron began to cry. “You lied to me! You’re not even one of us.”
“I am one of you.”
“I can tell, I can tell who is and who isn’t. Don’t lie to me. You’re not.”
“I knew I sensed something, you followed me the other day—Myron, I am one of you, I promise you. This is my trick. I figured out a way to hide the scent, so no one could tell I was around. Benson’s the only one who knew I could do it, Benson and Florence now; but I tried it too often and it got stuck. That’s when I left Marcus—I didn’t want him to know I could do it. I’m trying to get it back where I can turn it on and off. You’ve got to believe me.” Her face was contorted in desperation and agony, and she held her hand out. “I have so many plans for us. Please, Myron, come back to the conference.”
“Okay, prove it, then. Turn into a raccoon.”
“I can’t. I told you, the platypus—”
“I don’t believe you! I don’t even believe platypuses are poisonous!”
Mignon Emanuel said, “Venomou—”
But at that moment there was an explosion, somewhere off in the house. The foundation shook. There were screams in the distance, delegates shouting and stampeding. The abrupt crackling of flames. Mignon Emanuel paused midword, and turned her head toward the noise. And Myron turned the key and pushed the door open.
The swinging of the door triggered the motion detector, and the light went on in the room. Exhaust fans were already running. The floor was ornately tiled, and the tiles spelled out a motto in Latin, which of course Myron could not read, but I have it on no less an authority than Dr. Aluys’s, who survived the incident and whom I later interviewed, that it was a quote from Emperor Vespatian, who said to his subjects on his deathbed (and I translate), “Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?” The walls, somewhat less tastefully, were covered with tinfoil, as was, Myron could only suppose, the back of the door, including the keyhole he had popped through. Tinfoil over the keyhole (his mind was working rapidly) could have been pinpricked by Oliver when he tried to pick the lock, and would explain why, when it was reapplied, Myron could no longer smell the room beyond. But none of this was what was surprising.
All along the walls of the room, like a hunting lodge’s, were the heads of animals, mounted on plaques: a bighorn sheep, a beaver, a wolverine, a caribou, and so on. Smaller plaques held the whole bodies of stuffed rodents and rabbits. In the center of the room was a nearly complete skeleton of a great cat, bound together with silver wire, its right foreleg missing. And then Myron realized that this was not a bighorn sheep or a beaver, this was the bighorn sheep and the beaver; because there, there newly mounted to one side of the door, there was the moose. He had died with no antlers, of course, so the taxidermist had provided him with false antlers, but they were a cruel mockery of the antlers Myron remembered, these were stunted, misshapen devil’s antlers falsely wired to his great head. The bile rising in his stomach, his head still swimming, Myron, who had taken all of this in during a mere moment, turned back in wrath to Mignon Emanuel. He screamed, and she—she was occluded by the shredded, floating remains of a twenty-five-hundred-dollar outfit. And then, standing in her place, roaring and eight feet tall, was a bear.
Myron thought he was going to die. But the bear turned away from him and batted with an enormous paw something fast and on fire. The fiery bolt crashed into a wall, blasting a hole in it. Past the bear, standing amid the smoke and flame, Myron could now see a young Indian man with a bow, an arrow nocked in it. The arrow appeared to be shimmering, or pulsating, strangely.
“Get away—he’s mine!” the young man shouted. He was, of course, Myron perceived, the man he had fought among the Nine Unknown Men in New York.
The bear became Mignon Emanuel again. “You’re not going to hurt him.”
“I only want to hurt him for a few minutes,” said the man, whose name, Myron had finally put together, must be Dantaghata. “Then I’ll kill him.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Mignon Emanuel. “You know you can’t kill us.“
“Are you certain?” Dantaghata said. “I hold the Pashupatastra, unmaker of worlds, the irresistible weapon of Lord Shiva the Destroyer.”
Mignon Em
anuel blanched. Myron could not see her face, so he could not see if she looked afraid, but her voice betrayed her when she asked, “Is that . . . is that arrow there the Pashupatastra?”
“Of course not—the Pashupatastra is reserved for him. But this is the Narayanastra.”
“Oh, is that all?” said Mignon Emanuel with relief, and became a bear, charging down the corridor at the archer.
Myron immediately turned the other way and ran smack into Oliver. He pushed the larger boy out of the way and then pulled him as they ran around a corner.
“That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Oliver said.
Myron said nothing.
“Did you see that?” Oliver asked. “Miss Emanuel was naked.”
“Come along,” Myron said.
They ran a while longer—it was a big house. Oliver said, along the way, that he thought Mignon Emanuel might have followed him to the rendezvous at the locked door. Myron didn’t have the strength to remind him that there had been no rendezvous. The sounds of thunderclaps echoed along the corridors. Finally they reached a back door to the outside, and Myron turned to Oliver and said, “I’m going to go to the West Coast. I’m going to go looking for the Rosicrucians.”
“Wait, you want to leave?”
“I don’t know who else might even know about what’s going on. Look, maybe you should come, too. We can look for your parents, they’re near there, right?”
“You can’t go, you were just starting to be cool!”
“Oliver, you don’t belong here. These people are crazy, and they’re liars, and, Oliver, they kill people. We’ve got to go.”
But stretching up to his full height, Oliver scoffed, “Yeah, well, good luck getting anywhere without your poster tube.”
So Myron handed over the shape and then, when Oliver fell over and curled up fetal around it, picked up the cardboard tube he had dropped. Leaving Oliver, and everything, behind, Myron ran across the lawn, doubling around to pick up his bow from the side of the obstacle course where it had been abandoned on the wet ground. It was already dark, and it was getting darker. Then he was off, into the pitch-black woods.
One quick last glance back to confirm that the house was on fire, and in places beginning to collapse.
VIII. On the C
When you say I am a thief, Pete, you lie. You can kill me, but still I will say you lie.
Jack London, The Cruise of the “Dazzler”
1.
There is a famous paradox, probably already familiar to you from the letters of Paul: Epimenides the Cretan has stated that all Cretans are liars. But if Cretans are liars, who trusts Epimenides the Cretan when he tells us all Cretans are liars? If you are a space robot, your circuits have already been fried by reading this.
Slightly less well-known is the fact that Plato, who proclaimed that all poets are liars, was himself a poet. “I wish I were the night, so I could watch you sleep with its thousand eyes,” he wrote. In Greek it’s a poem. Plato was therefore a liar.
Or was he? I mention Plato in the first place because he also proposed, through the mouth of Socrates, that so-called learning is merely recollecting what we, or our immortal souls, already knew. Usually this, like much Platonism, sounds spurious to me—Plato also said that humans were once four-armed hermaphrodites, and I think I would remember that if it were true—but Myron offers a curious case.
I have written a great many stories in my time, as I have mentioned, and certainly many of them involved a young man learning various things. Myron, at the very least, is or has been an amnesiac. For him, if anyone, learning can be recollection. What did he learn in the Fortress of the Id (as I call it)? Or what did he recall there? As he was leaving, dashing through the woods, did he think he was wiser than he had been two months before? Did he think he was as wise as he had been ten years before?
To be handed, after years or even a lifetime of powerlessness, a chance at power, this must be a heady feeling. But Myron had lost it, and whether he had thrown it away in the pursuit of absolute truth, or whether it had been wrenched from his grasp by a capricious fate—well, it was probably a little of both. The woods were cold and filled with burrs, and Myron was alone. For a good twenty feet the dim light from the blaze lit his way, and then abruptly it was dark. Whatever tears he shed in the blackness may have been for Spenser and may have been for himself.
When he finally stumbled onto a highway, his fancy suit was in rags and he was covered in mud. He kept his head down and stuck his thumb out. He asked the first trucker who picked him up if he was headed for the West Coast, but this was, of course, the wrong road for that. They were going to Chicago, which, Myron said, was good enough. Frankly, it was the only place he knew where someone he knew was.
Over the next two hundred and fifty miles, Myron passed the time inventing stories about how he had gotten separated from his Chicagoan family and cleaning himself with several-dozen premoistened towelettes. “I can give myself a complete bath with those things and still keep one hand on the wheel,” his driver said. “Wanna see?” But Myron faked asleep, and soon he really was.
Once within Chicago city limits, Myron hopped out at a stoplight and ran the wrong way up a one-way street, leaving behind only his hastily shouted thanks. Then he just looked up the Central Anarchist Council in a phone book. He went to the address and claimed he had burned his face off with acid protesting the existence of the bourgeoisie. The guy he was talking to didn’t know what the bourgeoisie was, but he thought burning your face off with acid was pretty hard-core, and he just went ahead and told Myron where to find Gloria. At a bowling alley, passed out in a booth near the back. She was wearing a powder blue tracksuit, with a unicorn on the top. Her shoes were not regulation. Half a cigarette had smoldered out in her hand. As Myron slid in across from her, Gloria’s head snapped up.
“Hello,” he said.
Gloria said nothing.
“I want to go to the West Coast to meet the Rosicrucians,” Myron said. “But I have no idea where they are, and I have no way of getting there. Can you help me?”
“Follow me,” said Gloria, lighting another cigarette.
They went out a back door into an alley. “Tie your shoe,” Gloria said. She held the doomsday device and the compound bow while Myron bent over. When he straightened up again, Gloria was atop a fire escape, her clothes a little disheveled. She was looking at the cardboard tube with doomsday inside it.
“Actually, I don’t want this,” she said, and dropped it down to Myron, who caught it after some bobbling.
“Hey, come back with my bow,” Myron then said.
“No one knows where the Rosicrucians are,” Gloria said. “You should probably just ask the Nine Unknown Men.”
“They want to kill me,” Myron said.
“They do, huh? You’re better at this than I thought.”
“Give me back my bow.”
“I’ faith, Myron, I’m doing this to teach you a valuable lesson about the world. No one else is going to take the time to teach you these things—”
Myron shouted up, interrupting, “Mignon Emanuel gave me lessons all the time.”
“She did? Like what?”
“Like about confirmation bias.”
“What the devil is that?”
“That’s when you notice things that agree with what you already believe more often than things that contradict your beliefs.”
“I’ve never noticed anything of the sort. Anyway, she was just using you, I heard all about the conference. No one else—”
“Spenser taught me all about woodcraft. He taught me how to make a fire with a soda can, and how to build a shelter.”
“The moose taught you how to build a fire?”
“And he taught me all about the lycanthropes, and how there’s one of each species and everything.”
“No, I taught you that. I taught you that in Shoreditch.”
“Well, he taught me more, about the Time of Troubles, and who killed who.�
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“That was all implicit in what I told you,” Gloria shouted down. “You could have pieced it together yourself.”
“And he told me about meeting you in Scotland.”
“I had no way of knowing you’d even be interested in that.”
“And he taught me how things always get worse.”
“I could have told you that! Did you think I couldn’t have told you that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Marry! I’ll show you what I know.” Gloria turned, up on the fire escape, from an old woman into a gorilla. Her clothes stretched out but stayed on the gorilla; they just fit poorly. A cigarette still dangled from her lips. She jumped down to the alleyway and then became a woman again. The tracksuit was bunched up at the knee and off kilter around the shoulders. “No Unknown Men, then,” she said. “Some of us have met the Rosicrucians, although there are only three that I know of still alive. The lion’s one, but he’s right out. There’s the ring-tailed lemur.”
“I strangled her unconscious, and then her house blew up. Also, I don’t think she likes me.”
“Her house blew up? You are better at this than I’d thought. Well, that leaves the coyote.”
“And you’ll tell me where the coyote is?”
“Oh, Myron, that’s not what I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you so much more. You’re going to learn life on the C.”
On the sea was not something Myron had expected to hear in Chicago, and he had a bout of excitement mixed with a minor panic attack that his knowledge of geography was totally kinked. But the C was for con.
“I would really prefer not to steal from anyone,” Myron objected.
“What about when you liberated that suit of clothes in Shoreditch?”
“I was going to freeze to death! I needed that suit of clothes, and it was an emergency!” Looking back, Myron wasn’t sure this was true. He had been awfully cavalier about the theft.