Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  “It was your jail,” the Marshal responded. “And I’m thinking that maybe I’m still in it. You made a very odd remark at teatime. Several odd remarks.”

  “Nonsense.” Wiggler smiled as the Harijans entered carrying silver platters of quail, pheasant, turkey, venison, buffalo, trout, and rabbit, along with Indian corn, runner beans, black-eyed peas, golden potatoes, butternut squash—and piles of wild nuts and berries (followed later by six different kinds of fruit pie, mountain goat cheese, and homemade vanilla bean ice cream).

  For a while the only sounds in the room were chewing and swallowing, as no one knew what to say. Blind Lemon hoed into the repast with gusto—which drew Maggie’s attention.

  “Hee eats, too?”

  Blind Lemon promptly farted. “Do los more ’an ’at.”

  “Settle, Lemon,” said Wiggler. “I apologize for Ms. Kane. She’s young and ignorant—but she has a good heart.”

  “Iggno-rant?” Maggie cried, crushing a bite of quail.

  “Careful, my dear. You don’t want to choke on a bone. In answer to your question, Blind Lemon is in your terms fully human. His body is organic, just as yours is—although of superior quality and durability. It’s in the neurological and psychagogic realms that the really significant differences arise.”

  Maggie was about to make another insulting remark and perhaps even heave a biscuit—when the Marshal sat up in his chair.

  “What do you mean, his name’s not Wiggler? Who is he, then?”

  “That was a delayed reaction,” Wiggler commented.

  “He’s really Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd, the neglected nineteenth-century American genius,” Clearfather answered.

  “Who?” gasped the Marshal. “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “That’s because he’s neglected.”

  “I have worn many faces and names,” their host nodded.

  “Wait a minute!” snapped the Marshal. “Nineteenth century? That makes him—”

  “Well preserved?” Wiggler smiled, inspecting a platter of prairie pigeons stuffed with wild rice.

  “I think,” said Clearfather, “that it’s time you tell me—us—the whole story.”

  “The whole story? I’m flattered you think I know,” said Wiggler, serving himself some venison. “Well, as there’s no lemon curd for you to fall into, perhaps it will be all right.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Accidents will happen in the most chemically balanced families. But enough. I am Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd—or was. But everyone has been someone else. If we’re lucky, we get to be many people. In my case, I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of what I was—and what we are—when I was taken up in a tornado as a boy.”

  “Yoo werr?” Maggie gawked.

  “So it appeared. But it was the Vortex—a dimensional passageway that opened for me a new vision.”

  “Sheet, mister. Yoo really are on drugs.”

  “I was seeking communion with my twin sister, who died at birth. She’s my ghost, Marshal. But I discovered something more. The presence of other life-forms.”

  “Aliens?” wheezed the Marshal, spilling butternut squash in his lap. “You found aliens inside a tornado?”

  “As I said, it wasn’t a tornado. It was a tunnel. That led to a field. A psychic energy field that surrounds and informs us—which makes us possible.”

  “Like a cornfield?” Maggie asked.

  “No,” Wiggler sighed. “I mean a field in the sense of physics. A nonmaterial region of self-organizing influence.”

  “Oh.”

  “This field is an ecosystem that both supports and is sustained by myriad beings, who have their own networks and interrelationships.”

  “You’re talking creatures?” the Marshal queried.

  “They are not creatures in a biological, organic sense. They have no physical form and are both discontinuous and ubiquitous. Yet they have immense physical effect in the dimension of our being.”

  “Like ghosts? Ghosts are real?”

  “That ghosts, souls, spirits are the primary reality—is a very old belief. What I experienced is the literal truth of this intuition,” said their host. “There’s no need to look to other planets. These beings are right here—and have been here—inside us all the time. They are us.”

  “Wait a minute—” said Clearfather and the Marshal in unison.

  “You are not who you think you are,” Wiggler intoned, spearing a runner bean. “Inside your cells right now are microscopic creatures called mitochondria, tenanting your body. They have their own DNA and RNA. They are not ‘you’—and yet without them you couldn’t function. You are their environment, their world. We’ve known this is true on the biophysical level for a very long time. But the same is also true in the realms of the mind and the spirit.”

  “Are you saying ideas are alive?” the Marshal asked.

  “Sort of . . . yes,” Wiggler replied. “Our minds are inhabited and defined by beings, just as we inhabit and give expression to larger and more complex psychic Entities.”

  “Excuse me,” Clearfather interrupted. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “It has everything to do with all of us,” Wiggler replied. “I can’t even begin to explain the War without speaking about the Entities.”

  “What war?” the Marshal asked. “The Holy War?”

  “No, Marshal. A much greater conflict. A secret war. The struggle for the destiny of America, Western civilization, and indeed the human species.”

  “Oh.”

  “If I may continue,” Wiggler said, ravaging a turkey leg. “We are composed via hierarchical levels of organization. From the quantum level to the molecular, cellular, et cetera. Each level depends on the levels below it but is free from direct awareness. You’re listening to me now because you aren’t consciously digesting your food or making your heart pump—or, for that matter, firing your nervous system. You are the continuous result of these ‘systems’ functioning harmoniously and yet independently of what you call ‘you.’ But just as we are insulated from these lower levels—we are also sealed off from those above. What happened to me is that I got a peek both up and down the stairs.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Entities existing in vortices that penetrate and permeate the world. They found special expression in certain creatures—of which humankind was the most hospitable.”

  “So . . . they’re like diseases . . . viruses?”

  “Some are,” Wiggler confirmed. “But those are minor forms. Potent and persistent—but minor. I’m speaking of more complex Entities that have developed symbiotic relationships with us. Language, symbolism, reasoning . . . these have colonized the brain of the human more completely than any other species—and have come to distinguish our species. From these relationships still larger and more complex creatures have arisen . . . mind, individuality, societies, culture, civilization.”

  “Why did you call me Elroy?” Clearfather blurted.

  “I’ll get to that,” Wiggler insisted. “Patience.”

  Maggie flicked a black-eyed pea at Blind Lemon, who’d dozed off in his chair.

  “In the beginning was the Word,” said the Marshal, serving himself some buffalo.

  “Yes!” said Wiggler. “The runes that Odin hanged himself to learn . . . the word made flesh. Magic, religion, science, poetry, music—all these supposedly human activities are collaborative mutations arising out of the symbiosis of the Entities and us!”

  “So who are we at war with? These Entities?” the Marshal asked.

  Blind Lemon came awake in his chair, produced a small gold pocketwatch from his coat, and held it up to his ear. “You’ll be excusin’ me. Iss time.”

  “That’s fine, Lemon,” Wiggler said, relaxing again. “Did you enjoy the meal?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the old black man smiled, rising with Ray Charles dignity. “Be comin’ back for pie later.”

  “Of course.” Wiggler smiled and spoke in the mantis language to the Harijan
s, who entered to lead the bluesman away.

  “Howa cum yoo so polite with him?” Maggie snorted.

  “Because Blind Lemon is a Lord of Life. If I took too much credit earlier, I apologize. As with your friend here,” he said, indicating Clearfather. “I merely opened the window. They are the wind.”

  “I want to know who I really am—and why I’m here,” Clearfather said.

  “And I want to know who we’re at war with,” said the Marshal.

  “An’ I wanna knoa where tha bathrooom is,” Maggie burped.

  “Well,” said Wiggler, rising. “Let us pause in our gustation . . . and ruminate over dark and difficult questions. Come. We’ll adjourn to the Thinking Parlor, where I will tell you the tale of the Psyche War . . . and of your friend here. The Last Hope.”

  And we, when all is said and done

  Depend on creatures we have made.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE,

  Faust, Part Two

  CHAPTER 1

  Apparatus

  The Thinking Parlor was bare except for the most comortable chairs the visitors had ever experienced. Over the course of the conversation that followed, the walls came alive with various images. Heads and faces eased through the partitions as if through water—sometimes in sync with something Wiggler said—other times as if part of a dream the room was having.

  “All right,” said the Marshal when they were seated in the chairs, which also poured drinks. “A quick roundup. First, you’re more than two hundred years old.”

  “True,” said Wiggler.

  “Second, you were taken up in a tornado when you were a child. But it wasn’t a tornado—it was a doorway to another dimension—where you discovered that ideas aren’t something human beings have, they’re part of what we are.”

  “Well said.”

  “Language and mathematics and such aren’t things we invented—in a sense they invented us, as in made us different from the other animals.”

  “Exactement!”

  “But we . . . in turn make up other . . . organisms . . . like societies . . . corporations . . . ?”

  “We give them definition—but they are not our creations,” Wiggler confirmed. “These Entities in turn fit into higher levels of organization and being, which are beyond our comprehension.”

  “Okay,” said the Marshal. “Now, would I be right in thinking that this ‘war’ you were speaking of has to do with these other levels of being?”

  “Yes. That is the true nature of the conflict, although many human elements have been involved for a very long time.”

  “And this war . . . also has something to do with Clearfather—or Elroy, as you called him. Is he your real son?”

  “I have never had a conversation in which the word real was used that I didn’t find frustrating—so let’s put the second question aside,” Wiggler replied. “As to the War . . . I saw great wonders in the Vortex but out on the periphery—on the very edge of my ability to perceive—I glimpsed a shadow.”

  “A monstur?” Maggie asked, sitting up straight.

  “In the sense of an omen—a warning—yes.”

  “Something Evil?” the Marshal asked.

  “It would not seem Evil to itself—it is beyond such categories—but to me—to us—I feel it so. My name for it is APPARATUS, although it has no name. It’s psychopathological, arising out of darknesses and divisions in the levels beneath it. Its goal is to transcend itself—as in all the supporting levels of being that compose it. It has been evolving and gaining strength for untold time. When it reaches ascendancy, the point I call Dominion, a crisis will occur in our dimension of unbearable magnitude. A black hole will open in the spiritworld. All the Entities will be consumed.”

  “Like the end of the wurld?”

  “I’m not talking about bodies piled in the streets or the death of the last little mammal in the last tree in the last rain forest, although both these things could happen. How can I explain it?”

  Wiggler squirmed in his chair, which squirmed to accommodate him.

  “What does APPARATUS look like?” Clearfather asked.

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” groaned their host. “It can’t be seen! It’s multidimensional and simultaneous. We exist within it!”

  “Okay,” said the Marshal, now accepting a drink from his chair. “If it were a body—what would we be inside it? Nerve endings? Enzymes?”

  “It’s not like any body,” Wiggler replied. “It’s like an enormous insect group mind.”

  “Ooooh!” Maggie shuddered.

  “But that, too, is wrong—for the hive needs its drones, its queen and warriors. This is like the moment when a crowd becomes a mob—intent on destroying itself. APPARATUS seeks transcendence through dissolution. It is Psychecide.”

  “Jesus.” The Marshal sighed. “I thought the biggest things we had to worry about were Al-Waqi‘a and the Vitessa Cultporation.”

  Wiggler seemed to gray out in his chair.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said the Marshal. “Didn’t Ronwell Seward have a hand in launching Vitessa? If you’re Stinky Wiggler . . .”

  Wiggler came alert and shimmied in his chair so that the chair had to change shape to compensate. “Are you ready for the really bad news?”

  “Sheet,” Maggie moaned. “Whot cudd bee wurse than some giant insect thing wantin’ to kill itself—takin’ over everthin’?”

  “I am the motive force behind Vitessa,” Wiggler answered. “Vitessa was my great strategy to combat APPARATUS. Vitessa acted in secret with Al-Waqi‘a to conduct the so-called Holy War against the United States and its allies—knowing it would ultimately strengthen Vitessa’s position. Once Vitessa’s position was consolidated, Al-Waqi‘a was seen to be defeated.”

  “But Vitessa’s been trying to kill me!” Clearfather cried. “They killed Kokomo!”

  Wiggler sat motionless. The room went deathly still, and the Marshal began shaking.

  “Y-you can’t be—serious. You meglo-m-maniac! My daughter—my beautiful daughter—died in that war! She sacrificed her life!”

  “Many people died in that war,” Wiggler said.

  Clearfather saw the Marshal twitching—and he thought of Kokomo’s cool green eyes that had soothed him when he was full of pain. The letters in his back burned. Wiggler sat calm and vulnerable. The Marshal simmered, straining to keep from boiling over.

  “So—it was a conspiracy? A huge conspiracy?”

  “I thought of it as an Inspiracy,” Wiggler answered. “I weighed the potential damage against the potential gain and made a strategic decision.”

  “On behalf of the goddamn nation—and the world!” the Marshal rasped. “Who gave you the right?”

  “I saw it then and see it now as a responsibility, my Great Work. And the Entities endowed me. They chose me. Just as they chose Spiro of Lemnos.”

  “Who?”

  “My mentor and nemesis. The first Cycloner, the original Enigmatist. If I’ve sought secret answers and forbidden knowledge it has been in the service of my struggle. A struggle I was embroiled in as a child. You speak of war—I’ve been at war my whole life. Civilization is itself a war—of values—of darkness and illumination. I’ve lost companions and family. I’ve endured loneliness you would find unfathomable. Where others have sought the lights of history, I’ve clung to the shadows. I’ve always experimented on myself first. You think me a moral monster? I came back down out of the Whirlwind, Marshal. I could’ve ascended, uploaded, escaped. I came back down to keep the ladder from being pulled up—to keep the Vortex open.”

  In the dining room Walt Whitman rolled over in his sleep. The Marshal looked torn between emotions too complex to name. At last he spoke.

  “First thing tomorrow morning I’m leaving. I can’t stay a minute longer than I have to knowing what I do now. You two are welcome to join me,” he said, nodding to his companions. “But we’re not here because of me. We came to help our friend find answers. You called him the last hope
. Well, if you’re so high and mighty, conducting this secret war of yours—let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.”

  Wiggler exhaled deeply and looked at Clearfather. “My intention was to discuss these matters in private.”

  “They’re like family,” Clearfather said. “They are family. Tell us all.”

  Wiggler winced but sat up. “Vitessa is no longer in my control. It hasn’t been for a while now. Like my old instructor and enemy, Spiro, I found myself in combat with myself—so to speak. Contending against APPARATUS is like playing chess with an opponent who can not only take your pieces but turn them against you. In the last hundred and fifty years I have had to reinvent and sustain myself biotechnically in order to keep up the struggle. I’ve had to make copies of myself to keep from being trapped. At every turn my creations and strategies have turned against me or developed their own creations and campaigns. However, when in doubt, always savor your uncertainty, for in uncertainty lies Hope, and it is in this very special kind of darkness we find ourselves now. I still have one trick up my sleeve. I have changed the game from chess to poker. Not straight poker. Spiral. And I have one card left to play. You. The Ace of Strangers.”

  “I soo doan get yoo!” Maggie cried.

  “In order to understand this at all,” Wiggler answered, “I must take you back to Macropotamia, the world’s first modern amusement park, which I designed in Pittsburgh in the 1870s.

  “I thought I was being very ambitious at the time and I thought I had achieved a very great victory over what I then perceived to be the true forces of corruption and confusion in the modern world. I wanted to create a realm not simply of wonder and surprise—but of true enlightenment—a place not just of recreation but of re-creation—my vision of what America could be if science and art, religion and passion joined together. Well, I’d underestimated the forces aligned against me and how powerful APPARATUS already was. My dream failed. In the end I had to make a strategic retreat. But I came to see that the only solution was to become more ambitious.

  “I’d made a habit of circulating throughout the park in disguise. It was a good way to find out what visitors thought and how well employees were performing. One day I overheard a little girl ask her father why Pittsburgh wasn’t as clean an amusement park. I suddenly realized that my creation was a realm owned and controlled by a board of wealthy magnates—but so was Pittsburgh—and by the same magnates. The boundary was psychological, a matter of perception. Since every matter of perception is in part a matter of illusion, I saw that it was possible to redraw the boundaries to create a new kind of theme park where I would not be beholden to a band of robber barons—where everyone would be participants, sharing in the creation and maintenance of the new reality. I saw that I needed to work not on the scale of a city—but on the scale of America.”