The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  In the hut, by candlelight, Cley inspected the secret gift. It was a crystal, much like the one the body scribe had put in his mouth before stepping into the fire. The stone was a perfectly clear, smooth oval—most pleasing to hold. The hunter took off his clothes and lay on the reed mat, staring into the stone. He wondered what prompted the gift and why the clandestine nature in which it had been given. These thoughts would have to wait, though, because Wood was beside him with the book.

  They could not read fast enough to keep up with the theft of pages. Each night they landed in the middle of a completely new subject. The dog was genuinely put out by the lack of linearity in the reading, but Cley found a certain amusement in trying to guess what hobbyhorse the metaphysical author would be riding. One night it was “the power of faith,” another, “the connection of the mind and the universe through a certain pealike structure in the brain,” and on this particular occasion, “the souls of inanimate objects.” He thought the subject mildly interesting, but could go no further than two pages owing to the effects of the drink served at the celebration.

  Wood, for all of his insistence on hearing the words, was asleep before Cley closed the singed cover. The village outside was still, and the cry of a lone night bird sounded from a distant grove. Before extinguishing the candle, he rested back on the mat and held the crystal up to look at again. In his memory, he saw the old man step into the fire and become a cloud of smoke. “How?” he whispered. What was yet more difficult for him to figure out was how the pink illusion of Sirimon was made to roar.

  If he had learned anything valuable from the Silent Ones it was that he needed to change the way he thought about the Beyond. This, he saw, was a key to his survival. Somehow he had to find harmony with the wild territory. All of his long-held beliefs, garnered from a lifetime in the realm, were causing him to struggle against the wilderness. He was an infection, an invading parasite the land had identified as alien. The secret was to become like the snake that lived in the belly of the creature he had shot on the trip to the waterfall. In order to accomplish that, he decided he would have to prolong his stay in the village.

  As he rolled over to blow out the candle, he was interrupted by the sound of movement just outside his hut. He turned back and saw the animal-skin flap being lifted. Slipping through the entrance was the queen. She came toward him, holding a drinking gourd, with a most seductive look on her face. Cley reached over quickly and covered himself with the animal skin that was his blanket. Although he knew speech was useless, he asked, “Can I help you?”

  She crouched next to him and handed him the gourd. He looked at her and she at him, and he knew he would have to drink. Thinking it was the same mixture that had been served at the celebration, Cley leaned back and dashed off three-quarters of the brew. Only when he had finished the rest of it did he realize that this drink was something completely different. It was much stronger, more bitter, and he choked on the aftertaste. He handed the gourd back to her, and she nonchalantly knocked it out of his hand. She grabbed the edge of the animal-skin blanket and pulled it away from him.

  “Excuse me,” said Cley.

  He looked at her and she was beautiful, but the look on her face was one of such fierce determination that she also frightened him. For the first time, he noticed that her eyes were a dazzling shade of green, and that etched everywhere upon her shoulders, along her neck, across her forehead were tiny blue crickets. She leaned forward and licked his throat. He reached forward to touch her breasts.

  “Trouble,” he thought, but the intimacy was something he had longed for.

  She moved one leg over him, straddling his middle, and then reached down and maneuvered his member inside herself. Cley felt the drug she had given him begin to work. It moved as swiftly as fire from his toes to his chest, a wave of paralysis sweeping up the length of his body. He could no longer move his feet, his legs, his arms, his hands.

  The condition galloped onto his neck, and, as he tried to cry out, his tongue became paralyzed and all that came forth was a grunt. Although he was completely numb, he could see perfectly in the flickering candlelight. The queen sat up straight above him and looked down past her breasts. Now he heard others entering his hut. The chief was there, looking over his wife’s left shoulder, smiling mechanically, while the old man peered from over the right shoulder. Behind them there were other members of the tribe. As Cley began to lose consciousness, the queen swept down and licked his right ear.

  “Pa-ni-ta,” she whispered.

  The last thing the hunter was aware of was the raucous laughter of the Silent Ones.

  others

  Believe me, I have kept my vigil every evening here at the desk, juiced to the tips of my horns with beauty, waiting for the wilderness to seep out onto the paper. I could feel the Beyond behind my eyes, like a ball of ice with the potential to melt into a river of words, but the blackness in which I had last left Cley kept it frozen, and I could not generate the creative warmth necessary to get things running, no matter how many cigarettes I smoked or how I grimaced and muttered.

  I poked around in the old, dust-covered files of the Ministry of Justice, reading some of the prosecutions Cley had been involved in when he had been Physiognomist, First Class. A good many of these had fanciful titles—“The Latrobian Werewolf,” “The Grulig Case,” “The Unseeing Eye,” “The Guilt of Flock”—and read much like fictional stories. I had hoped that reading about my subject in a different context might help me find him again in my own thoughts, but the Cley of those older times was a different man entirely.

  My frustration even led me down beneath the remains of the Academy of Physiognomy, through a tight aperture in a passage choked with wreckage. There, in a well-preserved marble room, one massive wall of which was lined with three-foot-by-three-foot metal vault doors, I paid a visit to number 243. Behind each of those doors was the body of a mechanized human being. These individuals were victims of Below’s experiments. He had created a small population of organic automatons that could be brought to life by pressing the backs of their necks. From what Cley had told me, they were wired from within and their neurons had been replaced with those of dogs. Though they looked in every way like normal people, the Master’s abilities were not capable of capturing the inner humanity. On our journey to the Beyond, Cley had confessed to me one night that when he was a student he had fallen in love with the physical beauty of one of these monstrosities.

  Years ago, when I had first returned to the ruins, I remembered his story and came in search of them. I found the very one he had mentioned and brought her to life for an hour. The sight of her elicited in me an overwhelming reaction of pity, for her as well as myself. I can’t say why I recently thought another meeting with number 243 would somehow focus my vision of Cley in the Beyond, but I went and brought her to life. Perhaps it was just the peripheral connection to my subject, perhaps something else entirely. The movements of her beautiful body made me think, for a short time, that I was onto something, but her first horrible grunt in response to a voiced thought of mine was enough for me to lead her back to the rolling slab behind the door and return her to merciful sleep. I fled the basement of the Academy more confused and depressed than when I had entered. I swore to myself never to return to that hell.

  Following the ill-fated meeting with 243, I injected myself with so much beauty one night that I thought I was going to drift out of my own body. No writing came of it, but I was visited by many apparitions of those whom I had known and those I never knew. My father, Drachton Below, made an appearance and admonished me for my desolate existence. He told me he wished I had never discovered the secret trove of the drug he had stashed away in the underground tunnels. “Face it,” he told me, “you are a man. Now start acting like one. Guilt is the food of the weak and the useless.” At the end of his speech, he forgave me for my sins and moved close to put his arms around me. Yes, I wanted to feel that embrace, the comfort of it, even though he had been a murderer and a tyrant,
but, alas, he fizzled into nothing and was gone.

  In that same monumental stupor, I saw the girl, Emilia, who had come to visit me, and it struck me that my problem was not that I could not find Cley in the Beyond, but that I longed to speak with her again. I could not go on with the writing until I settled this dilemma in my own life. Although the beauty had never been able to catch me up in addiction, I was now addicted to the notion of having a friend. Her visit made my loneliness so much more apparent to me, and it became clear that this was the very winter that kept the particulars of Cley’s journey frozen like a ball of ice behind my eyes.

  The discovery stayed with me when I again became sober, but I was, of course, too much a coward to act upon it. What was I to do, fly to Wenau and sneak up to her window at night to speak with her? When I flew her home, I did not enter the village, but left her on its outskirts. I had no idea which of the many houses was hers. Now, with all of the new growth of that village, there are so many buildings. Instead, I spent my nights stealing and smoking fresh cigarettes and staring at the moon.

  Then, two days ago, she returned, this time in the flesh, with others. I was in the ruins of the laboratory, marveling at a green, female human head with long black tresses that I remembered had once floated in a giant jar of clear liquid until the werewolves had ransacked the place and broken all of the glass. The many years the thing had been exposed to the air had mummified it. Though it was shriveled, it still retained all of its features. I had never put it together before that this was either the prototype or the corporeal conclusion of the Fetch, that disembodied head that flew through the Master’s memory palace. How he expected to achieve the same ends with it in reality, I had no idea. For Below, imagination, memory, reality were all one and the same. I wondered, “How might that belief govern one’s life in the world?” and at that moment, I smelled them approaching.

  Perhaps I should have been more cautious, but I knew from my senses that Emilia was among them. If it was to be a trap, I didn’t care. I instantly lit into the air through a hole in the roof and was above the city before they had left the fields of Harakun. From my vantage point among the clouds, I watched them approach in wagons and on horseback. The girl was there, and there were no fewer than twenty others, men and women and children. Some of the men carried rifles, but they walked away from their mounts without fear, and Emilia was leading them. I swept down to my coral seat atop the pile of rubble and anxiously waited.

  They came in a close group, creeping across the plaza below as had Emilia and the boys. I had to admire the girl as she led them, out in front of burly fellows carrying weapons. She spotted me again and pointed for the others to see. They did not run, but many of them looked as though they would have liked to. For a moment, it entered my mind that this was a dangerous situation. I was sure that Emilia could be trusted, but I wasn’t sure that one of the others might not, at the last second, balk at the undeniable “otherness” of my form and drill me through the heart. The girl told me, herself, how much negative propaganda had been leveled against me, how my species was for them a religious symbol of evil portent, a living nightmare.

  I dispersed these cautions with the flapping of my wings and went down to meet them. Of course, when I landed, they backed up a few steps, and one or two of the men brought up their guns as a precaution. I held out one of my hands and said, “Peace be with you,” a line I had stolen from one of the thousands of volumes I had devoured in my seclusion.

  “Misrix,” said Emilia, pointing to me and looking back at the others.

  They nodded and smiled.

  I nodded but did not smile, knowing how ghastly it might look to them to see my fangs. “I am so pleased that you all have come,” I said. When I uttered these words, I intended them as a pleasantry, but in the midst of speaking, I suddenly understood the depth to which I meant them. There were tears in my eyes. I removed my spectacles and brushed them away. It was this unguarded show of emotion that I believe convinced them more than any stolen lines of literature that I was to be trusted. Then, the rifles were lowered and one by one, they stepped forward and offered me their hands. This time, I shook each one.

  One middle-aged woman wearing a flowered scarf over her hair introduced herself to me as Emilia’s mother. She took my huge hand in both of hers and thanked me for saving her daughter from the river. I told her it was my pleasure to count Emilia as my friend, and she gave way to tears that, I could tell, had to do with many other things besides my rescue of her daughter.

  The official leader of the group was a tall, bright-looking young man named Feskin. He wore a pair of spectacles like my own, and I liked him immediately. I learned that he was a schoolteacher back in Wenau and had carefully studied the manuscripts that Cley had left behind, and gathered, over the years, a good deal of history concerning the ruins and the culture of the Well-Built City. He had been the first one to extend the theory that I might be more civilized than given credit for. Through the logic of his argument and because of Emilia swearing I had saved her from the river, the others were not unwilling to believe that the lurid stories told about me had been false.

  Mr. Feskin inquired as to how I spent my days, and I told him of the books I had read. He seemed mightily impressed and, right there, we had a discussion about Brisden’s Geography of the Soul, a classic from the early days of the realm that had had a most limited print run of three copies. While the others listened, we waxed somewhat erudite, and although it was boorish, I wanted desperately for them to know that I was learned.

  I gave them all a tour of the ruins, with Emilia at my side. She was very proud of herself for being able to point out details of the remaining architecture I had discussed with her on her last visit. When I stopped among the ruins of the Ministry of Science for them to see the preserved remains of the monkey who had been taught to write the line “I am not a monkey,” a woman came up to me and asked what my diet consisted of. When I told her plant meat and fruit, she then seemed confident enough to ask if she could touch my wings. I said it would be fine. She ran her hand over the membrane. Upon seeing this, the others stepped up and touched me in different places. The children wanted to feel the sharpness of the barb at the end of my tail, and I warned them not to prick their fingers since it contained a poison. One young woman reached up on her toes and, closing her hand around my left horn, stroked it up and down repeatedly. For a moment I considered returning her touch, but then thought better of it.

  In the Museum of the Ruins, they each had many questions to ask about the history of the City. They marveled at the core of the fruit of Paradise, and I allowed each to hold it and smell its aroma. I attested to its ability to produce miracles and told them that there was a specimen of that tree growing within the confines of the ruins.

  “You are a miracle,” said Feskin, placing one of his long, thin hands on my shoulder. “More human than many of those who would damn you back in Wenau.”

  He would have continued with my praises, but an older woman had just found among the shelves the head of a doll she remembered owning when she was a girl, living in the Well-Built City. I told her to take it with her, but she shook her head.

  “It belongs here,” she said.

  In the way she said it, I wondered how many of them still thought the same of me.

  We walked in a group out to the broken wall through which they could return to their wagons and horses. One by one, they thanked me for the tour and asked if there was anything they could bring me or that I might need. I told them I couldn’t think of anything. As the others departed the ruins, Feskin and Emilia stayed behind.

  “I want you to come and visit us at Wenau,” he said to me.

  “That would be wonderful, but I doubt the entire village would want that,” I said.

  “Give me some time to speak to them. A week is all I need. Come to the schoolhouse in a week. It is the building …”

  “I know the building,” I told him. “Where the old market used to be, by the bell.
”

  He nodded. “Come in the evening, an hour after sunset. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  I agreed to it.

  “One other thing, Misrix,” he said. “A rather delicate matter, so don’t take offense. This may sound presumptuous, but you must do something to clothe yourself if you want to move freely among the people of Wenau.”

  He was looking down at my loins as he finished speaking, and I could not help but laugh.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  Emilia, to her credit, looked at Feskin as if she had no idea as to what he was alluding. When the schoolteacher left, she remained with me for a few minutes.

  “I brought you something,” she said, and reached into her pocket. Out came a long, thin object wrapped in brown paper.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Her mother called to her to come and she said good-bye to me and ran through the opening in the wall. “It’s candy,” she called back.

  For three days, I did nothing but bask in the glow of meeting the people of Wenau. At night I would fly over the village and look down at the lights burning in the dark and wonder which of my new acquaintances was sitting by each flame, reading or sewing or rocking a child to sleep. I did not eat the stick of candy that Emilia had given me. I did not even dare to unwrap it, but I would run its length under my nose. It smelled sweetly of orange, and its aroma was more lovely to me than that of the fruit of Paradise. This afternoon I was doing just this, when I saw in my mind’s eye an image of Cley, kneeling next to a pool of clear water. Then I knew it was time again to write.