Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  “There is one last thing to do and it will take some time.”

  “But you said it was finished.”

  “Yes…it’s difficult to explain.”

  He looked toward the tall windows, though the drapes were closed. As if he’d heard something outside the gate. “Were you working on other masks?”

  “No. I…was supposed to. But yours is the only one I truly cared about.”

  Was it easier to confess things to the blind? Perhaps. But a voice could be just as revealing as an expression in the eyes. From inside that executioner’s mask, he didn’t seem to move. One milky eye peered toward me, past me. His hands held his cane as if it were a lifeline on a raft and he was the last survivor of a catastrophic sinking.

  “Are you very alone?” he said, though we sat just inches apart.

  A question from one creature to another.

  “I have been.”

  It wasn’t sadness, but a strange melancholy that beset me when I left his home. He walked me to the door, as if I was some kind of gentleman caller.

  “I will see you in the summer,” he said. These easy turns of phrases that had now become ironic and impossible.

  Nearly, anyway. Nearly impossible.

  “You will.”

  There is blood, of course. For something such as this, there can only be blood and the pain of blood. The Savior bled from every pore and birth is never gentle. Neither rebirth. The incantations of the heart can save or skewer. An eye for an eye.

  My eyes for your eyes. The carving blade I set to clay, now to my own skin, my eyes, my face. To carve myself out of myself and to say the words, and taste the blood, that transmogrifies these parts to become yours.

  To make them eternal, the Egyptians mummified their royal dead. This is the least I can do. What grander gesture of love and eternity and sacrifice? What better way to say it? Long ago I’d come to realize the absence of my own life. To move through the world unnoticed was more painful than the most lashing mockery. How to justify my own existence when from day to day there was neither joy nor anything as raw as sorrow? There is only a middle place that stretches on, and I can see no end and no beginning, no features on either side, no landmarks and no population; it is only this and I am in the middle of it, turning to all compass points but each way is equally gray. I wake up to count the hours when I can sleep again, seeking oblivion, but my dreams betray me. In them are phantasms of worry and loss, memory mixed with some future I know has happened already because in my dreams I am a child aware of my grown life and all that does not exist anymore. My town, my parents, their harsh judgment and protective love, and all of my resentments and regrets balled up like fists that I beat against each bizarre nightmare that stalks me into the waking world. I am screaming or I am crying, as if the only emotions that can swim to the surface of my living life are born from the dark places, these rooms in which I speak like speech is a covenant made only with devils. The devils linger in the mornings and at the foot of my bed, and I am finished with it.

  I need to be done. I need to make meaning and before you there was none.

  So now there is the blood and I cry into the bath of it made from the excavation of my own face, each word a scream, each sound a promise, and I touch my wet red hands to the clay mask to make it come alive.

  We are at the summer house. One of the nurses brings him into the old study, I hear her voice. I hear how she doesn’t linger in the room with us and the door shuts. It is late in the afternoon when the sun begins to slant away to shun the moon.

  “David?”

  “I’m here.” My vision is shadow and light, like fish dancing beneath a stream. “I have your mask, but you must sit very still and not say a word.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” There is the sound of leather set on the floor. His executioner’s hood, discarded.

  “Don’t move and don’t say a word. You’ll know when it’s all right.”

  “David?” Concern in his tone, because I repeat myself.

  But I don’t answer. I see just enough of the outline of him. It manifests the way dreams do, where if I stare long enough I can remember when I awaken. I hold his mask in my hands but now edge forward in my seat. I begin to say the words and he doesn’t interrupt me, though the sound of the words must perturb or even frighten him. Words that bleed into themselves and begin to sound like nothing at all except discordant keening. There is a stone in my throat, as smooth as something resting in a riverbed, and my words are the tides that glide over it, giving it shape. Changing its shape.

  This mask made of me now slips over his skin. He gasps. I speak louder. I touch his cheeks and feel them tighten. I run my fingers over the edges of him, feel muscle and bone, cartilage and tears. His tears. I imagine setting my mouth to them for their salt, I can even see it from within my own shadows, like peering through a keyhole. All the pain was given already, it is splattered and stained in my attic back in the city. The scent of it will never disappear. Maybe it’s still on my hands, beneath my fingernails, driven deep into the lines on my palms. Maybe my hands are red when they touch all over his new, perfect face.

  He seizes my wrists. “David.”

  I can’t see him. He says, “David.”

  He doesn’t let go of me. He says, “David.”

  He can see now. He can see me.

  He wrenches himself away and runs from the room.

  I wake up only to stay in bed. Do you know what it’s like to sleep when you can’t close your eyes? When there are no eyes to shut? Sleep and wakefulness become the same thing, it is only a matter of dreams. And even then.

  Of course you came back to me, when the shock wore off. All you kept saying was, “How do I explain? How do I explain?” as if the world had become closed to just that question when in fact it had opened out again. You could see, you were whole, you had your features back, that classical beauty before the ages took you, before any sort of war and walk in the field. You could look up again and see the hawk, the sky was just as blue as you remembered, even bluer, and nothing hurt when you smiled. And you smiled. You smiled like it was the first expression to ever cross your mind, you smiled like a baby does when it wants to understand the world, you smiled like you were in love. Maybe you were in love with yourself and the possibilities and despite what was left of my face you couldn’t stop yourself from smiling.

  “I don’t understand,” but it didn’t matter because you held my hand in your confusion and you said that I was terrible for doing this to myself but I could hear it in your voice how easy it was to lie. Of course there was guilt but there was also gratitude and that was all that mattered. That and the way you held my hand and you held my mind in the palm of your hand, you were all I thought about and all I had been thinking about since last summer.

  Now you read to me, now we took walks in the garden and I held your arm, I tapped a cane, I stared into shadows and the edges of flickering light, like a moving picture that had hit the end of its reel and if I looked very hard, I could rewind to some vision of reality where we are both whole and walking amongst the flowers and we both feel the perfect breeze on our perfect skin and you will let me taste the salt on your cheeks that isn’t from tears. This is my dream now.

  So we spent the summer and of course I knew it had to end, you kept saying you didn’t know how you would ever explain and I said, “Don’t explain.” What I meant was, Don’t say the words. Don’t say you’re thankful, don’t say you’ll never forget, don’t say you’ll write because all I want to hear is Don’t go. But I’m not the one who’s going, after all. I am staying, I will find an attic that doesn’t carry the scent and texture of blood because there is no other place in the world for me, we know this. I hear it in the sound of your voice, I feel it in the grip of your hands and it’s true, my senses have not diminished, especially not the one that saw you that first afternoon in the first summer when you tore the grass from the earth.

  You were tearing my heart out of my chest. You are
tearing my heart out of my chest, and I give it to you like I gave you the other parts of me and refashioned them into something beautiful. What was dead has come alive.

  You are this beautiful and it doesn’t need to be justified. It doesn’t need to be explained.

  Beauty is its own kind of magic, you know.

  THE LIBRARY OF LOST THINGS

  MATTHEW BRIGHT

  The Librarian turned his eyes upon me, reversed the single sheet of paper once, then neatly back again.

  “An excellent candidate,” he said.

  And:

  “Thomas Hardy. An apropos name. We have one of his, you know? No relation, I assume?”

  And:

  “‘Favourite grammatical form: passive voice.’” He looked me up and down, pinprick eyes narrowed, and licked his dry bottom lip. “Marvellous.”

  “Sir?” I said.

  The Librarian’s tongue flickered. “So wonderfully uninterested. Most boys, well they come here with their nasty adverbs and their present tense, or, God forbid, second person.” When he shuddered his spine cracked like an old hardback opened in one swift, cruel motion. “Quite unsuitable. You on the other hand…”

  And, after some deliberation:

  “Very well. The job is yours, young Thomas.”

  “Tom,” I said and swallowed with relief that he hadn’t asked me why I wanted to work for the Library. I’d prepared a response, but I doubted it would impress. The Librarian’s eyes were sharp and astute, shadowed in the hollows beneath a foxed brow. He would have picked apart my half-truths, separating non-fiction from fiction and, suspicious, sniffed around the superlative adjectives.

  “Come along.” He unfolded his eight-foot frame from the armchair. A stick insect stretching. He led me out of his office, down a long hall which echoed our footsteps, and to a set of ornate double doors. “Through here,” he said, “is the main hall of the Library. You must always treat this place with the utmost respect. We serve a greater good. Stay long and you will know this.”

  He guided me through the doors. On the other side, bookshelves reached the horizon.

  The Librarian bent close to my ear. He reeked like damp second-hand bookshops, or comic books left to moulder in the bottom of a wardrobe. “How would you describe it, Tom?”

  I was still being tested. The interview was not truly over. Perhaps it never would be.

  I looked from one behemoth shelf to the next: it was a graveyard of spines, leather, paper, string, the wormed carcasses of all those books, buried next to each other one after another into the dark. The feeling of disintegrated sentences hung in the air, a deadness of language, like a word abandoned mid-syllable.

  “It’s impressive,” I said.

  “Impressive.” The Librarian outstretched his arms to the expectant hall. “It takes you three syllables to encompass all this?”

  I had been memorising Roget’s 1911. “Large,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Better to be faced with an eternity of literature and render it down to one uttered word, one brief sound. ‘Large’—I think you’ll be perfect.”

  From beneath a shelf of peeling grimoires, scratchy muttered sounds could be heard. At first I interpreted them as squeaks, then realised instead that they were voices. Words, I realised. “Stripling! Gangrel! Pilgarlic!” A scurry of grey tiny shapes crossed our path and disappeared among the nearest bookshelf.

  “Ignore the rats,” the Librarian said. “So bothersome. I try to keep them away from the books, but they over-run the place. They have a particular taste for the folios. I suppose it’s only natural they’ve picked up some words. But such bothersome words.” He licked a spindly forefinger and thumbed his lapel as if he could turn the page of his suit. “To work then, my unremarkable boy.”

  He led me through the stacks, past row upon row of books. Some were bound in leather, some gaudy, some decrepit, some little more than stapled paper, and some emanating a faint electric glow. Skittering around in the shadows, the rats could be heard in our wake: “Jackanape! Welkin!”

  “Voilà!” said the Librarian. “The Index.”

  Like a still pool in a forest, the library had given way to clear empty space containing a circle of doors, freestanding and unsupported, each unadorned apart from a single round window at head height. Narrow bookcases stood attendant by each, laid out like spokes within the wheel of doors.

  “Observe.” The Librarian plucked the first volume waiting on one of the bookcase-spokes. It was gently smoking; the Librarian carefully patted out its glowing embers. He inspected both of its covers. “Sonnenfinsternis by Arthur Koestler. You do know German? I’ve been waiting for this one. File this under Wartime Casualties.”

  And:

  A sandy pile of barely bound papers. “The Visions of Iddo the Seer—fascinating. File under Myriad Apocrypha.”

  And:

  A sheaf of laser-printed paper. “Untitled Novel About a Boy with No Hands (Incomplete) by S. Berman. That’s one for the Self-Doubt section—half a novel deleted in a crisis of confidence, if I’m not mistaken.” He coughed. No, it was a laugh. “I’m never mistaken.”

  And:

  A threadbare exercise book missing one of its staples. “The Collected Works of the Poet Jeremiah Blenkinsop, Aged 13-and-Three-Quarters. Much as I regret that we must collect such ephemeral dross: file under Adolescent Verse. Do I make the task at hand clear? Take the volume, examine its cover, file in the appropriate section.”

  I nodded.

  “Under no circumstances do you open the book. Is that clear?”

  When I was late in responding, he peered at me. “You are not a curious boy are you? I insist on no aspirations, no predilections. Books are not to be read.”

  “I haven’t read a word since my GCSEs, sir.”

  He smiled. I suppressed a shudder. His teeth were spotted, like the acid foxing on old paper.

  In the round window of the door directly behind the Librarian, a face appeared. It was a wide, flat face, that of a rag doll’s, or a scarecrow’s—the look emphasised further by thick stitches that shut his eyes. The door opened to admit the lumpish creature. Behind it, I saw a vista: not the Library stretching away but a courtyard at night. A mound of books burned and the silhouettes of men watched from below scarlet flags. At the sound of a bugle, each figure raised their right arm high in salute.

  The Librarian noted how I stared. “1943 Common Era,” he said in a grave tone. “So many books lost forever. We were understaffed—had been since the Great Pandemic.”

  The rag-doll creature unloaded an armful of still-smouldering books onto the case before turning back to the door. The Librarian stopped it. “This is a Collector,” he said, then added, squinting at the nametag sewed on his chest, “Gadzooks.”

  “Why are his eyes sewn shut?”

  The Librarian scowled. “That’s only a metaphor.” He squinted at me. “You know…symbolic? Not real?” He sighed and bent an arm around my shoulder. “Gadzooks, this is Thomas Hardy. Passive voice, mind you. He’s our new Indexer.”

  Gadzooks bowed his head.

  “I trust you’ll show him the ropes,” said the Librarian, “and then to his chambers at the end of the day.” He picked up the next book on the shelf. “Misguided Pornography,” he said, then placed it into my hands and shuffled away.

  So:

  I worked, for an indeterminate number of hours, filing away the books as they were deposited on the stands for my inspection. I saw many more Collectors, barging in and out of their respective doors, carrying armfuls of books; through the frames, I caught glimpses of a multitude of places—a sun-baked Jerusalem, a Scottish highland under water, the underwear-strewn floor of a teenager’s bedroom. 1943 remained where it was even as the others changed; clearly there was much work to be done there. Gadzooks lumbered around gloomily beside me, pointing in the right direction for each department: “Censored Tracts? By the fountain. Suicide? Fourth on your left. Hard Drive Failure? Up the ladders by Rejected First Novels.”
His gentle voice belied his maimed face.

  Occasionally on my journeys I would spy the rats. One might dash close and spit out a forgotten word at me—“Nidgery! Borborygmus!”—then skitter away back beneath the stacks. Gadzooks grunted and chased them away. “They seem to like you,” he said.

  And then:

  The day closed, Collectors unloaded their last piles and vanished. All but Gadzooks, who gestured for me to follow him. I did so, because I was a curious boy, and let him lead me into the deep warren of the Library. We arrived at a rickety spiral staircase at the back of Reformation Sermons. The small room at the top was draughty and sparsely furnished, nothing much more than an unmade bed and a little writing table.

  “Your room,” said Gadzooks.

  I thanked him, expecting him to leave. Instead he hovered in the doorway, wringing his massive and scarred hands.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Sometimes at night, we—well, I wondered if you might like to come…to a party?”

  And then:

  A trio of Collectors recited couplets from Love’s Labour’s Won, regaling each other with smutty double entendres. In another corner, a gaggle of Collectors pored over Byron’s diaries, pausing frequently to ooh and ahh. Another group gathered in armchairs, pouring absinthe over sugar cubes into their glasses, and repeating lines to each other from Rimbaud’s La Chasse Spirituelle. “Welcome to the Speakeasy.” Gadzooks moved with a bit of mirth.

  He led me to the bar, introducing me to those we passed on the way, a series of names—Tango, Philtrum, Esperanza, Pushkin—that I immediately failed to correctly attribute to their proper owners. “This is Tom, the new Indexer,” he said, and they all earnestly shook my hand and recited couplets for me by way of introduction.

  “Whiskey,” said Gadzooks at the bar. “You do drink whiskey?”

  I felt bold. “Naturally.” A glass was pressed into my hand.