The Motion of Puppets

by Keith Donohue

  The lights went out. Thin strips of sunlight filtered through the edges of the back door and the cardboard window covering. The room was warming, the glass ticking as it expanded, the air rising from the floor. If only she could ride the wave and escape. Normally she faced a blank wall, but this morning she dared to change position and did not look away. The rest of the puppets assumed their inert countenances, dead eyes, blank expressions, as still as corpses. Quiet descended, heavy and expansive. She was alone again.

  The days were all the same in the Back Room. For the first few hours, she remembered her life before this life. Fleeting images crossed her mind. Her mother cutting out a silhouette from black cardboard, asking the five-year-old Kay to please sit still. At a high school gymnastics meet, the auditorium hushed while she prepared a dismount from the balance beam, her foot slipping, her hips wiggling, her shoulders throwing off her equilibrium, and then her father’s soft voice reaching her from the bleachers: be still. Her husband—not yet her husband—peering intently at her across a table of Indian food, the tail end of an argument over some silly ex-boyfriend, and she asks do you love me and he says: Still.

  Inside her head, she laughs at herself, as if she had any choice in the matter, since she could not will herself to be anything but still during the daytime. She wanted to move. She wanted to be more than a doll on a shelf. She wanted to see the man in the glass jar and wondered if he was waiting for her, out in the Front Room. Her thoughts disturbed her rest: when would the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains come for her? What role would she play? She could no longer move on her own in the daytime. Nothing to be done but to wait in stillness.

  7

  She left a hole his mind tried to fill. Theo dreamt of finding Kay all the time, but every morning, she was still missing. He woke up tired and disoriented, and all he could remember was the hellish sensation of having been watched on his journey. Spied upon by tiny eyes of creatures hiding among the trees and hedges in the parks or from the old stone buildings that lined the twisting streets of the Basse-Ville, gremlins squirreled away in second-story windows shrouded by lace curtains.

  He shared the tale of the watchful eyes with Egon as they stopped for coffee at a sidewalk bistro near the Terrasse Dufferin. From their table, they could see the length of the grand esplanade that runs above the Saint Lawrence, crowded with tourists taking in the sights, the weather warm enough for shorts or skirts and sandals. The little man nodded demurely, and Theo wondered if he had somehow offended him, drawn a subconscious comparison between the gremlins and the diminutive size of his only friend in Québec. A breeze rippled the flags that flew above the square. A light sky above the river was purled with clouds. A perfect day in July. Kay had been gone for three weeks.

  “I used to feel that I was being watched, too,” said Egon. “Or rather, it was a case of being scrutinized all the time. Even now you can see it in their eyes, how quickly some people turn away when they first notice me.”

  A pair of tourists shambled up in matching Québec je t’aime T-shirts.

  “Then they look away. Guilty buggers. There but for the grace. And then they look back. Curious as the killed cat. And then away again to show you how liberal and unprejudiced they are: that’s okay, you are a little person, I do not mind.”

  The couple, who must have heard him, frowned as they passed.

  “I prefer the children, les enfants horrible, no more than two or three years old. They will look to their hearts’ content, unabashed, and point their fingers right at you as if to say, Maman, explain that to me. How can it be? A man just my size, what a glorious conundrum. But I get what you are feeling, Harper. Maybe you are a little bit paranoid, understandably.”

  “Paranoid?”

  He drained the cold dregs from his cappuccino and scraped the last cloud of brown foam with his index finger. “Perhaps you feel you are being watched because of that incident with the police. And all those who are pointing a finger at you. Unjustly, I might add. But don’t worry. I defend you like a wolverine.”

  “Who is pointing a finger? What are they saying?”

  He licked the back of his spoon. “I don’t like to repeat gossip, but there are stories going around. These are actors, don’t forget, and worse, circus people. I overheard Reance tell a chorus girl that you lied to the police about the body of the drowned girl, who was in fact your wife, and you are hiding the truth because you killed her. The police have no way of identifying her. She is perfectly anonymous, no dental records, no fingerprints on file. Reance is being profoundly ridiculous. A slanderer. I’m not sure I should mention the other one, it might upset you.”

  “Upset me? What could possibly be worse than that?”

  Waving away the question, Egon fished in his pocket and laid a loonie coin next to his saucer. On the boardwalk in front of the Château Frontenac, a small crowd had gathered to watch a juggler in a striped shirt atop a unicycle. He was working with three bowler hats, catching each by the brim, and then sending them spinning like plates into the air. After a few moments, without a single hesitation, he flipped one atop his head, and the next, and finally the third, so that he looked like a triple-decker ice cream cone. The tourists applauded, and Theo and Egon were on their way before the empty donation hat could be passed to them.

  They walked to the overlook and stood along the cast-iron railing and watched the boats go by on the Saint Lawrence. “Kay’s mother has been in touch with the cirque. She says you haven’t been returning her calls.”

  Theo closed his eyes against the sunlight reflecting off the water. “I don’t know what to say to her anymore. She asks questions with no answers.”

  “She’s distraught about her daughter.”

  “Naturally. I know. I just cannot face her.”

  “I’ve been getting this secondhand, realize. She spoke with the stage manager, who told someone who told me, so it is not from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Her mother thinks you two had a row, a blowup, and Kay has run away from you and is hiding. Afraid of you.”

  “Her mother barely knows me. Lost my temper? Why would Kay be hiding from me? We were happy.” Just as he said the words, he heard himself speaking of her in the past tense, and his voice caught in his throat. He pictured his mother-in-law back on her farm, fretting the days away over Kay, going about what chores she could manage in that stoic New England manner. While his first thoughts were sympathetic, he quickly grew angry about her suspicions. She had never liked him, not from the start. Perhaps the ten-year age difference with her daughter bothered her more than anything, though he could not be sure if a more fundamental distrust existed. She was unfailingly cordial to him, hospitable on the few occasions when they’d spent the night under her roof, but she focused almost all of her attentions on her daughter, as though he was not there. The last time they saw Mrs. Bird, at the wedding earlier in the year, she had seemed so fragile in her wheelchair. But there was a fierceness to her as well, a mother bear protecting her cub.

  “Could be she has a point, the mother-in-law,” Egon said. “I don’t mean that Kay is afraid of you, of course not. And I don’t see her deliberately hiding from you. But perhaps she isn’t here at all. Perhaps she left the city. She took a wrong turn, bumped her head, ended up somewhere other than Old Town. We have been up and down these same streets a thousand times. Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place.”

  Blown by a sudden gust of wind, a derby rolled down the boardwalk, spinning on its brim until bumping into Theo’s feet. From a distance, the juggler came running toward them in an odd and curious manner. He moved like a mime pretending to run, a slow-motion gait in exaggerated steps. Theo thought of Muybridge’s photographs of the racehorse, how they needed to be viewed at the right speed to convey the illusion of galloping. Played too slowly, the sequence of images produced a herky-jerky notion of a horse, like this juggler who seemed to have slipped off the sprockets. Panting despite his awkward chase, the young man stopped in front of them and bowed deeply a
t the waist, like a puppet loosed from its strings. With a quick thank-you, he retrieved his derby and then trotted away.

  “Nice catch.” A voice came from the other direction. It was Inspector Thompson with his partner Foucault. Theo wondered if they had been tailing him the whole day.

  “We noticed you across the street,” Foucault said, “and thought we should say hello.”

  “Any leads, detectives?” Egon asked.

  Thompson joined them at the fence and grasped the iron bars. “I wish we had some news for you, Mr. Harper, but there’s nothing. We’re looking. We’ve recanvassed the neighborhoods and businesses between your place and the theater, but nobody saw a thing that night. Nobody watching the street at that hour.”

  Except the gremlins, Theo thought. Except the little eyes peering through the little holes.

  Egon lit a smoke and flung the match over the edge. “Is there any chance that she went somewhere else?”

  Foucault mimicked his senior partner and joined the line at the fence. “We notified the provincial police straight away, and even the Mounties in case she’s gone off the farm entirely, so there are police officers all across Canada keeping their eyes out.”

  “Of course anything is possible,” Thompson said. “Is there any reason to think she might have left the city, Mr. Harper?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Did you two ever argue, Mr. Harper? I mean, above and beyond the usual why do you leave your socks about the place?”

  He denied it with a frown.

  “Did she ever talk about going home to the States? Any reason to believe?”

  “What have you heard? Have you been talking to that bastard Reance from the cirque? Has my mother-in-law been calling you?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Foucault said, “she told us that Kay worried about how possessive you can be, prone to jealousy. You didn’t lose your—”

  “Her mother has no right to make such accusations. She thinks I stole her daughter away. I assure you everything was fine between me and Kay. We are happy.”

  Thompson drummed on the iron bar with his fingers. “I apologize for my partner, Mr. Harper. Just considering the possibilities, so that we may dismiss the unlikely.”

  Stepping away from the fence, Theo faced them all. “Listen, Kay wouldn’t leave me. She wouldn’t go off on her own. Don’t listen to all these false stories about a temper. I have no temper. I didn’t do anything to her, and never would. She’s here, I can feel it in my bones.”

  * * *

  The changeover always happened slowly. A spark flickered deep within, perhaps only in her mind or, as she now thought, at her soul’s center of gravity. The inside flame would go on and then off and on again until it caught hold, and suddenly she would be conscious, not quite aware of where and who she was, but able to think. In those moments of limbo, Kay remembered vestiges of all she had left behind: the circus, the balancing act, a man following her through darkened streets, Father, Mother, husband. He would be worried about her, why she had not yet come home. So late, she should send a text to explain how they got carried away, one drink becomes many, and how she tried to shake that persistent old lecher. She should be home with her man, his books and papers messing up the kitchen table. The Muybridge Obsession. Her husband whispering French to himself as he worked. His old-fashioned fountain pen marching across the blank page. In his own world, he could still be working and not have noticed how late it had gotten and the fact that she had not yet come home. Or when she did, he would be at her side in bed, his hand resting on her hip, but he was not here. And no hips, no breasts, her figure gone back to a child’s, the dawning awareness of the state she was in, a wire frame, cloth body, arms, and legs, stuffed, a head full of dust. Her puppetness came gradually upon her. The flatness of the shelf was now hard against her back, and she was very nearly overcome by how stiff she felt.

  The overhead lights beat down like so many suns. She sat up, surprised once more that she could sit. Only the Dog had awakened before her. He sat by the door staring at the knob, forever hopeful that he might be let out. Hanging from the coatrack, the Queen opened one eye and yawned. After a long slow stretch, she began worrying the knots holding her in place. Nix, who slept curled into a ball, unfurled to full length and sprang to his feet, toddling over to wake Mr. Firkin. In the bustle of the midnight morning, she did not notice anything out of the ordinary until all the puppets had risen. The two Judges and the Hag were missing. The mismatched chessmen sat atop the worn and folded board, and in the old woman’s rocking chair sat Noë, her knees drawn up and her straw head resting on her crossed arms. Leaping down from the shelf, Kay scurried across the floor and pointed to the empty spaces. “They’re not here. They’ve gone!”

  The Three Sisters untangled their wires and strolled over to the place where the vanished puppets should have been. Olya laid a hand on Kay’s shoulders, and Masha and Irina inspected the spot like two children wondering where their lost toys had gone. The others came over as well. Even the Worm inched his way to bear witness. Some bowed their heads, and others looked wistfully at the curtain to the toy shop.

  “Where are the Judges?” Kay asked. “What happened to the Old Hag?”

  “They’ve been selected,” said Mr. Firkin. Beneath his walrus mustache, he was smiling. Murmurs of delight filled the air. The Devil waltzed the Good Fairy across the floor. Nix turned three cartwheels and ended with a heels-over-head backflip. Even Noë overcame her immediate regret and clapped and whistled.

  Seeing the confusion on Kay’s face, the Queen took her aside from the boisterous celebration. “You should be happy for them. They’ve gone to a better place. The Quatre Mains is putting on a new show, and he must have selected those three to be in it. They have the chance to do what they have been created to do, you see. Who knows, they may be out in the great world, perhaps a children’s show in the city square, if they are lucky. And if you are good, and the puppeteers find a part for you in this show or the next, then you will have your chance, too. There is nothing like a performance to lift the spirits.”

  “So they are just in a puppet show for now? They will be coming back?”

  The Queen stared at her shoes. “You can never tell. The ways of the artist are mysterious. Sometimes the puppets return, sometimes they never come back. Sometimes they last forever. Do you remember the wooden man in the bell jar?”

  “What do you mean never come back?”

  “Don’t worry yourself, child. Just be happy for them. They have a chance to be under the spotlight.” She patted Kay atop her head and then went off with the Dog, playing fetch with a ball with a nose attached to it.

  The night went on as other nights had, though with a lingering bittersweetness. There aren’t too many occasions when a new role comes your way, but on the other hand, she expected to see everything in its proper place—the Judges exchanging pawns and bottle caps, the Old Hag cupping her ear to catch the latest mischief. But they had vanished.

  With no companion of her own, Noë seemed particularly forlorn. Kay found her in a far corner, whittling with a nail file at the stub of a pencil, intent on her task. Dark circles ringed her button eyes, and here and there, pieces of straw had fallen—or had been pulled—from her head. She jangled her right foot rapidly over the edge of the box on which she sat, and she hummed a song to herself under her breath.

  “What are you making?” Kay asked.

  “A point.” Her voice had an odd rasping sound, like a duck with a cold. Noë glared at her, but Kay did not take the hint.

  “A pencil point, I get it. What do you want a pencil for?”

  “In case I ever find a paper, so I can write a note. You don’t happen to have a paper?” She whittled more furiously, the shavings popping from the wood.

  Kay shook her head, and then suddenly remembered where she had seen paper of a sort. On tiptoe, she stole over to the abandoned chess set that the Judges had contrived from a few real chessmen and the odd flotsam and
jetsam of the Back Room—a few bottle caps, an eraser, the lid to a tube of glue. Among these treasures was a spent matchbook, the outside printed with a picture of a dancing woman and the advertisement for a club called Les Déesses and an address in Montreal. But the inside was gloriously blank. She tucked the matchbook under her jumper and wound her way back to the corner. Making sure nobody was watching her, she sat next to Noë, her bottom resting on the cold bare floor, and handed over the piece of cardboard.

  “There,” she said triumphantly. “Write to your heart’s content.”

  “Are you sure nobody saw you? There are spies everywhere.”

  Using her body as a shield, Kay made the corner secluded from the rest of the room. The straw-haired girl printed in block letters: HELP. Get me out of here. When she finished, Noë folded the cover to hide the note and concealed it under her blouse. “We need to get a message to the outside world to come rescue me.”

  “But you can never leave. Besides, why would you want to leave the Back Room? Is it because the Old Hag was chosen to be in the show? Don’t worry, the Queen said that she will return.”

  “Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go, and I’ve rarely seen them back in here, no matter what she might say.” Her eyes danced in her skull. “Depends on what the puppeteers decide, or what the man in the bell jar tells them to do. Listen, kid, you haven’t been here so long, but it is a hell of a way to live. I don’t want to end up on a shelf. Or worse. We gotta figure out how to get this note under the locked door. We gotta find some way to let the people outside know that we are trapped in here.”

  Kay studied her friend’s sad face. “I will help you,” she said.

  They hatched a plan in the corner. When Mr. Firkin rang the bell for the end of the day, Noë would run across the room as though to part the curtain and escape into the toy shop. She would never make it, of course, but in the diversion as the others ran to trap her, Kay could slide the flattened matchbook under the back door, for no one would suspect her of such a thing. Heads together, they conspired in whispers, and she felt an almost human intimacy in how their voices mingled, how the secret bound them together in the moment.