The Motion of Puppets

by Keith Donohue

  “Should I go look for him?” Nix asked at last, and the rest rebuked him at once.

  “Do you think the Original is with the others?” The Old Hag shuddered. “What a horrible thought. Who knows what he might decide?”

  “We will hope a while longer,” said the Queen. “There is no sense sending out a search party.”

  “Or all of us disappearing, one by one,” Masha said. She had expressed the unthinkable and cast a pall over the general unease in the room that lasted the whole night. Toward dawn, from the bowels of the building, a strange voice called out and was met with a round of hearty laughter. The puppets took it as a sign that the Devil would not be back.

  “He’s gone,” Mr. Firkin said as he turned off the lamp. “But we must keep the protocols. Places, please, everyone.”

  The storm had ended. The last of the raindrops dripped from the eaves, the music like a dirge. The Queen sighed and retired from her throne. With a clap and a whistle, the Old Hag called the little dog, who jumped into her arms and fell fast asleep. In the trough, the Three Sisters laid their bodies down, and the jester put away his juggling and bound together the loose twigs and sticks at the Good Fairy’s hands and feet.

  Disobeying the curfew, Noë spoke to Kay. “Do you think they have killed him? Has he been unmade?”

  “Shh. We don’t know what happened to the Devil. We don’t even know what’s out there.”

  Noë snapped a straw from her head and worried it with her fingers. “Do you think they will come for us? They will kill us, too.”

  “Nobody’s dead. Nobody’s killed. Nobody knows.”

  Mr. Firkin hissed from his spot. “Quiet. Not a word after dawn. Not a word.”

  18

  Nobody came and nobody went. During the daytime, the barn was calm and hushed. Mice scurried along the walls, and in the rafters a mourning dove, reluctant to make the fall migration, cooed and waited for a reply that would never come. From sunrise to sundown, the old boards ticked and moaned as the cold and warmth alternately played off the wood. The people had departed or perhaps stayed inside the farmhouse, nobody could tell, but the familiar sounds of car engines or wheels along the gravel had all but ceased. Nights were quieter still; the bark of a fox, the cough of a deer would startle a soul. And after midnight, when ordinarily they would have had the run of the place, the puppets were too scared to move.

  The disappearance of the Devil made them question their faith. Not in the Quatre Mains—they had long ago learned to mistrust him and his seemingly random capacity to dispatch one of their number into the void. But now they feared the others, the unknown lurking just beyond the cramped chamber into which they had been stuffed. Some accepted the close quarters with stoic forbearance. “Make the best of your situation is my motto,” Mr. Firkin said more than once. Others could not tolerate the claustrophobia. Noë had pulled out nearly every straw on her head. The sisters looked terrible, too, draping themselves like pashas in the trough. Masha covered her eyes with one mitt and complained of a migraine. Olya wore a path in the sawdust, desperate for a cup of tea. Irina spoke only in sighs.

  Kay did not like her new body. She felt like Alice grown ten feet tall, too big to fit into such a small room after tasting from the bottle labeled DRINK ME. “Which would you have liked best,” she remembered from her nursery Wonderland. “To be a tiny Alice, no larger than a kitten, or a great tall Alice, with your head knocking against the ceiling?” Kay had been small as a kitten, and under the circumstances, given a choice, she preferred that size. She was taller than she had been when she lived in the real world. She was bigger than her husband.

  What would he think if he suddenly saw her in the barn? So changed as to be unrecognizable. He would walk right past her as though she were a stranger. Or a stranger still. There was so much she had not told him, sides to her personality kept secret during the months of dating and even after they had moved in together, after the wedding, too. She had always thought there would be time for the whole story. And he, too, hidden by the past, a stranger in many ways, the life he had away from her, the teaching he would be good at, he was a generous and patient man, and she imagined a gaggle of coeds would fall in love with him every semester. The French seduction. A man of words. Muybridge, she recalled suddenly. White beard, animals in motion. She could picture her husband hunched over the pages, moving Muybridge between languages. At the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and a serious frown of concentration that sometimes frightened her. Theo.

  “What did you say?” the Good Fairy asked.

  She would have blushed had blood run beneath her skin. “Theo,” she said at last. “Theo was his name. It just came back to me again. Sometimes my mind comes and goes about the way things used to be.”

  With a creak of wooden bones, the Good Fairy sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulder, a weariness in the motion. A twig snagged on Kay’s collar.

  “Better you forget all about him,” the Good Fairy said, as they untangled.

  “I don’t think about him much, except to wonder if he misses me. If he is curious about what happened, or if he has forgotten about me yet.”

  The Good Fairy rubbed her back in wide circles, the rough fingers scratching an itch that had not existed before. “I used to be just like you. When I first came into this world, it was passing strange. Imagine my surprise to find I’d been changed into this scarecrow, this bundle of kindling, where before I was a person just like you and the rest. For the longest time, I ached to be who I once was, to see my people—Lord, how I missed them. But I made my peace with it, took the advice of Mr. Firkin and the Queen and just put the past where it belonged. There is no past, only the right now. Much more appealing to think about what is to come.”

  “Well, what is to come?” Kay asked. “Are we to be here for long? I heard the Deux Mains say to the people in the village that the next shows will be in the spring. Does that mean we’ll be shut inside through the whole winter?”

  “You’ll learn,” the Good Fairy said. “Don’t measure the days as you once did, not as something to be endured but as an opportunity to rest. And savor the moments for what they allow.”

  Behind them came a drumming on the floor, starting out slowly and softly and increasing in speed and volume. Noë stomped her feet and growled, the tantrum intensifying till she threw her hands in the air and howled and caterwauled. “All winter, all winter. I can’t stand another minute.” Shrieking, she ran across the room and sped around the corner, heading for the barn door. The puppets were too shocked to react immediately, and they stood there, stunned, as her screams bounced off the walls, a spray of curses as she fought the lock.

  Nix and Mr. Firkin were the first to move, and the others quickly followed, even the little dog madly barking at the commotion. Kay and the Good Fairy brought up the rear, trailed only by the Queen, who seemed to glide, her robes flowing like a bridal train. They found Noë gnashing her teeth, wailing uncontrollably at the stubborn bar. As soon as she saw them, she banged her skull against the wood. “I’ll go mad if I don’t get out.”

  Reaching over the tops of their heads, the Queen grabbed Noë by the scruff of her neck and silenced her. She lifted her as if no more than a rag doll and wrapped her tightly in her arms. Noë sobbed against the Queen’s bosom. Trembling, Noë tried to catch her breath, but the attempts to stop herself only exacerbated the emotions. The others watched, wondering whether the Queen would crush her wire and paper body or offer comfort.

  “There, there, child,” the Queen said. “We must have none of this. You know better. You know there is no way out by yourself.”

  “I want to go home,” Noë said.

  The Queen stroked her face, ran her fingers over the bristly stubble on her bald head. They all waited for the sobbing to subside, reluctant witnesses to her despair.

  “I want … I want…” And Noë lost control again and buried herself more deeply in the billowy largeness of the Queen.

  Kay could not bear to w
atch the suffering of her friend. She moved away from the pack, leaned against the wall, and peered through the crack between two boards. Another day approached. In the yellow and lavender light and shadow, she could see the frost coating the grass. In the jagged starlight under the setting moon, the ground sparkled and danced. Theo would have been mesmerized. Gathering her in his arms, he would have stood behind her, holding her until the night gave way. She, too, would go mad if she never saw him again.

  * * *

  Aboard ship on the Atlantic, Muybridge looked back at the United States of America for what would be the last time. Going home at last, back to England, back for good. He was sixty-four, but felt like an old man with a young man’s ambition. Turning toward the east, Helios, god of the sun, going back to its rising. The year before, his zoopraxiscope had played motion pictures at the world’s fair in Chicago. He had met with Edison and Étienne-Jules Marey, worked in Philadelphia with the painter Thomas Eakins. He had toured the country, gone to and come back from Europe, lecturing to enthusiastic crowds enchanted by his moving images. The foundation had been laid for his two masterworks, Animal Locomotion and The Human Figure in Motion, but all he could think about on the wild gray sea was his wife and her lover, Harry Larkyns, and the bullet to the heart. And all that might have been.

  “Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of complete existence,” Muybridge once wrote. Each moment part of a series, yet separate and complete somehow, the motion but an illusion, the way to mark time. He could see his wife twist her neck, the realization of what was to happen clearly marked on her face, the recognition in that split second of all that had passed and all that was to come. That scoundrel’s eyes bore a permanent regret. All in the space between the smile and the squeeze of a trigger.

  New York harbor receded on the horizon. Muybridge rubbed his great white beard and spat into the ocean. He had stopped time, yes, but it could not be unwound, reversed, replayed. There was only one direction: forward.

  Theo added the final page to the manuscript and put down his pen. Finished, but for the last revisions. When Kay first disappeared, he had blamed that man from the circus, that seedy old ringmaster, and Theo would have shot that roué had he a gun. But now he was not so sure. Now he had convinced himself that she had made it to the Quatre Mains puppet shop that night and had vanished from there.

  She had disappeared once before.

  They had been dating three or four months and had arranged to meet at the Central Park Zoo on a Sunday afternoon. She had wanted to see the penguins. He had wanted to see her. So much so that he arrived an hour early and settled in on one of the benches facing the circular pool where the sea lions cavorted on the rocks, the feeding routine drawing in the young families and children like magic. Theo watched the people come and go, idly speculating about his future with Kay, the prospect of bringing their own children to the zoo, to the park. And on the bench in that hour, he decided that one day soon he would ask her to marry him.

  When she did not show up at the appointed hour, he wandered over to the iron fence that separated the zoo from the street, and there she was. At first, the sight of Kay amid the crowds of tourists was an early and welcome surprise. But there was something wrong. From the distance, he could see only her animated motions. She gestured to a man who leaned in closer, his face red with anger. They were arguing, he could tell, and unsure of himself, he froze on the bench and watched the show play out with dismay. When Kay tried to break away, the man grabbed her by the arm and would not let go. Theo sprang to his feet and raced toward the fence. He recognized the man from the rooftop party near the Flatiron. Her old boyfriend.

  “Get your hands off her,” Theo shouted, his face pressed between the bars, and as soon as he spoke, her eyes widened with alarm, and the man reflexively let go of her, and she pivoted on her heels and made her way to Fifth Avenue, running as fast as possible through the clots of people on the sidewalk. By hesitating for one moment, Theo lost the chance to catch her, and by the time he found the exit from the zoo, he could not spot her anywhere. He walked quickly up the avenue, looking for her along the way to see if she had doubled back into the park and was waiting for him, but she would not be found.

  She did not answer her cell phone. She did not answer the intercom when he buzzed her apartment building, and he sat on the stoop till nightfall, hoping to intercept her. In those long hours, all he could see was the image of her sprinting crazily through the streets of New York, and his thoughts ran wild with conjecture about the man on the sidewalk and why she had fled rather than simply talk to Theo. Everything that he knew about her seemed to fly away, every dream seemed to curdle. At midnight, he gave up and went home.

  Another full day passed before she reappeared on a Tuesday morning in the spy hole in his front door. With a box of rugelach and two coffees, she appeared contrite. The worry that had eaten at him gave way to a gush of relief. He threw his arms around her and led her in.

  “What happened to you Sunday? Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.”

  Pulling him close, she kissed him, trembling in his arms till he returned her embrace.

  “What is it, Kay? What’s wrong?”

  Breaking from the embrace, she positioned herself behind an armchair, holding on to the wings for protection. “I can’t tell you. If I tell you, you will want nothing to do with me.”

  Theo remembered that moment as a crossroads, but at the time, his answer was spontaneous and unequivocal. “There’s nothing you could say that would make me want to end this. Is it about that man you were arguing with? Your boyfriend?”

  She laughed nervously, apprehending his thoughts for the first time. “Barry? Not in the way you are thinking. There’s nothing between us, honestly. Not anymore. Nothing romantic, if that’s what you are afraid of, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But you were yelling at him, and he would not let go.”

  “You’ll hate me.”

  “Say anything.”

  “He’s a mistake, a bad influence,” she said. “That’s not exactly right. He’s a guy who can get his hands on drugs. That’s what we were arguing about. That’s why I ran away from you.”

  Her confession stunned him.

  “I’d needed some speed. There were back-to-back auditions, and I’ve been feeling run-down and tired. When I saw you there, you were early, you weren’t supposed to be so early. I didn’t want you to know, so I ran away.”

  “Are you still using? Are you still seeing him?”

  “Lord no,” she said. “A little boost to get me through a rough patch. I hadn’t seen him in ages, but I knew that he could hook me up. But I’ve stopped. I’ll stop.”

  “Except for Sunday.”

  “One time,” she said. “Look, he said he was interested, but I’m not. That’s why we were fighting. I was trying to end things for good. Untangle the strings.”

  The moment proved a fulcrum between doubt and trust. He canceled his classes for the day, and they talked all morning, shedding layers of the past. Soon enough they worked their way back to each other, tempered now by the moment. It wasn’t the drugs, so much, for he had experimented in his own foolish youth. It was her disappearance, how she did not trust him and instead had run away from him. How Kay had not realized that he would be so frightened. “I do not want to live without you,” he told her in bed that afternoon, and she had held on tightly and told him she would not leave. And here he was, living despite her absence.

  Tell me where you are, and I will come find you.

  The computer chimed when he switched it on, and from the couch, Egon mumbled in his sleep. Just past two in the morning. Careful not to wake him, Theo plugged in his earbuds and clicked on the bookmarked video. He watched the parade again. The video began midstream, a second of shaking as the camera sought its subject. Light fluctuated, too dark, too bright, and then a balanced exposure. Disembodied voices from the crowd, children ooh
ing and aahing as each puppet came into view. “Look at her,” some child said clearly when Kay appeared, and he froze the image. She was beautiful as a puppet, her countenance serene, almost peaceful. She looked like an Art Nouveau exaggeration, herself and not herself. The sculptors had captured the heart shape of her face framed by a stylized sweep of hair. And the arc of her cheekbones sharp against the smooth paper skin, the slight overbite that pushed forward her smile, the delicacy of her small ears, the set of her eyes beneath the arch of her brows. He clicked the mouse and set the video in motion, and she was gone as suddenly as she had appeared, and then the children screamed with delight as the giant queen arrived, her handlers struggling to keep her aright and steady, and then she filled the frame before all went suddenly black. The last moment was nearly terrifying in the extreme close-up, as if the taping had suddenly become too intense for the videographer, as if the scene were swallowing the camera. He whispered to the screen, “How could you have gone away?”

  Late into the night he typed his corrections to Muybridge, one ear on his snoring friend Egon and one ear attuned to the music of translation. Although the publisher would surely have further questions and corrections, Theo was giddy to be nearly done, the work so long a part of his life. At dawn he put on a pot of coffee and muscled through the transcription of his own spidery handwriting, some pages taking him back to Québec, back to that misery. The morning brightened. There was only one direction: forward.

  “I’m finished,” he said to Egon as soon as he arose. “Let’s find those puppets.”

  Book Three

  19

  Cozied in his office, Mitchell listened to their story from start to finish, surrounded by the artifacts of his passion for the ancient world. From over his shoulder, a bust of Aristotle looked down on Theo and Egon, and the bookshelves were crowded with titles in Greek and Latin. He seemed open and credulous, nodding at certain points as though he recognized elements that mirrored his vast knowledge of mythology. When Theo and Egon had finished, he leaned back in his chair and toyed with a shard of pottery decorated with a chain of fearsome maidens linked in a ritual dance.