by A. R. Moxon
The thing behind him is still behind him.
Nothing has changed.
He’s on the strip now, walking blind, making sure nothing has changed. In his pocket he finds a pack of cigarettes. He tries one, but they make him cough unbearably. At a nearby convenience store, he purchases some cheap cigars, and puffs as he walks, only allowing the smoke’s flavors to reach his mouth, but the second one annoys his throat and he discards the rest. A cigar, perhaps, should be a sometimes thing, a weekly reward.
As he walks, he is drawn to the line of posters pasted to a fence, advertising the circus. The poster shows a beautiful woman flying on a trapeze, her dark hair shot with gold. A short round mustachioed man capers in the poster’s corner. There is something about this woman. Morris decides he will attend the circus. Perhaps he will…it’s a strange thought, but a compelling one…perhaps he’ll even buy this circus. The woman on the poster is very beautiful. And a travelling circus might have uses…
Morris’s face is changed in ways that have nothing to do with features. Perhaps it is possessed of some new quality, some even deeper certainty, some even more singular focus, but it is changed, changed. Somebody who knew him well would sense it instinctively. But there are few who know him well, and of that number there are none who do not fearfully revere him, so it will go unremarked, this change that has come over him.
VOICE
With Morris, the main difference between the bird and the spade was whether or not you got the water. If you’re a bird, then you drink and sink, to be reformed and reused. But if you’re shown a spade, you’re kept in there for good, and you go in with your memories. You have to live there in full knowledge of yourself.
Everybody gets the box.
The followers Morris recruited were a rough bunch, well suited to dirty work, mercenary warriors of varying disciplines. As soon as the oubliettes were ready, Morris showed them the sign of the bird, dosed them with fountain water, made them the first tenants. Caught there, immobile and blank-minded, surrounded by mirrors, confronted with no input other than images of themselves, they learned that only the self existed; raised back to life by Morris, they learned that even their selves were only manifestations of his far greater self. You met some of them, Father. Here in Loony Island they’re known as the cardinals. So there you have birds again. There were a few birds down there, but most of us were lifers. You could tell by looking at the shelves. There was a little steel plate affixed with a serial number and an icon: bird or spade. They remained after Gordon transformed the shelves to doors. I never asked him why he kept them there. He could have removed them.
The birds have the better part of it. They know of no better world. Those of us who were put down there with no drink had to teach ourselves amnesia. To fully realize your situation and keep your sanity? Impossible. Folks can train their minds to forget—everybody does it. You forget things each day as a matter of convenience: the time of a dreaded appointment, an incriminating fact, your most embarrassing moment, the worst thing you ever did. Those things we don’t want to look at, so we just don’t see them. In the same way, you forget yourself completely if your whole self turns into something you can’t bear to consider. No memory, no worries, no regrets, no pain, no priorities either or even fear. That’s what the oubliettes do to you. They convert remembrance into pain, forcing amnesia as self-defense. All prisoners cultivate the ability to live without the pain of memory. Negate yourself to say say save yourself. But memory is always calling from beyond the prehistoric door.
And then, one day, one man answered the call. Broke free and bested Love’s door.
That was my Gordon. That was my boy.
* * *
—
Time
is
odd.
Odder still is when it ceases to be time any more. Then you stop staring into your reflection and your reflection starts staring into you. Then comes the blend, my friend, my friend, the blend. Your only companion a close one. He hangs above you. He is watching you. Whatever he does, you must follow. Bewitching; you love him. You adore him. You’d kill him if it weren’t for the straps. He’d kill you, but he’s strapped, too. Lucky those bands are there, or he’d be on you, fingers on your throat. You wish he would kill you; you’d like to die.
And then, it occurs to you: You have died. This is it forever.
Right?
Things get bad, after that.
Why haven’t you starved, dehydrated, asphyxiated? These questions bubble unbidden—your mind, untethered from your will, rattles where it wants. And where is the light coming from? It is emitted from somewhere behind your buddy overhead, he’s backlit like a deranged angel. He’s a maniac, look at him lying in his spaghetti of tubing. Lips pulled back from his teeth. Those eyes, they look like they’ve seen it all. Thank God he’s strapped—he’d peel your head like a grape if he could. And he won’t stop staring at you, like he thinks you’re tasty. Closing your eyes; that’s no help. He’s still glaring, you know it. He’s always staring right at you. You crack your lids—yes, as you suspected, there he is, licking his lips. His sense of anticipation is sick—he licks his lips when you do; the exact same instant.
You try not to blink. You breathe, and try to count the breaths between blinks, but your mind is greased, it’s impossible to maintain the tally. Can’t even reach ten…You start over again, and again, and again. Soon you are trying to count failed attempts alongside the breaths. Calculate the average number of breaths before failure. Futile. You’ll never count past twenty. At some point, you realize you are counting in the ten thousands. Have you slept? If so, when?
It is becoming easier not to blink. The one above never closes his eyes.
There are moments—interminable flashes—when you realize that this figure upon whom you lavish all your devotion and hatred is only yourself reflected. You’ve learned to quell these flashes. The passive role is preferred; better to be the reflection than the reflector, and better still to not be at all, to float around in amniotic negation, unbeing, undesiring, for to be is to desire, and to desire in this state is to desire any state other than this. You are one. One is you. One is one, and one is all.
After some time, the figure above one becomes only what it is, neither good nor bad. It just is. Its screams and grimaces are mere diversions for one’s atrophied desire. It is real. It is the only real thing. Obviously it’s an illusion. It must be illusion; there must be something more than this. It hangs above one, the only universe one has ever known, the skeletal jitterbugging face. It is all there is, this visage that one observes.
There is nothing else.
Nothing.
Clearly there must be more.
Someone is calling a familiar name, soft and persistent.
This is unwelcome. It pulls from the knowable, negates comfortable nothing. If only it would stop, if only the soul petitioned by it would answer it! One’s familiar, suspended above, is equally disconcerted; his eyes dash like caged things.
The soft voice calls forth visions of things terrible and familiar. A birthday party. A day at the beach, when Mom stepped on the sand castle, but then you built another. Tonka trucks, jigsaw puzzles, running through the trees, rows of low mobile homes. Flashing lights, turning circus wheels mirrors laserlights…a…a gorilla? Weren’t you the gorilla? No, you fly on the trapeze with a beautiful woman, her dark hair shot through with gold, and you move wherever her eyes tell you to, but your parchment is a spade and you—
—but there is no you, there is only one, you are one, one is you, one is one and one is all
Someone is calling a familiar name, soft and persistent.
It is getting louder. No, no, it is soft. Yes, but louder. It is both. (There can be no both, there is only one.) But yes—both. The voice is soft, but not as soft as before. It is getting closer. And the name…that name…the face above is nearing the zenith of
its agitation. One has never seen such fidgets and faces
—Gordy.
—Gordy.
—Gordy.
And now neither voice nor name can possibly be denied, and as one screams in reply, the face above—so dear, so known and hateful, the universe itself—slides away from one leaving in its place only distant blackness and traces of remembered light. One is cold, and begins to bleat at the empty sky like a newborn, and the thing is still calling the name—your name. Bawling, one struggles to sit, but the straps hold one fast. The voice calls out again, and then one’s limbs are free, trammeling straps slide off and away, hooks unclasp.
—Gordy.
By and by, one thinks: Gordy. Your name is Gordy. My name is Gordy. You howl denial into the ink, extremities aflail, night-blind. You lie in a low shelf. Even though you are unstrapped, sitting presents a challenge. Back muscles wilted to paper. Hands on the rim, you try to pull up out of it, frustrated by tremble-arms and the dizzy betrayal of your inner ear. You wish you were stronger and then, then—oh! you can feel sinew knit, muscles tumesce like bicycle tires, you are stronger, thin still, but you rise from your tray with ease, somehow well again. As you gasp, you feel your lungs accept more air than they’re accustomed; you had no idea how fallow they had grown. But other problems present themselves. The floor, for one thing. It is way down there—you’re far too high to jump. And there are the tubes. Nasty, these tubes; they have taken residence uninvited in your secret places. Regardless, there is still a voice that will not be silenced, calling urging demanding your name.
—Gordy.
There’s a pull, almost a suction, impelling you forward. You’ll have to jump, and trust your luck. But when you stand, unconsciously sloughing bountiful tubing from all orifi, harness unbuckling and unhooking as if released by invisible hands, you step out from the tray and float, sinking like cottonseed to the ground, landing softly.
It’s quiet here, and still.
You’re not alone.
The cavern hall is long and high-roofed, and there are many beds like the one from which you’ve escaped. They’re interred in the near wall, locked with Swiss precision into their vaults, with only one steel side visible. Floor to ceiling, and yours the sole open one; it juts like a lone tooth. A powerful shaft of light rises from it, cuts through the dark and illuminates a patch of the cave roof above, where sporadic pipes abide. In the floor, set at intervals in shallow declivities, dim lights are ensconced, providing sufficient illumination to see the slope leading upward, upward, upward.
And at the opposite end of the hall from the great slope, you see a shaft of warmer light pouring from an open door.
A woman stands beside it, beckoning frantically.
Obedient, you pad toward her, and she withdraws into the light before you reach her. Arriving, you see it’s a small apartment room, incongruously normal considering its placement in this prison cavern. The woman is here; so is a girl. The similarity of features leaves no doubt regarding the nature of their relation. The mother stands beside a large antique writing desk, upon it a tablet with pen. The daughter rests on a sofa, an antimacassar dangling from a toe, reading a paperback. She holds the book one-handed, its spine bent backward, the cover hidden. They are both wistfully beautiful. The girl is swan-necked and spider-legged and reclines in easy contortion, motionless as a yogi, head tilted slightly, eyes devouring words, completely unconcerned by the intrusion of one such as yourself. But the woman…you look at the woman and die. Dark hair shot with gold. Intelligent fingers, watchful almond eyes, legs crossed at the ankle beneath the chair. It seems to you these two could reside in these positions indefinitely, as if they have achieved their perfected forms: They might be figures in a painting.
“You escaped.” The woman says it as if stating a great impossibility.
“He’s young,” the daughter proclaims, assaying you with mild interest. “I thought he’d be old. Forty or something.”
“He was even younger when they put him down. Not much older than the age then you are now. It was the circus that caught him.” Closing the door, she says again: “You escaped. How?”
“Can I help you?” To your chagrin, this sounds brusque; you hadn’t meant to, but everything is new, unexpected, even your body, even your name…
“I’m Jane,” the woman says. “This is my daughter.”
“Finch.” The girl offers her hand.
“Gordy.”
Her focus is on the book, yours is on the mother. You complete your half of the world’s most perfunctory handshake.
“We’re the caretakers down here.”
“Caretakers?”
There is a thickness now in the air, clearly affecting only you. You’re sinking into hyper-aware muck around this woman, fuddled, tongue-tied in her presence. She seems aware of this, and amused, though not unkindly so.
“Have a seat.” She gestures to a chair. All her gestures seem economical ones, graceful, no more than is needed, and no less. You obey. Jane remains standing.
“You’re putting us all in terrible danger,” she says, and you wonder how you missed it before, the fear in her perfect eyes.
“I see.”
“I don’t know how you escaped, and I don’t what to do with an escapee. I wouldn’t put you back even if I knew how, which I don’t. But…he’s here. Right now. Out there.”
“Huh?”
“Gordy, pay attention!” She claps her hands near your ears. “Morris is here, now! Watching that damned door of his. He’s tranced by it, but we can’t count on him staying tranced. He’ll wake and see your box open. We have to figure out what to do. Hide you, sneak you out…something.”
“Oh.”
You feel trapped in the maze of her person, hypnotized. Entrancing. Lissome movements. She’s your elder, and you feel the weight of this difference, the disparity in experience. You find yourself desperately unsure of what to do with your hands. Her gaze remains direct, benevolent but focused, but it’s also familiar, and it augers into you, knowing you somehow. This is unpleasant and wonderful. The silence between them extends mercilessly and you know you’re helpless to end it. Finch flips a page with a practiced thumb, a sound reverberating through this expectant silence as if tearing it.
“I remember you,” you say, suddenly. It’s true. You remember eyes looking right at you, you, crouched beneath the bleachers, at the…the circus…
Something terrible is rising in you.
“I remember you, too,” Jane says. “You in particular. I even kept your things, all this time.” She’s gone to a drawer; rummaging, she procures a large plastic bag, sealed, which she opens. “There’s not much, but I managed to hold onto it when they…after they…” for once she seems at a loss.
She’s right; there’s not much. A red-and-yellow T-shirt, folded. A pair of jeans. In the pocket of the shorts, a twinkle of green peeks…curious, you reach for it. Oh yes, that’s right, it’s that ticket, the one that oddball gave you at the…
Circus.
Something terrible is rising in you.
It occurs to you that you’ve grown.
You’ve grown up down here.
You’ve grown up in there.
The rage and hate are too much to bear
it is
it’s
I’ve
I’ve lost—
…years?
YEARS
my god I grew up in there how many
years
did those
bastards oh those
Jane’s saying something to you, but you don’t hear it over your screams. Then comes something you do hear: someone calling a familiar name, soft and persistent.
—Gordy.
You leave.
“Gordy!”
You want
to answer her, but you can’t. The voice calls you; it is in you, and it compels, it almost propels—out of this apartment, ignoring her consternation, numb to her attempts to pull you back.
—Gordy.
The voice is coming from the top of the great slope. You head toward it, footflaps whispering echoes against the unseen roof. Considerations of personal circumstance—how, where, when—have not yet recurred; the devices by which questions are asked and answered appear to have atrophied with you. The voice demands you, so you fetch yourself to it; obedience is simple, and its simplicity alone is enough to make it the most acceptable course. Presently the massive wall of steel trays on your right side falls away as you climb the slope, and the walls draw gradually closer on either side. Reaching the top, you see a stairway to your left, leading up to pale light, which may be sunlight. Across from the stairway, a simple door and frame. Hallways are hewn into the clay wall on either side of the frame and space has been dug from above it. You cannot see how far back this excavation stretches—the sparse lighting of this place affords a view of mere feet before cave-blackness swallows it.
Turning from the door, you are startled: A man sits in lotus between you and the stairs. He is facing you, but his features are in shadow; motionless, he neither speaks nor acknowledges you. He may be sleeping, or entranced…or is he the one who has called you?
—Gordy.
No. The voice emanates from behind the door, not from the yogi. You set your hand upon the door’s handle, and it opens easily. You step inside, drawing the door shut behind, and see before you a short hallway leading to a small room. You walk to the room and