by A. R. Moxon
You are in another place.
You are in the same place.
You remain aware of walls, close around, but they are indistinct and now there is more here here, an expanse too vast for this cave to hold. In truth, it seems too large to be contained at all. Within your small room, a shoreline stretches to infinity. From the shore a great sea spreads, calm as water in a basin, an ocean without termination. The sky is not seen, and so immense is the ocean, it is difficult to say it does not rise to become the sky, or indeed that the sky itself does not descend to become ocean or else live commingled with it, each confederated with and inseparable from the other. You are mute with wonder, but more wondrous still, the voice speaks—it rises from every atom of this great sea, and each atomy echoes all others in infinite harmonic thrum:
—You have come.
–Yes.
Your voice sounds small and utterly meaningless. You wish you had something significant to say. You are mercilessly aware of your nudity.
–Did…um. Did you want me to come?
—That is why I called.
–I was in the…
—Within your various confinements, yes.
–Why me?
—Why not you?
You consider the rows of trays. Hundreds of prisoners, at least.
–It could have been any of us?
—Perhaps you are the only one to answer.
–Who…who are you?
—You know already.
–But what is your…you know, your name?
A pause. Then:
—I yam what I yam. And that’s all that I yam.
All about you and throughout you, pendulous in each molecule, a shimmering tension of amusement shivers, pauses, ceases.
–I don’t understand.
—I am as you expect me. That will suffice. You remember those who imprisoned you.
–I don’t remember anything.
—You remember them.
This sounds like a command. And yes, you do remember; memory rushes into you, shows you all you have lost and all that has been taken from you. Again, there is rage, and hate.
–I remember. Yes.
—Look at yourself.
You stagger to the edge of the sea. Approaching it is a vertiginous act, like approaching a mountain ledge on a windy day. You peer into the ocean—it is calm as a puddle—and see him. Him: your beloved despised familiar, your sole companion, your only confidant, your tormentor. You, yet not you; this face is older than yours, years older, a young man’s face, but still a man’s. You search its architecture, seeking the boy who once lived there.
Years. God, years.
You fall back from the merciless reflection, ill with loss.
—They are wicked, and led by a bent man. He kicks hard against the goads. If he does not turn from his path, he and all he calls his own will be destroyed.
You think, viciously—Yes. Destroyed, yes.
—Return to the prisoners and heal. Then deliver the warning of the coming destruction.
–Me?
—Yes.
–How?
—By doing it.
–But I don’t know how to heal. They’ll murder me. You’ve chosen the wrong guy.
—Separate the water from the sky.
–What?
—Tell the water to separate from the sky.
Afraid not to comply, you say:
–Let the water…ah, make it separate from the…sky?…
You feel awkward saying it. You feel false. But even as you speak, the sky lifts from water, water falls from sky in stentorian sheet-rain, all at once, and the placid sea becomes turbid; it roars the horizon’s birth. You look, amazed and horrified, as the tidal wave your demarcation has wrought rushes toward you. Its shadow races ahead of it and falls heavy on you as the shoreline sucks itself miles inward, preparing the way for it. You brace for swift death—it will be here in seconds. You scream:
–Stop!
The wave halts in mid-break, hanging over you and the rest of this long shore like a gallows.
–Did I do that?
—The starting and the slowing. You share in its rage. It is a part of you, and you of it. But not you alone.
You look up at the hanging wave; water has replaced sky once more, but now they are not joined and the separation effects a great violence, held now in check. A weight greater than the world. Had it fallen upon you, it would have pressed you into a diamond. And, as you look at it, it seems to you it is still moving, not in a rush, but in increments. Yes, it is nearer now. Nearer by inches or feet or miles, it is impossible to tell. This place defies any definitions space might impose.
–It’s still coming.
—Yes. It will not be stayed forever. When it arrives, he and all he calls his own will be destroyed. And now you must deliver the warning of it.
–I don’t understand what this has to do with me.
—You were imprisoned, and have been released. What more do you require?
–I’m sorry…it’s just that…
Impossible to articulate. The wave weighs above you.
–Back there, the waves and sky don’t obey me. I’m not powerful. I’m nothing.
—You will have what you need.
–But how will I know?
All about you there is the sense of some great gathering.
—I will give you what you seem to require: something to look at and to hold. The power I would vest in you I will pour into it. Look in your hand.
You look at it; you’d forgotten you even held it. It glints green.
LUCKY 21
SEE WHAT YOU’VE WON
A thousand bucks. Didn’t you once know the winning square? It doesn’t really matter. The prize has changed.
—Use it. Clothe yourself in some uniform other than that of a prisoner.
You think of new clothes, and then you have them. Just like that. It’s the damnedest thing.
—Remember what I have told you, and remember what you have seen. Tell them. The broken must be healed, the path must be walked back, or destruction will come.
Yes. Heal the fallen. And, after that, destruction. This is right and just. Horrid mirrors, hundreds of mirrored boxes, each holding a human soul staring at itself in amnesiac madness, degraded fully; each one stripped of one’s self, or else one’s self made hateful, or both. The fountain behind the curtain, the lines of people drinking, the theft of years. Yes. Destroy them. Finish them all. Heal the prisoners and then let the wicked drown in the coming wave. It is nearer now. Is it nearer?
—Deliver the message. Heal the broken.
–I will.
—Go without fear. I will not forsake.
The voice has finished. You hold the ticket in your hand, vibrant with a combusting madness of power. The door lies behind you. You open it and step back into the world. The door closes, and then you seal the great cavern from the outside world, and open the prison doors. All the prison doors.
A great screaming from the oubliettes begins, and as the prisoners break free shed tubing drag ruined limbs blind eyes distended bellies mewling toward you for healing and forgetfulness, their screaming grows, as does the hate blooming within you, large and large and larger, against men that perform such wonders upon their fellows, hate as encompassing as that monstrous wave, moving still slowly, still relentlessly, yet unbroken, always before your eyes.
BIRD
These were the Acts of Gordon Shirker, whose ticket gave him control over everything, everything.
These were the acts of Gordy-Gord, my only son.
He sealed off the great cavern holding the oubliettes and prisoners—sequestered us from harm, from recrimination from the topsiders who had done this to us.
He opened all the oubliettes, f
reed the prisoners. Made his rounds among them, healed their bodies, soothed their frantic minds.
He made a home for his people; converted Morris’s prison cavern into an enormous vault—multiplied it in size, then doubled, redoubled, and redoubled it again; dankness made bright, starkness filled with fancies. He crafted new delights daily: An amusement center, a zen garden, a beach. A slight declivity in one wall might lead to an alcove holding a ski lodge, a mountain. This was Gordon’s favorite trick: bigger inside than outside. The thrill of opening a refrigerator and discovering an entire grocery. He could hide space within space, could tuck away deeper surprises expanding out the farther in you went…and he turned each of our oubliettes, former homes of our torment, into apartments, crafted to our exact specification.
He instructed his people. He told us there was a great wave coming, an agent of divine justice, which would, when the time was right, arrive. He said the wave was always in his vision. He said it would destroy all of our enemies. He promised that on that day, safe at last, we would all rise to the surface.
He cared for his people, visited them, replenished their supplies. To answer the petitions of so many, he learned to create multiple selves, projections of his physical being each carrying the totality of his consciousness. He learned not to approach unless invited, realizing his presence was weighted with burdens of reverence and of dread, with the endless possibility of what he was able to do at a thought. Think of it: What if he were to become angry? What if he should sneeze? Would we all suddenly have lobster claws? Would we turn, even briefly, into a lungfish or a table lamp or a Waldorf salad? What if we awake one morning from uneasy dreams to find ourselves transformed in our beds into gigantic insects?
Yes, Gordon’s people avoided him. All except for three.
The first was me, his own daddy. Here’s the tragedy: I remembered Gordon, but he didn’t remember me. So he claimed. He called no man pappy. Every once in a while, I’d press him. He didn’t like that. It about killed me. Your boy sitting right there in front of you, and no acknowledgment, none. Still I’d keep close, and hope.
The second was Morris. I didn’t recognize him for who he was. None of us did. He’d made himself seem like he was one of us. He made himself friendly as he plotted.
Morris’s problem was simple: Gordon had the ticket, but he kept it hidden, close and secret. He showed it on the first day, at his welcoming party, when he told us all of the wave, and then never again. And how to get it? You couldn’t very well mug him; he could turn you into sunshine and dust. Anyway for that you’d need to know where he had it hid—which Morris did not. But that ticket was all Morris wanted, all he thought about. It was the power he believed to be his birthright, loose in the world. Morris kept deadly patient over the months, waiting for opportunity, and showed his skill when opportunity finally presented itself.
He was using her, see. He was using that poor woman: Jane, the caretaker, his former…I still don’t know what to call it. “Wife” sounds a little too wholesome, given Morris’s methods—but whatever you’d say, she was down there, too, and Morris had her controls.
She was the third. Morris ordered her to summon Gordon, try to get him to fall in love with her—not like that was hard for her to do. I get the sense the boy started out besotted. I don’t blame her for it, though. It’s not like she had any choice, not with her little girl to think about.
From there, it all went sour fast. Fast enough I couldn’t tell you the details of how it happened, though I was there.
One day came the final act of Gordon Shirker, whose ticket gave him control. The final act of Gordy-Gord, my son.
Without warning, he ran off. Abandoned us all.
I still don’t know why.
* * *
—
Jane Sim holds Gordy as he nuzzles his head into her. They’re in her apartment’s one bedroom. She can hear Finch in the distance, rooting through the library like a merchant searching for fine pearls. She’ll be there for hours, or maybe days. At Jane’s request, Gordy made the library. A new door in her apartments, opening on a vast space, three-story shelves, accessible only by hydraulic lift. According to him, it’s a room with all the books.
She’d asked: All what books?
The, he’d replied.
She’d asked him then: How does the ticket work? He’d brought it out, held it up. “I just say,” Gordy told her. “And it does.”
He looked at her writing desk. “Be lime Jell-O,” he said.
The desk obeyed. It stopped being wood and brass. Instead, it became a single translucent tough-skinned blob of gelatin.
“And if you weren’t holding it?” she’d wondered.
“Let’s see,” he replied, and set the ticket down on the blob. “Back to a desk again,” he commanded it.
Nothing happened.
Once again, he took the ticket and issued the same command, and at once the desk returned to its previous form. “So there you go,” Gordy said. Later it would occur to her how vulnerable he’d made himself to her; the trust he’d placed in her, in placing it within her reach, his commitment to what he thought of as their love. She could have taken it, betrayed him, claimed the power for her own, been the Delilah to his Samson.
And, more to the point, she should have. It’s an agonizing thought. If she’d only done it, she wouldn’t still have to trust him. But it’s too late for that now, the situation is too dire to waste time on self-recriminations. The library keeps Finch away, gives Jane time to work on this boy-god in exactly the way Morris commanded, meanwhile planning this final betrayal of her master. There have been other betrayals, but those were all secret ones; from this one, there will be no cover to be found.
She has come to the moment of the leap. She is frightened, but not because she loves Gordy, for she does not, nor even because he believes he loves her. Over a dozen times he’s said it, “I love you,” almost a prayer. He says it each time he sees her. But she knows men and love; soon it will sound less like a prayer than a challenge, before it curdles at last into an accusation.
Jane doesn’t try to pretend the lie of their love into being, but neither does she try to disentangle him from his hold on her body or his belief in his ardor. This has always been her skill: remaining herself without giving herself, allowing others to make their own inferences, to ensnare themselves within thickets of their own mythologies. Morris believes she is controlled, while this one in her arms believes she is loved. Jane allows them to deceive themselves. To disabuse them of their notions would be unproductive. Controlled? Morris doesn’t dream she intends to betray him, or comprehend how she intends to do it. Loved? Love exists, she knows that now. But love is something you learn about another, not something another is expected to already know about you. This one thrusts his love at her presumptively, as though it has already been accepted. If love is blind, she thinks, then infatuation has no sense at all, save touch.
Touch is how Gordy experiences her. It’s how he imagines he loves her—yet he lives so much in his mind; from what he says she guesses the “Gordy” with whom she interacts may not even be his true self, or at least not his only true self; he’s able to be in many places at once. He can’t explain how he does this, other than to invoke the ticket. It’s as easy for him to have selves in two places as for her to touch opposing sides of her own head with two fingers. He claims an imperfect understanding of the mechanics of so much of what he does, and meticulously avoids the implications of identity, of which “him” is the real “him.” For Gordy, whichever “him” receives the bulk of his attention is, for the time, the real him, while the others fade into transparency or flicker into invisibility or finally drift away, nonexistent, a no longer relevant aspect of himself. Sometimes she’ll ask him which of the former prisoners all the other “hims” are helping, and he’ll answer; Georgina, Russell, Florence.
She wonders—does he imagine you stop e
xisting for him, whenever you stop being the subject of his attention, his attentiveness. his touch? Can she trust his infatuation? Will the hope of his rage bear her weight? But she’s swung on less sturdy ropes than infatuation, and leapt from them over the void toward catches less certain than rage. She now knows she’s been with the circus since long before she was ever with Morris. But all this is an empty space; something that she knows without knowing, something she read about herself as if it were about another. In memory, it still seems to her she was birthed whole into the world on the day of her “wedding” to Morris, fully formed and ready for his use. For years, her first memories had been of herself in bed. Awakened under the canopy. Enough breeze to push aside the gauzy white cloud of the valance, beyond which could be seen the deep rolling conifer green and the slow drizzle falling everywhere around. That had been the first awareness. No effort can pierce the mental gauze leading into the past. Eyes open to billowing white sheets, four-poster valanced, her lying beneath. The sheets her only covering, born naked before she knew of clothes, feeling the soft warm push blowing the sheets and valance and her cheek—the experience of wind before knowledge of wind. And when Morris came to her shortly thereafter, it was not just the first man she had seen, but the first time the concept of an other had occurred to her, and again it was the same curiosity, the same detachment, though different pushing.
Even in these first moments her mind was calm and crafting and omnivorous. “You’re the only person I’ve seen drink and not panic and scream,” he’d told her. He phrased it like a compliment, so she took it as such, at least externally. Internally, she tumbled it over and around, finding and cataloguing new meanings, new implications. There was a drink. She had drunk. Many others had drunk. This man had seen it. The others all had panicked. The others all had screamed. She had not. The difference impressed this man. Impressing this man was important. Calmness was important. All these answers led to different unanswered questions—What was the drink? Who were the others? Why would they scream? Who is this man?—but while these passageways lay as yet unilluminated, the mystery of darkness was of no concern to her, content as she was to stay there, watchful, in the small patch of illumination, already so much brighter and larger than it had been a moment before. She would sit, and be calm, and watch the lights as one after another they came stuttering back to life.