by A. R. Moxon
In this way she reconstructed the world. Her willingness to absorb made Morris willing to tell her far more than he would have otherwise deemed prudent.
Until she discovered the wisdom of seeming less mechanical, even Morris had found her cold, so steeped was she in waterproof pragmatism, in the meticulous cataloguing of things, of experience. She would listen to him with care, the better to reflect his opinion of her back to him, but it was his power she responded to, only that—and why oppose it? Wiser by far to do as he desired her to do, to admit herself to be an appendage of his own singularity, rather than to argue a separate existence for herself, especially when such admission placed her on the highest shelf of his esteem. She was his greatest triumph, he had taken it upon himself to instruct her; and when he was upon her, she gave him his way, gave up to him all of the self he believed nonexistent. The dividends he paid for this fealty were a measure of his own power, a perquisite to his most preferred and honored trustee. The-figment-which-knew-itself-to-be-a-figment spent her days as she pleased, holding sway over his property; slave in his presence, steward in his absence. She opened the windows of the bedroom and sat and felt the air. She moved around the manor silent and watchful. The rooms of the house were filled with ancient books, which creaked when they opened. Some of these she read, replacing after a few pages those that failed to please her, devouring the others. Once in a deep cupboard she found three crates of cheaply made paperback books with lurid covers, a secret cache left behind, she imagined, by one of her antecedents, a previous wife of a previous master. These she devoured again and again. In time, she spent his long absences secretly writing her own versions of these stories into leather-bound blank-paged books. In these she and Morris would be cast and recast and recast, thrust into new scenarios, dropped into new locales. Here he was different than he was, and so was she, for in them she could draw points of comparison, by which she could construct at last a model of what she was from the mold of what she was not.
“Some days I would swear you were as real as me,” Morris told her, one night. He nudged up against her like Gordy does now; she as always lay on her back, eyes seeking upward.
“I’m not,” she replied, as she had learned to do. “You know it. I only seem real.”
Their flat-roofed mansion lay on the mountainside, sequestered far back in the trees, miles from town. Stilts kept it level, with windows floor to ceiling overlooking an evergreen sea. These windows were mounted on swivels, allowing one hundred and eighty degrees of articulation. You could with the touch of a button open the room to the outside, sit and watch the rain runnel off the roof, feel the wet of the air, simultaneously experience indoors and outdoors. That night, to test her loyalty after the incident with the boy at the circus, he’d told her to leap out the open window, and she had been running to do it when he had called to stop her. Only when he had called out had she halted, inches from the lip, knowing she would not have hesitated before casting herself upon the mercy of the pointed tops of spruce trees yet a dozen feet below. This surprised her; that her heart still beat level in her chest. Her calm had pleased her and convinced him. He shook his head as she rejoined him under the valance.
“You would have done it. You would have jumped.”
“Yes.” And may have caught a branch, she thought but did not say. No net stretched below, but a leap is a leap, and a catch is a catch.
“Brave. If you had jumped, I don’t know if I could have prevented you from falling.”
“You would have.” You would not have, she thought but did not say.
“It’s hard to know. I can’t be sure. I’ve never been able to transcend gravity. It should be such a simple thing. It annoys me more than you can know.”
“You would have. We can try again.” She rose then, made as if to try, but he caught her.
“No. But…you really would have done it. You weren’t frightened at all.”
“Why would I be?”
Then he had trusted her even more.
It had been the book she wrote that had made him suspicious, had made him put her to that test. The year before, she discovered, tucked in a bookshelf behind a muster of tomes, a black leather chapbook, handwritten: A Family History of the Loves. With each reading, her understanding grew. In her deepest secret places, an atomic kernel of anger sprouted infinitesimal red shoots, slowly unfurling, reaching for the sun. She purchased a new blank-paged book with a red cover, and began filling it with a new novel, a retelling of Morris’s account of his own hereditary sins, telling it in a way that let the confession of them emerge, telling it as a wrong committed rather than an attained right.
Frightened, she determined to hide these books, both his and hers, at last secreting them behind a little-visited shelf in the historical section of the public library. Through long habit of obedience she tried to forget hiding it by turning the memory into a kernel, capturing the kernel in a kettle, filling the kettle with stones, sinking it in a lake, only—after the incident with the boy at the circus—to see the kettle come rising again, unbidden to the surface.
This is what makes enacting her plans so difficult and frightening: the habit of obedience. Not that she loves Gordy (for she doesn’t) not that he claims to love her (immaterial), but out of simple foolish habit. It feels forbidden. This is the strength of Morris’s sway: Gordy’s power is total down here, yet despite her new boy’s power almighty, the worn harness of long training still restrains. This betrayal tastes of danger, of fear. She is aware of her heart pounding. It hasn’t happened yet. She hasn’t done it yet. She is here with Gordy on Morris’s instructions. They are lovers on his instructions. In her actions there is no betrayal yet to be found. But soon. She will do it soon. She will cast her master off with a movement so slight he won’t be able to detect it.
I’ve never been able to transcend gravity. Unusual for him to admit weakness in himself. She finds it simple, after long practice, to put herself in his place, to see things in his peculiar way. She imagines Morris thinks birds and gravity are another way his mind teases him, or (more likely) presents him with yet another lesson, pulling him into some greater understanding of the “himself” he sees all around him. The birds show him how easy it is to break the natural laws he imposes upon his own form, how false those laws are, how arbitrary. And then Gordy did just that: stepped off his shelf high up the oubliette wall, floated down as light as an autumn leaf. Enter the door—his door. Claim the power—his power. Knowing Morris as she does, she understands the effort it’s taking him to hide down here, to maintain the level of control he is exerting over himself. Inside, he must be chaos and rage and destruction.
Gordy nuzzles her, and she runs her fingers along the ridge of his back to placate him. It was at the circus she first saw him, just a boy hiding beneath the bleachers, peeking into things he ought not to. It had been a moment of clarity for her. Even if she had never seen him again, he would still have lived in her memory. The first moment—nothing but a movement of her eyes, warning this boy—a tiny rebellion, perfectly undetectable, perfectly deniable, but it became for her a fulcrum, a moment upon which she could stand as herself. The knowledge that, in such a moment, she would oppose Morris; that, if given the choice to free another, she would take it. She knew this before Finch was conceived, and this knowledge may have saved them both.
During those early days, there was still the circus. In the early years of their “marriage” Morris had sent her for training. No—not training, remember—re-training. Remember again—you were with the circus before Morris bought it, though you can’t remember it. Before you read his history, and realized this truth, you imagined Morris had sent you to learn the trapeze, and had been amazed at your felicity—how easily you’d grasped it!—unaware you were merely relearning a skill you’d been made to forget. Plundered of your heirlooms, and the thief himself wrapped one of them up and gave it back to you as a gift
Morris loved w
atching her perform. She would attend the Assizement with him when fat old Colonel Krane and the circus rotated back on their slow wheel through the breadbasket, heavy with runaways and recruits. The circus was a treat for most of Pigeon Forge; those who had in the half-year previous performed satisfactorily against the metrics. After she’d performed for them, she’d slip behind the curtain to watch him deal with the circus’s latest additions, and those deemed unworthy. For her alone the presence of the fountain, rather than increasing fear of it, served in her to quench it entirely: It came for them all eventually. Someday it will come again for you. Why concern yourself with it, then? Live from leap to leap, hold to hold, swing to swing. Fly in the meantime. Only reading his book somehow made it all real for her—it is the knowledge of the evil done against her that became her original sin; knowledge of wrong, for which every Adam throughout history has condemned every Eve.
After the Assizement, the circus would perform a second time, exclusively for him and his guard. He would applaud for her as she spun and twisted, leapt and caught. She can see now: She, too, was defeating gravity for him. To Morris, it was he, not her, who flew. She, like the birds, symbolized something to him, a lesson he passed from himself to himself.
What, then, had been the lesson he learned from himself at the sight of an infant daughter? During her gravid months he had been attentive, as close to obsequious as she had ever seen him. Morris was never happier than when a thing was fulfilling his concept of its purpose, and as her bundle grew within her, she perfectly fit her expected form. But upon birth the male line was rudely interrupted by a distaff adulteration: a girl. What had he been teaching himself about himself with this new bird?
But she knew. At least, she knew what he’d told her.
He summoned them and regarded her silently. He had been silent for a long time already. Weeks. She knew silence meant she ought to fear him, so she held her new baby and feared him. At last he said: “It means the end of Continuity,” and smiled, and then she held the baby closer and feared him more. “I already knew it, but I didn’t see it. Continuity is weakness. Isaac’s edict was folly. There is no line and never has been. This is the revelation. I need no offspring to live forever. There is no eternal life in heritage; I’m eternal already. I stretch backward to Isaac and before; I must also stretch ahead. Your time is over. Come with me.”
He’d brought her beneath the fountain then. She brought the baby, shielding it in her arms, terrified. Before, it had been her alone and she could still jump and catch and swing and fly; it had been easy to forestall dread by giving herself over entirely to fate. But now, incumbered by another, dread at last closed its damp jaws on her and she descended the granite steps weeping. Expecting him to present her with the bird, and for the child the spade, but he surprised her: He gave them each an empty card, blank and clear. A new thing. He exiled her, but he exiled her to sanctuary.
At his command the adjuncts excavated rooms, comfortable and small, out of the cavern wall. Carried the necessary materials down the stairs, rolled them from the landing (where the mysterious door waited) far down the incline, past the banks of oubliettes to the construction site. Hundreds of bags of concrete, yards of galvanized pipe, PVC, connectors, water heater, porcelain tile, wood studs, Sheetrock walls, assortments of glues and latex sealant and Teflon tapes, multitudes of screws and bolts and nuts and washers, furniture, sinks, appliances. One day an enormous sump pump was brought down with great care and interred behind the wall. She slept on a cot beside Finch’s crib and marveled as they assembled this architectural oddity. Attendants came each week equipped with whatever supplies she’d requested the week before. Their instructions had been to refuse nothing save freedom—or anyway Jane had not, throughout the years, managed to find any other caveat. When the stillness oppressed her, she found they did not hesitate to bring toys and books for Finch, nor pen and paper for her to write.
Claustrophobia did not intrude, for the apartments opened onto the vast cavern. She’d run laps in the space, clay walls on one side, stainless-steel banks of oubliette drawers on the other, the placards stamped with serial numbers and icon whirring past: spade, spade, spade, bird, spade, spade, bird, spade. Once a month a delegation of trustees arrived dressed in formal garb and led them upstairs into the light. They stood guard as mother and daughter walked in the sun in the view of the fountain, the offense of it diminishing with familiarity but never dissipating entirely. Every six months, when the circus came heaving back to town, she was allowed a week to rehearse, a day to perform.
During the years she’d spent in their house Morris would disappear for days and weeks. Not until he forced her underground did she discover that the cavern was the place he spent these absences. He would appear in the cavern and sit down opposite the door. He never glanced her way, but even in her fright it amused her to think she saw more of him in her exile than she had during their habitation. She kept scarce when he was about, peeked from behind corners, lurked in shadow, considering it wise to remain out of sight, needing only to look at steel shelves rising up to see how unaccountably slight her punishment had been, and what capacity still existed for a worse one. Finch she would not even allow out of the apartments during his visitations; whenever Morris came for a long vigil, she locked their daughter inside. The key rode in Jane’s pocket whenever her duties or her curiosity took her outside their sanctuary.
The child hadn’t been “Finch” in the beginning. Years passed before the baby received her name. In those early days Jane vacillated between a ferocious protectiveness toward the baby and a marauding desire to harm her. She longed to dash the bawling thing to the ground even as she held it, to choke it even as it suckled, this bundle of squall and shit and piss that had come out of her own traitorous body to divest her of all she had built up for herself. Perhaps, she thought, this was Morris’s test for her. And then, in thinking it, realized—of course it was. He won’t do it for you. You may at any time climb out of this pit, but to climb, you will need empty arms.
And so her desire to destroy the child grew.
The thought was simultaneously unbearable and unbearably tempting; the fear of it would not leave her, nor would the desire for it. Sickening to imagine various tragedies, yet from her mind they leapt unbidden. Greatest of these was the thought Morris would repent his small charity and return to finish them. She knew she would try to kill him to prevent it, and would surely be destroyed in the process. The existence of her fear for another being she saw as some parasitic alien root that had captured her mind. To allow it to remain seemed intolerable. To uproot it would destroy her. Early months were spent on the floor of the new-built kitchen, feeling cool tile on cheek and temple, as the nausea of fear washed over her—terrified that she would rise and dash the child to pieces, disgusted with herself that she would not. Her freedom purchasable in any instant, yet when she would drag herself to the cradle where her baby lay, she would hold it and feed it, and wait for those Morris had appointed to provide them with supplies, and feel those tendrils snaked into her. The baby, as if guided by atavistic instinct, would reach up one fat hand and perch it, gentle as a songbird, upon her nose.
She had fought against this unnatural attachment, this clinging to a thing that was not her and could in no way bring her benefit. Years passed before the struggle subsided, before Jane found peace in it. The fearful root grew in her until it finally overtook, leaving behind something—someone—entirely new. The desire to purchase her freedom through Finch’s murder faded, replaced by a new hatred, the desire to appease transformed slowly into a hunger for defiance; but even still, Jane kept patient. One day, playing with Finch’s hair and inventing a story for them, the thought came I too can grow slow roots, even in this soil…and the girl, guided still by the same unerring gifts of entanglement, reached out her small hand and landed a finger upon her mother’s nose. Jane, with only the slightest hesitation, returned the gesture: a shared thing now, meaning nothin
g but itself, meaning everything at once.
The girl never ceased terrifying her mother as she grew. She flitted, and chirped, and darted, she made herself impossible to catch as she explored the nooks of the dim cave, bounced on the bed, made her mother gasp by climbing the wall of vaults, using the indentions as holds for hands and feet, climbing high, always returning. At the far end of the hall from their rooms stood the door immovable, watched over always by silent deadlies dressed in scarlet. They never moved against Finch, no matter how close she came, but there was never any doubt she would not be allowed to test the door they guarded, and so the door naturally became the girl’s obsession. Jane wearied of protesting ignorance of what lay behind, and of delivering admonishments to avoid it at all costs. Whatever it was, it belonged to Morris, and that lent it danger enough.
But then would come the occasions when the guards would depart, banished to their quarters. For weeks at a time Morris could be seen, perched above on the landing, facing the door, immobile as an anvil. Finch learned to detest the slight, raged at being forced into hiding. Tantrums came when reason failed.
“But why?”
“Never mind.”
“Just for minute. Please.” Finch could massage five extra syllables from “please.”
“Not even for a second. Not ever. Do you hear me?”
Sullen, she didn’t answer. But when Jane touched her nose, she reciprocated automatically.
She held the girl and rocked her until she passed into sleep. Later, outside the Sanctuary, she remained in the dimness, observing Morris for hours; an obelisk of a man, sitting naked and cross-legged, murmuring petitions at the ancient ancestral obsession. She counted her exhalations to ten, then took a step. In this way she closed the distance between them; crept close enough to hear him muttering, though the words remained indistinct. Every muscle strained, each breath precisely measured. For some reason, she was focused on the shadowy concavity where skull met neck, the entryway to the brain-stem. A fascinating place, perfect for a sharp thin object, which would turn a man into nothing but meat on the ground. She had a sharp thin object in her hand—how strange. The letter opener had been on her desk, and she had without thinking put her hand to it as she left. Creeping forward, soft and slow. He had never needed to teach her stealth. She was near now, and nearer.