by A. R. Moxon
With horror, you understand you have left the voice, but the voice has not left you.
—No harm.
You scream.
It has no objection, the voice, that you might leave someone to be devoured by parasites. It has no objection that you have introduced such a plague into the world. It objects only that you might do it to him, the worst person in the world, the one man who might possibly deserve it.
You foul the guns of your adversaries. It’s the simplest matter in the world to convert the firing pins to cheese. They pull the trigger without effect, glance at one another with rising fear.
Morris observes this new development, unperturbedly analyzing. To his remaining men, armed with swords, he says: Well?
The men look at each other.
Kill him. He has no power over me.
Somehow he knows—how? Has he been told in the same way you have been told?
—Give it to him. Complete the task.
The voice came from within. It resonates in your bones and your tissue; your cells thrum in sympathy with it. There is no physical pain, but each moment of resistance imparts the sensation of peeling the self away and emerging raw into the world. When the voice ceases, the sensation fades by degrees, but the command is in you. The command is in you. You will not resist it long. The effort it requires to do so splits your head. You scream. Even now the wave hangs before your eyes, even now you stand on the beach. You must escape. The voice compels on the level of existence itself; soon you will perform the unimaginable part it demands of you. Worst is how it compels but does not coerce. The command is in you, but the command is not you. Even now it only presents its will—a will so vast it would seem to leave no room for choice, but here is the terror: Space has been left for choice nonetheless, but within a band so narrow, a container so small, you know you cannot long remain in it. Soon you will give Morris the ticket, and, in doing, doom yourself, and all the world, long before any cleansing wave will come and save it. The need for escape is irreducible within you now; some place must be found, some crevice in which to hide from the atrocity you are commanded to commit. The ticket rides in an inner pocket near your breast. Once this power had opened new prospects of peace, prosperity, and comfort, but now you feel its fangs, and its terrible potential for doom sags from you like a gorged tick. This warrant you carry is transferable, it was intended for transference. What it can be used for…
–Never. I will never I will never.
Morris’s men have found, in their fear of him, enough courage to overcome their fear of you; they approach. You convert their swords to flowers. You create an inescapable wall of wind, pushing them against the cavern wall, but slowly, gently, harmlessly, which allows you to push Morris as well. Pinned like specimens. Against it they can struggle but not prevail.
Two remain beside you, your father and your lover. They look at you in grateful wonder; they think you’ve won. You want to go to them and explain, but you are carrying something awful—a world-destroyer, a doomsday bomb with the fuse run out, the capsule carrying the unkillable virus, a poison pill potent enough to foul the oceans. You want to say things to them—to her in particular—but you have to go now before the voice sounds throughout you again. You mustn’t look at her as you go—those eyes will kill you—but of course you do look. You die one last time. A boy at the circus, hiding beneath the bleachers. You remember. You always have. Without pause you begin to run, through the breach and down the great slope, back into the vault.
Gordy-Gord, where are you going?
Your father. He’s pacing with you. You run faster.
Don’t you leave, boy, don’t you leave me again.
Faster.
Gordon, don’t you leave me.
You feel fingers on your shoulder as you begin moving faster than a man can run, faster than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap across the length of the vault in a single bound and you burrow into the far wall without slowing, pushing molecules aside, carving a path deep into rock, melting it in front of you at vaporizing temperatures and leaving behind you the cauterized perfect glassy “O” of your passing, ten feet in diameter; fusing shale and sandstone, siltstone, quartz, into smooth shiny rounded walls, re-crystallizing deeper igneous layers of granite into heat-buffed glass. You aim deep, deep, deeper, passing in seconds through millennia of millennia, from Paleozoic to Mesozoic to Cenozoic, then flatten out and accelerate in no particular direction. Distance is all that matters. Miles a second. But still the command is in you.
Gordy! Help me! Help!
You turn your attention behind. Sterling, caught up in your backscatter and carried along. You have created a zone around you, protection from the heat you are creating, and he is in it, but where you are going, he cannot come—I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry. I have to leave you all behind now. Your father, a distant man but kind. You know him now; you always did. You had a life together once. He would read to you at night after Mommy…what happened to Mommy? Why did you deny those memories? You will find someplace safe for him at least; someplace to hide, heavily populated, out of the way. There is no time for goodbye. The command is in you and you will soon obey it. You push back up, shearing through the strata. You punch up and up and up, until you are a mere dozen feet below the surface. You straighten course for a few miles, leaving beneath the city a tunnel long and straight and cauterized white, and then when you are beneath the heart of a city you send your father out and up and into the air, you send a piece of your consciousness with him for a time—soaring over a wedge of city, a neighborhood resembling a gray slice of pizza, a neighborhood dominated by an immense cathedral—while you continue on digging a long straight tunnel below. Protecting Sterling from the heat and the scattering flecks of plasma and magma and pyroclast expelled along with him, you float him down to the sidewalk, keeping with him for a few minutes after he touches. Aware of the conflagration you have started when you ejected Dad in fiery parabola—ah! the cathedral’s caught fire—you create a rainstorm to quench it, and then you lose track of it all as you blast away faster and faster and faster. Below the ocean now. You imagine you can sense the infinite weight of water pressing down. Infinite? Nothing like it. The entire Atlantic would be drowned in the coming wave—and may that wave come soon. Behind you one continent recedes; ahead, another grows larger. And still the voice reaching out to you:
—Gordy, Gordy. Where are you going?
–As far as I can get.
The voice is in you and the command is in you. You cast out your awareness to the limits, but nowhere in the universe can you escape it. But now in desperation, seeking some far land, some territory unknown, you press your awareness into cracks previously unglimpsed, which strangely, unbelievably, open into possibility. It’s like a new way of seeing and hearing. All about you other frequencies sing, higher and lower, and in this awareness, a great shimmering appears over your senses, as if you are observing the threads that allow you in small ways to make the great marionette of reality dance. Each moment and each place is entirely mutable, possessing infinite qualities: now simple, now complex, suffused at the atomic level not only with potential for energy but potential for potential. Anything can be anything else. Every point in this universe is a new diegetic portal to every other. Not just holes torn in space, but in possibility itself.
You pick a point on the course ahead of you, focus as sharply as possible upon it for this one task, this one final escape. The point you have picked grows, you widen it, dilating it, you imagine it into being from out of the strands of potential, a transparent disc between this place and that one. Crafting it in your mind into a membrane both solid and permeable, you race toward it and then you are upon it and without slowing you
pass through it.
You are in the same place. You are in a different place.
You are still tunneling below the sea, still approaching a great mas
s of land. Adjusting your course, you speed toward the largest nearby city. You are generating incredible heat, and, resolved to be more cautious of property and humanity than you were on your previous eruption, you surface in steam and water and then splash back down again, treading in the chop of the sea, bobbing in a harbor, alone, your appearance marked only by waking gulls. Against the chalk smudges of midnight blue and city glow, shipping cranes point their dormant arms in all directions. Later, when you have found a ladder on the sea wall and hauled yourself out, you sit on the embankment and let yourself slowly dry in the night air. This city is…you seek the knowledge, and then you have it. Brasschaat, in the tiny coastal nation of Färland. It will be as good a place as any to hide yourself, but first you list for yourself the steps you must take. It is crucial you don’t forget anything, for when you have enacted the last step, you won’t know to fix it—you won’t even know you can. The ticket cannot be destroyed, and it’s too dangerous to discard. It needs to be hidden somewhere on your person, and so you hide it well enough you are confident even you will never find it. But in the hiding of it, you make use of it, and the voice surfaces:
—Gordy, Gordy. Where are you?
You hold perfectly still. To empty your thoughts, you stare in wild wonder at a pebble.
—You are choosing a more difficult path.
Even here the command has found you. Even here. As you make your way into town, you list your steps carefully. When the time comes you must execute them quickly and without error. You will need to be fast and precise if you are to escape. The voice is in you still but the tidal pull has weakened; still, you fear it will soon come back in strength. In your flight you have discovered new threads of infinite possibility, and you have traced the logical chain that follows thereupon: If you, possessed of this ticket, can find these new folds of reality, then Morris, possessed of it, could find them as well, and, in finding them, would desire to own them. More even than the universe is at stake, then. It is time to be gone, erased. It is time to be swallowed up and brought to the bottom of the sea. It is time to escape. You wish it had never come to you, this burden, but to give it to another is unthinkable—how could another be trusted with it? The excruciating truth is, it would be better to be back in the oubliette. It would be better to never have escaped. Yes, even that would be better.
There is a part of the town already awake—or, more likely, it has not yet gone to sleep; you can hear their music and shouts. Desirous of human presence, you make your way toward it, an apparent red-light district. Arriving, you find listless working women standing behind windows, or outside, slouched against walls, smoking at the end or at the beginning of their shifts. Bright signs shout from the windows as you pass by; some advertise beer, others spirits, others sex, others the names of the establishments where you can get one or all of them. From a nearby tavern you catch a scrap of lyric that strikes you as fitting
…nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street, and now you’re gonna have to get used to it…
so you enter. You request a beer, a pen, and a scrap of paper. The bartender brings you a Duvel in a bottle, fat and squat and white. You take it to a darker corner table and sip at it, taking some last seconds to prepare. It is time. You know your steps. It will only take a few seconds. You can feel the ticket in its hiding place, its power still available.
First. The note, which you write to yourself quickly, in precise block letters.
Next. You’ll need to be able to communicate. At first you consider giving yourself only French, but then you remember Dutch would also be useful, and then you realize making limits is foolish, so you give yourself Language, locking it deep, preserving it against the coming deluge of your last step.
—Gordy.
The voice arrives at once, like the pressure of the deep, pressing at you on every square inch, compressing you down, crumpling you. But you will not listen, you are buried, you are in the heart of the sea.
Next. You will need to eat. You give yourself a bag of cash, enough to live on for a few months, providing you’re not lavish. After consideration, you have deemed a greater amount to be dangerous to carry, and banks would make you visible in ways you don’t want. It will be better not to have much to live on, to have to work to create something new.
—Gordy, where are you?
The command is in you. Suffuses you. Engulfing waters threaten you.
…after he took from you everything he could steal…
Next. You will need to live. Here comes the most difficult step. The most precise one; the one you have worried at and shaped to what you hope is perfection. You don’t want to be seen, and yet you will find times when it is important or useful to be seen. Only when you want to be seen should you be, and then only by those you trust, and only for as long as they give you reason to trust them. And—crucially—by those who don’t take notice of you anyway—the anonymous visible invisibility of the shopper to the cashier, the taxi driver to the fare—this partial visibility should be yours.
You make it so, and to those around you, though they don’t realize it, you begin to flicker.
—Gordy.
You bite your cheeks against the rising scream. Even now you have only to wish it and you can be back, standing before Morris. You can obey the command and release it from yourself. The temptation is so strong. It won’t be your fault. It will be Its—The Voice’s. What could you have done? How could you have resisted?
But then you think of the atrocity of it: Morris holding the ticket.
Finally, the last and easiest step, the one you have been waiting for. You think of the wicked white fountain, concentrate upon that black tenebrous water pouring from turtlemouth, that amnesiac cherub piss. Your white bottle of beer squats before you like a fat abbot, waiting to deliver to you either judgment or absolution; you pass your hand over it and now it holds something darker than beer. Your fate was sealed long before you were presented with any card. It has always been both bird and spade for you. You drink it down to the dregs and
A bag rests on a table. A note perches beside the bag, bequeathing you your name, a brief reassurance, and the contents of the bag. You look into the bag and see the money. You sit for a long time. You notice everything as if it were new and there is no judgment in it, no value in one thing greater or lesser than the other. The light of a newly risen sun passing through the window is a revelation to you, but no less so than the ring of water remaining on the table from your empty bottle, or the table itself, or each breath you take. You read the note twice more, fold it, and put it into the bag. There is nothing in you now, nor any knowledge within you that there should be anything in you. Unknown to the world and to yourself, with no more secrets to conceal, you rise and make your way out the door and into the day.
PART III – THE REVISIONARIES
A saint does not dissolve the chaos;
if he did the world would have changed long ago.
I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself,
for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion
of a man setting the universe in order.
It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
His course is a caress of the hill.
His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment
of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.
Something in him so loves the world that he gives
himself to the laws of gravity and chance.
⁓LEONARD COHEN, Beautiful Losers
author
Once again: There have been changes, and not for the better.
Still, you think, eying the newest stack, it’s better to be the author. When you’re the author you control it. All of it, almost. Most of it, at least. Some of it, anyway. You can play any game you want.
You smoke and stare at the pages.
It was easier before, you think. Still, it’s better to be the author.
It’s wonderful.
It’s only gotten worse.
Since Gordy went to Färland, it’s been worst of all. You think—I must have caused it. Who else? You’re punishing yourself for something—but what? What crime have I committed? I never intended harm. All I want is to break down the barriers keeping me from myself. Is it best to be the author? After all, to perfect oneself, one may deal only with oneself, and with oneself one may have plain dealings. Even with characters there can be a certain understanding. But to perfect interpretation…How do you overcome an audience? You can never trust those god-damned readers.
Perhaps the donut shop will have made a difference. It will have—it has to have.
Nothing else has.
There was the time when you still lived the lie, trapped without even knowing it. Back in there, on the other side of the door—it was so much easier then!
Yes, easier—but not better.
Back on the other side of the door, the day you dispatched your father, the day you unsealed the old cavern beneath the fountain, the day you descended those cold granite steps, found the doorway. So small, so ordinary, that door—how strange it must have appeared to old Isaac, that ancient ancestor, that closest cousin, separated farthest in time but nearest in spirit. You allowed yourself another cigarette, collecting yourself for the task. At last you had reached out and grasped the knob, and it had turned; the door gave easily and you passed out of the cavern into the next place. There was no flash of light, no luminous epiphany, no angels singing, only the act of stepping from one place into another. But wait—there had been something, you remember it now; there’d come, for a fraction of a moment, a sense of doubling and redoubling, a stabbing pain behind the eyes, a rush of too much information, as if an excess of water were passing too quickly through narrow pipes. The room held too much detail, a higher resolution than you had ever experienced or considered. Every mote of dust playing in the sun, every scuff upon the floor and the grain of the wood of the boards, the lack of border between one thing and another…all passed over you like an ocean wave, nearly capsizing your consciousness, and then receded, subsided.