by A. R. Moxon
When it had passed, the room in which you found yourself was recognizable as an artist’s studio, or perhaps an architect’s. In one corner of the room a drafting table presided, its surface lit comprehensively by two powerful lamps on adjustable stems. On the walls, a mob of framed art and keepsakes. Lower down, along the length of the far wall, a low huddle of heavy steel cabinets provided a surface for a desultory repository: stacks of paper, assorted action figures and other toys, cereal boxes, wine bottles, dirty dishes, bric-a-brac. Checking the cabinets, you found, maintained as precisely and specifically as the stacks atop were haphazard, an array of individual paper sleeves, each of which contained a single page of original art—comic book art, by the look of it, with Cat’s Crib scrawled in an upper corner along with an issue and page number. So: not an architect’s drafting table, but one belonging to an artist…of sorts. A comic-book artist. An author.
Your door—looking behind you—yes, it was still there, half-open and you could see the cavern beyond. Good. You judged it safe to reconnoiter further.
The size and appointment of the house testified to the author’s success, and a brief investigation in the kitchen turned up recent mail, which provided his name: Landrude Markson, of Knoxville TN. Returning to the studio, you reviewed the trays holding the archives of the author’s work, the walls festooned with praise and awards, the shelves holding the collected published work to date in nine evenly sized volumes. You smoked and read, recognizing the feel of the world therein, but not your part of it. Nothing of Pigeon Forge, only some silly place, a parody of a city, some garish approximation of a slum called “Loony Island.” A ridiculous story. Daniel “Donk” Donkmien? Bailey and Boyd Ligneclaire? Unrecognizable characters, in an unrecognizable place, with adventures as meaningless as they were puerile. Fools yowling absurd catchphrases. You read faster, impatient to finally find yourself in the narrative—Yes, here you are at last. The most recent pages taking the form of a flashback; the history in Tennessee of the Love clan, as explained to Donk, Boyd, and Bailey by a skittery, jittery, stammering inmate of the nearby mental institute, once a well-spoken college professor, now an escapee from your oubliettes. In the most recent pages the inmate described your recent encounter with your father, specific enough to give you a sense of nausea, or vertigo—Your recent past on a page, a doubling not of vision, but of memory.
You hadn’t yet been the author, you still inhabited the lie, your life as a mere character; you hadn’t yet learned anything else about this “Landrude”—but in that moment you knew, with unassailable certainty, this was your great enemy. Whatever place this was you’d found behind the door, whatever power allowed the author to maintain ownership of it, you immediately claimed them as your own rightful property—yours, and stolen from you. This author, who had wrongfully claimed both place and position, would need the correction of an oubliette.
You prepared to read on, but were interrupted by the sound of an arrival—key in door. You went slow and cautious, but ready, your hand in your inner jacket. You had seen him then—the author. Enemy. Creator. An older fellow with a broad lined face and more salt than pepper in his mane. Powder blue suit. He had some artwork in his hand and was studying it as if it confused him.
So, you said in a loud clear voice, you’re the one.
The author leapt, startled, almost comically so. You regarded each other for a while.
You look just like me, he said at last. This surprised you, but you’d learned not to let surprise tell on your face. Yes, you’d said. I warrant on the other side, you’ll look just like me. Then you said: Better make yourself ready, and started for him and he was terrified then and he said wait and he said wait wait wait, just like your father had said earlier, but you hadn’t waited for your father nor would you wait for him and once you’d put the fountain water in him you watched the terror in his face go to nothing at all.
Plenty of time now to deal with him at leisure. You left him unconscious on the floor and explored the residence. Making use of the bathroom, you observed the mirror and saw without surprise that the author had spoken truly. In this place you were an older fellow, with a broad lined face and more salt than pepper in his mane. To your reflection you whispered: You look just like me. Unsurprising—given the strange nature of this place, this lack of demarcation—that you wouldn’t have the same appearance on this side of the door as on the other…but why this specific appearance? Then it came to you: You haven’t changed. This is what you look like on this side of the door. You didn’t change to look like him. He looks like you. He is the lesser; you are the greater. It was your lesson to yourself of your rightful place, of you calling yourself to the higher level. Proof of your singularity.
When you returned to the spot in the book and took up reading, you quickly found yourself. But…flipping from page to page…this was nonsense. Offensive. He’s made some sort of mole-cat of you, tunneling to prisons and taking control of the prisoners, your plot slowly uncovered by the intrepid heroes, whose clear narrative task is the defeat and expulsion from Loony Island of this new threat, this monster, this…
I’m the villain? you snarled at the author’s unconscious form. I’m the…I’m…
You mastered the urge to kick the prone figure. Instead you glared—No. I won’t smash your skull in. Wouldn’t do to act too villainous, now, would it? You fool. No wonder you’re a failed strain. Just wait; you’ll see what I can do.
It’s a sign of how much you’ve grown that you can now admit; it was fear that held you back. No—not fear, but prudence. His existence suggested strange entanglements best approached cautiously. You didn’t know what might happen if he died.
In truth, you still don’t.
Later, you found his notebook, and saw his plans for your upcoming dispatch, and your rage overpowered you—in the end, you drop a fucking safe on me?—but by then, you’d already done what you did. Dragged him through the door into the side you’d left behind, back into the cavern, flopped him like a spud upon the clay. Flipped him over and studied the face. Yes, it was as you suspected. You look just like me, you murmured to the prone abducted figure. You look like me if I will it, and so I do so will, and so you obey.
It all made so much sense to you. This was the lesson to yourself you’d been awaiting: your ascension to a higher plane, the replacement of a failed vessel with one more suitable, the replacement of a perverse and misguided understanding with one more complete and fitting. On the edges of your vision you detected a strange phenomenon; from one instant to the next, you seemed to be, variously, in a closet the size of a mine shaft, in a room the size of a kitchen, in a cavern the size of a cathedral, and the size of a stadium, and the size of a planet. Your first hints of those readers and their endless variations of interpretation. You shook yourself—it didn’t matter—and returned your attention to the figure on the cave floor. Write me as a villain? A minor villain? No matter; I’ll correct all wrong impressions. I’ll make your readers see the world true, and I’ll make you feel it. You be me for a while. Try my struggle for perfection and see how it suits you. And I can do it—I hold the controls. What I say is will be. I’m the author. You’re the villain. Have my memories. Feel my pain. Know my struggle. It’s not a usurpation. It’s claiming what’s mine by right.
Returning to his—your—house, you closed the door behind you, leaving the author, now Morris, behind forever, forever—or so you thought.
You went to his—your—closet, saw the seven identical hanging suits of powder blue, tailor-made to fit the author.
They fit perfectly.
It’s better to be the author.
You sit and smoke and stare at the pages. These revisions. What’s making them? Soon, you know, you must read them—and what horrors will you discover this time? Sometimes there’s not much, but sometimes…
Last time, for example.
Last time, healing Julius, Boyd completely disappe
ared.
Three months following the great riot, the circus came to Loony Island.
This was strange in itself. Folks buzzed up and down Transept. What mad fool would bring a circus—a circus—to Loony Island?
That wasn’t the strangest part. The strangest part was this: Once it had arrived, before the show could even begin, it disappeared entirely. One moment it was there, the next, all in a flash, it was gone. Not a sign left of it, not a tent, not a rope, not a single ball off a clown’s blouse, not a scrap of straw. This came as quite a shock to almost everyone, but there was something about this mysterious disappearance that made shock difficult to express; some self-negating quality that made the vanishing not an event within the stories of their lives, but rather a void—something remembered, but impossible to countenance, gone so fast it immediately became difficult to credit that it had ever existed; though remembered by the mind, some instinct beneath the mind, which the more spiritual nature might perhaps describe as the soul, questioned whether it was something taboo, something never to mention, something to treat as if it had ever been there. The circusgoers were disappointed, but there was no hint of a riot over tickets unrefunded. They dispersed quickly, as if suspecting the disappearance was more a reversion to proper form, as if such fancies as a circus had never been for such people as they.
Additionally, there were in the Island at least two direct witnesses to the event who were quickly provided with even greater distractions. Before they’d had time to process what they’d seen, Father Julius and Gordy had been given much deeper things to think about than a vanished circus.
Roughly three months after the Loony Riot. Nearly ninety days. Eighty-seven days, to be precise. Sometimes ambiguity is important. Sometimes nothing will do but precision.
Here’s what happened.
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
ATTIC
These days, the dreams are easier than the waking. In waking, there is only the hospital room, and Nettles, and the occasional nurse, and visitors. In dreams, Bailey wanders the Attic.
It begins in the same place each time. Bailey opens her eyes to find she has somehow returned after long absence to the home of her childhood. Awake in the dim of dawn, risen as usual before her brother from their communal huddle on the mattress on the floor in the corner. So strange, she thinks, to have forgotten that she remains young and whole, and that she has a brother. (His name is…Boy? What an odd name.) Every time she finds herself in this place, she thinks remember this when you wake but she keeps forgetting. If she could just remember after she wakes back up, she’d be so much happier. Why does she forget? She’ll be sure to remember this time.
Sunrise sneaks between buildings and vertical blinds to paint long shadows on the wall. Everything the sun illuminates is as she remembers it. Here on the baseboard, she sees a boot-scuff, into whose obscure shape she as a child once imagined the silhouette of a woman in flight. Here is a chunk of wood splintered out of the doorframe between the living room (where their mattress lies) and the sick darkness of the sole bedroom. Behind the blinds hangs a tiny unadorned concrete balcony; she can open the glass sliding door and go sit there if she wants. She is about to do this when she notices another door beside the slider.
So strange, to have lived so many years in this tiny two-room Domino City apartment and never noticed a door there. It’s a normal door. Nothing unusual about it. But…how is it she’s never opened it before? Never even thought about it? She opens it now, revealing rough wooden steps leading up to a landing. The landing appears to open, on the right hand, upon a brightly lit area, which, though yet out of sight, gives the impression of spaciousness.
Of course, Bailey thinks—it’s the Attic.
Naturally she remembers the Attic. How could she forget it, just because she’s never been there before? So strange, to have had this Attic all along and never visited.
When she reaches the top of the stairs she catches her breath; the Attic is vast. Roof beams high on the wall on one side curve like ribs down to meet the gleaming wooden floor. At intervals between the beams, dormer windows set into the roof let in bright shafts of day—the sun must be directly above—in which motes dance and play and chase one another. The Attic is filled with tables and cabinets and trunks and boxes. Upon the tables she finds marvelous assortments: There are cages, some with real birds, some holding what appear to be intricately crafted avian robots whose every movement and twirrup perfectly mimics life; there are tools, antique but well-kept; there are toys, made of wood and made of tin—drummers, animals, a working miniature carousel; there is a table filled with variegated vases, another bristling with timepieces, another stacked with Russian nesting dolls, all un-nested and arranged beside one another with identical stupid hopeful expressions; there’s still another with books in impossible stacks climbing halfway to the ceiling; another and yet another and yet still another, table and table and table piled, and looming here and there among them, resting on the floor, are shapes covered in canvas, some of which might be bicycles, some of which might be wardrobes.
Though they’re familiar, she’s never seen these things before. Why did she bring them up here? Why then did she forget them? She drifts slowly among them, until she reaches the far end. Here she discovers another door, which she opens to find three sets of flagstone stairways, the middle of which leads upward and straight ahead. The ones on either side lead downward and curve away. She’s never been here, and is delighted to be back again. Of course—this place! She chooses the upward staircase, which leads to a deep dungeon, far underground, windowless and well-lit by the sun. Massive gray brick walls make up the corridor, which seems to have no termination; on either side are doors made of bars, like those found in a prison cell. On a whim she opens one and sees there is a garden within. No, not a garden—a greenhouse. An arboretum. It’s the greenhouse as it could have been, before Yale found it abandoned. It is filled with banana and frangipani trees, and with monkeys and butterflies. The monkeys play and chatter and try without success to catch the butterflies. They eat the bananas and throw them into the broad-leafed foliage underneath and pick at each other’s fur for snacks. Bailey moves beneath the canopy on a pebbled path. Occasionally she passes an abandoned sculpture pushing up through the undergrowth. Above, she can see the greenhouse roof, and through it the sky set against the cityscape’s purple and aquamarine arabesque steeples crowding far above, like the legs of a concubine’s pantaloons, like the frosted tops of weightless cupcakes—if only, Bailey thinks, we could have found the greenhouse when it was still like this. When it was whole and safe, on the ground floor, in some other city.
In time she comes upon the great tree in the arboretum’s center. Embedded in its trunk is a door, which opens onto a hall of paintings. Here is a field of rippling wheat, a house on one side of the horizon, a jury of storm clouds congregated on the other. Here is a girl floating on her back in a stream, viewed between the overarching boughs of trees, her sun hat undisturbed. Here is a desert. Here is an ocean. Here is a wedding party. Here is a canyon. Here are the rooftops of Budapest at dawn. Here is a table, and upon the table a vase, and in the vase a profusion of flowers, and on a flower, an aphid. Here is an interconnected series of circles of various colors. Here are black stripes on white canvas. Here is a bullfight. Here are peasants gathered around a table. Here is a woman, rendered in sharp geometric shapes, perched on the edge of a bathtub. Here is a man seated in a confessional, unaware of the emptiness on the other side; the priest has abdicated. Here is a meadow suggested entirely by particolored points of paint.
Finally, she comes to a piece she does not want to leave. Viewed from an alleyway, a courtyard within a great city of domed buildings. The sky is lavender, festooned with blue clouds. The painting is rendered in sure lines, thin and even and precise, demarcating each object one from the other. Each cobblestone is a distinct thing, each brick. The colors are also cleanly
separated, one from another, but vivid, creating an effect simultaneously real and hallucinatory. The picture’s frame is long and wide as a doorway, hung close to the floor. It almost seems you could step into it. Bailey steps into it, and, upon examining herself, discovers she has now taken on the same style as the work into which she has entered. She thinks: Now I remember. All boundaries are permeable.
She never sees anyone else in the Attic; it is hers, and she walks in it alone. Never the same journey twice—though rooms sometimes repeat—but it always ends in the same place: a small room, dominated by a bed. In the corner a woman sits, holding a book. Beside the bed, machines stand guard, emitting beeps at intervals to substantiate their alertness. Lying in the bed is a thing. It is gaunt and nearly hairless, this thing, its eyes sunk deep into its skull, lids closed. This is not the room she wanted. Bailey turns to leave, but to her horror she has somehow found the room with no doors, and the thing is drawing her closer. It lies motionless, yet it emits malign gravity. She scrambles to resist, but her legs will not move, tries to grab hold of something—anything—to avoid the pull, but her arms remain by her sides. (Of course—she can’t move. How strange to have forgotten it.) She is as helpless and boneless as a rag doll as it pulls her. It is emitting an odd mechanical keening. She is near now, near. It turns her to face it, and she sees it is a head. Either it has grown or she has shrunk as she is drawn into it. She can see the death-skull contours of it, the tiny hairs growing from its scalp. Its eyes are closed. She is small now and sinking down toward the Thing, slowly, slowly. Then, just as Bailey thinks she will land on the lid, the eye opens and it is black. It is black and she is sinking toward it. She is sinking and it is black and it is all around her now and Bailey is in the blackness and thinks so there was a door in this room, after all