by A. R. Moxon
To end our days blockaded in this grave)
With neither hope of death nor life to save
But to eternal prison now a slave
Encircled twenty strong in tinnéd cave
I know a trick which ought to make us brave
For there are stories hid within our stack
Thus I suggest, though we begin to rave
Perhaps each one of us, though knight or knave
Produce a tale which shall with words engrave
And play within our minds beneath these waves
For each of us, methinks, contains a tome”
He smiles. Bailey, look at the rhyme scheme. Wheatgrass Tea won’t know what hit them.
Who are you?
I’m Boyd. I’m your brother.
You’re not. Yale’s my brother, but he’s dead.
Yale’s not your brother, I am. I used to be.
You used to be what?
I used to be. I’m not anymore. Nevertheless, I can still write.
I don’t follow.
You should follow.
What should I follow?
Follow me. I’ll show you where to set your feet.
You’re not making sense.
For the first time, Boyd looks flustered. He shakes his hands in front of his face, stares at them as if he wishes he could see more eloquent answers written there. He says: There’s an author. And then there’s another. They’re fighting each other for it.
It?
Oh…everything. They’re writing, they’re rewriting. But one of them is doing it all wrong. But I’m out of it now; I’m not, but I was. I can see both threads, knit them together, write it down and choose what it means. You have to read it. I put it all into Father Ex for you. Father Julius made a way for me to send it. Read it; it’ll tell you. Follow what I give you to the letter, until it’s time to stop following, and you’ll find me again. You’ll need to run.
I can’t run, she explains with exaggerated patience. I’m hurt. The walls are no longer leaking. Either the plaster has fallen down completely or they have entered a new room without passing through a door. Now they are in a vast room, painted white, but covered from top to bottom with tiny individually numbered dots, a few of which, she can see, have been connected by some kid with a shaky hand.
You’ll have to run, he repeats. You’ll have to jump, and trust your luck.
Bailey shakes her head, exasperated. Running gives me bedsores. If I try to run, I’ll die.
But within her she can feel what’s happening now on the walls—millions of dots are being connected with straight precise lines. As the lines connect, they turn bright. As the bright lines form shapes they fall away, revealing windows into the inevitable final room, where the Thing lies. It is there, lying in the bed, but moving—yes, moving—it is slowly sitting up. A figure is standing in the doorway. She turns to Boyd, who knits faster and faster the faster he falls. What’s happening? she asks him.
The last of the dots connect, the last of the lines shines out bright. The final panel falls away. Now it is only her and Boyd and the figure at the door and the Thing in the bed, which is moving. Which is moving.
You’ll have to run, he says. Follow what you find out from Father Ex. Follow it to the letter. Find me again.
Bailey sits straight up in her bed. A shaking spectacled skeletal figure is standing in the doorway, holding a book and a thick sheaf of papers. “We have to get out of here,” he says, and she realizes he’s the missing loony Father Julius is looking for, the one they call Tennessee.
She waves her arms. “Hey—I can move.”
“OK. That’s good,” Tennessee says, glancing over his shoulder.
“I can move everything.”
“We have to get away.”
“What’s happened to me?” she gasps. “What’s happened? What’s—”
“Look, we have to run,” Tennessee says.
“Why are you here?”
Tennessee hands her the top paper from his stack, as if it offers some sort of explanation. “It came from Father Ex. I just came from the Neon. Gordy’s gone. Julius told me to come get you.” He lifts one sandaled foot up onto the hospital bed and looks at her as he expects her to comment on it. When she doesn’t, he continues, “Julius wants you to have these pages. But also, he wants us to scram out of here while we still can.”
Still marveling at her motile limbs, Bailey takes the page. It’s gibberish; something about a circus disappearing, and precision and eighty-seven days. It promises to tell how it happened—whatever “it” is. She turns the paper over, but there’s nothing more.
“What is this supposed to mean?”
Tennessee leaps in panicked impatience. “Read on the way. We have to go right now. It’s all fallen apart. There’s still bad trouble after me.”
GORDY READS: FOREHEAD
Here is part of what Gordy read from Julius’s diary, the day after the circus disappeared, the day he and the priest left Loony Island. Beams through the window lent brilliance to the particulate stew maundering through the air. Gordy barely breathed, scanning the pages, taking in the priest’s final secrets, all too aware which secrets of his own were even then being disclosed. Reading himself into the history of another, feeling the past become the present, he slipped from was and happened into is and happens, and feels, in the moment, he has the power to bring the world along with him.
* * *
—
My father was a man with far too delicate a mind. I should get this out of the way: He had what he believed to be an aquiline forehead. Most people with aquiline features tend toward noses, but my father had what he believed to be an aquiline forehead. What do I mean by that: “an aquiline forehead”? I haven’t the slightest clue. I wish I had. I had to reassemble all this from my memory, and from reading his diaries years later—if you want to call them “diaries.” He’d unfurled five rolls of single-ply toilet paper, filled them with tiny letters: meticulous, ledger-straight, perfectly legible. Then he’d rolled them back up onto their cardboard spools and stored them on a shelf behind the crockery, left them hidden and waiting like lost texts to be chanced upon by some passing shepherd boy. Who inevitably turned out to be me, making inventory of personal effects after my mother died. Capital letters. Blue ink. Not one rip. Think about that. I do. It’s some sort of testament to the futility of human diligence. On rolls of toilet paper I reconstructed my father. By the time I was born, he’d been shunned from polite society for his oddities, and deposed from control of the family business. I suspect the angle of his social decline increased following his decision to wear a hat furnished with side-mirrors—this to catch people laughing behind his back. My father’s lack of gainful employment had no effect on our lives. The family wealth, passed through the generations, had already grown from a sardine to a whale—an entity of its own, immune even to years of inept stewardship of my father. He spent his time in the basement, performing what he called “experiments.” These secretive projects, he alleged, were designed to restore him to social life, but in truth he performed scrimshaw upon his own sanity in a tiny, sparsely furnished room with mirrored walls, lit by candles. Not to say he was inactive. No, my father worked down there. My father built. He produced.
Not that I knew this then. A quiet child, I would wait, curious as a ferret, at the top of the basement stairs, as near as I dared come. I stared at the closed and locked oak door at the bottom, until one day my father, noticing me, sidled up, and whispered promises of a day when he would call upon me, and only me, to assist him. By the time he wandered away, my heart was filled with a child’s pride and loyalty; in that moment, I determined I would do anything for this man, anything at all.
Yet time did what time always does; it slid the gilt off the lily. The days passed into weeks shuffled into years, yet the door never
opened; my father ignored me as ever before. I began to wonder if it was a test. Wouldn’t a real son, faithful and obedient, walk boldly down the staircase, knock on the door with confidence, and offer up his service? As I carried on my daily vigil at the top of the stairs, was my father enduring a similar wait, growing increasingly impatient with his laggard son? But what if it was a test of the other sort? If I knocked, would my father instead be disappointed with my impatience? So the agonizing months dragged by.
Finally, on my twelfth birthday, I crept down the stairs.
mountain
In early days, you determined it was wise to stay on the author’s side of the door as much as possible. Before leaving the author unconscious on the clay, you’d seen the horrible thing that floated over his shoulder. A thing that enfolded dimensions. A tiny speck, it seemed, but the longer you stared at it, the larger you could perceive it to be. You had no idea where it came from, but you innately sensed the immense destructive power of it—and, you suspected, all his to command.
Wisest to keep away.
You stare at the pages. If only it could have stayed the way it had been at the start, before Gordy appeared and started cocking everything up.
It was so clear, this lesson you were giving yourself. As above, so below. Just as you had been required to perfect yourself before being allowed to ascend to this sphere; so here, on the author’s side, another perfection would be required, another portal identified, another sacrifice slain, if you wished to be permitted access from this sphere to the next…which implied a series of higher spheres. You’d never before imagined more than one ascension might be required, but you didn’t quail. The perfection required of you was obvious—the perfection of the story from which you’d ascended—and then the door would open for you to the next place.
Leaving the unconscious figure on the cavern side, returning to the author’s side, you’d become aware of your hunger, and a craving for cigarettes. Luckily, his mail had told you already that he lived in Knoxville. You knew Knoxville.
But it was Knoxville and it wasn’t. There was so much more stuff in it, so much finer detail, a specificity and yet a messiness and a muchness to the reality to which you hadn’t yet learned to acclimate yourself. And, as you passed out of your residential area and into a commercially zoned district, you could see the details were off, here and there. Familiar things in the wrong places, unfamiliar things in settings you thought you knew well. You stumbled and stared, aware you were making a spectacle of yourself. Wary of unwanted attention, you walked quickly, seeking the first likely convenience store, which you reached at the first major intersection. The proprietor was there alone; he had a potbelly and a walrus moustache. Got your usual, he said, fetching already the cigars from a box under the counter. You’d made a face and shaken your head, pointed (not yet daring to test similarity of voice) to a random brand—it didn’t matter which, you didn’t recognize any of the names. The man reached for the cigarettes, but he looked at you curiously, and you made vague apologetic motions in the direction of your throat, which he hoped would convey a sense of some temporary vocal inconvenience, paid, and retreated. Back at the house, the refrigerator held nothing more nourishing than condiments, but this paucity posed no mystery and no problem. An archeology of takeout discards in the trash, with plenty of menus on the counter advertising delivery. You found the phone and placed the order, then smoked yourself calm until the food arrived.
Satiated, you returned your attention to the study, beginning with the mementos on the wall—So. This author is some sort of famous in this place, which means that, in a way, so am I. This world knows my exploits. You’d found this confirmation unsurprising, but accepted it, the approval of an aesthete finding an expected thing in its proper location.
Except you weren’t famous, really, you remembered with mounting rage. You’d read the story already with the author unconscious on the floor; book after book, eyes casting over the pages, following the thread, like one scanning through someone else’s photo album for images of oneself. Nothing of you—it was all this Loony Island nonsense, Donk and Boyd and Bailey and loonies. You didn’t come in until the end.
You’d searched the archival cabinets, starting at the far end where a blue label, neatly hand-lettered, proclaimed ISSUE 1, Pg. 1. Removed the page, read it, returned it to its translucent pouch, and selected the next. Comic-book pages. You compared it to the published books on the shelf; a match. So: original art in the cabinets, the finished product on the shelf. Reading through his—your—contracts with publishers, and various correspondence with colleagues and fans, the picture took hold: monthly issues, drawn and written by you; each year’s worth of issue representing a story arc, each arc of twelve collected in trade paperback, and ten trades on the shelf. After that, there were the three most recent issues, as yet uncollected. and then the issue that hadn’t been completed yet, the one he’d been working on when you interrupted him, the final page of which was still tacked up to his drafting table.
You didn’t show up until this latest story line. As the fucking villain.
You searched on. In a drawer of the drafting table you found your prizes: a sheaf of notebooks and loose papers, scraps of sketches held on by paper clips, newspaper articles, all bound together in a large folder—the author’s notebook. Here you discovered the larger story sketched out, future threads begun, followed, lost, rediscovered. Teasing out the information you wanted proved difficult; the narrative was incomplete. The author maintained only a scattershot organization for his folder, or else it followed some logic you could not detect. As you found references to the “Morris” portion of the story, you extracted them from the notebook and set them on the table. When you’d made a full survey, you brought the pile—a small pile—back to the chair and sifted through. The picture got worse the more it came into focus, and worst of all when at the bottom of the drawer you discovered the thick binders of pages, and the horror of a title page.
LOVE’S FOUNTAIN
A Novel
By Landrude Markson
You read it deep into the night, a record of your earliest ancestor carrying forward to the tale of your own exploits. It wasn’t a novel. It was a failed novel, an abandoned novel, tailed off into discursion. You’d seen the author’s betrayal then, plain and clear. He was making of you nothing more than salvage, picking pieces of you for use, inserted into his other work, infinitely more puerile and therefore far more palatable to the readers, the proles, the philistines who wanted nothing more than their funnybooks. But at least the author would understand your superiority, would intuit that in you, at last, these so-called heroes of his had, at last, met an adversary that was their better.
When in the author’s notes you discovered the details of your planned demise, the rage took you. You screamed and howled and pounded the walls with baboon rage. Not just a demise—a grotesquerie of a death, an insult, a bit of slapstick, a joke.
The artist has them drop a safe on you. A fucking safe.
But you would fix it.
Thus the first game began, the game of “climb the mountain.” Perfect the sphere below so that you might rise to the one above. You thought of the artist—drugged with fountain water, drained of any knowledge of himself, dragged into his own work and abandoned there—and smiled, almost magnanimous. Ah, you murmured, you poor demoted bastard—I’ll gift you the old place. I’ll let you have the perfect lower world, before I climb higher. With whom, after all, would I replace you?
It would be simple. Your mind was ordered, perfected. You knew exactly how the world needed to be arranged. Now you simply had to do it.
There were problems.
First came the problem of drawing. You had presumed the artistic ability would now be yours, since it belonged to the one you’d replaced. Even now it’s perverse to think a lesser version of you should possess some skill you don’t. Your first task was to complete the next ins
tallment, and you thought to use that opportunity to integrate “Morris” into the story as seamlessly as possible, but your every line went askew. Once you’d rubbed the eraser through the paper, you tore it in anger from the easel. The second attempt proved more disastrous; there was no way to get the borders right. Even the concept of straight lines conspired against you—and time ran short. You had a deadline, responsibilities—so your management claimed. Finally, seized less by inspiration than panic, you tacked up a new blank sheet. Using a mint tin as a template, you traced in the center a small rectangle, and in the middle of the rectangle, using as reference a previously drawn panel, sketched a serviceable duplication of an opening eye. After long contemplation, you began to write. A deep breath—make him disappear to himself completely.
Below the panel, you painstakingly lettered:
When Morris emerges to himself again, he is on the hard clay floor. His head feels as though it has been stuffed with soft packing for transshipment. His mouth feels raw. He rises to his hands and knees, aware of the damage he has done to his clothing; luckily there are replacements in the car back at the rendezvous point. The flashlight is still on. Retrieving it, he looks around; the door remains closed. Nothing else has changed. Nothing has changed. He looks for a long time at the thing behind him, but nothing has changed, so this means nothing has changed. Here is the bag of tools, and nothing has changed. Here is the flashlight, and the batteries are still powering it and nothing has changed. Here are the stairs leading up into the light of day, and that is the same as well, and nothing has changed. Everything is fine, and everything is fine, and everything is fine and nothing has changed. He still has all his memories, he knows who he is and why he is here and what it is he intends to do, and the thing behind him is still there behind him, and so nothing has changed. The thing to remember is that nothing has changed, and for this reason it logically follows that nothing has changed.