by A. R. Moxon
But that was after. Immediately after Gordy departed, she, in the shock of transformation, not yet grown into acceptance, tried desperately to shave it—a futile exercise. The follicles oozed out more beard as soon as the hairs were sliced, the side shaved first grew out inches a minute, tickling as it went, restored to full length before she could lather the other side. There was a length the thing wanted to be: a preordained beard. The rest of the night she sat and waited for Morris, but Morris never returned. She, having caught her fish, no longer had further use, other than as another one of his earners here on a side street off a little-used tributary of the main strip of the Brasschaat red-light, where she presided as the strange and powerful queen.
Now look at him—Morris. He’s back, offering her a return to the madness, the chase for the ticket and the man who holds it, spade and bird, circus and train, leap and catch. To want to return to such a thing would be an unexpected act, like leaping through the air without the safety of a net, or embracing the femininity of a beard. She feels the pull of the circus, the trapeze…and of the ticket. It’s out there, she thinks. The ticket—even if you don’t trust this bastard to keep his word—is out there. And just because he hasn’t managed to find it doesn’t mean you might not succeed where he’s failed. Who better to cozen it from Gordy than you? If you can kill him with your eyes, you can rob him with your fingers. And—how strange you’ve never thought of it before—you yourself have never made an attempt on Morris’s mysterious door. Something is back there, and if even half of what Gordy said is true, it has more than a few answers.
“What you don’t seem to understand,” Jane tells Morris, “Is that I like it here.”
“I don’t believe it.” Listen to him. He watched her make a life in a room built off a prison cave, but he can’t imagine what she could find here in an ancient continental seaport town. She knows why—it’s because this is where he sends people for whom he has little use. Every time he finds a new crop to traffic, a new influx of the weaker strain arrives; fresh meat. Weaklings. Semblants. Too puny to hold their selves, he blanks them and turns them out, ships them here or farther inland to whore. How could she find any measure of value in a place that holds no value for him?
“As much as I can ‘like’ anywhere, I like it,” she says. “I’m valued here. The life I lead is strange, but it’s mine.”
“He feels sorry for what he did, you know. Gordy. He wants to heal you of your beard.”
Heal. Of course, it’s that. Polish the mirror so she can reflect him better. Even now Gordy would make himself the hero of her story, make of her the mechanism of his redemption. And Morris is the same, save only that he seeks no redemption, for he thinks he is redemption itself.
“You think you have such control, don’t you?”
“I’ve proved it.”
“But your feet are clay. And one of your legs.” With great pleasure, she sees how angry this makes him. He’s fidgeting on his crutch, worse than ever before. He’ll sit soon.
“Big talk, little Judas. But you still dance on my string.”
“At least now we understand each other.”
“So you’ll come?”
“And at least now you’re asking me.”
“But you will?” And, as he at last takes a seat, it finally sounds like a question.
“You’d bring Finch out. You’d let me see her.”
He smiles. “That’s…negotiable.”
It’s as if she sees, from a great height, her life spread before her like a river branching, rebranching, deltaing into the ocean, chasing away across the country into river stream creek tributary lake. Before her lies a great branch. She can remain here in this quiet estuary, beauty eroding, money saved up, alone with pen and paper and memories, a great madame in a little-considered city of a little-considered country, visited still by one or two old men who remember her greatness and think of her fondly, coming now to her as if returned to the battlefields and schoolhouses of their youths. This has a deep appeal: to rest, faded, old, a folded newspaper in an unopened drawer. The other path widens, quickens; it leads to the rapids and rocks, where chance will bounce and joust and dash and break.
The quiet depths of this Brasschaat estuary call to her. But out in those rapids, somewhere, caught beneath a rock, heart still fluttering, Finch lies—her little bird. And there is this, too: In those waters will be found other canoes alongside, paddled by the thoughtless or the careless or the wicked. In the rapids, much is left to chance—but not chance for her alone. Others are riding in that white water, among rock and current, little understanding how flimsy their pathetic little punts are. Rushing down the neck of those rapids, she may find a door, a fountain, a ticket, power…perhaps she can locate her lost bird, gather her up, heal her, bring her at last to somewhere quiet and possible. And if she cannot…well, then, at least there will be, one last time, the leap and the catch, the susurrations of the crowds—and, before drowning, she might at least hope to find a firm place to stand and tip the canoes of these foolish careless men, teach the art of swimming to those who have for so long floated, unaware of their ease. She can feel it now, currents drawing her in, the bobbing of a boat in waters growing slowly rougher, genuflecting up, down, like the sure flight of a bird, like the slow nodding of a beard.
GORDY READS: CATHEDRAL
I ran toward the city, from the future into the past—or so I imagined, watching declining numbers on mailboxes. 3042. Mansions gave way to domestic shaded streets gave way to pleasant sunbaked avenues. I felt the wind on my face. My bones and joints ached. My little-used muscles screamed, yet I willed myself on. 2665. Now I ran through another neighborhood, where the trees lay evenly spaced and did not cluster to protect from common sight the low houses made of brick and tall ones covered in siding. 2018. An assembly of boys playing wiffle ball in a corner lot watched me pass with curiosity as I shed cumbersome school-issue coat and tie without breaking stride and hurled them away. 1754. My chest burned and the stitch in my side agonized as the houses became smaller and shabbier. 1490. Dingy high-rise apartments loomed. Dirty houses with sagging porches and shaggy, mangy yards. Tall buildings separated by dank graffitied alleyways. 1128. Factories sequestered behind tall chain-link fences topped with concertina wire, abandoned construction sites ringed with plank fences. 712. My feet were molten. 476. My head pounded. Now the street spread out, wide and littered, nearly deserted. At every intersection a bureaucracy of crosswalks and streetlights attempted to block me, but I ran through WALK and DON’T WALK both the same, only marginally aware—my store of will was all but depleted—that I climbed a strange switchback up a mild hill. Streetlights now activated as I ran beneath them, and in my holy exhaustion I hallucinated them as glowing lonely star-fruit each hanging pendulous from the tip of a spindly sprouting finger of a subterranean giant. In the growing darkness, an irregularity of elevation between the regular plates of the sidewalk loomed unseen in a puddle of shadow, and when I, exhausted, tripped on it, I went impressively airborne, then landed hard on shoulder and head. My pain was immense, but my fatigue even greater. I had fallen beside an alleyway, and I fell asleep even as I pulled myself, wounds yet untended, into it.
When I woke hours later, the first thing I saw was the cathedral. It lay directly across the street from my hiding place. The stone face of the tower climbed before me, its summit capped with a steel cross. Huge doors rose, echoing the shape of the arches within which they were set, pointing up the tower toward a huge, round, stained-glass window, black now in the dimness. A green spire climbed in cascades from the far side, rising above even the tower.
Distracting me from this spectacle was the pain. Seven dwarves inside my skull swung ball-peen hammers as if their next seven meals depended upon finding some gem hidden behind my left eye. My cheek felt hot, as though branded; my legs were driftwood. My throat was a raw core of thirst, giving way to the empty howl of my belly. Standing
resulted in iron-band cramping of both legs and lower back, but after a few moments upright this torture subsided, and I managed to limp forward on tenderized feet. Wide stairs fronted the cathedral, leading to the huge iron doors. There’s no way, I thought as I began my climb, but I mounted the stairs with increasing speed, with muscles newly torn, yet beneath the pain newly strengthened. The first door I tried was locked, as expected, but the second one slid open weightless on oiled hinges. The interior lay dark and undefined, but air pushed out of it like the breath of a living thing, warm, and full of complicated and unfamiliar scents. I slipped into the gloom, which was cavernous and palely lit by candles set on stands at regular intervals. I found myself at the termination point of a long, carpeted aisle lined with symmetrical rows of identical benches. Though the nave’s vaulted ceilings were lost to darkness, walls stood on each side, lined with tall spears of dark glass. Ahead, far ahead, stretched the altar rail, and beyond the rail the altar, glowing as if lit from above. Eerie silence blanketed the basilica’s vastness.
I was alone there. So I believed.
stack
Now you—smoking your pack empty, working up the nerve to read—eyeball the latest revisions, the ones you just made in the donut shop, talking to Julius and his troublesome ward. You tell yourself: These will be better. They have to be. You still shudder to think of the first ones. What you found in that first stack wasn’t your triumph, and it wasn’t proof you could generate the book on the other side using simply your will freed from constraints of craft. Nothing of the kind.
Original artwork, yes. Crafted by your action beyond the door, yes. But nothing remained of the pages you’d written with Neato. You read the last year’s worth; in them Donk, Boyd, and Bailey remained alive—not so much brought back to life as never killed. And more was revised than just the issues you had authored and Neato had drawn. Bad enough if it were only that, but…as you flipped deeper down, numb-fingered, you found pages from earlier times, from all the way back, even a page from issue #1…and…filled with malign presentiments, you went to the cabinets to compare these pages to the original art: yes, exact matches. The published paperbacks were the same. The book had been utterly, historically, changed. And, even worse…
“Who the hell is this ‘Gordy?’ ” you’d asked the empty room.
On the night of the circus, it was Gordy who led the way and Julius who trailed. Julius smiled to see his young friend so enthusiastic, but still the priest kept wary. He’d tried to convince Gordy to avoid it, but there was no dissuading him; the kid admitted the danger was likely real, yet worth risking for the chance to see Jane again. “It’s just something I have to do,” Gordy said. Julius had switched his strategy, turning to Donk for help. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s got to be some kind of trap,” Julius told him. “Morris used this lady to catch Gordy before—and even if Gordy can’t remember it, he’s gotten in trouble with a circus very much like this one before, according to Tennessee.”
Donk had agreed, and appointed a retinue of loonies as bodyguards, which he decided to lead. They walked in formation around Gordy as they all made their way toward the circus, and Julius, who couldn’t help but worry about something, noted how easy the ring of bodyguards would make it for somebody who hadn’t yet learned the trick of seeing the flickering man to deduce his location. Finally, admonishing himself for perseverating over things that couldn’t be helped, he determined to put it out of his mind.
The circus wasn’t far; the event organizers put it in the Island’s largest empty area; the unaccountably large parking lot at Barney’s Suds & Bowling. Perhaps in the days when the factories boomed it had reached capacity, but that was long ago; now it lay empty, filled with grass and weeds, awaiting a use that most assumed would never come. Now it had found a purpose at last, however temporary. The blue and white stripes of the circus could be seen lifting above some of the lower buildings. Their entourage rounded the corner. From a distance, Julius and Gordy could see the round bouncing barker, could hear his call: COME on STEP right up SEE the see…and there it was, lights and amazing—the Circus of Bearded Love.
—Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change
STOPS
But Gordy’s story isn’t lining up—that’s the problem. Gordy can’t remember any of the story Tennessee told, which ended with Gordy escaping the Pigeon Forge dungeons. Perversely, Gordy remembers everything after that point. It’s as though Tennessee and Gordy comprise two halves of a single book. It would be reasonable to assume, wouldn’t it, that between the two halves, a single coherent narrative might be stitched? But, no, they seem written by different authors who never compared notes, who kept no story bible for continuity. Gordy’s never even heard of Pigeon Forge. Laws, laws, he don’t know nothing about no oubliettes, and no fountain, and no door, neither. For Gordy, there’s only a hard start with nothing before it: a pub in Brasschaat in early morning, a wad of cash, a note in his own hand, an empty cup. Imagine living like that. No knowledge of previous life—nothing. Julius knows the curiosity would drive him insane, but not so with Gordy. There’s the first day he can remember, followed by a career as a red-light drunk—Gordy’s stories are all vague, lurid, and boring—and then, following some momentous unpleasantness with his lady, but for no reason he can think of, he was kidnapped and brought here. “And that’s it,” Gordy says. “You’ve got the whole sad tale.”
“So Pigeon Forge might have come before?”
“Anything might have come before,” Gordy says blandly, infuriatingly incurious. Liberation has been good for him. He’s taken his place in the Neon Chapel, and while he’s considered oddly by the brothers and sisters, who still remember how he flickered for them in the early weeks, he’s well liked. Eyes bright, bounce in the gait. He’s even getting physically stronger after months of running—literally running—daily errands with Julius. The haunted, terrified, hollow-eyed kid Julius met in the Wales is not on display; he’s been replaced by a Gordy who’s disarmingly uncomplicated, almost light-hearted—during the day, that is.
At night, the screaming comes.
“It doesn’t bother you, not knowing what came before?”
“It used to, a little. I look forward now. It’s healthier.”
“What about God?”
“God?” Look at him. He’s already staring at the table. This is how you bring the scared kid back out of the blithe one. This is how you get the once-flickering man to flicker again.
“Back in the Wales, you told me God speaks to you.”
“Ah.”
“So? When he talks…what does…God…say?”
Is there the slightest of hesitations? Gordy says: “I don’t remember.”
“Is that why you scream at night?”
“You all tell me I scream. I don’t remember.”
“Seems likely, though. If it’s so bad.”
“Anything’s possible.”
It goes in circles like this forever if you force it. Julius can press him for details but he’ll slowly close off, become less and less friendly. Sentences become single words; words become grunts. Press far enough, he’ll start to blink out again, and Julius has to stop or risk losing him. Julius finds it infuriating—not even an itch you can’t scratch, but one you can’t even acknowledge as an itch. If only Tennessee were here this would be simpler. Then they could collaborate, the two of them, thread the one tale to the other, pull the weave tight to create a whole. There are other discrepancies beside the question of Pigeon Forge between Gordy’s tale and Tennessee’s. For example: According to Gordy there’s no ticket at all, and to his knowledge there never has been. Also, many of the characters from Tennessee’s telling are present in Gordy’s, but modified nearly out of recognition. The woman Jane, for example. In Gordy’s tale she isn’t an acrobat, and she has no daughter. And Morris is no scion of Appalachian wealth, he’s a mysterious Färland brothel owner. “And nobo
dy called him ‘Morris,’ anyway,” Gordy had told him. “I didn’t hear the name ‘Morris’ until he brought me back to Loony Island. Everyone in Brasschaat calls him ‘Mo’ Love.’ ”
“Your dad says he always went by ‘Morris,’ ” Julius remarked.
“Pretty strange you can tell me my past and name my father.”
“Stranger still that you can’t,” Julius had said, but gently. There’s so much Gordy doesn’t know about what he doesn’t know. They’ve had a lot of talk about the ticket—there’s never been a sense Gordy is withholding anything about his power or whatever it might be. It’s not a dangerous topic in the same way God is, nor a casually impenetrable one like his past; in fact, Gordy seems genuinely curious about it. Down in the panic room beneath Donk’s floorboards, there’d been plenty of time to debrief, and Gordy had not failed to disclose. By the light of a single bulb they reviewed experience and perspective. Yes, there are strange occurrences, inexplicable events. Yes, he’s sure he was the instigator of those events—in fact, when the inexplicable has happened (he mournfully agrees) they spring from him, from the explicit well of his desire, from the precise words of his mouth. The only exception is his partial visibility, which has, as far back as he can remember, been a perpetual state of his being.