by A. R. Moxon
It had gone perfectly. It had been a disaster. Returning to the artist’s side, you read the new pages through a crimson scrim of fury—after all that work, Gordy escaped. Of course. And of course he still managed to meet up with Bailey, Boyd, and Donk, and of course they still joined forces against Morris. The pages still ended the same way as always: the safe hurtling downward, about to strike, suspended through comic-book magic only inches above Morris’s head. But…now the former Juanita Neato, Jane Sim, was part of the story—and she’d brought the former Rupert Paddington along, the unmistakable Colonel Karl T. Krane, ringmaster of her circus. Two more submerged bubbles rising, unbidden, to the top. You hadn’t hesitated then; anger devoured deliberation and you were through the door and back into the interpretive mess before you understood what you intended.
*2 Over time, you had learned hard lessons about seeing the world through the interpretation of comics readers. Objects didn’t move from one place to another in a coherent way. A bird, for example, didn’t traverse the sky in a line; it would start in a single place, held perfectly still, perfectly clear, for a moment—then, a moment later, it would be discernible in another place, once again perfectly exact and fixed in its spot. Those two moments were not a problem; it was the in-between that struck at your sanity like a million microscopic strychnine-soaked knitting needles. The bird flew from exact moment to exact moment in all possible ways simultaneously, all the different ways all the different readers might imagine, an utterly crazy bird-spaghetti—the bird would fly straight as an arrow, and it would fly juddering and it would fly jerking, and it would bend this way, and that way, and it would swoop to the ground and soar back up in a parabola, performing a flick-tailed jaunty loop-the-loop—before all birds distilled themselves back down to the single bird, a few hundred feet farther on. Between one comics panel to the next, a profusion of madness, and on either side, oases of sane perception—and this was just one bird. Now imagine a flock. Imagine a crowd of people. Imagine all the movement in the world. A chain of moments frozen in exactitude and perfection, threaded to one another by progressions of infinite possibility, motile madnesses of infinite extrapolation. This was interpretation, back in the days before Färland.
After Färland, it got worse.
*3 But this was before Färland, and besides you’d grown practiced at traversing the interpretive stew, leaping within the work from one moment of stillness to another, moving quickly to the boy in the same time you “killed” him with the safe, near the very start, meandering down the street, about to join the narrative, to cock up the story forever. You materialized behind, grabbed Gordy by the hair and one arm and then you sped, leaping through time, across space, to the cavern, to the door—the kid struggling like a ferret, all wire-whip sinew. You cuffed him quiet and opened the door—I can’t kill you out of the story. I can’t keep you in a box. Now we do this. I can dump you anywhere at all in this world. You’ve no identity on the author side. You’ll never find your way back to the door.
Mister, please. Wait. Don’t. Don’t, mister. Please.
Too late for that, kid.
But when you came through the other side, you held air. The boy’s shouts cut off in mid-utterance. You cast about the apartment, searching, hoping Gordy had wrested free and was now hiding in a closet, in the shower, under the table…but you knew better. The kid hadn’t broken free; he’d disappeared. On the table another tall stack of pages waited. You couldn’t make yourself look; you set a giant red dictionary atop it to avoid the sight of it.
*4 When at last you came to the moment of surrender, you made yourself drunk enough to face it, and then removed the dictionary and read.
It worked, you’d thought. I’ve done it.
Gordy had gone missing from the story—completely gone. Wait…no. For some reason he still appears early in the story—Why would he still come into the story?—still escapes from the oubliette, for some reason…What was this?…goes behind the door—my door? You read quickly, then again, slower, then again, again, again—I don’t like that. I don’t like it. I don’t like not seeing what happens with Gordy behind the door. And, and, and, what the hell is this ticket, anyway? The ticket was just a thing you’d found in an inner pocket of one of your suits; you gave it to him so he could enter the circus, but…. it’s been transformed into some sort of object of power? And it’s a power like your power. Realizing you were no longer sodden enough to continue, you drank deeply from the bottle, then set about the important work of deciding none of it mattered.
After an hour, you decided it didn’t matter—you had what you wanted. Gordy’s gone from the book. He tunnels through the rock and disappears, never to be seen again. He never comes back.
Nor was this the only piece of good news. There was no longer a safe dangling over Morris’s head to conclude matters, either—and look at the final page. There, inch-deep, the cream that rose to the top, sat once again a hundred pages of your text-work, explanations to a recalcitrant readership, exacting descriptions of what it all means. The tiny typeface of your exegesis restored…you’d wept with relief. Here was the only part of the story that truly mattered. It was the real story, your true work. This pile would be the final stack of pages you’d ever generate. It was accomplished.
A month later the legal action began.
*5 You’d rushed back to the stack and flipped through in a panic. You found them all easily enough; you’d been so blind, so singularly focused upon Gordy’s absence, that you’d missed them. Infractions galore against intellectual property and common propriety, revised throughout the pages, the characters of other entities put to the most unauthorized uses imaginable. Mostly you’d find them in the background, inconspicuous but fully recognizable, their inclusion all the more egregious for their routinely unsavory crudeness, their aggressive pointlessness, their total lack of contribution to the plot—you couldn’t even argue satirical use. Here your troubles truly began. The back catalogue now offered itself up to the world’s legal mechanisms, enticingly actionable, a chum tray for attorneys, and every shark come to take a meaty bite out of you attracted the attention of three more. Amazed they’d never noticed before, but there’s no real statute of limitations here, so better late than never…the cowards wouldn’t even come themselves, sending instead unctuous functionaries. You couldn’t jab them with amnesia and hide them behind the door, they weren’t specific enough; these messengers, backed by sentient but non-tactile formless incorporation, bearing perfect blocks of text detailing your sins against them, listing their claims upon everything you owned. Court-ordered injunctions blockading profit from the sale of any of the remaining contested original artwork. The only way to make money now was through detestable appearances, signings, glad-handing—horrible work. You began dreaming of returning to the cavern side—I had it better when I was Morris. I could switch places back again. Or—or!—what if I took the ticket for myself?…Yes. Yes! My God, it’s so obvious!
But no. The ticket wouldn’t let you touch it. It defied you, tantalized, squirted from your grasp like a soapy sardine. And still more pages for your efforts. Within your heart, the notion took root and grew: I’m punishing myself for something…
In time, logic suggested a corrective. What had caused these woes? Gordy leaving. If so, then what might reverse them, but Gordy (as distasteful as this prospect might seem) returning? If the ending with the safe returned, you’d just have to find another way of dealing with it; that’s all. Anything to avoid this constant stream of papers served, this constant demand upon your depleting wealth and your dissipating reputation. You’d followed Gordy down the tunnel, found him in A Far Land, then returned and set yourself to the work. You gifted “Morris” the technology to travel a trans-Atlantic tunnel—his “Tunnel CAT,”—and then watched as he did the hard work of extraditing Gordy back to his original text.
*6 The bad news was, Gordy’s retur
n didn’t end your legal woes.
There was worse news. The last page of the revised stack no longer depicted the ending with the safe.
In its place, something horrible: Gordy, ticket-empowered, giving that ticket—that authorial fiat—back to “Morris.”
What, you wondered, might happen to “Morris,” if he received it? What might he realize? What might he remember? And what revenge might he desire?
You’d give anything, anything at all, to bring back the ending with the safe.
*7 The only thing that mattered anymore was preventing this terrible, impossible, unacceptable ending.
Now came the time of desperation and experiment, calculated but no less blind for the calculation, and all failed. The time wasted creating and maintaining Julius—My God, how many times did Julius fail? Stabbed, shot, fallen down a manhole. Since you made Julius up from scratch and interpolated him yourself, he never resisted your manipulations like the others, but so fragile he was, so inept. It was comical how not-up-to-the-task the bastard was. He kept dying and having to be saved, and really what’s the point, then, if ever and anon you’re required to pop back through the door, manufacture another set of revisions, just to read how he’s once again lost both the plot and his own life? And even this last time, after Julius finally got away from Morris alive, at the cost of Boyd’s complete banishment and Bailey’s broken body, still the final page showed Gordy giving Morris the ticket. You waited until morning to read the new stack, to see that even in success, even in success, Julius had failed. You lay on the floor and screamed.
*8 Once you’d finished screaming, you prepared yourself for the next visit. Devoted an entire week to writing exactly what you intended to say and how you intended to say it, the truths you intended to impart, the ones you intended to elide, then committed it to memory. You’d have to pretend to be other than you are, lean into their illusion that they and others exist, pretend you had their interests at heart. You’d need to go into the story, deeper into it, more fully integrated with it, than ever before. Still and ever your thoughts returned to Gordy’s unseen visit behind your door. The craving spread like disease, to know what was hidden from your vision—What did you learn, Gordy, when you grasped knob, turned, opened, entered? The stacks of revisions never show it, but you didn’t go to the same place I do. What did you see? Who empowered the ticket I gave you? And why? Maybe I can get you to tell, and I can listen. Ah! Now that would be a prize worth divulging secrets to receive.
When at last you felt yourself ready, you went in—Last chance, you bastards. Last chance. No more subtlety. I’m going in deeper than ever before. All the way inside your narrative, buried within it until I rise out of it to consume it. I’ll explain it all to you in plain language, everything you need to know; if that doesn’t do the trick, I’m done with you for good.
COMMAND
The confessional is dim and still, suffused with odors of cut wood and incense and lacquer. A padded bench rests against the back wall; you face the door as you sit. A hook-and-eye latch on the door provides privacy from intrusion, which calls up images—perhaps apt (given the parallel themes of unburdening), or even intentional (given Julius’s natural irreverence)—of a latrine. A lattice to the left suggests a priest listening on the other side, but the space is empty; nobody presides there but Father Ex, recording mutely and erasing each day, hearing and absolving, no presence to him save a slight mechanized whir, and even this is artifice; the booth long ago converted to digital. That distinct whir, added years ago by Father Julius, emits from a tiny speaker, an ersatz suggestion of analog equipment, produced (ironically enough) digitally, a suggested sense of the physical to preside over your repentance—creak of wheel, click of gear, recording dumbly, blindly, twenty-four hours’ worth, the tail end overwriting itself, second by second, absolving, expunging. Fitting I should remember it all here, Gordy thinks. Me and you, Father Ex, we erase ourselves every day.
It had been easy, in the end, as Landrude had suggested. He’d remembered, like lights switching on—not a single bulb filling a room, but rather a series of lights switching on in a massive space, each light a spotlight on one portion, but scattering illumination over the whole. In this way, the first few memories restored the rest. Remembering before Färland. Remembering cavern, circus, bird, spade, freaks and clowns and trapeze artists…oubliette and cavern and ticket and door and sanctuary…Jane, the acrobat, then the caretaker, still smooth-faced then, with the eyes that make you die—her girl, with a bird’s name. Remembering anger. Remembering running. Remembering the tunnel. Remembering even the nightly remembering. Remembering making yourself forget. Roughing in the details around the reasons until at last the final light goes on.
Someone is calling a familiar name, soft and persistent.
—Gordy.
—Gordy.
—Gordy.
Remembering: Of course. This is what happens each night: the command.
You call it a ticket. Give it to him. With each call, Gordy feels the order is imprinted anew in his flesh, written into his mind, wrapped tightly in amino helix and secreted into the smallest nests of his being. The naming of him is the naming of his command. With each call a scream tears from his deepest innards. The ticket must be given. It must. Unavoidable. Inexorable. Each night it has come, this furious squall of memory, the divine command to doom the world, to give all power to he who has proven himself least worthy of any. And then, relief—remembering the great hope of the coming wave. Gordy sees it looming, allows himself to believe it’s grown closer—soon it will come and wash Morris out of the world, him and all his poisonous tribe: his fountain and influence, gone, his empire of traffic in flesh, done, his pointillist reduction of philosophy, washed and destroyed, crushed beneath an everything of water, rightfully gone and rightfully forgotten.
The temptation is in Gordy to make himself forget. And he will; he does that every night, too. He’s located the seat of his power: green, rectangular, flat, shiny, still miraculously whole. He remembers where it’s hidden. As he is named, commanded, damned
—Gordy
and as he screams into the horror of it and the pain of resisting, the knowledge rises up—You can use it for another night, silence the command, forget, sink once more into the anesthesia of amnesia. You can’t long resist the command, you know you won’t long resist it, if Landrude is to be believed, you will give it…The soft and familiar and persistent naming comes with decreasing frequency now, but each time it arrives the intensity compounds. Either expunge its memory another night to live another day, or else obey; there exists no other option. And you could obey. That’s the great temptation. Lift the veil you’ve given yourself, announce your presence in the sky with fire, bring the bastard running for his prize and simply let him have it.
As his naming pulses into him once again
—Gordy
ripping another scream from his bowels through his lungs, out his ears, he considers it, letting himself imagine the peace: of submission, of letting Morris win. The villain wields it at last, triumphant, and then what will come will come, but at least for me, Gordy thinks, there will be peace…It comes to him—Landrude was right. Of course, I eventually give Morris the ticket. How could I do otherwise? How could anyone, let alone a poor weakling like myself, resist this storm forever?
You should end yourself, Gordy thinks. Unmake yourself, and it with you. Escape again, but not into your usual selective amnesia. Escape into not-being. Into never-having-been. I can order it and it’ll be done. Gone. Deeper than rest. More tranquil even than oblivion. More peaceful even than death. What, then, would save Morris from the coming wave? You should do it, Gordy thinks. You should do it. Take the peace for yourself but deny him the prize. I’ll do it. I will. I will.
As the minutes pass, Gordy finds he has not done it. It’s been long enough for him to dare hope he has outlasted the command when<
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—Gordy
a vision of the wave springs up before him again, endless, of volume unimaginable, poised to destroy his enemy but never reaching the terminus, while every cell thrums with the horrible command. Gordy screams resistance until his eyeballs cluster into a single globular entity, then clack together like billiard balls on either side of his head; parts of his body fall off and reassemble into distortions of form: his jaw to his lap, his tongue unfurled like a party favor, every hair electrified, spine contorted, he’s being unmade, reformed into something unruly and cartoonish, reconstituted, forced into caricatures of torment. When he arrives on the opposite shore of this universe of pain, he finds he has bloodied the back of his head against the wall.
Somebody is knocking timidly tap-tap-tap on the door. Julius, playing the mother hen. The next command may come in twenty minutes, or an hour, but when it comes, Gordy knows, he may damage himself badly, or give in at last to the command—Better to make yourself forget, put it off another day…but the end is coming soon. You may not have another day. If Landrude was right about everything else he’s likely right about that…Another knock at the door. Gordy ignores it—Julius can wait. The priest won’t listen to confession, but he needs to be told. And Father Ex is listening. Let Ex be your memory, and then you can forget.
Gordy speaks quickly, as calmly as he is able. He’s surprised to hear how calm he sounds to himself, how focused. Time constricts; the next command is coming: another naming, another torment, another temptation. And, after that, the next next command. And then the next. And, unless something is done, one of the next commands will be the command, the one that cannot be countermanded, the final edict, the end of the game. The important thing is to impart to Ex the most salient points, leaping across redundancies and immateriality. There is a ticket of power. A fountain of obliteration. Prisons of impossible cruelty. An edict to empower the imprisoner. A constraint against harming him. A promised wave to destroy him. But also, a terrible command to empower him. Gordy, impressed at how focused he is, how totally calm, how well he’s reminding himself on occasion to breathe, speaks in a voice low and desperate but calm and focused, and his voice arrives from a far land, serene and ragged and desperate and calm calm calmcalmcalm. Ticket. Fountain. Prisons. Edict. Constraint. Wave. Command. Landrude was right;*1 the game is ‘keep away.’ But the next command is coming. Julius still knocking at the door, and more insistent now, but Gordy is serene, a virtuoso of exposition, a maestro of summary, calm, focused, and weeping and the tap-tap-tap of the door soft but persistent just a goddamned minute, Julius, what could be more important than this, I wouldn’t have to be so calm if you would take one simple confession, I only need a moment to tell you the game is keep away and Command and Hide and Command and Seek and Command and at last it’s all out, saved for posterity provided we extract Father Ex’s memory in time, tap-tap-tap-tap settle down Julius there’s one thing left to say and then I can forget again for another day…The tapping on the door again. Good—time to give the priest his instructions, then go lie down, push delete on your gray matter for another day. Gordy opens the door, and blinks surprise—Julius has changed; he’s grotesquely shrunken, emaciated, his beard shaved, his eyes protruding, wearing thick glasses, a knit cap, and the bathrobe of a loony. The apparition smiles, his eyes watering, face crinkled into a road map of delight, and Gordy realizes his error.