by A. R. Moxon
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best available path, in his slow and deliberate way: down a foothill, along a ridge of trees, down a long two-lane road; a sign declares PIGEON FORGE 3 MILES. Sterling Shirker follows it. Stumbles down the main strip in early morning light. Finds a bench and sits himself down, tired down to his liver and kidneys, not knowing whether to laugh or cry—You’ve only just realized, old man, how forehead-slapping stupid you are. You haven’t got the slightest idea where this damn fountain is. Gordy found it, sure, but they’d captured you and brought you to it blindfolded.
Just stay here I guess, Sterling thinks, it’s as good a place as any other. Either they’ll pick me up or they won’t.
But you know how to get them to take you there.
The old man groans. “Yes sir,” he says. “Yes, I suppose I do know.” Sterling reaches into his satchel, draws out the toothpaste-striped robe of a Wales loony.
He’s wearing it when the morning crowds begin to arrive. Sterling stands on the bench, starts to speak in a loud voice, proclaiming it all, the old litany: fountain and ticket, bird and spade and cavern and door and oubliette by the row.
It doesn’t take long.
They come in the guise of police, but Sterling never doubts he’s going beneath the fountain, and there it is again: the door at the top of the ledge, the long slope opening up onto the cavern, the high wall of oubliettes. He’s held there at swordpoint until Morris arrives. The two of them stare at each other, two old beat up tom-raccoons negotiating over a trashcan lid. Morris looks a mess. His eyes are a bloodshot wonder. He glances over his shoulder unceasingly, almost manically.
“So you’ve returned to me,” Morris says. “Did you decide you deserved your punishment and come back to get it, or have you gone the rest of the way crazy?”
“Oh, I’ve been crazy a long time,” Sterling answers, truthfully enough. “Gone so crazy I looped back round again to sane a couple times. I guess I got tired of talking crazy and wanted to start doing crazy.”
That puts an atmosphere in the room. Morris’s lieutenants’ hands creep toward sword pommels. They think you’re strapped with a bomb or gun, Sterling realizes, and laughs. He can’t help it; it just bursts from him.
“And what crazy thing are you planning to do?” Morris asks, real quiet and real soft.
“There was a woman used to live here,” Sterling says. “She took care of the people in your prison. You let her do that, so I assume you saw some value in it once upon a time.”
It’s Morris’s turn to laugh. “You’ve…what? Come to apply for her job?”
Sterling salutes, bathrobe arm flapping. “No, captain, no sir. I’m not asking permission to do it; nothing like that. I’m just going to do it until somebody stops me.”
In the moments that follow, Sterling has no idea what Morris might be thinking, but under that owlish gaze, he feels as if he’s being watched and measured by something mechanical and precise. At the end of this scrutiny, Morris looks at his guards and barks: “Well? Show him to his room.” It’s a nice enough place, despite being at the far corner of a prison cavern. Bedroom. Living room. Kitchenette. The only real complaint I can think of, he thinks, is that every inch of the walls is covered in writing: I did not run away with the circus, the circus ran away with me.
“Wondering if I might ask for some paint,” Sterling says, without much hope of
* * *
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a meaningful role. Under the fountain in Pigeon Forge, caring for prisoners. It was tricky for the first few weeks, but now he’s got the hang of it.
“What about Biscuit Trudy?” Nettles asked, as much for distraction from her present task as out of curiosity. The meat had arrived as it did every week. She’d woken with no intention of doing anything other than tend her garden and read, like every other day since Julius had apparently become…but today, the deep freeze couldn’t hold any more, and Nettles simply couldn’t countenance the waste. Nothing left to do but to try her best; haul the heavy steamers out to the front yard and get started. Nettles could see it was going to be an absolute bitch, and no Brother Brock to man the tongs—and even if you figure that one out, who’s going to make his secret sauce? Nettles cursed and muttered. You wanted me to find a hopelessness, Jules? Here’s a hopelessness: the Neons without its members.
Biscuit Trudy’s made her way to Florida.
“And what’s she doing there?”
What she’s always done. Only she’s doing it there.
“And where’s Jack?”
Still heading west. Walking. His preference, obviously.
“Be better if he headed back east,” Nettles snarled, wrestling the first steamer onto the lawn. “I’m going to need the recipe for his sauce in about an hour.”
I’ll ask him, the Sandals Julius said.
“I…what?”
We’re all together now. I’ll ask him for
* * *
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his perfect and complete order. As night falls, the Coyote finds beauty in the metropolis. The precise lines of the skyscrapers, arranged in regiments like sentinels of order and justice, assure him of human intentionality and regulation. Ferries patrol the harbor, displaying to their cargo of tourists and commuters the ranks of skyscrapers set against the dusk autumn sky—their unbending majesty, their testament to the ingenuity of engineering, to technical exactitude, to imagination and toil, to their own illusions of permanence. He’s surprised how easy it’s been, maintaining order in a territory so glutted with humanity, but perhaps, he muses, this should not be surprising; these people have been optimized for order. They know each train route, they’ve memorized the times of arrival and departure, they have an almost genetic sense of the grid of streets, and their own specific rules of engagement with body and machine. Here, in the metropolis, they’ve even shaped and ordered the horizon.
The Coyote rests in his perfect control.
He need only think of a skill apt to his need to possess it; each day he gifts himself with new abilities. At first, he swooped down from the air to stop a crime in its moment of execution, but this soon proved tedious—far more efficient to hover above it all at a remove, raining justice down upon each perpetrator. His laser eyes produce most of the desired effects in the pettier cases: sudden loss of a hand or head or leg for the purse-snatcher, the carjacker, the rapist. His ice-breath freezes the arsonist solid, freezes even the stream of gas leading from floor to red plastic jerrycan. His hearing can catch the quieter thefts—graft, corruption, vice, bribery—in their various inceptions, and he whispers warnings with his super-targeted whispering power, fomenting a paranoia in the white-collared overworld, aborting misappropriation, terminating usury, strangling fraud in the crib of intention. Occasionally, he descends from the clouds to put the fear of himself into some still-saucy kingpin, pimp, or drug lord, some uncowed banker, financier, or broker, who still believes him nothing but rumor. They know him well by now, but soon they will know him better. They recognize the stylized crimson C he wears on his powerful chest and on his cape, the diamond amulet he’s removed from the chain and embedded into his forehead. In the minds of the evildoers awareness of him has grown. They whisper about him now: the Coyote. With his super-hearing, he hears this. He is everywhere, and everything. He cannot be evaded, nor bought, nor is he neutered by legal tricks. Pleading doesn’t work. There remains only one successful strategy, they think, which is to wait for the Coyote to go away. How amusing—compliance isn’t even considered. Poor fools. It’s so simple, really it is. Obey. Be quiet. Harm none. At times, briefly, he feels sorry for them, little big men still clinging to their filthy engines of misery—foolish like children, covering their eyes, thinking you can’t see them if they can’t see you; foolish like babies crying about the filth they’ve created for themselves to lie in; foolish like dogs ashamed of an infraction they barely understand a
nd remember only vaguely—almost innocent in their misunderstanding of how the world has already changed. Life won’t go on as it has. That was the old order. Man’s inhumanity can breed itself out, now that he is here to teach them justice.
But now the hour has come, and there is a weekly promise to be kept. There is one in particular—Morris—who requires a more attentive justice, whose worst impulses require a slower extermination. Today you’ll take his feet, replace them with something new and inappropriate. This will seem to him a punishment, but the day will come, when you have taken every original part of him, when you will begin to replace even the replacements, exchanging them again with something yet worse, and then he will long for the return of the lesser torment. Over the years you will make an example of him to pierce the dullest awareness—the suffering due to any who ever again dare cause the suffering of another being.
Over the city rolls a reverberating cannonade of exploding air, a flash like lightning, and then the Coyote is gone—miles away already, flying, faster than sound, fast almost as thought, over the mountains toward
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Pigeon Forge that morning, the train having stopped in Knoxville the previous night. She’d come in with the rest of the circus people—Jane the Flying Bearded Lady. Later she came to the cavern to visit her daughter’s creche, saw you at work on the scaffold. No, Sterling thinks: not the scaffold. Her scaffold. After all this time, for her to see the oubliettes have another caretaker. The confusion on her hirsute face, to see you, vaguely familiar from years before, fulfilling her old office, living in her suite. You’d taken the scaffold downward and she’d leaned in, smiled as if you were an old chum, gone in for a hug. “I’m here to tip canoes,” she whispered. “Get me behind that door if you can.” There hadn’t been time for more talk; she’d been well-guarded—but not as well-guarded as Morris’s door. How, wonders Sterling, does she expect you to help her do that?
Now they’ve taken the girl Finch out of her shelf and gotten her presentable to meet her mother. Finch waits patiently until it’s time for her to climb the stairs, take her turn out in the sun beside the fountain, keep a promised appointment with a mother she can’t remember. Sterling, not knowing what else to do, has brought her back to his apartment, which used to be her apartment, of course. The place smells of fresh paint, a pleasant eggshell matte, which Sterling laid on himself over the course of his first day, rolling it over I did not run away with the circus and the circus ran away with me, until he came to the last uncovered iteration, at the center of one wall, which he couldn’t bring himself to paint over. She’s reached her full growth down there in the awful bright, has Finch. She doesn’t remember that time either, for the moment they took her out screaming they dosed her again with the fountain water. Now she’s friendly, alert, and completely blank. Sterling, not knowing what else to do, serves her tea, and tells her of his time on Loony Island. “They cut all the loonies loose,” he explains. “They never told us why. And if they told any of the loonies why, no loony ever told me. Which wouldn’t be
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unbearable, Jane thinks. It’s absolutely unbearable.
The girl with no memory sits on a bench, facing the turtle’s stone eyes and yawning mouth. From the turtle’s massive back the fountain’s bleached, cherubencrusted extremity launches, rising above white basin and black water. The turtle screams stone anguish against the unfairness of its burden. The girl is placid, indifferent, as if she were waiting for a bus.
At a slight remove stand two tiny men dressed all in red. On the topmost of the stairs leading into the cavern beneath the fountain stands the new caretaker—a skinny, skittery-looking man wearing a bathrobe and pajamas and sandals. Jane sits beside her girl, occasionally touching her lightly upon her nose with a single finger. “Finch,” she says between sobs, “Finch. Finch.” But it isn’t Finch—that’s the cruelty. It’s not her. Finch is gone. This is the girl with no memory. “I’m sorry,” says the girl, presently. “I don’t know a ‘Finch.’ Is that my name? I don’t remember.” Jane thinks of the hours Finch spent, reading books, filling her life with stories, the years they spent together making their own story—all washed out of her now. The girl turns to the bearded lady. “It’s funny, don’t you know? I don’t remember anything at all before this. But I get the sense this is a magical place. So quiet. So still. Have I been here before?”
No prisoner save Finch has this routine. Each day they disinter her from her oubliette for her communion of obliterating water, the cleansing of her memory. Each day she is wiped fresh. Morris told Jane this on the return trip from Brasschaat. To him, it is a mercy. “You know better than I, dear,” he’d said. “What they’re like down there. You wouldn’t want to meet her if she were like that.” Each day, she is tortured with internment in the oubliette, but without the memory of the previous days, months, years preceding it. Each day begins anew without the horrific realization. Morris credits this to himself as an absolution, as he does these visits, which comprise the main part of her negotiated payment in exchange for compliance—and, to her surprise, Morris has not yet reneged. He gave her three visits, one a day, before she headed out with the circus for the dance and the stage and the leap and the catch. Yesterday was the fourth. Today makes a fifth. After the Assizement will come a final visit, and then she will go back on the road with the circus once more. She feels the coming wrench of departure, a different grief than the grief of presence.
“Yes,” Jane murmurs. “You’ve been here before.”
The girl takes this fact in without appearing to ascribe any value to it. “What a lovely beard you have. Did you braid it yourself?”
“You did,” Jane says. “Yesterday. I taught you how.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I know, I know, I know, I know.”
“Will you teach me again today?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you crying?” Finch asks, but they’re interrupted by Morris, risen from his morning meditations below ground.
“We’re close now,” he says. He’s stubbornly made his way up the steps unassisted, crutches shoved into armpits, eyes propped wide, and the…other alteration. “These are all lessons of my coming ascendance.”
Jane glares at him, then away. From what source does his unaccountable belief in himself spring? She’s heard the whisperings. Yesterday the Coyote found Morris in his home, turned his feet into something difficult to look at. The Andrews share a glance whose significance Jane can read: blossoming apostasy of two of Morris’s truest believers, for if this can happen—if this can be done to him—if these outrages can be permitted to be committed against him…then what is he, really? Explanations for past setbacks no longer align with the plumbline of received doctrine; when this sort of thing happens, future setbacks seem increasingly likely. It’s a question of worthiness, along lines of proof Morris himself has established within their orthodoxy. Now they’re unsure of his inevitability, unsure of his promised coming apotheosis. It seems everybody except Morris is meant for power. But Morris persists: “Possession of power is working its way toward us. Possession running from the hands of those farthest from me to the hands of those closest. Soon it will be in my hands.”
“That poor man,” says the girl.
“That’s no ‘poor man,’ ” Jane says.
“Who is he?”
“He’s the man who keeps you in prison.”
“Am I in prison?” asks the girl. She wonders this with the same polite interest as she wonders anything else.
“Yes, dear. You are.”
“Will I get out?”
As soon as I can manage, Jane thinks. Her fingers curl around those of her daughter and she squeezes—As soon as I can manage. And if I can’t manage, I’ll try to tip it all over.
“Yes, dear. You will get out,” Morris says, clumbering over the gras
s. “Your release, sweet girl, is a certainty. They all will get out. All of them. All imprisoned, both those below here and those who crawl the earth out there”—he waves his cane—” all of them are imprisoned. The mercy I have given those below is revelation: They know they are prisoners. The rest have no conception. But they too will be set free. I will set all the captives free. I will draw all men to mys—”
They see it in a flash and it is done—the flying figure of the Coyote striking like a bolt from the blue sky, straight downward, as if he had fallen from a cloud with ankles connected to a tether gauged to exact precisions of length and elasticity, hands reaching open, grasping closed, pulling Morris back up with him again. Keeping him there, twenty feet up, suspended, holding Morris close in his embrace, close, close as love, close as pain. He is whispering something to him.
“No fair,” Morris screams. “No fair. No fair.” And then he isn’t screaming words at all.
The Andrews look up in astonishment, observing the new harsh forms their lord has been instructed to inhabit, observing that he has no choice but to obey. Hearing the wordless chuckling screams. They leave their posts, move together to a spot beneath the floating atrocity, and look at each other with fresh understanding and new resolve. From beneath the fountain, the other red-clad guards race up, investigating this unexpected commotion, and they too see, in the sky, their leader’s woeful wordless tale.
“That man can fly!” the girl says, surprised at last. She’s risen from her seat, looking up, hands shading her eyes against the sun. Jane is enjoying watching events foretold in Boyd’s book come true when she feels a hand on her shoulder. The old guy, the new caretaker, come from the open stairway to meet her. “If you want to get behind that door,” he whispers, “I don’t think you’ll get a better chance.”