by A. R. Moxon
out in taffy of adrenaline, rubbery fear and elastic hope, anticipation of capture, expectation of discovery—then snapping back, jumping her forward from eternity to instant. She would never reach the door; she had reached it already. There was nobody to stop her. Hand met knob, knob gave way to query of rotation. Latch clicked, hinge creaked.
She entered, and then
* * *
—
Jane finds herself in a strange place. It would perhaps be more accurate to say: ‘Janes find herselves in strange places.’ If this paradox troubles you, take comfort in knowing that Jane was similarly troubled.
Perhaps it will help if I describe what Jane saw.
* * *
—
and then Jane saw the endless beach, and the infinity of its ocean gathered up into a crushing tidal wrath, suspended against the field of stars—unless it was so monstrously large that it encompassed the stars, submerging them.
And she saw the study, and the desperate struggle of the two men who occupied it.
And she saw the small room at the end of a short hall, and, in it, someone familiar.
And the voice said:
* * *
—
be successful. Everything’s gone upside-down after the door. One of the secret cruelties of life is its tendency to deliver your desire to you only once it has devised the means by which it might withhold your enjoyment of receipt. The Coyote’s torturous transformations of Morris came daily, with each change compounding Morris’s just and delicious misery—that is how she saw it at first. But this had been before she’d been past the door and learned deeper and crueler truths. Jane yearns for the simplicity of the earlier perspective, but she doesn’t have Gordy’s knack for self-deception; there can be no return for her to the Eden of her previous ignorance. She knows too well how each of the Coyote’s modifications pushes matters excruciatingly closer to the
* * *
—
voice, who says:
—Watch them well.
Jane watches the identical men in their struggle. Watches the one overcome the other. Watches what the victor does after. What he does to the woman named Juanita Neato, and to the round man named Paddington, and to others.
—Do you see?
“Yes.”
—And now the boy.
She watches the boy stand and struggle and split into multiple copies of himself, each holding the slim green scrap of paper. Watches one copy go, watches one stay.
—And now the wave.
Jane gazes at the wave. The blasphemy of its size.
“Gordy made it.”
—Yes, from him and of him; but also from those who contend: the author and his usurper. Tell Gordy it will soon come, if he does not do that which has been laid upon him. When it comes, all he calls his own will be destroyed with him.
“That’s what we’ve been hoping for,” Jane said, weeping: unfair, unfair.
—The hope is a false one. You know the reason now. He must do that which has been laid upon him.
“Gordy can’t obey you anymore,” Jane said, despairing. “He doesn’t have it. He gave it up, and now it’s gone.”
—Look again. Look at the one who stayed; who stands on the
* * *
—
brink. The Coyote provides Morris a torture more perfect than any she might have devised; the ruin of the body, combined with—far worse—the denial of his spirit’s great conviction. He’s spent his life believing all things spring from him; now, every day, the Coyote teaches him the lie of that belief. She sees the signs of Morris’s resolve weakening, evidence of load-bearing pillars of his internal cosmology beginning to crumple—things he says, rawness in his voice, a desperation in his brutalized eyes she’d never seen before. She should be drunk on the pleasure of it, but instead of a glutton she is a tantalus, strung taut, reaching for succor but unable to grasp it. All she can think when she watches him is: Will the next one be the one to finally collapse him? How much longer can he hold? The Coyote doesn’t understand what he’s doing; it’s desperately important to stop him, but she can’t think of any way to reach him. He keeps no timetable, his arrivals have no forewarnings, his movements are faster than thought, his visits are brief and filled only with the incoherent ululations of his victim. And, even if a message could be delivered, would the Coyote stop? She thinks not; he’s as blind to any possibility outside his own beliefs as is Morris. For the Coyote, as with Morris, the universe is a graspable thing, a realm of study he believes he’s apprehended perfectly and entirely.
If the Coyote can’t be stopped, all that remains—unless Gordy truly is on his way—is the desperate, useless task: Provide what comfort can be provided; plug the dam of Morris’s suffering and try, from restricted vantage, to reach the other leaks that spring up daily. Sterling’s offered his assistance, but in truth there are none better suited to the task than she, who has known Morris longest and best. Her servitude, more than any other, can be for him a bulwark against despair. He’ll see it as a lesson to himself, encouraging him into subhuman acts of persistence and endurance. This is the cruelty of the universe, she thinks: to hope for revenge, and watch another enact it; to see the enactment, but be compelled to prevent it; to come to the man who took away what is yours, even your selfhood, who used you however he chose, who took from you your bird, who replaced a mother’s constant flow of simultaneous goodbye and hello with an inescapable series of goodbyes. This now is the man you must comfort. She had hoped there might be found behind the door some trick or tool or knowledge to further throw him into hazard, but the trick was on her. Behind the door she found, not a tool to sever him from her, but rather knowledge of a great and unforgivable inter-connectedness. Jane knows Gordy hasn’t understood the full truth of it; that much is clear from the flawed understanding he delivers in his confession. How can anyone be so surprisingly right and yet so entirely wrong? Again, the terrible wickedness of the universe, that it can lend such great understanding, and for that privilege enforce such a perversely high interest, this usurious empathy. How unfair, after hoping so many years for this man’s bad end, to be made to look upon even him and feel for him such depths of pity. That she should look upon that hateful face and see in it her daughter’s, and her own—even an hour ago, when she last visited him. “Shush, shush,” she said, as the creature scrabbled at the ground with its approximation of feet and mewled. “Shush, shush. Shush shush.” Slowly the creature soothed. Slowly the sponge moved from face to bucket, from bucket to face, the water darkening with filth removed. Pity, like suffering, like mercy, all draws from a common pool.
She’s braided her beard for the trapeze with time to spare. Jane sits alone in the dim of a single candle and prepares herself. There’s been some sort of disturbance outside, in addition to the occasional agonized “Goop” and the gorilla’s miserable echolalia. It’s drawing nearer; she can now hear some indistinct voices, and, louder, angrier, some shouting, including some impassioned screeching from the Morris-thing. It’s been quiet for a minute now. He hears their approaching familiar voices. Gordy and Bailey.
So. Sterling was right. A second meeting, and then whatever happens next. We’re all spinning down the neck of this funnel; everything narrows from here, attenuates and distills into singularity. In the final quiet moment before they come in, Jane, who has been beyond the door and returned, sits in this infinite handful of remaining seconds, hand upon the dog-eared manuscript, and prepares herself for flight.
* * *
—
When they’d visited her in Raccoon River, she’d never looked at them: back turned, purposefully detached, purposefully remote, snatches of reflected eye contact, head wreathed by the halo of globular lights. Now she swings to face them as they enter, leaning forward, as if she expects something from them.
Gordy grins weakly at Jane, begins the speech he rehearsed on the way: “I
suppose you’re wondering why we’re—”
Jane interrupts: “Shut up. We don’t have much time. We may only have minutes. And—” premonitory finger to Gordy’s already-opening mouth—“no questions. If you have a question that doesn’t get answered by what I say, it means your question is stupid and the answer doesn’t matter. You have to obey the command you were given. The Coyote is torturing Morris past despair. I assume you saw him out there.”
“Saw…who?”
“So-called Morris. What’s left of him. These days they call him ‘Goop-Goop.’ ”
“That was Morris?”
“He’s holding on by his fingertips, but the wave’s coming. We don’t have much time if we’re going to stop it.”
Gordy laughs. “I don’t want to stop it. I’ve been waiting for it to come for years.”
“I know you have, you idiot. That’s why we’re in this mess.”
“You’ve got this all wrong.” Gordy hopes he sounds patient, not pedantic: “The wave is going to destroy him. It’ll bring an end to all this. We’re just here to save you first.”
“You’ve read Boyd’s book,” Bailey says gently. “You’ ’ ’ you die at the end of it.”
“The book only goes so far, and it can change. I’ve been on the other side of the door.”
Gordy stupidly repeats: “The door?”
“It’s not a place inside time. I saw what you saw. I heard what you heard.”
“Then you know the choice I have is no choice at all.” But then Gordy realizes. It’s so clear what he’s up against: a mother’s love—Of course. You’ve been too calculating, he admonishes himself, thinking of it as a mercy—the wave flooding out the prisoners along with their jailors, killing them. A grim mercy to be sure, but an end at least to suffering—an unfortunate but unavoidable cost—but for Jane, it would be something else entirely. Her only daughter…of course. You haven’t rehearsed for it, but you know your part. Here’s a chance to do one fine thing before the end. A sacrifice, no doubt, but a worthy one. You ought to have known it; there was never a good end in this for you. It’s better this way. Look at Jane, the poor thing, sick with worry. She’s been carrying all this weight alone. Gordy smiles sadly at her. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Before it comes, I’ll get Finch to safety.” He rises and steps around Bailey, takes Jane’s shoulder in what he hopes is a friendly and reassuring grip. “I promise you, I’m not leaving until we get Finch out of the oubliette first. I’ll get her safe or die trying.”
She looks up at him hatefully. “Oh, you unbelievable asshole…‘Safe?’ There’s no ‘safe’ if the wave comes.”
“Hey—” he’s pleased with himself, that he can still be magnanimous in the face of her understandable but misplaced anger. “It’s all right. I understand.”
She brandishes a listening device and earbuds. “I know everything you understand. I know how you think of it. But I was there when you got the ticket—I watched. You understand? I was there. I heard what the voice said to you. ‘He and all he calls his own will be destroyed.’ “Think of Morris. You know him. Listen to the actual words. It will destroy him, this wave. It will destroy him and all he calls his own.”
“Oh,” says Bailey, sinking to the ground. “Oh.” Gordy gives her a quizzical look. She seems to have understood something—but what? Is it some sort of her concern for her missing Attic? Does this somehow make her mistrust the book’s hope of a long-lost (or is it never-had) brother floating to the top of the narrative when all is finished? Or is it only that Bailey, who shoots every angle, realizes the devastation to Pigeon Forge, the tragedy, the death of the prisoners, population, tourists, all? Yes, it must be that. Bailey hasn’t had as much time as you to consider this quandary, she can’t know how fathomlessly impossible it all is to stop, she hasn’t yet comprehended the immensity of the gears of this horrendous machine. Against this, a single Appalachian town is a tragic but needful sacrifice. He turns back to Jane.
“Look, if I could save all of Pigeon Forge, I would. If I could save all the prisoners, I would. I tried and failed. It’s too big. But we might save Finch if we—”
Jane grabs him then, pulls him close, snarling: “Listen. To the words. All he calls his own. All he calls his own. All he calls his own.”
“Oh,” Gordy says, then: “Oh.”
It’s dawning on him: Not all I call his own, but all he calls his own. What did Landrude say, back at the doughnut shop? Imagine an Everything of Everythings. Can you? Can you even imagine imagining it?
There’s a kind of falling that feels like flying.
Gordy feels he’s being swallowed up by some mythic subterranean beast—All this time spent walking on dry land, he thinks, but it wasn’t ever land at all, it was only the face of the beast, who waited, patient as Moses, for you to meander close enough to its mouth, until it could open up and eat you without effort, let you tumble down, down, all the way down, into pitch-black digestive realization…A dream logic is taking hold—You’ve returned to Pigeon Forge, to the circus, and Bailey is here, and Jane. Around here somewhere are your dad and Finch, according to Boyd’s book. Morris is a nightmare freak, and Donk did it to him. Julius is here, and there, and everywhere: He’s sandals, at least in part he’s the sandals you’re wearing now, he’s spreading through the country like yeast being worked into dough. Stories are converging, overlapping, buzz of feedback from competing realities. You thought you were in your own story, and now you’re in somebody else’s. How do you climb back into your own?
“Oh,” Gordy says. He wishes he could argue. Instead he says: “Oh.”
“Oh,” he says. He sits down next to Bailey on the floor. There is grass here; Jane has cut away the canvas flooring in a rectangle; apparently, she dances with her feet on the turf. He hadn’t noticed before. How interesting. It’s all so worthless now. The world destroyed, or the world saved. No, not the world—more. Much more. Larger than the scope of imagination.
Somehow in his distraction he hears the sandals speak.
Hello, buddy, the sandals say.
“Hello, Julius,” Gordy mumbles.
How are things?
“They’ve been better,” Gordy says. It’s hard to breathe. Oceans. Land. Species. Stars. Galaxies. All he calls his own. And more. Morris’s claims upon reality are omnivorous, extending not only across the totality of the present but also into the past. Not only the past but also the future. Not just what is, but all possibilities that might be or could have been. Morris has seen Färland, so Morris will have claimed that as his own.
The old familiar thought arises—Let it come, then. What kind of universe is it you would save, which would elevate such a creature as Morris, which would enforce such grotesque mercy upon one so little deserving, which would stack the deck, rig the dice to make a winner of the worst before the first throw? What God would make sport of his creatures and bolster the worst delusions of its own cruelest creation? Submersion is preferable—isn’t it? To be carried away, to allow the swirl of flotsam over billions of millennia to find some more suitable order. Better to throw existence itself to that uncertain fate than to defer such richly deserved punishment.
Gordy reaches out and takes Bailey’s hand. Lost in her own shock of discovery, she numbly accepts it. From far away, he can hear Jane: “Don’t tell me you didn’t see what I saw. You knew all along what the wave was. Who made it. Who could call it.”
“I thought…. I thought I had called it by myself. The Voice told me to.”
“You’re just like him. You think it all springs from you. But how can you; you saw the two of them, like I did.”
“I didn’t see anybody but myself.”
“They were right there. Did you at least turn to look around you?”
“I…”
“How typical. How very you.”
“I looked out at the ocean.”
“Yes, that’s right. I remember; that�
��s exactly what you were doing. You never saw them, or me, or any of the rest you’d have seen if you just looked around. You didn’t even see Morris and Landrude. Unbelievable. You’re the least curious cat I’ve ever known.”
“I just—”
“Never mind. You made it wrong, but you can make it right. You have to do what you should have done from the start. The Coyote is coming soon. Whatever he’ll do to Morris next won’t be nice. He’s disturbingly creative.”
“The Coyote,” Bailey moans. “Oh God, Daniel. Oh God.”
“You’ve got to hurry. Use the ticket since you still seem to need it. Use it to take the Coyote’s power away—it’s in his diamond whatsit on his forehead. Then, give it to Morris. I’ve tended to him as best I can, but he’s near the end. He’ll die soon, or he’ll give up and call it. Either way, the wave will come, and if it does, who can stop it then?”
Gordy sighs. “What does it matter, though? You’re forgetting, I don’t have it. I gave it away. Now it’s gone. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
Jane sets her hands on her head and rubs her temples. She breathes in once, slowly and deeply, then out. Finally, she says, “You’re going to make me take you by the hand and walk you every step.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes you do, you chickenshit. You let yourself not understand just as much as you need to, so when it all finally ends, when you simultaneously get your sweet oblivion, and Morris gets his punishment, you can still say to the rest of us: ‘But I didn’t know.’ Won’t we just have to forgive you, then? Too bad you won’t have any excuse soon—I’m telling you all of your own secrets. Why do you think you take so easily to invisibility? Why do you suppose you keep hearing the Voice, seeing the wave, even after you returned from the other side?”