Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  Eventually someone else wanted to buy the café or library, and Jintha sold it. Probably in that case, this was what financed his life-purchase of an apartment in one of the fine tower-blocks of the city.

  Once installed, it transpires he never again left his rooms. Almost never again.

  The accommodation was simple enough. The large living-room, a spacious bathroom, a small kitchen and bedroom. Fully furnished and equipped with all expedient devices, the apartment could maintain itself, and also its inhabitant. It provided good food and selected beverages, heating, cooling, light, and clean water. As is usual too, such extras as the binocular, and so on.

  Here Jintha seems to have lived, in calm and quiet, for some fifty or sixty years.

  Though having no actual occupation, he appears never to have been unoccupied. Both his vocational work and his leisure pursuit were Humanity. This composite he studied, contemplated, examined, wrote of, and—undoubtedly—adored. It was not, presumably (demonstrably), that he beheld no flaws. It was simply (and here we use that word advisedly) that he fell in love with them. He loved them. He loved.

  * * *

  Most of the letters Jintha dispatched throughout this time in the tower, carefully folding them and casting them free as birds on the air, were never found, or if found, revealed. Of those that did fall, so to speak, into more talkative hands, none was said to have alighted either on the sidewalks or road below the tower, or in any closely adjacent area. Some were picked up, it seems, on other streets either deeper into the city, or further along towards the esplanade. Others were discovered on windowsills, in garden trees, and once (allegedly) aboard a small ship at anchor further along the coast.

  In a very few circumstances, despite being sent out long after their actual objects had ceased to use the thoroughfare below the tower, they were recorded as having been found by the very people to whom, even under Jintha’s invented names, they were—almost certainly—addressed.

  An illustration: a violinist had reported that he saw “his” letter in a flowerpot outside his lodging-house. He was both extremely shaken and touched by it since, after several months of vicious bad luck and near penury, he had just then gained an excellent position with a prestigious orchestra to the north. That very day of locating the letter, he had resigned his ill-paid clerical job in a shirt factory. The only benefit had been the chance to “borrow” endless types of shirts.

  Meanwhile the woman whom (very probably) Jintha had named “Rainbow” had been handed “her” letter one entire year after she had disappeared from the street below the tower. One year, that was, after she had, with no warning, met the love of her life, and immediately sailed away with him on his pleasure craft. (Her existence before had been both demeaning and potentially dangerous.) Only when the ship returned and lay briefly at anchor a few miles from the city, did her companion bring down to her a letter he had dislodged from among the rigging.

  The old woman with long white hair and the crippled spine had never admitted finding any letter at all. A distant friend merely told her extraordinary story. Which was of one morning waking to discover her back entirely healed and flexible. Of course, in this instance, she may not have been the “Empress” of Jintha’s letters.

  One other, though, did lay public claim to a letter. He was, or had been, an impoverished and lonely student, a failure and outcast, unhappy to the point of suicide. He had, generally at that time, been reckoned unspeakably hideous, his features causing horror, while life had also cursed him with an incurable skin rash which, while not painful or contagious, persuaded those he met to turn from him in embarrassed revulsion.

  The student, whom Jintha had named “Panther,” was, on a particular evening, creeping along beneath the tower. His misery was so overwhelming that he barely glanced at the street before him to see his way, let alone up at any far-off window. Yet abruptly he felt, he afterwards said, as if a powerful (indeed Godlike) hand had gently but firmly lifted from him the smothering cloak of gloom and despair.

  “It was,” “Panther” declared, his eyes shining, “as if a storm cloud of enormous weight, which all my life had been dragging me to the ground, dissolved. Suddenly I saw the westering sun, the glory of the sky. I straightened up and drew in a single breath that was like the first I’d ever taken, and it seemed to fill me with light and possibility. I felt—how can I describe this?—I felt I too had the resource of bright and unconquerable abilities. I need not hide. I needn’t be afraid.”

  That very evening he went to a cheap and popular café‚ and ate a meal and drank a glass of wine. He spoke confidently and courteously, even benignly, to those about him. He was not even startled when, after a moment or two, they reacted to him as to someone they could both respect and like. The next day he threw himself into his desired programme of learning, in which until then he had done poorly—and soon began to excel in every chosen field. In due course he had become eminent in that profession for which he had great talent, and also great love. He was a teacher both of the written word and of the sciences. Able to teach equally the brilliant and those thought unteachable, his students worshipped him. He had besides a mistress of unusual beauty and charm.

  As for the letter written to “Panther,” “Panther” had not come on it until nearly a decade after the burgeoning of his life. In fact, or so he said, he had drawn it from the pocket of an old coat he had worn off and on for years since last being on the street below the tower. For all intents and purposes it had never been in the pocket until that second. Certainly, till then, he had never put his hand on its folded shape.

  “Dear Panther,” (it began)

  “You fill me with a passion of admiration. What a glorious face is yours—unique and nearly supernal in its power. A single glance shows me the generous line of your mouth, your nose like a noble fallen column of beautifully veined stone from classical times, your wise, magician’s eyes; one so wide, the other narrow as the slimmest polished blade. It is at once evident how the wide eye, fearless as a camera, looks out on the world, knowing instantly how to assess and to translate all it sees. While the bronze blade of the other eye looks inward to the hidden world of visions and the spirit. Are you a priest? A mage? Yours is a face that has met with the gods themselves, and as they infrequently do, they have let you keep some knowledge of them, that you may teach other men the way to all things fine and wonderful. You are one of the custodians to the gate of life. But oh, you are clad also in the pelt of a warrior beast, the white pelt of snow-panthers patterned in crimson, your insignia. This kingly garment, half animal and half spirit, demonstrates your physical power, and your inherent supernatural gift for enlightened rule in the hierarchy of mankind…”

  * * *

  After he had lived in the tower for the fifty (or sixty) years, Jintha rose very early.

  It was before even the first blink of dawn could colour in the vertical sky, and the holy, ice blue wall of the sea, this distant view that was yet so clear, always, was like a painting on glass.

  He bathed himself as ever, but did not dress. He made a pot of black mint tea. Then he drew from their place (some cabinet or drawer) a fine smooth pen and two flasks of ink. No paper, however.

  What Jintha did then was to begin a very long letter.

  And this he wrote out on his own body.

  It began on his left foot, ascended up the left leg to the thigh, and so on to the left side of his belly. (Jintha was a lean, spare man, his skin largely, if untypically, free of wrinkles. That being so, his writing was perfectly legible.)

  Having mounted his belly, he continued the letter upward until it had covered all his left side, after which he wrote carefully along his left shoulder, and down the front of his left arm. When this was accomplished, leaving only his left hand bare, Jintha somehow wrote upward over the back of his left arm, across the shoulder-blade, and thereafter down his back itself to the left buttock, and below on to the back of the left thigh, leg, all the way to the left ankle bone.

&nb
sp; He then commenced to climb up the back of his right leg to the right buttock, right side of his back, (leaving only the ridges of his spine and the division of his buttocks to tabulate the letter in two neat columns).

  The rest of the process may, from this, be predicted. Returning across the right shoulder-blade, down the right arm at the back (exempting only the right hand), up the front of the right arm, across the front of the right shoulder, down the right pectoral and the belly—the central muscles, navel and genital area serving here as the column divider—and down the right leg. To finish up on the top of the right foot, by the toes.

  How Jintha was physically able to do this remains a mystery. Perhaps he observed the process regarding his back, and other rear surfaces, in the huge mirror with which all the tower bedrooms were fitted. This presupposes he could follow mirror writing, as well, of course, as himself writing elsewhere upside down. Also that he was blessed with an astounding agility and eye-hand co-ordination, to which ordinary ambidexterity and double-jointedness were nothing.

  When everything was completed, he must have—as throughout—allowed the ink on all his last “pages” completely to dry.

  Only the column-dividers to front and rear were unused, and two long slender margins that extended from below both armpits and so down both outer sides of the ribs, over each hip and along each leg to the ankle—the same margin being observed too on the inside of the legs, (and arms) and, as previously explained, the genital and anal preserves. The hands were quite bare, as were the soles of the feet; also both the face and neck, front and back.

  It would seem, (there is eyewitness evidence) that the letter began (on the upper side of the left foot) “Dear Loves.” It ended virtually on the top of the right foot, phrased as all Jintha’s letters appear to have concluded: “I remain, dearest Loves, your obedient servant.” And, as ever, no name was signed. Jintha’s name was only finally obtained by inspection of the tenancy agreement relating to his tower apartment.

  About 10 a.m., when the tower was almost empty, Jintha donned a light robe and left his rooms. He left them for the first time in fifty or sixty years.

  Outside his window he would have seen the gargoyles dryly glittering. It was a fine sunny day. There would be no rain. Jintha walked to the elevator and summoned its silvery carriage. Getting in, he allowed the mechanism to drift him purringly up to the roof.

  If Jintha had ever been to the roof of the tower at the very beginning is unknown. Maybe he never had. Besides, it was so very long ago.

  Apparently he stood there some while behind the waist-high railing, gazing down and down, now thirty floors, past the streamlined storeys and between the sparkled greenish-copper hedges of gargoyles—to the vista he could, lacking the binocular, only inadequately see.

  The reason why all this is so minutely documented is due to the curiosity (and redundancy) of a man who also lived in the tower. Having lost his work only a week before, this man, whom the authorities named Witness One, was en route to quit the building in his usual search for employment. (His subsequent celebrity would solve that dilemma, at least, very nicely.)

  However, having noted, as he said, “an elderly man of some distinction, dressed in a loose cotton robe, and otherwise covered in what looked like calligraphy” going into the elevator, Witness One became intrigued. Putting his personal quest from his mind, he checked where the cage was bound, and raced up all the stairs of the remaining fifteen storeys. It may here be noted his former occupation had been an athletic one.

  To start with, Witness One opened the door at the stair top softly, and surreptitiously peered out. Accordingly he beheld Jintha for some while gazing down at the city below. Jintha appeared, Witness One said, both “serene and very pleased. His face was all smiles. It was—a tender face.”

  But then it seems Jintha undid his robe, neatly rolled it up and set it by, giving it a “little pat—like a man taking leave of a neighbour’s dog he likes very much.”

  When Witness One took in the full extent of Jintha’s written-on body, nevertheless, the observer felt a pang of fright. This old fellow was clearly insane. The witness prepared himself, he said, for something truly horrible. He suspected suicide, and was ready to tackle the madman, save him from himself, or at least to be sure that self-murder was the only recourse.

  “I would have helped him the best I could. If there honestly was no way out, obviously I’d have helped him end it myself. But this poor old man, he should never—I thought—have to do it in that way. Jumping from the roof! And it was such a busy street. He might kill other people, falling down on them.”

  What happened next, though, flung all idea of intervention from the witness’s brain.

  Jintha had always folded each of his letters, exquisitely and identically and flawlessly, to the shape of a bird, its head pointed forward, its wings outstretched to sail the air.

  Now he began so to fold himself.

  “If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes, I never would have credited any of it.”

  The Witness, who willingly underwent the most contemporary lie-detection test, related his account many times over. He remarked later that, rather than anger or distress him, this process helped him find a sort of unders-tanding joy in what he had seen. A true belief—a hope.

  Jintha folded himself. He folded himself to the shape of a paper bird with outspread wings. Written on as a letter, he folded himself (exquisitely and identically and flawlessly) as he had folded all the other letters of love. How he did it is unanswerable. Yet demonstrably it caused him no pain and no overly strenuous effort. Naturally, it did dehumanize the very last of Jintha. It altered him from a man written upon to a written parchment, to a paper bird, to a message.

  And when the last muscle and bone had noiselessly and calmly realigned itself, the Letter sprang upward, as a bird might well spring to launch its flight, and over the railing, and down, down through the shining air, toward the sidewalk and a concrete death.

  Witness One, gagging with outrage, leapt across the roof. He was far too late.

  He craned over and watched the initial fall. And so he beheld Jintha, who was now Jintha’s Last Letter, turning slowly in the atmosphere, still unexpectedly near enough that the witness could read, upon the top of the left foot, the words: “Dear Loves, The time has come when I must go away…”

  Before distance and shock cancelled rational sight.

  * * *

  It was for sure a busy street that morning. So many looked up, and saw.

  They saw, they said (we refer here to a multitude of witnesses, labeled from Two to Seventy-nine), a paper pigeon, dove, or gull of unusual size, floating down through the upper air, quite slowly, sometimes fluttering and turning, revolving, dipping, dropping; even now and then swirled up again a little way by some current of the morning breeze.

  Nobody was afraid or disconcerted. They were only interested, questioning or perplexed, and one or two quite enchanted, since it reminded them of pretty kites flown in childhood.

  Of all the seventy-eight witnesses (the seventy-ninth, who was labeled One, being still on the roof), not a single man or woman did not catch a fraction of Jintha’s last letter—a paragraph, three or four lines, a sentence, a phrase, a solitary word. There was too an overall conception, common to them all, of the placement and direction of the writing climbing up and down on Jintha’s body.

  From their recollections, which seemed to remain, indefinitely, fixed and fresh, elements of Jintha’s earliest life, and his sole resultant purpose, have been pieced together. For in this ultimate letter he set out to tell the world—or the city, a world in miniature—how he had come to his vocational study and his passionate, obsessive love affairs; how much he had relished and valued them. The happiness and fulfillment they had brought him.

  As he fell, light as feathers, dawdling as if in delight, such fragments as these:

  “To see your faces in the loveliness of yourselves. Each separate, each connected, like precious jewels sw
imming inside a golden lake…”

  “My food and drink—oh, my banquets of amethyst and stars and red rose wine…”

  “My amber days, my days of azure…my nights of cinnabar and ebony…”

  “My faultless loves. All, all of you. Your sweetness and your goodness pressed like myrrh inside your very bones, not knowing what you are and led astray by lies, made to think yourselves cruel and barbarous and, for the longest moment being, perhaps, cruel, barbarous, fulfilling an untrue prophecy—but never never either or any evil thing at last…”

  “How I have loved you. My love can never leave you. How can it ever tear itself away?”

  “Believe in the golden creatures that you are. I have seen you, blazing through, like suns through the cloud of night.”

  The general consensus estimates that about an hour passed, while the enormous paper bird or kite flew over and above them, all the while, if in interrupted stages, tending nearer and nearer the ground.

  By then it was about midday. The solar disk stood centered over the peak of the tower that had been Jintha’s home.

  Away along the other road, the sea-paralleling esplanade looked white and clean, and behind was the holy wall of the blue, vertical-seeming sea, against the limitless glowing of the sky.

  With no warning, Jintha’s final letter dipped low. It passed just above all their heads, brushing—some of them later vowed—their hair, like a whisper, or a caress. The letter sped then very fast, horizontally off along the other road, straight over the esplanade, (where new persons, the very last witnesses of the seventy-nine) deciphered such fragments as “all ends in light” and “tomorrow is only yesterday.” Until, in the closing seconds, a beggar, who presently became known as a writer of distinction, accessed the tiny postscript: