These Shadows Remain

by B W Powe

  “The air.”

  They spoke quietly, unhurriedly, to each other. The circus outside had ceased to exist for them.

  “Yes, just that. The air.”

  “You’ll disappear.”

  “It’s what I want. To be nothing. Only you can do this. You have the power. You’re capable of living on both sides. Inject me with your openness. Let me go.”

  Tomas checked his toon hand. He felt solidifying bones and skin. The more sympathy he felt, the more his hand became flesh.

  Then he saw in his mind Gabrielle, Santiago, and Adina, and the sword. He saw it in the boy’s hand. Tomas’s only defense here had been his connection to the wind and his willingness to stand firmly in the open, where there was nothing to protect him.

  *

  “You’ll be nothing. No voice. No mind. No future. No memory. No past.”

  “It’s what I want,” the cloud said.

  “How will I do this?”

  “You know.”

  “And the images?”

  “They have a taste of freedom but not enough. I was lightning, and what I got was a flickering candle. I was thunder, and what I got was a paltry moan. Without my breath to sustain them they’ll fade and humans will return. Let me disappear.”

  “Good-bye then.”

  “You’ll do well as a human. You’re becoming sentimental. They usually become so just before they kill something.”

  “Still.”

  “Tomas, do you know what it will be like to return to the air?”

  “No.”

  “It’s simply another dimension where I’ll wait, even if I’m nothing. It’s where I’ll be waiting. For you. For another chance.”

  “What would you become if you came back?”

  Tomas regretted asking this the moment he said it.

  He’d put return out there, and that made it a possibility.

  “A chant instead of the wind. And a greater war.”

  Tomas raised his hands. By standing so he resembled a cross, a ship mast, a tree unfurling to the sun, an antenna reaching for invisible waves.

  *

  Pluta became a column of smoke. He went on rising like a breathing in, a listing inward, a soft gasping, a last grasp towards the unseen. Then the column of air scattered itself into the wind like a massive, long, weary, sad exhalation. The letting go, the breathing out. Here the wearying ahhh of farewell circled around and around, whirling and whirling out, then away.

  The wizard withered into the air until there was only a gust where Tomas stood. What was left behind was like a remembered breeze filling the space, becoming mild like a stroking hand on skin on the now liberated grass and trees, on the canvas returning to a mere tent wall, on the relieved earth and its hills, on the cartoon features that had never been fully human, on the surprised faces screen-bound that might try to be human again.

  *

  Tomas was tired. He felt cold too, shivers moving up and down his spine. The cloud had departed. The only thing to do was to sit down, curl up, close his eyes, and rest.

  So he did, under the willow that stood where the wizard’s sanctum had been. He was too tired to notice anything around him. Though one part of his mind reflected that it might not be safe yet – where were the guardian knights? – he felt the draining weight of his body and the eerie ease with which Pluta had asked to be released, as if only Tomas had held the key to his purgatorial oblivion, and he had waited all this time for his arrival. This imprinted Tomas’s soul with the need to rest.

  He sank down into himself. Some part of him vanished with the cloud into the invisible. He was draining into the cold. The cold was white and blank like freshly fallen snow on a wide empty movie screen.

  He fell into white.

  He sank down into the screen, falling fast into its whiteness, falling down into the white sheet which was now a ship’s sail, and the froth of a wave, and the moonlight over the forest where he awoke, and the focused beam from the projectors behind the shoulders of the audience, and the emanations of TVs, and the whiteness of a cloud on a clear brightened day, and it enveloped him, spreading sheer and bright and omnipresent and lucent.

  *

  He dreamed a kiss.

  It was light on his lips.

  He dreamed this kiss, and a sweet scent.

  “Wake up, Tomas.”

  He saw three white figures hover before him. He wanted to pray to them, but he didn’t know any prayers. He closed his eyes again, and felt the brush of another kiss on his lips, the merest touch, fleeting and fine.

  “Tomas. Come back to us.”

  Someone was holding his hand.

  Through his gradually focusing mind came these words, there is the language of dreams – another part, to read, to understand. Words were always close, like images, like the presence he had never been able to catch yet had driven him to meet Pluta again.

  *

  Freed from the human plane, the toons had taken wing like a great migration of nervous birds. They ascended towards the screens following their father in a pipeline, a Pentecost in reverse. As they climbed, they spread the news that they could return to the screens, and to the service they’d known, the servants of dreams. They were returning to where they could be content to know what was up, what was down, what was coded, what was framed. Upwards they flew sucked into the vortex centres that were each like the white holes of ancient TV sets. All through the world it seemed that the toons were yelping. To the few witnesses, it would look as if the images were eating their own, narrowing into funnels, a shape that the wizard had first used before the castle gates. They drew inwards into the centres, and then the funnels became long tangled electric cords, eel-like squiggling and piping into the depths of the holes, spinning until what remained were dots arrayed at the heart of these networks.

  The light in the valley quivered.

  It quivered and gradually faded until the valley resumed a natural radiance.

  The humans came back into their own by stepping free of their prison. But when they came through the screens, they passed the black cords of the spinning toons in an exchange where each brushed the other. The humans emerged, and looked first to one another before they spoke, and saw that they were bronzed, everyone no matter what race brightened from time in electronic light. They didn’t speak for a long time, while they examined this brilliance, every bit of flesh freshly tanned by the screen’s power. Soon their voices returned and, in the effigy of this transferral, their voices rose like chattering birds, their sense of peril and wounded pride and outrage and unending violation, a speaking frenzy to match what the toons expressed when they had taken wing and returned to the electricity that had sustained them.

  *

  The human complaint issuing from these bronzed faces became avid questions. No longer was there one word, monotonous and levelled. There was a relieved clamour ascending towards the glistening centres on the screens, and onwards to the castle and its opening gate and empty battlements and abandoned towers, the people welcoming the babble that to their ears sounded like a returning tide of friends and family members and acquaintances and partners.

  With the bronzing of the skin came a shower of white ashes like a layering of old burnt wire casings. These were the scorched remnants of the toons’ flesh.

  People wondered at their tans and the sheen of ashes that made them glow all the more.

  *

  Adina and Gabrielle and Santiago stood over the knight sleeping under the willow tree. Santiago carried the sword, and Gabrielle held her brother’s hand.

  “His hands,” Gabrielle said.

  “They’re human,” Santiago said.

  “Tomas,” Adina said. “It’s over. The storm’s gone. The images have returned to the screens.”

  She knelt beside him and kissed his lips once more, a full awakening kiss.

  He heard her, felt her lips, and slowly he returned, and saw the three.

  In succession he said each of their names. They were fre
sh and beautiful, as if he were naming them for the first time. He blinked and saw colours magnified, and then heard voices amplified: the world was dazzling.

  “We want to go back,” Gabrielle said. She meant home, and though the castle had never really been their home, all knew what she meant.

  *

  They were amazed by the ashes and the gatherings of people. The hiss had ended. In its place there was a complexity of noises. Tomas stood up slowly, and embraced each of the children, and then turned to Adina, and held her for a long time.

  Around them hordes of humans were wandering back to where they’d started. It was the beginning of their long search for those who might belong to them.

  On the tents’ screens the images were alive again, content in their frames. They began in the middle of their stories, where they had broken off when the promise had come to become more. They seemed to relish being inside the frames that children could trust.

  Yet Tomas detected a different frequency, slight and subtle, in their soundtracks and stories. They had not returned unchanged. But what this change could be he couldn’t see. All he could detect were knowledgeable glances, wily and fleeting, a different set to a mouth, a slightly different stance in the posture, a braver gesture here and there, another intonation to a word or phrase spoken, an awareness that only he seemed to track.

  He felt an ache in his heart. Why? Then he knew. The screens had been his domain too. He’d made the leap with them, though he had never entirely belonged in their realm. Now he was here, and he thought he would only be here, with Gabrielle, and Santiago, and Adina.

  *

  The trek back through the forest was long and slow. Others followed the path. Fatigue set into the children, and into Adina. Each felt it was time to sleep.

  The forest returned to its original shape. Its aroma now scented of trees and grass. The ground beneath them was solid, though sometimes when a dry branch snapped under foot, one of the children started, half expecting that a toon had buried itself, lying in ambush to stalk them again.

  “My legs hurt. I’ve got cramps. Do we have to walk all this way? Like how long’s it going on for?”

  “Well, you know, Gabrielle, I’m sure

  Tomas is tired too.” Adina was consoling.

  “I mean rilly. Like I did spend all that time on my feet y’know.”

  “Not all the time,” Santiago said. “Give me a break.”

  “I sooooo did. Was it rilly this far?” “Things are getting back to normal,” San-

  tiago said. “What is it with this dandruff?” He flicked ashes off his shoulder.

  “Like totally icky.” Gabrielle shoved the ashes off her shoulder too. “I so need a shower.”

  “Amen.” Adina daydreamed about martinis and a long hot bath.

  “You’re saying ‘like’ a lot,” Santiago said to Gabrielle.

  “Like, I’m not.”

  Tomas walked on, his eyes fixed on the castle looming up at the end of the path.

  *

  They came out of the forest, people flecked in ashes and with the bronze on their skin beginning to fade.

  Tomas and Adina and the children walked up the hill towards the castle. The gate was open. The people inside had come out, children and adults standing, still in disbelief, preparing their welcome and their calls of greeting, restrained by shock and the experience of seeing images come alive, but ready to believe again that their neighbours and colleagues, parents and older siblings would be returning.

  But Tomas slowed his pace when he saw that the castle was different.

  It glowed.

  And it had expanded with an elaborated architecture that appeared to have burst spontaneously after the wizard’s fading into air. The castle hadn’t disappeared, nor had it become just a fantastic museum-piece that miraculously survived the last transformation. It was crystalline and bright, with eight towers, skylights and telescopes glinting.

  The castle had a new intensity of design. Its extensions, its elaborated shapes, were radiant with the same glow Tomas saw on Miranda’s skin.

  He stopped, surveying the scene.

  Gabrielle and Santiago slowed their pace, seeing too that this wasn’t the place they had left. Adina seemed eager to get on, towards the gate, and to that bath she craved, though she too noted that the castle had become grander with a radiance that rivalled the luminous screens they’d left behind.

  *

  Tomas shielded his eyes. Suddenly there was too much energy. It was as if the castle was glowing in triumph.

  He tried to remember other places where he’d seen such a vibrant emptiness.

  In his dream, he saw it there, after the column of air had vanished into crackling immensity. It had the brilliant whiteness of screens just before the projections or emanations.

  What exchanges had taken place? What sharing of knowledge? Maybe traces of each form of being had been left on the other. Maybe the images had taken a piece of the human, and the humans bore the images’ mark.

  Tomas looked down at the forest from where they had come. He saw a fluttering in the leaves, a darting between branches. Then there was the presence, the one that had not been the children, or Adina, the other that never materialized yet had impelled him.

  It was ahead of him now, not behind.

  He looked to the trees. He looked to his hands and their humanness. Had he been the hand that had shaped the wizard’s disappearance? Or was he the hand that had been moved all along?

  Uncertain, he thought this was more difficult than being in the forest. There he’d known he was lost.

  Tomas made an abrupt gesture, unexpected to himself, to grasp the air. Then he looked at his hand, realizing that nothing had left its imprint.

  *

  Tomas stood alone on the hill before the castle while people greeted one another. He glanced over his shoulder.

  The valley was shadowed. A cloud crossed in front of the sun.

  People poured up from the forest. Their joyful noises were getting louder as they became more trusting of the earth, and the sky, and of the people before them, and the sun. But in the valley’s shadow Tomas saw a funnel of air forming. His senses opened like the gate to the castle. He wanted to absorb every detail and understand why a shiver of premonition shook him.

  “What’s this.” What he uttered wasn’t a question. It was an identification – a reaching after a name for what he saw.

  The funnel climbed like a prairie tornado. It narrowed, darkening. It rose, swirling.

  In their delight at seeing each other again, the people around him took no notice of what was far behind. The twister spun, churning up dust.

  He hadn’t scattered Pluta to the wind. Inadvertently he’d let him be everywhere. The magician was a master of distorting communication. Now he’d played the greatest joke of all. Tomas had merely helped him to transfigure. He had gone into the air, and the air could be anything, anywhere.

  Tomas blinked. Then the twister was gone.

  He turned to see Gabrielle, Santiago, and Adina, in the embrace of the guards and other children from the castle. He saw Cyrus approaching him. No one registered dismay or concern. They hadn’t seen the whirlwind.

  *

  Tomas nodded as if coming out of a dream.

  Maybe it had been a stray image or a straggler toon doing a fancy-free imitation. It could have been the Tasmanian Devil from the Warner Brothers’ vault of figures. Sid and Diego might have been body-surfing on the tip of the wind. Or the last toon, soon to be sucked back onto a screen, scampering wildly in one final mad exhibition, showing off before it became flat again.

  *

  Tomas felt a hand on his shoulder. Cyrus stood before him.

  “For the second time I say thank you. For our children. For our way of life. This time I say thank you for everything.”

  He looked into Cyrus’s face, and saw openness for an instant.

  “You must come inside with the others. We have things to discuss.”
<
br />   Tomas wondered if Cyrus had seen the whirlwind, but decided against mentioning it. This had been some after-image retina burn. It had been a trace. The rout must have been complete.

  “How’s the hand?” Cyrus asked, smiling.

  Tomas showed him both hands, palms up. They were flesh and blood.

  *

  Crowds assembled by the forge. The celebration, it was announced, would begin at nightfall. There would be food, drink, dancing, reunions. There would be speeches, and congratulations. Cyrus had left Tomas’s side and went up before the multitude, speaking on behalf of many. He said there would be moments when they would give thanks, and moments of silence to honour what had happened. He said there should be discussion of how to properly award the person who travelled so well between domains, and who had first led the children through the woods.

  Cyrus said it would be a long time before anyone turned on a screen again.

  Uneasy and shy, Tomas wasn’t certain he wanted to join the festivities. In the crowds he’d lost sight of Adina. When he gazed around, searching for Gabrielle and Santiago, he couldn’t see them either.

  The crowds grew. With their arrival came more of the clamour, the sound of many conversations at once.

  The castle swarmed with people, and Tomas abruptly felt that he wanted to find a place away.

  He needed a home.

  Where would this be?

  His home had been screens and then the wind. It had been the path of quests, then the forest, then the night, then this castle. Beyond these memories he knew nothing of what a home might resemble. Toons didn’t have resting places. They had shut off points, blankness, darkness, static, white space. They had suspended time, zones where they merely waited, muttering sometimes, for the next switch and the next episode. They might stay for months, or even years, stuck in a freeze-frame limbo. They might find themselves morphed into new configurations of being. Images hovered, images lingered. Symbols and images could withdraw into the invisible beyond the white spaces, and no human knew what they did there. But no toon had a language for that domain either.