Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He takes the cigarette out and points it at us.

  “You are a monster. Crazy thing. Big scary monster. Not a human being. Dust with legs.”

  We pick our teeth and glower at him.

  “We want to change,” we say.

  “Dust with legs. We give you skin, you be chipper chap?”

  He sucks on the cigarette and we sniff the air. There are deeper scents than echoes here, dead things with more flesh. In the lockers, we think. Not just echoes. Shadows and reflections too. A fireman pulling bodies from a burning plane wreck, going in again one time too many. A soldier fighting for freedom, or for oil fields belching smoke out in the desert. A shopkeeper reaching for the alarm under the desk holding an open cash register. A little girl running out onto a road toward an ice cream van, naked, skin blistered and burning from the napalm, dropping as the bullets spray her back.

  “We can walk on from someone else's steps,” we say. “We want… a past.”

  We wait for the serious questions to begin, the forms to fill out, citizenship pledges. In the echoes that we traced here through the wild black storms of Hinter, we found passports and papers, immigration visas and ID cards, biometric data, holograms and thumb chips. We expect this.

  Instead he simply flicks through a sheaf of papers and pulls out a yellowed page. His chair scrapes noisily on the wooden floorboards of the stage as he pushes it back, stands up and leads us over to the filing cabinets and lockers, the keys on his belt jangling as he walks. More like a janitor than a general, we think. He fumbles the right key into the right lock and clanks the locker door open.

  “Crazy thing,” he says. “Here. Take. Through door, go uphill.”

  The skinsuit hangs on the hook like a wet raincoat, thin and pale pink with the gravings of a dead man's soul across its chest. Shabby and pathetic, giving only the limp impression of a shape, we still feel a pang of longing as we look at it, to live and breathe, to have hopes and fears rather than to he them. A dark Pinocchio, carved out of thought instead of wood, we want to be a real boy. We reach out to touch it, stroke it, hold its glove of skin against our hand, palm to palm. If we kissed that slack mask, could we wake it into life with a breath?

  He holds the yellow page of someone else's life at arm's length, squeezing his eyes to read it.

  “We call you Jack now, crazy thing. Jack Carter, dead man, no need name no more.”

  He doesn't know, we realize, that we are all dead men, dead women, dead children, even a little animal perhaps, dressed in our suits of skin to walk again as we once did when we were flesh. We slide the skinsuit on, smooth skin around our arms and legs, and feel it form us, firm us. Will we also now forget, like him, in payment for this dreamtime, an exchange of memories of death for memories of life?

  “Through door, go uphill,” he repeats. “Remember, up. You go to Circus. Pipe up name with a salute. They give you past and future. All you want, crazy thing.”

  He hacks and rasps again as he hobbles to a fire-exit door, clatters the bar of a handle down and swings it open.

  Outside, inside or just beyond, the Haven waits for us, no novagrad of dust where shabtis scuff their feet through windblown echoes of humanity, but the real thing. Kentigern waits for us, a city sunken in the overgrowth of ruined reality. We see a park of darkness. Buildings glimpsed through a rustle of leaves. A world lying in state, it waits. We hesitate.

  “Go, crazy thing,” he says behind us. “Go, Jack Carter. Go home.”

  We step out into the dark of parkness, rich earth flowering with the scent of memory. The door swings closed behind us.

  The Castle and the City

  It seems to go up forever.

  “Now that,” says Guy, “is what I call grandiose.”

  “Peachy,” says Jack. “Want one.”

  The Duke's Keep rises over the city as a giant among ants, skyscrapers for its buttresses, all mirrored glass, its walls drab slabs of concrete dam stretching between them, a perversion of a Gothic cathedral. It is as if somebody took New York and rearranged the skyline, placing this tower here and that tower there, finding the symmetries and complementing shapes and heights and, having done so, they then built a wall of concrete joining tower block to tower block, mute gray between the glittering glass, and built it higher, higher, just to prove that commerce's great spectacle of a city was only the building blocks of their great scheme. The wall of it rises into low cloud but you can make out the crenulations of the buildings bridged with blocky iron towers, topped by domes or spires, a more ancient architecture perched up on the precipice's tip, like gulls’ nests on a cliff. Yes, grandiose is one word to describe it.

  We trundle on toward it, through a city which is nothing if not humble in comparison. Here two or three stories are the norm and most of these squat concrete, sometimes painted in sun yellows or sky blues or peach, with fading adverts on their sides, for washing powder or some other product of that old forgotten and fantastic world we used to call reality—so many look unfinished, half built, with spirally steel reinforcing rods sprouting from their flat roofs like reeds, rust-color stalks stuck in a vase. Small shacks, plant pots and chairs and washing lines among them, speak of these roofs being used as gardens. Here and there one of the houses has three walls of a new level still being built, brick and wet plaster. It's as if all the houses are expanding upward, just taking their time about it.

  I point this out and Joey, dismissive as ever, says it's just a tax dodge.

  Once the house is finished,” he says, “they'll have to start paying tax on it. So if the house is never actually finished …”

  “How do you know?”

  “Seen it before.”

  But the buildings themselves, the roofs apart, are all a jumble of jutting bits and bobs, of balconies and blinds, awnings and louvered shutters, fretworks of quatrefoil patterns running up their heights, more potted plants and washing lines, and I think it's just that Joey has no poetry in his soul, if Joey has a soul at all. I love the confusion of it, the vibrant and organic texture of an architecture so haphazard. It's a city where people live their lives outside, on their roofs, and on their balconies. And on the streets where the palm trees and the rhododendrons rise out of the dust and the kiosks and the cafes, on the verges of the road filled with fast-moving carts and bicycles, and even the occasional car weaving between the curses and scattering pedestrians, women in burkas, men in suits, excited children running alongside this garish cart of ours which almost fits in with its scarlet wood and painted legend on the side and us all over it like passengers on an overloaded bus, Jack and myself up on the roof, Guy in the driver's seat with Don beside him, Joey standing on the sideboards, holding on and looking down in silence through his dark sunglasses at the kids who tug his coat and yammer at him, babbling. I think if it weren't for the legend Troupe d'reynard blazoned in florid lettering on the cart's side in an alphabet so alien to them, so unlike the angular script that plasters every poster, shop and kiosk around us, we might pass without regard, just another bunch of gypsies heading for market.

  Instead old men blow out cigarette smoke and tut at us. Young men frown at Jack's wolf whistles but turn away, shrugging, as I pull him back and thwack his arm. Children chatter and point. Girls watch Joey play it cool. The legend emblazoned on the cart's side announces us as something other, something different, exotic.

  I lean over the front edge of the roof, look down at Guy.

  “Tell me we're playing here,” I say. “Before or afterward. Come on, they'd love it. We could get a bit of audience interaction going, you know? We don't have to do the usual mindfuck, just a plain old-fashioned show.”

  Guy nods at the castle looming up ahead. It rises out of a factory area, its gates sporting two Lady Liberty-size Atlases, heads bowed under globes.

  “We already have our audience, and we're booked to play tonight,” he says. ‘And I rather think we might be leaving in a hurry.”

  I humph.

  “How long's it been s
ince we did something that we actually got applause for?”

  “I got a standing ovation in the Sheol Athenaeum,” says Jack, leaning over beside me.

  “They weren't standing,” says Guy. “They were running.”

  “They were cheering, though.”

  “I think you'll find that it's called screaming,” says Guy. “Jack, shouldn't you be practicing your lines? You too.”

  Jack rolls away in a sulk.

  “I've got them down,” I say. “I don't see why we can't just entertain people, once in a while. A little song, a little dance, a little poetry.”

  “There can be no poetry after the apocalypse,” says Don.

  “Bollocks,” says Jack. “Fuck that shit.”

  I pull Guy's new script out of the leg pocket of my combats, flip through the pages to try and find my place. Where was I? Yes.

  The Harlequin has come home.

  Soulflesh Steeped in an Orgone Marinade

  We hear the door clank closed behind us, turn to find it is no longer there, only a dead-end dirt path in the bushes that surround us. Clouds glow infernal orange in the sky, but the air is clear, crisp. Are we the only bitmites here? We listen for other sylphs. Hissing and tinny as a radio buried in the ground beneath our feet, we hear only a single voice.

  “You're listening to the midnight music of Radio Free Kentigern, coming out over the ether for all you lone wolfmen and preachers of the night. That's right. This is Howling Don Coyote, your one and only dog-boy with the deep and dirty that you all want dished, and I'll be taking you through from dusk till doom, yes sir, right up till those first rosy rays of the apocalypse light up the morning sky. As my dear old mother used to tell me as she tucked me in at night, my boy, the world ends tomorrow and you may die. But until it does let's kick back with a track, and this one's going out for Jack, because believe me, mis amigos, if music has charms to soothe the savage beast, there's one psycho pup out there that really needs his tummy tickled.”

  The babble is intriguing. It stirs something in us.

  Following the path out of the bushes, pushing thick, rubbery leaves aside and stepping over roots, we come out of the darkness onto damp tarmac. Under us our shadow flexes, and we kneel to touch this shape graved sharp out of the night itself with stars, tiny pinpricks of light, scattered all throughout its hollow body. No, not stars but stones, white stones embedded in the path.

  In the Hinter we did not have a shadow; it escaped from underfoot, black earth itself coming alive, refusing to be walked on. This world is strange.

  Uphill to the right, the tarmac trails up through twiggy trees like gnarled brown brooms, to the brow of a high hill, a wall topped with barbed wire. This is our path, the janitor general has told us, leading to the Circus; but something is shifting in us, we feel, underneath this newfound skin.

  Jack Carter we call our sylph, but there is something else inside this dead man walking, something brighter, something other, yes, another name.

  Jack Flash.

  We taste it sudden in the clarity of Kentigern's air. Black blood of a dead hero, angel dust of bitmites, skitters and chitters into a shape we recognize in the gravings of our chest. A schizoid epiphany made real, the stuff that dreams are made on, oh but this is our favorite dream of yours, yes, Jack “Flash” Carter, the disintegrated man, first warrior we wore when far ago we walked out into the sunlight of your world. We wear him again, at last, his soulflesh steeped in an orgone marinade, simmered till tender over the fires of hell. Oh how we feel at home in his patchwork self. We try to word it for you simple. Do you grasp?

  Here, now, we are. We hear now:

  “Yes folks,” the voice says. “Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. Jack Flash blew up the local nick. If you haven't heard the news yet, you must be listening to the BBC. Seems like that one-man revolution who we all thought dead and solid gone just struck another blow for life and liberty—or chaos and confusion, depending on which side you're on; took some orgone-saturated Semtex to the Royal Caledonian Constabulary's very own HQ, that five-star hotel for our boys in black and blue, known in popular parlance as the Pit. I hear they got more bodies under the floorboards there than a serial killers’ convention and a range of torture implements unrivaled since the Inquisition. That's the rumors anyway but, hey, we don't believe everything we see on the radiovision, do we? Or do we? Can it be that Jack the Cracked, our jaguar jackal of the snicker-snack—that's right, folks—can it be that Jack is back?”

  Is this us? We sense it is. Forward and back, from slide to glide, and up and down, we feel time dancing in us, past and future jangling in us, singing strings of a blue guitar. We are keen for it.

  So, as some panther-spirit out of jungle myth, we slouch out of the thunder-growth of feral parkland, through a clearing of weedwalk granite where a crumbling stone fountain, long abandoned to the vandals, casts its shadow in the moonlight. We do not go uphill. No, we stride toward a bridge half buried in the mire of what was once a river, now a tumescent scar of debris and marsh grasses. It calls to us with its echoes of the crystal stream that once ran here, echoes offish and heron, and the time within this time, the world you did not want, of dreaming spires and students laughing in the summer sun, littering the green with glittering bottles, bags and food. Men fucking in the bushes in the night, and roaming gangs of razor kids. Stanley knives, and newspapers tumbling with tales of immigrants and war. We hear, we scent, we see the river flowing black with oil and burning as the books fell into it, and leering, cheering faces, in the days of mob, the days of bonfires lit and sacrifices made to hold back Evenfall. The river of forbidden text still flows though, slowly, silted filth, this rotting mulch of blackened blacklist books, under the marsh grass where the river rats run.

  Moonlight and the silhouette of the—what is the word?—the Rookery in front of us, the Circus high up the slope behind, we walk across the no-man's-land that edges them, across the scythe of wilderness cutting between the ghetto-den of thieves and dissidents ahead and the business boot camp at our back. We feel the play of light and dark over our shadow body. No, we will not go uphill, to the Circus that rules over this Haven.

  The Jack in us says, no.

  Well, what it says is…

  Fuck that shit.

  Chorus, Kouros, Darling Koré

  Jack dances out across the stage.

  “Come, all you women who left the battlements of play to follow me far from your foreign homes, to revel, to run riot by my side and be my company, my merry band. March round the royal halls of Pierrot, lift up the cymbals from your native land, up to the skies, and clash them, crash them against the walls, until this town of Pantaloon's decides to open up its eyes.”

  He stops to glance at me, offstage.

  ‘As for myself,” says Jack, giving a sharp and toothy grin and fondling the veins carved in his wooden wand, each snicking inch of him a Harlequin, “I think I'll head up to the hills,” he says, “to join the dance.”

  He lifts the wooden wand up to his lips and, with a lick of them before beginning, gives an eerie toot, this twinkling-eyed pied piper with his somewhat phallic flute. He skips offstage, playing his tune.

  And that's my cue.

  “From distant mount of timeless ashes, we run with the spirit of laughter. All our work becomes a joy, our weariness so sweet, when it's a song for Harlequin! Who can stand in our way? Who in their house can stay? Shift! Shift, I say. Or hush. Let every lip be shushed in solemn silence while we raise a hymn to Harlequin.”

  I sing, wearing a dress again, as ever, lipstick, rouge and eyeshadow, playing the Chorus to Jack's hero, Joey's villain; even Guy and Don at least get to perform with trousers on. Not me, though. No, apparently my rosy cheeks and cherub lips are much too saucy sweet to play a Pantaloon or Scaramouche.

  ‘And then, of course,” says Guy backstage before the show, “there's those long lashes over your doe eyes that flutter in the hearts of all who see them. Thomas, my dear boy, how could you not be Chorus, kouro
s, darling kore of our comedies?”

  Harrumph.

  ——

  So I walk out onto the stage in soft white silk, sheening and sleek and flowing, blowing in the gentle breeze, a slim-hipped maiden—with an angel's voice, I'm told.

  “Let us begin,” I sing, “within the secret sanctum of the curates of the holy cave where every day is born, where dancers with their crested helms pound for our sensual delight the ox-hide drum, building wild rhythm into the rapture of their shouts of song, and wind round it the sweet sound of the flute.”

  Jack's air floats in from offstage, distant and soft but fluttering, quick as a darting swallow's wings between the beats of Don's palms on his doumbek, Joey on the bongos.

  “Now satyrs steal it for their own,” I sing, “to play in dances in triennial feasts which lift the heart of Harlequin.”

  The Duke looks unimpressed but the Princess is smiling.

  ‘And who is Harlequin?” I sing.

  Quiet and gentle, genteel as the priciest courtesan, I reach out to the audience an open hand, an offering, a question. The Duke leans forward in his seat, chin on his fist. The Princess cocks her head, a vague and dreamy look on her face.

  “Before his time,” I sing, “this bastard boy was born in cross-fire hurricane when lightning flashed, flew from a storm god's hand and lashed his mother in her pain, to strip her of her life. Sooth, son of crow or corn, however, found the child a womb within his thigh, fastened it shut with golden safety pins, to hide him from the Queen of Heaven's eyes. And when the Fates had fully formed this horny child, he brought him forth and crowned him with a wreath of wild and writhing snakes just as his followers now wear. We hunt these serpents everywhere to weave among our hair” [I sing it breathy like it is sheer ecstasy] “to be like Harlequin.”

  Oh, but there's no one quite like Jack, I think.

  A Constellation of Teeth

  “And that, mis amigos, is the subject of tonight's call-in. Empires and their enemies. Did the sun set on the Great Brutish Empire or is it just behind a cloud? Who's to blame and who's to flame? Is anarcho-terrorism too extreme even if we're living in a fascist regime? So give me a call if you got something to say. This is Deep Dark Don Coyote, getting down till dawn on the astral airwaves. You can wear your tinfoil hat, you can rip out all your fillings, but you can't stop the sound of the suburban subconscious.”