Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He's laying on the bile a little thick, I think, lashing his words across the audience. Sometimes he comes across a little too intense, I think. Sometimes we piss him off; that's true, I guess. Sometimes he vents.

  “What is this nonsense that the Harlequin is a spirit, that he was once stitched up in a thigh, his mother blasted by a lightning flash, because the lying slut said the boy's father was divine? Is this sheer arrogance alone not all the reason that we need to hang this man, whoever he may be?”

  Sometimes, I swear, he looks at Jack as if he wants to throttle him, and I'm not sure if Joey's really acting that at all.

  “But look!”

  He halts.

  ‘Another miracle. It's Scaramouche, our counsel, dressed in motley fawn-skin cloak—and my own grandfather, waving his walking stick around. Is this a joke? Sir, this is sad. Have the two of you gone mad? Take off that ivy and put down that walking stick. My own grandfather! Did you put him up to this, you charlatan? What are you trying to do? If it weren't for the gray hair that's protecting you, I'd have you thrown in chains among the followers of Harlequin, for promoting these pernicious practices. Believe me, when the sparkle of sweet wine is found at women's feasts…”

  And Joey, Pierrot the King, the King of Tears, somehow projects, through all the rage, the burden of his tyranny:

  “Nothing good will come of it.”

  “What are you trying to do?” says Joey, looking out from behind the curtain at the crowd, as he paints on his tears. Out there, the audience waits for the show to start; they're getting restless and the Duke and Princess both look bored, but we, of course, always have time for these last-minute tantrums in the Troupe d'reynard: Jack sulking because, star of the show, he still doesn't have enough lines; Don muttering about how he'd only fuck them up: me—I must admit—grumbling about playing yet another girl's role, or because the dress is linen rather than silk and isn't nearly soft enough beside my tender skin. And Joey always convinced that, this time, Guy has taken it too far.

  “You want to turn the Harlequin into some kind of god wandering among men. What is this? You see some money to be made in ‘cult appeal’? All this mystery and mumbo jumbo. You'll have Scaramouche reading chicken's entrails next.”

  “Well, he is playing Teiresias,” says Monsieur Reynard. “It is based on The Bacchae, after all… with a few minor modifications.”

  Joey looks out at the Duke of this small corner of the dreamtime, sitting in business gray upon his throne, waiting impatiently for us to while away a little of eternity for him. There's always been an element of social satire in the Harlequin play, but here, in the Hinter of the Vellum, where dead men turn their kingdom paradises into the black iron prison of their own soul, trying to bring a little … reality into their afterlives can be a perilous adventure.

  “They'll hang us all,” says Joey. “They'll fucking tear us apart.”

  And Jack just grins, and Don puffs up his chest, tugging his beard into its place, and I pout in the mirror as I put my lipstick on. Guy shrugs, quoting his own script.

  “Have you no faith, sir? Would you mock old Pantaloon and all the seeds he's sown, those dragon's teeth, sons of the earth? And you, son of his daughter Columbine—you shame your birth.”

  ANOTHER COUNTRY

  January 31st, 1989.

  Don orders another beer from the waiter and turns back to the window. The Copthorne's bar is an ideal location for him, a long thin glass conservatory stretching along the ground floor of the hotel's frontage, facing out directly on George Square and elevated just enough for him to see over the cordon of riot police to the gathered protesters beyond. Some of the placards carry black-and-white pictures of the hunger striker Finn, and on the table in front of Don lies a pamphlet carrying the same image along with the logo of the Caledonia Workers’ Committee. Ten years in jail have only made the man more of a hero. Outside the crowd are chanting—Can't Pay, Won't Pay, Can't Pay, Won't Pay…

  It must be four months now. He came here in September of last year, following a lead on his latest story, his latest case, one Guy Reynard, currently in illegal possession of a medieval manuscript that was once in Kentigern University's Special Collection. Nobody's willing to tell him how this Reynard got hold of it or what it means to them, but they want it back so bad it worries him. There's only two reasons someone steals something, in Don's experience, and that's for money or for power. And if the power lies in a book, that can only be bad news. Sure, information is power, but only if it's secret.

  And if it's secret, these days, that means someone wants it that way.

  He's an agent for hire, is Don, a private eye with a press card good in any country of the Commonwealth, a license to snoop all that he wants as long as what he sends back to the Agency answers the client's questions to their satisfaction, and as long as what goes public serves the right agenda. Find the truth and spread the lie. Gather and scatter, search and destroy, weave and spin. There's no such thing as a free press, indeed. But at least it's not the government that owns him. No, the Agency is a private company in the best Thatcherite tradition. Set up by blue-blood Ivy Leaguers who escaped the USA's implosion, saw what was coming and gathered together the ruins of the intelligence community, brought them over here lock, stock and barrel to set up shop as independent contractors. That's the beauty of Albion's liberal fascism; it maintains the democratic facade of constitutional monarchy, lords and ministers, but behind that is a Babel of bureaucracy, red tape and paperwork designed to tie up all the would-be commissars, and all the true corridors of power hidden behind secret panels, in private, privatized. Business is taken care of in deals made behind closed doors, handshakes between old friends. The closing of the London ghettos was just an elimination of competitors.

  Don opens up his wallet to peel out a five-pound note for the waiter. It's something he's missed in his time in the States, all the different colors of Albion's money, and the different designs of this bank or that, Bank of Albion, Bank of Caledonia, Royal Bank of Caledonia, Clydeside Bank. For all that America is now a turmoil of militia territories, warring unions and confederacies, they all still cling to the same green bills—the Jacksons, Jeffersons and Washingtons—as if they all still share at least that one dream. He had the accent down pat in a few weeks but he never quite got used to that monomaniac currency, always fearing that his fumbling for the right note would one day blow his cover among whatever group of lunatics he happened to be infiltrating at the time. He fingers his way through blue and brown notes, receipts that he can claim back on expenses and a wad of just plain junk, finds the photogram and pulls it out as well, lays it on the table.

  He's a foxy character, this Reynard—pencil mustache, flop of hair, there's no other word for him but dapper, Don gazes out into the crowd, scanning the faces for a sight of the man. If he's mixed up with these socialists, then it's worse than he thought, and all the clues point in that direction. This little island empire built on trade, this nation of shopkeepers, of company directors, salesmen and marketing executives, he thinks, this is no country for idealists. But try telling that to the fools out there.

  He looks from face to face. The crowd is mainly young, would have been students, he reckons, before the closing of the universities. Young and rash, screaming against this new tax and against Westminster using Caledonia as a testing ground for it. But, then, it would be hard to think of anything better calculated to sow discontent among the socialists and nationalists of Caledonia than this tax.

  There's a riot coming, thinks Don.

  An SS officer walks past the window, up to the militiaman in charge, leans close to speak into his ear. The man nods, turns and barks an order to his troops.

  Don raises his beer to his lips to take a sip. You become inured to the violence, he thinks, after a while in this job, seeing it as if your own eye was a camera lens, as if the window that you're looking out of were a radiovision screen. It's not happening here and now but distant, in another country, in the pas
t. It's not real.

  A face in the crowd. Don rises from his seat just as it disappears. Another glimpse. It's him: Reynard. But as he cranes his neck for a better view, some longhair punk gets in the way. He turns to look right at Don, eyes boring into him even through the milling protesters and ranks of militia, a gaze sharp as a knife point trailing gently over someone's throat, searching for the artery.

  The militia raise their batons.

  In Gin and whisky, Wine and Beer

  “When an intelligent man,” says Scaramouche, “finds something he can get his teeth into, it's not a difficult thing to show a little flair, a little wit. You have a quick tongue in your head, my lord, but power and eloquence in a great man may bring fortune or a different fate; wit's not the same as wits. A man like you is the real peril to the state.”

  As Pierrot bristles, Guy as Scaramouche holds up his hands.

  “I only say it as I see it, lord. This Harlequin you mock is bound for such a height of power through the whole of this fair hell, I could not put it into words. But let me tell you this. There are two things, young prince, that matter most among all men. There is the earth—the fields, the grain—who feeds our bodies with her bread.”

  I twirl across the stage, grain strewing from my hands. I'm not convinced we really need to make the imagery so literal but Guy insists on it—they have to understand.

  “But as her counterpart there is this spirit, son of Simile, who fills our head with wine, stills all our sorrows over time, and brings us sleep where we forget all daily ills. There is no other cure for sorrow. Every offering we pour and every prayer that we make to any god—it's Harlequin who hears. He's there in every glass, in gin and whisky, wine and beer.”

  ——

  “This is the man you mock,” reads Guy, scribbling at the manuscript. “Because of some grand lie about him being sewn up in a deity's thigh.”

  He stands up to pace around inside the wagon, page in one hand, pen in the other, reciting the troubling section to us. Jack yawns. Joey pours a bottle of beer into his glass and dumps the empty on the table he's sitting on.

  “But I'll tell you a simple secret,” reads Guy. “When Sooth snatched Harlequin out of the lightning's flash, he would have taken the boy up to sit there at his side, in his eternal palace in the skies. Except the queen of heaven, who gets everything her way, wanted the child dead, wanted to see his body brought before her on display; Sooth had to find a way, some kind of scheme, so he broke off a tiny fragment of eternity—a dream—and made a double of the boy to satisfy her cruel demands, while he hid Harlequin in other hands. In time, because the ancient words for ‘thigh’ and ‘twin’ sound much the same, men lost the truth and found a legend in the space between two words.”

  Guy taps his pen upon the paper.

  “What do you think? Does that give the game away?” he asks. “If our audience is well acquainted with the myth of Dionysus …”

  “I hear the Duke is a well-educated man,” says Don. “He might well rumble it at that point.”

  Joey empties his glass.

  “If he doesn't get it right away,” he says, “and—”

  “Hang us, shoot us, slice us, dice us, blah blah, blah blah, blah” Jack cuts off Joey in midgloom.

  “I think,” says Guy, stepping between the two, “we might be better leaving that part out.”

  So Pierrot, on stage, just snorts and flicks a hand in sheer disdain.

  ‘And I suppose this spirit has a prophet's power too, that there is inspiration in inebriation? After all, when a mere human form is ‘filled up with the spirit,’ sodden with drink, they see visions, don't they? At least so they think. Or then again, in war sometimes, before the first gunshot, when panic grips an army, sends it in flight—is this the kind of frenzy loved by Harlequin? Is this your Harlequin's delight?”

  “The day will come,” says Scaramouche, “you'll see him leaping on the rock of oracles, a torch held high in one hand, and his green staff in the other, all of hell exalting him. Take my advice, Pierrot. Consider this: He forces no one to be chaste, but if it's part of who they are, no really modest maid will let her virtue be debased in any mysteries. Don't think that force alone can rule the world. Don't mistake wisdom for the opinion of a mind coming unfurled. Welcome this Harlequin into your realm, pour out libations, join the revel rout, and crown your head.”

  “Mark this,” says Scaramouche. ‘As you yourself are thrilled when crowds stand at the city gates and praise the name of Pierrot, he too, I think, delights in being cheered. So Pantaloon and I, for all your jeers, will wear garlands of ivy, join the dance and, even if we have gray beards, we will still prance.”

  He puts one hand on Pantaloon's shoulder and another on his walking stick, standing behind the old buffoon.

  “No matter what you say, it is the way of things; one mustn't kick against the pricks.”

  He mugs a wink, stroking old Pantaloon's stick to get a cheap laugh from the innuendo, letting the audience think that roguish Scaramouche is simply up to his old tricks.

  “Your mind is sick,” he says to Pierrot's disdainful back, but with a furtive glance toward the Duke. ‘And while it may be drugs that made you so, if it's a cure you're looking for, there's no drug that I know.”

  A PRACTICED GAZE OF UTTER CERTAINTY

  “And folks, this is the god's honest truth. Which god, I couldn't rightly say—it could be Mammon or it could be Moloch, Dionysus or Apollo, any god you care to follow—but I tell you this, folks, I was there that Bloody Friday in George Square, when those guns started blazing and the people started falling, and I know I saw Jack Flash himself That's right, folks, ten years to the day he died, I saw the man, the myth, the angel assassin with the devil's kiss. I saw him there, up on the roof of the City Chambers, chi-gun cutting through the coppers like a carving knife through bacon. In all the massacre and mayhem, I can't say for sure if what I saw was monster or messiah—maybe just a bit of both—but I can tell you folks I saw him with my own eyes, saw him leaping from a rooftop down into the massed ranks of the men in black, a zen grenade in each hand, two pins clenched between his grinning teeth.

  “Folks, what I'm telling you, I swear, is true. I'd seen the sketches in the papers as a young man and I knew, I knew that face the second that I saw it, fire in his eyes and grinning like a fiend. You should have seen me, baby, Howling Don Coyote, mouth open so wide that I was catching flies, dropping the pencil and the notebook where I used to write my lies. My friends, I want to open up here, let you know the truth; I wasn't always the same Don on the side of good. I was, for shame, an agent once, yes, spinning lies instead of disks and feeling oh-so-bad about it but still letting others take the risks. One thing changed that for me, my friends. One little thing that changes everything is all it takes. One little thing, one day, and your whole world breaks. “Well, mis amigos, now you know. Forme, that thing was Jack.”

  “Jack Flash is an empty hope, a futile gesture,” says Joey Narcosis. “His great revolutionary feats weren't half as spectacular as his failure.”

  “That's just the point,” says the Minister. “Jack Flash is dead. Or is there something we should know? There were reports, the Tax Riots of ‘89. Could—”

  “No.”

  He gives the Minister his empty glare, a practiced gaze of utter certainty, cold as a corpse's, laden with a knowledge absolute as death. The Minister drops his eyes, drops his question. So much for the will-to-power. Fascists, communists, anarchists. They're all the same. Bureaucrats or dreamers, with their swastikas, their hammers and sickles. To the Futurists those were only ever paths to power. While the people rallied round them, the Futurists of Russia and Germany nodded and smiled and joined in the songs and joined the party and they waited till those symbols had reshaped the nation. And then one day they ripped the hammer and sickle down, burned the swastika, and raised the flag of Futurism over the factories of death.

  He smiles at his reflection in the window, smart in black suit, black
leather jacket and black woolen overcoat—Italian and expensive—the embodiment of slick, deadly authority. Too bad he wasn't born on the other side of the Iron Wall, he thinks. Would have fitted right in. He runs his fingers over crow-black hair and turns to face the Minister.

  ‘All we have here,” he says, “is a wannabe living out his wet dream.”

  “Jack Flash or not, he's causing havoc. It may be his wet dream; it's my bloody nightmare.”

  And so you call in the dream-killer, thinks Joey.

  “Jack Flash is dead,” he says. “It's time to exorcise his ghost.”

  “Yes, mis amigos, Jack Flash was there and Jack Flash died that night a second time, but friends, it looks like Jack is back. How many lives does this cat have? Has someone taken up the maniac's mantle, or are we looking at the ghost of massacres past come back to haunt us? Mortal madman or angel assassin? Or killer queen, indeed, if what I've heard about his tastes in bed are true. So let's hear what you think. And—whoop-de-doo—I think we got our first call coming through right now. It's a big hello to… Harvey from Maryhill. Harvey, you're on the ether…”

  “Hello, Don. Aye … Jack Flash … I think he's a bit of a tosser, actually, and a dangerous one at that. The problem is—? can't remember who said it, but—‘to fight the Empire is to become it’ Once you start to play the game by their rules, use their methods, you've already lost; you're just the same as them.”

  “Violence begets violence, eh, Harvey?”

  “It doesn't matter whose foot the jackboot's on, it's still a jackboot kicking someone else in the face. Every baby killer sees themselves as just another good soldier fighting for the glorious cause…”

  The Minister flicks the latches on the leather briefcase and opens it up. There's a gleam of adamantium, too silvery to be gold, too golden to be silver, the glow of glamour and trapped souls. Joey Narcosis crosses the room calmly and gazes into the light. It's a handsome payment.