The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  “I can’t accept that. Everyone wants you to take it on faith that there’s a meaning, that you’ll know, but only after it’s too late. How can I know now?”

  She told him about the subtle energy fields that inhabited matter and gave it form. Consciousness was no more nor less than an energy field that recognized itself. A weird fusion of quantum physics and animism, her pitch was a universal solvent that atomized and reinvented every tenet of modern science that conventional religions choked on; evolution, the Big Bang and extraterrestrial life were not anathema, but scripture. And this was only the skin of the Truth, she told him. In this lifetime, they knew all the answers, and knew what even legendary spiritual seekers, when the day was done, had to take on faith. She offered him a book, Out Of The House Of Matter, free of charge, and left him to call for a taxi.

  Jarvis began to read the book on the flight home. At first, he was disappointed. Where the lady had hinted at miracles, he found breathing exercises, meditation schemes and a lot of yogic nonsense that proceeded from exactly the baseline state of inner tranquility that he was seeking, rather than offering a way to reach it. Angrily, he stuffed the book into the magazine caddy jammed against his knees and tried to sleep.

  As his mind drifted into that fleeting, semi-conscious phase of hypnagogic association that the book called the theta state, the breathing exercises rose unbidden in his mind to set themselves in motion. His body began to breathe cyclically of its own volition, and Jarvis was cut entirely free for the first time in his life from maintaining its operation, indeed cut free from the body itself. He saw himself cramped inside the tourist-class seat as he had been trapped inside his body for so long, and realized what he had become.

  A being of pure intellect, set free from the body, yet still coherent, still… alive? The ghost was free of the machine, but to what purpose? He drifted about the cabin, testing new senses, seeing the stunted, insensate energy fields of other travelers writhing like sodden laundry in damaged washing machines, unaware of their own divinity, unable or unwilling to respond to his reaching out.

  And what of the world beyond the airplane? Infinity yawned outside, yielding no answers, no self-evident purpose. So the soul was an independent entity from the body; what good eternal, bodiless life in an empty universe, like a lone insomniac in an eternally sleeping city? It was a small, unsatisfying truth in the end, but a large enough revelation to hint at others beyond. Practice the breathing exercises, attain mastery over the meditational disciplines, and perhaps a greater Truth would one day reveal itself to him, and fill him with what he sought. He remembered to retrieve the book before he deplaned.

  In the months that followed, he worked to strengthen his grasp on the elementary principles of astral projection. He learned to bring about the escape at will, and to manipulate his energy field so as to travel, not merely drift. New lessons brought him only greater confusion, raised only deeper questions. Separation from and objective viewing of his empty body tore away his previous conception of self: he was not the snub-nosed, colorless little man slumbering on the couch, any more than he was the boxy little car that little man drove to work every morning. What was he, then? A lonely, bodiless traveler in a strange, featureless country, bereft of fellow travelers through whom he might gain some perspective on his true nature. He considered and rejected again and again the notion of contacting the people from whom he’d received the book. He would not give up his new understanding for a place in an organized religion, which guarded and doled out revelations on the installment plan. He became a seeker at last, but his steps were halting and uncertain, and seemed to lead him only into a void of deeper doubt.

  He learned that though his energy field could not act upon the material world, he could move through it at will, and for a while contented himself with exploring his apartment building. This soon proved a tiresome and dispiriting affair, for his neighbors were like the atheists in Dante’s Inferno, willful prisoners in mausoleums of flesh and stone, dumbly denying their own torment. For all his pounding away at their wooden brows, he might have been trying to coax life from a tribe of wooden cigar-store Indians.

  In the flesh, he tried to introduce his breathing exercises to a few neighbors, who looked askance at him and shut doors in his face. Small wonder that they stopped their ears to his proselytizing, as his fleshly appearance had suffered for all his astral wandering. His job, too, had gone on without him. Returning from a jaunt of some days’ length, he found his shelves bare of edible food, his utilities switched off, and his body in an advanced state of abandonment. Bitterly, he saw to its needs and disposed of his automobile to pay his bills. He thought about selling a kidney, if he’d have to wait around that long.

  He sensed that he had reached the far turn in his quest for Truth, that his emptiness had only enlarged itself to contract again soon, when he would come upon the teleological lynchpin that held the universe together, and would enable him to return to his body and live contentedly in the world like those happy pilgrims at the outreach foundation.

  As his skill at astral projection grew, he learned that he had new senses, unbounded by the time and space traps that snared his material self. He could span any distance, compressing time so that a journey of many months’ length could be made in a single session. Still, his jaunts were empty affairs, for none appeared to guide or enlighten him. Was he an aberration, alone in the universe in his ability, or were they hiding from him, perhaps until such time as he could comprehend on his own the mystery he hoped to unravel? He understood that though the universe was indeed boundless, the domain of matter did have boundaries, was folded upon itself like a Chinese puzzle box to give only the illusion of infinity. He slipped beyond it one night, and held it in his “hand.” Beyond it lay a greater emptiness, a desert outside all deserts, a space beyond all space which he could not hope to traverse and ever return, and which offered no emissary to lead him to his destination. And that is when he saw the other.

  At first, he took it for a star, though he had traveled beyond stars and, indeed, grasped all the stars and space within himself. A pulsating light, it flowed past him, brushing against him with the unmistakable vibrations of a consciousness, its edges unblunted by the material moorings which had left him so skewed and alone.

  He attempted to communicate, but found this faculty had not progressed beyond the infantile in his evolved state. He struggled to follow the other, plunging down into the net of matter he’d escaped, down through spinning galaxies, constellations and suns, all the way down to his world, his land, his city, his apartment, his living room.

  He entered his bedroom, but the other was gone. Despondent, he approached his body, which in his absence had soiled itself.

  He could not get back in.

  Something pushed him away, where before he had found entry automatic, like succumbing to a vacuum. Sleepily, his eyes opened. They regarded him with benevolent comprehension, alert perception wedded to placid understanding of the Truth he’d found unattainable. Then they looked away. He watched as his body arose from his stained couch, cleaned itself, set his apartment in order, and called on the telephone.

  “Yes. I’ve just awakened in a new initiate… I understand. Yes, I’d like to open an outreach franchise in my city. Yes… Very good.” Jarvis Glaublich’s body regarded him again, his careworn face beaming on him with cosmic pity. “The Truth shall set you free,” the usurper of Jarvis Glaublich’s body told him, and blew him out of the house of matter, to find it.

  ~*~

  Your episodes seem to share common themes…

  What is this, self-serve analysis? You want me to spell them out?

  You have a morbid preoccupation with the occult, which is a coping mechanism for your uneasy atheism. Your preoccupation with paralysis and displacement suggests a metaphorical dialectic to interpret your self-doubt.

  Not me, goddammit, haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? It’s not me. It’s Him. Everything is Him.

  I’ve urge
d you to get out more. What did you do last night?

  I went to the movies.

  What did you see?

  I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. I sat in the front row, and I cried, because I knew I was a fictional character, too. Only the stories I live in are cheap little sacks of pus and petty dread for sick freaks who can’t wait to die. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I climbed up onto the apron and tried to break through the screen, to get into their story, any story but this one.

  This one? You mean you believe we’re in a story right now?

  That’s all there is here, is stories. This one is shabbier and even less developed than the rest, but it’s a story. My Demiurge is a hack writer who thinks too much, and loves himself too little. He’s you, Doctor. You’re probing me, trying to wring another drop of anxiety out of me for a story. I’m not your whipping boy, anymore. I can escape you, go where you’ll never find me again.

  You know the best way to exorcise these kind of fantasies is, don’t you?

  Oh, if I only could. Some day, I’d like to write a story about YOU.

  ~*~

  Where do you get your ideas?

  People often asked O____, as they always did when stuck in a dead-end conversation with a writer. And as any writer trapped by such a profoundly stupid question would, he always held forth about how anything was an idea in the offing for a real writer, but he always looked around first to see if his cousin the clinical therapist was in earshot.

  In the most useful of the hundreds of books on writing that O_____ had read, he found the only piece of advice that ever helped. To write well, one must have a “capacity for invention,” which enabled one to “articulate inchoate but universal feelings and impressions into unique plots which enveloped characters imbued by the deft deployment of a few poignant details with the semblance of both vitality and archetypal immortality.” But if one lacked such a capacity, one had only to “invent the capacity for invention.”

  Pure genius! O_____ left off trying to write mere stories, and committed himself to imagining O_____ the professional writer, who sweated brilliant ideas and digested the raw offal of life into golden eggs of art.

  When years of dedicated self-invention failed to yield any worthwhile story ideas, he cast about in desperation, and started listening actively to people around him.

  “Some of the shit they say, I tell you, you should hear it,” his cousin said, at a backyard barbecue. “That’d give you enough nightmares for a thousand stories.” Tight, but not yet drunk, so O____ poured another and another as the notion took hold in the slippery soil of his brain.

  “Play some of the tapes,” he kept pushing.

  “This one is especially twisted. Poor fucker’s got three or more degenerative conditions eating him alive, but he has these nightmares that’ve convinced him he’s God.”

  He poured another shot. “I gotta hear that.”

  The voice on the tape sounded like a disease in a cheap, disintegrating human disguise. You could hear pieces of it falling away as it started to speak. “No names, please––names are lies, except for the one you choose for yourself…”

  Suddenly sober, his cousin remembered his oath.

  “It’s not the fucking governor, for Christ’s sake. It’s not some celebrity. It’s a nobody, a sick man. You said so yourself.”

  The patient was only a rasping presence like the sound of a dying fire, as the session began. O____ killed another margarita and read the case notes as the tape played.

  Patient 7________ had nightmares, but the nightmares were more real than his waking life. Though they threatened his grip on reality, they seemed to offer the only relief from an existence devoid of meaningful rewards, a world that had utterly rejected him. In early sessions, he saw himself as a one-dimensional persona floating in an abysmally ill-conceived limbo until the next time his sadistic creator hauled him off the shelf, nailed him to another name and place, and dangled him before a crudely crayoned cyclorama of petty dread.

  He knew this sounded insane, however. Naturally, if he was an archetypal victim-puppet in a writer’s mind, he’d be incapable of recognizing it. God is always beyond understanding. His god, however nakedly mundane, would remain veiled in the inconceivable, free to torture imaginary sea monkeys in the dungeon of His divine mind. Unless––no, it was impossible. Unless his realization of the whole awful scenario was but another story, and when its telegraphed twist ending had finally unraveled, he would fall into the infinite void of true limbo as he was forgotten. Only natural, then, to concoct this fantasy of being God, trapped in his own creation.

  Finally, the therapist got around to asking him to describe the second-rate nightmares.

  “I’m a girl in a plain, ankle-length homespun frock over pants, surrounded by larger versions of same and men in homely Sunday suits. We go to Hometown Buffet in a group and we clear every tureen and steamer table at the buffet. Stuffed, ecstatic, we pile into our school bus and hasten to church.

  “The sermon is brief and interrupted by the first spasms of sickness from the crowd. My grandmother is among the first to rise up and testify to the evils of this world. Her speech is a long, wordless yawn of vomit that sprays over the pews and her fellow parishioners.

  “The spirit is come upon us all now, and the expulsion begins en masse. Bile flies in aerosolized spray while glutinous clods of half-chewed chicken and fish and tuna casserole coat the floor like hailstones. Those too sturdy of constitution to join in force fingers down throats to add to the Technicolor chorus, until all of us lie spent and skeletal, swaddled in stretched-out, empty skins.

  “The deacons crawl through the mess, pawing each morsel and pool of bile until, every so often, one of them finds a holy relic. Each discovery is brought to the altar, where a great glass case lined with white velvet holds an almost complete human skeleton, white as new-fallen snow and full of holy blue-white fire. Most of the “finds” prove to be little more than bones of chicken or pork, but one blind old woman has expelled the last missing metacarpal of the right hand, while a massive, toadlike woman in the back quite effortlessly heaved up the right half of the pelvis.

  “The priest is in an ecstasy as the penultimate bones are added to the reliquary. But the prophecy has not yet been fulfilled. Only the skull has not been delivered.

  “I alone have not been sick. All eyes fall upon me. All hands interlock to bar the exit. I look down at the bulge of my belly, and I try to stifle my prayer that this time, the Lord will see fit to come out of me through my mouth…”

  It was a goldmine. To be sure, he had never aspired to write such unpleasant drek––he was partial to crime fiction where the hero was the villain, so you didn’t have to keep track of a big, messy mystery. But he knew he’d never find better material. O____ took notes, filling both sides of twenty pages of his Moleskin notebook. His wife had to drag him away. His cousin wouldn’t let him borrow the tapes, but he promised to let him review further sessions.

  His first efforts were halting, inert lumps of prose until he discovered that he could recall the patient’s exact words, as if he had only just heard them, and the patient’s own tragically disaffected voice was the best vehicle for these tales of appalling, surreal dread. The completion of each one was less like labor than the lancing of some psychic carbuncle, the product in his eyes devoid of joy beyond the relief at its expulsion.

  For the stories had had their way with O____ before they found their way out of him, poisoning his capacity to reinvent himself. Indeed, the stories and their anonymous dreamer had reimagined him, so that when success came with much fatuous heraldry at his discovery and arrival, he made his entrance upon the public stage with suitable detachment and the haunted decorum borne of second-hand despair.

  Though he never had cause to suspect that 7______ was aware of his vicarious fame, he sometimes wondered if the nameless patient was toying with him. One recurring nightmare involved a writer who keeps penning masterpieces and sending them off, only t
o discover that they’ve all been done before by an ingenious but obscure writer whose final story before he disappeared was about a writer who becomes capable of seeing into the future and uses his gift to steal our hero’s ideas. Horror stories about writers were all the rage at the time, and O_____’s novel about it was the first to crack the bestseller lists, but he was sued by some aging nobody who’d written a story with the same premise that O_____ had read in a textbook in grade school. In 7_______’s dream, the hapless protagonist had written the final scene, powerless to stop typing even as his hands described the hideous apparition of the phantasmal plagiarist as he crept up and slipped fleshless talons around the hero’s throat. In real life, O_____ gracefully and quietly settled out of court.

  Another recurring, serialized nightmare was about a man who witnesses something in the middle of a riot. He tries to tell a girlfriend, but she almost immediately commits suicide. The protagonist keeps the horrible secret to himself, but its sheer toxicity leaks out his eyes and causes anyone he makes eye contact with to snuff it in the most spectacular fashion possible. He learns to spot potential victims by a cloud behind their eyes of sadness and buried pain and an unacknowledged hunger for self-destruction. Finally, he gouges out his eyes to stop the insanity, but the toxic cloud pours out of his eye sockets and poisons the whole city.

  With genuine, painful work, O_____ was able to turn the bleak vision into Victim Eyes, a rousing 600-page doorstop of paranormal adventure. He had some trouble coming up with a suitable enemy, but presently, it came to him with such intensity that he thought he was going mad, himself.

  In his dream, 7_______ saw a horde of towering puppeteers looming over the crowd, working their passions, stoking their bestial rage by slim quicksilver cords that plugged into their brains. The phantasmal puppeteers were themselves but the tiniest digital extremities of a forest of intangible limbs which converged on a headless hundred-handed leviathan hovering over the city like a bloated spider at the center of its web, injecting every individual mind with venomous hate and paralyzing reason to be drained of its essence and left a legion of impotent husks.