Always sad, always philosophical, that the good of the whole must outweigh the individual, as the Company voice decreed.
How else to explain, except that in the magical garden, the son recognized that “to fix” meant “to make into a better self.” Why fix the thing in place, in its former place, like a butterfly on a killing board? Pretty, but there was always something better it could be, under the son’s watchful guidance.
Every night before bedtime, the son would have a wonderful playtime with these creatures of their own creation. In that green and verdant closet, with so many miniatures of what the son hoped would someday be life-size. Charlie would lie down behind the false wall among the velveteen crush of so many hands and hooves and claws and webbed feet, the rough and the smooth and the lacerated, and surrender to that embrace, find a kind of peace. To let the voices of the fixed lull him to half sleep. To be enraptured in that space and that living bed. Certain that someday soon the magical garden might lawfully spill out into the wider world and his father would understand and the Company would understand, and so, too, might God.
But instead, one night too soon Charlie found his father at the door to the room, one hand on the doorknob, and Charlie could not look upon his father’s face, for the glow of satisfaction, the wide, wide grin was too much to bear, and by this look bestowed upon him knew he would be fixed again.
Except the fixing took yet another form this time.
For his father threw open the door to the magical garden and said, “I have prepared a feast for you, for all of your hard, hard work, my son. And I have used only the finest ingredients. Your own ingredients.”
There, upon a long table, lay dead and cooked all those creatures I had kept hidden for so long. Every single one, silent and flame-besotted, save the duck, which he knew I loved and he must have loved, too, in his way.
“And you must eat it all,” my father whispered in my ear. “You and the bird both. Every last scrap, between you.”
And thus the bird and I set to our feast with vigor, even as the tears trickled down my face and I felt as weak and exposed as anything my father had worked on splayed across the cutting boards in his laboratory. My nerves a network like a brittle starfish and my father breaking off pieces with no regard for the pattern.
Ah, Mother, even if I knew your face, how could this not be hell?
Another time, for time was fluid to the dark bird and she could not always distinguish between them, or moments stacked atop one another so there was no difference, no difference at all.
Night had dropped against sky once again, a kidnapping that held the dark bird close, and sometimes the bird sagged inside that darkness as if trapped in some rough black cloth that stank of surgery. It worried at the dark bird, worried at her like the stars were the tips of thorns and it had become stuck in a thicket of them.
Out in the City, members of some cult, going door to door in a broken shantytown neighborhood, hadn’t noticed the duck in the shadow out of the sun. Some broken cult that couldn’t contain itself, must be known by all, all must be in it, even though there were so few. The dark bird had slaughtered them when it meant to ignore, something in their demeanor bringing out the rage. Murder control bereft, the monster still in its home in her skull. So she had killed them all on her own. A seepage that startled. Nothing beatific in the remains, fly-studded but quiet.
There came again light under the blackened sky, there on the lonely hill where she had a nest—become starful against recollection, and grand and rich and also drenched in gray or light purple or even the moon. Soaked by the moon, the blackness, so it felt like cold river water, a comfort upon the dark bird’s face and beak.
There came no call from a Company outpost. No admonition to attack, to defend. No alert. Just the night, and some sense of the foxes out on the desert floor, the ones she despised, feared, envied. No one bound them. No voice owned them out of blue sky or velvet night.
But she waited in that place. For the tiny creatures to come out, the ones that could not know her type or her purpose or her past. If the dark bird remained still and silent, she could live in that moment, watching. Unspoiled by any impulse to snatch them up in her beak, to crunch, gnaw, or devour.
The nighttime blossoms registered black to human sight, but to her a glittering field of yellow and blue and saffron—pinprick flowers in multitudes—arose on slender stalks, and with them the smell of lavender and rosemary and mint. Smells, almost, from another world, deployed by the flowers as a kind of trap, a memory of things that no longer existed. For they were clever flowers, almost worthy of the magical garden.
Came with the flowers, weaving through them, a scrabbling of some mutant desert rat, then the tingle-hops of the three long legs, and a grappling as of two of them at play, sproing and spring, then gone. Came a fast-sharp slither of a two-tailed snake, headed after to eat the insects dislodged by their passage. Then peering out, subsonic arguments tin-tin-tin in the dark bird’s ears, alcohol minnows, whose gills distilled moisture from sand, stitching in and out, the glint the glint the glint. Their small dramas played out before this statue of a dark bird.
The way the mice chased the grasshoppers and the grasshoppers pretended to be flower stalks …
Idyllic, could have been to be silent nocturnal, on a hill, on a darkling plain. To not think. To not conflict with the internal. To watch the stars. But:
Murder control. Murder control. Feasting of a sudden on good gristle meat. Delicate ankle. Elbow. Feasting in the dank dim glow. Unpredictable. Let loose. Loosened. The rage so familiar, like breathing, that the dark bird felt only the aftermath, which was a kind of weakening.
Why should this impulse always be impulsive. Unable to tell if there had been a command, because there was now just an echo. Was it the echo of a command? Or was it nothing?
Comforting weight of the journal beneath the dark bird.
Murder control, read me another story. Just one more story. One about me, this time.
No matter how terrible?
No matter how terrible.
Even if it’s not really about you?
I know all the stories are really about him.
~ The Ugly Duckling ~
My father always said, “I’ll whip you if you don’t get it right,” so let us pretend I got it right in the end because it was never as gentle as whipping. But not every being can get it right the first time. I do not blame some in the magical garden. Their heads were not on right or not right away. Their angles were all wrong. They could never be like my duck. My duck was my luck, my pluck. I could never call it dark bird like the others.
But she was a duck—a plucky duckling who existed atop a hedgerow pedestal made of flesh in the magical garden. Queen of that place. Queen of my childhood. Duckling eternal. For I’d had the dark bird as a duckling for twenty years before she became a duck. A foundling found when I was but a child of seven. Or ten. Or zero. Or three. One of those. And she was left on our doorstep.
But where was that doorstep? Erased with my mother is every place I ever lived before the Company building. Should she be a hologram or holograsp beyond reach, I ask only that she once was real, so that I am too. What became confused is whether the provenance of flesh should sit heavy on the mind shoved inside.
My father always said, “Make this into a lesson or I’ll kill it. And you. Again.”
The Company, IT always said, BE EFFICIENT, BE INGENIOUS.
The Company, IT always said, IF IT DIES, IT WAS MEANT TO DIE.
The Company, IT always said, MAKE THIS INTO A LESSON OR I’LL KILL IT. AND YOU. AGAIN.
So I did. I made the duckling my first project: to arrest the aging process so the duckling would be forever young. Fluffy and fuzzy and never quack but instead make querulous ducking noises. Sometimes I gave the duckling three wings, sometimes one wing. Sometimes wings atop its head.
But always it had feathers and a head and a torso, though over time I found ways to splice the lizardacious onto h
er in ways that made her fuzzling beauty ever-more glowing and gorgeous, and locked her duckling self in place. Almost by mistake.
I had no mother but that duckling, or I was a mother to the duckling that became a duck. I was never a mother or a father but a friend to the duckling, and to all in the magical garden.
* * *
Listen:
Listen, yet how shall I mean it, because who is reading but me? Who will ever read this but me and in the ramble I can lose my thoughts lose my mind, forget even more until someday it will all be in here, or it will be lost forever. That much I learned from Sarah.
* * *
Once upon a time there was a torture garden, I mean a magical garden, that was destroyed by an evil sorcerer who happened to be a father who should never have had a child.
Everyone who lived within the magical garden, other than the duckling, was cooked and served at a vast banquet of the sweet and the savory and devoured whole or in slices or casseroles. It was terrible and beautiful and it was going to happen whether the son ate of his creations or not. What could they know of the bite and crunch by then?
God and the Company, IT decreed, DEVOUR and the devouring began and never ended.
After the banquet, the boy wizard, Charlie, fell into disrepair and despair. Even after the success of the blue fox (who could not be found) for the Company. Even as the Company spread so far and wide it became a vast mouth swallowing everything. Nothing in the boy wizard’s studies or experiments could lift his spirits. There were only the Company edicts, come from farther and farther away as their version of the City drifted from the center. The portal wall grew hazy and the vision of the original City on the banks of a vibrant river so distant. And the boy wizard could care less.
God not but Company yes, IT commanded, ALCHEMIZE THE FLESH TO BECOME THE WALLS. ADD TO THE WALL OF GLOBES EACH NEW ONE OF THE 7.
God or the Company, IT ordered, PRODUCE THE OTHERS THAT MIGHT POPULATE THE 7 AND FIGHT THE 3. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 …
Or this is just something I thought of now.
Charlie, through his gloom, wrestling with the proteins and the vocal cords and the sinew and the blood and the epidermis, to within those 10 create more magic, even with the magical garden dead. For the 7. Against the 3. Although he did not then really grasp who the 3 were, or how they might collude with the fox. The fox was the 1 or the 0. He became confused, like in all fairy tales retold and updated so what had been certain and sacrosanct sank into disavowal, disavowel, disembowelment.
How do you know you’re in hell, if God and Company are still conversing with you? Or is that how you know?
This continued for years.
My father transformed my face into that of a bat. My father slit my throat and inserted surgical mice. My father rearranged my organs so they spelled out the true name of the Company inside. 10, 7, 3, 0.
But chance or fortune or fate favorited Charlie in the end. For there came a day at the vats when his father fell, temporary consumed by fumes or poison or to the lacerating regard of a self-made creature whose dagger-quality to the eyes was in fact a propulsive sliver, lodging in my father’s neurological epicenters. It is still hard to tell why he fell even so, why he toppled like a cut tree, there in the laboratory. It seemed impossible. This toppling. Like the cutting of a tree in the yard of the house of my youth that no one, not even I, can remember. The tree you could not fit your arms around when you hugged it, the tree was so huge. Such a monster could never fall.
Nor did I understand why all looked to the boy-king Charlie to heal him.
And so the father died and the son cried while inside his mind he laughed so hard he cried. He laughed and laughed so hard his organs regained their natural places and blood seeped from his ears and his nose. But that was just because he was so unnatural now.
As my first act—I mean the son’s act—taking his place, the son forbade his removal from the vats, to preserve him, that some part of him might live on in the creatures I would create, and the ones I would save. For it was then that I set up the magical garden again, in plain view. And in this new magical garden there were many pools of healthy water and some that were muddy and stands of tall grasses and an artificial sun. But mostly there I hid and saved the parts and bits that mewled and would have been snuffed, and upon that pile, that throne, sat my duckling.
And perhaps duckling she would always have remained, to remind me of my smiling youth and my father and all of the other good, good things that had come my way.
But that, too, is when the voice of the Company came into my head, or perhaps it was the ghost of the ghost of my mother. In the last days, who could tell the difference? That was when the Company told me to transform the duckling into a duck. A duck with a broken wing. And to house what remained of my father’s brain within the duck.
And I believe it was a test for all of my days—that the Company wanted me to sacrifice the thing I had the most pride in, that I might no longer have pride and that I might obey the Company in all things.
So I made my duckling into a duck, and I did this in the blink of an eye. After twenty years, the duckling became the dark bird in only the space and slice of an eye. A day and a night. But it did not drive her mad. It made her greater than herself. I swear it. What drove her mad was the mission where she brought back Sarah, and I will not talk about that. It was not my fault.
And when things began to go bad all the way through, I was not to blame. I had been the one to listen to the voice in my head, even after I wasn’t sure if it was still from the Company but instead from God. I was the one who had rescued so many lost souls by remaking them in the magical garden.
But I could not predict Nocturnalia anymore, no how know how, for it had gotten beyond us. But I could not understand how chaos could be controlled all across the City because I did not know how no how it could be controlled within my self.
O and lo, then I needed the dark bird ever more, for so many special missions. To hold back the end of it all. To hold firm. To give me time. Which was all I ever needed, from beginning to end.
The dark bird that was the duckling that was me. That was my father.
Fly away dark bird, fly away. Far from here. With your broken wing.
I am mad, you see, and know it. And yet I know things.
Murder control clicking like a switch flipped like a click like a cut like a blood-covered switch that clicked … off. For a time.
Nocturnalia. Out upon the darkling plain, the tired dance of the broken wing. Brought to a halt by the thought of fire. The thought of what lay behind and what lay ahead being so the same. Passenger only. Passenger enslaved to fury. Some of it her own fury at being so encaptured and enraptured. Her own true nature. Inescapable, but one day perhaps would escape it.
Out there, one night, between being called forth. Between being the dark bird and just a duck with a mind of its own. Before the next possession. Came the vast slather of night wings above and the aerobatic capture of insects and, sometimes, like a lacy overlay on the dark bird’s mind, the invisible sonar of bats, inquiring and then rebuffed. For the dark bird was a dead space, but one that colonized if they lingered too long.
Came, too, in the absolute dead of one night, with no moon and the stars reduced to smudges, a shape-shifter exiled to that place. Exiled like something made and not now used. Manifest as several creatures at once, anchored to a writhing flat black pedestal. Registering as too many coordinates, a creature that had become a map.
“I’ll kill you,” the duck told the shape-shifter. “I’ll kill you and feast on your entrails.”
“You are not a duck.”
“You are not a whatever you are.”
“I’m out of place. I’m not meant to be here. Soon, I won’t be.”
Surprise at approximation of speech, which the shape-shifter, as a shape-shifter will, supplied … and all the rage snuffed out and no directive from the Company. The shape-shifter interfered with the signal. The burs
t was there, the burst-burst-burst, but sputtering, sputtered.
“Are you something that rhymes with duck?” the shapeshifter asked. “The ghost with the face of a bat used to mutter all the words that rhyme with duck.”
“I know nothing of that.”
The duck could not tell if the shape-shifter spoke for her, because the words didn’t sound like her words. But, then, she didn’t know what her words might sound like in this language.
“There are versions that are not versions at all but only Source. Yet the old man only keeps moving through versions. He’s fractured.”
“I’m not supposed to see him, but I do. I just pretend not to.”
“Bad luck. Bad duck. Sad, sad pluck.”
“Why are you out here?” A shape-shifter could be anything in the City, did not need to live as outcast.
“Because so few want me in there. Because it’s safer here. Besides, I’ve learned to like it here. It’s quiet. I can be alone.”
“I like it, too. I like the quiet. I like the stars.”
They looked up at the stars for a time.
“You cannot kill me,” the duck said, finally, after what analysis was left to it. “Or absorb me.”
“I know. That’s why I like you. And you like me.”
“Who made you?”
“I don’t know. Who made you?”
“I’ve forgotten. Perhaps the person who lives inside me.”
“Like a pit in a plum?”
“Like a pit.”
“Maybe the pit can’t see the old man. Pit to prune, not receiving.”
Dead Astronauts Page 15
