Goldenland Past Dark (33 page)

You wouldn’t get up to say goodbye.

Webern had thought these things, but Wags had said them. Webern had just watched from the other side of the mirror, from behind the glass; he had been Wags’s reflection, powerless, looking back. He could still remember the way Wags threw himself down on the bed, overacting as usual, kicking his legs and howling, the shape his hunchback made beneath his red robe, the hunchback and the rigid line of the back brace, and the way Webern’s mother had tried to comfort Wags but only for a minute, before she left, her hands pressed to her eyes, sobbing down the hall, “Ray, let’s go, let’s go, let’s just go!” Webern remembered now, but that was because he had been there watching, behind the mirror. It had been Wags . . . .

Webern struck his head against the floor again, and the stars orbited once, then disappeared. He was alone in the empty black tunnel of space. There was no Wags; there never had been. He opened his eyes. Willow and Billow—Wanda and Betsy—stared down at him; Marzipan twirled a lock of his hair.

“All right, ladies,” he said. His voice was Wags’s voice. “I confess.”

Wanda doused him with holy water from a thermos while Betsy made the sign of cross. Each twin clasped one of his hands.

“The Holy Ghost will burn your brow.”

“You’ll live in heaven with us now.”

Webern wiped holy water onto his shirt. He struggled to get up, but each twin pinned one hand to the floor.

“I wish you’d let me
go
.” He squeaked on the last word.

Betsy produced a rusty railroad spike from the pocket of her coveralls. A piece of yarn was wrapped around the top. “This will remind you of Christ’s pain.”

“What do you—do with it?” Webern winced, bracing himself. Betsy gently set it by his foot.

Wanda strung many saints’ medallions around his neck. “And these of faith through strife and strain.”

Webern tugged his hands away and pulled the necklaces off over his head. “Listen, you should save this stuff for somebody else.”

“Bernie Bee, these are God tags.” She jingled them emphatically. “They show the devil you’re not his.”

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do—” Webern rose unsteadily to his feet. “—but I don’t think things are this simple for me.”

“But Bernie Bee,” Wanda said, “we forgive you. You are saved.”

The twins gazed up at him from where they knelt on the floor. Their expressions, frank and plain, rounded and angular, were strangely calm, almost beatific; they glowed with a kind of radiance that sometimes came from old paintings, despite the cracks and wear of years. Webern thought of the masks they’d worn that day, so long ago; how those visions had eclipsed this light. Marzipan squatted beside them, unafraid; she grunted and dragged a knuckle on the rug.

“We are the dogcatchers of the Holy Spirit,” Betsy said. “We found you and we brought you home.”

“And like I said, I appreciate it. But I don’t deserve it. I hope you understand.” Webern walked toward the door; almost involuntarily, he glanced back over his hump at the mirror. His face was a mess, blood and tears and holy water—a face nobody would steal. He cracked a smile. “I don’t know why I didn’t invite you in. I was pretty lonely, up there all by myself.”

“Bernie Bee . . . ?”

“Bernie Bee!”

Webern pulled open the boxcar door; outside the ground moved swiftly past. The train was at its fastest now. Dark fields undulated against a darker sky. Behind him, Marzipan howled like something was being torn from her. Webern gulped and leapt headfirst into the night.

It looked a lot like his old bedroom in Dolphin River, Illinois, but as soon as Webern sat up he knew where he was. Two unicycles leaned up against the wall, two copies of the same Space Ace Grin McCase comic sat on two nightstands on opposite sides of the bed, beneath two black tin constellation lamps. Two open boxes of crayons spilled two sets of sixty-four colours on the floor. Webern leaned over the side of the mattress and peeked beneath the dust ruffle. Down under the bed, a left-handed catcher’s mitt lay beside a right-handed one, collecting dust. He was on the other side of the mirror.

“You get hit on the head, you’re bound to start seeing double,” said Wags, stepping out of the closet with two checkered vaudeville jackets slung over his arm.

“That’s not funny.”

“You want me to be serious? I’ll be serious, then.” Wags tossed one of the vaudeville jackets to Webern. “I’m beat. You have any idea how exhausting it is, running through your mind day in, day out? You’d think I was in a marathon.”

Webern looked past Wags, into the open closet. Identical rows of clothing hung on opposite racks. “So why’d you do it, then?”

“Why? Because I had to get you out of there, old buddy. You didn’t belong in that place anymore than I did. And what’s the point of being a freak amongst freaks when we’ve got everything we need right here? There’s costumes, there’s props, there’s a million things to do and a million years to do ’em. And there’s the two of us—the wacko and the straight man, the clown and the crowd. Without each other, we’re sunk—I’m a notion without a noggin, you’re an only twin. But together, we’re a team.”

Webern slipped on the jacket. The lining felt silky against his arms. It fit perfectly over his hump.

“Something’s missing,” said Webern.

“Trust me, there’s nothing you can’t find in here,” Wags told him. “Go on. Take a look around.”

Webern stood up uneasily; he approached the bureau that stood, as it always had, under the window across from the foot of the bed, and pulled open the top drawer. Two sets of face paint lay amid a sea of jacks. Two red rubber balls rolled to the front of the drawer.

“Mirrorland. This place takes whatever you’re thinking of, reflects it right back to you—twice over, and in style. Hey, did you ever hear the one about the mind-reading midget who broke out of jail?”

“Small medium at large,” Webern murmured. He opened the second drawer. Two slide whistles, two collapsible top hats. A weather house that housed two little gold-haired men. The jokers from a deck of cards. He knelt to yank the third drawer loose—it always stuck—and one knob popped out and rolled across the room. Inside were mismatched socks. Webern started tossing things out over his head: swimming trunks and boxer shorts, ticket stubs and rolling papers, frogman flippers, Napoleons, album covers, toy trumpets.

“Hey, slow down there, compadre. Where’s the fire?”

The drawer was deeper than he’d ever imagined. Pairs and pairs of lederhosen were piled on top of each other. Webern kept throwing them behind him. Leather flopped against leather; their buckles hit the carpet with soft thunks. Finally, Webern felt his hand close around what he’d been looking for. There was only one of these. Webern opened the blue velvet box.

“Now there’s a sight for sore eyes,” said Wags. His voice was small.

Webern took Bo-Bo’s glass eye out and held it in his hand. He thought of how when Bo-Bo’s husband left her, she took it out and replaced it with a black patch—how she kept to her house after that, with her mutilated photographs and her dusty chairs, her schedules and routines and her silent piano: a world of her own making. He had been so comforted by her life when he was a child, the order she exerted over things, her unparalleled ability to snip out what pained her, what didn’t fit in the pattern of her days. She’d blamed the eye for drawing the man who’d hurt her; she’d taken it out to stop that from happening again. She’d learned that folks could let her down; she caught her own raccoons after that. She’d kept to herself. Then, on her deathbed, she had given this eye to him, with one caveat:
Don’t keep it in a drawer.
Yet here in Mirrorland, that was exactly where it was.

The eye had a power: the power to liberate a person, even a miserable one, from that lonely island of her own skull. Or his.

Webern pushed past Wags. He slammed the closet shut. A golden frame hung on the back of the door, where the mirror had been all throughout his childhood. Through it, Webern saw another room, dark and emptied out, reversed: his real bedroom back at home. Webern wound his arm back, the eye squeezed tight in his fist. Wags tried to grasp his shoulder.

“Bernie, pal, hey. You can’t do this.”

“Just watch me.”

“Listen, you don’t like this place? We can change it. That’s the whole point—it can be anything you want it to be. A stage, a tent, the bottom of the sea—just say the word, and we’re there.”

“I’m going back.”

“And leaving me here by my lonesome? Me—your best friend in the world, your sidekick, your amigo, your blood brother, your strong arm man? Jeez. I’m your buddy—Scout’s honour. And I’m the only one who ever really was.”

Webern looked at Wags: the pleading, eager expression, the pale skin, the wide-spaced eyes.
The boy in the mirror is me
. He shook his head.

“You’re nobody.”

Wags let his breath out in a slow
whoosh
. He tucked his thumbs in the straps of his lederhosen and rocked back on his heels.

“Quick to the draw there, pardner—and aimed right at the heart, too. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to hurt my feelings.” He stepped aside. “Okey doke. Be my guest: I can’t stop you now. But get one thing through your head first: I’m not nobody. I’m you, Bernie, whether you like it or not. And there’s no escaping that.” He pointed his hand like a gun; fired once. “See you in your dreams.”

Webern threw the eye into the mirror; there was a brilliant flash of silver light. Then everything went black.

Webern Bell woke up facedown outside in the field, arms and legs splayed, as if he’d just been thrown a great distance. He groaned and rolled over onto his back. Prairie grasses bobbed above his head, and cumulous clouds formed enormous shapes in the liquid sky: a dancing bear, a fish, a pillow. His palms were raw, and his head throbbed. He groped around in the dirt for his glasses. He finally found them in the pocket of his lederhosen.

As he pulled them out, he realized he already held something in his hand. He put on his glasses, sat up, and looked into it. It was Bo-Bo’s eye. The centre of the pupil was splintered; cracks exploded outward like the rays of a star. He put the eye into his pocket and struggled to his feet.

Webern felt woozy. He stood in the middle of a vast field of rippling weeds. When he touched his forehead, his fingers met a scummy patch of dirt and half-dried blood. Terrific—another injury to add to his collection. He turned around slowly. Some twenty feet away, a set of railroad tracks cut through the prairie, raised on a bed of chalky white rocks. Other than that, nothing stretched in all directions. A lonely black crow swooped down from the sky into the grasses; it reappeared a second later with a squirming field mouse in its beak. It occurred to Webern that he might be sick.

This was what it had all come to, then. After everything he’d lived through, after everything he’d seen, he’d jumped again. What a coward. He thought of how he’d lain there, dreaming, while Nepenthe packed her clothes to leave him; how he stayed hunched over his grubby clown notebooks while she danced around the room—a vortex of terrifying beauty, the only thing that mattered. He had pushed her away, just as he had pushed his mother away, just as he had abandoned Dr. Show. He had been paralyzed and helpless, he had been afraid, he had nursed his wounds. He had retreated into a world of make-believe, just like a stubborn, stupid child. He hadn’t understood what he had, all the luck and the chances he’d ultimately squandered.