Meeks (21 page)

A man cleared his throat noisily beside me. Bedge had brought over another actor and ordered him to stand beside me; we were standing shoulder to shoulder at the base of the platform steps.

Trade jackets, whispered the other actor.

Pardon me?

Let's trade costumes—you take mine, and I'll take yours.

No way. Never, I said, continuing to look straight ahead, and I shook my head in disbelief. Even a novice to the stage knows better than to break this most basic rule.

But I couldn't resist knowing what my options were. I turned to study his costume—a Condemned Man? The Bell Ringer? He was a frail man, aged beyond his years, wearing a beautifully tailored dark suit. He turned to face me. I stared into his eyes. His hand shook slightly as he pointed at my chest.

You, he said, should trust
me
, and he turned his pointing hand upon himself.

I stared at the man standing beside me. I was face-to-face with the man in the black jacket. Bedge had granted me my only wish in life, and I heard myself say, I should trust
you
? (Why in life's biggest moments, when what I say should matter most, do I resort helplessly to repetition?)

It's not too late, he said earnestly. He tried to hand me his props—the theatrical hood, a length of rope. Quickly, he said. He reached out to touch my elbow, and I flinched.

Meeks.

Yes, that's right, I answered blandly, I will be playing the Captain. (I felt very far away from myself.)

No—you: Meeks.

Again you amaze me with your powers of observation. You are correct: I am playing Captain Meeks.

Trade with me, he pleaded. Let me go in your place.

I shook my head no—of course, now that I finally had something worthwhile, something of inestimable value, he had returned to take it from me. You must think I'm a great fool, I said.

I promised your mother I'd take care of you.

What a joke, I said, and rolled my eyes for good measure, but I was suddenly close to tears.

Please, Meeks. Take these things from me.

Bedge came clomping back down the platform steps and stopped directly before me. The crowd was silent. He laid his hands on my shoulders and met my eyes; I knew that once we ascended the stairs he would be lost to me forever.

Bedge, I said.

Meeks, he answered.

I turned to look at the man in the black jacket. He gave Bedge a final, long, desperate look and whispered, Let me go in his place! Bedge and I ignored him, and I turned to follow Bedge up the stairs to the stage, though my thoughts, to be truthful, were suddenly in a frightening state of disarray, scrambling for safe and solid places to alight. Think of your mother, I instructed myself as I climbed the stairs. Then I thought of my mother, only of my mother, imagined the cool, light pressure of her hand against my forehead.

Ben

Ben stared at the ground and pushed his way through the crowd. Young men shoved him; young women recoiled at the sight of his haggard face, his hanging gray smock, his bloodstained undershirt. He could feel the men in the trees watching him.

As he approached the corral of prisoners, a policeman stepped in his way, laid a hand forcefully on his shoulder. “You're in the wrong place, Brother. Go back to the worker area unless you'd rather be a prisoner.” Ben was too terrified to look. The policeman turned him around by the shoulders and kicked him in the seat of his pants. “That way!"

Ben walked; the people parted slightly as he went, and he followed the channel opening up before him. He was
willing
to sacrifice himself, but his will was forever the hostage and lackey of the brutal, soulless survivor who ran things in his head. A cloud dragged its shadow like a net across the trees, across the light gray backs of the birds that had settled along the branches. Ben could see the Brothers of Mercy walking along the periphery of the crowd, searching for someone. Perhaps the others had said something; he wanted immediately to run. Hold your ground, his brain instructed sternly, and he managed to hold his ground by closing his eyes and pretending he was elsewhere. All of humanity was absorbed in the events of the day, save him, who had discovered in himself the freedom to occupy other scenarios, other moments, at will. Every other creature of this world—the men, the women, the horses, the birds, the beetles, the bees, the moths, the squirrels—were just the things he had invented for himself. The dark gray buildings, the yellow-glowing windows, the rows of trucks, the watchful policemen, the untrustworthy brothers, the gusting postcards, the swaying ropes, the fruit-laden branches rising in succession like an archway of swords, like a series of curtains parting: they were all his.

"Move aside! Step back!” Ben could hear the Brothers of Mercy making their way through the crowd; he opened his eyes and watched them pass at a safe distance. He was as good as dead, but he still had possession of his body, a fungible corpse he could choose to trade in for something better in this world. If he ran toward the stage, he could reach it in time, be hanged in an innocent man's stead. His body refused to move.

The sun was setting, casting everything in a blue-gray light, the evening air subsuming more and more, until this world would be reduced to a meaningless thicket of shadows: rock indistinguishable from man, earth from sea. The world was disappearing, thing by thing, the evening steadily repossessing all the objects that the daylight had made to seem permanently stowed among Ben's own effects. The lavender spaces between the dark green leaves were flooding with ink, the shapes of leaves fusing together in the failing light. Men would be consolidated with their hats, with the tools of their trades; women would be consolidated into blocks of shadow with the men, their children circling them frantically in the failing light. Ben checked his shirt. The buttons were still bright, the cuffs luminescent; he had not yet been subsumed. Ben's mother had once given him a blank book, a book in which to write his thoughts. He had never written in it. He looked overhead at the clouds, flat and bright against the evening sky. He remembered: he had upset his mother; to spite her he had torn the blank pages of his book and thrown them into the river.

"Step aside! Let us through!” The Brothers of Mercy coming closer. If he ran hard across the park and kept to the river, he might be able to reach the wilderness beyond the prison and take refuge among the unnavigable pines.

"There! Stop right there!” Ben waited to feel their claws on his back, to be wrestled brutally to the ground. Then he saw her—as if the Brothers of Mercy had guided his eyes to the very spot. She was walking alone through the crowd, as if hiding from someone or seeking them out. She walked faster; Ben watched her. He felt happy, then hurt, then angry, then worried—was she in trouble? Don't be ridiculous, he chided himself, she has everything in this world, and you have nothing. Did she help you when you needed it most? He was not marooned in this world. He would not be simply forgotten! Let her see him. Let her
see
him. Let everyone see him, let them finally get it: when something is lost, it's lost forever.

Meeks

I stood in silence beside Bedge on the high platform. Pairs of workers walked along the cake, carrying the fiery lengths of rope between them, igniting the candles as they went, and then throwing the rope into the river where it slapped the surface and steamed. I gazed down the steps at the man in the black jacket. What on earth was my mother thinking when she entrusted my safety to this frail and fearful creature? I wished I had never pursued the matter, that I had let it rest, that I had concentrated on a future made of something other than the ancient past.

I wanted nothing more than to return to my former routines—I was still as curious as I had ever been about the city and the people in it. I wanted to descend the platform steps immediately and be among them again, to walk with the furiousness of a private purpose through the park, as I often had when I was happy. I strained to see distant details in the growing dark. I searched the windows of the buildings on the grand avenue. What
was
that infinitesimal light glowing within them?

Bedge was talking about the history of our great city, as depicted on the cake, glowing like a river of well-meaning light below us. There was Captain Meeks carrying his mother's body through the flood-blue streets. Captain Meeks walking unperturbed beneath the deep blue water; a clutch of icing bubbles overhead that bloomed to puffs of clean steam on the surface and fed the machines on the nearby piers. He walked along the ocean floor, harvesting mussels by hand, tossing them into a net that trailed behind him for dozens of feet. The net was filled with bricks, wheat, pheasants, goats, gold, stone, trees, rain clouds, salmon, reeds, horses, fire, and yellow rosettes of stars he plucked as lazily as peaches from the firmament as he crossed the mountain ranges, when he had the joy of a mountaineer! Captain Meeks in the bleak, bulb-lit rooms by the piers, lecturing from atop the butcher-block tables (he was explaining a new world, understanding it). Captain Meeks by the river pointing to the trees, to the earth. Young women stared seriously wherever he pointed; young men stared seriously wherever he pointed. Captain Meeks lassoing and saddling the wild horses and stooping to feed their foals. Captain Meeks shooting birds out of the blank white sky, climbing trees to cut their nests to the ground with a curved sword. (How could one ever tire of Independence Day or the story of Independence Day?) I stared. As always, I was in awe of the cake, as one cannot help but be awed by the velocity of tradition and by the brutal hugeness of life, in diversified and self-diversifying forms, as it habitates one's hour. Mint-green icing leaves and chocolate-planked trees. Teardrop cookies, pouched in the deep white icing, were the small gray and purple birds that the Captain had blasted out of the brisk, leafless air.

I tilted my head back to see the men high in the Great Tree. I could see their boot soles clearly, as if they were standing on the surface of a clean, cool river and I was looking up from the riverbed. I smiled at the sight, the men hanging about in the trees, rapt, the spectators studying the cake or watching us on the stage. The theatrical workers navigated their ropes, whispering terse directives to one another. I saw the brothers on their branch, the elder brother watching me with cold intensity, the younger muttering apologetically to his hands. My
brothers
.

Bedge cleared his throat; he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. The river emptied forever into the gray harbor. My heart swelled with longing for my mother, with love for the crowd before me. After all these years, the sight of other people could still be the most beautiful.

The Bell Ringer
, announced Bedge in a voice that was so successfully theatrical it made my blood run cold. The man in the black jacket regarded me from the bottom of the platform steps, his hands shaking visibly as he clutched the hood, the length of rope. What a heartbreaking disappointment a father could be when one held him up against the beauty and complexity of the world that had existed before him. Perhaps he was no one, only a man who had stolen precious hours from me, time I might have spent with my mother while she was still in this world. The man in the black jacket climbed the wooden steps and was soon beside me. I stared straight ahead, looked deep into the empty streets. I could hear the river emptying into the sea; I could hear the fountain churning, the soothing illusion of infinite action.

In the poor light, the stone facades of the distant buildings looked as if they had been cut from coarse gray paper, and I imagined I could hear the cellophane rustle of counterfeit fires burning in their fireplaces, could reach out and touch anything in the world, no matter how remote. This world, however imperfect, was all that my mother had left me. I was frightened.
Bedge
, I whispered. He ignored me. Rust-colored leaves gusted across the park and toward the river. The air was drafting coolly up from the surface of the water. I could see out of the corner of my eye that the man in the black jacket was trembling, staring at his hands, the tools that they held. My neck ached from the strain of standing at attention before the crowd. The man in the black jacket whispered,
Meeks.
I ignored him.

If I could hold in my mind everyone who had ever hurt my mother and within the final act destroy them, obliterate everyone who had hurt my mother by hurting her only son, perhaps I would. There is no grief as deep as a mother's grief, as never-ending; no one knows her grief but her. Other scenarios, other visions of life, are forever presenting themselves, but one must choose how to live, choose whether or not to betray the people who introduced you first to this world. I knew this story by heart, the story of Captain Meeks and of my brothers and sisters. Was I my own man or was I theirs, or did I belong, eternally, to my mother?

The crowd had begun to chant my name:
Meeks. Meeks. Meeks.

I was trying to imagine what it would be like to feel the terrible coarseness of the heavy rope as it fell against my neck; I was trying to imagine what it would be like to smell the old fabric of the black hood as it fell across my face, and then I saw a man break away from the shadows and run. What a heartbreaking and beautiful sight! I wanted to call out to him, to shout: Run! Run! A lone figure, his legs pumping wildly as he ran through the dusk toward the black horizon; he ran, turning this way then that, racing toward me, then away, as the Brothers of Mercy gave chase. Look how energetic and hopeful these lifeforms are! How vigorous and blind and greedy to the end, the man churning through the thinning air, the Brothers of Mercy, sleek and holy-looking, closing in on him. Run! Run!

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Julia Holmes was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and grew up in the Middle East, Texas, and New York, where she is an assistant editor at
Rolling Stone
. She is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction.
Meeks
is her first novel.