The Grimscribe's Puppets (12 page)

“Indeed. Well, if our business, then, is at an end…”

“And I get to keep the cigarette?”

“You and that cigarette were made for each other, Mr. Furst. Don’t worry about a thing. We couldn’t collect from you without your voluntary compliance, and frankly, we wouldn’t have room for you, anyway. An eternity of pleasure and anticipation awaits, Mr. Furst. A latter-day Sisyphus, you are. All the world at your feet in no time, I have no doubt.”

The Devil’s velvety logorrhea rolled over Furst like a hot, balmy wind, but he was sharp enough to catch the false note. “What did you call me? D’you call me a sissy?”

“You know, the best kind of deal is when each party walk away believing they’ve gotten the best of the other.”

“Yeah, pleasure doing business with you, too. Get the hell out.”

“Be seeing you,” the Devil murmured, and left. The locks relocked, the traps reset, and Furst was alone. He stood there and thawed for a moment, the realization sinking in like the nicotine stain and carbon ink on his fingers.

He couldn’t die! The list of things he’d do, the places he’d wreck, the people he’d settle up with... More, he’d beaten the Devil at his own game. He’d screwed the tits off the patron saint of salesmen, and he’d only go up from there. That crack he’d made about going into the soul business himself had seemed to rattle His Satanic Majesty an awful lot. Maybe he could drive the Devil out of the Devil business. But first, he’d go out to have a drink, celebrate...

Before the door, he fumbled out his key ring. So many keys on it, five for the front door alone, two for the car, one for the bank night deposit, and his pocketknife and a bottle opener and a mini-flashlight, besides. It was hard to juggle with the lit cigarette, and, as he often did, he dropped them onto the bare, poured-concrete floor.

Leaning over, cursing his keys and their mothers and his own as well, he picked them up. He took a deep, satisfying hit off the eternal cigarette.
Emil Furst, the man who beat the Devil today and who’s gonna do it again tomorrow, can’t even hold onto his keys.
He laughed.

And the man who beat the Devil dropped his keys.

And he picked them up.

And took a hit off the cigarette.

And laughed.

And dropped his keys...

“OK, you win, Devil,” said Emil Furst, about a hundred years later. “Come and get me…”

And the Devil said, “No.”

~*~

And how long have you been suffering from these delusions?

For as long as I can remember. Sometimes, they’re all I can remember.

Please elaborate.

I have no childhood, no memories to hold onto except these contrived, cruel situations I keep getting forced into. The only time things seem focused, tangible is when they happen.

But why do you harbor such disgust for them, if you believe they’re real life, and this experience only a dream?

As shabby as they are––and the prose that describes them… God, how I wish I at least had my own words for them––they’re so much more real than anything here. I can’t really see your face, for instance. Or the plaques on your office wall; they’re just gray shades, props with no words on them. Everything is like that, Doctor, people, things, my own body. All I can feel is a vague sense of weight and a feeling of repulsion, of animosity.

You feel that inanimate objects wish to do you harm?

No. Just that they want to push me out. They ignore me, they break down, they get lost, they get sick and die, they stand me up, they catch fire, they get scratched up by the cat or melt in the sun, they don’t return my calls. They repel me, they push me out… into the stories. At least in there, there’s some sort of connection. I have a family or a wife or a position of power, though it always turns to shit in some cheaply ironic fashion. Or He makes me an evil person, a cardboard shitheel who deserves every sadistic, ridiculous thing that happens to him.

And you believe that God is to blame for this, that you’re some kind of pawn for his amusement…

No, not at all. God wouldn’t make worlds like these: flawed, unfinished, breaking down and not there at all when nobody’s looking. No, most of the time, I think I’m in the hands of a Demiurge. Do you know Gnosticism, Doctor?

Not as well as you seem to.

God doesn’t have anything to do with the Material world. For him, it’d be like playing in his own shit. A Demiurge created the world, and its flaws are a reflection of his tortured, self-hating soul. Everything in it is poorly conceived, and wants to fall apart. We’re all puppets. This world is the closet I lie in until he takes me out to make me play his sadistic games.

It gratifies you, however, to be the special object of these episodes. You feel important, as the focal point of his attentions.

It sickens me. He traps me in these awful situations, warping my character into a hapless victim for whatever monstrous scenario He’s concocted. No matter what I try to do, I’m sticking my head into the noose, even as I’m crying out to stop. It’s hell for me, knowing that whenever the whim strikes Him, it’ll happen. And all too often, they start and never stop, and a part of me is trapped forever in some ill-conceived, aborted fragment…another bit of me in the trunk.

Yet you find this world so oppressive and alienating. Haven’t you invested quite a lot of energy in making these escapes of yours seem real? And doesn’t their punitive violence reflect your own feelings of inadequacy, that you can’t grant yourself even the boon of a rewarding fantasy life?

No! Nobody hates himself this much! You don’t know what it’s like… Oh, God, it’s like—

~*~

Jarvis Glaublich felt empty inside, a hollow shell against which people and events flailed and battered, like blind, dysfunctional machines on a disassembly line. The faith of his parents offered no revelations to fill him with light, only deeper shadows that covered the secret workings of life. Hadn’t they themselves been deprived of all but the knowledge that they were flawed and dirty vessels, speaking of nothing with passion and enjoying sexual congress only through a hole in a sheet? He walked the earth in the trappings of a beast of burden, but without the serenity of a beast’s corporeal understanding of its true role. If there was a great central Truth which could fill him, he would gladly pledge his soul, kill or die for it, and rest in peace. But his was not a seeker’s nature, and though his hunger for faith gnawed him inside, he settled for it, because it was not emptiness.

One thing which Jarvis’s inherited faith did instill was an assiduous work ethic, which propelled him to a position of median responsibility without any real enthusiasm on his part. So it was that, laid over in a strange, fogbound city long after midnight while on a business trip, he was chased down a dim side street by a rampaging psychotic with pendular throat tumors like the wattles of a frilled lizard, who chanted, “
Beatupwhitepeople, taketheystuff
,” in time to the rhythm of his fist pounding the side of his own head. Terrified, Jarvis dragged his suitcase by its leash even after the wheels had all broken off. It skipped behind him like a runaway sled, and swept his feet out from under him when he stopped at a lighted street corner.

A woman stood beneath the lamppost, wearing a long woolen coat and a stocking cap. She held a clipboard in one hand and reached out to Jarvis with the other, her warm smile smothering his primal terror like a security blanket.

“You look like you could use some help. Would you like to come inside?” she said, and when he looked around, he found she’d dispelled the maniac, or at least defrayed him. Still, it was only out of residual fear for his safety that he accepted her invitation.

She explained as she led him up the street that she was a member of a nondenominational outreach program dedicated to self-improvement. They stopped before an office building that, alone among all the buildings on the block, glowed with lights and hummed with activity. People moved about behind the grimy windows, animated by a sense of purpose and imbued with a radiant wellbeing that struck Jarvis harder than his suitcase.

“Have you ever felt empty inside, Mr. Glaublich?” she asked, and he sputtered until he remembered he’d already offered his name.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Only to take a brief personality test, like a survey. Then, if you’re interested in what we have to tell you about yourself, you can learn more.” Was it the hunger of his faithlessness, the warm, smiling woman beside him, or the cancerous monster skulking beyond the glow of the lamp that set Jarvis Glaublich upon his path? Or was it you, ungentle Reader, without whom he might never have existed, at all?

The survey took only fifteen minutes. Jarvis had done personality tests in college that lasted for hours and well over a thousand questions, and offered reflections of himself as true as a funhouse mirror made of lead. But with twenty questions, the nice lady effortlessly parsed Jarvis Glaublich’s invisible skein of Gordian angst. She catalogued him and his mountainous freight of woes in the third person, and he wept to hear this man’s trouble. How did he live? On what shared article of faith did the cells of his organism agree to slog through this life, and not fly apart to lead successful, solitary lives as dust-eating amoebae? What was it all for, anyway? The questions burned holes in his brain, spilled out of his mouth.

“You can’t find the answers to those questions in your fleshly body. The mortal senses cannot comprehend the truths of the universe, any more than a cell of the body can comprehend the larger purpose of the whole.”

“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.