Act 3:
Easy Come...
Episode One: On The Road Again
There should be in you by now, Listener, a certain cognitive friction. If you are feeling a tension wire stretched thin between the mountain peaks of Why Do I Know This and How Could It Possibly Be Relevant, and your disbelief is suspended between with Who Gives a Damn looming infinitely below, I would like to welcome you to that State of Consciousness I call my Waking State. Things will not get better from here. And a good story is not good, a tragedy is not a tragedy, if things get better before they get worse.
That is to say that things are about to get much, must worse – for you, but especially for me.
I had all of the world's collected knowledge, some of it things I never should have been able to learn, crammed into my head. I have said before and will say again: it is easy to train yourself not to think about something; what's hard is how you'll be struck when you're forced to.
I had not thought about the Master and his games in... well, days, honestly. But those were anomalies – breaches in my cognitive defenses. I should say that I had not pondered the Master and his games practically since I'd left his tutelage and struck out on my own. Some seven years, now. You are no doubt wondering what I mean when I say his games. It is difficult to succinctly describe with the knowledge that you have of both the Master and my upbringing at his side. There will be a time to tell that tale, but it is not now. Already I put the brakes on this story too often for either of our likings.
There are lots of ways to educate a child. The Master was fond of contriving situations for me which would act as tests for the things I was learning. Little challenges of my knowledge. Hypotheticals of how I would handle different stiumuli, I suppose you could say. He was fond of codes and riddles, and with him, everything had at least two layers of meaning. He expected me to parse them out often.I had little reason to doubt that the past days and those coming would be potentially filled with little clues - riddles and puzzles and codes he expected me to solve to understand exactly what was going on.
And I had no interest in it.
Disinterest is not to say I had no obligation, no necessity, to play along.
There was so much to decipher in the last day alone, to say nothing of the apparently missing week before. And that was without accounting for the Master. Unless Peitho was lying when she said he was involved. Which would require conditions I didn't even want to consider— Someone or something able and willing to convincingly let's say shapeshift into the Master who also has privileged information about me – information which I believed only the Master knew. Whatever – or whoever – the case will turn out to be, a game was not very much afoot. That much was indisputable.
I just didn't know what it was, what the rules were, what my motivation was to win – or whether I wanted to play it at all.
We need the Cosmos to be constantly reminding us that Fate is a Weave of our own making.
It turns out that there is one for-sure solution to this suspended State you are in, if it is a problem to be solved: Don't think about it. If you try to carry too much too far, you will hurt yourself. You'd be amazed at the things you don't know that your brain knows to remember. Trust me, you get used to it.
Anyway, I dangled above this precipice for a week.
Why did the Master fill my head with the things he did? Why did he let me escape? Could I really have remained hidden from them if they actually wanted to find me? It didn't feel very likely. But maybe Peitho was right.
I don't know. But I hope it isn't to do this.
Ol Jimmy sure could talk.
That's not his name. Let's make that clear. It should also be clear that I got my money's worth of hearing him talk. Or he got his worth out of talking. That seems to me all I remember of our nine day (and eight night) journey: A hell of a lot of talking.
About what, you might wonder.
Fucking nothing!
From sunup til he fell asleep, his mouth never stopped saying what he easily could have thought in silence instead. This, I realized, was what I brought all the weed for. I smoked, and he talked. I'd nod off, and he'd be talking when I woke up. Clearly, he didn't care whether I responded. I don't think he even cared whether I listened. Which – I didn't. Before the end of the second day, his voice became so much white noise.
I don't know whether Ol Jimmy could somehow sense that there was something on my mind, of if he thought his ceaseless chatter was keeping me from backing out on our agreement; but I do know that for the next nine days I didn't think once about Peitho, Metus, Francis, Regina, or my wife. Not that she was ever much close to my thoughts. I didn't think about Genoa at all. In fact, I didn't think much of any relevance at all. It was almost like in putting Genoa geographically behind me, I had left everything that happened the last week or so geographically locked behind me as well. It wasn't freedom, not exactly. But it wasn't agonized obsession over problems I couldn't solve, either.
It wasn't real, either.
No matter how far or how fast you run, your problems always catch up with you. Like Jason Voorhees, they just plod along til you make a mistake.
And you will always make a mistake sooner or later.
I didn't want to go to Venice. I knew that much for sure. If what I'd Seen was at all veridical, then Pepin – or the blister-eyed madman, I had no way of distinguishing the two with the information I had – was, is, or is going to be in Venice.
Did I even want to find him?
More than once I found myself asking that question.
Did I even want to find Peitho's man? That's what I'm doing, right? In going to Venice? Is it? Or is Venice a convenient first leg of my full-scale flight from Christendom? I'm not sure. But I need to decide whether it's what I want to do. Why does it matter? It's what I am doing. So I can decide to turn and run. And just bail on Jimmy like that? I don't owe him anything. Nothing but your company. So I can lay here and nap all day? I don't even help unstuck the cart. But if I find him, what then?
This is a taste of the first day. Before the dreams.
The dreams... confused things.
The first day after the dreams was... uneasy.
Dreams are... difficult to talk about while also sounding like you know what you're talking about. If my struggles have not made that clear. What could make me dream something like that? Because I didn't know that he brain does what it does, my hypotheses were not, by a modern standard, especially good. I didn't know whether it was gods or whatever trying to communicate with me. But I did know that any god that wanted to communicate with me by showing me that – what I saw in the dreams – was... what? Cruel? Malevolent? Sick? Or were they only being direct? Honest?
Did I even believe that dreams came from gods?
I knew that ancient peoples and the religious all over the world thought that or something like it. And that when I read and listened to the dreams they claim held prophecy, I could only imagine a much later storyteller inventing a perfectly obvious prophetic dream where maybe there was none at all.
And yet, as the dreams continued and I came to get comfortable in the dreamscape – in a way I can no more describe than you can comprehend if you have never had recurring dreams – I grew less certain that what I was seeing at night and logging in my journal in the morning, were not subtle metaphors that I could parse out for meaning. This was happening. Or maybe had happened. Or would happen.
I could only pray it won't be by me when it does.
And I didn't even believe in the efficacy of prayer.
Is that what they're trying to tell me? Am I that destructive to the women in my life? Is my dreaming mind telling me that this is what I've done? Had I killed Regina? Had I killed my wife? Was it my fault Maria had died? Was I breaking hearts and leaving in my wake the shattered lives of women who would love me? Peitho had implied as much. The Rod is too easy a sexual allegory for me not to notice, and for that reason I ignore it: Telling myself that nothing, even dreams or visions or whatever are never what they appear to be at first glance. Everything has more to say. A deeper and more profound truth.
I just don't know what this one is.
So I push the thoughts – the dreams, the Vision, Peitho, Metus, Regina and Francis, Genoa, all of them out of my mind. And listen to Jimmy talk. And talk. And talk. And I smoke. And I sleep. And I dream of young women being killed by a lunatic with a magick rod – in the city I'm headed toward. And I wonder:
Is this what I want?
I am risking my life by going to Venice. Not only because of the real and present danger of bandits – people with the temperament for killing didn't last long in cities, and were exiled to fend for themselves in the very real and very dense wilderness. Wilderness which I, alone with a man in his late middle years and his one donkey, am now effectively lost in.
This is the first of the reasons I come up with for not abandoning Ol Jimmy: I don't know where I am. The world isn't so vast, nor our way so hard going – not nearly as hard going as I'd thought to expect, actually; turns out Ol Jimmy's no slouch – that I could not find a way to orient myself. There was also nothing stopping me from a fall into a bear's or a cat's den or a viper nest or otherwise – or from getting hopelessly lost and dying out here. With Jimmy, I exert only the energy I want to – which turns out to be how much I need to in order to keep my body from atrophying to the point I can no longer walk – and move faster.
By the Po Valley, this is a less obvious – and less convincing – reason. I could find another Driver in one of these towns. I could. But I doubt I would. Or make for the coast and find a boat. I could do that in Venice – could have done it in Genoa, for that matter.
And, of course, over all of this hung the specter of Peitho's coin.
I maintain that I never charged for my services. But that isn't to say that I never exaggerated my efforts – the equivalent of padding the bill when you don't bill for your services. I could convince myself that I took her money because she left it. I could even say that I had earned it by using the Plant. But I knew why I took it: to tell her I'd fled – and to come and find me.
So. Was Venice where I wanted to go?
Did I want to find Pepin?
Did I want to meet Metus again?
No. All a resounding no.
But was I duty bound to them?
I was certainly cart-bound.
For nine days we rode. For nine days I learned everything there was to learn about Ol Jimmy – things I never wanted to know and would never have asked. For nine days I watched the landscape slide by in a kind of stoned stupor: first the coastal mountains with their precipitous drops toward the sea, then through Appenine wilderness, swamps, and finally the flats of the Po River Valley. Until the last night of our journey, we didn't stop in towns with recognizable names – instead, Ol Jimmy kept his promise: we stayed at tiny taverns, old waystations from an earlier Age. And he wasn't kidding about having me pay for him to eat better than the pottage slop normally on offer – and plenty of it. For a wizened sun-dried tomato of a man, he should could put away a lot of food. Soon enough, I'd spent all the silver coin I'd brought with me, leaving me with just the purse of Peitho's gold – a purse which I'd been perhaps too superstitious to even so much as open.
For nine days we rode, and eight nights after the first we slept. For eight nights, I dreamed. Eight nights of visions which for eight days I worked not to ponder. The first seven nights, the dreams were of a sort of series, the eigth is immediately narratively relevant – so we'll discuss it later. Hopefully not much.
For seven nights, I dreamed the same dream: I am moving through a canaled city I do not know, but which I'm certain is Venice in that way that you know things with absolute certainty in dreams. And I'm not me. I am hunched over, hiding something beneath a thin, tattered woolen cloak I'm wearing pulled – even clutched – tight around my body. I hide in alleys, behind trash and discarded detritus. I do not wish to be seen. But I can see just fine. It's eerie. It's not by the light of the moon. The gibbous silver disk overhead is not bright enough to cut through the thick night. But I can see the shadows.
In the first dream, the city sounds normal. I am someplace not many people seem to venture. But I feel the warm thing tucked to my chest get warmer when people come near. I can feel them, even sort of see them through the alley walls that hide me – an amorphous kind of light, floating along the path they take. I slip my hands around the warm thing. I feel the faint pulse. Boom – boom. Their hearts beating in time to the pulsing of the Rod.
In each of the dreams, I do this. In each successive, the town seems a little emptier and quieter until at last it is completely empty and silent. In the eighth, I see armed men in chearp armor patrolling the city at night – looking for me – because of what I am about to do.
It is at this point that she walks by. A girl. Always a girl. And young. Too young for me to do what I do. Even in a dream. I reach out with the Rod's power and I take that light from her. She falls, lifeless, to the street.
I'm usually muttering to myself right now. Things like, “I'll show them.... Then they'll see.... Make them see....” Gibbering. I pull out my knife and I... remove their eyelids. Cursing them to see as I have to. All the while mumbling about how I'll make them all see. The last thing I see is their eyes, the reflection in the empty, dead orbs. The reflection of a man with bloodshot, blistered-red eyes. And I hear a whispered, desperate plea: “Help them. Stop him. Please.”
Each dream would wake me some many minutes before Jimmy, in a sort of suspended state of horror. Each faded out as though to imply they had plenty more horrors to show – was I sure I wanted to leave? I was sure, thank you. I was less thankful for the time this afforded me to analyze them. I hate that I have participated in whatever way in them. I hate myself a little for generating them. I write each of them in my journal by the time Ol Jimmy gets up. The morning after the first dream, I assuage my loathing with placating notions that the dream is meaningless, that it's just a repetition of the Vision – that it is, somehow, a lingering after effect of the Potion. When I am unable to smoke the dreams away, I start to wonder whether I'm wrong, whether there is some sort of meaning behind them.
I spent those eight days following the eight nights of dreams trying to convince myself that the dreams didn't mean anything. That they were, in fact, just dreams. Then the ninth night happened, and everything started to unravel.
I wake up in the spot I fell asleep. It's a few hours before dawn. And Jimmy isn't snoring. When he isn't talking, he is snoring. How he was able to go from babble to sleep in the space of a single breath, I will never know and can even now only admire. Jimmy isn't in his bedroll, for that matter. Suddenly I don't want Jimmy to know I'm up – but I do want to know what he's up to.
I am exceptionally quiet. I think I hear a voice behind a bush, just out of eyeshot from the road.
Jimmy? I think? So I creep over there, staying low and as quiet as I can.
Soon I'm close enough that I can see a small but bright light, shining behind the bush. I hear talking, but I am too engrossed with the light. All Ol Jimmy does is talk. Why should I pay attention now? Then I'm close enough to see it: a fist size statuette, green, a snake coiled in three stacked loops, its head at the top, great wings wrapped around it. He is kneeling before it, eyes closed, hands held as though in prayer.
Then his eyes snap open and he's looking directly at me.
He opens his mouth, and instead of surprise or protestation, he hisses. He is suddenly a giant serpent, and he launches himself at me.
It is from this that I awoke with a start the ninth morning. Later than usual. Jimmy is shaking me gently.
I spend that last day sober, hardly noticing anything, not our passage through Padua, not the other people on the road. All I notice is that with every minute, every foot that passes beneath us, I'm getting closer to Venice – closer to the destiny looming over my head like an ax waiting to fall.
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