City of Saints and Madmen

and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen them or heard mention of their existence. Ever… After several days, your eyes stray and unfocus and blink slowly. You notice, at the very bottom of the mirror, the glass, a door. The door is as big as the machine.

The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so small that you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent-the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely-perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a non-existent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth.

The worms are singing to you through the rubble. You cannot think. You cannot breathe. You dare not breathe. Your head is full of blood.

There is something behind the door.

There is something behind the door.

There is something behind the door.

The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You run you run you run you run from that place as fast as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while you drown in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hatdoesnwor atdoeswor tdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door…

Patient l9-9-l8-9-l4

Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute l3l4Albumuth Boulevard

Ambergris Il3-24

THE RELEASE OF BELACQUA

The shade of the composer Voss Bender himself might have passed Belacqua in the back corridors of the opera house; the aging critic Janice Shriek might have half-noticed the stoic humor of his performance, just not thought it important enough to mention in her review.

Much about him cried out for attention. Above the black shoes: the long red socks, matched only by the outrageous pink-blue chessboard buttons of his jacket, mimicked in lazy rural fashion by the green eyes on his yellow shirt. His hair — in a twisted red braid (frayed at the end) — hung down in front like the fuse to the bomb of his head. His made-up face reflected a certain forethought mirrored in the shrewd miscalculation of his clothes. The eyebrows (more than one opera-goer may have thought, attention wandering momentarily from the major players) had been stolen from the flourishes on the body of a violin: they overpowered the small, terrified eyes, melted into the lines of the long, garrulous (fake) nose, which itself loomed over the parrotfish mouth (flanked by vertical lines like gills) and sometimes slid down in mock surrender to gravity by performance’s end. This farce was pigmented with sow-pink skin, paler above the rarefied heights of the dueling eyebrows, as overdone in description as in life.

But we would know all of this if we had attended a performance, his costume blaring at us like a bawdy horn. Belacqua, Belacqua, the horns blared— this is Belacqua. See him move across the stage. See him briefly speak, and turning burn his image across our eyes. We could never know that he lives on the fifth floor of a hideous old hotel, in a cramped apartment with indi ferent lime-green wallpaper. Neighbors who move around above and below like blunt objects with a dulled sense of direction. Children who cry in the dark like ragged ghosts. A flutter of wings at the windowpane, delicate as eyelashes, and then gone. The repeated banging of a bedpost like some erotic gunshot aimed at his heart. (Next door, for ease of transition and translation, a necropole awaits those who grow cold in the hotel’s embrace.) On weekend mornings, he sits on the balcony, an unlit cigar between his lips. Dressed in a plain white robe, renouncing all make up, he feels the wind move through him as if he does not exist. He watches the people who pass by on the street below and anoints them all with secret lives, breathes into them qualities to match the golden light that filters down between the rooftops.

Sometimes, his gaze blurs upon the filigreed balcony railing as he remembers his dreams. His dreams are all disturbing jokes with obscure punchlines. In one dream, he sees his father: a dark figure at the far end of an alley, briefly illuminated by the glare of a bulb that cuts through the murk. He hears the sound of running water or beer poured from a bottle. Shards of glass lacerate his feet as he runs across the cobblestones. But the joke is, no matter how fast he runs, he can never come close enough to read his father’s eyes. Motionless, frictionless, his father glides ahead, continually twenty, thirty feet beyond his grasp.

The filigree of the balcony at first seems like protection from the dream, not protection from falling. He drops the cigar, stands up, goes back inside, dresses in subdued pants and shirt, descends the stairs, walks out onto the street, loses himself there, glad to be anonymous. He leaves his opera persona behind him like an abandoned skin: a husk that has as little to do with him as his clothes.

As he walks toward Albumuth Boulevard (possibly to buy a book at Borges Bookstore, possibly just to wander), a black flame burns inside of him — it lights up his eyes and lends his speech (a word to the fruit vendor, a brief exchange with a more talented but unemployed actor) a subdued yet incandescent fury.

Each word arrives burnt around the edges, consumed. His mother used to talk that way, as she let her life be created by his father. The Great Actor. The DrownedMan. The Drunkard.

Even now, he cannot completely forget his role in Bender’s most popular opera, the last written before his death and staged posthumously under a one-word title: Trillian. The opera recounts, in six raucous acts lasting four hours, the reign of Trillian the Great Banker, leaving out nothing, presenting every scene as a painting of the sort in which a thousand brightly-colored details battle for the viewer’s attention. His role, as the Great Banker’s gray cap advisor Belacqua, consisted of four lines and two hours of pratfalls.

The part was based on hearsay, heresy, and innuendo, for no history he had ever read mentioned Trillian’s advisor. Bender had made it up, and he had played the falsehood for ten years now, the opera’s undiminished popularity both blessing and curse. His father would never have taken such a role, but he had no choice. He had always recognized both the limitations of his acting style and that he lacked any spark of talent in other trades. Belacqua he was and Belacqua he would always be. Thus doomed to replay this other self night after night, while his father’s ghost hooted and howled, besotted, from some upper balcony seat.

The role, though small, required work, if only because the directors could require work of him without complaint. They told him exactly where to stand, and he stood there. They told him when to make absurd little motions in time to the main players pouring out in perfect pitch and tone the words that now to his ears had no meaning, much as any repetition reduces function and content to a void. He also studied gray caps when he came upon them slumped in alleys or, from a distance, at dusk as they began to waken — observed their hunching gait, their distinctive clothing, their deep, unknowable eyes. He even took lessons on how to project small upon the audience, making his five-foot-six-inch height look like four-foot-four (this last a precaution against getting the boot).

In his pocket, he kept a crumpled piece of paper. On the paper he had scribbled stage directions and The Lines.

BELACQUA approaches the front of the stage, holding the bloody knife. When he reaches TRILLIAN, he sternly sings:

What you cannot know and will not trust Will find you here because it must— I fly away now, the night to bring Down upon Trillian’s head, and then? No-thing.

Below this, he had written what he thought Belacqua felt in that moment: “Everything that had been building up for so long — dissipated in the pool of blood bubbling up from X’s body.”