LV
“Get those damn fixtures up. The final act is about to start,” shouted Rex.
He was livid, but you could tell that he was merely inspired by passion. There was a look in his eye that on one hand, was seeing every potential accident and delay tied to every single cable, wire, and quickly arranged beam; and on the other hand, the whole show going according to plan. There was a point in his eye of unwavering balance that to Bean looked nothing like the emptiness of heavenly equanimity. His equilibrium was still yes, but it looked like he might explode at any second, and either swing from the rafters in stupendous delight, or set fire to this tent. Simply watching and not knowing, for Bean, was an incredible experience. He felt sure that the slightest breeze might pendulate the giant in either direction; and either, he thought, would be a wonderful sight at which to marvel. As he hid beneath the stands, his anticipation swelled to the point where the only thing that would calm him was to chew hungrily on the tips of his fingers. Such was his frenetic exhilaration that he worried - for should he wait any longer, he might gnaw off his hands entirely.
In the morning, the encampment had been empty and ghostlike, except for a few stage crew who juggled the abuse and orders from the giant on the stage. Most had gone with their master on some kind of quest, chanting religious hymns and walking in the direction of town. Bean chose not to follow The Ringmaster. Instead, when he was sure everyone had gone, he snuck into the carriage under which he had spent the night pondering and sorted through The Ringmaster’s personal documents.
He opened first, a bag full of letters it seemed. There were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands; maybe even more. Each was the same as the other, in that, unlike the story he knew so intimately, they were all completely different. Thousands upon thousands of stories about the same theme – life – and yet none of them were the same. This alone both excited and scared the bookkeeper. In one clump, for example, there were six letters from four children and their dear and loving parents. Those very six people, who lived under the same roof and experienced life amidst the same conditions, spoke of six entirely different stories. It was a sight to behold indeed.
The family had lived in one room their entire lives, and in that room, according to the sum of the letters, there was nothing but an empty match box, a crack in the wall, and for one reason or another, a tin can full of matchheads and shrapnel. Although logic would prescribe that under such conditions, each person should have no excuse for not being able to account for each object, as it turned out, each person wrote entirely their own account, as if their experiences had been thwarted by their feelings and emotions, and by how they perceived the objects in the room. Bean read six different accounts of the same room.
The mother wrote mainly about the past, as if the children she was clinging to, were constantly becoming lost beneath longer legs, meaner expressions, quicker tongues, and scruffier hair. The children wrote differently according to their ages. One spoke of the crack in the wall, and how she was sure that at some point in her life, she was would have been small enough to slip through and escape. She had been, in her story, thinking about alighting with the boy that she could hear, imprisoned in the room next door. Her other siblings wrote about things there were not even in the room, things that they believed had once been there, and of whose ghosts kept them company and watched over them while they slept. The youngest wrote about the can of match heads, and how joyful it was to hear them rattle; while the father wrote about the bomb that he held in his hands all day, and the irony that he hadn’t saved a single match to set it off.
In all of the letters, people spoke of the one recurring theme – life. And were this Heaven, one could stop reading after the very first letter, for everything that could have been said, would have been said, and it would have been no different to anyone else’s identical perception. Such was the premise of equanimity – clear and thoughtless perception. Here, though, Bean was drawn further into every new tale. He would put one down and then itch for a second, telling himself that a thousand was enough. Sure enough, though, he would be selling himself the plausible lie of; “Just one more, and then we’ll stop.”
And as he sorted through the piles of letters, he saw the same recurring pattern. There was, even in the most finite and probable setting, infinite probability. No two storied were the same. His existence, the existence of Heaven, was based on one story, that of The Sun of God; and it could be told word for word without missing a beat. Were every soul to write that story, they would be written with the same number of words and spaced over the same number of lines. That symmetry and preciseness, he had thought, was all that mattered; that, in the same way that humour was an extension of man’s suffering and discontent, so too was the story of The Sun of God, merely an outcome and a tangible example of equanimity.
But he was wrong.
He had never imagined the kind of exhilaration that he felt now, the kind that could only be found at the behest of the unknown. He felt as he took each story, the same kind of trembling unease of a home owner, creeping through the darkness to check a suspicious noise. In each story, he had no idea what he would find, whether it was something to cause him fright and discomfort, something satiric to tickle his bones, something amorous or adventurous, or whether there was no nothing at all; whether the story had no purpose, and was merely written in the same directionless manner in which any life could be lived. This indecision was something else entirely. Inside the finite parables of substantives, adjectives, vowels and consonants, he had found infinity.
After reading almost every letter, Bean became sure that Heaven was some placated monstrosity that was in no need of saving. As he thought this, his heart, body, and mind swelled with an unconquerable vibrancy, and he felt for the first time ever, an unflinching capacity to accomplish even the improbable. He felt strong enough to punch his way through a mountain; fast enough to outrun Light, and tall enough to pick a satellite out of the sky as it if were a plump and ripe fruit.
As he sat spying on Rex, Bean thought about the girl, who, in another temporal dimension, and outside of her ruined and crippled legs, was the fly in Heaven’s ointment. Though he had come here to stop her, whatever that meant, now he was certain that she had to die.
He left the tent when Rex did and followed him from a distance as the giant met up with two women, one with a tattoo that couldn’t keep still, and the other with a beard identical to his own. He kept some distance, but he read their lips and expressions, with as much avid thirst as he did, the thousands of stories.
“How long will the poison take to work?” asked Rex.
“Barely a drop in each cup will have been sufficient enough to kill even the most hopeful man, woman or child, a hundredfold. How much did you offer?”
“Half a cup for each.”
He would make a gallant soldier of Heaven.
Gaia smiled.
“I see why The Ringmaster chose you,” she said.
“Are we nearing the end?” asked Delilah.
“We are. After tonight, there shall only be Heaven. The boy, his depression has set in. He cares not to create and sits not by the door of time. We, The Soldiers of Light, now command the door. There are no new universes. There is no new time. There is only Heaven, and from it, there is no escape.”
All three crossed a star over their foreheads.
“And the cripple?” asked Delilah.
“Take these,” said Gaia, handing Rex three arborous bullets.
“What are they?” he said, estranged.
“They are the only way to kill the girl. They are carved from the wound of a demon and made strong with its sexing compassion.”
“Won’t any normal bullet do?”
“No,” said Gaia, for the first time sounding resolute and firm. “She can only be shot with this weapon. These arborous bullets will bind her for an eternity in The Demon’s womb. Her fate depends on it.”
Rex stared at them. They looked like sticky wooden plaits.
&n
bsp; “This is for the good of Heaven, right?” he asked, like a child.
“Oh don’t be such a pussy. Give ‘em to me,” shouted Delilah, trying to rip open the giant’s clutch.
“Tell me this is for the good of Heaven,” he said adamantly, staring right at Gaia.
She was beautiful and normally that alone could defuse any man. But Rex was overcome with a feeling that not even a simple prayer could quell.
“I know how you feel,” said Gaia, stroking the giant’s face. “It is you who is the true martyr. You will be remembered for your treachery, and you will be despised for it. You will be spoken of, for the rest of time, as the patriarch of corruption and perfidy. But without you, there can be no ascension, the sun cannot rise. You are exemplary, but you will be stoned for what you are about to do.”
“Is it for the good of Heaven?” he asked again.
“It is,” said Gaia.
Rex thought about his master, and how much he worshiped his ideal. He thought about Heaven too, more so, he thought about his mother who had abandoned him as a child. He hoped that soon, she could finally look past his deformity and see what sacrifice he was about to make, for the good of every soul in the omniverse. He hoped that she would love him, even if he were to spend an eternity in hell.
“I can do it,” said Delilah, once again, snatching at the giant’s hands. “I can do it right now. I hate that fucking little bitch.”
“You decide,” said Gaia, “whether you shoot the girl yourself or have another do it for you. It is in your hands now, the outcome of her fate,” said Gaia, kissing Rex’s cheek.
Rex felt, immediately, the weight of his decision. He felt the betrayal that he had yet to assume, and he felt the great heaving shame that came with it.
“For the good of Heaven,” he said, nursing his shaking hand.
“For the good of Heaven,” said Gaia, walking away.
Bean followed Rex and Delilah through the encampment. They stopped beside The Big Top, where inside, the townsfolk were starting to get restless, waiting for the final act. Maybe it was the poison, or maybe it was just a damn good show. Whatever it was, poor old Rex was beside himself. He had never looked so unsure in his life.
“Let me do it,” said Delilah.
“You don’t understand,” said Rex. “It cannot be done with pleasure. That is why it must be me.”
“You heard the witch. You need not carry this burden yourself. Allow me to unburden you.”
As she spoke, her hands, so soft and gentle, worked their way inside of the giant’s dirtied overalls. Her eyes never flinched, not for a second, as she touched Rex in a manner that had never been touched before.
“Let me take this burden from you,” she said, in lustful reprise; kissing his cheek, just as Gaia had, and working her arm with fervent rigor until the giant shook and then yelped, in strained orgasm.
As he ejaculated, he threw the bullets in Delilah’s face and was immediately immersed in stagnant disgrace. He ran away from the bearded whore with his hands over his face, but by the time he returned to his post backstage, he was somewhat composed. As he prepared for the final act, all he could think of were those three arborous bullets having left his cowardice hands.
The applause was rapturous, as the Light in The Big Top shone upon the stage. As Rex queued in the start of the grand finale, Delilah, made her way backstage, and prepared for the gran treason – combing her beard, and affixing her voluptuous breasts. So drunk was she, on her own wonder, she couldn’t hear the door open, and she didn’t notice at all, the shadow that crept behind her.
Bean had no idea now who to pray to, or what expression to use. Instead, he merely put his hands around Delilah’s throat and strangled her. She was a strong woman. She had hands like a blacksmith, and a stern grasp too. As hard as she hit back, though, Bean didn’t let go. He squeezed and squeezed, and with every gasp that he squeezed out of her, he squeezed even more.
And as the final act got underway, a great deal of death was already being sworn in. As Bean strangled a bearded whore to death, in a secret room beneath the stage, Rex the giant hanged himself, incapable of treading water in such a momentous tide of guilt and shame.
In the name of Light, the Sun of God, and in the name of all that is good and holy, in Heaven and here on Earth, I present to you, The Incredible Accordion Girl.
”Bean left the whore’s body nestled beneath its covers. It was, as he thought, the right of the conscious to make a great deal out of death, especially one who, at one point or another, should make it their profession. He stood over her body momentarily. Were he in Heaven or any of his past lives, he would have prayed for her soul, and in that, he would have tainted the true colour of her soul, and pissed in her pond so to speak.
But as a being that had only recently done away with God, he had no idea how to celebrate this moment, and how to do away with this guilt. So he leaned in, and he kissed her forehead and he ran his hand through her beard, as he imagined that this was something that she would have found fond and regaling.
“Go alone,” he said, “go with great haste, without caution and with passion and vibrant colour. Take strides and leaps, and do not hold yourself back. Sail across the infinite sea. Name every ocean that you cross, but never lay your anchor in the tides of your past. Sail toward the sun that never sets.”
And as The Young Cripple wept, hanging above a stage, Bean dressed in a whore’s attire, taking the same care and attention to how he looked, as did she. Their resemblance was uncanny. He combed his beard and affixed his padded breasts, then emptied the gun of its arborous bullets, loading three more that he found on the whore’s dresser. And when he was done, he pulled the robe over his head, walked invisibly through the maze backstage, and he walked out on stage.