IX
The Young Boy was indeed lurking about, and by all means, up to no good. The encampment was all but empty. There were a few engineers and constructors, but they were busy inside the main tent, preparing tonight’s extravaganza. As for the rows of carriages, tents, and makeshift burrows, they were all left open or ajar, and really, just asking for someone to poke around. It wouldn’t be the boy’s fault if he were to act, as was entirely expected.
And so, like a virus coursing through a child’s veins, The Young Boy made his way through the tight bends and twisting corners of the encampment, infected and overcome by sheer curiosity and, by now, a want to belong; to belong and to escape.
He found himself, as he had the other night, like a magnet, inexplicably drawn toward that tree at the centre of the encampment. And he stood there, staring at it, with the same strange delirium as he once had, at an old man on a hospital gurney, covered in his own faeces and screaming in a language that none of the nurses could understand.
The tree was like that old man. It should have died at a more appropriate time when its beauty and fondness could still be remembered. But like the old man, there was something inside that kept it hinged to life; but not as in a child in the midst of a game, or as lovers, sharing their first bed. This was the kind of life that was translucent, blotched and veiny, and that was fragile and covered in bed sores. It was the kind of life that had one awaken, whether they were ready or not, to the unjust duty of their humanity. It was the kind of life that had one sharpening their axe or reaching for a suffocating pillow, or for a plug to pull. And like the old man, this tree was driven, inspired, and kept in a state of unremitting agony, by something so greatly unresolved.
The Young Boy stood there, unable to look away, and half expecting the branches to reach out and snatch him, and then drag him towards one of the rotting and festering cankers in its bark, that which was probably a mouth, or a gateway or hell.
From where he stood, though, he could still make out the mix and mash of names and initials, all carved into the splintering wood. He studied them, tilting his head to one side, and then back to the other as he read one after the other, the declarations of love, infatuation, obsession, treachery, and betrayal.
“I love her.”
“She loves me.”
“I hate you.”
“And I hate myself, even more.’
“Janey is a slut.”
“John and her forever.”
And, “I miss you. I can’t live without you. Please, please! Come home.”
There were names and initials of all the people in town who had died. Their last confessions etched upon the tree. The Young Boy scoured with his eyes, for any proof of his mother having been here, any reason at all for her dying, aside from what his sceptical father called, ‘a strange and unfortunate coincidence’.
That and nothing more.
Scouring as he did, he couldn’t see his mother’s or his sister’s initials. He couldn’t see any note, code, or any cryptic message that could have hinted towards their illnesses, and their subsequent deaths. But a great deal of the tree was missing. It looked as if it had been shaved, or shredded, as if layer after layer, like slices of cheese, had been cut away from all sides of the trunk and from its branches too, which the boy remembered, many years ago, being round and sturdy enough for a dozen children to climb and spend the day hanging on; but now, looked as weak and on the verge of collapse as an old junkie’s veins.
“Why all the secrecy?” spoke a voice, behind the boy.
“It’s not important for you to know,” spoke another.
The Young Boy hid beneath a carriage, the carriage with the broken door.
“All I’m saying is all,” said The Three Legged Midget, “is, you know, if you’re gonna make me do something, then just tell me what it is. I’d like to know what all the fuss is about, is all.”
Rex sighed heavily.
“How much of what you do?” asked Rex, pausing, and leaning down like a crane towards his companion. “How much, are you actually aware of?”
“Everything,” said The Three Legged Midget.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What colour is the sky? How many clouds are there? What does it say on my shirt? What kind of shoes am I wearing? And you for that matter? What colour belt am I wearing? How many branches are on that tree behind you? And how many trees are there? One? Two? Fifty?”
“There’s one,” said The Three Legged Midget, assured. “Yeah, there’s one. There has to be.”
He stared at Rex, looking for validation.
“Nah wait, that’s a trick, isn’t it? Hold on…”
“Don’t turn your head,” said Rex.
“Fuck it,” said The Three Legged Midget, “I don’t know. Fine…. I don’t know anything, alright? The world’s a bloody mystery. You happy now? How many are there then? Fifty? A hundred? A forest?”
“One,” said Rex. “And the sky is grey, like everything else in this town. My shirt says my profession, like all of us. I’m wearing green Velcro sandals, size eighty-four, and you’re wearing tri-coloured bowling shoes, a children’s size six. And I don’t wear a belt. I find it pinches below my belly. I much prefer elastic. And as for tree, there are seven branches, if you include the one buried under dried leaves just a stone’s throw away. You don’t need to know why things are, my friend. What does it say on your shirt?”
“Doer.”
“Right. And mine.”
“Delegator.”
“Right. That’s all you need to know, is what I tell you to do.”
“All I’m saying is….” he said, mumbling to himself as he stood on one side of the tree, holding a long shearing blade that he and Rex, ran back and forth, slowly cutting sheaths of wood away from the tree, less than a millimetre thick.
“Carry that load back,” said Rex, handing his companion a pile of wood.
“Then what?” replied The Three Legged Midget.
“Start the pulp. I’ll be there soon.”
The Three Legged Midget took off through the encampment, carrying one of the piles of wood that they had sheathed away. Rex stayed behind, running his infantile fingers over the other pile, that which was scarred with names and initials, of some requited, but mostly lovelorn vows. He ran his fingers into the grooves, catching a splinter or two and wondering to himself, as he carefully filled the hessian sack, if what he felt for his master were the kind of love worth cutting into the bark of a tree.
Rex took the other pile and walked right past The Young Boy, who was hiding beneath the steps of the carriage with the broken door. He had no idea that the boy was there. He thought only of his master and imagined him on the highest of pedestals, one that could reach the stars, and he imagined himself holding its long and shaky wooden legs.
There were three carriages that aligned the sickly, old tree; The Ringmaster’s, his crippled daughter’s, and that of Gaia. Rex stood outside her door for what could be regarded as a great while. Sweet smoke poured out from behind coloured veils that hung in her doorway, and the sound of rattling shells and sitar had Rex feeling a mix of relaxation and discomfort. The sound was beautiful, like a thousand shells being washed up on some harmonic shore. And yet, his discomfort came from thinking himself as interrupting, and being some kind of a disrupting bore.
Eventually, after some nervous time, he pushed his head through the coloured veils in the doorway and then disappeared into the carriage. There, on the floor, he saw Gaia sitting in the lotus position, with a single card pressed against her forehead. She was whispering quietly, and with such avid intent, as if she was responding directly to another person, but Rex could see only her.
“Sorry mam,” he said, his sight focused on his humungous toes.
“Thank you, my love,” said Gaia, turning away from The Demon for a second. “You can leave the letters right there.”
“Yes mam,” said Rex, carefully placing the hessian sack on the floor, and backing
out of the carriage.
“Oh dear,” said Gaia toward Rex. “Forgive me for a second,” she said to The Demon, turning her attention back to the gentle giant who struggled to back in through the tiny door.
“Yes mam,” he said.
“Your mother sends her regards,” said Gaia. “And she’s proud of you.”
Rex smiled. He hadn’t thought of her in so long. He hadn’t prayed for her, and he hadn’t visited her grave either. It had been far too long. He didn’t feel bad, though. He didn’t feel racked with guilt as a lazy commoner might, one whose absence was versed around alcohol, opium, sex, and squander. She would have to know, surely she would. And she was proud of him. So by all accounts, she most certainly did. Rex walked back through the encampment to join his comrades with the pulping duties, wearing a deranged kind of grin and skipping as he went along.
“Where were we?” said Gaia, returning her attention to The Demon, who sat just as she, its legs crossed, and its hands rested comfortably over its knees.
“The souls, as you requested.”
“We prefer the term stories,” said Gaia. “But yes, good work.”
“My part in this deal is done,” said The Demon. “Now bestow unto me, what was promised.”
“We are not done yet,” said Gaia, laying out the card of The Fool. “The deal is still in effect.”
“How can I trust you?” asked The Demon.
“You cannot. Trust is not a right or a birthmark. It is the effect of our passage together. It is earned, not deserved. And it is attained, not merely asked for. When our deal is done, you will have your trust. But know that at the end of this, we will trade no more. But you will have your prize. You will have your obsession. Now,” she said, inhaling profoundly, “let us pray.”
The two bowed their heads, Gaia, and The Demon. And while former guided them both through meditative prayer; fragmenting, healing, and then realigning every atom at their core, the latter focused the whole of its conscious attention on its breath, riding each inhalation like a rudderless vessel, adrift in the rise and fall of some gargantuan, oceanic swell, from the burrows of each trough, until almost tipping at the spill of each crest, and then sliding down the back of each breath, and into another.
They each twisted their bodies into shapes that not even elastic could fathom until it was almost impossible to tell where one body started, and the other ended. They intertwined; she coiled around its back for one moment, and then it around hers the next; at one point, mirroring some magnificent yet beguiling, four-armed deity.
And at the end of their prayer, they made love.
The Young Boy watched from a crack in the wooden panelling as Gaia stood above The Demon, her long black hair, flowing like an irenic stream, around every curve of her naked body. The boy’s focus, though, was on the creature that lay on the floor weeping, its twig-like fingers pressed shamefully over a cavity between its shoulders, which the boy assumed must certainly be its face.
He thought of his mother, and the last time that he had seen her; pale, skeletal, and bleeding profusely from open sores, with cuts on her wrists, between her toes, and beneath her breasts - the extent of her relentless scratching. He thought of her voice on that third day, and how the cracking of her parting lips sounded like a blister popping. And he felt that same feeling of disgust right now, as he had each time his mother braved herself to speak.
He stared at The Demon, and he was not overcome with fear as he was the other night. He felt as he had on the third day, when his mother was full of boils, and ulcers, and when the skin on her back and on her legs, sloughed like fresh snow, off the side of a mountain.
Gaia knelt down above the weeping demon and then straddled its legs.
“Love,” she said.
“This is not love,” said The Demon, its wretched fingers still clenching its cankerous and void-like face.
“Then what is it?” she asked.
The Demon turned its head to the pile of letters on the floor that had been carved out of the old tree. Though they could never be its own, they were the closest it had come to true love.
“Let us then, read of your obsession.”
Gaia took from the pile, one of the stories, and she read it aloud while she continued to masturbate The Demon.
“We should go,” the letter said. “We should get out of here. Just you and me.”
“But where will we go?” the next line read. “And how will we get there?”
“It doesn’t matter where we end up, and how we even get there, just as long as we’re together. I can’t live without you,” the third line read. “And I’d soon as cut out my own heart then have to go back home, and live as if you don’t exist.”
The Demon wept.
“This is love?” mocked Gaia. “Pretentious hyperbolic affection.”
She threw the letter across the room and took another, her left hand still massaging The Demon’s arborous and splintered erection.
“Please,” read the letter. “I love another man. And I don’t know what to do.”
“The slut,” said Gaia.
The Demon shook its head.
“It’s not like that,” said The Demon. “Read on.”
“I love my family I do. I love my children, my son and my daughter. And my husband, he is a good man, he is. He’s kind. He’s generous, and he’s fair. He doesn’t deserve any of this. But life’s not fair, fate isn’t fair. I didn’t ask for this to happen. I didn’t ask for him to show up after all this time. I thought he was gone. I thought he was never coming back. And I can’t go on pretending that I don’t feel this way. It’s not fair to my husband. It’s not fair to Christopher, my boy, and to Elize…”
The Young Boy’s eyes widened.
“Mother,” he said to himself, feeling sick and weak in his stomach.
He fought to twist and turn, to see the woman reading the letter, but he could only see The Demon’s mournful face. Gaia continued.
“…she should know her real father,” the last line read.
The Young Boy wept, as The Demon did.
As Gaia masturbated The Demon, she read letter after letter, of all the people who had declared their love, their intention, and their amorous planning beside the once healthy Sycamore tree. She read every story of every person who had long since suffered. She read every story of every person who had long since died. She read every story of which, since the birth of time, The Demon had scribed. And she laughed as she tossed each one, like a soiled tissue, over her shoulder in a pile near the door.
The Demon wept as she spoke, and more so, as she laughed; and at the height of its discomfort, it orgasmed. Gaia collected every drop of its sticky amber sap in a small vial, and placed it on her working bench, beneath a flickering oil lamp, and beside the three small arborous bullets that she had carved out of the sickly old tree’s roots.
“Dispose of them,” said Gaia.
The Demon sat upright and began collecting the papers.
“I have a place,” it said.
“Good. Do not let yourself be followed. Take the stories there, and bury them. Ensure they can never be found,” said Gaia.
The Demon shook its head.
“Return in the morn,” she said.
“Where I travel, there is no morn. There is no time. I might have already returned, were it not that I had yet to leave.”
“Our time,” replied Gaia. “Our morn.”
“Agreed. I shall do my best.”
“There is still the rest of the town yet. The troupe is out collecting their stories as we speak. There will be at least one more journey.”
“To be clear, after this we are done. Agreed?”
“When you return, I will have for you, what is yours.”
The Young Boy eyed the shadowy pile behind the door. How on earth would he know one from the other? But before he could even think, or will himself to move, The Demon had already risen and taken the pile of letters, ordering them neatly into a hessian sack, of
which he slung over his shoulder.
“Will it be worth it, everything that I have seen?” asked The Demon.
“When you see Heaven, you will understand.”
The Demon lowered its head and walked out of the carriage, the heavy sack stowed to its shoulders. It didn’t notice Gaia, by the flickering of the gas lamp, loading the now sticky and amber, arborous bullets into the cylinder of a shiny silver handgun. As it closed the carriage door, it didn’t notice The Young Boy, whose face was buried in his knees, curled in a tight ball beneath the carriage steps. It didn’t notice too, as it opened a cavity in the tree and peered into the infinite black void, how The Young Boy had followed him, sneaking behind and under the other carriages, his eyes glued to the hessian sack on The Demon’s shoulder. And it didn’t notice either, as it slipped into the void, and as the cavity closed behind it, how desperately The Young Boy beat on, and tore at the bark of the tree, almost ripping his fingernails off, trying to get inside.
The Demon’s thoughts were only on the place where it had to be.