What God Forgot #2
“You’re not dead, my son,” replies Davide, who shortly comes to doubt himself when he learns the boy was pulled from the river and possesses no pulse but a whirring thrum.
Even when whipped, say the disciplinary officers, he doesn’t bleed so much as unravel.
“Change is not death,” the chaplain reassures him.
“It’s a constant rhythm. Expect waxing and waning and waxing again. These cycles are inevitable.”
The same words that comfort so many seem only to upset Mallory, and when the boy breaks down, Davide takes him into his arms and rocks him in the stony light of the chapel. He rests his nose against his temple, and notices that he does, perhaps, smell a little like Hock.
The second time Davide returns to his villa, and the third, and the fourth, he tries to explain to his wife the uncanny familiarity of this criminal child, one he insists is deeper than skin, emerging in rare, crooked smiles, mannerisms, figures of speech, his encyclopedic but largely incorrect knowledge of the old operas.
His wife will tell him he is only deluded by his guilty conscience, and for a while, he believes her.
Ultimately, he will prove himself too cowardly to confirm the relation between Mallory and Hock—it is a suspicion, and a certainty, that he will hold unspoken for the rest of his life.
The fifth time Davide returns to his villa, his wife is gone. He is less devastated than he expects. He is not blindsided by the abandonment, nor indignant, nor even sorry for himself, only miffed that she didn’t do him the courtesy of trashing the place before she left.
A GENTLEMAN OF THE VOID
ACT I
Because the floor is damp, Guy presses the paper against the wall of his cell.
The pen is a furtive gift from Maximian, a small relief in the cramped, endless dark.
He can’t see, but he measures his lines with the width of his thumb, scribbling dialogue and music he does not know how to notate but only describe in lavish detail.
For days he works, until his shoulder aches, until his thoughts tangle, until the fury of his pen rips through the fibers.
The words multiply under him, burgeoning like the cells on Dr. Whyck’s agar plates, like the teratopod’s captive flesh, like the Revivalist gardens springing up in the wake of ecdytoxic battles.
He composes with insane prolificacy, demanding more paper every time Maximian visits him.
He demands candles, pens, a desk, a chair, a typewriter, a harpsichord.
The Marshal’s gifts fill his prison, first his tiny cell, then the next over, payments for an embrace, a conversation, a false profession of love or forgiveness.
Tortured by the music, by the pounding of venom, he exorcises the stories rapidly, repeatedly, spilling his grief into verse, into deaths and resurrections, into wild retellings of Guylag and his squire, of Larbella, of Mallory—Mal, as a Valkyrie.
Mal, as a vindictive alchemist with a handkerchief in his pocket, as a relentless torturer, as a stoic mercenary.
Men are murdered under Guy’s pen, damsels courted, banks robbed and monsters slain.
Heels tap and blades clash with merciless beauty.
Libretti fill his cell, spilling through the bars, making their way from his hands into Maximian’s, then the Chancellor’s.
The tales are clumsy, repetitive, unedited, and, to both Gorslung’s despair and his unparalleled satisfaction, the best he has ever read.
The verse, an untrained attempt at meter, misses the mark so much it breaks the constraints of traditional form and blossoms into pure, unfettered lyricism.
What his composers can interpret of the music drives him to ecstatic tears.
“It’s true,” he breathes, astonished. “It’s fucking true what they say about prison.”
Despite whatever grudge he may bear toward his traitorous hireling, the Laurel Chancellor is, first and foremost, a steward of beauty.
He gathers his editors, composers, and conductors, and prunes the madly written scripts.
He walks down to the depths of the midcity and pries the name Olaf Aufhocker from his new dramaturge, which he attaches to a lengthy and binding contract.
He shoves his prisoner’s thumb to paper, and the productions are put on to great and lasting success.
The reclusive composer-librettist takes the city by storm, and the facets of the movement’s disparate visual, architectural, martial, and olfactory styles unify on the stage.
The half-baked concept called Post-Neo-Repressionism comes to fruition, blooming into something utterly unique.
“There are so many treasures still to be found among those affected—no, inspired by the Revival,” the Laurel Chancellor tells the Arbuscle. “Eir Aufhocker is unquestionably our greatest, and I am elated, absolutely humbled, to be his patron.”
By his fifth year in prison, he is established as the Dramaturge Laureate, though he is not informed of this until Maximian mentions it to him offhand.
In his sixth year, he earns a new bed, a downy luxury awarded for his most successful season yet.
In his eighth, by far his least productive, he earns several beatings and a session with the thumbscrews.
His tenth, Maximian goes out of his way, and behind the Chancellor’s back, to release him for an hour, escorting him down to an empty xylem channel to watch a terrified soprano sing the aria that broke a thousand hearts the first night Fleeting Lodestar was performed.
“It didn’t turn out as well as I had it in my head,” Hock mutters.
To his captors in Mongfestun, Mallory proves more of a poltergeist than a prisoner. Evasive, aggressive, almost entirely nocturnal, the boy scratches himself constantly, picking at the soft creases of his wrists and elbows until his flesh comes away in long, fibrous threads.
He is a weird child, but he is also clever, more so to his detriment than benefit.
He devises elaborate escape attempts, perfects his prickly comebacks, executes small acts of sabotage wherever he goes, but he also learns to read, to load a gun and parry a strike, to properly set a ten-course meal and properly eat it, to interrogate a prisoner and arrange a bouquet.
He endures the lectures on etiquette, the whippings, the badminton games, the cruelty of his peers. He dries his eyes and whets his blade.
His only friend, besides the reformatory’s volunteer chaplain (who is also, according to the rumors, his father), is a flamboyant arrival from Tiliard, the delinquent son of a usurer who, driven by a sudden onslaught of aesthetic madness, destroyed every artwork in his parents’ gallery.
“It was all Revivalist garbage anyway,” Demetrius says, before launching on a tirade about the dismal state of dance in the city. “These people can’t even use ecdytoxin right, and they invented the stuff. You should’ve seen what they’ve done to the architecture. To the music.”
Mallory, though professing little interest in aesthetic mores, is drawn to Demetrius, rapt at his diatribes, his mocking impressions of the Laurel Chancellor and the Grand Marshal.
He devours the magazines Demetrius has shipped in from the city, the newspapers, the photographs.
He saves all articles concerning the Marshal Revenant, over which he obsesses, spending night after night looking them over, thrumming with hate, until he has to open a fingertip and pull out a long, torturous string.
They squirm from him in blues and reds and greens, restless and hungry.
If left alone, they will wander, so he sews them into his pillowcase, into the serviettes he is supposed to practice folding, driving his hatred into the helpless fabric with the satisfaction of an épée’s touch.
He stitches impulsive but elaborate landscapes, scenes from Tiliarder canon, patterns of almost Revivalist floridity, then watches them fray and die.
Demetrius is lovestruck by his work. “All he talks about at confession,” chuckles the reformatory chaplain, “is you.”
“He doesn’t know me,” Mallory replies, though he has already revealed many secret parts of himself to Dee, details he has not, and will never, share with Father Bateusse.
He has already made plans to escape Mongfestun with the other boy, which have been modified, reworked, then abandoned a dozen times over (and none of which yet involve a flour sack).
His plots are further altered when Demetrius, bored out of his mind, petitions the chaplain, then the warden, that the boys be allowed to see country renditions of recent city performances, Deep Canyon and Sons and Brothers and informational playlets that circulate through the villages.
Moved by the young man’s lengthy, improvised speech about the civilizing power of theater, the warden defers to the request, though the chaplain does not attend.
(Musical turmoil, he says, exacerbates his angina.) The first true work of Revivalism to make it to the countryside is an operetta called Sins of Our Patrons, about a seamstress who finds a lost prince in an oil drum.
It is a weak facsimile of the original performance, staged in the reformatory cafeteria by a generous troupe of volunteers, and it is ruthlessly panned by every boy in attendance, most of all Demetrius.
“Drivel,” he spits. “Utter dogshit. Everything the Laureate writes is contrived as hell.”
Mallory can’t reply. He lowers his eyes, because he has wept through the whole performance, profusely and in utter silence. “What…” he dares to mutter, only well after the actors have been booed away and the tables dragged back into place. “What was the librettist’s name again?”