Where is he? Point the way. There over yonder, there past the Locks and the Pits, Dungmarte and Batty Springs and Shay Longeur, old names for even older neighborhoods. His keepers hold the place, all districts surrounding. They’ve renamed neighborhoods according to the lay of his body: the Pits now Left Pointer Finger, the Locks now Left Middle, Batty Springs no longer Batty Springs but His Left Knee. The western suburb they call Left Arm, the eastern the Right…geography takes on the features of his avatar and people are made to live within it.
His population increases daily. Refugees, outcasts, exiles of every stripe, immigrants from the countryside no matter which country. Each arrive following the chemtrails of a rumor: the answer-man resides here, in a room somewhere in the ever-wandering perfect center of the city. Each was born into a life and they’ve brought it this far, helped it survive. They’ve dodged disease and bondage at the hands of bandits and slavers. They’ve walked the small path and seek passage into a larger one, just need directions and a reliable map to get there. The Wrinkle King, they’re told. Ask the Wrinkle King, he’ll show you, where and how. Years ago they asked where they might find such a man and a finger, different each time but always ever crooked, pointed the way. As they left, were told: no easy feat to score an audience with the man, so be ready. To gain access will have to pay with patience, teeth and blood, days and years, your soul (should you have one), and maybe a little dry paper money.
Such is the talk that surrounds him. Talk that squanders the legend but fleshes out the man. The Wrinkle King, an old boy, a Lao Tzu of slumland.
This city, Wrinkle City. Some will tell once it was called Tollinghurst. Then the man came or was born, the man took his throne and evolved out of obscurity into royalty. After that happened they changed their tune. They spoke as if he’d always been here, had been in fact its first and only citizen. This city, thousands of years deep in the present moment, back when it was an infant only, they claim, The Wrinkle King was there to suckle it, proto-wolf to its Romulus and Remus. He was ancient even then. He lived in a hut in the bog lands waiting for people to gather and for those people to procreate and fatten a town and government. Shacks became houses; houses became office parks. Walking paths became streets. The childhood of this place might be traced across of the features of the man himself: creases and scored marks, blemishes left behind by age running riot over his face. Of course this town has no royalty and this man is hardly an oligarch, he’s but a guy who’s lived here longer than grass on the ground. Grass not for all time but just this past spring.
Here then. Descriptions and instructions. They keep him a room, shirtless and pantless, plus-sized and breathing. A fulsome sun-damaged oracle. A door opens and his attendants lead you up a flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs another door. Knock, knock. Another peasant. Come on in, have a seat, what brings you? The door opens and there he is, this huge creature sitting on a cot in the corner, box spring mattress, half dozen floor fans arranged in semicircle around him, churning air his direction. It’s summer, flies sizzle about his head. A cane-back chair in the middle of the fans, waiting to creak and crinkle under weight of another visitor. You sit. You watch and wait. The great man shifts in his seat one buttcheek to the other. A long quiet. Attendants stand with backs to the wall by the door. You’ve been frisked, patted down for shivs and other such weapons. Neat, clean. Only sharp things about you might be questions you might ask, if they can manage to formulate. The great man mouthbreathes. An arm lifts, settles on a slabby thigh. Wrinkles break pattern across his body in hundreds of minuscule ways then settle into fresh relation. They remind the eye of a dried lake bottom, mud baked into spiderworks of excoriated geometry. Here he sits before you waiting.
“Name?”
[State your name]
“Where you hail from?”
[Your hometown]
“That’s a far bit. Welcome then. What you want to know?”
The rules. Before being led to this room you’ve been told rules. To these you’ve nodded head, agreed. One question. Pilgrims are granted one, therefore are encouraged to really think. The line is long. Time enough for only a few minutes. King sees a couple hundred each day, from waking to sleep. Wakes, first thing a bowl of oatmeal, cup of coffee. Then the first pilgrim is led upstairs for counsel. Goes like that six days a week. The seventh his day of rest. Years, decades he’s been doing this, offering his body as wisdom, if you have the stomach, if you can look at him. Rule #1: Rehearse your question. You’ll be granted only one sentence to phrase it with. Rule #2: After presenting your question, keep quiet. Let the man think. The room’s acoustics are part of the process. Don’t rush him. Sit back in the chair and wait. Rule #3: Watch all of him, not just the face. Prophecies or simple responses might take shape across any part of him. Could be a bicep, a pectoral, across the plump of a thigh or calf or elsewhere across his back or globulous belly. Skin does the talking, not the man’s mouth. If he does mobilize in more verbal ways, consider those mere additions, captions for whatever is expressed across the theater of his vast nudity. Rule #4: A rune, a puzzle. A cat’s cradle of wrinkles spelling out fate in complex ideogram. Memorize the lines. Commit the characters to recall. Once you have seen and truly taken what’s shown, nod. One nod will be enough. Give assent for the erasure and reshuffling that follows. A shift in his seat and wrinkles flatten, wander, resurface into neutral position, ready for a next question. Rule #5: Stand. Thank him. Walk backwards while facing him (never, never turn your back to him), until his doormen take you by arm and lead you out, down the stairs.
Those are the rules, simple. Break any one or take them out of order, you’ll be led out the exit never to be granted second entry. Some have tried. None have been crafty enough to fool the doormen. Some, having flubbed the rules and having failed to sweet talk their way back into favor resorted to extreme measures of self-revision, sought plastic surgery to rechristen their faces. They’d arrive with different clothes, mannerisms. They’d come with fake IDs and backstories. They’d sit for pre-interview with the Wrinkle King’s screeners and run through rehearsed details about where they’d come from, why they were seeking counsel. They’d been wandering for years. They’d come from the hinterlands hoping for clarity. They were lost. Lost much as the rest are. Might they secure an audience with His Excellency. Each screener in their turn would weather such sob stories with controlled indifference, squint, study the aspect before them, then conclude no. No, we know you. You have tried before. You’ve proven yourself unworthy. The future doesn’t wish to meet you. Off they’d go, pushed to the street, crowds of fellow pilgrims watching.
You’ve seen those types. Strangers have called you aside, pointed them out. No shortcuts, they advise. Know the rules, memorize them. Some had rolls of cloth they’d produce by request, the rules stitched into them or written in charcoal or ink. Study the rules and practice. Notice others here and there doing that? You look around and there see people standing off to the side or squatting by the curb or face to face in an alley, one assuming an imperious posture, arms crossed, gaze lowered, the other holding a roll of cloth in hand, reciting the rules. First flush using the written copy for reference. Second try running through the rules by rote.
Where’s the waiting room, you ask? After check-in with the screeners you’ll need to know. Easy, they say. It all is, anywhere around here. The whole neighborhood. By now probably the whole city. Pick a spot, lay out a bed roll, you’ll be in the waiting room. All of this, you ask and they nod. Tents and cardboard boxes, cairns of junk and sheets strung up with sticks and wires. To find a place in the waiting room, they tell you, all you have to do is foreswear a home, you don't even have to own one. If homeless they'll know from the look of you you’re waiting. They see everything. They keep track and tally. Don’t take numbers, though, numbers are for houses. Wrinkle King’s people only trade in names and faces.
Names and faces. So then, what’s yours? You had a face once but it left you. You had a name to go with it, where’s that now? People speak of cats and karma, past lives. People lose their names or change them. They age or gain weight or lose it, wear makeup or grimace or smile. Faces change and bring fresh acquaintances with them, someone new where they were once just themselves.
Roll-call of alibis, disguises. Who’d you been? Who were selves that passed through you, that brought you here? Self #12: A fishmonger named Devin Greene. Scar running diagonally left to right, forehead to chin, down your face. Reminded everyone who met you of a movie star they admired but couldn’t place. Self #60: Dylanna Sparks-Evans, three miscarriages in a year she told no one about, including her husband. Self #105: An old chess master who waited alone in public squares with board and pieces prepared on cardboard box before him, two chairs. Hoping for challengers. Pigeons talked to him occasionally, bringing news of the seasons and secrets overheard from windowsills. Self #838: A blind woman who saved her money for a year to hire the services of an experienced climber to guide her to the summit of the world’s tallest mountain. Her name was Jane, you remember, Jane Bull. She spat from the side of her mouth and cracked her knuckles from time to time.
These. These and more. Each useful for a day or an hour or week or month. Would bring you to a new self then molt off you like skin with an expiration date. Self to self you travelled from various species of nowhere until you arrived here, Wrinkle City. Who now? Wouldn’t be enough to ask just anyone. Find a store window, a parked car’s side mirror. Ask for a compact from some lady with fuchsia wig doing her lipstick. A shard of glass on the ground, lift it, hold at an angle just so. Who’s that looking back? Your most recent incarnation: a girl of twelve. How from the looks of her you know she’s twelve? It’s the feeling, how it strikes you, the rightness, the recognition, turning the glass at slight angles to examine her features. There then, that’s you now. Who knows for how long. Get on with it.
You are Melanie Winters, the reflection says. Just by sight, wordlessly: telekinesis by reflection. You’re a runaway from Minneapolis and hate your mother. What she’s done to you you can’t remember.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Melanie.”
“You new?”
“Yeah, just got here.”
“Here to see King?”
“Yeah. Where we go to sign in?”
There, they tell you, see that line of people? It goes around one block then another. Like a traffic jam of mice in a maze. This is the middle and there’s no cutting. Follow the line zigzag, find the very end and take your place. Best to hurry, dozens get added by the minute.
It takes two full days to get there. Over bridges, underground into subways and up again. Through the warehouse district, the garment district, flower district. Everyone facing one direction and you walking the opposite way. Note the looks, bystanders in single-file. Each cost a little, none free. To one pay a half-second of your time, to another half a half-second; in exchange you’re provided guidance: here’s a line, we’re part of it; trust it; there’s a place reserved for you at the end.
The end is in a neighborhood once West Quay. So says the person just a minute ago standing end of the line (now you are). A business type without industry, dirty suit, disheveled. Housing projects wherever you throw a stone, he says, a park with a pond and fountain and an old armory building. A basketball court and horseshoe pits. In another life families once picnicked here.
Tip of His Left Pinkie Toe, he explains. Long ago King’s sovereignty trumped city planning and West Quay got renamed. Everything around, everything you see belongs to him, being part of him. Us now too. We shake hands, the handshake's his. This line here's the vagus nerve, connects his many parts and runs right through him.
While the businessman does his business thing, mansplaining, the line lengthens. You look over shoulder and notice. A kid with brick in hand takes a spot behind you. An elderly couple shuffles behind. A woman in heels, a man in uniform, a nurse pushing a bluehair in a wheel chair. People north, south, east, northeast, west, southwest, wander over and join the line. Your fingertips are wet, you rub them together, look up. Sky’s gray, it's drizzling.
*
“Cheers, you survived.”
“Did I?”
“Surely.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’re still honestly breathing. About half only get that far. Most of these, look close, you'll notice their chests expand but aren’t drawing air. Only faking. Somewhere along the way they died on their feet waiting. If they dropped and began to rot, they’d lose their place in line. Come this far, why concede?”
Pair of fingers to neck, check your pulse. Hold back of a hand under nose, feel air come out warm, cloven by nostrils.
“See? The real deal.”
Screeners lead people off the line at the check-in. Separate pilgrim cadavers from the living. Aware or not, they’re dead. Dead gets disqualified. Each taken by upper arm, walked over to a gaggle of other such detainees cordoned behind a chain-link fence.
The check-in station. Five card tables under a tarp pavilion. Behind each sits a screener, clipboard and camera at hand. The check-in attendant leads you furthest to the right. Split second you pause to wonder, wait, he talks a good game, but is he breathing? Gone before you can lean close to gauge whether there’s pulse to his heartbeat.
The screener sits, you stand. She lifts the camera, viewfinder stealing her eye. A Diana, you see, a Diana F+. You name it without effort. How? One of your past selves, more than likely. Which? Self #55: The kid who won the camera at a carnival. A toy. Came with two free rolls of 120 mm film. One weekend a month her mother would bring her along to the West Side Market where she’d exercise an informal sort of mortal possession, snapping photos of fruit vendors or patrons bartering for a better deal on kielbasa. That one. That self was in the know. Screener lady raised the camera to take photo for ID purposes, smile from Self #55 found her face quite naturally. Melanie Winters with Self #55’s smile of nostalgia.
Screener hands the camera to an attendant. Attendant walks it over to a courier. Courier hustles to a door off the main street, a brownstone. Man in plastic apron and elbow-length work gloves takes it, off to the Royal Developer. Negatives grand enough for contacts straight off the sheet, no need for enlarger. Dark room, Developer works the chemicals. Your likeness emerges from the slick void of paper. The proof pinned with clothespins on a wire. It dries. Developer snatches it free, holds it to blacklight. Confirmed: this resemblance, somewhere there’s someone live behind it. Proof is sleeved in manilla envelope, in turn passed to one of many return couriers. The courier rushes it back to Screener #5, who opens envelope, slips free the official double of you who stands for comparison and scrutiny. Proof held next to your head. Look to one then the other. Two dimensional, then three. You as you, you as it. Together twins of a screener’s witness.
Head nods (nods around this place the highest currency). Approved. Schedule them on the King’s calendar.
Awkwardly, at loss for your role, you thank her.
Screener hands your face back to you, keeps the envelope. Do with it whatever, she says. We’ll remember. We’re keen on who you are, or can be.
Attendant leads you left. The outed dead, walked from the line, watch from behind the fence. They track your good fortune, access to the prime waiting area of the city-wide waiting room.
How will they know when to call you?
Attendant sucks his teeth, spits at your feet. Step away from the spit, admonished. Your shoes, their tips, both point toward it. Spit-checked you nod accordingly. Attendant too. Exchange rate of nods between peons and power people around the place uneven, five nickels to a penny.
Look around, over heads of the crowd. Aluminum bleachers on sidewalk either side of the street.
Street’s name? Check the sign.
Corpus Callosum Avenue.
In the brain, you think. The King’s Brain, center of Wrinkle City.
Among bleachers you choose left. Right-handed, you don’t trust yourself. Sullen hundreds crammed shoulder to shoulder, ass to ass, elbows on knees, leaning forward. Five rows up, you spot a gap. Apologizing, you climb, step past, hand on a shoulder, arm extended to manage balance. Wriggle through punters to reach row and spot. This taken? you ask sitters either side of it. Guy with Baltimore Orioles cap and Bengals jersey next to guy with black left eye and bandage over right.
Sure, one says.
Go for it, the other.
Turn, plant ass on cold aluminum, street scene in full view before you. A bustle right out of Ellis Island. The tired, hungry and poor, children of a lesser life, supposedly. “The stadium, you should’ve seen it,” you overhear a stranger tell a stranger. “There a week ago. Up in the nosebleed section for a year. Eat, bathroom, sleep. Eat bathroom sleep. Same day, day in day out, till I realized no one was holding me. Attendant brought me so guess I assumed I should stay? Been a week here on bleachers, no one minds. Funny it’d take me so long to figure. Why?”
Here begins the real wait. When pilgrim becomes penitent. Believe in the King, his beneficence and works, his clairvoyant thoughtfulness? Prove it. Here’s a rash, suffer the rash. Here’s gout, endure it. It rains, it snows. Suffer the elements. Fall winter spring summer, same all over again. If sunburnt, offer up the sunburn. Sunburn curdles to melanoma, offer up the cancer. Should cancer metastasize, offer it up wherever it spreads. Not mere forbearance, this. Merely your contribution to his ongoing absorption of collective misery and hardship. What you endure he endures in effigy, by proxy. The King in his room, on his mattress. Apart from the rest, gathering the sufferings of subjects unto himself by osmosis. Powered, sustained by each little pain or discomfort. This is what the waiting’s for. Your turn to begin.
“Helps if you picture him,” they say.
No shortage of camaraderie among sufferers.
“His room, the wallpaper. The chair set before him.”
“Helps too sometimes to rehearse it mentally. Stepping through the doorway. Taking the seat. Consider how you’ll sit. Hands palms-down on knees? Cross your legs? If so, left ankle over right knee or right ankle over left?”
They’re in pain, they explain, offering advice sometimes provides relief.
“Try it,” they say. “Advise us.”
“Ok. Um…”
“Take your time. Pause a while before offering a bit of advice, it increases the advice’s potency.”
“Ok.” Count to ten. Inhale, exhale. Assume a noble posture then speak.
“With migraines, try this little trick. Take thumb and forefinger of one hand, pinch hard the muscle between thumb and forefinger of the other. There’s a pressure point there. Apply intense pressure, it’ll relieve a migraine.”
Fellow penitents gathered round find their pressure point, pinch it. Pause, focus. Assume a collective attitude of listening. Then come the nods. Nods all around, thanking you. "It works," they say. "Amazing!" There are doubts. You wonder. How could each have suffered a migraine that very minute? Then a warm feeling hits you and the doubts leave. Relief. Like a high. The perfect painkiller.
You’re elsewhere, bleachers in the past. A year’s gone by. You’re sitting next to a woman in a wife beater, padlock dangling from bandana tied around her neck. The bandana’s red. Feather earrings hang from both lobes, blow and flick. You’re louche in lawn chair on a tarry rooftop, audience to this woman’s rambling. Barefoot, toenails janky yellow, so many meth teeth. This too offered up to the King.
The King’s treasury, this lady, Charlene, tells you. All this pain and suffering, what’s it buy and what’s he spending it on? They say it powers the wrinkles. Their morph-games. Always on the move, switching places, musical chairs, but what music? Look. Look at me! (You look.) I got shit-ton of wrinkles but no one sees much in ‘em. You too, girl. Look at you. (Fishes a pair of aviators perched atop her forehead, lowers them to look through at you, doubled in their reflection). Your face. Browned, burnt. Lined haphazardly like a piece of paper crumpled, tossed to ground, walked over, picked back up, unwadded. Haggard from receiving the full voltage of direct sun.
Charlene winces at the reaction. Snatches the glasses off. You gesture for them. This feeling is suffering too. She hands them to you, you open them, look down at yourself reflected from an even crueler angle. A wattle! You have a wattle. Skin hangs from your neck like drapings. Fingertips touch it, tug. That feeling again, heavy and real. Offer it up. Somewhere in his room King metabolizes it, turns it to predictive potential, and a ripple sweeps across an expanse of backfat. You’ve lost your youth, he’s empowered. Charlene snots on the ground. For what? she says. Done, beyond help. You pinch the meat between pointer finger and thumb, say hey, look here, this could help. A squint. Advice? she says. Haven’t you figured it yet? Advice around here is about as useful as virginity. Only idiots brag about it.
“Roweena, honey, sorry to burst your bubble,” she says.
Roweena. Who’s Roweena? You check your doubled reflection again in the aviators.
From shock at sight of your leatheriness, you hadn’t noticed: you’re a different self. She’s skinny. Lean angular nose. Straight brown hair drawn back in a ponytail. Self #1,258: Roweena Sykes. Charlene continues her complaining and you try to summon knowledge of this new self’s history, where she came from, why she left, what she might ask the King in order to interpret the resulting configuration of wrinkles. Memory comes back with nothing. Blank. Maybe it’s Roweena, maybe her mind’s going. Early onset dementia. Long term memory the last to go, followed by slow decay of motor functions.
Make a fist. Open, close. Repeat: I am Roweena Sykes, I’m talking with Charlene. Who’s Charlene though? The woman in lawn chair next to you jabbers on about the futility of advice, offering it, taking it. You think maybe this is Charlene.
Dying. Are you dying?
No, you’re undergoing another change, in real time. A fresh self emerges, no more Roweena. Who’s this one? Self #1,259: another old woman. You turn to Charlene but she hardly notices. Before you can check your reflection, match this new feeling with a face, another change comes over you. Self #1,260: a middle-aged broker. You last as the broker about ten seconds. Charlene’s still on a ramble about the King and his policies, misses the transformation. Maybe it’s all one self to her? Maybe they’re all rough versions of one person and sudden deviations don’t jar her? You stand. On your feet, view over rooftops, already you’re someone else. A disgraced anesthesiologist. Behind you Charlene picks another beer from a cooler, cracks it. Sips. A beer. You’d love one. You turn to ask for one but by the time the turn’s complete you’ve switched selves again, your bad luck: one recently sober.
This self thing, you think. It’s breaking down. Degraded maybe by so much waiting.
Edge of rooftop, sidewalk below. One step. One short step. Quick solution to the problem or was it? Suicide versus sunk-cost fallacy: you’ve lived this long, come this far, to end it now you'd lose the whole investment. Miles traveled and years spent waiting. Insult to the King too. Killing self, you’d kill the King, part of him that was you. Regicide once removed.
“Not much of a view, is it?” Charlene says, beer to her lips.
People on rooftops across the street wave. Tiny. Smog and distance makes them so. You have a hand too, you realize, two of them. Right raised, waves back. Which self's doing this?. All the old spent ones or none of them? Self #1,291: A man born in Iguapa who, when drunk and in company of family, can recite on request collected letters of a Polish housewife to her sister living in a village on the Bothnian coast. In exact order of their composition. Last word written? Wygnanie. “Banishment.” Eighty-third before last? Mydło. "Soap." Channeling her letters often a consolation for him, though frequently they're colored by loneliness. Family never tires hearing them. The woman's words sad on his voice but how can he say no?
“Jump!” Charlene jokes. You look down.
Parked cars and trash and people below gawking up at you.
*
A bald, fried little man. Sprigs of hair blowing free from a comb-over. Jeweler’s loupe to eye. Your hand palm-up before him. This is the Navigator. Caretaker and technician of the craft, interpreter of wrinkles.
“See?” he says. “The lines, the patterns. Move your fingers, they change. Nothing static. Blueprints, maps in fluid movement. Scaled down to miniature, as a hand, but like the larger landscape always changing.”
He sniffs. Plucks the loupe from his eye. There are shelves behind the counter, ceiling-high. Maps of every kind, topographical, cadastral, hung on rollers.
“Whole city’s in this room,” he tells you. A look of expectancy when said, as if he’s said it many times before. Waiting for some expression of confusion.
“These here,” he points to the rows on his left. “Document every quirk of land the city was built on. Rivers, hills, marshes. Stretches of flat ground.”
“And these,” he says, pointing to the right. “These diagram the city's underground, the sewer system.”
“These others,” he says, "are the majority." A sweeping gesture towards the stacks behind him. “Streets, properties, easements, buildings. Everything aboveground.”
“Lay them out in the rain, all on top one another. Let ink bleed through and blend, maybe then. Maybe then you’d have some kind of approximation. What sort of dominion we’re living in. Think of King as a big kid. A lonely kid in his room, no playmates. Daydreaming. Every one of us, every one to the last, imaginary friends who can't outgrow him."
Little of this makes sense but he’s the Navigator. His expertise and good judgment come rated highly. Bear with him.
“Five minutes. At most five,” Navigator says.
“Picture the room. King on his mattress. Cane-back chair facing him, no other furniture. Brownish blots on the ceiling, moisture damage. See him?”
“Question is, what kind of eye will you bring to the room? Everything thought, felt, everything done to you, enacted upon others by you, witnessed firsthand or heard about, remembered or long forgotten. Sum total of your life informs what you notice. So ask yourself. ‘Is my eye keen enough? Will it be literate before the King’s wrinkles?’”
No. No is obvious. Said as much earlier that morning, all 2,054 versions of you come knocking at his door.
Navigator’s office opens at 8 A.M. Glass double doors on third floor of the county courthouse. Navigator’s assistant comes from interior of the map room to unlock them, crowd waiting in the hallway. Pauses at the sight. Considers maybe benefits of not opening.
“One at a time,” she states. “Who first?”
We're together, you explain. All one person.
Assistant is indifferent. “One at a time or none.”
Too many of you for one hallway. Some hunker on steps in stairwells. Others lounge on hard wooden benches. Most loiter in groups conversing in the ground floor foyer.
“I’ll go,” elects Self # 741. “I was a law clerk once. Ordered copies of maps from county employees, who can be a tough breed. Know a bit how to ingratiate myself to them.” Selves talk among each other. Agree, give approval.
Self #741 steps in. Assistant locks door behind him. Rest of the crowd stands on other side of glass, so many aquarium-watchers. There goes their representative: florescent lights flickering on, key ring on assistant’s hip jangling.
Navigator sits on a metal swivel chair, hands folded on countertop before him. State your purpose. Why you've come. Many a fellow pilgrim has recommended his services. Come to gain skill and knowledge of the art of wrinkle-reading. A meeting with the King scheduled. Next in line in the waiting room. Unprepared, though, not much conversant in the King’s script and English.
“And these others," Navigator asks. Indicating crowd on the other side of the door.
“Them? All selves that brought me here.”
“I see.”
“Once we were all of a piece, one person. It was crowded but manageable. Waiting eventually got to us, I guess. After check-in we had to wait. Didn't know it'd be this long. The longer we had to wait, the more selves came and went. Turns out there was a limit to how many we could contain. Hit a threshold, I suppose. Began splitting apart. This shared body of ours broke open. Scattered selves everywhere like milkweed.”
Navigator seems satisfied by the explanation. Nothing new? He arranges instruction tools on the countertop, begins his lesson.
First exercise. Take a cup of pencils, throw them to the floor. Pencils of many colors roll, settle to stillness at varied angles.
"What do you see?"
"Pencils," you say.
"Well enough. That’s literally what’s before you. But semantically?"
"Semantically? How do you mean?"
"Imagine there's a word on a page. Say, for example, token. You pass an eye over it, you see it. Your eye perceives a string of five letters, each unlike the other--a "t", an "o", a "k", an "e", an "n". Precisely crafted flicks of ink on a page: what your eye sees literally. Very quickly your perspective shifts. Something seems to access the subtler intelligence of the eye and it begins reading. Intuitions bloom in an instant and soon they proliferate into a host of connotations, associations. Marks on a page begin to inspire all sorts of possibilities. That's the feeling of it, at least. Of perceiving a thing semantically."
"These pencils, then," he says. "You see them. But can you read them?"
"No."
Navigator points to pencils, their angles of arrangement on marble tile flooring. Analyzes what's there to be seen. This one, you see, in 45 degree diagonal relation to that? That one right there in 80 degree relation to this other? Wood and graphite. Sharpened tips and erasers. Compositional complexity of each against the other. One word emerges then the next. Navigator works slowly for your benefit, translating. Finishing he steps back, presents his interpretation: THURSDAY NEXT WEEK BETWEEN NOON AND THREE IT WILL RAIN FOR TWENTY-TWO MINUTES TOTAL. A prediction of weather mundane as rain or snow. This the message encoded in pencils, message non-existent before pencils were thrown to floor.
“Read it now?”
“Can’t believe it, but yes, I do.” So obvious once he points it out. Angles suggesting letters, letters assembling words. THURSDAY NEXT WEEK and IT WILL RAIN.
After pencils you observe scribbles on a napkin. After that, Chinese takeout dumped on a counter. After that, cracks in plaster on a wall. To each the Navigator points, you squint and read, lines sometimes fine as dendrites or axons but discernible to the interpreting eye.
Days of this, seeing and reading, order of discernment begins to shift. Soon you’re reading the meaning of things before you see them. In the corner of a windowsill you read GIVEN A CHOICE, TURN LEFT. You blink, reorient, see there a dead housefly. Freshly diminished carcass in which the message’s written.
“I think you have it,” Navigator decides.
Days have passed or has it been longer?
You touch chin, there’s a beard. Days? Beard’s long so maybe you’ve been here longer.
“A final test,” Navigator says. He lifts a cup of pencils, chucks them to floor. They roll and scatter.
“What do they say?”
One by one pencils roll to rest, vanish. Pencils no longer there but letters. Assembling into a newfound phrase at your feet. MANY CAN PASS THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE, SO LONG AS THEY PASS ONE AT A TIME AND ALONE. A proverb of sorts.
Navigator asks, “What do they say?”
You relate, he nods.
“Congratulations. You’ve passed the test, it’s official: you can read.” He bends with cup to gather pencils. Assistant stands at hand, ready to lead you back through the stacks to the door. Lines on her forehead legible where once they were merely noticeable: THIS WAY TO THE EXIT, NO ARGUMENT.
Double glass doors, assistant unlocks them.
On the other side the rest, many orphan versions of you. Backs to walls sitting on hallway floor, scratching chin or yawning. Door opens, out you step. Eyes look to you, you return the look. What you see there you can’t help but read. WHO CAN SAVE US IF WE’RE HELPLESS? Uncomfortable, you look away. Looking back they're merely people again. Waiting for instructions, word of a next move.
*
A janitor from Bogue Chitto, Louisiana.
A cellist with four tattoos (all cellos).
A nine-year-old named Hollis Baker.
A middle-aged woman on disability, hands deformed clumps, severe rheumatoid arthritis, thirty-four cats for roommates.
You and you and you.
You’re a crowd, you’re walking west. You gauge west against the angle of the sun. This is downtown, the streets are wide, no traffic. The buildings spider-eyed with glinting lit windows. One of you steps off the sidewalk and the rest follow. Bystanders stand clear, watch them pass. Hundreds and dozens of people on the move, walking with purpose. If there were anything to protest, maybe protestors. If there were anything to find, a search party. A city without commuters, without working hours, offices with reasons to be filled. No kind of rush hour, no buses or taxis to catch, subways dormant for a century or more, if they ever ran in the first place. Built to lie dormant. Tracks laid then laid to rest.
The pack leader cuts left, the crowd bends and follows. One block and the buildings part, pull away, hang back. A plaza with concrete benches and fountain and gaudy works of abstract public sculpture. There are skinny trees every few paces, birds flit from one to the other. The crowd gathers in the center of the plaza and there you stand, over two thousand selves freshly divided and curious for collective purpose. You turn head and from several thousand eyes gauge your surroundings.
The crowd waits and settles, gathering the scene unto itself, waiting to gain further clarity on next steps to be taken. Advice had been given. A man, a professional navigator, had taught one and so all of you how to read the language of nature laid out in lines and creases. This was part of it but not enough. This was half of it, a third of it. What’s needed.
The demands that lie ahead of you, two-thirds incomplete.
Two considerable tasks before you. The crowd shuffles and listens and assembles what it knows.
There is a city, the crowd says to itself. The King’s city. A patterned extension of his body. In one of its rooms resides that very body, but to reach it honestly, knowledgeably, one must explore every other building in the city that does not contain this room. One must venture across every inch of the city where the King is represented but not found. There are streets, but how many streets, there are alleys, but where and how many. There are hundreds of thousands of rooms if not millions, each an extension of the King, his provenance and power, none specifically the room that holds him. Each must be visited. Each must be explored, its every detail registered, scrutinized, its whole taken in fully.
If doors are locked, locks must be picked or doors shouldered open. If there are beds, a knee must be taken and beds looked under. If there are closets, closets must be rummaged through, stood within. If there are shoeboxes lined on top shelves of closets, shoeboxes must be taken down and emptied.
No cupboard should be left unopened. No refrigerator left un-investigated. If refrigerators are filled with jars and cartons of expired foodstuffs, these should be pushed aside so a clearer view of the interiors of refrigerators can be assessed.
There are stairwells, there are attics, basements and crawl spaces. These should be explored and subject to thoroughgoing, disciplined inspection. Roofs should be accessed, fire escapes climbed, sheds and gardens isolated and studied.
This the plan. One third the challenge. Traverse the city, hunt down every detail, commit every inch to memory.
The other third yet addressed, the other challenge.
The question. The question you plan to bring to the King. Your one chance, moment you’ve waited for, waited years for: to ask King a question of your choosing. It should be clear, pilgrims have told you. Concise, direct. Not one answered by yes or no. For your own sake, they told you, make it open. Ask him an open question. Process described to you times and times over so you can picture it. A door will open. Doormen will lead you into a room. No furnishing in the room but a mattress thrown to floor in a corner and in its middle a single chair empty and waiting. There you will sit. Made to wait. King’s massive body on mattress will rouse. King’s eyes will open. An arm or leg will shift its weight. Once settled and ready, you will be welcome to ask it anything. One question though, one only. Pronounce it slowly, clear and loud, then sit silently, wait. Changes will come over the body before you, quakes and ripples. Wrinkles surfacing to skin and traveling. An epidermal canvas on which the import of your question articulates itself and plays. Wrinkles and ripples slow, settle. And there it is: the patterns of an answer. Begin now the work of your eye, its yen for search and interrelation. Educated as eyes come, it discerns a message, teases it from wrinkles. It reads the definition of its fate. A prediction. Often accompanied by directions. Where to go, how to evade capture and detection, should you be hunted by your own body and its mortal timetables. There is a void and always it takes the shape of a maze. Wrinkles provide know-how, navigations that negotiate safe passage through the maze.
This too you lack. A question. One that leaves out nothing and accounts for everything, in detail.
The plan then. Self to self the crowd in the plaza begins debating, comes to a decision. It will break into groups of fifty. Groups will trek to certain designated neighborhoods. From there, they’ll break into pairs. Each pair assigned a street to investigate and archive into collective memory. Together while doing so, pairs will ask each other questions. Ambitious questions. Unanswerable. The best of these, the strongest, they will write on the backs of hands or forearms with a pen. Selves with bags of gel-tip pens move among the crowd, hand one to each of you. One pen and one only. Respect it. Honor it. Don’t waste its ink scribbling out drafts of second-rate questions.
A week’s time. Seven suns rise and fall. Come back in a week’s time is the plan. Meet here this very plaza. You will take stock, compare questions. Vote for the most worthy candidates. Hone the list after much deliberation down to one. One to memorize, practice. One to bring up the stairs, if and when you’re called, stand at the King’s throne room door, question in mind and ready to be asked, hidden where no one can see it: in your head.
The crowd splits, wanders. Gathers into wayward collectives across the plaza. Some selves walk group to group struggling to decide which feels right. Selves that belong together feel together, you tell them. Don't force it. Take your time.
A skateboarder named Queenie turns to a fourteenth century pig farmer named Pasquier. “I would’ve never lived if I’d known,” she tells him. The pig farmer, innocent of her language, nods (nods here lingua franca). Since he doesn’t understand, no end to what she could have him agree with. This day one. Day one of seven. In a week they’ll return to this very plaza, these two and several thousand others, part student part scavenger. They will bring together everything they’ve seen and it will be a crowd again. A crowd of one mind with a learned eye.
"Je ne comprends pas," the pig farmer tells the girl. But she can't understand him either.
*
Here’s the door. You stand facing it, where they’ve led you, the doormen. Fish-eye lens peephole and brass knob. No lock you can see, on other side of it maybe a deadbolt. You stand short of six foot, top of the doorway a foot higher. It’s wooden. Painted light grey, bluish. Almost baby blue, if baby blue could reach old age. Chipped. Cruddy mold softening the door frame.
The floor at your feet, wood too. Nails in studs. Carpet maybe at one time, torn out, tossed. Carpet like flesh doesn’t age well.
Once a number on the door, that too you note. Discoloration on the paint and wood where numbers had been. Cheap tin or brass or other some kind of metal, nailed in two places per letter, up top and below. You make out “32”. Room 32 in another life. BCE. “Before City Era.”
Behind you two doormen, stopped at top of the stairway. Told by them: don’t look back, face the door. May take a while.
You can feel them behind you watching.
The way up stairs creaked. Hull-of-ship sounds. One doorman ahead of you, one behind. The hallway at the top was dark, electric lamps fixed to the walls middle of the wall every two doors. Some were out and some flickered. Old technology. Forty-watt bulbs.
Looked like Section-8 housing or a drug hotel. Looked Skid Row but more modest in its desecrations, more abandoned.
This is you. Only one of you.
The rest of you gone, detained.
Door doesn’t move, it waits without interest in you; so remember. It happened earlier the day before. You’d come walking, full group of you, down the main street to the check-in station. One of the King’s messengers had found you, relayed notice: wait’s over, report to check-in first thing next morning. Selves gathered their things and followed. Check-in beneath a large tarp tent, one card table, one attendant seated behind and one standing. Too many of you to get close enough to hear what they might say. So standing attendant lifted a bullhorn. Blared instructions.
“King thanks you for your patience. Rules stipulate one visitor per visit. Please elect a representative. The rest please stand to the right.”
You were the one they decided on. You, self #942.
Disagreements. Arguments. Hardly a self among you felt it shouldn’t be them.
The deciding factor: pulses. One of you remembered what an attendant had said years before, back when you first checked into waiting room and stood in line.
People could die. Die in line waiting and not know. Check your wrist, your neck. Press fingers to feel for pulse. This sifted wheat from chaff. Still living candidates from dead ones.
Some couldn’t accept disqualification. Faked a pulse, said, “Not me. Over here, me, still living.” They’d raise their hand, walk to the left where candidates for King’s visitation stood. Ruse would last until attendant at screening station would check, stethoscope to chest. Many standing to the left lowered gaze when attendant first lifted stethoscope from her bag. They knew. Truth would out and they’d be sent with others past chain-link partition to the detainment area.
It took a day. Morning, afternoon, evening. Majority of selves, it seems, put forth their best effort lying. One even patted his leg to a rhythm while stethoscope was pressed to his chest. Hoping ventriloquist concussions might pass for a heartbeat.
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
None fought their verdict, out of fear it’d disqualify the lot of you.
Many were surprised, genuinely believed they’d been alive, shocked to find they weren’t. Others blamed the screeners, as if checking a pulse had killed them. Some had to be nudged out of a daze, caught off guards they weren’t exemplary. Only one took to running; the runaway Melinda; cornered by fate, instincts took over. No one called her back nor chased her. The rest were led away by an attendant to the partition area. Still-conscious dead people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, pressed into a crowd behind a fence, watching. Who would it be? they murmured among each other. Which one of you?
Here at the door you still wonder, “Why me?” Surely there’d been better candidates.
A full grown healthy adult male. A child would garner more sympathy. Well-kempt, with kind face. But for those reasons maybe a bit forgettable? Robust, good genes, lucky you. Maybe you’d be regarded with less suspicion though if sickly? Your name’s Sergei. Self #942. Sergei Blankenship. A lab technician, chemist for a water company. Father of two. Married seventeen years. Here you stand, shy in your manners, be-speckled, arms awkwardly hanging at sides (no pockets per doorman’s instruction: at all times hands must be visible). Excellent knack for stats and figures. This. Maybe this the reason. If there’s a question to be recalled, recited, this self would deliver. Humdrum but reliable. Type of guy who writes out chess problems for fun or invents crosswords from scientific jargon.
Against their will, against their better judgement, other selves died or disqualified themselves to elect this last person remaining. Sergei, husband to Miriam (how he misses her). Nerdy and meek. His habit a lifetime ago before he became part of you, each evening after tucking kids to bed: to sketch one thumbnail-sized portrait of Miri in pocket notebook kept on nightstand. A mnemonic exercise. Something a therapist had suggested. Miri the artist, but gone, swallowed whole by renal carcinoma. So to massage his grieving unconscious, drew her face from memory. Unconscious would respond and sometimes there'd she be, in dreams. But not often. Less and less so.
Someone with kids. A widower. This the one they chose.
Someone grieving with responsibilities.
Familiar with sickbed interpretations and long hours waiting. Daddy figure straight from sappy television drama, prime for sympathy.
You were Sergei now and the rest were elsewhere, standing behind a fence. They’d watched you go. Attendants led you down a street then down an alley. A left turn then a right in the alley and halfway down another a loading dock. Chains rattled, bay door lifted. Attendants helped you onto platform, where doormen waited and took over. One ahead, one behind, guided you through a stockroom to a stairway. Up the stairs to other floors, other stairs. No talk. No gestures this or that direction. Soon in a hotel of sorts. A ballroom. Conference rooms. Poorly lit grubby decor. In windbreaker and jeans you followed doormen through a series of halls until halls ended and you came to a door. On the door eye-level faint remains of a number. In another life Room 32.
A sniffle. A cough behind you.
“Soon,” one of the doormen says.
You find yourself studying the doorknob. Waiting long as you have, eyes have strayed and studied every inch of the door but here it is again, the knob.
Dull goldish glow. As if light isn’t reflecting off the knob's metal but shines from behind it, in corona. One heavenly body occluding another, bright about the edges. Familiar. Seen before. Where?
Some long-gone instant in Sergei Blankenship’s childhood: one July afternoon he stands on a playground, views a lunar eclipse with fellow fourth graders. Teacher Ms. Anders hands around strips of dark film. Hold to your eye, she instructs. Peer through dark to study light safely. Do otherwise you’ll burn your eye, permanently.
You blink, there goes the sun, the moon, Ms. Anders. You’re in a hallway again and years have passed and you’re waiting.
There is a King, you tell yourself, on the other side of this door is a room.
There are selves elsewhere, you say, they’ve accompanied me here but from here I must go alone.
The King is large, plentiful, he sits upon his throne in his birth form, naked. He is covered in wrinkles and wrinkles move in response to certain forms of mortal questioning. His subjects wish to know the how and where and with whom of their future. His subjects who survive much privation and decades of squalor to reach him.
These things have been made real, you say, by consensus.
Many have come before you and have imagined the same; have repeated among one another the legend; have handed along belief in the expressive flair of a King’s flesh, its migratory array of wrinkles.
These visions await consummation behind this door. You are certain, you are grateful. As sure as your name is Sergei and you have two children who rely on you, your dear wife Miriam dead but resurrected nightly by your hand sketching ink onto paper. Open, you tell yourself. Open and grant entry. You’ve come a very long way and the way has made you lonely.
The King, as promised, will provide insight, directions, shape lostness into something whole again. But first, the door.
Enough. Enough of this, you say. You raise a fist to knock. It knocks. The knob turns, the door doesn't open then opens.
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