Wildcard (62 page)

“You will not find them here,” she said. “In
the center, each thing is unique.”

It was true. Each cup, each floor tile, each
board in the porch, was different. Solomon looked for a repeat
after she said it, through the trees, in the meadow with the stump,
among the insects. He never found it.

He and CJ arrived at the stream. He sat on a
rock beside the bridge, looking at it. The gate. So small a thing
to hold back a universe.

“
CJ, the wolf of the
center,”
he said. “
I wish you could come with me. Maybe I’ll see you out there,
pup.
”

He rubbed the sides of their faces together.

“How long will you live?”

He had not written much, but felt an urge to
now. He held the pen, fitted the cap on the bottom with a
satisfying snugness. The blank page intimidated in this finely
crafted book. He did not want to mar it with some trivial thing. He
had only his anguish at leaving home and his excitement. These
fleeting emotions, though intense, might not be worthy of the first
entry in his lovely book.

He laughed at his hesitation and wrote.

…go…

sorrow was not his name,

as he strove in the brilliant sun,

against a foe beyond all definition,

bearing hard upon him

It’s intuition complete, it wandered
away.

Who could say what truly happened,

as we trick ourselves time and again

as before we always have as well

?but must we always

like Kings in the Bible

trick ourselves, time and again

laying upon a blanket of false kindness

whispering funny lies in the night

to no one

to whomever we are with

do not send yourself

slipping from the center

unbravely and alone into the world

but, claiming courage

as you were born to do

go…

He reread the poem, put the book in his
pack, pulled it tight, and threw a stick for CJ. He didn’t chase it
this time. He just looked at Solomon with those mournful dog
eyes.

“See you later, boy.” He knelt and hugged
him, then turned and crossed the bridge leading out of the
center.

drown

The Poet walked out on her deck. She thought of
herself as Virginia at times, as Karl had named her, years before.
She remembered it, the delirium of waking after the box opened. RJ
Sublime, the Gambler, had been kneeling over her, trying to stop
her bleeding from the hole where her child had been torn. He saved
her life, somehow. He had buried LuvRay’s body, cleaned up the
mess, and stayed with her for a few weeks. He did not speak of what
he saw, and she never asked. She felt the horror of it as a ghost
in that room, and didn’t want to know. Knowing what had happened to
her infant would be worse than not knowing.

She thought of Karl, fingered the scar on
her belly, faded from sailing in the sun. She was an old woman now.
The years before Karl came, before the box, had not been measured.
Time had not been meaningful to the Poet until loss hung itself on
her door. The people in the nearby town, so nameless and distant,
became more real. She came to care for them, the grocer, the
fisherman, the teacher. It was a stock village, clearly there for
her benefit. Icons, she understood, flat beings existing only to
give context to her world. They were there only for her to have a
life, to bring her food and relate to her, each in their own way.
They seemed almost to disappear when she was not around, or to
perform a few simple functions over and over.

That changed after the box. The icons became
more real, infected with the tragedy of what passed. They knew
something terrible had happened, knew the baby had disappeared, and
never asked her. That night created the world she now lived in. It
turned the inhabitants from a simple, but boring cheerfulness, into
the somber and slightly deranged group it was now. They had become
real people. The world had ceased to be hers, and she was happy
about that. She had never known how unusual it was to live in a
world that turned upon her being, but its absence lifted that
strange burden, a fact which took her as long to notice as it took
to happen.

She had become more real as well. She had
been little more than an icon herself, when Karl came and they fell
in love. His presence, his child, and the box had matured her. She
was no longer just a doorway for Wildcard’s voice; she now had her
own voice. Having never faced the events of that night, she
harbored the shame of believing herself to be a coward. Odd, and
perhaps wrong, that it took that kind of suffering and mental
scarring to make her a real human being. Would she have been a good
mother?

She had aged quickly, growing old in a few
short years. She looked at her wrinkled hands and chuckled. How
many more poems did they have left? The number was not infinite.
Death was coming, making its presence felt in a personal way.
Before, in the poems, it had always been an abstraction.

She was on her boat, sailing, before she
knew what she was doing. A short one, she lied, as the thin lip of
land and home slipped away behind. She lost herself in sad thoughts
of Karl and her missing child, wondering what her life had meant.
She put her cheek against chill of the brass railing and looked
behind the boat, at the fading wedge running after. She wanted to
tell its story, saw in each tiny chudding roll of the wake a
metaphor of the individual rising from the oceanic sameness.

Soon, she could feel the taking, her mind
turning towards as Wildcard claimed her for his purpose. Tears
came, just a moistness, as she touched the edge of the ecstasy that
had been absent for so long. She clutched the railing, seeing her
fate, and happy for it.

“I am ready,” she said. “Take me.”

The wind was brilliant and the sky blew its
blueness at her in the needed rhythm, in the why of naked
existence. Setting the sail to spend itself straight out over the
light chop of the sea, she went below decks to write, as she had
not done in far too long. The knife edge of the pen burned as it
joined with her hunger, the pages crying for her again, as once
they did, and far more often. She wrote the pain of the box, of her
world, of her lost love and child, Karl, and the nameless and
numberless beings scattered and found by Wildcard’s hand whose
suffering and lost stories were limited by no imagination and whose
simple clever wonder always stole her eye away from herself. She
belonged to this many, and her shame had made her forget, but now
she remembered. All of her days and the fiery longing she had
allowed to be twisted in the aftermath of that night brought itself
to the flowing ink.

She lost herself, in the embrace of the
blank page, as it filled itself again and again with their
beautiful song of union. A timeless zone, like a snow-globe,
settled upon the cabin, and she lost track of light and dark as
they hovered like moths around.

A storm rose, strange and hypnotic, the
mirror of her writing. She wrote the abstract epic of the storm,
saw the symbol pitching the boat which would write her death as she
let it blow with no thought of leaving the table. What she now
wrote could never be read, and must be written. The boat blew,
scudding and rocking, tipping in the wind, but never quite tipping
over. She was knocked about, eventually managed to halt her pen
long enough to strap herself into the chair which was lagged to the
floor.

Sensing the beauty the words would have
brought to people in despair, she choked on the sadness of knowing
that her final offering, written in the helpless vision of seeing
all the realms of beings laid out before her like a seed in the
palm, would never be known. Her greatest work would die with her,
as it was born, echoing the fate of the child she had never
met.

A rush of images rose and fell, stories
written in the brilliant heartbreak of a single word, all true. As
they ran, she captured what she could, ceased looking at the paper,
writing by feel and memory of how the hand should move, but
watching and living the display of unique histories, more than she
could number or ever write. She became a door for Wildcard,
collapsing into the mystic syllable of being his voice again, of no
hindrance to perfect perception, and let the tears of the
unbearable epiphany write the saga more than the ink itself.

Pictures of suffering and joy, stories, love,
sacrifice and dark heroics, she wrote it all, going too fast to
know what she was putting down. It may have lasted for days or
minutes, she had no notion and no thought of it. Finally the boat
capsized, tossing her against the table, breaking ribs. The ancient
scar reopened and she bled. The pen was lost.

She fought her way up, and standing on the
ceiling of the cabin, holding pages on the bottom of the table,
clutching one of its legs, desperate with the fullness, she took
paper and wrote with her own blood. It was slow, impossible, but
she had no choice. She was furious with the greed of putting the
words down so that they could sink away forever from the mind of
man.

She wrote one more of the hundred million
lines she had yet to pen in the unreal vision of watching her blood
float out from the submerged page as she struggled to tell the
story of Wildcard’s children. “You are born,” she wrote, “into the
death of the story.”

SOS

Virginia was five. She never met her mother,
who had died during childbirth, from a mistake the Doctor made
while giving a caesarean section. She lived with her father in a
large and elegant two story home with a white picket fence. She
learned to read at the startling age of 2 and a half, and could
read well now. She could use a dictionary. Her father had taught
her.

One day, she was playing in her father’s
study, filled with books. So many books. They were old and leather
and fine. She had seen a few other books, not like these, but bound
with paper. Paperbacks were not allowed here. These were books of
quality. That’s what her dad said. Sometimes he read to her; there
were some children’s books. Today, she was in there by herself,
playing. She ran her hands along the spines of the books, enjoying
the fine smell.

One of the books shocked her.

“Owie.” Static electricity, it was called.
“My finger.”

She looked at the spine of the book. It was
blank leather. She pulled it off the shelf and looked at the cover.
The Song of Solomon.
She opened it.

The Sorcerer’s Code

Why does this being,

powerful and ablaze in all the universe,

live for but an instant?

Why does it feel naked and afraid?

There was no battle; all war is illusion,
there is no death; all death is a dream,

The play of things does not occur

Look for our power, aching with dark
magic,

look for our undying, filled with breaking
light,

our protection is not for you alone, we
would heal all if it were in our sway

we care for that which needs it, and when we
must, we destroy

stand with us, at your death’s hour

at the lip of the universe

come, upon the now

tell me your name

?are you a child that darkens our door

She didn’t know the meaning, but she liked
the words. Virginia laid the book on the desk and went to get her
dad.

“Daddy, come look at the book I found on the
shelf.”

He was busy, but after a bit he came with her. It
was not on the desk anymore. She looked on the shelf where it
should be, but it was not there either.

“Virginia, sweetie, Daddy doesn’t have time for
these games. I’m busy right now. Go play with something else,
OK?”

But she didn’t want to play with
something else. She wanted to find
The Song of
Solomon
.