The Troupe (56 page)

Soon the world is almost as it was when the boy destroyed it. He has rebuilt time all the way up to his own life, his own story, and almost to the very events that led to where he stands now. And there he stops.

For the first time he is uncertain. He knows what he is about to see. But he is not sure what he will do.

He blinks, and suddenly he is standing on the waters of a wide, dark river. Behind him is a huge cement wall, damming the river back. And even though he shuts his eyes, the boy knows what is emerging from the black mists ahead: a
small island, and on that island are many tall trees, and at the base of one of the tallest trees is a man.

The man is tall and thin and his hair is a bright bottle blond. Even though he is muddy, he is impeccably dressed. He is grasping one of the lower branches of the trees as if he intends to climb it, but he has turned and is staring out across the waters at the boy. Yet he does not see him; time does not work in this place, not yet, and so the man can see nothing. It is as if he is a statue.

The boy opens his eyes and looks at the man, and all the breath leaves his body. The boy has rebuilt so much history with no more than a thought, and yet this one event, so tiny in comparison to all the rest of what he has made, is the grain of sand within the marvelous workings of his creation. The very sight of this man wounds the boy in some deep, hidden part of himself. And yet it is not entirely painful. In some ways, the boy rejoices to see this muddy, pale, anxious figure. He feels like he has done this before. After all, the last time he saw the man whole and unhurt he’d been standing beneath a tree, and the man had not seen or spoken to him then, either…

The boy hesitates, and waves to the man. The boy drops his hand and says, “You can’t see me. I know that. It was stupid of me to wave, but… I thought I should anyway.”

His lips tremble. He knows that if he does not say what he wishes to say, he never will. So he walks across the waters to the man, and asks, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me what you were?”

Of course, the man does not answer; he simply stares ahead, as still and frozen as the rest of this new world.

“I wish you had told me,” the boy says. “I know why you didn’t, but… I still wish you had.”

The boy realizes he is breathing very fast. He looks up the tree, and tears begin to well up in his eyes. “I know what’s going to happen,” he says to the man. “I know what will happen if you climb that tree. You’ll chain yourself to it, and Annie will break the dam, and then, then…”

He cannot stop himself now. The boy begins crying. The man stares ahead, ignorant of his tears. In a way the boy is the only person in the world, and yet somehow he feels even more alone than that.

“You don’t have to!” the boy shouts at the man. “You don’t have to climb the tree! The dam doesn’t have to break! I could… I could snap my fingers, and none of this could happen! We could be… be back at the theater, in your dressing room, and I could be watching you practice. You played Claudio Merulo. I remember that. It was so pretty, Father. You did so good.

“Or maybe we could be somewhere else,” the boy says to the frozen figure. “I could make a home for us. Somewhere where there are trees. We could go on walks together. And you could talk. You could talk to me. You wouldn’t have to write anymore! Do you hear me? You wouldn’t have to write anymore! Wouldn’t you like that? I could do that for you! I could do that, with just a wave of my hand!”

But the man does not answer. He stares across the water, face fixed in an expression of curious concern. And yet there is peace in his face. It is the look of a man who knows exactly what he is doing, and would gladly do so again.

The boy looks into the man’s eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he sniffs. “But we don’t get that, do we?” he asks him. “We don’t get those moments. It wouldn’t be right, to make the world something it isn’t, just because we want it to be.” He looks down at his hand, and the broken watch clutched there. “It wouldn’t be right. And it wouldn’t be real.”

He looks back up at the frozen man. The boy nods. “What will happen will happen. I’m… I’m glad we got what we did. And I’m sorry if I was mean to you. But you know that, don’t you.”

The boy steps forward, and takes the frozen man by the shoulders. Then, standing up on his tiptoes—for the man is very tall, and the boy very short—he places one kiss on the man’s cheek, and whispers into his ear, “I’ll see you soon. Just you wait. I’ve already been there. And so have you.”

Then he steps back, and he nods, and the trees and the island and the man melt into darkness, and the moment passes by.

The world will continue as it was. And besides, the boy cannot go back. Even if he were to choose a life of his own creation, and carve a blissful history for himself into the world’s face with his own hand, it would give him no joy, for he cannot forget what he has seen. Unlike all the other inhabitants of this world, he has now seen all the hidden truths, all the shadowed corners.

All but one. As the boy makes his final changes to Creation, the First Song
slipping through his fingers as he uses up every note and every voice, he begins to wonder… is he wrong, or is he seeing a structure in the song? Is there a hand invisibly working throughout all the melodies and harmonies, one that is not his own? Who sang this song, originally? Was it ever sung, or has it always been echoing in the deeps?

He knows the wolves are but an accidental audience. So whom is he singing for? For himself? Or something more? Is there a face drawn out among all the millions of notes of this song, and is it looking back at him, and smiling?

As soon as he wonders these questions he understands he will never know. He has so much of the song, but he is still missing a few little notes, and one or two key voices. These gaps, as tiny as they are, upset the whole, and he is not sure if he can see any kind of plan at all in what he is singing.

Perhaps this is not the first time. Perhaps there have been other Creators besides himself, all of them stumbling across this echoing song and re-singing the world when it is threatened by the dark. And each time it is imperfect. Maybe so.

That truth will always be beyond him. And he nods, submitting to it. What will happen will happen.

He is almost finished now. He has made all the changes he thinks he can. He rebuilds the valley, every twig and every tree, and the girl is there on the very edge clinging to a branch, and his father lies at his feet once again. The wolves still wait at the end of the valley, and the great wolf towers above them, head cocked, curious.

The boy does not start time again yet. The world remains frozen. He has only a few more notes of the song left, but he refrains from singing them.

From the great wolf comes a voice that is like the churning core of the Earth. It asks: And what did that do?

The boy says, “I changed things.”

The wolf asks: How?

“For so long you’ve been the abyss,” says the boy. “We stare into you, and you terrify us. You swallow up the world piece by piece. But now I have changed that.”

The great wolf’s head cocks a little more.

“Now the abyss will know what it is like to look into itself,” says the boy. “Because I have taken all your children, and made them real.”

The great wolf looks down, shocked, and around its feet are not the dark, feral shapes that were like tiny versions of itself. Instead it is surrounded by men in gray suits, but now they are no longer pictures: they are real, with flesh and bone and skin. The men in gray look down upon themselves, and see that they now no longer imitate humans; they
are
humans, and each of them carries a tiny shred of the First Song within him.

“You are all alive now,” says the boy. “Just like everyone else. And one day you will die, just like everyone else. You will be eaten by the very shadow you once were.”

A horrified cry rises up among all the men in gray. They wail and feel their fleshy bodies, and gnash their all-too-real teeth. To exist, they scream, is the worst possible nightmare, an unimaginable horror.

The great wolf above them wheels about, confused, and, for the first time since Creation was made, frightened. How could this be so? How could the boy have changed something so elemental?

It looks at the boy, and says: You cannot do this. You cannot make me devour my own children.

“Yet you must,” says the boy. “They exist, so they must end. Maybe not today, but someday. How many of our own children have we lost to you? How many fathers, how many mothers? How many will we lose if you should get what you want, and devour the world?”

The wolf says: But we must. It pains us so. It pains us.

“I know,” says the boy. “It hurts to be below Creation. Just as it hurts to dangle above the darkness. Then what are we to do?”

The wolf looks at the boy, thinking. It asks: What is it you want?

“What anyone wants. Time.”

The wolf says: I cannot give you that.

“Then you will lose your children, and be alone, even less than you once were. You will be broken forever, and never whole.”

The wolf thinks. It realizes now that it must make a decision. The darkness
has never made a decision before. There has only been one possible thing to do, to swallow up the light above. There has never been an alternative. But now it must take a first step into this unfamiliar country, and think of how to please this small boy in this little valley.

The great wolf finally asks: How much time?

And the boy tells him.

There was a clap of thunder, and a soft breeze rolled across the valley. Colette jumped and swayed drunkenly as she grasped the tree branch. Then she gave up and fell to the ground and sat there.

She felt very dizzy. For a second it’d been like the ground was lurching beneath her. But that hadn’t really been it, she decided. For a moment everything had
stuttered
, just like when Harry and Stanley performed the First Song, but… that gap where everything was gone had been so much
longer
. Hadn’t it? It had felt like so many seconds and years had been lost just now.

Something had changed, she realized as she looked around. The trees were no longer bent toward the valley, and the lines of leaves were not there. It was just ordinary forest floor. Someone or some
thing
had just been here, she said to herself, but it had changed things, or left something behind before it departed, yet she could not see it.

She stood back up. Then she said, “George,” and began to sprint down the hillside.

Colette ran along the riverbank, trying to find some trace of Stanley or George, but she saw nothing, only broken trees and many upturned rocks. Then she spotted a figure crouching over something
by the riverbank. They were dressed in bright blue, but it was not George, or Stanley…

The person looked up. He smiled a little apologetically. “Hello, Lettie,” said Silenus.

Colette stared at him, astounded. He was wearing an extraordinarily blue sack coat and checked trousers, and a clean bowler derby sat on the rock beside him. She gaped for a moment. “Harry?” she cried.

He nodded, but he looked quite sad. “Hello,” he said again.

She laughed and ran to him, thinking to embrace him, but stopped when she saw what he was crouching over. Her happiness vanished and she covered her mouth in horror.

George and Stanley lay side by side on the riverbank. Stanley’s arms had clearly been broken, and there was a horrible gash in his side. His skin was pale and waxy, and his eyelids and lips were already turning blue. Colette had not ever seen anyone in such a state, but she immediately knew he was dead.

Silenus reached down and stroked one side of Stanley’s face, and sniffed. “I… I didn’t think it could ever come to this,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Colette, and she walked to where George lay.

He did not look as bad as Stanley: his skin was still pink, and he had not a mark on him. But she could see he was not breathing, and when she touched his neck he was warm but there was no pulse.

“What happened?” said Silenus.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was up the hill, and… and then everything
bent
, and it was… Wait, what happened to
you
? I… I saw you die, Harry!” She reached out and took his shoulder with one hand and felt his face with the other. “I saw it.”

“Yeah, well,” he said darkly. “Let’s just say it didn’t take. I got here as fast as I could from the Founding. And I just… found them here. Stanley is… He’s…”

“He flooded the valley,” said Colette. “He distracted the wolves from us so that we could get away, and drowned them. I guess he got hurt. I’m sorry, Harry.”

Silenus nodded, but kept stroking Stanley’s face.

“What’s wrong with George?” she asked. “I didn’t see what happened to him. He’s got no pulse, and he’s not breathing… Oh, George.”

“He’s not dead,” said Silenus. “He’s just… not here.”

“What do you mean, not here?”

“I mean George, himself, is somewhere else right now. Outside of his body. Where, I couldn’t begin to say, but it must be very, very far.” He looked at the hills around them and the sky above. “Farther than I can sense. I only hope—”

But then George’s eyes flicked open, and Colette grabbed Silenus’s shoulder. “Harry!” she said, and they both looked down and knelt beside him.

George did not move or say anything. He simply stared up at the sky, seemingly seeing nothing.

“George?” said Silenus. “George, can you hear me?”

If he did, he did not show it.

“George?” said Colette. “Are you all right?”

George slowly blinked. Then, as if he was trying to remember how his own body worked, he lifted his right arm and looked at his hand. Silenus and Colette saw he was holding something, something they had not noticed before. In fact, Colette could have sworn he hadn’t been holding anything at all just a second ago.