“Actually,” I said, kicking myself in the shin from the other side of the table, “I suppose you might say I’m his.” V: MR. MAGNOLIA Mr. Magnolia arrived home from the weekly torture orgy, fed his goldfish, and went to bed, first making sure his bandages were secure so that he wouldn’t wake up in the morning glued to his sheets. As he drifted off, he could feel the claret ooze like syrup from a dozen fresh interruptions in his skin. The clear, sticky discharge, he mused, was the afterbirth of his blood, the ambrosia that fed the dreams of godhood he hoped to conjure. The last thing Magnolia pictured in his mind’s eye before he rolled over, winced, and sighed himself asleep was the sign. It hung on every wall inside the private club he’d just returned from. It hovered over every link of chain, every crusted sawtooth, and governed each ejaculation of lymph and unmasking of bone. It was a gentle commandment, the maxim that guided all who operated under it. “Cut into others,” it read in golden letters both extravagant and restrained, “as you would have them cut into you.” VI: CALEL Ice cannot harm me, nor fire. Swords and pitchforks fall blunt against my skin. My thews, taut and thick, are knotted with monstrous energies. There is a furnace in my breast, a flintlock in my spine. My name is Calel. I never wanted this. But I cannot remove what God has seen fit to install in my body. I often feel as though I am his finger, as if there is a vast, intangible fist behind me through which courses divine love, divine will, divine might. And then abruptly, in the midst of such rapturous delirium, I remember. I VII: ART When Art’s biography was published, he refused to read it. First of all, the author — one Quentin Algonquin, obviously a pseudonym, and a tacky one at that — hadn’t even bothered Art with advance notice of the project, let alone an interview of any kind. Furthermore, Art was a middle-aged man, balding, drably dressed, given to hemorrhoids, and employed by a failing pet-supply store. In short he was, by his own estimation, the least compelling subject of a biography imaginable. Art harrumphed as he studied the stack of display copies of the book — Profiles in Cabbage: The Un-Arthur-ized Story of Arthur Mitchell Murtha, a hardcover with an embossed dust jacket that bore a photo of his childhood self, big-eared and runny-nosed — in the window of the bookshop four doors down from his place of work. It was part of a larger display of new biographies: The names Horace, Zak, Ojid, Andrew, Magnolia, and Calel adorned the spines and covers of the others. Around Art the strip mall was silent, half abandoned, littered with vacant storefronts that gaped like missing teeth in a fossilized jaw. Anyone who would go through the trouble of writing about my dull life, Art assured himself as he continued down the sidewalk, must be in dire need of a life of his own. In the very least, the decision to unilaterally chronicle the veritable nonexistence of Arthur Mitchell Murtha (and, presumably, the other six poor souls stacked in the window display) shows a poverty of judgment that surely must reflect in this Algonquin character’s very acumen as a biographer. After all, reading lies about oneself is bad enough; reading lies poorly worded is another thing entirely. remember where I come from. I remember who I am. As base as it is to hold one’s soul at arm’s length from heaven and covet it so, I cradle what little is left of myself as if it were a sick child, wasted from thirst and hunger. But at night, I forget. At night, I fall. At night, the cape calls.
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