Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

Martin jumped to his feet, flinging away the cotton candy and dropping the funnel cake. “So I was nice to him, so what? That doesn’t make me anything special.”

“It does to him. To us .”

“What is he? And don’t give me that ‘more or less’ human shit, I need to know .”

“Why?”

“Because I . . .” He felt the tears forming in his eyes and hated himself for being so weak yet again. “Because I need something to believe in . I need to believe that I’ll be at ease in my own skin one day, that something I’ve done matters, that I can still fall in love with . . . anything —a woman, a song, an idea! I need to believe that there’s more than just breathing and taking up space and collecting a paycheck every two weeks. I need to know if . . .” “If what?” “. . . nothing . . .” “Say it.” “Fuck you.”

“Ever the eloquent one— say it .”

Martin balled his hands into fists and pressed them against his legs, his body shaking. Oh, yeah—you’re living in your own private Idaho, all right.

“Fine,” said Jerry. “Then let’s see if we can’t jog a little something loose, shall we?”

He rose to his feet and lifted his right hand.

The performers in all three rings froze in place, and from the very center of the Center Ring a ripple appeared in the atmosphere and one of the Onlookers stepped through, the ripple closing behind it (for a flash Martin saw the wall of the gym, then it was the circus again). It leaned forward, opening only one of its brass half-sphere eyes, projecting a beam that solidified a few feet from where Martin stood.

He was looking at the image of himself talking to Dr. Hayes, who was saying: “. . . if you will tell me, to the best of your recollection, where you were and what you were doing when you first made the decision to start planning your own death, we’ll call it a day and take up at that point tomorrow, all right?”

Martin looked down and shook his head. “This isn’t fair.”

“Oh, give me a break!” said Jerry. “Is that the best you can come up with? ‘Fair’ is for six-year-olds playing with marbles or horseshoes; the stakes are a bit higher here.”

Martin looked back to himself and Dr. Hayes. His projected self was saying: “I’d stripped the floor in one of the second-floor women’s rest rooms and was re-waxing it. I started in the toilet stalls and worked my way out—that’s how you do it if you don’t want to wax yourself into a corner. But when you start in the stalls, you have to do it on your hands and knees, with rubber gloves and a sponge and the wax in a bucket. You dip the sponge in, then spread it on the floor, being careful not to splash any on the toilet base or the wall tiles down there. It’s kind of like painting, and it takes a while.

“I’d laid the first two coats in all the stalls, and was just starting to lay the last one when I stopped, sat back, and really looked at it. It was a good job, the corners were sharp, nothing on the base or the walls, the coats were smooth . . . and it occurred to me that this didn’t matter! I’d just spent forty minutes doing something that no one except maybe the building manager was going to notice or care about. And I got to thinking about something Dad used to say after he’d had a really rotten day at the plant—and there were a lot of those: ‘At least it’s honest work, there’s no shame in that.’ But I could tell, every time he said that, I could tell that he didn’t really believe it, that he felt ashamed, because who gives a damn about the person who cuts the blades for the saws you buy at the hardware store, or who waxes behind the women’s toilet? I sat there looking at this smooth job, asking myself what else I could have done with those forty minutes if I had them back, and . . . I couldn’t come up with anything. My whole goddamn life was right there in that freshly-waxed corner behind the toilet: a lot of careful effort put into something that was ultimately meaningless. I watched my parents work shit factory jobs their entire lives, sometimes coming home so sore and tired they could barely force down some dinner, and all it did was lessen them, diminish them in their own eyes, suck the joy out of them until they‘d finally put in enough years to retire, and by that time they were both so fucking sick they couldn’t enjoy it. So I looked at that perfectly-waxed corner and decided, screw it; you’re forty-four years old, if you were going to do anything of value or importance with your life, you’d have done it by now, so why drag this out?

“ That’s when I decided to do it. Happy now?”

Dr. Hayes smiled and leaned forward, patting Martin’s shoulder. “You probably don’t know it, but you’ve told me an awful lot today. Thank you.”

The Onlooker closed its eyes and the image vanished.

Martin whirled around to face Jerry. “And the point of that little stroll down Happy Moments Lane was . . . ?” “To remind you of the one thing you most need to believe.” “Which is?” Jerry shook his head. “You tell me.” “We’re back to that?”

“Say it . ”

“Fuck you squared.”

“ Say it .”

“Fine—I need to know that my folks died believing their lives had some value, okay? I need to know whether or not I was . . . shit—a failure in their eyes. If I could just know that , if I could’ve known that . . . maybe that goddamn waxed corner would’ve just looked like a waxed corner. Jesus does it sound ridiculous, saying it out loud like that. But I can’t . . . can’t help wondering , you know?”

“Dr. Hayes was right, you know, when she said that some peoples’ spirits bleed to death from thousands of small scratches they aren’t even aware of. Just so you know, yours hasn’t bled quite to death yet.”

“Go piss up a rope—your turn: what the hell is Bob?”

Jerry looked away for a moment, his eyes focusing on something only he could see as he considered how to phrase the reply. “The Onlookers are God’s art critics; the human race is, for lack of a better term, the work in progress; Bob is one of those rare people who has been entrusted with the duty of re-creating the world on a daily basis.”

Martin stared at him, blinked, then said: “I think I just slipped a gear—come again?”

“The world as you know it is kept in existence by a group of beings whose number is quite small when compared against the whole of humankind. Some are painters, others are composers, poets or storytellers, but most of them, Martin, most of them are the brick-layers, the auto mechanics, the laborers, those who cut the saw blades, who wash the dishes, who wax the floors. The only difference between them and you is that they know the value, the necessity, the beauty of what they do and what they are. There is as much majesty in a perfectly-cleaned window looking out on a winter’s night as there is in the entirety of the ceiling in the Capella Sistina .

“The Universe is constantly bombarding human senses with images and ideas like these—” He pointed toward the circus performers. “—but most people can’t pick up on, let alone interpret , them. Bob has been receiving them for all his life, non-stop, just like the others of his kind—and just so you know, they are called Qui Constructum, Tunc Constructum Iterum : ‘Those Who Build, Then Build Again.’ Some very ancient texts refer to them as the Substruo , which means ‘to build beneath, to lay a foundation.’ “They are the ones who must revise and re-create reality; who destroy and re-build the world—” “‘—because when the real world gets too horrible, then the real world must be altered.’” Jerry nodded. “Exactly.”