The sun’s declining; its light is cold, pale yellow. Along the top of the inner fence two crows are perched, keeping watch. No hope for you, my friends, thinks Felix. I’m the only one coming out today and I’m not dead yet. He climbs into his frozen car. After two tries, the motor starts.
The outer gate swings open, propelled by invisible hands. My thanks, ye demi-puppets, Felix addresses them silently, ye elves of barbed wire, tasers, and strong walls, weak masters though ye be. As he drives away downhill the gate closes behind him, locking itself with a metallic thud. Already the air is darkening; behind him, the searchlights blare into life.
His car follows the highway, then turns off and snouts its way along the narrow snowy roadway toward his cave, almost as if he isn’t steering it but commanding it by thought alone. He allows himself to feel relief: the first and greatest obstacles have now been overcome, the first goals achieved. He has captured his Miranda, and Ariel has been transformed and accepted. He can sense the rest of his cast emerging as if from a fog, their faces indistinct but present. So far, his charms hold good.
His car stops as if grounded. Luckily there’s no new windrow of hard-packed snow and frozen sludge to be shoveled. He parks and locks, then trudges up the lane to his hovel, snow creaking underfoot. From the field to the left comes a glassy whispering: it’s the dead weed stalks that are sticking up through the drifts, glazed with ice, stirred by the wind. Tinkling like bells.
All dark within, no light at the window. Almost he knocks, but who would answer? He has a sudden cold sensation, as if from news of a boundless loss. He opens the door.
Empty. Devoid. No presence. Inside the shack it’s chilly; he banked the woodstove before going off to Fletcher that morning, but he doesn’t like to leave the electrical heater on when he’s not there. Too risky, though surely Miranda
would keep a watch on it. Wouldn’t she?
Fool, he tells himself. She’s not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself.
He can’t resign himself.
—
He builds up the fire, switches on the heater. It won’t take the place long to warm up. He’ll have an egg for supper and a couple of soda crackers. A cup of tea. He’s not very hungry. After the adrenalin hit of this first week he’s having a letdown; surely that’s all it is. But he feels a weakness within himself, a dejection, a fissure in his will, a faltering.
Lately his vengeance has seemed so close. All he had to do was wait until Tony and Sal came to Fletcher Correctional for their VIP visit, then make sure they did not view the video of the play upstairs with the Warden but in the sealed wing—where he would be expecting them, although unseen by them at first.
Once the video began to run, it would split in two. One version would be the video running onscreen in the rest of the prison. The other version would suddenly have real people in it, directed and controlled by himself. Creating an illusion through doubles—it’s one of the oldest theatrical gimmicks in the box.
But now his vision is blurring. Why is he so sure he can pull this off? Not the play itself; that will already exist as a finished video. But the other play, the improvised drama he has in mind for his distinguished enemies—how to arrange it? He’ll need a degree of technical expertise he doesn’t possess. And even if he can solve that problem, how foolhardy of him to attempt such a gambit! How risky! So much could go wrong. His actors might get carried away, especially in the presence of a tough-on-crime Minister of Justice. That situation could prove tempting for them. Someone might be hurt.
“No harm, no harm,” he tells himself. But there could very well be harm. He doesn’t have any obedient elementals backing him up, he has no real alchemy.
He has no weapons.
Better to abdicate. Give up his plans for retribution, for restoration. Kiss his former self goodbye. Go quietly into the dark. What has he ever accomplished in his life, anyway, beyond a few gaudy hours, a few short-lived triumphs of no importance in the world where most people live? Why did he ever feel he was entitled to special consideration from the universe at large?
Miranda doesn’t like it when he’s depressed. It makes her anxious. Maybe that’s why she’s rendered herself invisible, though she’s usually almost invisible anyway. Is that her, in the other room? Does he hear a humming? Or is it only the bar fridge?
—
The bedroom has a medicinal smell, as if someone’s been ill in it. An invalid, for a long time. No, she’s not in here. Only the photo in its silver frame: the small girl on the swing, frozen in Time’s jelly. Visible but not alive.
He switches on the bedside lamp, opens the door of the large armoire. There’s his wizard’s garment; it’s been waiting for him now for a dozen years. Must it go to waste, after all? Its many eyes glint, alive, aware.
“Not yet,” he tells his magic animals. “Not quite yet. It is not the hour.”
Their hour will be his hour. His vengeful hour. There must be a way he can make it work. Surely he still has a few tricks left.
—
He moves back into the front room. “Dear one,” he says out loud; and there she is, over in the corner. Luckily she’s wearing white: she glimmers. What is this fretful energy he’s feeling? She’s picked up on his worries, and now she’s worrying herself.
“There’s no harm done,” he says. “And there won’t be, I promise. I will do nothing but in care of thee.”
But what has his care amounted to? He’s protected her, true, but hasn’t he overdone it? There are so many things he should be able to offer her. She should have what other girls her age take for granted, not that he knows what those things are. Clothes, certainly. Pretty clothes, more clothes than she has at her disposal now. She seems to go around in makeshifts, fabricated out of cheesecloth and old bed sheets. She ought to have silks and velvets, or mini- skirts and those tall boots girls these days seem so fond of. She ought to have an iPhone, in a pastel shade. She ought to be painting her nails blue or silver or green, chattering with her friends, listening to music through her pink ear buds.
Going to parties.
He’s been such a failure as a parent. How can he make it up to her? It’s a wonder she isn’t sulkier, cooped up here with nobody but her shabby old father;
but then, she doesn’t know what she’s missing. Still, he’s been able to teach her a lot of things that most girls her age would never have a chance of learning.
“What have you been up to all day?” he says to her. “Would you like a game of chess?”
Reluctantly—is that reluctance?—she moves to the chess board, set up as
usual on the red Formica table.
Black or white? she asks him.
