The Motion of Puppets(58)
“Except for Sunday.”
“One time,” she said. “Look, he said he was interested, but I’m not. That’s why we were fighting. I was trying to end things for good. Untangle the strings.”
The moment proved a fulcrum between doubt and trust. He canceled his classes for the day, and they talked all morning, shedding layers of the past. Soon enough they worked their way back to each other, tempered now by the moment. It wasn’t the drugs, so much, for he had experimented in his own foolish youth. It was her disappearance, how she did not trust him and instead had run away from him. How Kay had not realized that he would be so frightened. “I do not want to live without you,” he told her in bed that afternoon, and she had held on tightly and told him she would not leave. And here he was, living despite her absence.
Tell me where you are, and I will come find you.
The computer chimed when he switched it on, and from the couch, Egon mumbled in his sleep. Just past two in the morning. Careful not to wake him, Theo plugged in his earbuds and clicked on the bookmarked video. He watched the parade again. The video began midstream, a second of shaking as the camera sought its subject. Light fluctuated, too dark, too bright, and then a balanced exposure. Disembodied voices from the crowd, children oohing and aahing as each puppet came into view. “Look at her,” some child said clearly when Kay appeared, and he froze the image. She was beautiful as a puppet, her countenance serene, almost peaceful. She looked like an Art Nouveau exaggeration, herself and not herself. The sculptors had captured the heart shape of her face framed by a stylized sweep of hair. And the arc of her cheekbones sharp against the smooth paper skin, the slight overbite that pushed forward her smile, the delicacy of her small ears, the set of her eyes beneath the arch of her brows. He clicked the mouse and set the video in motion, and she was gone as suddenly as she had appeared, and then the children screamed with delight as the giant queen arrived, her handlers struggling to keep her aright and steady, and then she filled the frame before all went suddenly black. The last moment was nearly terrifying in the extreme close-up, as if the taping had suddenly become too intense for the videographer, as if the scene were swallowing the camera. He whispered to the screen, “How could you have gone away?”
Late into the night he typed his corrections to Muybridge, one ear on his snoring friend Egon and one ear attuned to the music of translation. Although the publisher would surely have further questions and corrections, Theo was giddy to be nearly done, the work so long a part of his life. At dawn he put on a pot of coffee and muscled through the transcription of his own spidery handwriting, some pages taking him back to Québec, back to that misery. The morning brightened. There was only one direction: forward.
“I’m finished,” he said to Egon as soon as he arose. “Let’s find those puppets.”
Book Three
19
Cozied in his office, Mitchell listened to their story from start to finish, surrounded by the artifacts of his passion for the ancient world. From over his shoulder, a bust of Aristotle looked down on Theo and Egon, and the bookshelves were crowded with titles in Greek and Latin. He seemed open and credulous, nodding at certain points as though he recognized elements that mirrored his vast knowledge of mythology. When Theo and Egon had finished, he leaned back in his chair and toyed with a shard of pottery decorated with a chain of fearsome maidens linked in a ritual dance.
“What do I know of puppets? I would like to say it was the Greeks who invented the puppet, but they are older than that by thousands of years. The Egyptians buried clay puppets with the mummified corpses in their tombs. Pull the strings, and their marionettes could knead bread. Even the dead get hungry in the afterlife. In India thousands of years ago, they made a terra-cotta monkey who could be made to climb a stick, and there are puppets mentioned in the Mahabharata and the Kama Sutra.”
“Kama Sutra, you don’t say,” Egon whispered an aside. “I’d like to see that.”
“Shadow puppets of ancient China, the bunraku of Japan, the wayang of Java, still in use to this day. The American aboriginals had their totemic dolls with movable arms and legs, and Cortez, who brought along his own puppeteers, encountered such figures among the Aztecs. They have been with us for millennia all over the world. An ancient impulse.”
Theo cleared his throat. “There was one of those primitive aboriginal dolls in the window of the Quatre Mains. Native American. Inuit, maybe? Kay fell in love with it.”
“The doll and the puppet are really an expression of our desire to create and control life,” Mitchell continued. “We make a little man—”
Egon wriggled in his chair and scowled.
“I beg your pardon,” Mitchell said. “Figuratively, hah, in every sense, a simulacrum. A homunculus, a human machine. Like us, but not like us. A stand-in, an actor that can be put in motion, made to speak, and suffer indignities or lift us to transcendence. You see it as well in icons and idols. These effigies that you showed me on the computer.”
On the edge of his seat, Egon interjected, “Giant puppets. Life-size. And larger than life.”
Setting down the pottery shard, Mitchell leaned across the desk. “Small or large, on the end of a finger or lifted by a dozen men, the idea is the same. What did Horace say? ‘Man is nothing but a puppet on a string’?