The Motion of Puppets(83)

He loosened the noose around his neck and pulled it over his head to hand to No?. She unraveled its full length and tied a knot around an iron hook screwed into the floorboard.

Kay looked into his eyes. “I want to see your face before we go.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“The Good Fairy wants to be sure you are who you say you are. It’s the least we can do.”

The three of them turned as one and signaled to the Good Fairy. Grabbing the hem of his muslin head, Theo lifted gently. The rag stuffing spilled to the floor. Gasping for air, like breaking the surface from under water, he pulled off the disguise completely. She saw his disheveled hair and bright eyes. She kissed him and remembered. No? grabbed the rope, ready to climb.

Across the room, the Good Fairy snapped a stick from the lattice of her forearm and tossed it toward the spot where the Original lay surrounded by his entourage. The little dog jumped to chase the stick, and the Good Fairy shouted, “My arm, my arm, the Dog has stolen my arm.” Barking and snarling, the Dog charged around and over the sleeping bodies, heedless of where it stepped, surprising them from their slumber. The stick landed with a clatter at the Original’s feet. The Good Fairy saw the others were distracted and signaled to the escapees.

“Here we go,” Theo said, and taking her by the hips, he hoisted No? up to the slit in the wall. Teetering on the ragged boards, she turned sideways, framed by the black night, and tossed the length of the rope through the exit, testing it once to see if the knot would hold. Quickly shinnying up the side, No? pulled herself through and disappeared over the edge.

“You go,” Kay said. “I’m right behind you.”

In the loft, the clamor rose, shouts of dismay over the intrusion of the little dog, the puppets stirring, waking. Barking, laughing, a sudden scream. Theo lifted himself to the threshold. Outside, the night sky glistened with stars, and six feet below, he could see No? let go of the rope and land on firm ground. “Are you there, Kay?” he shouted over his shoulder, but he heard no reply. He forced himself to keep facing the darkness. The puppets were shouting for him to stop.

The Original hollered, “No!”

He looked back to see if she had followed.

Her face was beautiful. Wide-eyed, startled. He could imagine her whole again, real and alive. She was mouthing something he could not hear, only see the movements of her lips, “I love you” or “All I knew” or … and they were right upon her, the satyrs pulling her away from the wall, as if she were drowning and swept out to sea. A great tide of puppets swelled forward, holding her back, and Theo knew at once his mistake.

The point of the spear pierced a spot just below his sternum and took his breath away. The metamorphosis began at once. His hands went first, turning from flesh to paper, his head emptied into a husk, and he felt the transformation jolt through his body, as he lost all sense of himself. He became instead a hollow man, a puppet.

The awful puppets were crowding around him now, their language indecipherable, a primitive guttural chanting, and the little wooden man, the one she had loved through the shop window, withdrew the spear, and Theo collapsed to the wooden floor.

Like a little tyrant god, the ancient doll held up the spear to show to the assembly. The devil was there. The sisters forlorn. A fairy made of sticks. He tried to find Kay in the crowd, to tell her that he was sorry, but he could not speak, could not remember how to raise himself from the ground, lift his head, or move at all. He had a vague recollection of his life, a series of images in stop time. The Original sought a response from the crowd. He was asking a question, looking for their affirmation of his judgment, and the mob roared in reply.

The maenads leapt upon Theo at once and tore him to pieces. They were at him in a fury, rending cloth and cardboard and twisted wire, unmaking the puppet body. A woman in a leopard skin severed his head with a single blow, others split apart his limbs at the seams, and where his heart once had been they left nothing but paper tatters.





27

Muybridge intuited that in order to record motion, one must break it into components.

A single second of film requires 24 images to make the motion seem fluid, natural, lifelike.

Persistence of vision depends upon our physiological ability to see both the image and the afterimage at the same time. Try spinning a sparkler in the dark.

A puppet cannot fully replicate human movement because it cannot move at the proper and constant time signature.

Do I love her, or the after her?

Mitchell closed the notebook and settled back in Theo’s chair. Random notes in the margins of his translation, the vagrant thoughts of a troubled mind. Outside his office window, snow was falling, a February snow thick and heavy. The weather report showed the storm’s path wide and long, snow in Québec, snow in Vermont.

The doctor advised him to go slow and easy, not to try to do everything at once when he came back to work, and of course, the college understood fully, granting Mitchell a semester’s sabbatical, considering. If only they knew the whole story. But whom could he tell now? They might think he was still mad.

Love or, as he saw it now, infatuation had made him say and do things out of character. The night nurse, a pretty young woman with whom he was hopelessly smitten, would sit with him after the nightmares those first few weeks. Mitchell would sit up with a start, drenched with sweat, and the nurse would answer his terrors, calm him, while she held his hand as he told bits and pieces of the story.