“I thought, Wait, he had nothing to do with this whole dumb show. He didn’t put the crazy horses on the carousel. He’s your pal, your friend, your buddy. He’s all that’s left of life. That was the turnaround. The road back from madness is knowing you’re mad. The road back means no more highway, and you can only turn. I loved you. I love you. So I came back. And opened the tomb and let the true Beast out.”
Roy turned his head and looked at me. His gaze said: Am I on report? Will you hurt me for what I have hurt? Are we still friends? What made me do whatever I did? Must the police know? And who will tell them? Must I be punished? Do the insane have to pay? Isn’t it all a madness? Mad sets, mad lines, mad actors? Is the play over? Or has it just begun? Do we laugh now or weep? For what?
His face said, Not long from now the sun will be up, the two cities will start, one more alive than the other. The dead will stay dead, yes, but the living will repeat the lines they were still saying just yesterday. Do we let them speak? Or do we rewrite them together? Do I make the Death that rides fast, and when he opens his mouth will your words be there?
What … ?
Roy waited.
“Are you really back with me?” I said.
I took a breath, and went on. “Are you Roy Holdstrom again and will you just stay that way and not be anything else but my friend, from now on, yes? Roy?”
Roy’s head was down. At last he put out his hand.
I seized it as if I might sway and fall to the streets of the Beast’s Paris, below.
We held tight.
With his free hand, Roy worked at the rest of his mask. He balled the substance, the torn-away wax and powder and celadon scar in his fist and hurled it from Notre Dame. We did not hear it land. But a voice, startled, shot up.
“God damn! Hey!”
We stared down.
It was Crumley, a simple peasant on the Notre Dame porch below. “I ran out of gas,” he called. “I kept going around the block. And then: no gas.”
“What,” he shielded his eyes, “in hell’s going on up there?”
73
Arbuthnot was buried two days later.
Or rather reburied. Or rather, placed in the tomb, carried there before dawn by some friends of the church who didn’t know who they carried or why or what for.
Father Kelly officiated at the funeral of a stillborn child, nameless and so not recently baptized.
I was there with Crumley and Constance and Henry and Fritz and Maggie. Roy stood far back from us all.
“What’re we doing here?” I muttered.
“Just making sure he
’s buried forever,” observed Crumley.
“Forgiving the poor son of a bitch,” Constance said, quietly.
“Oh, if people out beyond knew what was going on here today,” I said, “think of the crowds that might come to see that it’s over at last. Napoleon’s farewell.”
“He was no Napoleon,” said Constance.
“No?”
I looked across the graveyard wall where the cities of the world lay strewn-flat, and no place for Kong to grab at biplanes, and no dust-blown white sepulcher for the tomb-lost Christ, and no cross to hang some faith or future on, and no—
No, I thought, maybe not Napoleon, but Barnum, Gandhi, and Jesus. Herod, Edison, and Griffith. Mussolini, Genghis Khan, and Tom Mix. Bertrand Russell, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, and The Invisible Man. Frankenstein, Tiny Tim, and Drac—
I must have said some of this aloud.