Trouble Ensues

by Berman, Duchamp, Gunn, Holt, Nestvold, Sellars, Swanwick, and perhaps more
 

It's a long and strange road that leads to Reality -- and not everyone knows the way. But let me tell you a little secret: the fly on the wall in the third room to the left might be able to give you a hint. He's not an actual fly, of course, but an agent, a gatekeeper, the guy who decides whether you set foot on the road that leads nowhere and everywhere or whether you're stuck in Castle Dementia for all eternity.

But let's start at the beginning. Your beginning, my begining, it always begins the same. Even the Gatekeeper, his story in the Castle begins just as everyone else's has. He made a tiny decision, one that the rest of the world barely noticed, to leave reality for just a moment. He figured, as we all do, that he wouldn't be gone long, that he could return at any time.

For the Gatekeeper, that moment came on August 8, 1974. He was a senior at B.U. that year, and on that particular day, he was walking on the
Fenway, the little strip of park that runs through Brookline to Back Bay. He picked up a handful of ghostly brown oak leaves from the banks of the Muddy River, and thought, strangely, of the skeleton leaves that clothed Barrie's Peter Pan. A voice in his head said, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

So he did. He smoked them all. It was odd, he thought: he couldn't get high. The hell with it! He left the Fenway and walked down to Mass Ave,
then over the bridge to MIT. What an odd day. Storrow Drive was clogged with students. Some were yelling and waving their hands, and others were throwing punch-card chads into the air.

Even many years later, clinging to the wall, he remembered that moment, the moment he realized his reality had shifted. He was standing on the
first Smoots marker, on the MIT side of the bridge. It was a hot afternoon, sunny, humid, and dusty. A young woman in shorts and a tight, striped shirt grabbed him and kissed him right there. Must be a B.U. student, he thought. She sure didn't kiss like MIT.

She was yelling something at him. He shifted his attention from her shirt to what she was saying. Something about Nixon....

He grabbed her by the shoulders. "What? What! Did he cut a deal with Ford? Has the bastard finally abdicated?"

Her face was smooth and dry, all except for her freckled nose. (God he loved freckles on a woman's smooth, creamy skin!) Tiny drops of sweat,
almost too small to see, clung there, neither evaporating nor dripping. "Abdicated? Not hardly. The House just brought in a bill of
impeachment!"

He was confused. "They can impeach an emperor?"

She laughed as though he had said something witty.

[COLUMN ONE]

A heavy hand dropped onto his shoulder. "Virgil, you really oughta give the acid a rest, ya know?"

Acid? It had been leave in a pipe, right? He would have remembered if he'd dropped acid. Suddenly he was feeling crowded, the glories of the
striped shirt notwithstanding. Three shrieking blondes and a couple of skinny guys had taken off their clothes and started to dance. A dog yipped and ran around in circles chasing its tail. And meanwhile, the guy behind him was literally breathing down his neck. And what was with this Virgil stuff?

"Ignore him, Virgil," the lady said. "Hard as it may be to believe, Larry's so out of it that he probably never even saw that cover of Time." She looked past him with a quizzical look on her face, presumably at the ass-hole who had a grip on his shoulder. "Do you know where he goes when
he drops out of sight for weeks at a time?"

He realized with confusion that the question was addressed to him, as though he might actually know the answer. Who the fuck was this guy, Larry?
Larry seemed to think he knew him... There was no way he was tripping. It wasn't like any he'd ever had-- that he could
remember, anyway. He had to do something. The urge was like an itch he couldn't resist scratching. Maybe because it was too
hot to have some joker named Larry breathing down your neck, maybe because there was something about this scene that didn't feel right.
 

[COLUMN TWO]

"With the deals he's been cutting with the Chinese? Please. He'll be lucky not to end up bleeding on the marble floors in his tweed
toga."

"You sound as if that's a good thing," he said, and she rolled her eyes. "No, really. How would it look if... you know, what would
the rest of the world think? And the Bolivians... it's not a good time..."

"Fine, Philip," she said, and he recognized that word with a start. Philip. Nobody had ever called him that before, but even so, it was
his name. Or Pirrip. Or Felipe. Or Pill. Some word that sounded like it. She went on, "Be a pill. I don't care. I have to get back to work." And
she stalked off back into the horse-and-slave clogged maze of the city.

Philrippe, or Filopa, or Philos, called out to her, but she didn't look over her shoulder, didn't reply. She just disappeared between the
buildings, and when he started after her, he could feel the walls leaning away, as if he were toxic somehow, a danger. But he ignored them and their concrete scruples, keeping his eyes fixed on the now-distant woman whose kiss lay there still upon his lips, squirming no more, bête pauvre, but rather drying out in the pale, greyed sunlight, passing into the realm of squirming, sensuous memory.

The trees shuddered with gentle terror as he passed them.
 

[END DOUBLE COLUMNS]

And just like that, his worldviews collapsed into a single reality. He stood, panting, under the quaking trees, feeling the terror washing off of
them in waves. Warring memories fought within his head. At his feet, the nondescript dog that had been chasing its tail was now vigorously licking its crotch, growling with virtuous pleasure. One raised leg quivered with every growl.

Abruptly, the dog looked up. “Got your bearings now? Good. Because there’s a long way to go before we can get this all worked through.” He got up
and began trotting down the road that looked like nothing so much as a stone-and-concrete bridge stretching smoot upon smoot toward infinity and beyond.

“My name’s Cicero, by the way,” the dog threw over his shoulder. “Frank Cicero.”

Phil followed the dog towards the bridge, trying to recall the freckles. Freckles were good.

He had to run to catch up. “My name’s Virgil,” he said. That seemed wrong. “I mean Larry. My name is Larry.” That didn’t seem right either, but he continued. “So, do I call you Frank, or do I call you Cicero?”

“Call me anything you like, Bob,” said the dog. “Just don’t call me late for dinner.” He licked his lips wolfishly.

“I’m Bob?” said Phil, pathetically. The dog seemed to know what he was doing.

“Figure of speech,” said the dog. “That’s Bob as in ‘As you know, Bob.’
It’s Bob as in J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. It’s Bob as in ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ Do you need
any more examples, or are you smarter than you look?”

I’ve met this dog before, thought Phil. I know his name, and it isn’t
Frank. Cicero, that is his name. Memories, as if newly minted, flooded his
mind. His family had a series of dogs when he was a kid, and his mom always
named them after speechmakers. She hoped it would encourage them to talk. There
was Demosthenes, Cicero, Webster, and Stanton. It was a mistake to name a dog
something you couldn’t yell at it, Phil thought, but his mom didn’t make that
mistake twice. Cicero was a great dog, smart and sassy.

“Cicero!” said Phil. “Cicero! It’s me! Phil!”

“Well, at least you know your own name now,” said Cicero. “That’s a
help. Let’s get going. Walkies, Phil! We’ve got smoots to go before we sleep.”
Cicero started briskly down the road.

"Where are we going?" Phil asked.

The dog stopped to pee against a fire hydrant. "You'll never know unless you keep walking."

Phil had to admit that Frank was right. But why keep walking if you didn't know where you were going?

He stopped. "What if I'd rather sit around drinking beer all day?"

The dog stopped and looked around deliberately. "You never were the smartest bulb in the chandelier. Do you see any beer here? Or a pub for
that matter? Anyplace where you could drink or buy mind-numbing alcoholic beverages?"

It was true. The dream visions of Boston were fading into the mist, the freckles with them. It appeared he had already crossed some sort of threshhold without intending to. The only option left was the damn bridge.

"Will there be beer on the other side?" he asked.

"Beer as good as the stuff that God hides from the Angels in Heaven," the dog said.

The man at the end of the bar noticed the dog paying for the drinks. The bartender poured the ale into a bowl for the dog. "Man, you want yours
in a glass?" the bartender asked. The man wasn't quite with them, but the dog nodded at the glass.

"Frank," the bartender continued, "He doesn't look so good."

"He's the Gatekeeper," said Frank, "I don't think he's supposed to be on this side. Call him Good Boy. He gets happy with Good Boy. I
never could get behind that one.”

The Bartender drifted off to a customer and back again, "What's going to happen with the Gatekeeper here, and well, what about The Gate?"

"I noticed a lot a jabber on the lightpoles and fire hydrants that my people weren't getting through the gate. Lots of old dogs just wafting in
the wind. They should be across in a while."

"How long you plan to be here?"

"Until my Good Boy's happy."

The man at the end of the bar tucked a twenty under his glass and went out the back service door, worried at the fuzzy picture of a dog drinking alone, an imperial pint of ale slowly leaking out of the glass next to him. The man had seen and heard; now he was headed over the bridge to gather a few bad men to help in his last days in power.

As he walked out the door, he heard the dog behind him beerily say, “My apologies to Oliver Smoot,” and then, “I call this, ‘Stopping by MIT on a
Snowy Evening.’” His voice rose up in a lovely whisky tenor as he began to sing:

“Whose school this is, I think I know
I see them passing to and fro
They do not see me standing here
With less than seven smoots to go
The Charles, below, it seems so near
Just seven smoots less half an ear
To sleep from which I'd never wake
At this the coldest time of year
The students have exams to take
A quiet splash no fuss would make
From Harvard Bridge to endless sleep
A demon thirst one step would slake
The water's lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And smoots to go before I sleep
And smoots to go before I sleep.”

Things were getting serious now. Pirrip knew who he was – he was Phil, and Virgil, and Larry, and possibly even Bob. He was the Gatekeeper. Most
importantly of all, he was Good Boy. This was a very solid foundation on which he could build.

There were footsteps behind him. He didn’t need to turn around to know that it was the man from the bar. He didn’t need to ask to know that he’d just acquired the first hard man for his posse. Over his shoulder, he said, “You ready for some action?”

“Hell, if anybody so much as looks at me, I’ll shot him in the face,” the stranger said. “You wouldn’t want to know what I do to people I don’t
like.”

There were things . . . men . . . shapes crawling out of the dark wood and clambering up onto the endless bridge that stretched through all realities. Evil bastards every one of them, with not a good thought among the lot. They were useful, though, for what he had in mind.

Faces began to appear on the man-shapes crowding onto the bridge. A head formed into a deep widow's peak with horns that looked like hands giving the two finger Victory sign or the old Peace sign. A ski-nose popped out over thin lips. It slithered past and spit on the man from the bar.
“Thank you, my boy, you have made me look good.”

Another shape began to form from a large pompadour shifting into a plain but kindly face. It smiled at the Gatekeeper, but its expression turned cold when it saw the man from the bar. “I told Mother that I should give you up”

The stranger at the bar magicked an over-under shotgun out of thin air and unloaded a blast into each of the shades. The shot went right through
them.

A third man -- fully formed and as dense as any who ever lived on the far side of the bridge -- body slammed the Gatekeeper. “Good Boy, get out of my way.” He grabbed the shotgun in his left hand, shaking the stranger’s hand with his right, and pushed his greasy haired head forward until they were nose to nose. “Bormann, Martin Bormann. Mein Freund. Gute Arbeit, gut gemacht. Aufgabe erledigt,” he said. But what the stranger heard was, “My Friend. Good work, well done. Task completed.”

The Bormann creature released his grip on the stranger and moved on down the bridge carrying the shotgun. “Sie sind mein Erbe,” he shouted over his shoulder. "You are my heir," the stranger heard.

“What the hell are those things crossing the bridge?” the stranger asked.

The Gatekeeper turned at looked at him, eyes narrowed. "Those wispy creatures can leave anytime someone steps on the bridge, for they have served their penance and have lost the weight of evil that binds them there. I don’t know what happens to them –- perhaps they are blown away by the wind. The solid ones can leave only when someone more evil than they are voluntarily crosses the bridge."

Phil looked down and realized then that the bridge no longer traversed the innocent Charles. He loved that muddy water, and now it
was gone, replaced by a fluid that could only be called stygian. The other bank of that dark effluent no longer held the plane trees and mansions and stupefyingly bad drivers of Back Bay: it was all gone -- Arlington Street to Mass Ave, Huntington to Back Street -- and in its place was that cesspool of evil known as Castle Dementia. Storrow Drive remained pretty much the same as always, a voracious, truck-decapitating serpent of a highway, well suited to be the northern boundry of Hell, and if not the final resting place of Boston’s drivers, then certainly their Purgatory.

As they gathered around him -- the morally decrepit, the viperous, the scum of human existence – Firrip felt a deep resonance hum within him. Cicero’s plaintive tenor was fading, and Vergil’s inner being stirred to the maddened buzzing of the numberless souls enhived in
Castle Dementia. They needed him, and he needed the relentlessly evil beings who hung behind the nameless stranger with the crooked grin, the man who had been at the end of the bar.

“Allons-y, mes miserables!” Larry shouted, encouraging the tortured misfits with a pull of his heavily muscled arm. “We are needed over the bridge!”And, to his astonishment and shame, the disgusting shapes oozed, burbled, and chortled toward him. The mass of them,
Bob in the lead, moved inexorably toward the bridge over the River Styx. As they did so, numerous others escaped the Castle Dementia and scuttled across the bridge, headed for Reality. Or so they thought.

Over the bridge went our hero, the full 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one ear, and entered, with his foul entourage, the Castle of Dementia. He was Good Boy no more. There were no good boys here -- but he was still Bob, Larry, Vergil, Firrip, and, somewhere deep inside, Phil. And as soon as he passed through the castle gate, he began to disassociate, like the layers of an onion. Vergil peeled off first. Phil, deep within, was taken aback. I have given forth a ghost, he thought. But he was unable to give voice to his thought.

Bob, far braver than Phil and more superficial, spoke up easily. "Hey there," he called to Vergil. "Are you a guy or a ghost?"

The ghost spoke to him. "I was a guy once, for all that is to you. Singer/songwriter. Maybe you've heard my chart-buster?" He started into a ditty right there -- country song, apparently. "Ohhh-whoa, I'm-a singing of guns and a guy--"

Bob cut him off. "Or a gal?"

Vergil stopped singing. "I weren't singing of no gal here." He thought. "Maybe you've heard this one?" Again, he broke into song. "I was born on a mountaintop in Roma, see? Greenest state in the--"

Again, Bob cut him off, but this time with a yelp, as Bob himself separated from Larry, Firrip, and Phil. "Awright!!" he screamed, as he extracted himself. "Give me Slack or kill me!"

By now, Phil had a headache, but he still had no control over what was happening to him. Or did he?

Once Larry peeled off from Phil, the headache disappeared. Larry, the big stooge, seemed to have taken it with him. There was nobody left but Firrip and Phil, and Phil realized that he was Firrip and Firrip was Phil. With that realization, he pulled himself together and came
to his senses. What a long, strange trip it had been. And now where was he? He was in a castle at the gates of Hades, formerly Boston, Massachusetts, surrounded by some of history’s most loathsome characters.

What was he going to do now? Well, there was no sense, Phil thought, in coming all the way to Hell if you didn’t do
something nice for the folks there. Perhaps, he thought, Virgil would show him around.

“Can you help me out?” he asked.

“Boy, you gonna hafta take another
way outta here. I think you better follow me.” The old songwriter pulled
himself up to his full height and set out, and Phil followed behind him.

After Phil came Bob and Larry and the
scum of the earth, slithering and wheezing, and the stranger from the bar with
the crooked grin and the shotgun.

The entryway to Castle Dementia was
capacious, and the entire party could have passed through it side-by-side, but
these were not people who walked easily by the sides of one another. They
cringed away, each from the other, and when they accidentally touched, they
snarled and pulled back. Virgil in the front seemed unperturbed by the
atmosphere of vicious paranoia, but Phil was deeply aware of the small tussles
and growls he heard behind him.

Ahead of him, however, was a sight that gladdened his heart. “Cicero!” he said, joyfully. “Is that my Cicero I see?”

“That there’s Cerberus,” said Vergil, not unkindly. “He guards the gate, you know."

“Call me Cyrano,” said the hound, its eyes ablaze.

“Call me Capone,” said the hound’s second head, saliva dripping from its jaws.

“Call me Caligula,” said the third head, and, dipping down, it snatched up the crook-grinned man from the bar and gobbled him down in three quick bites.

“That pore sumbidge didn’t even get the chance to let off one round,” Virgil said sadly. He scratched his head. “I s’pect there might be a song in that.”

Then the black dog Cerberus was among the shades and specters, biting and snarling and tossing bodies up in the air with one head, to be caught by a second and fed to a third, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, neat as neat and violent as hell. Taller than a tower, Cyrano-Capone-Caligula ravaged and tore at Pirrip’s hard men until a thick mist of blood billed the air and all that could be seen were its six fiery eyes and all that could be heard were its snarls and gnashings and the despairing cries of the wicked.

When it was over, Virgil tore off his Stetson, threw it on the ground, and stamped on it. “Gaw-dayum!” he exclaimed. “I just plumb give up. The majesty of this here fight just plain makes a mockery of my admittedly remarkable skills. I don’t think Walt Disney hisself could do it justice.”

Now the Dog of Fate trotted to the far side of the bridge and into the courtyard of Castle Dementia. He squatted in the forecourt and proceeded to void himself of all the men he had gobbled down. They came out looking significantly worse for the wear. Then, one by one, they despondently trooped inside the castle.

“I changed my mind,” Virgil said. “Disney wouldn’t so much as touch it.”

The dog returned to the bridge, greatly diminished in stature and bearing only one head. He was now recognizably Frank, that same shaggy old beer-loving doggums that Phil had known and loved as a little boy. He bounced up and put his front paws on Phil’s chest. “Good boy!” he said. “Who’s a good boy? You’re a good boy. Woof!”

Despondently, Bob said, “It’s over then, isn’t it? I wanted to break down the barriers between Castle Dementia and the living world. I wanted to free the apple trees of dementia to get across the bridge and eat the cones under the pines of Reality. And now I’ve failed.”

“Failed?” Cicero said. “Good lord, no!” He bounded aside. “You’ve succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Tell him, Virgil.”

So, after a moment or two of tuning, Virgil put thumb to the strings of his guitar and sang:

“So Cerberus spoke: the mandate from above
Good Boy obey'd. The virgin-seed of Jove,
In Virgil’s form, confirm'd the full accord,
And unwilling felons knew their lawful lord.”

“That one’s not mine, it’s a traditional little ditty given a modern interpretation by a fella name of Al Pope,” Virgil said. He slung his guitar over his back and, putting a hand on Firrip’s shoulder, led him across the bridge. “See, what he was tryin’ to say, in his own folksy way, was that various varmints and evil-doers managed to break out of Castle Dementia because its rightful guardian was away from his post, smoking leaves.” Here he gave Phillip such a piercing look that Phil could not help but blush. “Frank here couldn’t stop ‘em because he was facing the wrong way, and anyhow he had his heads full just keeping people out.”

“So it was . . . all my fault?” Good Boy said sadly.

“Yup. You were the gatekeeper and you fell asleep at your post. You screwed up big-time. However, you were a stand-up guy about it. A real Mensch. You took that long, long road to Reality and you brought the bastards back. And, give or take a war or three, with no harm done.”

“So everything’s cool then? We’re all square, forgive and forget, no loose ends left dangling?”

“Well,” said Caligula. “There is the small question of your punishment.”

                                        *                         *                         *

So there he sits, the gatekeeper of many names and no fixed identity, almost unnoticeable on a wall in the third room to the left. Now and again, one of the hard men tries to slip by unnoticed. But he gatekeeper has multi-faceted eyes and he never sleeps, and when that happens he swoops down on the prisoner biting and stinging and flying up his nostrils until he’s driven back into the depths of Castle Dementia.

Sometimes, though, the gatekeeper stares yearningly at the apple trees that grow all around the castle, perpetually in bloom, perpetually bearing fruit, perpetually turning Autumn and shedding red and yellow leaves on the ground. He stares and thinks and wonders.