The Puppet's Mark (fiction)

My memory has become hazy of late, due to bad dreams, but it was around April when my friend R_____ contacted me. It came as a surprise; we hadn’t spoken in eight years. We exchanged the usual formalities, and that Saturday I found myself at the bar on S______ street, our old haunt. It had gone to seed: the pavement was cracked, the paint was flaking, the whole region of town was like a faded postcard. Even the sunlight seemed sickly. From the moment he called me I had felt a vague uneasiness. Now, as I walked across the empty lot towards the bar, I felt almost ill. But through the window I could see R_____’s profile, unmistakably my old friend. He raised his right hand in greeting, and my sense of dread disappeared.

The bar was vacant except for a group setting equipment on a small band stage, and a bartender I didn’t recognize sullenly wiping the counter. “Hello, R_____,” I said, sliding onto the seat opposite him. “You’re still looking as handsome as ever.”  Truthfully he looked awful: insomniac, haggard, thirty years past his age. He didn’t respond to me at first, he just stared out the window. “Do you see that? There,” he said. He nodded at something, and I looked across the street. It was empty. “Well, it’s good to see you too,” I said, with a slight chuckle. “There, in the window,” he insisted, pointing. I looked again. A silhouette moved in one of the windows of the crumbling tenement, I saw a flash of a brown face, and then it vanished. “You mean that person?” I said. I was still smiling: he finally turned his head and looked at me. He didn’t look happy. I held his gaze for a few seconds then laughed and slapped the table. “I’m getting a beer,” I said.

The bartender poured my beer and took payment without even glancing at me. I contemplated what R_____ had said. I contemplated turning around and walking out the door. Then I fastened a smile on my face and carried my beer back to the table. “Listen, what’s going on with you?” I said genially. “You’re not, I don’t know, homeless, or…” I waved my hands vaguely. Again, R_____ seemed not to acknowledge me. Just as I opened my mouth to say something, he said “I’m sorry, J_____, calling you out here. I didn’t want to do it in a place like this. Don’t you remember what this place was like? It was really alive once. Now look at it. It looks worse than me.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “What’s been going on with you? You were seeing L_____, right? How’s she? Looks like it didn’t work out.”
“No, it worked out, we were married,” he said. “She left me only a month ago.”
“Ah,” I said, sipping my beer. I started to form a picture of the situation. Then R____ held up his right hand. The ring finger had been severed at the stump.  It was badly healed, with mottled scar tissue. I almost spat out my beer.

“Jesus, R____, what the hell is that?” I said.
“The ring is gone,” he replied, “Still on the finger. It’s not really after anything specific, it’s what it represents. The act of sacrifice.”
“R_____,” I said gently, “Listen, I don’t know what’s been going on with you, but it sounds like you need some help. Did you do that? Did you cut off your own finger?”
“I did,” he said.
“But why?”
“I’m trying to think of a way to put this,” he said slowly. He paused and shook his head. “Did I ever tell you the puppet story?”

At those words my nausea intensified. I realized I was hunching my shoulders and forced myself to relax. Again, I thought about leaving, simply walking out. But R_____ had been my friend once. He was clearly sick. I decided to listen to his story and see if I could help him. “No, you never told me,” I hesitated. “Wait – I do remember. It was the night after prom, right? I remember you told me something about a puppet.”

“When I was little, I was scared of puppets,” he said. “Because my dad once told me a story about a puppet that lives in the cupboard, and a little boy who lives in the house. And the little boy knows there’s something wrong with the puppet, but his parents don’t believe him. And the story ends with the puppet pulling him into the cupboard, and the little boy is never seen again.”
“Ok, yeah, I remember,” I said. “I remember now. Prom night. Yeah, you were laughing. We both were. It’s such a fucked-up story to tell a five-year-old kid. We were laughing at your dad.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Only he never told me that story. I asked him about it, later. And he said he was sure, absolutely sure, that he never told me that story. He'd never heard of it. And when I thought back, I couldn’t remember it either. Him telling me, I mean. All I know is at some point, someone told me. A stranger. A stranger with my dad’s face. In my memory.”
He stopped talking, and I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I said, “Well, alright, so what? At some point as a kid you heard this story, it freaked you out, but you grew up. It’s a campfire story. You heard it at scouts maybe. Where are you going with this?”

“Well, you were the first person I ever talked to about the puppet. And not long after I shared that story with you, I started getting these cramps. In here,” he said, placing his right hand on his stomach. “Me and L_____ were together, I was at the law firm, she was teaching, it was all going great.  I got this weird feeling one day, like I was on the edge of sick. It would go away for a while, but it always came back. I grew to expect it. And it started getting worse, so I went to the doctor, and he prescribed me,” – R_____ stopped suddenly, with a snort of laughter – “he prescribed me heartburn medicine. And you know, it worked for a while. The feeling went away.”

“And so life went back to normal. I was promoted at the firm. L_____  got pregnant. We had a kid. And then last year I started having these dreams.”  He stopped to sip his drink. I noticed his hand was shaking. “In the first dream, I was sitting up in my bed. As if I had just woken up. But I knew I was dreaming. At the end of my bed was the puppet. I had never seen it before, but I knew – I knew – it was the one from the story. A ventriloquist dummy. It was facing away from me with its head lolling to the side. And it had this smell – like rotting meat. Its clothes were covered in patches of white mold. The room was dark, but it was lit up by a weird gray light at the same time. The light was wrong. The bed was wrong. The walls were wrong. You were there – “
“Clothed, I hope,” I said.
“You were standing in the corner of the room. And L_____ and my kid C_____  were with you. You all looked scared. You were so, so scared. And because you were scared, it made me scared too.” He looked up at me, and I could see tears in his eyes. “Like you’re scared now,” he said.
“Yes, I’m scared,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “I’m scared because I didn’t see you for eight years and now you’ve cut your finger off and apparently gone crazy.”
“No,” he said. “I mean the fear in your stomach. You feel it too, don’t you? You know what I mean.”
I didn’t say anything to that, and he continued.

“After I dreamed about the puppet for the first time, the sick feeling came back, worse than ever, and the medicine didn’t help this time. I got more medicine, harder stuff. Antipsychotics eventually. But the dreams continued. For example: I was back at university, standing in front of a giant lecture hall. And I was debating with that asshole V_____ and killing it. And then the light changed. The light coming through the windows was gray. The walls didn’t meet the floor at right angles anymore. I looked back at the seats and I already knew what I was going to see. V_____ was gone. Everyone was gone. The whole hall was empty. But he was there. The puppet. He was sitting on an empty seat right at the back. The same suit, the same smell. Head tilted, always facing away from me. And the hall – it was the size of a football stadium, a colosseum. But for some reason, despite sitting so far away, it was as if he was right next to me. Every fiber of his suit was distinguishable, every line in his carved hair. The wood of his head was dark – polished walnut was my first thought – but I knew immediately I was wrong. What I was looking at was prehistoric. And the lights were going out. The university halls always had timed lights. I knew that if the lights went out, and I was still in that room with him, in the dark, he’d turn his head around and show me his face. And I sprinted for the door, my running completely useless, like it always is in a nightmare, and the lights grew dimmer, and dimmer, until all the shapes around me were just silhouettes. But I could still see him. I knew that once he turned his head, and I perceived that face…then…”

“Then what?” I said. But he only shook his head and looked down.

“Your finger, why’d you cut off your finger?” I said gently.

“I told my son about him,” he said, his voice cracking. “I had to; the puppet made me. Each time I dreamed, it was facing me a little more. First, I could discern the corner of the puppet’s nose, then his eyesocket. And eventually, his head had turned so much, that I knew the next time I slept, I’d be able to see half of his face. His eye would be looking into mine. The medicine stopped working, and talking to my wife stopped working. I confided everything to her. She was helping me. She found this great psychologist, she – she was so good to me, she was perfect – but that face. The puppet was going to show me his face. Can you possibly understand? The terror? It was like Moses with the burning bush, there are some things we can’t look at. We just can’t. And the only thing I could do was tell my son. And I did. I told him the puppet story. And when I finished the story, he was scared and confused and he said ‘And then they found the little boy, didn’t they daddy? And they went into the cupboard and got him?’ and I looked at my son and told him no, they didn’t.”

R_____ burst into tears. I sat there awkwardly, not knowing at all what to do. My friend had something wrong with him, that was clear. Some kind of neurosis, schizophrenia, psychosis, whatever the hell it was. And obviously he’d got to the point of self-harm and his wife had been overwhelmed and left, and since then…God knows what he’d been doing. God knows why he’d called me of all people. I looked around the bar. The bartender was still wiping glasses, and the young people were setting up their microphone on the small stage. They didn’t pay any attention to the bawling man in the booth.

I reached out gingerly and placed a hand on R_____’s shoulder. He sniffled then pointed at my beer, which I’d barely touched. “Can I have that?” he said. “Sure,” I said, handing it to him. He downed the entire bottle in one draught and wiped a hand across his eyes. I wondered briefly if he was an alcoholic. I was totally shaken and upset. This broken, pathetic man had nothing in common with the bright young law student I had befriended, except he had his face – slack, worn out, and lined. Lined like wood, I thought morbidly.

He continued his story. “L_____ wanted to know why our son was crying, and why he couldn’t sleep. When he told her about the puppet, she figured it out. She was furious with me. She wouldn’t talk to me, she just looked at me like she didn’t know me. And in bed she turned her back on me. That night I had a new dream, the worst yet. I was a kid again. I was in school. I got sent to the principal’s office. The door to the office swung open, and I went inside. And of course, the puppet was there. Facing away from me. And this time he spoke to me. A low, croaking voice, rasping out of this ancient wooden thing. The springs and wood in his throat were creaking, and his little carved teeth were clacking. It reminded me of when my dog went rabid – you remember that – at first, he was just rolling back and forth, over and over, compulsively. Well, the puppet talked like my dog played. Gibberish. Random words. “Circle, circle, dot, dot.” Then the nonsense cohered into weird, formal speech. Like he was reading from a book. And he said: ‘your physics has come to understand that a thing cannot be separated from the act of perception’. Just that. He said ‘Once there was an animal, a kind of ape, the weakest in nature. But it was strong in spite. It was strong in malice. It was strong in cunning. And one day, it perceived something nature did not intend it to perceive. It came to know something no other animal knew.” And the puppet said: “I want you to remember that.’”

“When I woke up the next morning, I heard my wife screaming from the other room. Our son was gone. Of course he was. And of course we hunted for him, and there was the police, and the rescue effort. And of course he had disappeared, like the boy in the story, without a trace. I knew where he had gone. My wife didn’t, but she knew I was to blame. I will never forget the hatred with which she looked at me. The things she said. Because she knew the wolf had come knocking at our door. She didn’t know how, exactly, but she knew the wolf had come knocking at our door, and I – had given our son to it. Out of cowardice, I had given up my own son as a sacrifice.”

“It kept visiting me, its head was turning each time, still turning towards me. But I told myself that this time I’d face it. This time, I’d have the strength to stare it down. I would be strong. For my son. Eventually came the night that it turned its head halfway, and it stared into my eye. I saw the perfect black hole drilled into its wooden eye. And it told me that we were running out of things to sacrifice to it. It addressed me as “you”, but it meant “mankind”. It said, ‘As I colonized your mind, I colonized your environment. You began to build things, geometric forms, and to prostrate yourselves before them. As you came to know me, as I unfolded myself through your history, you grew in power over your fellow animals. So you forgot life, and you worshipped me. The space between the stars. The space between the bird's wings. The painted shadow of the animal. Your eyes made me real.'"

“I tried to talk to my wife about it. I tried to tell her what it was saying to me. She would not hear. She screamed, she struck me, she threw my diploma, our son’s soccer trophy, and she tore off her wedding ring and threw that too. She told me I deserved to go to hell. That night the puppet visited me again, and his head was still turned halfway and his eye still stared into mine. And his wooden head was carved with its fixed grin, and he was twitching, as if to say: "at any moment". At any moment, he might violently snap his head around and show me his face. I didn’t say anything to him. I made the choice with my heart – a falling, a plummeting sensation. Like nausea. The next morning, my wife had disappeared. I woke up to find her suitcase half-packed. There were divorce papers on the table, which she had started to sign, and suddenly stopped, the ink trailing violently off the page. Something had forced her, pulled her away from the page. There was a wardrobe in that room, incidentally.”

“In dreams it kept talking to me, and it kept turning its head. I kept finding things to delay it. I gave it my security – left home, took to the streets. I gave it my finger with the ring still attached. And it kept talking. In this horrible verbose way. Words clacking, winding, creaking out of it, endlessly, out of the wooden throat. It said ‘You are running out of things to sacrifice. You started with cattle, then children, and through agonizing ages by degrees you escalated to God sacrificing God to himself. Now you must sacrifice something more. Your twentieth century had significance. Significance. Significance. When you created the concentration camp, you created the concentration camp universe. The Swastika, the Hakenkreuz, it represents Samsara, the breaking wheel of existence. The Hooked Cross was your millennium's Crucifixion.'”

It said, “The instant mankind perceived me, I perceived you, and I left my mark on you. That which I marked will sacrifice.”

It said, “There are things in man's future undreamt by man.”

“I’ve heard enough,” I said abruptly, standing up. “You’re sick,” I said. “Do you hear yourself? You’re talking like – like a teenage boy talks about philosophy. Like a heavy metal album cover, monster of the week. Real adolescent shit. It’s laughable, really. I suppose you’re about to sacrifice me, too? To this demon, whatever it is?”

“No,” he whispered.

“No?” I said, grinning fiercely. I really did feel sick now, the queasy feeling had spread; I felt feverish and dizzy. “No?”

“I sacrificed you ten minutes ago,” he said. “When you sat down. I pointed out the window, and you saw its face. Now you’ve seen it, and it’s seen you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I laughed. “For God’s sake. Do you hear yourself? I mean actually hear yourself?”

“Look around you. This world belongs – has always belonged – to the puppet," he said. "The animals tear away at each other. The humans tear away at each other. Everything is tearing away at everything else – forever. Chaos at feast. Our history on this earth is not a history of love, but of war and sacrifice. Our so-called intelligence is a joke. We are turning the rivers into grey water and the land into desert. We are the latest extinction event to befall this world. It’s right in front of you. It's not trying to hide. We are the ones trying to hide from it. Look around.”

“Like rabies makes a dog twitch," he said, "this thing in our brains makes us act the way we do. We live in the vain hope that when it finally takes us, maybe it won’t be so bad, that we can die as Americans or as Christians or as Humans instead of as what we actually are – nameless beings dying alone in eternity, stamped with the puppet’s mark.”

I just stood there shaking my head. “It’s too bad,” I said. “You know, I wanted to help you, that’s why I stayed and listened. But it’s obvious you’re utterly insane. I feel sorry for you. Don’t you know I’m your friend? That I’m on your side? And you say you’ve ‘sacrificed’ me. I guess I can see you for what you are. I can see why your wife left you – did you hurt her? Did you hurt your son? I don’t know and I don’t care. Whatever’s happened to you is punishment enough. You’re alone.”

He looked at me with real hatred then, and rolled up his sleeve, and I could see his left arm was wooden. A badly made prosthetic. I hadn’t seen the wooden hand; he’d kept it in his lap the whole time. He moved his leg, and I saw one of them was prosthetic too. “Oh Jesus Christ,” I said, doubling over as a fresh wave of nausea hit. “What have you done? Oh Jesus Christ.”

The nausea passed. Gasping, I put a hand on the booth and pushed myself upright. “I’m not hearing another word,” I said, and staggered towards the exit. The bartender was gone, and the young people had finished setting up their act. They were gone, too. On the small stage was a microphone, no instruments. The microphone was placed next to a stool. Sitting cockeyed on the stool was a puppet, an expertly carved ventriloquist dummy. It was facing away from me.

That’s when I started to laugh, and turned on my heel. “Oh, I get it! Not funny! Not funny at all!” I said, stalking towards him. He whined, tried to squirm away from me, but I hauled him up and belted him across the face, repeatedly, until his mouth was a red bleeding hole and teeth littered the floor. “Where’s the candid camera, huh? What’s this, a fake arm?” I said, tugging at the wooden arm. It came loose with an awful soft crunching sound, and I threw it to the ground in disgust. R_____ was crying, blood and snot running down his face, right hand pressed to the stump of his left arm. I suddenly dropped him, jumping back, as if he were a cockroach I had found crawling on my hands. He collapsed to the ground, scrabbling for his scattered teeth, and crawled, shuddering, towards the stage.

I brushed down my shirt, brushed my hands through my hair, breathed deeply, and walked out into the empty lot. I did not glance at the stage, or at R_____ again. I got in my car, started the engine, and I drove away. The light from the setting sun had a grayish quality that made the sky look like TV static.

I walked into my apartment and dropped the keys on the counter. I washed my hands twice. I didn't know what to do. The sick feeling remained. I sat in front of the television and turned it on – the Nature channel. Apparently, certain trees had stopped absorbing carbon dioxide, we didn’t know why, and scientists were panicking. “Very relaxing. Just the thing to improve my mood,” I muttered, and had to laugh. I changed the channel. Five-year-old girls stabbed to death by a Jihadist in England – I laughed again. It burst out of me. I couldn’t control it at all. I changed the channel. In Palestine, little kids had been playing football when the bombs fell. Their arms and legs were scattered across the pavement like a doll's limbs. I laughed at the limbs. I laughed at the murdered girls. I laughed at the suffocating trees. I laughed until I cried.