He could unfailingly spot those who’d made a concerted effort to find him, and such was this pair, if the elder against what he thought to be better judgment. But if that wasn’t love, Hieronymus Beadle didn’t know what was. Always most touching, when they came two by two.
“Wine?” he offered, showing them the stemmed glasses ranked before the fire, glowing like purplish orbs. “There’s no place left to serve it mulled. Criminal, that. I’m forced to do it myself, but if you’ll look ‘round at the sad state of disrepair here, you’ll understand why they’re only too happy to allow me the indulgence. Cloves and cardamom, cardamom and cloves. They smooth and mellow, they round off the bite.”
“Jared,” said the skeptic. “The man’s an escapee.”
“Perhaps. But is it a true escape after the jail’s fallen to ruin? Of course not — it’s opportunity seized. Now. Seize some chairs, why don’t you? They’re not half uncomfortable.”
When they moved to sit, he leaned forward as if to shake the skeptic’s hand, catching him by surprise and clenching tight.
“Don’t mind me, just browsing,” he told the man, whose lean and startled face had begun to show the true lines of age and of character, and harder times in sorrow’s forge. “You’re possessed of a fitness mania to prolong the illusion of youth. You’ve a cat named…Voodoo, is it? whom you feel you’ve quite ignored as of late. Your favorite sexual act is mutual oral, but you’ve never bothered to dig deep enough to understand why. Shall I tell you?”
Always a treat, shocking doubters into silence.
“I’ll take that as a tacit affirmative. Somewhere very, very deep within you, the act you call sixty-nine satisfies a yearning for wholeness in creation. Reminds you of the uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. Much more apropos, I say, betwixt two men than man and woman. You’re each half the world to the other then, yes?”
“It’s like that, yeah,” he said, dry-throated, and yanked his hand free.
“How…?” said the one in need. Jared.
“Psychometry, plain and simple. A gaudy parlor trick, though, telling present and past. But the future, now, if I could only have managed that one, why, the world would’ve come to me instead of the other way around.” Hieronymus Beadle smiled, eyes crinkling above plump cheeks. “Still, here you are. You’ve met me halfway, at least. Tell me what carries you through yonder door.”
But he knew already. Spend a few weeks anywhere, and whispers inevitably churned like an undertow to draw out seekers of relief from the torments of existence. They came looking precisely like this Jared: miserable with hope, before the court of last resort.
“I take souls, gentlemen,” he began, sparing himself the need of listening to questions heard a hundred thousand times already. “I’m no devil, I wreak no sulphurous damnation. A humble peddler, am I, a tinker of flesh and spirit. A dying trade, but all I know to practice, and ironically, more needed today than ever before. I take souls. They’re never missed, for with them goes the capacity to miss them. It’s not unlike the snipping of a giant nerve that connects one to a gangrenous appendage. And just as the amputated limb may be burnt without bringing further suffering in the flames, so too will that troublesome soul wither quite on its own, unfelt. I take souls, and give peace in return.”
“And what do you do with them then?” asked the skeptic.
“None of your bloody business.”
Hieronymus Beadle sipped his wine, folded hands over belly, and watched them argue. Once he’d provided his services for kings and princes, sultans and emirs, who’d feared themselves in danger of attack by malign sorcery. They’d paid him fabulous sums for the safekeeping of the stuff of their hearts and dreams, until enemies could be rooted out and destroyed. Quite the comedown, this, for so few believed in true magic anymore, motivated only by hopes of an end to suffering. He refused to blame them. It had been a cruel century, overall.
The argument was over, and Jared unswayed.
“Can you…do it here?” he asked. “Now?”
“Good heavens, no. Don’t be absurd. Souls can’t be handed over like wallets. They can’t be stolen. They must be surrendered willingly, because they cling to the flesh they know, and must be coaxed and bullied into quitting the familiar. Rather exhausting, the process, but then, peace must often be preceded by a war.”
“And is there any other…cost?”
“To you? Oh no. The overhead’s already been paid.” Hieronymus Beadle now regarded the skeptic. “And you, sir? Is there naught I can do for you? Because if you’ll pardon my bluntness, I caught quite the potent whiff of soul’s gangrene from you, as well, a few minutes ago. Serge, was that the name? Indeed it was.”
Mr. Beadle watched him wriggle on temptation’s hook.
Some days he felt there to be no honor left in what he did, what had once been a noble trade, suffering no master but his own soul and the short-term dictates of royalty. Never had he dreamt back then that he would one day dance to corporate tunes played by wealthy pipers in their steel towers, overlooking kingdoms of rust and ruin. Serving the beasts they had created, this new generation of city fathers paid bounties in hopes of cleansing each malignant landscape of those who did not fit its dream of what it should be. Purity had always struck him as such a bland and petty goal, yet they worked so tirelessly to achieve it.
He told himself he was still providing a valuable service. In such an age as this, wasn’t one’s soul a liability, after all?
“Sweet peace, good sir?” he said to the skeptic.
“I don’t suppose you can…remove the gangrene, and leave the limb, can you?”
“I fear not. It’s to be all or nothing. Rather like severing one’s spinal cord.”
The man shook his head, as if it took some effort. So close; so very close. Still, Hieronymus Beadle was heartened to see one slip through his grasp. Hope for the future, and all.
“Go to hell,” the man said, then clung to his Jared in final appeal, which fell upon deaf ears and a heart already starting to scale.
The next morning was the first in more than two years that I woke up alone. Voodoo, curled in a black and white ball at the end of the bed, didn’t count. I’ve often envied the way cats can sleep with someone, yet still sleep alone.
I laid my hand on Jared’s side of the bed, then stood before the window, staring out at streets and signs, at other buildings and other people who stared in turn, all of us framed alone and dead-eyed in our windows like portraits left subtly incomplete.
Jared. He was out there somewhere. Or maybe he was now Jared in name only, no longer the real Jared who delighted in obscure movies and liked his chest bitten and drew apocalyptic anti-heroes making their ways through worlds that had been leveled around them by warheads or disease or neglect. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t yet come home, maybe never would. He’d become his own character.
I moved away from the window and lingered before a cluster of his sketches inspired by the title character of El Topo, the movie that had brought us together. Slim-legged, in black, wearing a rider coat that hit him above the knee, this was your archetypical wandering gunslinger, rendered in sharp, scratchy strokes of Jared’s pencil. Mostly he roamed the starkest deserts and canyons and blasted city streets. But in one he stood contorted in anguish as bullets splattered his blood onto a wall behind him, already shaded with stains from corrosive rain, while the shadow he cast upon it stood in contrast, the essence of balance and calm.
There was nothing like this in the movie, although I could guess what Jared had been drawing inspiration from: the scene in which El Topo has met the first of four Master Gunfighters, a man who can no longer be wounded because he’s learned to render his flesh impervious to gunfire.