"Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page."
-Borges and I, Jorges Luís Borges
There is another man who wears my name. He waits now in the corner, almost invisible, but not quite. To the unwary eye he resembles the paper flowers that adorn the wall, those cheery yellow petals that stare back at me unwittingly, but his eyes are jade daggers and are so very sharp amid the sunflowers.
He's looking at me now, watching me through those twin stars that dance behind his wallpaper disguise. His dark-clad arms are crossed and a frown graces his pale and sharp features. I don't think he trusts the pen in my fingers or the glances I send desperately toward him. I can't say I blame him—in the end I don't trust him either.
He calls himself Fakir, but he is referred to by other names as well. He is the writer, the story spinner, the judge, the editor, and sometimes he's Drosselmeyer. Like death, he waits patiently in black, a cloak thrown over his thin shoulders, the sword casually waiting beside his crippled writing hand. Just in case things don't go according to plan.
He's not watching me, of course: he's watching the girl. I'm only there by association. I'm the problem, the word that needs to be edited out—except he can't quite bring himself to do it because it would ruin the tone of the piece. Such a pity to have to start over again when it was all turning out so beautifully.
She's sleeping now. Her red hair spills across my chest; her eyes close delicately. I trace the scars of raven's claws across her back and I wonder what shape the ink made when it formed the words that tore her flesh. Her soft blue eyes have closed and for a moment there is no pain, no loneliness, no death and no hope of salvation. There is only her in my arms and the writer, careful eyes tracking her from across the room.
She doesn't see him. Her blue eyes skip past him, wander over him, although she claims to have seen him once. She often does that, though—she becomes lost in her own rewritten world and in the fog steps over what she should have seen in the beginning. It's not her fault that she doesn't see the inevitable in an invisible man's yellow-feathered pen.
I remember the first time I saw her—how my eyes slid over her scars and her fear, slid over her red hair and her terrified eyes. I walked past her, around her, as if she was only a cog in the great machine that whirred above my head. She was only a word in a story, then, a scattering of yellow light (yellow flowers) painted upon the academy walls.
She stumbled into the practice room. The eyes were upon her like ravens on a corpse. She stood amid the sea of unfamiliar faces, a duck out of water, drowning in their curiosity and indifference. Dangling from her neck there was a blood red pendent, like the egg of the firebird streaking across the sky; it glowed in the sunlight and lit the terrified sea trapped in her eyes.
She said her name was Duck and that she wanted to dance. She didn't say anything else, but like a third eye, the necklace caught the light dutifully and stared at the crowd until they were amazed into silence.
She faded then, a wobbling, weak-legged girl with desperate, pale hands and a hesitant smile. I danced past her and around her, seeing nothing of her face or her eyes, seeing only the clumsy legs ahead of mine. It was only at the end that I saw her eyes.
She stood, staring at the prince and the princess, Mythos and Rue, the dove and the raven in each other's arms. There was a stillness in her that spoke of eternity. The bottom of a well in which a stone is dropped, where one stands and can only see the ripples on the edge as the stone sinks into the shadows—that depth of stillness. In her eyes was the reflection of her heart being torn in half by casual indifference; their blue reflected the emptiness that accompanies a lake covered in fog.
Like hastily written words that bleed into the page, she ran from the room. The expression was forgotten. Although I did not see him then, I now know that in the corner the writer stood, and that his dagger eyes followed the sunlight trapped in her necklace as it travelled westward beyond his sight. I know, too, that he then followed her, the firebird, across the night sky, following the trail of golden feathers she had left behind.
I noticed her through repetition. The Prince and the Raven trapped in her hands, her legs shaking terribly, her blue eyes watching in horror as her world was ripped away from her. Repetition, repetition, repetition drew my eye to the black-feathered duck. She was positively covered in ink, if I had ever bothered to look.
She is three women, my Duck.
I saw her, the swan, a red shard of glass trapped in her hand. It cut its way into the abyss in the prince's chest. He screamed in agony, she smiled gently, and I watched by the lake. There was no darkness in her—only white light and the red blood of the prince's queen of hearts. But when she turned to me, in her eyes a raven took flight.
I saw her, the raven, her toe shoes painted black, watching enviously as the prince took his Rue by the hand and danced with her in the candlelight night. She followed them, a shadow against the wall, scattered light amid the stars. There was only the fire and the blood, nothing of heaven, nothing of love. I saw her and she turned to me. I knew that she saw past my haggard existence and straight into my withered soul.
"I'm really just a crow (I'm really just a duck)," she tells me when only I am there to listen, "but sometimes I don't feel like a crow (duck). Sometimes I wake up and I feel normal, but then I look at them and I know… It hurts, sometimes."
It was only natural that I should confront her, dangerous as she was, with her black (pink) toe shoes and her white (red) form. She held the book in her hands, the unfinished novel, and she smiled as if she had been expecting me all along. Her hair was tied back in its usual braid and in her form there was no hint of swan or raven, only the girl with her bright blue eyes. She clashed with the library, not belonging to the world of words or fables; her bright hair was too full of sunshine for such a dreary home. (Outside the crows sat upon the windowsill and in the cedar limbs with glittering eyes and hungry smiles.)
Duck, you do not belong in my world.
"You're Tutu and you're the raven," I said to her. She nodded to one and denied the other with a shrug. Both motions were casual, almost as if they require no thought, no tortured confession. To her they were merely words, words that were written in some other world by a man with eyes like the lake of despair.
"You're the knight, but you're the writer too," she said with a wistful smile, as if that explained everything (it explained nothing). She closed the novel then. The raven and the prince grinned at me brightly from the cover; the princess was nowhere in sight. I am not on the cover either, although I have searched there for my torn flesh.
"What are you trying to say?"
Her eyes glittered then, like the crow's when it has spied something strange, some fallen star amidst the weeds. She was not smiling, but rather her expression drew inward; all the while her eyes danced like words in the furnace—words being burned alive. "You don't remember?"
"No, and I don't enjoy being riddled with." I paused, then, my mind trapped by the fleeting light of some other world in her eyes. "I don't particularly care what you want with Mythos, but I need you to know that whatever you intend, I will stop it. Don't stand in my way."
I realized her words too late. Now all I can see is my own cruel reflection beside the lake with a red pendant in his hand.
She then told me her story, her hands guiding her words through the air, her eyes lighting in the right places and darkening in others. She had been born the deformed daughter of the raven, and she was his greatest disappointment. No one could love her, because how could anyone love anything that had two (four) faces? There was only the prince, the prince who loved everyone (no one)—only he could stand to kiss Janus on the cheek.
"He didn't, though. Father lied. He does that sometimes, when he thinks it's funny or when I'm not listening. The prince doesn't love anyone, but if he did, it wouldn't be me. When the prince looks at her, at Rue, it's like there's nothing else in the world. I don't exist anywhere, not at home, and not there. For the prince, I'm not even real." The girl's hands paused here, as if searching for some distant phrase or drifting over the bottom of an abyss. She sighed, then, and looked at Fakir with eyes that seemed terribly old.
"It doesn't matter, though. Without his heart he's not real, either." She shrugged again; her thin shoulders rose and fell slightly.
Her other words were drowned out by the cawing of the crows.
The crows followed her, tormented her. Outside of the practice room they waited patiently, their talons aching for her swan's blood. She danced and danced, her feet bleeding, but always the crows waited and she didn't leave. She had no place left to go.
I took her into my home because she needed my help, she needed the knight. Then I knew who had given her that pendant, although she had never told me. I know whose words traced the scars her father's crows had torn into her flesh. I know, too, whose feet echo hers in the pas de deux she dances beside the lake.
I do not know what tragedy befell her, before his words warped reality. Perhaps it was winter that stripped her of her wings, left her frozen in the snow before his feet. Perhaps it was the bullet of a gun, an eager hunter who could not hear his screaming. Perhaps she simply left, and he found himself alone in the dark with the machinery of his own writing ticking in his head.
I pick up the pen for him, for her, not for myself. I pick it up for that other Fakir, because he is spiriting her away even as I write. I see his ending now, the girl who is loved by no one, a fallen star, a firebird streaking across the sky. Her father has abandoned her, in her prince's fantasy she is only dust and scattered light—but to the writer she is everything. She takes his hand and she leaves this world (she leaves me) and she smiles for the first time in her life, all the scars forgotten, the weariness and the hatred gone. Only their eyes, like stars…
I write, but as I write I realize that I too am creating a story in which I am reflected. In creating her I create myself: I create another Fakir who will cling to her with all his might. The words are the walls of the labyrinth, twisting and changing as each Fakir picks up his pen in defiance of the fate proposed by the other.
I then know that this Fakir, this author beside me, is not the first just as I am not the last. My image is cast across infinity and eternity.
In the twilight of the room my hand stalls.