The Jester's Confession

ACT I

The fog rolled down Blackfriars Road like a living thing, thick and yellow and smelling of coal smoke and river rot. Arthur Blackwood watched it press against the basement window from his perch on the wooden crate that served as his armchair. Fifty-two sets of painted eyes stared back at him from the shelves, the table, the floor. Fifty-two paper faces, each one wearing a different suit of colours—red hearts, diamond shapes, club leaves, spade points.

He poured tea into fifty-three cups. His was always the coldest, because it was the last.

'You're late, Arthur,' said the Heart Seven. Or rather, Arthur said it for Heart Seven, because Heart Seven could not speak. Heart Seven was made of burlap and straw and a porcelain doll's head that Arthur had bought from a junk shop in Seven Dials for three halfpence.

'I know, I know,' Arthur replied, taking his own seat at the head of the table. 'The fog was particularly thick tonight. Nearly took the gas lamp off its hook.'

He ate his cold bread and cheese in the company of fifty-two silent listeners. This was how it had been for seven years. Seven years since the sea gave him back to London, broken and hollow and full of nothing but time. Seven years since he had decided that silence was too heavy a burden for one man to carry alone.

The basement smelled of damp wood and old cloth and the faint sweet rot of straw. Gaslight flickered across the fifty-two faces, making them seem to breathe, to shift, to lean forward in their various degrees of attentiveness. Arthur had named them all. He knew which ones tilted their heads when he spoke of his voyages, which ones seemed to close their eyes when he spoke of things he preferred not to name.

A clock somewhere above him chimed midnight. The fog outside thickened until the window was nothing but a pale wall.

'Another night, another voyage,' Arthur said to the room. And the room, as it always did, said nothing back.

But then—

'Why do you build them?'

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. It was Arthur's voice, but younger, sharper, stripped of the salt-corne erosion that had worn his real voice down to a rasp. It was the voice of a boy who had not yet learned to swallow his questions.

Arthur froze. His bread hung halfway to his mouth.

'Who said that?'

The fifty-two faces said nothing. They never did.

'Not them,' the voice said. It was coming from inside his own skull now, clear and cold as a winter stream. 'Me. The one who stays behind when you go out and buy more cloth and more stuffing and more painted faces.'

Arthur set down his bread. He looked at the Spade King, the closest to him on the lower shelf. The painted smile looked different tonight. Meaner. Knowing.

'You're not real,' Arthur whispered.

'No,' said the voice. 'I'm worse. I'm the only real thing in this room.'

ACT II

It happened every night after that. The voice would come when the gas burned low and the fog pressed closest against the glass. It had no name, but Arthur began to think of it as the Jester, because it always sounded like it was smiling, and because it reminded him of the court jesters he had seen in paintings—cap and bells, allowed to speak truths no one else could bear to speak.

'Why fifty-two?' the Jester asked on the third night.

'Because that's how many I could afford,' Arthur said aloud, though he knew the answer was a lie.

'You could have made one. Or ten. Why fifty-two?'

Arthur did not answer. He was sorting the cups, arranging them by花色, and his hands were busy.

'Because you needed an army,' the Jester said. 'Not friends. Not family. An army. Because one voice inside your head wasn't enough to drown out the real one.'

The real one. The one that had screamed when the ship went down. The one that had wept at his wife's grave. The one that had not stopped screaming or weeping for forty years of sea and back.

'You built them to replace the people who left,' the Jester continued. 'The sea took your shipmates. Death took your wife. Time took your children—they grew up and forgot about the father who smelled of salt and came home with stories they didn't believe. So you built fifty-two replacements. Red hearts for the family you lost. Diamond merchants for the men who got rich while you got nothing. Club scholars for the men who knew things you never learned. Spade soldiers for the men who fought wars you were too old to fight.'

'Stop,' Arthur said.

'I'm not done,' said the Jester. 'You think they're listening to you. You think they care about your voyages and your tea and your cold bread. But they're not people, Arthur. They're mirrors. You're talking to fifty-two mirrors, and you're calling it companionship.'

Arthur stood up so fast his chair fell over. 'Shut up,' he said. 'Shut up, shut up, shut up.'

He spent the rest of the night sweeping the floor, because sweeping gave his hands something to do and his mouth something other than silence. But even the sweeping could not drown out the Jester's laughter, which was the worst part—because it sounded exactly like his father's laughter, the man who had sent him to sea at twelve and never asked him if he wanted to go.

Weeks passed. Or months. Time in a basement with no windows is measured not in days but in the slow accumulation of fog against glass. Arthur continued his rituals. Tea at seven. Bread and cheese at eight. Stories at nine. The Jester at midnight.

He stopped sleeping. Or rather, he continued to sleep, but sleep brought no peace, because the Jester was there in his dreams too, standing at the foot of his narrow bed, smiling that terrible knowing smile, asking questions that had no answers.

'What are you afraid of, Arthur?'

'What do you want?'

'Who are you when no one is watching?'

ACT III

The end came on a night so foggy that Arthur could not see his own hand in front of his face. He lay in his narrow bed, which was really just a mattress on the floor with a layer of old coats underneath for warmth, and he felt the familiar weight of the Jester settling into his skull.

But tonight the Jester did not speak. Tonight the Jester simply opened the door.

Not the basement door—the door inside Arthur's mind that he had kept locked since he was a boy of twelve and his father handed him a ticket to Southampton and told him the sea would make a man of him whether he wanted to be made or not.

The door opened, and through it walked fifty-two figures. Not the cloth-and-straw puppets on the shelves. Real figures. Flesh and blood and the same worn faces that the puppets wore.

Heart Seven stepped forward first. She looked exactly like his mother, the way she had been before the consumption took her, when she still had colour in her cheeks and light in her eyes.

'Darling,' she said, and her voice was the voice he had not heard in thirty years.

Then Diamond Three. His first mate, Tom, who had gone down with the Mary Anne in '58, clutching Arthur's arm with dying fingers, whispering, 'Don't let go, don't let go,' and Arthur—Arthur had let go. He had let go because Tom was heavier than he looked and the waves were pulling them both under and Arthur was twenty-four and terrified and every instinct screamed one thing: survive.

'You let go,' Tom said. Not angry. Just stating a fact.

Then Club Nine. The scholar. Dr. Pemberton, who had taught Arthur to read in the dockyard school, who had said, 'You've got a mind for it, boy, if you're willing to use it.' Arthur had never used it. He had used his hands, his back, his courage, but never his mind. The mind was for scholars and gentlemen, not for dockyard boys and sailors.

Then Spade King. His father. Standing in the doorframe of his own childhood home, saying the words he had said a hundred times before: 'You'll make a man of him. The sea will make a man of him.'

One by one, all fifty-two walked through the door. Not as puppets. Not as replacements. As themselves. As the people they had been. As the people Arthur had turned them into in his head.

And Arthur understood.

They were not outside him. They had never been outside him. They had been inside all along—fifty-two pieces of himself, split off and stored away like cards in a deck, waiting for him to draw them one by one and read their meaning.

Heart was his capacity for love, which he had buried deep because love meant loss and loss meant pain. Diamond was his ambition, which he had starved because ambition meant risk and risk meant failure. Club was his intellect, which he had neglected because intellect meant responsibility and responsibility meant choosing a path and committing to it. Spade was his capacity for violence, which he had unleashed on the sea and the ships and the men who sailed with him and never once turned inward.

Fifty-two pieces. Fifty-two masks. Fifty-two colours and shapes painted over a face he had not looked at in sixty years.

And the Jester—

The Jester was the face underneath. The one that had been there from the beginning. The one that asked 'why' before it learned to swallow the question. The one that had watched him build fifty-two masks and call them friends and pretend that the masks were real and pretend that he was real underneath them, when really he was just the empty space between the masks, the blank card that held them all together.

'I see you now,' Arthur whispered.

'Good,' said the Jester. 'It's about time.'

Arthur Blackwood died at three in the morning on a fog-bound night in November of 1888. He died with a smile on his face, which startled the landlord who found him two days later, because dead men rarely smiled, and because the basement was filled with fifty-two paper-faced puppets arranged around the body like a court of judges, and all of them—every single one—were smiling too.

ACT IV

The landlord called the constable. The constable called the coroner. The coroner wrote 'cardiac arrest' on his form and went home to dinner.

The fifty-two puppets were confiscated as 'unsanitary clutter' and thrown into a cart bound for the river. The landlord sold the mattress and the wooden crate and the fifty-three teacups at a pawn shop for fourteen shillings.

On the desk in the basement, beneath a layer of dust and river damp, someone found a single playing card. It was the Joker. The card was blank on both sides. Not written on and erased—blank from the beginning.

On the back of the card, in handwriting so small it could barely be read with a magnifying glass, someone had written one sentence in a hand that trembled but was otherwise steady:

'I was here. I asked questions. That was enough.'

The card was thrown into the river with the puppets. The fog swallowed it before it hit the water.