Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

OLD FOSS IS THE NAME OF HIS CAT by David Sandner

Old Foss watched the Old Man out barefoot in his nightshirt ranting in the rain; at least the rain had chased away the boys throwing mud and rocks. The Old Man had black stains along his back and a welt on his forehead, not that he noticed. But as night pushed over the town, growing from shadows leaning along the ramshackle red tile roofs, darkness spreading like ink across a tabletop, Old Foss knew there were worse things than rain or boys with rocks. Soon, the Jumblies would rise from the water’s edge to bring the Old Man to sea in a sieve. And anyone who goes to sea in a sieve, of course, never returns. They sink and they drown.

The rain wept against the glass as Old Foss watched impassively behind the window. The Old Man ran back and forth across the cobbled street, his long white nightshirt soaked and clinging to his ungainly frame, his paunched belly and skinny pale legs. His long bedraggled beard leaked, sloughing off water when he shook his head and bellowed: “Where is my Jumbly Girl?” The Old Man knocked on every door he came to, but no one answered for they knew the old Englishman too well.

At first, when the fugues came on, the locals had only shaken their heads at him, then argued with him in broken English or too fluent Italian, especially when the rain came up fast. They pushed him towards the villa he and Old Foss rented; but when the confusion came upon him he would only look at them uncomprehendingly, or look at their doors long after they had shut them with the oddest expression of thwarted desire, then he would wander away again and knock on another wrong door. For no one could see the Jumblies but him and Old Foss. None could know of his time with his Jumbly Girl but Old Foss and himself. Old Foss and he is how it should be for the Jumbly girl would bring him only death for all her promises. Why couldn’t he see that, Old Foss thought crossly, twitching his tail, and was it really so much as all that to love a Jumbly Girl?

The sun reflected blindingly on the sand and burst across the blue water in shimmers and rolling spots of light, like crystal broken on tile, like sparks shooting and spinning into the air from a roaring fire, like nothing the Old Man could capture on his canvas.

“It’s like nothing, Old Foss, why can’t the poets ever say that? It’s like nothing we can see or say, like something more than we can know, like less than I can rhyme and more than I can show.”

The Old Man dabbed at the canvas anyway with his paintbrushes, trying to somehow put a glimmer of white behind, between, before smears of blue. He swayed his pear-shaped body, shoved into a too-tight brown suit, frayed white cuffs showing at the wrists, coat open to display a mismatched plaid vest missing every other button; he moved from side to side considering the canvas from different angles, cocking his head with deliberation. How to capture the certain slant of light, the moment out of joint, when time pulsed below the threshold of meaning before it can be said? He took the painting off its easel, still rickety in the soft sand, and flung it end over end into the sea.

“Old Foss, what shall we do instead? What is it this moment deserves?”

Old Foss, striped orange and black, fat and with a wide full tail, lay on a red-checked picnic blanket in a way no human would ever know—stretched out backwards almost in upon himself again, only his tail’s end moving when a wind ruffled his fur, only his ears listening; he hadn’t moved for an hour. It was what Old Foss considered giving the moment its due already. When Old Foss opened his eyes suddenly it was not to answer the Old Man, but to look out to sea after the canvas. He made one mew.

“What’s that?” The Old Man turned to look, and his rotund body seemed to deflate and go limp, his mouth slack, opening in a kind of dumb wonder. The Jumblies sailed out of nothing—or from the edge of things, but too fast, sailing out of his discarded canvas, glancing off blinding light to land on the white sand beach, singing sea chanteys, and laughing too loud like prisoners before a gallows or dreamers awakened too soon from perfect dreams.

The Jumblies sailed in a sieve of glinting polished silver with holes and holes and holes that spouted water as they ran before the wind with a mast made of an upright coat-rack and a sail of fine, aged Swiss cheese stitched with red and gold thread.

“This can’t be good,” Old Foss said.

The Old Man blinked and without taking his eyes from the Jumblies said, “Why can I only sometimes understand you? Sometimes you are just a cat and other times a voice, a friend. Why is that Old Foss?”

“I am always your friend,” Old Foss said, “only you are sometimes deaf. I don’t know why.”

The Jumblies tumbled out and came galumphing up the shore all together, kicking up sand with their bootheels, until they seemed to arrive in a heap before the Old Man and Old Foss, their green gangly arms stuck out at odd angles, eyes peering from the most unlikely spaces, under elbows and over shoulders, and who was who and which was which and how many were there and how did they move all together like that were questions that could not be asked or answered so the Old Man didn’t bother. They were pea green except when they smiled, then they shifted to a kind of off blue. They smiled at the Old Man just then, bluely.

“Will you come with us,” they asked, “to the sea in our shining sieve?” They smiled in a beguiling manner with teeth half-sharpened but blindingly white, and shuffled about together in a way that made the Old Man ache with longing to belong to something as they belonged—it was a dream of empathy, that heap of blue inhumanity smiling up at him, of being so close to others that one speaks as another speaks and each knows what is meant, not something else but just that and every word, at last—finally!—meaning what it means and not so many other things, not a tragic failing off to loneliness, to war, to hunger, to darkness, to death.

“We will see such sights as never have been seen by you or any of yours. We will trade baubles with the Keepers of the sixty winds in their caverns beyond the edge of things; we will live where the Bong-Tree grows in the endless summer of the islands of the sun; we will sail beyond the stars, lifted by Phoenix birds into the sky on silver ropes held in their fiery beaks and we will tread the inky darkness until we reach the river of night and dream along its banks of unknown things. What do you say?” There was a pause. “You must say.”

“What do I say, Old Foss?” said the Old Man, never turning his eyes from them.

“They are like what should be over the horizon,” Old Foss said, “or a poem dreamed but left unfinished; they are desire and loss. Say no. Say no now and turn and run and do not look back.”

“Why not go?” the Old Man said. “I wish to, with all my art, my heart, my feet, to go with them.”

“Ah,” Old Foss said, “but a sieve will only sink and bring you certainly to a place you cannot know now, but death has been visited by others before and will be again and is common enough that we can wait until it finds us without looking for it. I think there are no dreams there.”

And the Old Man turned his head to look at Old Foss, then, and it was enough that first time to save him. For Old Foss yawned and was just a cat again. And the Jumblies were just the wind piling sand and unpiling it again back into the sea, a whisper that did not ask, will you come with us?

But when they came again only she came, the Jumbly Girl, in the night when he dreams, where Old Foss could not protect him.

Old Foss paused to wrinkle his nose for the rain he would have to endure. But he loved the Old Man, and the Old Man loved him; the Old Man had found him long ago when he was a lost kitten, and picked him up and took him in and fed him. Some debts, Old Foss reflected, are always still to be paid, no matter what we do.

He dropped to the floor and hurried to see if the front or back door has been left ajar, but no. The windows were all shut up tight for the storm. So it would have to be the hard way, to slip through a crack between here and there, to unravel the world for a moment as only cats know how to do.

I am too old for such things, Old Foss thought; too fat, he reflected, too comfortable, too tired, too selfish, too peevish, too everything.

Out of the world and back into the world again, but outside. No mean feat, Old Foss thought, even for a cat. He ran around the room, reaching out to catch at the frayed threads of the world where he could find them, pouncing, missing them as they seemed to curl around the corners of things into nothing; faster, he thought. He became wild-eyed with the pursuit, chasing the shadows of elsewhere across the hearth, up the wall, around turns that weren’t there. Soon, he was tearing as fast as he could around the room, panting with the exertion, until he disappeared.

Then he was there, like being under a rug, in a dark corridor with light poking through the frayed edges to show him where to go. He pushed through, his ears back, mewing with the work of it, until he felt, through one thin patch, the rain. It would have to do; he tore out, nearly running into a wall, running up it instead and stopping only when he reached the top—a red tile roof, wet and slick. He scrabbled for footing indecorously, caught himself, pulled himself upright and looked about, his eyes big, his heart pumping, the rain cold against his fur and already bringing forth a musty smell. He mewed forlornly with self pity.

But Old Foss from his vantage saw the Old Man receding in the distance like a wave going out at low tide. No, Old Foss thought, no, he’s headed to sea.

Old Foss began to run, clattering over rooftops after the Old Man stepping so briskly to meet only death who waited, Old Foss knew, so patient and still below the unceasing heaving of the water.

Once before the Old Man had gone to sea in a sieve with his Jumbly Girl and her eyes of jade to match her skin and her smiles like sweet heartache in blue. Her touch against his cheek was a heart stopped, her voice in his ear a thought to fill immensity. They went indeed to visit with the sixty contending winds, who traded them wine for their baubles brought out of the world, giving a manna sweet drink called Ring-Bo-Ree for little rings from the noses of pigs or unfinished paintings thrown discarded into the sea, or perhaps for the occasional runcible spoon. They sailed into the shifting thickness beyond the edge of things and were drawn into the sky by fiery birds and dreamed beside the islands of the sun and the night river. And—who knew?—sieves sink more slowly then one might suppose. At least sometimes, when the wind is right to hold them up, perhaps, or, perhaps when one moves too fast to notice one is sinking.

Old Foss had come after him, hiding in the rigging, or under the bundles to trade, watching and waiting.

And one day when the water of night came in too high and no one was left to bail it out and it was too late by far, Old Foss whispered in the Old Man’s ear as he dreamed: “Time to come home, for the water’s rising. Time to wake up, now or never. Time to dream a little less and live a little more, old friend,” and a partial payment on a debt never to be repaid was made.

“Thank you,” the Old Man said, when awake and in his bed again, “for surely I would have drowned.”

And yet, something was taken from the Old Man too, something taken that can never be returned—what the Jumbly Girl meant to him—and for that there was a new debt, never to be repaid.

“Why did you bother me,” the Old Man would say at other times, when the confusion came to him, “why didn’t you leave me to drown in peace, in bliss of other things, with my Jumbly Girl?”

For they had tried to keep him:

“Stay,” they had told him, despite the rising water, the leaking of the sieve. “Stay and dream with us.”

“Come with me,” he had said to his Jumbly Girl, “come with me and be my love; we will think of things to do to pass the time, though it will not be this—we will paint unfinished pictures by the shore and hold hands inside the rain. I will write you poems and you will tell bad jokes. It’s not this but isn’t it something?”

And she agreed to come with him, to meet him in the morning, by the shore of everything, below the sun, beside the night, where the sky birds came to draw them home by silver cords in their fiery beaks, on a raft made of fronds from the Twangum Tree; he and Old Foss waited for her to come from the sieve as it sank in the river of night, but she did not appear.

Somehow, it seemed, in stepping from the sieve to the shore to the raft, he had misplaced her; when he had turned back to hold out his hand and help her out, she was gone.

She never reappeared. And the Jumblies disappeared from the sieve with the morning light, like fog retreating into the sea, but with an ache like when you remember what you thought the world was going to be like when you were young and foolish.

“Come on, Old Man,” Old Foss had said, “the sieve is sinking fast.”

“Will I ever see her again?”

There is no answer to such questions and he offered none, but the Old Man asked it again, asked it so many times over the years that Old Foss finally said, “I’m sorry, Old Man.”

“Oh, I know, it’s all right, Old Foss.”

But it wasn’t.

Old Foss leapt from roof to roof like a young cat with nothing to lose, not a fat old cat with everything at stake. The rain had depressed him, then frustrated him, then made him ironic and bitterly elated. He sang: “How many lives, how many lives, how many more lives for the cat? At least one more, at least one more, and another one after that!” as he leapt across an alleyway and scrabbled onto the roof on the other side. When he reached the edge of town he climbed quickly, nosily, awkwardly down a drainpipe full with leaking water rushing. Leaping off the pipe, he landed badly, quickly looking around, licking his shoulder uselessly in the rain, and walking with what dignity he could muster toward the shore, his orange and black fur matted to his bulging body where it wasn’t sticking out ridiculously.

Then he saw the Old Man curled into a ball on the hill, halfway down to the beach, a white blur among the grey of water falling; Old Foss ran to him.

Old Foss whispered in his ear, “Come, Old Man. Time to come in, the water is falling fast and your nightshirt is thin.”

“She came to me in my dreams,” the Old Man shouted suddenly, his eyes opening wide and wild, “she came to me in my dreams. They’ve come again in the sieve to take me to sea.”

“This would be the last time,” Old Foss said. “Wait a little while longer and we will find ways to pass the time—painting unfinished pictures by the shore, or you can pet me by the fire when it rains, or….”

He didn’t know what to say. Could he do this to the Old Man again, take him from his Jumbly Girl?

For the Jumblies were by the shore, and the Jumbly Girl was with them. As the rain lessened they came into sight. She was leaving them and wandering up the hill, a ghost in green, her voice on the wind:

“Come with us, come to stay, and we will sail under the sea, and we will never leave but we will never want to….”

Old Foss turned away from looking at her.

I suppose you should go, Old Foss thought, I suppose you could go and I should stay for I only wanted you for myself, an old debt I will never be able to repay. He didn’t say it because it hurt too much to say it.

But the Old Man did not turn his head to look at his Jumbly Girl.

She came closer, calling again, “Come, come, come to sea, to the sieve that sinks below the waves until we drown, to the lost worlds below the sun.”

But the Old Man did not turn his head.

The Jumbly Girl stopped. “Can’t you hear me, love?”

Old Foss dared not turn to look at her again. The Old Man did not hear. He could not see. Old Foss would not give away her presence.

The Jumbly Girl stood, her body heaving, crying, Old Foss supposed, but the rain made that indeterminate. That at least was what he tried to tell himself.

The Old Man cried, too, and that he could see despite the rain, for the Old Man beat his breast and tore at his thinning hair, and pulled hard on his frumpy old beard until he pulled the hair out in uneven patches.

“I want to die,” the Old Man said, as the Jumbly Girl reached out for him with arms of green embrace, with love forever and ever for him, to death, yes certainly to death but perhaps beyond as well.

“I’m sorry I made a mistake, so long ago,” Old Foss said, “that time by the river of night, I should have let you drown. Or maybe you have with me.”

But the Old Man didn’t hear, or couldn’t listen.

Old Foss mewed piteously, wet through.

“Oh, Old Foss,” the Old Man said, “look at you, oh, you’re wet through.”

Old Foss shivered and looked to him like he had looked to him once long ago as a kitten lost in the rain.

“Come on, Old Foss, let’s go home,” the Old Man said, rising, pulling Old Foss against him, heading back up the hill. “They’re not coming after all.” He choked on the words. “They’re not here.”

The Old Man leaned over Old Foss, and Old Foss peered over the Old Man’s shoulder to see the Jumblies come in a heap to the Jumbly Girl crying on the hill. They covered her in their love, with their arms at all angles and their boots kicking out, and their eyes green compassion. They smiled a blue benediction.

“I’m sorry,” they said to the Jumbly Girl, and turning they all walked, or rolled, or shambled downhill. “I’m sorry,” they said together and held her in their arms until they vanished in rain.

“Home again soon,” the Old Man said, soothing, but tired like a drunk man sobered by sorrow on his way home again from a lost night on the town, or like a storm-tossed sailor thrown on the shore, wobbling inland to safety.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right, Old Foss.”

“I’m sorry,” Old Foss said.

“There, there,” the Old Man said, though he couldn’t hear. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t.