It’s been a long while coming (our fault) but it’s here. The last three chapters of The Puppet Parade and The Man of Peace from Matt Jones. A Canadian war veteran and born-again bohemian completes his tale where PTSD and reality collide in a day in Paris.
(6 mins reading)
I told myself after the war I would lead a new life, become a man of peace, someone gentle and after ten years look – I’ve done it
Part 3
Ophelie is the beautiful freak with many tattoos and the bracelet from last night’s rave on her wrist. She’s responsible to electronically control the puppet’s wild glowing eyes and lids which should shutter with a clack.
Minutes before showtime, she’s still tinkering with the batteries, tanned forearms thrust deep into the puppet’s brain. She tells me not to stress and I think this is what she tells people when her own stress rises. She makes a phone call, plugs in a battery whose connectors slipped, and the eyes clack open on the severed head, radiating madness and eerie unlife.
I climb into the harness, strap the wide belt thrice as Ophelie holds the puppet’s arms. She tells me to “push” and somehow we make life together – I wobble to my feet and the puppet sways. The crowd, mostly delighted children, or so it sounds, is searching for the oiseau’s friend, trois tete – that’s me. But I am hidden behind hanger doors, with Ophelie melted into the shadows, and a big man with a microphone and a stick holding up his hair is re-reading his lines: he’s my voice.
Smoke machine haze trickles through the hanger doors and the crowd sounds swollen and half insane. Volunteers throw the hanger doors open; my eyes clack open and blaze with strange wisdom; my voice bursts guttural and amplified – I dance my puppet into the crowd: showtime.
Part 4
Showtime and I leap, spinning and grasping and booming. Hundreds of humans in the smoke and new night, children carried on parents’ shoulders, or squealing in joy somewhere around my kneecaps – my monster cannot be caged.
Sometimes in the crowd I see my friends and while you might expect me to feel shame, dancing like a fool under a megapuppet, I feel a burning pride.
My puppet mentor arrives, slips between my ever-clutching fingers and shouts that my light is out, a light like those that dangle from angler fish in sea-bottom depths, and I kneel my unwieldy burden like some knight of perverse creativity before his queen. After, the shadows of my grotesque face flee, the eyes clacking open with insane fire, and I shuffle and dance, giving high fives to children, running my papier mache hands over parked cards with a lover’s tender touch. Trying not to trample the elderly. Nodding to the giant serpent, the dogfish, the barnacle, the leviathan, the kraken, and the other sea beasts en route to the catfish’s trial. There will be justice and fire – I eat no children, though every fifth one gives me fear-face, nightmares come to life – this is what the monster beneath the bed looks like.
When the crowd is packed too thick to follow the oiseau, I dance. Dance with the sweeping arms and the slow spin, or extending my huge hands high on their sticks. Sometimes in the crowd I see my friends and while you might expect me to feel shame, dancing like a fool under a megapuppet, I feel a burning pride.
I told myself after the war I would lead a new life, become a man of peace, someone gentle and after ten years look – I’ve done it.
Part 5
Panting and winded at the water’s edge; Ophelie looks worried my strength will flag but I am watching the trial. The judge is an old Moses in a flowing robe, flanked by myself and the other two mega-puppets. His ancient hair whips with the strength of prophecy, mid bridge, while the crowd throngs along the shore and street – tonight the catfish will burn – its crimes are a Taliban’s Christmas list: arms smuggling, training suicide bombers, sex with a (gasp) white woman; but the list grows to include the town’s flagging economy, the need for vaccinations, aging, the pain of childbirth, the fact that joyful moments are so fleeting in the sea of pain and tedium that is life.
tonight the catfish will burn – its crimes are a Taliban’s Christmas list: arms smuggling, training suicide bombers, sex with a (gasp) white woman
We pour all our gripes and griefs into the catfish so that, when we murder it, we’ll find peace – not like the peace so many of my comrades found, taking their own lives and dropping to the ground like spent magazines. This peace helps the community endure and it’s here, at the trial, that I return to my body at last, and my body is exhausted. My arms are so sore I can barely lift my giant hands; my shoulders have cramped; my back is dead; my hips are broken; my feet and ankles are toast; and my thirst will require an entire bathtub of beer to quench. Funny, this is the moment that several people approach me with their problems, thinking that the exhausted foreigner in the giant puppet suit is obviously the one with his finger on the pulse, and I mumble about three words before the stressed-out Mom realized my brain is scrambled eggs; whereas the 10-year-old Draco Malfoy clone merely hears my accent and request that he speak slower before glaring in contempt and striding away imperiously.
Our friend Helen, the mermaid, rises to the catfish’s defence, pleading its mind was fogged by munching the radioactive wastes that we dumped in its home. She’s dressed in a shimmering suit of scales, floating on a boat, and shouting into a loudspeaker.
But the crowd is too bloodthirsty for the mermaid’s appeals. Moses raises his hands and passes judgement: banishment. The catfish will be sent down the canal, and all our sins will go with it. In one final act of defiance, its ass explodes with fireworks. The giant puppets follow the irreverent catfish as it floats along until we are stopped by the danger line. That’s when the sky bursts with harmless and multi-hued artillery, colour and sound, and I tell Ophelie my strength has waned.
She leads me away, my dance concluded. I set down my burden and became a mere man.