From the moment she
was finished, shoved in a box, and buried under a shower of styrofoam
peanuts, Bertie Rathbun understood that through some accident of God
she had been given a soul. As she had been dangled in the air at the
inspection station, and as her strings were jerked each in turn,
jiggling Bertie’s head, hands, arms, legs, and feet against her
will, she had caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the eyeglasses
of the woman who would initial the packing slip signaling her
completion.
Bertie was alarmed
not only by what she had seen reflected in the woman’s glasses, but
also by the fact that she could see anything at all.
Something
had happened, and though she was not quite sure what had
happened, Bertie thought that whatever it was had occurred earlier in
the afternoon when one of the detailers in finishing –a small,
stooped, and melancholy Japanese man who was nearing retirement–
had bent over her, puffed his warm breath three times directly into
her face, and then buffed her painted features with a soft rag.
The little man had
then held Bertie Rathbun before him in his outstretched arms, and
with an expression of great sadness on his face addressed her in a
quiet voice. What the man said to Bertie, before he carried her into
the next room and hung her on a metal rack alongside dozens of other
puppets, was this: “Such a pity, little one.”
And in that man’s
warm breath, and in his strange, inscrutable statement –somewhere
in that series of moments– Bertie’s soul had entered her body.
Perhaps,
even, it was not Bertie Rathbun’s soul at all, but the soul of the
old man, or a seed from his soul that he planted in her empty chest
or head. Bertie didn’t know a thing about souls; she didn’t even
know anything about knowing,
but it would later occur to her that somehow she’d been given that
old man’s broad ignorance and disappointments, his longings and
desires and badly faded dreams, dreams that would appear to Bertie as
dim and fleeting images on an almost translucent screen.
No sooner was Bertie
Rathbun folded up in the darkness of her box and she began to feel
the first fierce stirrings of resentment at her fate. She hated the
very idea that she was a puppet; even worse was the realization that
she was being sent out into the world as the most hopeless and
hackneyed of all-purpose metaphors.
Bertie also recalled
with horror that glimpse of her own reflection: she had absolutely no
idea what sort of puppet she was supposed to be. Was she a mouse? A
little boy bear? A kitten? Perhaps, even, a wingless bat?
Like all puppets
that have been cursed with consciousness from time immemorial, Bertie
Rathbun dreamed of autonomy, of free will, of a life unfettered by
her cursed strings and her dependence on the hands and whims and
attention spans of complete strangers. Bertie wanted to play the
bongo drums and dance of her own volition and, regardless of what
sort of creature she was supposed to be, she wanted to live in a hole
in a river bank, ride about in boats, and sleep in a luxurious
four-poster bed.
All of these
thoughts went through Bertie Rathbun’s head during the many days
she spent smothered in the darkness of her box and being jostled
about and then, eventually, dangled and jerked around in a store full
of other bright and noisy toys.
A fat and smiling
woman finally purchased Bertie Rathbun one day and took her home and
hung her from a fireplace mantle alongside a glowering nun and a
stern gladiator, both of which were clearly as devoid of feeling and
soul as the leering nutcracker displayed on the ledge above them.
The next morning a
little boy came down the stairs and squealed with delight when he saw
the puppets hanging above the fireplace. Bertie watched as the boy
first took down the gladiator and swung him around the room
gracelessly, tangling his strings and then letting him drop in a heap
to the floor. She saw the boy crouch to remove the giant sword from
the gladiator’s fist, and Bertie felt a spasm of hope and
excitement jigging in her chest.
With her eyes Bertie
Rathbun tried to implore the boy to cut her strings and set her free.
And then she watched with horror as the little boy took the
gladiator’s sword and, rather than cutting Bertie’s strings,
plunged it directly into, and through, the neck of the nun.
The
nun did not make a sound or shed a single tear, but slowly at first,
and then in a bright torrent, blood began to stream from the wound in
her neck and started to drip, drip, drip down to the fireplace
hearth, entirely unnoticed by the little boy, who had moved on to
play with the other toys that were splayed beneath the Christmas
tree.
And at that moment
Bertie Rathbun watched as the translucent screen on which the old
man’s dim dreams were displayed in her head went entirely blank,
and she felt her soul leave her body.
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