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Previously: Deshawn's mom will not bow to the Queen. She arrested for treason.
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The trial.
The sun, sweltering. Mother, in shackles, cast to the dirt. The Queen and her coterie, glaring from the gallery over the pavilion. Deshawn and father, heads bowed in shame, off to the side with other commonfolk. A minstrel, playing ominous music on his lute.
The Sheriff of Nottingham, high-booted and dressed in black, circling Deshawn's mother, kicking up dust. "And what have you to say for yourself, you impudent wretch!"
Mother stared up, defiant. "You fuckers can expect to hear from my lawyer."
The Sheriff and his henchpeople laughed. "A lawyer you say?" The Sheriff rubbed his bulging belly above the belt. "There will be no lawyers for traitors such as thee!"
"Yea!" shouted a loyal subject from the crowd, "The only law in England is the Queens law!"
Deshawn found himself nodding.
The Sheriff bellowed: "I will give the accused one final chance: What do you have to say in your defense?"
"Queen Elizabeth wasn't even alive during the same time as the Legend of Robinhood!"
"Dissidence! Sedition!" the Sheriff howled. "She calls for the death of the Queen and invokes the name of a known insurrectionist!"
Members of the crowd covered their mouths, touched their faces in distress, hollered insults.
"My Lord in Heaven," Deshawn muttered under his breath, eyes closed. "I pray to you that mother cease this evil speech."
Snap out of it! That's your mom up there! yelled some distant part of Deshawn. It tried to remember what it had read online about the post-Opening phenomenon of genre-possession. That phrase genre possession...what did it mean?
At this thought, a man in the gallery snapped his head toward Deshawn. His eye gleamed, as if Deshawn's mentation had somehow instilled a recognition in this man. Had Deshawn made his acquaintance previous? The man was younger than others above, perhaps 25. He wore an odd hat.
Oh. He was the court jester. He had a dark complexion. And his hair was odd for England: shaved on the sides, and orange toward the top, where it poked out amidst the bells of his jester's cap. Had not Deshawn seen this man before?
Ah, but of course. He was reminiscent of the herald from earlier. Perhaps the two were brothers. Still staring at Deshawn, the man whispered something to the Queen.
Terror shot through Deshawn.
"Father, we should go."
Father shook his head grimly. "Your mother may be treasonous, but we must stand strong for her."
"No, father, you don't understand."
"Quiet, son."
The Queen stood, preparing herself to speak. But not before her jester could whisper one final thing in her ear. The Queen nodded, then addressed the Sheriff. "Good Sheriff! Before the trial proceeds, my jester would like to give a brief performance."
"A performance? Now?" The Sheriff frowned. "But justice must be served!"
"And justice shall be served. But on such a macabre occasion, a performance would please me greatly."
"Very well, the––"
"Tah dah!" The jester had leapt out of the gallery and somersaulted onto the ground. He now held out his hands, as if to cue his audience. "They call me Saint Lenny. Did you hear what I said? I said...tah dah! It's all a trick! Now you clap for me!"
The audience was silent.
The jester turned to the commonfolk. He nodded to someone in the audience. A freckled woman to Deshawn's right began to clap. Then The Queen began to clap. Then the entire audience followed. The freckled woman clapped harder. The audience now clapped and hooted. Their clamor grew until it was riotous.
"Shhh! Be quiet!" the jester gestured, with one finger to his mouth.
The crowd went silent again. Except for the minstrel, who played a happy tune on his lute.
"Lutey, shhh."
The luteplayer stopped.
"Now clap!"
They clapped.
"Now shhh."
They stopped.
"You see! You're all lemmings! All little lemmings!" Abruptly he turned, the bells on his cap jingling. "Isn't that right? Aren't they lemmings?"
The jester was staring straight at Deshawn. Deshawn felt as if light passed between their pupils, like a white-flamed torch dropped through a hall of mirrors. For a moment, Deshawn and the jester shared some sort of understanding, though Deshawn didn't know what. Slowly, Deshawn nodded. He became aware once more that he was wearing strange clothing. In fact, many of the commonfolk were wearing strange clothing. But somehow these commonfolk, and even these assembled lords and ladies in the gallery...they were all different than Deshawn and this man, the jester. The two of them were somehow other.
The jester winked and then addressed the crowd. "Beautiful lemmings. How can I blame you, you beautiful lemmings? These are chaotic times, are they not? Mmm yes, nod little lemmings. We all agree."
The jester pulled loose a bell from his hat. He shook it, but it made no sound.
"These are chaotic times! And what is more comforting in chaotic times than something to follow? And what better to follow than an entire world? A complete world! A world like this one! Wouldn't we prefer it to be real rather than fantasy? This is a nice, simple world. In this world our roles are clear. You, my Highness, are the imperious and graceful Queen. Yes, you have a land to rule, and conspirators to thwart, and daughters to marry away to foreign lands, all very complicated and taxing but – still! – you know exactly what you must do."
The jester bowed to The Queen. She nodded uneasily.
"And you lot, you are the dastardly villains!" The jester wiggled his fingers with mock menace at the Sheriff's men, who wore red and black.
"I protest!" yelled the Sheriff of Nottingham.
"Why protest? In another life, you could have been a floundering actor, starved for work, with a yearly dress-up festival furnishing your sole source of meaning! Be glad you are a villain instead! At least a villain knows what things to do, yes?" The jester counted them off his fingers. "A villain: schemes; murders, blackmails; tortures; bribes; spies – yes? A villain knows what it means to succeed! Simply get more power and you win! Be glad you weren't born in an age where no one knows what it means to succeed."
The Sheriff stood dumbfounded. He looked up to the Queen for guidance. But the Queen merely blinked.
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"And you, over there, you are the humdrum commonfolk. You may think you have it the worst, yes? You are neither hero nor villain, neither chancellor, nor treasurer, nor cardinal. No role to play! That's what you might think. But you've been blessed with the best role of all: the role of no role. What's expected of a commoner? What path, what purpose, what position are you supposed to aspire to? None at all! Just live your life! You are expected to be, to toil, to pray, and to die.
"Imagine if you lived in a different time where perhaps not even death was guaranteed? Where every day brought new decisions: Who will I be? Who will I become? What am I to believe about the nature of the world?
"Imagine being born into a time where everyone needed to concoct their own custom answers to the all the big questions! Where to live? What profession to enter? Who to call 'family?' What to eat? Whether to be man or woman or neither? What cultures to join? Should I have children? What religion or political ideology should I place my faith in?
"You might just go mad in such a time! You might see everyone around you going mad! You might see millions of people yearn to pitch themselves down the holes of distorted worldviews, of strange escapist fantasies – anything to gain some certainty! Be thankful, commonfolk, for here, in England, under Her Majesty's reign, all of your questions have been answered!
"And – last but least – you, reader! Oh, to disappear within the words of a serial novel. To, for a moment, inhabit a fictional scene instead of your own muddled self. All you need to do right now is to read the next word. What glorious hypnosis!"
Members of the audience looked confused.
"Sorry, got ahead of myself. Another trick?"
The jester removed some juggling balls from his pouch. He tossed them high into the air. But instead of catching them, all three fell to the ground.
He walked up to a knight. He took the knight's helmut and put it on a peasant woman. The peasant woman's bonnet he placed on the head of a nobleman. The nobleman's feathered cap he held in the air, as if preparing to replace his own jester's cap, but then paused. He stuffed the feathered cap down his pants.
"Didn't see that coming? Did you?"
"You rogue!" barked the nobleman. "Return my cap at once, lest you––"
But he was interrupted by the jester pointing at a strange object in the sky that left a white trail. What was that? A shooting star by daylight? A celestial sign from the Almighty?
The jester cleared his throat and they all looked back at the jester. The jester brought his fist to his mouth and tried to fit it all inside. It would not fit. The jester shrugged.
"Tah-dah!"
There was silence.
"Fine. You don't need to clap for that one. That's OK. OK, look, despite my lack of talent, I get around as a jester. I jest for The Queen. I jest for myself. And I jest for other lords. One lord – let's call him The Prince – he believes we need to re-enchant the world. And you know, I'd like that too. But look at me, stupid jester, ruining the enchantment of this moment! We could be living amongst wizards! Heroes! Gods! Royalty! Should we try to re-enchant the world together?" The jester nodded again to a freckled woman in the audience.
"Huzzah!" she yelled.
"Re-enchant the world!" she chanted with the group around her.
"Come on, I've ruined the mood and you're all desperate for something to chant. Let's chant! Re-enchant the world!"
The audience picked up the chant: "Re-enchant the world! Re-enchant the world!"
"Shhh! Be quiet!" the jester put one finger to his mouth.
The crowd went silent once more.
"Here's the thing: you're not ready. Only the mind that is free can experience true enchantment. Otherwise, it's just more of this! Stiff roles! Stuck fantasies! Forms without life! The mere image of enchantment without the juice! Only the free mind can drink the juice. To let the juice be liquid! How will you drink if you turn everything solid? And you all wonder why you feel existentially constipated!
"Have you ever seen a real solid? I haven't. It's just a trick of the eye. Fleeting appearance. Mere surface tension on liquid. To be free, you need to embrace the liquid nature of all things. To let them flow right through you. To relish in changeability, in chaos! To become capable of living in any role and dying at any time. Watch."
The jester approached the minstrel. "Can I have that?"
The minstrel passed his lute uncomfortably.
The jester showed it to the gallery and the commonfolk. Then he broke it over one knee.
"Thou artless fiend!" yelled the minstrel.
"Worry not – your instrument has not been broken, merely changed. Look!"
The jester suddenly thrust the lute broken handle toward the Sheriff, startling him. The Sheriff, dazed, took the handle in his hands. The jester adjusted it so that the splintered end faced outward. Then the Sheriff was sent backpedaling as the jester made fencing movements.
"You see?" he called to the crowd. "Even a hunk of wood is liquid. Its role is liquid."
The crowd stayed silent.
The jester hung his head. "No, you don't see. You don't want to see. Not while you can still fool yourself that everything is just one way. It's going to take a betrayal for you to see. A betrayal of everything you know. You've seen rulers toppled. You've seen plague murder millions. And yet it's not enough. You'll always come back the illusion of solids. Anything to hold onto. No. The ability to hold itself must be broken if you are to be free. Otherwise you'll just hold onto your idea of freedom, make it your whole identity, fix yet another thing! No, that won't do.
"A betrayal is needed. A deeper betrayal than ever before. A betrayal of reality itself. Ontological betrayal – a betrayal of the categories of existence, a betrayal of the very capacity to categorize! It is only then – when you have no idea what anything is, and when you've lost all hope of finding out – only then will you become free."
The jester scanned the crowd. "Oh dear. I'm boring you all. I've paused the story for too long. That's what you're here for, isn't it? You're here to be entranced. Not to listen to vague philosophical ramblings. You want there to be rising stakes, character development, and conflict. You don't want to flounder in confusion – not even for a minute. You want a pacing that will keep you spellbound – a pacing with peaks and valleys just regular enough for you to feel relaxed but also just surprising enough to keep you engaged. You want to be carried along a narrative assembly line. You want standard narrative structure. Action. Sensory stimulation. Yet here I am, all tell and no show.
"All right then." The jester clapped then branched out his hands again. "How about one final trick? I call it ontological betrayal. You're going to hate it. But you'll need to learn to love it. Ready? Are you ready for ontological betrayal?
"All right then, a question for you all: There are some things in this scene that don't belong here." He began to walk backwards toward Deshawn's mother. "There are things that do not belong here, in Elizabethan England. Can you see them? Yes. You can see them. I can tell. But it's one thing to see and another to notice." Now he was several paces from mother. If he didn't stop his gait, he would soon trip over her. "You only let yourselves notice that which fits the rest of the pattern. That's your problem! You're always trying to fix the scene in one pattern, one way. But there are so many, many other ways. This is where true enchantment lies: in the fluidity of perception. Thus, I, the guy in the jester hat, hereby present to you: another way."
The jester stopped right in front of Deshawn's mother. Then he leapt out of the way to present her to all assembled.
They watched mother squirm, shaking her hip to one side. What was she doing? A small sleek slab fell out of her pocket. Suddenly, it glowed. What?
The jester cleared his throat. "Sheriff. That's your cue."
The Sheriff shook his head, as if waking from an afternoon nap. He followed the jester's point finger to the glowing slab. For a moment, it seemed that an impulse to avert his eyes competed with an impulse to fixate on the mysterious object. Finally, he gained composure. Then he himself pointed at the glowing slab. "What now is this?"cried the Sheriff. "What unholy sorcery is this?"
The crowd stirred. The Queen leaned forward in the gallery.
"A magic stone?" breathed a bearded man to Deshawn's left. The man straightened his pointy wide-brimmed hat. Then he darted out of the crowd. His robe fluttered behind him as he ran down a dusty road and into the woods.
Deshawn looked back to mother. She brought her face down to the slab and began to press it with her nose. The slab now glowed in different colors!
For a moment, everyone stood stock-still.
Deshawn suddenly came into his senses. That was a phone. Mother was trying to call the cops.
What he'd read about contagious genre-possession came rushing back. Some posts on the Psi-tings forum suggested that collective delusions could be broken by catastrophic anomalies – events that broke radically from the tropes of the genre. Once a catastrophic anomaly occurred, it became possible to notice more and more deviations from the genre.
And now Deshawn noticed that mother – his mom – was wearing strange clothing. 21st century clothing. Deshawn looked around. The common folk – the festival attendees – around him began to blink and frown. Now a reverse contagion was occurring: the 21st century was arguing for its own version of reality.
The inner clash had begun.
The queen stood up. The Sheriff of Nottingham's eyes went wide. Deshawn remembered what one commenter had written online: All people possessed by a genre participate in channeling its will – even those casting themselves as the oppressed. However, one must be especially wary of those who held the roles of power prescribed by a genre. They will do anything to reassert its framework.
Which meant that this was a very, very dangerous moment.
The jester grinned.
"Witchcraft!" the Sheriff of Nottingham roared.
"Witchcraft!" his henchmen yelled to the crowd.
"Witchcraft!" the commonfolk repeated.
The queen, face flushed, pointed at Deshawn's mom: "Seize her!'
Deshawn broke from the crowd and into the pavilion.
The Sheriff of Nottingham caught him before he could reach his mom. The Sheriff fished a phone out of Deshawn's pocket. "See here!" he said, flaunting the phone to all assembled. The child is her sorcerous apprentice!"
"Demons!" the crowd yelled. "Heretics! Blasphemers!"
"Seize them both!" commanded the queen.
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Next release: Deshawn and his mother meet a punishment suitable for witches.
Read ahead at Psychofauna.com