THERE WAS A FRAMED photograph hung on the wall in front of me, and when I said your name I saw you in the picture. Well, I saw your back, and your long, bright ponytail fluttering. The image is black and white, and you’re running, and you cast a number of shadows that cluster about you like a bouquet. There’s a figure running a little ahead of you and at first that figure seems to be a shadow too, except that it casts a backward glance that establishes an entirely separate personality. The figure’s features are wooden, but mobile—some sort of sprite moves within, not gently, but convulsively. A beauty that rattles you until you’re in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland. You and the puppet—I decided it was a puppet—were leaping through one upright rectangle into another. An open door seen through an open door, and in the corner of that distant room was a cupboard, fallen onto its side. There was a sign on the cupboard door. (I tilted my head: The sign read TOYS.)
It’s a photo in which lines abruptly draw back from each other and ceilings and floors spin off in different directions, but for all that the world that’s pictured doesn’t seem to be ending. You were both running in place, you blurred around the edges, the puppet hardly blurred at all, and the puppet was looking back, not at you, but at me. It felt like the two of you were running for your lives, for fear I’d take them. Or you could’ve been racing each other to that cupboard door, racing each other home. TOYS, the sign reads, but signs aren’t guarantees. Either way I wanted to go too, and wished the puppet would hold out its hand to me, or beckon me, or do something more than return my gaze with that strange tolerance.
—
WHEN MY NAME was called I entered the audition room and my glove puppet made an irresolute attempt to eat a sugar cube from a bowlful that had been left on a table, then gave in to despair and decided to sleep. After a minute there was a crackling sound in the corner of the room and I heard your voice through the speaker, Myrna, trying to give me a chance. “Miss Chaudhry, don’t you have anything prepared? You’ve only got ten more minutes and as you may have seen in the waiting room, we’re observing quite a few applicants today.”
This reminder had no effect on me; I continued as I was until someone knocked on the audition room door and then came in, glancing first at the clock and then through the mirrored wall to the spot where I presumed you were sitting. It was a boy who came in—he had a hand behind his back, and I think I would’ve found that threatening if it weren’t for his deep-set, elephantine eyes, the patience in them.
“I’m Gustav,” he said. “Give me your puppet and you shall have a different one.”
“What will you do with mine?”
“It’s up to him. He can sleep all he wants and have as much sugar as he likes, make new friends, maybe change the position of the parting in his hair if he’s feeling daring. Quickly, take her.”
I handed over my glove puppet and received a brass marionette in exchange. “I got this one out of the store cupboard. She hasn’t been out in a while . . . a lot of people find they can’t work with her; she’s haunted,” Gustav said over his shoulder, as he left the room. Smashing.
—
ORCHESTRATING this new puppet’s movements seemed hopeless; I was holding the wooden bar that controlled all her strings correctly, and none of the strings were tangled, but that had been Gustav’s quick, deft work, not mine. Though we both stood still I felt the marionette advance upon me, and without moving I shrank away.
“Five minutes,” you said through the speaker, not hiding the note of incredulity in your voice. I spoke to the puppet in the looking-glass English that my ghost friend speaks. I asked her if she was haunted or something worse. She answered eagerly, as you do in a foreign country when you need assistance and come upon someone who speaks your language: “Worse thingsome,” was her answer. “Worse thingsome.” And if I help you now, you must help me later.
You won’t ask me to harm anyone? I asked.
Never.
Then I accept.
Good. Simply translate what I say. I will speak; don’t worry about the controls, I will match your posture, it’ll look better.
She spoke the way that my ghost friend spoke—it cannot be that all ghosts speak the same way, I knew that even then—and I translated. It didn’t take long:
I am not a haunted puppet, we said, I am living. My name is Gepetta and a long time ago I was an apprentice to two puppeteers whose names are honored in this place. I took care of the puppets in the workshop—I was a kind of nurse to them, tending to their damage, and making sure that they lasted. Their masters grew old and died, and I stayed with the puppets. They were not living, but one step away from living, always one step away. They know when human life is near them, and they need human life to be near them; it keeps them from going . . . wrong.
I began to train others in the care of puppets. In my time it seemed such knowledge was dying out . . . I trained a few boys and girls who wanted to learn, but a plague came. Not a plague that revealed itself in the skin, this one crept through the air. My apprentices died, and I would have too, but my puppet charges forbade it.
Each puppet sacrificed something—a leg, an arm, torso, head, and so on . . . you will replace these things when you are ready, they said.
They assembled a body, but didn’t join up the parts.
Look at your new body. You will go in, they said.
I said I would not, but it happened hour by hour; I would drowse a little and when I woke another part of me had been replaced. It began with my left hand and ended with my right foot. Think of it: looking down at your human foot out of a pair of brass eyes. And then I grew smaller, and all of a piece, as I am today. My name is Gepetta; long have I wanted to say this, but nobody would help me to say it . . .