The Chains That You Refuse

Elizabeth Bear

It will have been raining in Harvard Square for only half an hour when you give up hope. Only half an hour, but raining hard enough to send the tourists fleeing into cafes and coffeehouses, the rest of the street corner entertainers home in disgust. You will have already known that you would be the last holdout, shivering under an awning with the three white doves rustling in their box in the canvas bag by your feet and the revelatory neon of John Harvard’s/Grendel’s/Au Bon Pain reflecting on the rainsoaked brick, twisting answers to questions you would have preferred not to ask. You will not have made any money.

You will not be eating tonight, but you will have known that for some time.

You’ll pick up the tote and walk to the Red Line station opposite the Cambridge Savings Bank, having forgotten your umbrella, shoes squishing and the canvas straps cutting into your cold red fingers. You’ll mean to take the T north to Alewife, to the parking garage where you left your rusted yellow Volvo with barely enough gas in it to get you home. But as you enter the dry underground the doves will coo and flutter. The antique silver dollars in your pockets will jingle against the subway tokens. And you will journey south—rumble and clatter and rock of the underground train across the muddy Charles—and switch to the Orange line at Downtown Crossing, and emerge from the T in Chinatown.

It will have been raining here also, and the streets will be smeared with neon. You will have emerged not far from the Orpheum Theatre. You will take it as a portent and force yourself not to look back as you climb from the light of the T station into the rainbow-daubed darkness of the streets. Your black oversized denim jacket with the concealed pockets sewn into the sleeves and the clips and elastic beneath the arms will grow soggy, heavy, cold. Sleepily, the doves will be complaining. The air will fill with aromas of soy and ginger. The neon will guide you. Red light, green light, triple-XXX and live nude girls. Peking duck and garlic noodle. Parsley, sage, and time.

You will know hope. You will have blinked and missed it in the weather, whistling, headed in the other direction, hat pulled low against the rain over its bright feathers. You will know that you never had a chance; the neon teaches all. You will have drawn a silk scarf from a secret pocket and knotted it about your hand to take the weight of the tote bag, the three white doves, and their metal box: their cage.

The charlatans of old days read entrails for their instruction; the charlatans of today read the future in the flutter of neon, in the passing of cars. Charlatans, because it’s the only magic there is. Magic is a trap. Magic is a lie.

You will find a paperclip in the gutter, a bit of tinfoil, a condom wrapper, page seventeen of the Boston Globe. You’ll bend and fold them as you walk, into a hat or a sailboat, the canvas straps cutting your wristbone now. You’ll place your creation in the gutter and watch the cataract carry it into a storm sewer, inevitably as rain. You’ll have seen every ripple of its falling in the ominous neon. You will not have been surprised.

Ceroscopy, anthropomancy, planchette, scapulomancy, omens: nothing, suggestions, glimpses, glimmerings. Nothing to the truth of neon and the sorcery of electric lights.

Magicians are charlatans, for all their power. They can no longer make the future. There is no magic in knowing what happens next. All you have to do is read the signs.

You will walk—you will have been walking—tracing a pattern you will have always known. You are a true charlatan, a magician with your rings and balls and cards and the three white doves who you know will always return, whenever you hold out your long and perfect hand. Your future has been immutable. You have enjoyed the serenity of perfect certainty. You will have feared and you will have envied and you will have pitied those who are not like you, for their illusion of free will. You will not have been able to imagine such a thing:

You have always been able to read the signs.

You have known all your life that this is the day your life ends, because here is Boston Common, where the neon leads you out of Chinatown. And there, on the Common spread out like a banquet of darkness in the rain, will have been the mugger who will be disappointed in how little you have earned, turning scarves to doves on a coldly rainy night. And there, on the Common, will have been the diluted blood, and the silk scarves, and the white feathers sodden in the rain.

You will limp in squishy shoes onto the grassy border of the Common, resigned and a little relieved, the doves cooing in their box despite the darkness there.

And then a relay will trip. A machine will fail. A ripple of blackness like spilled ink will flutter the height of the East Coast, starting in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, New York City, Hartford, sweet old winding Providence and finally, finally, at long last—

Boston.

Behind you, before you, the old gray city will settle into darkness with a sigh like an exhausted dog. And the neon, the signs, the writing on the walls will all wink out.

As you step forward onto the Common, there will come a moment when you will be offered a choice. You will have drawn a silk scarf from a secret pocket and knotted it about your hand. But the canvas strap of the tote will have slipped up your wrist, the rattled doves complaining. You will unwind the scarf, stretch it between your hands, and you will draw a deep and trembling breath. Fear will swallow you. Fear of the known and the unknown, fear of the knife in the darkness and fear of the darkness of never knowing whence the knife will come.

You will have known—a final torment, a final benediction before the curse of prophecy deserts you for an instant of free will—you will have known that you have only seconds to decide.

You will have bound the scarf about your eyes.

You will have knelt in the grass at the edge of the common, and blindly you will have fumbled the tote bag open, blindly you will have unlatched the cage, blindly you will have lifted the three white doves and set them softly on the sweet, slick, soaking grass. You will unknot your blindfold as the lights swell behind you, and you will throw the cage away. Your hair will plaster your face, sting your eyes, fill your mouth.

The doves will coo and ruffle and huddle: wet, sleepy, confused. They will sit there dumbly, blinking in the rain and the darkness, unable to see, unable to fly at night. They will cling to each other and mourn the dry safety of their cage.

You will recognize the archetypal battered fedora as it tumbles past you, one bright shivering feather trapped in the band. You will bend and catch it; it will fall into your hand as if destined. You will clap hope’s chapeau over draggled curls at a rakish angle, and you will return to the overarching night.

It will be all right. The sun will rise in the morning. The doves will most likely fly away. Sooner or later, the rain will probably end.

You cannot know what will happen next.

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