But by morning, gulls are able to coast in the upsweep. And when the water has pushed back to its shallowest limit, Fliess emerges from the trance. He stands with the aid of his cobra’s head cane. He flutters his cape and stretches in the rays of the rising sun. And then he gives the signal to his legion. A snap of the fingers is all it takes and they emerge from their crevices, half-naked and carrying their crude shovels.
They scurry down the rocks and scamper over the new graves, still marked despite the night’s heavy tide. They get to work in groups of two and three, panning out the wet sand, heaps of grain flying through the dim air. They know what to do. Fliess need not shout commands. He controls them by thought alone at this point.
In no time at all, the graves are opened and the scoliotic little demons are pulling on braided ships ropes, ropes as thick as their own necks. And as they pull, the coffins of the freaks begin to emerge from the earth. The pine boxes come up in the order they were planted. The last to reach the surface is, of course, the chicken boy.
Dr. Fliess comes down the cliff with the graceful movements of a natural dancer, a dandy to the end. His creatures rock and moan, torn between the urge to cower and the need to exult. Fliess paces around the semicircle of coffins that sit in pools of wet sand and seaweed. He is waiting, one might guess, for the rising sun to backlight his eminence. He is lost in a meditation on his own long-sought fate. What will happen this morning, in these next few minutes, will determine who the doctor is, will clarify, once and for all, the nature of his character. The facts about his very identity.
The enormity of this moment in time is not lost on the doctor. He understands all too well, better than anyone else could, the meaning of the task he has attempted. He feels its immensity and density in his marrow. It throbs there, pulsing like a vein in God’s forehead. It is what has driven him all these years. It is what has allowed him to ignore the nasty legends and push on. His calling has isolated him from any kind of fellowship. But that’s the price the chosen must pay for their gifts. The shaman integrates the tribe by remaining apart from the tribe. The shaman integrates the world by standing, forever, outside the world.
Gulls pool above the coffins, wretched birds that feed on the leavings of others. Fliess looks to one of his creatures who jumps into the semicircle and does a little war dance, thrusting its stubby, misshapen arms and crying out in a high-pitched babble. The birds disperse for the moment and the creature runs back to its station.
Fliess turns one last time and looks out at the water and the crown of the sun as it breaks above the horizon.
“It is time,” he whispers.
Like a magician suddenly bored with his own secrets, Fliess walks to the first casket, Bruno’s box, and flips open the lid without looking inside. He moves gracefully to Milena’s box and opens it in the same manner. And then the coffins of Fatos, Aziz, Nadja, Jeta, Antoinette, Marcel and Vasco. He opens the piano-size coffin of Durga, the fat lady, and the miniature coffin of Kitty, the beloved dwarf. And he stops before the coffin of the chicken boy, puts a boot on the lid, closes his eyes, brings a hand to his mouth. Beneath the hand, he mumbles something, words of a different tongue, Latin perhaps. Then he bends from the waist and throws back the lid with more force than needed.
It is almost silent on the beach. Even the gulls cease their cawing. And if the waves continue to lap, the noise goes unnoticed.
Dr. Fliess brings his arms out to his sides. His cape spreads over his shoulder. Then he pulls his hands together to produce a clap that echoes off the rocks like gunfire. His face placid, he opens his mouth and says, “Good morning, my children. And welcome to your new life.”
The first to rise is Bruno, the leader in all things. He has hair on his head. His Atlas tattoos are gone. His left arm has lost its grotesque bulge, reduced itself to more human proportions. And its mate has reappeared, grown fresh and new and entirely normal, from shoulder to the tips of the fingernails.
At last Fliess smiles, looks up to the sky, turns palms toward the fading stars and pantomimes a call to rise. From a sitting position, Bruno stretches his newly proportioned arms and stands slowly, looking around the beach as if he has found himself on a new planet or in the midst of an afterlife for which he has prayed since birth.
He climbs out of his coffin, eyes on his healer, the transforming agent of his new normalcy. Bruno moves to Milena’s crate, reaches down and extends an arm that is taken by a small and well-manicured hand. And Milena rises, healed, void of penis and Adam’s apple, fully female and entirely beautiful.
In turn, she moves to her neighbor and assists Fatos, who has lost his mule face and now looks like the prince of a Nordic tribe.
Fatos calls out Aziz, who has grown legs and feet.
Aziz springs Nadja whose lobster limbs have become perfectly delineated hands and feet, ten fingers and ten toes and each of them exquisite.
Nadja bids Jeta to wake and the human skeleton has grown a pink and healthy crop of flesh.
Jeta summons Antoinette, whose pinhead has bloomed and rounded into a skull that could carry the crown in any number of pageants.
Antoinette calls forth Marcel and Vasco who rise independently, Vasco stepping onto the sand with a look of shock on his face. Until he spies Marcel climbing out of the box to join him. They touch their hips simultaneously and then break into a little jig before waking Durga.
Who no longer needs three-quarters of her casket. She emerges onto the beach lithe and slim, unable to stop looking at her own arms and thighs, even as she invites Kitty to join her.
The beloved dwarf shows first one leg and then another and both of them long and perfectly shaped. She rises on these gams, tall and strong enough to captain a volleyball team.
But like the rest of her troupe, she is unable to revel in the joy of her new normalcy until the last one joins them and they are whole together. Kitty goes down on one knee, leans over the last coffin and reaches in to wake her man.
And then she draws back and crumples on the sand in a heap of silent tears. The others freeze in place, but Dr. Fliess runs to the coffin and falls beside it. Then he rears up and begins to scream, filling the cool morning air with obscene rage before collapsing, like Kitty, into a convulsion of bitter weeping.
Ever the patriarch, it is Bruno who moves to the casket and lifts the limp, soaked body up into the air. The boy is still covered in his feathers. His freak nature could not be rewritten. Fliess’s magic could not touch him.
While Fliess continues his tantrum, his fists pounding the sand like a child denied a toy, the troupe gathers around the coffin. And Bruno, even without his brawn, has no trouble hoisting the body into his arms. He holds Chick for a time so that the others can draw around and stroke their brother and gaze on his beaked face. Bruno places this fallen bird into the arms of Kitty, who weeps like mother, sister, lover, her tears shed on feathers that, already, are going brittle and dull.
Bruno knows what must be done. He steps around the doctor, takes hold of Chick’s coffin lid, and tears it free of the box. Kitty looks up at the sound. Bruno nods to her and, though her sobbing increases, she manages to nod back. This time, no one needs to explain a thing to Antoinette, the former pinhead. This time, Antoinette understands it all.