Travelogue: The Lonely Witness

The Thief and the Thief

Here: we need to go around a little to get to the point.

Once, long before any living person could remember, there was a brilliant and poor tailor, who wanted to do right by his family. He had no friends anymore – he had been hurt and didn’t know how to be with people and would cause hurt and then be hurt in return – and he wanted only to protect his family (this is how some people love); to that end, he lied to the townsfolk and to his family, told either group that the other were monsters. And because his family loved him and the townsfolk trusted him, both groups grew fearful and suspicious of the others and avoided each other at all costs.

The tailor was not kind. What he was was strong-willed, and diligent, resourceful; capable, cunning, clever. His work was done on a shoestring and he could size a person up, drunk and from three hundred feet away (he cultivated this skill to keep his family, and his reputation, safe) and his work was far more than satisfactory. Some would say that the tailor was a magician for his uncanny ability to size people up – though we know now that magic is almost never deliberate and, when it is, it’s a mistake. But the tailor did not make mistakes in his seaming.

Ruling this same land was a cruel and powerful emperor who wore opulent clothes (which were always a little too big), and – in spite of his armies, in spite of his “birthright” and his lands – he had a deep Fear of something he could not ever name. He was not good to the people of the land, but he didn’t understand this. He only understood he had Power and the people did not and that the Power was his to wield and not theirs. People told him of their suffering… but he could only understand that it wasn’t his suffering. His advisors tried to teach him of the complex geopolitical struggles between the many nations of his region… but he grew frustrated, beet-red, and had difficulty breathing. His physician said this was symptomatic of a heart condition and the emperor would never learn or he’d die.

But death was not his Fear.

Anyway, in his Fear, he would wear glory and valor as though they were well-tailored armor (but they weren’t) and would often parade through the streets of his country. The tailor, one day, made rounds through the town just as the emperor held one of these events.

The tailor stared at the emperor. He’d never once been so close to somebody who governed Nations or had orchestras played in his name. And in the emperor’s mismade outfit, the Power he wielded and the Glory of it all, the tailor saw an opportunity to protect himself and his family. He sprinted home and stayed awake all night then into the next and then the next, cutting, sewing, weaving, grafting, bringing in all manner of millinery, embroidery, and silk-swerving. The tailor envisioned the emperor, his power, and his cruelty, his armies and wealth as he cut and cut and cut. He disregarded all other commissions, he ignored his family, and it went on like that for two weeks, until the tailor emerged from his workshop, disheveled, eyes bulging and red, holding a suit fit perfectly for the emperor.

Upon seeing the tailor and this suit, his children sobbed and his wife stood, eyes flooding with fear. He had explained what he would be doing and what he intended, how it would help them all, before he went into his workshop. And his family had trusted him.

But now they couldn’t bear to look upon him knowing that those hands could make things like this, had made a thing like this. They ran out the front door – never again would the tailor lay eyes upon them. The tailor, confused and hurt, felt something shocking and wet inside his eyes; he pressed his fingers into the shoulder of the suit with all the pain and clutching he’d held onto his family with and his fingers dipped into the miasma of fabric and the tailor felt some pain gone. He brought the suit out to the town square. And then all the people who saw it swore they would never commission the tailor again for the suit was the suit.

At this point, in any other story, I would describe this suit to you. But I’ve never seen it and if I had, I would have followed it to the ends of the earth, the ends of this story and I would have burnt it, hung it over the moon so the currents of space could disperse the ashes somewhere far, far away and I would’ve had a different tale to tell and it would have had feasts. And delights. And magic.

But that’s not the story we have. The tailor traveled the whole country like this, a living corpse presenting his masterpiece in cold harbors, warm inns, bustling markets, to strangers on the road; like a dilapidated chicken coop, he’d crumble at signs of conversation and pull out the suit. Sometimes, people would fall, prostrate and ask to be spared. Others would throw rocks at the suit; more often people shifted uncomfortably and tried to not respond to the tailor’s gasps of admiration. But, occasionally, people ask to touch it, at which the tailor would shudder away and gather one who followed the scent of power. As more people did this, more people followed and eventually, he amassed a small army of stragglers and made his way to the emperor.

The emperor had heard reports of a citizens’ army approaching his gates and soon found the tailor and the loose grip of fanatics shocking way into the emperor’s throne room with the suit, rejected in this precise direction. At first, the emperor tried to have the tailor thrown out, but whenever guards looked upon the suit, they would just shake their heads and stand away until eventually the tailor had made his way to the throne.

“My liege,” said the tailor, his voice cracking like a wasteland, “I made this suit for you. Your old clothes never suited you so I made this, woven from the echo of your power and authority.” And the emperor sat for a moment, thinking. His current outfits never quite fit, always leaving gaps in the elbows and tight at the knees. And he could feel guilt still in the corners of his being. But as he looked at this new outfit which never quite came into focus, he wondered about the Fear and he felt an echo of something familiar as he stared at the tailor.

“Let me try it,” the emperor said, “and if it fails to fit, you will be killed.” And the tailor abided: he had nothing to lose anymore, and knew there was nothing more hollow than life.

The emperor went to his room, stripped to nothing, and put the tailor’s suit on, starting with the socks. Then the skirt, the pants, then the blouse, and with each piece of clothing, the emperor felt more and more himself and the Fear receded, absorbed into the clothes. And it fit perfectly at the knees and the elbows. Wearing it, he no longer felt guilt in the corner of his being. Instead, he felt it in his heart.

The emperor knelt, hugging himself, sobbing, knowing the truth of himself and despising it with such gravity that his fingers dug into his pauldrons and after he was drained of tears, the emperor felt a pin prick at the back of his eyes and felt some piece of his pain numbed, drawn out from his finger pads. Upon this, the emperor knew that the Fear had always been true.

He had the tailor killed moments later and reigned more miserably and miserly than ever before until one day, he was assassinated in the same outfit.

By this point, the outfit had become so filled with the Fear, a horrible Truth, and the Power, that it knew nothing in its whole existence but the seed of death and the want for a home. It unwrapped itself from the man’s corpse and found a new host in the assassin. It had learned from the emperor an extravagant Power and Fear. It had learned from the tailor to covet and to lie and love corrupted. It began to find desperate people to wear, each becoming more cruel with the Truth they found inside the suit and each gave themselves over to this despair. This went on for a very long time until the suit had taken a life of its own, pieced together from each of its wearers, and at this point it realized that it knew how to take with great skill.

This is when the thief became the thief.