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The hotel was so quiet now. No Antonia, no Sophia, no Geppetto rattling around in his room upstairs. Now that the crisis was over, the survivors had taken to catching up on lost rest and spent most of the nights in their respective rooms. No more need for the midnight war rooms that had kept the hotel bustling at any hour of the day.
P also had a room in the hotel that had mostly been used for storage, at least until recently. He had begun to feel…tired, after returning Sophia’s Ergo to her new body, or maybe it was sometime before that. He wasn’t sure exactly. But tonight, he couldn’t sleep. He had had that dream again, the bad one he had to remind himself was only imagining. Sleep was new, dreams were new, and not all his experiences of being something like human were pleasant.
He came back down to the lobby in the middle of the night to find it utterly deserted, so quiet it was a little eerie. Polendina had shut the doors before he retired to wherever he went at night, and now P was alone, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the polished tile floor. He didn’t dare put on the gramophone in case he woke anyone up, so instead he took out the Ergo wavelength decoder and hooked it up to the Stargazer, the way Mr. Venigni had shown him. He put the headphones over his ears and slid down with his back against the Stargazer, closing his eyes to listen. It was not the first time he had listened to the message again. It was not the second time, either. Sometimes listening to Romeo’s voice made his bad dreams seem further away, and kept his own thoughts quiet. Even if it also hurt in its own way.
I’m Romeo. We grew up together in the Monad Charity House. Remember? We’re best friends!
He did not remember. He knew it was because this message was really for Carlo, but Carlo was dead and even if he had been given Carlo’s face, even if he’d been given Carlo’s Ergo, he was not Carlo. This had been to his father’s bitter disappointment, and to Romeo’s undoing. And so now P was alone, listening again and again to Romeo’s aching plea to be heard, a plea that had fallen on uncomprehending ears, until it was too late. Because of him.
He listened until the pain in his heart threatened to choke him with its terrible power. His throat ached, like it had when father had died in his arms. This pain, this grief, this inescapable part of being human, was so much to bear that sometimes it felt like he was drowning. Polendina had erased himself to stop from feeling it. Sometimes he knew how Polendina had felt.
“Could you not sleep, compagno?”
He looked up sharply, slipping the headphones off his head and turning off the decoder in his lap. Mr. Venigni approached him, wearing a set of striped pyjamas under a characteristic Venigni-red dressing gown. He wasn’t wearing his hat, and his hair was tousled from sleep. It made him look smaller, and his dark eyes were sympathetic behind his glasses. “No,” P admitted, and maybe it was because the hotel was so empty, or because Romeo’s message made him feel so lonely tonight, that without knowing he was going to, he added, “I had a bad dream.”
He saw Venigni’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise before he quickly adjusted his expression again. P knew what he was thinking – puppets could dream? – and then he had remembered that P wasn’t quite a puppet anymore, was he? “What do you dream of?”
It was always the same. In the dream, he had agreed to give father his heart when he asked. But father had not made him into a real boy like he promised – instead he took the organ right out of his chest, and placed it in the body of the horrific corpse puppet he had used to try and kill him. Just like Romeo tried to tell him he would - he understood this now. Then, in the dream, he really was Carlo, and his father had ordered him to kill all the survivors in the hotel. He could still remember how good it felt when father smiled at him, like the warmth of the sun on his face. He could still see how his friends had been replaced by puppets, with rictus smiles and repetitive, cold voices. He wasn’t sure what felt worse when he woke – the horrible feeling of having killed them, like he’d killed so many others, or how much it hurt to know his father would never smile at him like that. That he still wanted that, despite everything. He found he couldn’t say any of this to Venigni, so instead he shrugged a little and said, “My father. Bad things happening.”
This seemed enough to satisfy Venigni, who took a seat beside him on the floor, with his back against the base of the stargazer, though he winced a bit as he did so. “I suppose it makes sense, after all you’ve been through. I sleep poorly myself. The past, it catches up quicker at night, doesn’t it?”
It did. “What do you do?” he asked. “To…make it better.”
“Ah,” Venigni laughed, a bit uncomfortably. “Well, I uh, I work, mostly.” He sighed, looking over at the makeshift workshop he had set up in his corner of the lobby. P thought maybe he was deciding whether to say something more. When he turned back to him, he gestured to the decoder held in P’s lap. “The message from the King of Puppets, yes? Does it help?”
P considered. “Yes. No. Sometimes it…hurts so much it feels like I’m dying. And then sometimes I wish…”
He trailed off, unable to finish the thought. Venigni was silent for a long time, and P thought he had probably said the wrong thing, and opened his mouth to apologize when Venigni said, “When my parents died, I…didn’t always want to go on. Pulcinella got me out of bed every day, even when I didn’t want to. Then, one day I could do it myself. It didn’t hurt any less, but…eventually there was room for other things, too.”
P nodded. His thoughts and feelings were still too complex for him to untangle, let alone articulate out loud. If only he had understood Romeo, so much of this might have been avoided. A lot of people would still be alive. Romeo might still be alive. Maybe this pain was what he deserved, for what had happened. For failing Romeo, for not being Carlo, for not being good enough to convince his father to love him. Maybe if he hadn’t lied quite so much, his father would not have – but he tried to stop the train of these thoughts before they carried him off.
“Look,” P tried, staring down at his hands. He ran the fingers of his human hand over the joints of his mechanical knuckles, tracing the edges of the metal along the backs of his fingers. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth about the wavelength decoder. About my father. I…lied to you, about what I heard. I’m sorry.”
Venigni looked at him for a long moment, his eyes surprised and then softening behind those tinted glasses. “You were trying to spare my feelings, I think. Very human of you.” He looked away, wrapping his arms around his knees and gazing out over his workspace again. “I admit, it was…an adjustment, to imagine that the man I so admired might have been the cause of so much suffering. To think I could have misjudged him so badly. He was farther gone than I thought.” He shook his head, stroking a hand over his moustache, lost in thoughts of his own.
P swallowed. In his dream, Geppetto had made him kill Venigni and then had him replaced with a puppet, and not even a lifelike facsimile, like he was, but a grinning automaton. He was sure his father would not really have done that, that it was only a horrible imagining, but late at night when he was alone, he wasn’t sure of that at all. Far gone, Venigni had called it. Yes, his father had not been here, not really, but in some world of his own imagining, where he had a happy family to return to. P thought about the uncannily lifelike painting of Carlo in Geppetto’s study, his sad child’s face speaking volumes about his father’s real happy family. His heart had clenched so hard, thumping arrhythmically, when father had demanded he give it to him. He was sure, somehow, that Carlo had not wanted that either.
Then Venigni sighed, drawing him out of his thoughts, looking back over at him with a lopsided little smile. “I am sorry, for what he did to you. You saved us all. You deserved better.”
P didn’t know about that. He thought about all the things he had done to save Krat. How many people he had killed, whether he had wanted to or not. How much blood and oil had stained his clothing, his hair, his hands. He thought too about all the things his father had said to him, at the end. Your freedom is not for you. Troublesome little puppet. He had said it with such poison in his voice, and sometimes P’s whirring mind replayed his words on repeat, making grooves in his memory like the records on the gramophone, going around and around. Father had apologized, but he had meant them too. And yet P was still sorry he was dead. He still felt a little surprised whenever he went up to his room and found it empty, save for the painting of Carlo, who only stared sadly out at the room without meeting his eyes. Alone. He didn’t know how to live with these feelings. “I wasn’t made for…better.”
Venigni reached over and whacked him companionably on the arm. It didn’t hurt, but P blinked at him in surprise, his eyes round, and Venigni waved a finger at his face. His eyebrows were drawn down, his expression uncharacteristically fierce. “You are more than what he made you for, my boy. Never doubt that. Now you get to choose what you live for. This is the duty of the living. We will rebuild Krat, together.” Then he got to his feet and held out his hand to help P stand. With exquisite gentleness, he pried the wavelength decoder out of P’s hands and placed it on the edge of the Stargazer, slightly out of P’s reach. “When this is all over, when Krat is restored to her former glory, you shall have anything you could want. The Great Venigni will make sure the Hero of Krat is celebrated with the fanfare he deserves.”
The things P really wanted Venigni could not give to him, not with all the money in the world. But he tried to smile, because his friend likely knew that already, and he only wanted to help, however he could. His throat hurt with the effort of holding back his tears. “Thank you.” A moment’s hesitation, and then P threw his arms around him in a tight embrace. A second of surprise, and Venigni’s shoulders relaxed as he hugged him, patting him gently on the back. He was taller than P, and P buried his face in the collar of Venigni’s dressing gown, trying and finally failing to blink back the tears that had been threatening since he had awoken from his latest nightmare. Venigni let him weep into his chest, holding him silently, and P’s shoulders shook with the force of his grief. For Romeo and Carlo, Antonia and Polendina, for Sophia, for Geppetto. And then he wept for himself, for all that had happened, for never having been held like this by his father. Finally, as his shaking subsided, Venigni cleared his throat delicately and stepped back to look down into his face.
“Come. Pulcinella will put on a pot of tea. We will stay up with you. No need to flay yourself with this anymore tonight, eh?” He clapped P on the shoulder, indicating he should leave the wavelength decoder behind on the Stargazer. P nodded, even though he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. “I will regale you with tales of my most ingenious inventions, until you fall asleep.”
A little laugh burst out of P’s mouth, unexpected and shaky. “Bah! It was not a joke!” Venigni exclaimed, though his eyes twinkled. “No one appreciates the genius of Venigni! What will it take to get due credit around here?”
P laughed for real then, a hiccuping sob of a laugh, sniffling and wiping his wet eyes with the back of his right hand. As he trailed behind Venigni, who was muttering indignantly as they walked up the stairs, the lobby of Hotel Krat rang with laughter for the first time in a long time.