Cabaso's Hat: Part I

Cabaso was not in the habit of getting himself into difficult situations. Not difficult situations that he could not easily talk himself out of. It was a bit more difficult to talk himself out a situation when there was no one around to talk to. Which meant there was also no one around to hear him complain of the circumstances that had led to him being here, and if there was a short list of the things he loved most dearly in this world, complaining was most certainly on it. Near the top. Somewhere after apple crumble and friend plantains and being a mysterious, charismatic, rakish enigma.

He would have complained, had anyone been around to hear it, that in the beginning it was only because he’d wanted his hat back. The hat was not just any old hat. It was not just any new hat. It’s magnificence transcended time and any notion of old or new. It was timeless, beautiful, elegant. A masterpiece of hattery. It had a hidden pocket, which was nearly unheard of, and every colour on it was like a colour seen in the shade, so it always gave the impression that he had just emerged from the shadows, or was a blink away from slipping back into them. He was, when he wore it, effortlessly unique. It was a hat he refused to give up.

Which was what made losing it so hard to stomach in the first place. He had not gambled it away. Not even drunkenly. Cabaso did many things drunkenly, but the consequences were never visited upon the hat. But he’d been doing someone a favour, and been happily doing it (for favours always had to be returned, and on the shortlist of things he loved dearly, being owed was present), and somewhere within the favour he’d been clubbed over the head, and the hat had not protected him. In fact, when he’d come to, the hat had been notably absent. This was disturbing for many reasons, not the least of them being that, hatless, Cabaso was also up to his thighs in water, and the water was slowly rising. We will return to that in a moment. For the moment, the hat.

The hat should have been in Cabaso’s possession partly because it had, once he’d procured it, never left his possession. And secondly, because there was no reason for anyone else to have the hat, unless someone was trying to hold it hostage, to make their way out of a debt they owed him. When he racked his mind quickly for the name of the soul malicious enough to attempt it, he came up empty. When his mind instead conjured up the image of his hat, his hat of midnight colours and the shine of wet cobblestones upon another’s head, circuitry in his brain suffered.

Some say that clothing does not reflect the person inside them as well as they could or should, and that they do not make the man. This is, to some extent, correct. But it is more correct to say that when Cabaso the boy put on the hat and glanced at himself in the mirror of the White Hart Inn’s tavern he saw Cabaso the man, and Cabaso the man stood straighter, tilted his chin up, unless he wanted to look menacing, and was no thief of a good hat, but had come to own it the same way he’d come to be conceive: because the universe had willed it. Cabaso the boy had not had the name yet, but Cabaso the man knew it as soon as he donned the hat and saw himself in it. The hat was big then, but no less resplendent and perfect. Its perfection had only aged with him, as it should. Cabaso. The name came with the hat. No other name could wear this hat.

Back to the water, which was climbing up his pelvis. There had certainly not been this much when he’d been put here, he thought, for he would have woken up to such a shock, rather than this gentle lapping of rising water. All he had wanted was to get his hat back. It had been harder demanding answers without the hat. People listened to the hat. The face beneath it was slightly harder to remember without the shadow of the brim cast on it. And people generally did not want to remember Cabaso. Remembering him often came with seeing him, and often that walked hand in hand with owing him.

Cabaso tested his throat and gave a very slight hollar. There was a rasp in his throat that told him his assailant with the club had either dunked water down his throat, which might explain the ugly feeling in his stomach, or had had their hands wrapped around his throat at some point in his black memory. Maybe there was an ache to his throat he could examine later, when the water was not mounting his hipbones and rising.

In the market, Cabaso had asked the local friers for their assistance. Friers were not much in the way of assistance when it came to intellectual matters, but they could use their eyes at least, and mostly they could use their memories. Cabaso needed some of both. “Did you see a fellow go by with a hat?” Cabaso asked them. “You would know the hat. Beautiful. Magnificent. Incredible. Belongs on a head of a similar kind. The fellow with it would have had to come by here to get anywhere.” The market headed off the honeycomb labyrinth of underground paths. The way he and the assailant had both come had been blocked off by the rising water levels. The tunnels were cut off.

A frier with a basket full of bok-choy shook his head. He dumped the bok-choy into a steaming pan and covered it with a net, to catch the spitting oil. His skin looked like he’d been frying things for years and leaning over his job. It also looked like he’d been eating fried things for years and had forgotten food existed outside his job. “Haven’t seen him. Did you check the pawn shops? All sorts come their way.” The bok-choy frier coughed. “We’s got bok-choy, if yer interested.”

“I am not interested,” said Cabaso. “I am interested in my hat, which none of you seem to recognize. When I find it, I shall return to broaden your sad horizons with it. Which pawn shops are in this district? Where would I be able to buy it back?”

The bok-choy frier shrugged. “Pawn shops along the ridge.”

“And who would have bought my hat?” asked Cabaso.

The bok-choy frier did not answer. When Cabaso repeated the question, he lifted a hand in a gesture that Cabaso felt was unsportsmanlike. Gentlemen were not to be found often in the market. It was followed by another gesture of the kind that looked, if they were playing charades, as though the frier were slitting his own throat. Cabaso was determined, but smart. He asked no more questions. He kept looking for answers.

Elsewhere, there were more answers to be found. Someone dealing in old trunks, who smelled like a cellar that had not been well taken care of, told him, “I know who you are. I know you’re looking for your hat. Saw it by the ridge. Near that old second hand- you know. What’s the place called? There’s a long-nosed man who runs it.”

He had the attention of the hair on the back of Cabaso’s neck. “Well. The Belfast Beacon?”

The trunk-dealer snapped his fingers in Cabaso’s direction. This was not much of an improvement, as far as gestures went. It was shaping up to be one of those days that was against Cabaso. But the trunk-dealer was of a friendly kind, so Cabaso was generously silent about the gesture. “That’s it. That’s the store. But I still can’t remember the bugger’s name…”

“You are quite close with bugger,” Cabaso said. He did not sigh. Sighing was particularly not in style. Or not of the kind of style Cabaso preferred. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I know his name.” There had been no cheer in him, but now the absence of cheer was instead filled with anti-cheer. He could feel that, without the hat, it looked petulant and resentful on him, instead of broody and misunderstood.

He walked away and toward the ridge, which was covered with second hand shops and pawn shops. He held his hand over his eyes when he passed under a lamp meant to imitate the sun’s glare. It was doing a fabulous job of pointing out Cabaso’s lack of a hat. Gold is never wrapped in more gold, said a voice in his head, in the exact tone of his brother’s voice. Precious things are never wrapped in precious things. Cabaso made an effort to pretend his brother’s voice had not spoken in his head.

Instead he pondered as he neared the ridge. This was a risk, because Cabaso had few friends here and many people owed him favours, and because The Belfast Beacon was home to one of the very few men in the world that Cabaso owed. He liked to make calculations and the way he understood it was that there were only a handful of deals in the world worth making. He had made one that was not among that handful, and the month he’d spent with the girl enthralled by a love potion was not enough to owe another human being. But he’d done it.

Here, he would have not to trust anyone. Cabaso had good practice with this. Without the hat, he did not even trust himself.

He should not even have trusted the paths on the edge of the ridge, because no one was watching closely enough to stop his assailant. He remembered looking toward The Belfast Beacon and the one Turkish lantern shining in the window and thinking, something is off. Then correcting himself, because it was not something. Many things are off here. He turned. Wrong, wrong, wrong. That was about the time that the club struck the back of his head and flashpapers ignited behind his eyes. They settled again as he tumbled into the dark.

Which brings us back to the water. It was the third thing he’d noticed upon waking because the first thing he noticed was that his hands were cuffed to the wall. And secondly, he was still without hat.

He had been unconscious. And now that he was conscious, there was no one around him to determine that he was in any condition other than the one in which they’d delivered him to the cellar filling with water. It was a compartment in a sewer that he was cuffed into, filling rapidly. It was not watertight, but the leak around the locked door on the other side of the compartment was slight enough that it did not matter how much water drained from it. On this side, water would continue to rise and to make his circumstances increasingly lethal.

He knew exactly who it was that had put him here in the first place. He knew who it was that owned the Belfast Beacon, which was not the first store of its name. But the last store had been burned down. An incident that could have been viewed, unfortunately, as Cabaso’s fault. It really depended on who one asked. If they asked Cabaso, he would tell them that it had only happened in his presence, and near him, and that he was not in control of all of his limbs all the time. If they asked an eye witness, they would tell you that the Cabaso had, basely and clumsily, knocked over a candle and set the place ablaze, thus putting him in the poor graces of the Beacon’s owner, Mr.Castle. And also in Mr.Castle’s debt. Cabaso could see Mr.Castle’s awful, spider smile now, unhappy to watch his shop burn to the ground, glad to have caught Cabaso and to be owed something for the mess Cabaso had put him in. He had never wanted to see the smile again, but he was seeing it now, namely because Mr.Castle was leaning out of a hutch in the compartment several feet above his head, and looking down upon Cabaso with glee.

“An honour, surely,” Cabaso said. He made as much of a bow as a man can make with his hands cuffed to the wall, and without an elegant hat. “I had not anticipated seeing you, Mr.Castle, or I would have dressed more appropriately. The cuffs are a bit excessive in your presence, I think. If you rid me of them, I think you’ll find I’m in a manner more befitting a chat with you. We can talk, you and I.”

To Mr.Castle, it was obvious that ‘you and I’ was a concept he had no interest in. “I think not,” he said. His voice was smooth, like the smoke rising from a lit cigarette. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get you in that position? You are slippery. I am giving you no slack at all until I know for certain that you are dead. Then you can have all the slack you want.”

“Again, how honourable of you,” Cabaso said.

“I really want to hear you beg and scream. I want to hear you pleading for mercy. Have you ever cried, Cabaso? Of course you have. I meant outside of infancy. You will today. For me.”

“That sounds like an unlikely thing,” Cabaso said, “but we’ll see. You did not follow me to the market on the off chance that I would lose my hat, be drawn toward the ridge looking for it, and then receive instructions to go looking for The Belfast Beacon to retrieve it, and thereby put myself in the position to be thwarted and stuffed into this hell hole, did you?”

Mr.Castle smiled.

“Well, that is devotion,” Cabaso observed. “Or overreaction.”

“Devotion,” Mr.Castle agreed. “I had other plans as well, to find you and make you pay for what you did. This was, infact, the simplest of them.”

Cabaso did not doubt that it was. Mr.Castle seemed the type to use simplicity so long as it was efficiency. He liked to look clever, and though scheming looked very clever, winning looked the cleverest. And he did look suspiciously like he was winning right now. He stood up straight and pressed his back to the wall. The water was above his belly button now. The sensation did something unpleasant to Cabaso’s body, and to his panic.

“Well?” Mr.Castle said. “Beg for my forgiveness.”

“Ah! Oh, I see. Well, here goes: please! I’m begging you! I have much to look forward to. I have my whole life! Mercy! Please! You looked best with a bit of compassion on your face, Mr.Castle, and I know I deserve not to even be lifted from this tank and onto the dirt beneath your feet, but if you were feeling so forgiving-”

“I think you are aware,” Mr.Castle said, “that it is a factor of the cadence of your voice that everything that comes out of your mouth sounds sarcastic.”

“I am aware now. Shall I change my voice for you? I am afraid my accent is strong. And my voice won’t matter much longer. Underwater and all that.”

“Be quiet,” Mr.Castle suggested. “You will be on your own very soon. In some time, the room will fill with more water, and you’ll drown. You’ll be dead the next time I come in. There will be laughing on my part. I’ll get someone to chuck your body into the river or something.” He turned his head a fraction toward the window he was poking out of. “Ah. Hang on. Here is something…”

He left. And he returned wearing an insult. He wore it not nearly as well as Cabaso wore it. The rim was too tight around his head, and the shadow that fell across his eyes was sleazy and unkind to his features. The hat itself was a magnificent thing, shining like wet cobblestones, in dark shades, like it was permanently in a shadow. It was mysterious. Charismatic. Enigmatic. Everything about the angle of the rim said elegance and beauty.

Cabaso’s head swelled with rage. Blackness pushed on the inside of his cranium and carried his temper on it, buoyed and darkening the rest of the world. He was really only a few feet below the hat, and the head wearing it, unjustly. The hat was doing its best to turn Mr.Castle the bastard into Mr.Castle the handsome rake. Because it was nto just any old hat. It was his hat.

Then Mr.Castle went back inside the window, and this time he shut it behind him. There was a bang as it swung all the way closed. The darkness was absolute. It did not rid him of the water, which was counting his ribs upward. He writhed against the wall, but the cuffs were firm and tight around his wrists. His legs were free, but they could only go so far without his hands. And he did not want to try walking away and slip into the water with his hands snagged above him. It sounded uncomfortable on several levels.

The hat would have been able to solve this. There was a hat pin in there was had many more uses than most hat pins did have. There were buttons on the hat that had more capabilities than other people’s buttons. There were picklocks and tiny useful instruments in the concealed pocket of the hat. There was also a bandage that would have been perfect for sliding between the cuff and the knob of his wrist. The water did not help his hands slick and come out of the cuffs. It only made it a little harder to concentrate when it was almost up to his underarms.

Cabaso did a quick calculation and realized he was on his way to a quick death. Not necessarily a pleasant death; he’d heard many things about drowning and most of them pointed toward agony. All he had to do was un-cuff himself, and then he would be free to find the source of the water and shut it off, or get out of the room, or both options in alternative order, and then avoid Mr.Castle but not avoid the hat. He would complete it with the most perfect getaway Mr.Castle or anyone in the market had every seen.

He tugged on his wrists. The cuffs bit them hungrily. He tugged harder. He lost a little more of the skin on his wrists to the cuffs. He considered when he’d last updated his will and then whether or not he had actually told anyone where it was. He had many fine possessions he was proud of, but the one that he would be most worried about in whatever afterlife existed sat on Mr.Castle’s head. He thought about his death, and the agony, and the after, and his hat.

“Oh, stop that. Now’s not the time.”

The voice had spoken in his ear, so Cabaso turned his head, automatically, toward the speaker. There was something metallic and finicky happening around his wrists. The pressure around one of them was gone. His hand came back to life as he lifted it out of the water, out of the unlocked cuff.

Cabaso turned to the voice. “Pardon?”

In the darkness, Cabaso should not have been at all able to make out the smile. But he could, because the darkness parted for that kind of handsomeness. The smile was roguish and inviting; the eyes invited swooning.

“Other wrist, now,” said the man. He smiled and the eyes did not invite swooning so much as encourage it.

Cabaso did not swoon. He shifted his shoulder slightly so the man could reach around him without moving through the water too much. The water was up to Cabaso’s shoulders, and not quite up to the man’s. The couple inches of difference were annoyingly infuriating. The man did something else metallic and the cuff around his other hand opened.

“That’s better, isn’t it? I hoped you weren’t in trouble, but it sounded like you were,” the man said. He looked at Cabaso from a dark and handsome face. Cabaso looked back from his own dark face. His eyes sparkled. He was not much taller than the average man, but his posture told everyone he was ever likely to meet that they would look up to him in some way or other so they may as well begin by looking up to him physically.

“Trouble? What trouble? I am perfectly all right,” Cabaso said.

“All right does not require rescuing. I just did that.”

Cabaso would allow him to hold this opinion, however wrong it was. “Mr.Castle does not know you’re here, does he?”

“Absolutely not. He’s still waiting on the other side for you to drown. If you were cuffed, that would only have taken another, foot, but I think he wants to be sure. See? The water is already up to your chin. The water’s coming from the floor. But give it a minute and it will buoy us up to a door in the wall.”

“You planned this?”

The man with Cabaso’s skin and the roguish smile said, “Of course.” He made a face that might have made some people, when looking at Cabaso and the man side by side, think, for a horribly misguided second, that he was a tad more handsome than Cabaso. “Did you really think I was going to stand by and let someone drown my little brother?”

The water touched Cabaso’s bottom lip. He did not tilt his head back. He had his pride. “No one was drowning me. I told you, I’m all right.”

The man began to float on top of the water. His limbs helped him. He didn’t look toward the window where Mr.Castle and the hat had disappeared. He looked toward the opposite side of the compartment and pushed himself slowly to it. Cabaso floated on the water too, and watched him reach for a latch. A part of the wall that did not look like a door swung open, like a door. “This is it,” the man said. “I recommend going quickly, before it fills with water.”

Then he did not give Cabaso the chance to ignore his advice, because he seized Cabaso and hauled him through the door, which was actually the entrance to a tunnel, which was actually like a long water slide.

The water slide went on for a bit. In the dark, Cabaso had the time to reflect that he was going down and away, and getting farther and farther from the hat, and that he did not know what was at the bottom of this, and also, that he was not enjoying himself.

At the bottom, he nearly twisted his ankle in a metal grate. He hit his face on it instead. The hat’s brim would have saved him. He dragged himself off the grate and onto a concrete floor where he shivered and was miserable and wet.

From the tunnel came a sort of enjoying-himself noise. It preceded his brother, who shot out of the tunnel and only his feet like he’d finished performing a very good trick. “Ha!” he said. “Brilliant, huh?”

“To some,” Cabaso conceded. And, not that he was particularly curious, but, “were you holding your hands above your head as you came down?”

“Of course I was. Why wouldn’t I?”

Cabaso got to his feet. His feet didn’t like it. Well, his feet would have to just take it. “You name? Is it still Algernon?”

“Absolutely. No reason to change it. Don’t fix what isn’t broken and all that. And you, Cabaso? Still calling yourself by that name?”

“Don’t fix, and all that,” Cabaso said, though it could be argued that changing his name might actually aid him. He sounded uncertain. He looked drowned and conviction-less. He felt very young and stupid.

“Well, whatever works. Look, I’ve got to go. You know, things to do. Just don’t get into any more messy situations. And don’t worry about it. I know you would have done it for me.” Algernon meant every word he said, which did not make Cabaso feel better about it. It made him, in fact, feel much, much worse.

This really was an awful day. Because now it just had to be said. “Thank you, brother.”

“You don’t have to. But! Your hat, right?” Algernon smiled, like the way he said it did not make Cabaso feel ten inches tall. “Mr.Castle still has it, as you know. And I know you don’t want to hear any advice, but here it is: forget the hat. Really. You’ll be better off without it. Get another one.”

“Hm,” Cabaso said.

“Hm.” Algernon inclined his head, and it was as elegant a gesture as though he were wearing a hat. He shook his head once, spraying water, turning his hair into a devastating mess. He was elusive as he left, leaving in a direction that Cabaso did not notice entirely. This was Algernon’s talent. Leaving through indeterminate routes. People were always left with the feeling that they’d just witnessed a magic trick, but a very high end one.

He could forget the hat. He could lie low or pay someone else to retrieve it for him. He could change his name and plan out a route too complicated for Mr.Castle to chase him. He could get a new hat. Not his hat. It would not be his hat at all.

He came very close to another sigh. He was still going to get his hat back. And part of it was this: sometime, when he was young, he’d decided who he wanted to be. And because he had human imagination, what he created could only get as far as an amalgamation of things that already existed, and it was a variation on a model he’d already seen.

He had known many things about who he wanted to be, and what he wanted not to be, and even as a boy he had decided to become or not become all of them. He had wanted to be entirely different from his brother. He had not wanted to be like anyone that already existed. He wanted to be clever and enigmatic and slippery and devastating. He wanted to be one of a kind.

So, essentially, like his brother.  

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by anonymous