Circles

History repeats and time moves in circles. The law of dreams is to keep moving and Charlie has stopped still.

I

The first time Charlie leaves the Factory is exactly twenty-five years after the last time he entered it and forgot to leave again.

Charlie is old and young and magic and ordinary all at once, a walking kaleidoscope of contradictions, and he walks out as if he never left the ordinary world behind, ignoring the call of the Factory telling him to come back, telling him the heart can't just walk out of its body, telling him to just let himself become part of his too-bright hyper-reality and stop deluding himself that he can leave.

He walks out as if he never left and no one will ever know how much it took out of him to keep dragging one foot in front of the other, to not collapse to his knees and simply crawl back to the Factory doors like a penitent lover, to just keep breathing.

II

The first thing he discovers about the outside world once more is non-Wonka chocolate. He'd forgotten such a thing existed. He feels the block of plain chocolate melt on his tongue

(milk, sugar, Cocoa mass, Cocoa butter, vegetable fat, emulsifiers – why, those cheats!)

and it's so ridiculously plain compared to his own outrageous creations he nearly faints at the simplicity of it.

He wanders from shop to shop, and if he still remembered how to lie he would say he was checking up on enemy advances, becoming the spy Mr Wonka was too proud, too secure, too moral to use. Instead he simply tastes a little of each cheap Fickelgruber and Slugworth and Prodnose rip-off and moves on, serene and untouchable, a swan of plum velvet.

something lost: innocence

III

"I need an heir," Mr Wonka said.

Later, when they found out about Wonka-Vite, immortality in pill form, they asked why he didn't use it himself and now Charlie has the answer, buried deep in the hollow spaces of himself like shards of glass and disillusionment in his blood and bones.

the answer to a question never asked: because he was lucky, because he had nothing but luck, because history repeats and time moves in circles.

IV

a secret: Mr Wonka's ghost still haunts the factory. Except when it is not a ghost.

The hat upon his head and the plum velvet frock coat and silver-buttoned waistcoat he wears still bear Mr Wonka's scent, though he never wore them. Charlie will never admit that the smell he has associated with Mr Wonka from childhood is now his own.

He holds Mr Wonka's cane as if he were born with it in his hand, he hop skip dances about as if he has always been as he is now.

"Hello Mr Wonka," he says to his reflection, eyes glittering beneath the brim of the top hat, and feels a shiver over his skin, the name and personality slipping over him like a mask, like a second skin. He feels himself become (a) Mr Wonka, who is not a person but an ideal, an image, a necessary piece of magic.

The real Mr Wonka slips into his shadow, becomes his shadow or his shadow becomes him; either way there is a weight on his back and velvet-covered arms tight about his neck. Charlie carries his expectations with him wherever he goes and with more ease than he ever would have thought possible back when the Factory first became his, when Mr Wonka's weight looked to crush him – it is a heavy legacy he has to bear.

Sometimes even he, looking so hard, can't tell the difference between himself in the mirror and his recollections of the chocolatier. It'd be worrying, if it weren't so right.

This is the way the world turns — history repeats, time moves in circles.

a truth: his heart is not broken. He can go on without Mr Wonka.

V

The second thing he relearns about the outside world is that people are wonderful and terrible and oh so human all at once, and they are very, very interesting to watch. He resolves to leave the Factory more often, and study this phenomenon that is humanity further.

a secret: Mr Wonka said it was for the space that he went underground and hollowed out new rooms but this is an untruth – not a lie, never a lie, just a type of truth that isn't quite all it purports to be. The truth is he went underground because Mr Wonka's kind belongs beneath the earth.

VI

He writes with Mr Wonka's elaborate capitals and swirling lines and curls, anything else wouldn't fit into the fluid ever-shifting realm of the Factory. He left the rounded serviceable letters of his childhood behind without regret, but it doesn't stop him jumping every time he sees a post-it note with Mr Wonka's handwriting – as if his mentor would come back just to remind him the Snozzberry wallpaper "needs more snozzberries" and that he needs to stop mining Fudge Mountain for awhile so he can discover what caused the last cave-in.

Knowing Mr Wonka, he just might.

a lie: he is content. He does not wish his life had played out as it should have and he reached this point in his life starving in the streets.

VII

The third thing he rediscovers in the outside world (he thinks it's a 're' because he can vaguely remember the joy of overhearing discussions about a ticket long ago, but that might have been a dream he lost while creating jelly-filled liquorice bats) is the vicarious entertainment of gossip.

He finds it amusing to hear about Presidents and royalty and the tawdry affairs of celebrities so minor only the Oompa Loompas would know who they were, and it isn't until Mr Wonka saunters into the conversation that he remembers he really must get back to Inventing Room, he left something boiling…

The man's dead, surely, he hears them say, and he wants to say I am him now that he's gone. There are no children around or the answer might be different, for they would have pointed out without guile or astonishment that Mr Wonka is magic, of course.

Of course.

He remembers that he is a recluse and stalks back into the Factory and stares at his reflection that is Mr Wonka's reflection for a long, long time.

a misplaced piece of knowledge: Mr Wonka was wonderful but human. Maybe.

VIII

The Factory is another realm of existence. Time flows and stops and starts with what used to be alarming irregularity; these days he wonders that he was ever startled by his habit of losing minutes/hours/days. Everything is brighter, more intense here and Charlie is capable of impossible things. He has to be, or else the Factory would devour him; he can't afford to be unworthy of this legacy.

a puzzle: he is quite sure his eyes used to be a different colour, but he can't quite remember what.

IX

Gravity is a law, not a suggested option, he scrawls on the walls of the Fizzy Lifting Drinks room after his fourth outing, surrounded by humming bubbles. Five minutes later he walks back in, reads it once in frozen shock, forces a laugh and covers it over with paint.

X

He does his best work at Halloween, and for his fifth outing he goes out to see for himself the adored holiday of his childhood – free candy is, after all, free food. He walks out in the disguise of a normal person. The Factory lets him go just a little easier than all the times before

(this time he doesn't even need to empty the stash of chocolate in his second outer pocket to give him enough strength to reach the main street before collapsing)

and he understands why as he watches masked and costumed children careen past with wild yells and happy obliviousness. He wonders if the holiday always looked so cheap, so tawdry and utterly mundane, or if this is only the result of his jaded eyes, used to the hollow hill beneath the Factory.

"Hey," he says to a boy watching trick-or-treaters pass with the longing only the starving could show – brown hair, brown eyes, face starved and pinched, and why is this familiar? – and offers him a whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight from his inner pocket (pocket four, second from top, right hand side)

something found: cruelty

and watches his little sociological experiment play itself out. The boy has been told, no doubt, over and over, never to take candy from strangers, but Charlie remembers just barely the rule of hunger, the times when his stomach was a stone in his belly that he believed would never feel hunger again – until someone showed him food.

Hunger wins, of course. How many mousetraps prove that?

He walks on, grinning the Cheshire grin of someone he has forgotten.

something borrowed: a skewed sense of morality.

XI

He wonders briefly if it is time for another Golden Ticket contest, but knows from the thrill of horror that runs over his skin at the thought of someone unknown to Mr Wonka entering the Factory that neither he nor the Factory is ready.

Time moves in circles, and history repeats, and somewhere out there is an ordinary boy with nothing but luck to his name, waiting to become real while he waits in his colourful sugar world beneath the earth for the time to come when he can turn the wheel once more.

a whisper he should have paid attention to: the law of dreams is to keep moving.

XII

The sixth time he leaves the Factory he comes back with a starved cat on his shoulder, his clothing in rags. Gingerly licking at the blood on his lip he wonders what the tang of iron could be offset with (strawberry crème perhaps?) and if it would be best to enhance its bitterness with milk chocolate or complement it with dark. The cat rubs its head against his cheek and Charlie feels the purr thrumming in its throat as he scratches beneath its chin and debates the merits of lollipops over chocolate bars as a medium of choice.

He remembers why he acceded so easily to the call for him to stay forever and forget another world existed in the first place.

XIII

The seventh time he leaves the Factory he does nothing but watch the sun come up and go down, just because he can. He returns the Factory as the stars come out and he knows in his heart he will never leave again.

a promise: the Factory will keep producing marvels and dreams so long as Mr Wonka is there to make them.