by Adam Vine
Filip’s eyes looked nervous, but his voice was firm. “We’ve found some places where your rewritten version loses the meaning. Also, some of the rhyming structure is wrong. I don’t attribute this to laziness on your part, or anything else negative. You probably didn’t understand there was supposed to be more than one implication to some of these words, and we didn’t pay close enough attention to what you were doing. But I’m afraid most of these passages will need to be rewritten.”
At least he broke the news gently, I thought. Rage warped the edges of my vision. I waited until I was sure my voice wouldn’t shake, and then spoke as clearly and evenly as I could. “With all due respect, this stuff took me more than a month. I double-checked everything; triple-checked, in some places. If I have to do it over, I’ll be working on Part I until Christmas.”
Filip tilted his head to show his sympathy. “Unfortunately, I think so. I know how frustrating it is to start over, but this is one area we can’t compromise on. I’m sorry, Dan. You look sad.”
I tried to play it cool, taking slow, deep breaths to let the fire out of my belly. “No, I’m fine. I’ve had a lot of work rejected over the years, from magazines, from… well, mostly magazines… it’s part of the deal, y’know? Comes with the territory. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Great,” Filip said with a big, paternal smile.
We spent the next hour going over the edits. I made notes in my phone, but I was too angry to pay much attention. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that it had been a mistake to take this job. I knew some of my word choices had been the right ones, and that my boss being persnickety was actually going to rob some of the meaning from the poem, not add to it. Hell, some of the lines he wanted to cut were the best work I’d ever done.
Before I left Filip’s office to go back to my desk, he stopped me by the door to shake my hand and said, “Oh, by the way. I know it’s still a ways away, and I’m really sorry, but I wanted to tell you early so you could make other plans. I actually can’t host you this Christmas. It’s not that I don’t want to. I do. And I’m sad I have to break our plans. But, my wife’s father is sick, so we will have to spend Christmas at her home, in the east of Country.”
“No problem, Filip. Is he all right?” I said.
Filip rolled his head uncertainly. “We’re not sure. We are trying to err on the side of caution.”
“We can take a rain check next year,” I said.
“Hopefully sooner. When things are a little less busy, maybe we can go out for a beer,” Filip said.
“I’d like that,” I said.
I spent the rest of the day surfing the Internet, trying to psyche myself up for my first Friday night out now that I was single and relatively healthy again. I signed up for the guest lists at a few dance clubs that looked promising.
I suppose I’d been single all along, but it hadn’t felt that way. I had actually thought Kashka and I had something. I’d even started thinking about our future together. Not the first time I’ve been wrong about that.
While I was surfing the web, I came across a website called howtomeetwomen.com, which looked like spam until I saw the headline of the latest blog post, titled America is Sick. I read the first sentence, then the first paragraph, then the whole thing, feeling a growing sense of déjà vu at each new criticism of American food, culture, feminism, and belt sizes. The website didn’t appear to have much to do with picking up girls at all.
I wasn’t surprised at all to see Ink’s dour, bearded face staring back at me when I clicked through to the author’s bio. He looked younger in his author picture than he did in real life, his black hair cropped shorter and his corpse-green eyes squinted. One, long, bony finger rested on his cheek in a classic philosopher’s pose.
I spent far more time on that website than I should have, reading post after post about the fallen state of modern America. The further back I searched in Ink’s blog archive, the more frequently I came across posts about picking up girls; which opening lines to use, when the right time was to approach, how often a man should shave or what kind of soap he should use to “maximize attraction.”
Before he first moved to Country, Ink almost never wrote about American culture, except how hard it was to get American girls in bed. He didn’t write cultural criticisms at all. His oldest posts had titles like How to Obey Your Boner and Which Nationality of Girl is Right for You? The website had over a million views in the past month.
Most of it made me cringe. Some of it even turned my stomach a little. But while Ink’s style was crude, and he certainly wasn’t going to make friends with feminists any time soon, the advice he gave seemed to make a primitive kind of sense. Any of it could’ve been something my dad had told me about the birds and the bees back when I was still a clueless teenager. In some ways I had reverted back to that state after losing Carly. It wasn’t hard to imagine how, in the modern age of video games and porn, a lot of guys never grew out of it in the first place.
I understood why Ink’s website was popular. Taken on their own, those individual grains of advice sounded somewhat reasonable. What I couldn’t get over was the packaging. Ink’s entire worldview struck me as bitter, sad, and extremely nihilistic. My dad had always told me not to trust people whose views came off as extreme one way or the other - that most of the world’s problems were caused by people being unwilling to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes.
But what did I have to lose just by trying it?
By the time I got to the old city around ten PM, I was too depressed and exhausted to talk to anyone. I saw a few groups of girls, but no matter how much my inner voice screamed at me to talk to them, my legs and mouth and heart didn’t listen.
Tomorrow, I told myself. I’ll try again tomorrow. Hell, there’s always next weekend, too. I knew Ink would’ve slammed me for giving up and packing it in, but I was too cold, and too tired to care.
I went home and slept, the first good, deep sleep I’d had in almost a week.
THE BURROW
MY EYES OPENED to a ceiling of smooth, ancient stones where guttering torchlight played a grim, unending marathon of silent movies. I gasped a deep breath of stale air. The smell of mold and piss stung in my sinuses.
I sat up, sucking my teeth in pain. My shoulder felt like it had been run through with a lance. There were men outside my door. Their voices fell silent and they gave me quick, nervous glances when they saw I was awake.
Aching and nauseas, I rose to my feet, shivered, and brushed the patches of moldy straw from my rough wool clothes. It seemed like weeks since I’d gone to sleep in this subterranean prison, though I knew it had only been a few hours. I was in a body that wasn’t my own, a world that wasn’t my own. My memories of that other place were already slipping away, fast fading into vagueness and darkness like the false days that slid by on the surface above.
I walked to the door of my cell. “Good morning,” I said.
A giant meat chimney of a man with a handlebar mustache, who carried a spear with a red blade that looked like it was made of amber and wore a three-lobed fur hat with a large, floppy button on the top, said, “The fuck you say?”
“Gator, right?” I said.
The man cleared his throat and spat on the floor of his own jail.
“Uh… hi. Listen. I’m really cold, and I have no idea why I’m locked up in here. Barn Owl said I was supposed to meet someone named Queen Rat, which I assume is going to be some kind of hearing, or trial, maybe… anyway. I was wondering, can you tell me when that’s going to be? And could I get some food and fresh water while I wait? I’m feeling pretty dehydrated, and I think it’s been a long time since I had something to eat. There’s a bucket next to my bed, but it smells nasty, and I think it probably isn’t safe for me to drink.”
One of the other men outside my cell, a jowly son of a bitch with a skinny guy gut and a month’s worth of stubble slapped Gator on the chest. “C’mon, then! The l
ittle prince is hungry. What were we thinking, leaving him in a cell with nothing to eat or drink? Surely we can’t expect him to sip from his own soil bucket, can we? We’ll order him a nice, greasy piece of mutton from the kitchens right away…”
The man yelped as Gator grabbed his hand and twisted it in the direction it wasn’t supposed to turn. “Tell her the guests are awake,” Gator grunted as he held the cowering man in submission, steering him a full 180 degrees, then sent the interlocutor scurrying away down the hall with a swift, dusty kick on the ass.
Gator must’ve had decades of training to pull a move like that off. I guessed the other guy had little, if any.
Gator gazed through the bars of my cell.
I gave him my easiest, toothiest smile. “So, how about that water?” I said.
“That bucket is not for drinking,” Gator said.
Then Gator did something I didn’t expect. He wrapped his pinky finger around one of the bars of my door and pulled it open. It hadn’t even been locked. “You are no prisoner of mine. This was for your own protection,” Gator said.
I hesitantly walked through the cell door. I thought it might be some sort of trap. But Gator only spat again and folded his arms. When I was sure he wasn’t going to beat me bloody, I stretched and said, “How long was I out?”
“You slept about six hours. One full torch,” Gator said. He gestured to the other end of the prison block. “C’mon. There’s hot soup and mulled ale waiting for you in the chow hall. If you need a hot bath, you’re welcome to that, too. I suggest you take one before you visit the queen.”
“Um… Gator? Can I ask you something?” I said, as he put a gentle hand on my shoulder and we started walking.
“Knock yourself out,” Gator said.
“Are you only being nice to me now because of what Barn Owl said? Or is there some other reason? I only ask because you seemed a lot meaner last night, while you and your… uh… friends, were shaving me. You guys were pretty rough. I’ve got cuts all over my body,” I said.
Gator spat. “Everyone gets cut. Also, I apologize for spitting so much. Medical condition.” He spat again. “But get something through your skull, friend. It’s always night here. We don’t have such things as evenings and mornings. Those ended with the Last Day of Sun. Here, we measure time in torches. You slept for one torch. You’ll be awake for three. I’m told four torches is the length of time we used to call a day, but how the fuck should I know? The True Night started a hundred years before I was born. Try to remember that it won’t be endin’ anytime soon, and things will go easier for you.”
“What things?” I said.
Gator scratched the stubble under his chin. “And, I don’t give two piles of bat shit what Barn Owl thinks. You got one apology. Don’t expect any more. I was… mistaken about who you were. We couldn’t recognize you with all that fucking hair.”
“Who I was?” I said.
“Aye, who you were.”
Does he mean this body, with the ugly, beat-up face that looks like a caveman? This person who isn’t me?
Gator fixed me with a gorgon’s gaze. As if reading my mind, he said, “We were friends when you were alive.”
We both fell silent for a moment.
Gator’s eyes and chin fell toward the floor, his brow growing heavy with sorrow. “Of course, you’re different now. Changed. You don’t know the man you used to be. That man is gone. But, it’s always that way with your kind.”
“My kind? What do you mean?” I said.
“I wasn’t sure until I watched you sleeping,” Gator said. “Thought I recognized you when the Surface Party first brought you in, but it wasn’t until I crept next to you and pulled up your eyelid that I knew for certain.”
Even though I knew Gator could throw me through a wall if he wanted to, I was getting impatient with his unnecessarily cryptic way of speaking.
“Knew what?” I said.
Gator shrugged, eyes darting abstractly as he weighed each possibility, and said, “That you are not the same man we lost scouting in the snow for food stores four weeks past… that you’re not Len. That you’re not one of us at all.” His eyes locked on me and narrowed. “That you’re just… visiting.”
Gator cackled and slapped me hard on the back. I choked, coughing thick, black liquid into the palm of my hand. Gator looked at me with disgust, then laughed even harder.
His laughter faded and his tone became thoughtful. “This is why we are showing you such gracious hospitality! If you really were a Snowman, I would’ve tortured and beheaded you myself. You should’ve said something sooner.
“Of course, nobody would’ve believed you. The men all thought you were some kind of abomination – that you kidnapped and brainwashed that poor girl, so you could take her back to your den while the meat was still warm. They were ready to cut your internal organs out and make the dogs fight for them. But I had a premonition. A talking Snowman? I told them. Don’t be absurd!” His laughter boomed through the shadow-ridden halls of the jail.
Gator cracked his neck, his jovial smile falling to a hard, downward curve. “When everyone saw it, they quickly changed their tune. So, don’t worry. They’re more frightened of you than they are of Him.” He pointed to the ceiling, raising an eyebrow.
He means the Crippled King.
I had so many questions I couldn’t keep them straight. Start from the beginning, just like a poem. Prioritize the information that matters, and make sense of that first. Then go back and fill in the parts that don’t make sense later, I thought.
“Wait. What was it you saw?” I said.
Gator leaned in close, lowering his voice. “The Spiral,” he said, gesturing to his own eye with a finger. “You have it. Right there. The girl has it, too. As do all Visitors who return in the corpses of the recently frozen.”
I didn’t have time to ask Gator anything else. We arrived at a heavy iron door reinforced with struts and rows of one-inch spikes. Gator casually kicked it, and it swung open from the other side.
Behind the door, an old man draped under a musty bearskin robe nodded to us curtly. His head and face were hidden inside the bear’s jaws, except for a narrow slit left open for his nose and eyes.
“Bob of the Knob,” Gator told me, denoting the bear-man with his thumb. “Be cordial to him if you want to go anywhere in this shoddy shithole of a barracks we call the Last Station. He holds the keys to all the doors you might actually want to enter. Be polite, say hello… just don’t expect much in return. He lost his lips to frostbite. Then he lost his dick and tongue to a Snowwoman. Legend has it she bit one off, while the other froze from being inside her too long. I’ll leave your imagination to decide which was which. Did I get that right, Bob, or did I forget something?”
Bob’s eyes slanted behind the bear’s yellowed canines.
I bowed to Bob o’ the Knob and hurried through the door into a dim hall bedecked with rows of slender, white marble pillars. The ceiling was high and vaulted, covered in time-blanched mosaics of hallowed kings and warrior angels. Shadows hid in the crevices like clouds of black, formless bats, ebbing and waning in the light of a hundred guttering torches. Rust-eaten armor suits lined the walls, their eyeless faces reflecting floating ghosts in the polished, tiled marble of the floor.
Gator led me to a well-lit dais in the back of the hall where two women sat talking at a long dinner table. I didn’t realize until we were close that the small woman with the shaved head and skinny, bruised arms was Zaea.
They cut off her hair. Her cascading, beautiful, whiskey-colored hair.
The women interrupted their own conversation and waited for Gator and I to climb the steps up to the dais. Zaea’s spoon swam nervously through the chunky, brown soup in her bowl. The other woman studied me with eyes like amber arrowheads.
“A feast fit for royalty,” Gator exclaimed, placing both hands on the table, palms down. There wasn’t much – a few baskets of stale bread and a large pot of the same, unappetizing soup that w
as in Zaea’s bowl, warming over a hillock of embers burning in an iron fixture.
Gator picked up one of the stale rolls, tapped it on the armored plate over his chest, creating an audible plunk, then tossed the roll to me. I caught it with both hands. “Enjoy yourself. I still want to have teeth tomorrow, so I try not to eat anything around here that isn’t liquid, if you catch my meaning,” Gator said.
“Thanks,” I said.
The woman with the amber eyes dismissed Gator with a look. He shrugged, took another roll, and shoved it inside his coat. “On the other hand, I might not get to eat before then, unlike you fortunate people,” Gator said. “Maybe teeth are a luxury I can’t afford. To your health,” he said, raising the roll like a glass. Then, biting down hard and wrangling a piece of it free with his jaws, Gator left.
“May I sit?” I asked the woman with the amber eyes. She had to be someone important; the queen’s personal attendant, maybe, or one of her high court ladies; no doubt, she would be the one to present Zaea and me in front of the throne when we were done eating.
The woman gestured for me to sit down. She was older than me, but not much, thirty-five or so. She had an unattractive, square-jawed face, and short orange hair, ghostly pale skin, and a sunburst of ginger freckles like mine. She wore a simple wool tunic tied with a leather belt, frayed and stained as every other garment I’d seen in the Burrow. The only accouterments that denoted a higher station than someone like Gator was her gloves, red leather lined with soft, delicate sable fur. I’d seen gloves like that in the posh store windows on Saint Mary’s Street back in City, bearing price tags that would make people back in the U.S. feel poor. Her shoulders were decorated with a white stole embroidered with twin suns in red lace, one rising, and one setting.