Crap Kingdom

by D. C. Pierson

  As they wove their way through the network of blanket forts, Gark was announcing Tom’s arrival.

  “Chosen One here!” Gark hollered. “Chosen One walking a sacred and predestined path to the castle of our sovereign!”

  Tom was so excited by this mention of an actual king in a legitimate castle that he didn’t notice as they passed a mangy toddler fighting an equally mangy dog for a scrap of gristle right in the middle of his sacred and predestined path, and when the dog gave up and let go, the toddler went flying backward into Tom’s knees, causing Tom to fall forward into a generous-sized puddle of what he hoped was brown water.

  “Oh!” Gark said, and ran to help Tom up. “Not to worry!” he shouted to everyone around them. “The Chosen One shall encounter many dangers on his journey, and he shall handle them all with equal—oof!—aplomb!”

  Tom was back on his feet. He thought momentarily about wringing his shirt out, then decided to just accept the fact that in this world, he would always be wet.

  Gark’s pronouncements made a man sitting outside his fort look up from what he was doing, which was roasting gray meat on a gray TV satellite dish that had been repurposed as a grill. A little fire licked its underside. The meat rested in either the concave or the convex part of the dish, Tom couldn’t remember which was the right word. The man looked Tom up and down and snorted.

  Let him snort, Tom thought. There were lots of examples of a Chosen One being scrawny and not all that intimidating and sometimes even covered in mud. If anything, it was the norm. You didn’t see a whole lot of Chosen Ones who looked like Chosen Ones, with muscles and long, dreamy hair. Mostly they were kids like Tom, nerdy and not all that special-seeming one way or the other. If people snorted at you, maybe that meant you were doing something right.

  They were about thirty paces past the barbecuing guy when another man ran right across their path. The man was on fire.

  It was the second man totally engulfed in flame that Tom had seen in a span of two hours. Still, Tom yelped involuntarily. It wasn’t something you got used to.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Gark said.

  “Did he screw up a spell, too?” Tom said.

  “I wouldn’t say, I mean, not to contradict you, but I wouldn’t say I screwed up the spell, so much as the fire has a mind of its own,” Gark said. “And, no. That’s just a customer from The Johns.”

  “The Johns” created an image in Tom’s mind of a business run by two guys named John whose main job was to set their customers on fire.

  “The Johns?” Tom said.

  “Yep,” Gark said. “Our oldest drinking establishment.”

  They turned down the alley the flaming man had run from. The oldest drinking establishment in the kingdom was three portable toilet stalls all lashed together. The sheds had their front panels cut off, creating the effect of a little barn with one side open to the elements. Above the cut-open part, each individual shed had a brand name emblazoned on it in extruded green plastic: MOBI-JOHN.

  “I know it looks like they’re drinking their own pee,” Gark said, “but they’re not.”

  Gark was right: there were two patrons seated on the toilets, fully clothed, with long straws like the one from Gark’s conveyance running down into the toilet bowls.

  “Then . . . what are they doing?” Tom said.

  “Well,” Gark said, smiling, “I know in your world, you use those things for, you know . . . and that’s what you do. But what we do—” and here Gark seemed like he was a great chef telling Tom his secret ingredient—“is fill them with our native liquor, thinkdrink. The plastic and the drinker’s body heat combine to keep the thinkdrink at a steady warm temperature. People love it. It has one disadvantage, though.”

  “What’s that?” Tom said, suspecting that even though Gark had said very explicitly that it wasn’t pee, he would now admit that it actually was.

  “It’s best served warm,” Gark said, “but if it gets too warm, it starts a fire.”

  “Oh,” said Tom. “But it gets you drunk?”

  “Oh yeah,” Gark said. “You start remembering all kinds of stuff.”

  Tom was confused. Admittedly, he’d never been drunk before. But he knew from TV and movies that a lot of people drank to forget. If you listened to five songs that mentioned going to a bar, usually four of them were talking specifically about going to the bar to drink and forget something or someone.

  “Thinkdrink makes all your memories, but especially painful ones, clear and sharp,” Gark said. “That way you can sit and think for hours about where you went wrong.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Tom said.

  “Because then you’re thinking of the past,” Gark said, “and the past is better than the present and they’re both better than the future. At least, that’s what everybody says. Anyway, I don’t drink it much myself. Mostly my memories are happy so it only makes me think of happy stuff and I guess that isn’t the point.”

  “Thanks!” someone behind them said. Tom turned and saw the previously on-fire guy walking out of a booth. He was now fully extinguished, though his sweater and plaid pajama pants were burned. He waved to the guy inside the booth, which contained a long Tupperware storage tub full of grayish water, a stool for the proprietor to sit on, and a sign reading JUMP IN HERE AND GET PUT OUT, FIVE MONEYCOINS. PAYABLE AFTER EXTINGUISHING. The dripping man passed Tom and Gark and went back into The Johns, resuming his place at the bar, or on the toilets, or whatever the proper term was here.

  “It was like I was right back there,” the old man said to his old-man companion one toilet over, “the night she died.”

  “Yeesh,” Tom said out loud.

  Tom kept reminding himself that no matter how gross or dangerous his surroundings, at the end of this path they were walking, there was a king, and a prophecy with his name on it, and it was all inside an honest-to-goodness castle.

  “This is it,” Gark said a few minutes later.

  They were standing in front of what appeared to be a small fiberglass castle from a miniature golf course. Built out from this tiny castle was an actual structure, the biggest Tom had seen in the kingdom. It was a patchwork of planks and boards composing a rough, uneven dome that was maybe the height of a two-story Earth building. It looked like someone had taken every set piece the Arrowview Drama Department had ever constructed and nailed them together, unpainted side out. The fiberglass mini-golf castle was just the entrance to the actual castle, and the actual castle was a wooden monstrosity that was the most sturdily built thing in the kingdom, yet also seemed like it could be knocked over by an extra-strong sneeze.

  Maybe there will be swords inside, Tom thought. There had better be swords inside.

  6

  “THIS IS IT?”

  The king of the nameless kingdom was talking about Tom.

  The king was old and bearded, the way Tom thought of kings as being, but he was wearing an unzipped black goose-down jacket with nothing underneath it, so his stomach protruded, bare and covered in salt-and-pepper hair, and the knobs of his knees poked out of Hawaiian-print shorts. There were green shower sandals on his feet and a baseball cap where his crown should have been. Unless the cap was his crown, in which case, his crown had white letters on it that said BIKINI INSPECTOR.

  “This is he!” Gark said.

  “Him,” the king said. “You mean to say ‘this is him.’”

  Tom knew “this is he” was actually correct, because his mom corrected him about that kind of thing a ton. He hesitated to correct a king, though, even if he was a king whose throne appeared to be a blue Igloo cooler, with its open top serving as the chair back and lots of towels and blankets inside to act as a seat. Also, the king had a British accent. Tom liked British accents a lot. They made anyone who had one sound smart no matter what they said. If the king had a British ac
cent, he probably knew what he was talking about way more than Tom or even his mom did.

  “He’s awfully small,” the king said.

  Tom felt like it was probably time for him to pipe up and defend himself, but he didn’t know what to say, exactly. A Chosen One wouldn’t wait to have it all figured out, though. He’d just act.

  “Your Highness,” Tom said, “I won’t let you down.”

  “I’m afraid you already have,” the king said.

  “How?” Tom said. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do here.”

  “And that’s exactly it,” said the king. “A true Chosen One would not need to be told what to do, he would just do it.”

  “Come on,” Gark said. “He hasn’t even been here an hour. He hasn’t even heard the prophecy!”

  “In my opinion,” the king said, “a Chosen One needing to hear the prophecy that foretells his coming before he can do the thing he’s come to do is a little like the sun needing to hear a poem about itself to be reminded how to shine. But go ahead, if you believe it will help.”

  “I’ll go and grab it,” Gark said, running out of the throne room, which was a big wooden cavern cluttered with crisscrossing beams and lit by torches. Tom didn’t think it was a very good idea to keep torches in a room that was basically a big jumble of flammable wood, given the kingdom’s overall fire safety record.

  “You must understand it is nothing against you personally,” the king said. “Gark is rather an abnormality here. He is perhaps our least intelligent citizen. He is also the one with the most positive attitude. Which is strange, because his father was one of our most respected citizens, and also one of our most negative.”

  “Why was he respected?” Tom asked. Tom had often been accused of being negative, and in his experience, it made people like you less, not more.

  “Because negativity is one of our most valued qualities. Gark’s father, Garko, was a masterfully depressing person.”

  Say something smart, Tom thought. Something smart and Chosen One–like.

  “That’s interesting,” Tom said. “On Earth we think of happiness as kind of the goal.”

  “Oh, we do as well,” the king said. “But our people are happier when their expectations are lower. The past was better than today, today is bad, and tomorrow will be worse. Viewed that way, anything that happens that is remotely good is very good. But you must also realize it’s an accident. You might pursue a pattern of behavior that would cause more good things to happen, but with each triumph, you are getting your expectations out of sync with how the universe normally works. Eventually, you are going to fail, and when that failure happens, you will feel even worse than you had when you started. So why start?”

  “Uhm,” Tom said, “That’s . . .”

  “A quote. I was quoting Garko, rest his miserable soul. Garko, Garko, Garko,” the king said, staring into the shadows, getting nostalgic. “Ah, there’s a good example! Our names, you see. Gark’s father was Garko. Garko, son of Garkon. Garkon, son of Garkona. And so on and so on. When it is time to name your offspring, you name them after their father if it is a boy, the mother if it’s a girl, and drop a letter. One letter each generation. It reminds us that the past was better, that we are all our parents, but less.”

  “What if you have two boys or two girls?”

  “Most people stop at one. I did. It’s not an experience one seeks to replicate.”

  Tom was an only child. He imagined his dad telling his mom that Tom was an experience he did not seek to replicate.

  “What happens when you run out of letters in your names?”

  “For most, that is four generations from now, and we’ll worry about it when it happens. If it happens at all. We did not expect to exist even this long.”

  Tom marveled at how depressing Garko must have been if the king considered Garko even more depressing than the king was.

  “When we transitioned out of a life of mere survival, it was Garko the Great Cynicist who kept our expectations low. All this Chosen One nonsense is really for his sake. I do not believe he would have wished to see his son go through life as an optimistic person, so I am letting this all play out in hopes that it will be a spectacular failure, Gark will finally realize that idealistic endeavors are simply asking for trouble and become so disillusioned he’ll choose to continue the legacy of his father. He actually found you and brought you back, which is impressive. If only he would apply his energies to some really productive brooding, he could easily be one of the greatest men in Nggghthththhh.”

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Nggghthththhh? The name of our kingdom.”

  “Gark said the kingdom didn’t have a name.”

  “It doesn’t,” the king said. “But there are times where, grammatically, it makes sense to speak the name of the kingdom aloud. And since it does not have a name, it is traditional just to mumble unintelligibly for the length of the average kingdom name.”

  “Why not just name it?”

  “No one would be able to agree on a name. We’d end up with something everyone hated.”

  “Can’t you just make a proclamation?”

  “That would be awfully arrogant. Can you imagine how mad people might get if I was just to go around proclaiming things?”

  “I thought that’s what kings were supposed to do.”

  “I suppose. But in our society, it is more the king’s job to set a mood, to discourage outbursts of irrational ambition or exuberance. We’ve always had an army, but I’ve found that they’re most effective just being at home, bored, chatting with their friends and neighbors, complaining about the state of things and imagining the horrible ways they might get worse. I suppose if I started doing rash things like issuing proclamations, I might have to tell them to take up arms and gather around me to protect me from an angry populace. As it stands now, no one is mad at me because they know I can’t do anything and they trust me not to do anything even if I could because it’s all futile.”

  “Oh,” Tom said.

  “Unless you have an idea for a brilliant kingdom name to which everyone will instantly agree?”

  Tom was silent.

  “No? Then we shall continue to be nameless. For if we name our kingdom,” the king said, “we might develop an identity. A culture. A sense of ourselves. And what happens if those things are taken away? If we do not develop a sense of ourselves, we will not miss each other when we’re gone. If our kingdom is destroyed—”

  Tom was about to ask who would want to destroy them when Gark came clomping back in. “Here it is!” he yelled, waving a white piece of paper over his head. He paused and tried to catch his breath. “Do you want me to read it to him? You said ‘Hear the prophecy,’ so . . .”

  “You said ‘hear the prophecy.’ I was just repeating what you said,” said the king. “Just give it to him and let him read it.”

  If he could read it for himself, Tom thought, that meant it wouldn’t be in runes or pictographs. But when Gark handed it over, he realized it was even less impressive than that. It looked like it had been printed out on any computer and typed up using any word-processing program on Earth. It was formatted exactly like a paper Tom would turn in for school, double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman. It read:

  The Chosen One must be retrieved from Earth.

  He will bring down the Wall and restore the kingdom to glory.

  His name is Tom Parking.

  It was a cool enough prophecy, Tom thought. The problem was presentation. It was a white sheet of printer paper with three lines on it. If Tom had been told to write a prophecy on his home computer, he would have at least made sure the words were centered in the middle of the page. He didn’t dare point these things out, though. Sure, it was a prophecy any kid could have made in any computer lab. But it was also a prophecy that
named him as the Chosen One.

  “Gark, where did you get this?” Tom asked.

  “It was slipped in through my window at night,” Gark said.

  “I must confess,” the king said, “there is one very small part of me that wants this prophecy to be right about you. So, Tom—”

  “Come on,” Gark said. “It’s Tim, it’s right here on the page.”

  “It is right here on the page,” Tom said, “and it’s Tom.”

  “Yes, Tom, what is it exactly will you do as Chosen One?”

  “Uhm, I guess whatever the prophecy says?”

  “I find the idea of a Chosen One reading his own prophecy like an instruction booklet distasteful. You’ve read the prophecy. What now?”

  “Uhm, there’s a lot of things in it that I’m unclear on. . . .”

  Gark perked up. “‘The Wall’ refers to—”

  “Ah ah ah!” The king said. “Now we must interpret it for you as well?”

  “Just help me out here!” Tom said. “Trust me, I’d love to actually feel like I was your Chosen One, and just come in here and know exactly what I was doing and start doing it, but I don’t, and you said there’s one part of you that wants me to succeed, so why not help me as much as you possibly can? I thought, like, maybe in your world I’d have special magical powers or something, but I clearly don’t have any, and you guys aren’t offering me any magical swords or anything like that, and I clearly need all the help I can get, so why not just tell me as much as you know and stop holding back?”