Wilde Stories 2014

by Editred by Steve Berman

  The caryatid reached out with the arm that didn’t hold the window, tried to catch him, but the impact was too much, and her arm snapped off. Feetmeat plummeted toward the garden below, struggling to catch himself on something. He needed to get back, to distract the Court from Felipe.

  His belt yanked tight around his waist. He almost vomited from the sudden squeeze, and then he was falling sideways. He opened his eyes, amazed to see tiny bits of glass falling like snow from his hair and clothes, sparkling in the moonlight.

  Two stone paws hung in front of his head, their talons curled back toward him. The gargoyle that clutched his belt swung around, gently sweeping its way toward the ground.

  “No,” Feetmeat gasped. “Back to the window. I don’t care if they kill me. I’m not leaving him.”

  He wasn’t sure if it understood. Maybe it didn’t care, and would rather have someone to clean pigeon shit from its feathers than some human it had never seen.

  But after a moment of flapping in place, it banked right, then began to rise. When it swooped toward the window, Feetmeat spotted Bestra curled on the floor, clutching her knee. As soon as the gargoyle’s shadow flickered over them, the others glanced out.

  It swept in, its great stone wings knocking more glass from the frame, and gently placed Feetmeat on top of a standalone bookshelf. It grabbed Bestra in its hind claws and leapt off into the sky, her scream echoing back as it flew off to its perch.

  Bulgar bellowed, like the camels in the caravan. He and King both let go of Felipe. Bulgar thundered toward Feetmeat, his fingers hooked like claws. Feetmeat tossed a book at him, but he didn’t even notice. A dark shadow flitted across the moonlit floor once more, and this time, King grabbed the stone jug from the floor where Feetmeat had dropped it.

  When the gargoyle flew in, King swung the jug, snapping off some of its feathers. It whirled on him in silent fury, even as more gargoyles crawled and flew in through the window. One by one, the Court were dragged screaming from the room.

  The last gargoyle looked closely at Felipe, where he crouched motionless on the table.

  “Please,” Feetmeat said hoarsely. “He’s my friend.”

  The gargoyle turned and took wing. It dipped down below the window sill.

  Feetmeat clambered down off the bookshelf, suddenly aware of every place where glass had lodged in his skin. Felipe, who wore slippers, hurried off of the desk and over to Feetmeat, who sagged against the books.

  “I’m sorry. Bleeding all over. And the window…. If it rains, the books will get wet,” Feetmeat said, his voice as hoarse as if he’d swallowed the glass. He didn’t know what else to say.

  Felipe wrapped Feetmeat in his strong arms.

  “How did you do that,” he whispered. It didn’t sound like a question.

  Feetmeat shook his head. “I’m sure if the books could have, they would have defended you. It just turns out the place I belong has more teeth.”

  Felipe laughed, all relief and little humor. After a moment, he released Feetmeat. “Thank you,” he said, but instead of getting up and leaving, he leaned toward Feetmeat once more. This time he pressed his swollen, bleeding lips against Feetmeat’s. Soft but unyielding, he kissed Feetmeat until neither of their mouths tasted of blood.

  “Now, whose lips are these?” Felipe asked, outlining Feetmeat’s mouth with one gentle finger.

  Feetmeat thought of what he’d done, of the burden he’d taken upon himself, of the friends he hadn’t known he had, and most of all, the caryatides watching his combined sins and heroism with their implacable stone gaze.

  “Telamon,” he said. “That is my name.”

  The Revenge of Oscar Wilde

  Sean Eads

  Wilde accepts their praise, acknowledging his growing reputation as the knight-errant of this, the disturbed Exposition Universelle. It is as if no one remembers his dank, weary form haunting the city’s cheapest cafés, a penniless, friendless alcoholic and shamed bugger, embracing a long and pathetic public suicide. Most likely some of these same women spat at him on the street only a month ago as their fine, intact parasols darkened him with shadow.

  "C’est lui! Dieu merci!”

  “Je vous remercie, Saints, pour la santé de Monsieur O.W.!”

  He bows to acknowledge the appreciation from eight pretty damsels in distress. Two divergent groups of shambling, decomposing Lazarus men have herded them into a terrible trap in the narrow street between the Panorama du Congo and the massive, barricading left wing of the Palais du Trocadero. An hour ago, they were modern, self-assured young ladies quite unwilling to let the men, their fathers and brothers and husbands, sequester them further. They were armed, after all, and no doubt confident in the sturdiness of their parasols. Now the skeletal remains of those umbrellas lecture them on their foolishness. Shreds of fine vibrant fabric flutter off the broken, twisted ribs, mimicking the crisp, massive flags high overhead on the Palais spires. But the women’s gaze is not heavenward. If there is a god to them now, he walks this earth and his name is Oscar Wilde.

  He has appeared seemingly out of nowhere and stands resplendent in an orange topcoat, a sunflower in the uppermost buttonhole and an elegant Webley Royal Irish 450 CF revolver in his right hand—the weapon a gift from his lover Bosie, the pretty poison he has picked and died from years ago. Wilde’s head is bared to the breeze, his brown hair long and unkempt as in his younger days. Standing beside him, significantly shorter and appropriately serious and somehow vibrant in matching gray pants and shirt, is Albert Ayat—as of fifteen days ago the gold medalist in fencing at this, the 1900 Olympics here in Paris.

  The sword Ayat lifts in salute to the ladies now is sturdier than a traditional foil but his accuracy and speed with it are unchallenged and deadlier for the heft. It cuts a nifty whistle in the air when his wrists flick it just so.

  “I do not believe any of these Lazari include the one who bit poor Bosie, Ayat. Nevertheless the ladies require our attention—how dreadful.”

  “There are ten threatening from the left. I will take them,” Ayat says. Wilde listens, slow on the translation. Ayat is difficult to understand when he’s almost breathless. Wilde himself is nearly breathless just from looking at Ayat. But all that must wait. Ayat maneuvers toward the larger group of Lazarus men in that peculiar fencer’s stance that seems both noble and ridiculous. Wilde turns, his sigh quickly changing to a gasp as he weaves away from one clumsy hand. Decaying fingernails rip the sunflower from his chest and crush the petals. Three lumbering creatures growl at him and close.

  Wilde recomposes himself, brushes the flower’s remains from the buttonhole and retreats several steps, coolly checking the Webley to find it loaded and in good working order. In the days before his downfall in England, when Bosie’s father the Marquess of Queensberry threatened to assault him, Wilde threatened in turn to shoot him on sight. It had been a bluff—and Wilde was a very good bluffer. There was genuine fear in the little old bully’s eyes when he thought the towering Irishman might kill him there and then. I should have, Wilde thinks. But in 1893 he was another man, civilized, Bosie’s devoted fool. Wilde has been—and been with—many different men since then. Every dead incarnation of his being lives in whatever man he is now. But perhaps men always remain, inside, with the first person they ever loved, and remain the men they were at the time of that love’s experiencing. Why else is he out here once more avenging Bosie’s honor?

  Bosie’s father died many months ago. His passing did nothing to ease Wilde’s troubles at the time. It did not elicit the strange recall to life he feels now. His greatest pleasure, before he shoots the nearest Lazarus man in the head, is imagining it is 1893 again and that Queensberry is charging toward him. A bullet would have undone much misery.

  Wilde smiles and returns the first resurrected man to his rest. He dispatches the second and third attacker in short order, aiming at Queensberry’s face each time. It will take more than Christ to bring these Lazari back now. But perhaps resurrection was always the
devil’s own work.

  Behind him, Ayat has troubles. He is a genius with the blade and a fine physical specimen, though Wilde cares little for the curly moustaches that age the Frenchman’s face past its twenty-four years, hanging off his lips like wilted petals on an otherwise vibrant flower. Careful and strategic in most circumstances, diagonal in his feints and parries—a chess-piece bishop with the sword of a chess-piece knight—Ayat has miscalculated. Wilde knows the root of his difficulties is the ladies and his eagerness to impress them. The young fencer leapt into the fray without realizing how the narrow confines and the Lazari’s sheer numbers cheat his sword of its principal attribute—length. Now nearly encircled, he cannot swing or stab his way free. A smitten fool, Wilde thinks. But Ayat looks too wholesome and fresh to garner further opprobrium. The fencer’s youth and vitality have made Wilde’s heart his Piste.

  He reaches into his left coat pocket for bullets to feed the Webley and then steps forward unflinching, gun outstretched. He sees Queensberry’s right and left profile; he sees the back of Queensberry’s head. Imagining well is the best revenge and the Lazari sate his imagination. Several minutes later, when the last resurrected man is returned to the dust, Wilde can only marvel at the Webley, saying, “The pen may be mightier than the sword, Ayat, but I believe I should like to compose only with this henceforth. There are several critics I have been meaning to send letters.”

  “Must you be so impossible, Oscar?”

  “It is an impossible situation, Ayat.”

  The ladies rush toward them, their white gloved hands waving in welcome little surrenders to both men. The French women are very unlike the British, Wilde notes, especially in moments of excitement. Their initial hysterias are the same, but French ladies seem immune to fainting spells and are surprisingly adaptive to scenes of gore. Consider how they stand around these rotting corpses unfazed now that the danger has passed. Wilde accepts their praise, acknowledging his growing reputation as the knight-errant of this, the disturbed Exposition Universelle. It is as if no one remembers his dank, weary form haunting the city’s cheapest cafés, a penniless, friendless alcoholic and shamed bugger, embracing a long and pathetic public suicide. Most likely some of these same women spat at him on the street only a month ago as their fine, intact parasols darkened him with shadow.

  Their scorn was well deserved and earned, Wilde thinks, shuddering at an image he conjures of himself lying insensate in a gutter. It has been over three years since he completed the jail sentence that destroyed his soul. Disgraced, humiliated, divorced, he has lived these years in European exile, determined to conclude it here in Paris. There had been presumptive talk among his friends that he should write again—that his wit would be a magic balm to erase the past and soar him to even greater heights. None of them understood, not even his dear and loyal friend Robbie Ross, the impish boy who first seduced Wilde and unlocked the key of his being, stirring fresh life from an existence that was dead for reasons Wilde could not articulate to himself. He had a wife and darling children and yet he was not a living man until Robbie embraced him—Robbie who seemed to understand everything in the world in spite of his youth, or perhaps because of it. No, not even Robbie understood the prison experience, the years of hard labor, the hideous conditions that yet held sway over his mind. When Wilde dreams, he is there again, in the prison yard watching fair-haired youths bruised and worked until they shamble about so very much like the creatures he and Ayat just put down.

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves

  By each let this be heard.

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word.

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

  Wilde shudders again and the women mistake it for something else and offer their comfort. A glance at Ayat’s dripping blade makes him remember the conclusion of his poem, his only attempt at writing since his release. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” had been an anonymous hit with the public and it had pleased him, the master of paradoxes, that everyone had missed the poem’s ultimate paradox. Even Robbie and Bosie had missed the intent of that line—For each man kills the thing he loves. Had Wilde not also said, “To love oneself is the start of a lifelong romance?” The poem was a statement of intention, a suicide note that announced he planned to kill himself by living.

  He had embarked on this plan by drinking and whoring as much as he could, each day a meaningless and wincing preamble to a long and stuporous night. He wanted only to rot where he stood and decay as he walked, until nothing remained. Yes, it was a prolonged suicide, and a successful one until the phenomenon of the Lazarus men. Wilde may have seen the very first of their kind, three weeks ago. He had fallen into a gutter across from a man who seemed quite dead, no doubt a murdered tourist. Wilde had even slurred a question to him about what it was like. Then the dead man rose and stumbled into the crowded night. A hallucination or mere mistake, Wilde thought at the time, though now he is certain it was a Lazarus man and he wonders if his drunken impotence then bears some responsibility for the present chaos. And for poor Bosie’s condition.

  “These ladies are lovely, are they not, Oscar?”

  Ayat gallantly swipes the sword’s blood across his right pants leg and then kisses the hand of the girl he has decided, Wilde assumes, is the loveliest. The ladies are quiet and indeed all of Paris seems so. How many of its citizens have been killed—and killed again? He thinks of Bosie, stripped half-naked and sweating in his sheets at the hotel, his throat bandaged from the bite that happened three days ago. He hears the young aristocrat calling out, fading away. The auditory vividness of it startles Wilde. What am I doing out here, attempting to avenge a death that has not even happened—and won’t happen! He wonders if this self-assurance is a bluff or a mad reliance on a technicality. There is one point of universal agreement in these days of penumbral confusion: a Lazarus man’s bite is fatally transformative. Bosie will die and yet he will not die.

  Wilde considers how best to excuse himself. Ayat will want to accompany him. Even the allure of beautiful, willing women is not enough to sever the sudden warrior bond between them. They have now fought four battles together, Ayat having sought Wilde out for his renewed fame. Wilde was, of course, quite drunk when the first incidents occurred and multiplied. The attack at the Velodrome de Vincennes supposedly killed over three hundred people, though it had not proven easy to distinguish victims from attackers in many instances. Wilde realizes, from what little he can remember, that nothing short of divine providence acquitted his escape at the simultaneous attack on the Champ de Mars. For he had defended a child using the heavy cane of someone already felled. Wilde was a very large man, not athletic but powerful all the same. Fueled by alcohol and rage, a powerful anti-societal vengeance suddenly electric in his spine, Wilde bashed heads with such furor that no less than ten skulls were certified split open from his blows. Reflecting on it in later sobriety as he wittily held court before admiring Frenchmen and the child’s injured mother (bitten, poor creature, but at the time this was no cause for alarm), he realized he had no idea if the people he had struck—men only, there was at least that balm—were innocent people or their resurrected assailants.

  He has not touched a drop of alcohol since.

  “See the ladies to safety, Ayat. I have urgent business elsewhere.”

  The Olympic fencer protests but there is nothing he can do. Wilde holds up an imposing, callused hand. “We will find each other later, dear boy. You may rest assured.”

  “Yes, Oscar.”

  Ayat is breathless now in a different way as he turns back to the women. Wilde smiles, wondering if the ladies are in even more danger now. But the Frenchman is young and no doubt lacks expertise. A pity, he thinks, checking the Webley again before starting off. Youth is wasted on the inexperienced.

  He could expect a tedious walk to the Hôtel d’Alsace under normal circumstances, Paris’s population having swelled by many thousand
s on account of Exposition and the Olympics. Now the streets are shockingly deserted and the Eiffel Tower, which Wilde considers an appropriate idol to worship if these are indeed the Last Days, stands a lonely sentinel’s watch from across the way. He walks faster than he has in years and his heart feels it. He thinks of what he will say when he re-enters their room. He knows he must sound self-assured and fluid. Somehow he believes only a display of great confidence will keep Bosie alive. Bosie, you must not die and you will not die as long as you have my love. Therefore, Bosie, I can assure you of a splendid immortality.

  Truth be told, while he has always been known as an amazing speaker, with wit at will, his speech is seldom as extemporaneous as it sounds. He has held imaginary conversations with himself since he was a boy, working on lines and rehearsing clever dialogue and bons mots to summon only slightly altered according to need. His employment and delivery is so quick and seamless that it truly feels spontaneous. But true ease in talking comes from art, not chance, to paraphrase Pope, and he believes Pope is always better paraphrased than taken directly. When faced with subjects he cannot even conceive of, much less practice for, Wilde knows he sounds like a stuttering fool, even a simpleton. Bosie’s charming torment is his ability to create hour after unbroken hour of such instances, and Wilde humiliates himself in base incoherencies for the sake of love.

  The entrance to the d’Alsace is like that of other hotels since the crisis, barricaded and patrolled by three armed and watchful men. Their guns train on Wilde before he is ever properly in shooting distance. Wilde stops and adjusts his posture and bearing to make sure neither in any way resembles the stumbling shuffle of the Lazari. He calls loudly to them in his Irish brogue and their fingers relax off the triggers. “Monsieur Wilde,” one says, nods politely and clears a path for him.

  “If only decent theatres could afford armed gunmen to keep out the public, plays might finally be performed in their perfection before absolutely no one. I’ve always said the unfortunate fact of drama is that it must be witnessed.”