Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  Unaccompanied by musical scores and dialogue, Henry thinks, the films seem diminished, rendered silly, broad pantomimes of events nothing at all like life, unless, he thinks, life is this simple, this stereotypically predictable.

  A few minutes later another aide in a gho approaches. Henry rises and offers to shake the man’s hand, but the gesture is ignored. “You are not under any circumstance to touch the prince. This is expressly forbidden. Under no circumstances are you to ask him anything, or speak unless spoken to, or address him as anything other than Your Majesty.”

  “Sure, that’s—” Henry begins, but the man raises a hand, silencing him.

  “In addition, any discussion of the Galadonian political situation, international trade, human rights, the environment, the health of the king, or the prince’s recent trip to Graceland is also expressly forbidden.”

  “Gotcha,” Henry answers. “Ixnay on the Elvisay.”

  The man stares at Henry for a moment, then looks to Shug as if he is considering calling the whole thing off. But it is too late. Someone across the hall has waved for them to approach. The man lifts his chin at Henry and says, “He is ready for you.”

  Henry looks at Shug. “Aren’t you coming?”

  Shug shakes his head. “The prince prides himself on his command of English. My presence would be an insult.”

  ~ * ~

  When Henry is halfway across the room, the new chaperone stops him. From the flat bench-press station near the wall of windows at the end of the room comes a high-pitched, extended grunt as the weights—what look to be three forty-five-pound plates on each side of the bar—rise and fall in short, pistonlike bursts. A final exaggerated squeal is the signal for the royal spotters to grab the ends of the bar and safely place it in the forks of the rack. When the bar is secured, the spotters stand back and the lifter sits upright, then jumps up onto the bench, where, squealing again, he begins to execute a series of moves that are a combination of bastardized bodybuilder poses, World Wrestling Federation bravado, and a six-year-old’s interpretation of kung fu. The music playing on the sound system, Henry realizes, is “Get Your Head in the Game” from Disney’s High School Musical. It is during this routine that Henry notices that even though the lifter, presumably the prince, is standing on the bench, he is the same height as his seemingly average-sized spotters.

  “Holy crap,” he says. “His Highness is a Smallness.”

  The chaperone looks at Henry. “Any discussion of height is also—”

  Henry cuts him off. “Understood. Is bodybuilding something of a national obsession here?”

  “No. This is the only such facility in the kingdom. The prince discovered the benefits of weight training and nutrition during a visit to the San Francisco Bay area several years ago.”

  For his final pose the prince rolls his black Lycra shorts down to his knees, then bends and thrusts his hard, thickly veined bubble butt toward the rest of the room, Henry included, shaking it to the final chords of the Disney tune. After the prince pulls his shorts back on, one of his assistants gives him a high five and another helps him into a shiny lavender Adidas sweat jacket before whispering into his ear and nodding toward Henry.

  When the prince sights Henry, he hops off the bench and bounds toward him.

  “Remember,” the chaperone says under his breath, “no touching.”

  But the prince is quickening his pace and spreading his short, incongruously muscled arms as wide as they will go. “Mister Henry Tuhoe! What’s up Yo-Town!” he says, and embraces Henry, who looks over the prince’s shoulder at the chaperone.

  Is it more dangerous to return the royal embrace or to ignore it? What’s up with the princely enthusiasm? And on what planet is this place called Yo-Town? He gets no help from the chaperone, just a sinister sort of smile. Finally Henry raises his arms less than a foot away from his outer thighs and gently wraps them around the prince’s back.

  “Welcome to my kingdom. It is an honor.”

  “The honor is mine, Your Highness. Thank you for having me.

  “Go, Huskies.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Go, Huskies. You are a fellow Northeastern man, yes?”

  Henry blinks. Aren’t princes supposed to go to Harvard or Yale? “You know Northeastern?”

  “Go, Huskies! Class of ’01, Yo-Town!”

  “Really? I was ‘00.”

  “I know. This is partially why I granted you an audience. You were a geology major, no?”

  “Actually, I majored in English, with a geology minor.”

  The prince stops smiling, and for a moment it looks as if he might cry, or have Henry or whoever gave him the slightly inaccurate biographical information put to death. As if on cue the Disney music stops, but Henry can still hear music. It is coming faintly from the iPod headphones dangling around the prince’s neck.

  “The Hold Steady?”

  The prince tilts his head, again not sure if this is a slight or some insider’s lingo that he doesn’t know about. Either one would be bad for everyone involved. But Henry points at the postage-stamp-sized music player. “The Hold Steady. ‘Sequestered in Memphis.’ I like their sound.”

  The prince looks at his headphones and then at Henry. He smiles. “The Hold Steady. Absolutely, bro!” He slaps Henry on the small of his back. “Come,” he says. “Let me show you around. It is such a pleasure to have an American here to appreciate what I am trying to do with our archaic little society in Galado. Ancient ways. Ancient places. Spirituality. Too much, you know, can have such a corrosive effect on the culture.”

  Henry decides it’s best not to comment on this. The prince waves off the members of his staff and leads Henry into a room off the thousand-year-old iron-pumping room. It’s a smaller, more formal space, with one wall of windows looking out on an expanse of royal gardens.

  Against the near wall is a one-thousand-gallon fish tank, at the bottom of which floats one eighteen-inch-long, wrinkled, and grotesque fish. Henry has to bend closer to make sure that the fish, a gray, black-spotted, seemingly eyeless being with a long pocked and whiskered nose, is alive.

  “Ah-hah,” the prince offers, bending alongside Henry to observe the barely moving creature. “This is Gaily, a rare specimen indeed. Gaily is the last known living evidence of the bottle-nosed Galadonian riverfish. Gaily has become something of a pet project of mine, and a symbol of my government’s commitment to preserving the indigenous species of Galado. It is blind.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It uses sonar to catch other fish. But now, after twenty million years, it is threatened. Every day teams of scientists from the Ministry of Wildlife scour our streams and rivers, in hopes of finding one blessed partner for lovely Gaily to perpetuate the species.”

  “Is Gaily male or female?”

  In response to the question, the prince stands up and cocks his head.

  “I’m just saying it would be a shame if it was a male and after all that work the only fish they found was another male.”

  The prince doesn’t answer. “Come,” he says, waving Henry away from the last living bottle-nosed Galadonian riverfish, “There is much to see.” He strolls to a long, knee-high table in the middle of the room, upon which are two scale models of two versions of the same urban landscape. In the center of the table is a laminated sign that reads The Shangri-La Zone. Before the model on the right is a smaller sign that reads Present, and before the model on the left, which is considerably larger and features a number of large office towers, banks, hotels, brand-name luxury boutiques, and a huge cineplex, is a sign that reads Very Near Future.

  “What do you think?”

  Henry bends and then decides to kneel to consider the models more closely. After giving the past a casual glance, he decides it’s better etiquette to linger on the future. “That’s quite a cineplex.”

  “Twenty-eight theaters, with a grand auditorium for world premieres and, of course, the film festival. Just like Cannes.”

  In fr
ont of the mock cinemas are tiny limousines and tiny paparazzi, and at the entrance high above the street is a two-inch likeness of the prince standing atop a grand, red-carpeted semicircle of stairs. Henry says, “I like the movies too.”

  The prince comes alongside him and, looking at the model, asks, “Have you seen the film Walk the Line?”

  “I have. I love Johnny Cash.”

  “Of all the types of film, I enjoy nothing more than a well-done biopic. Biopics make me cry, because if created with love, they make me consider the only cliche that still has the power to make me laugh and care and thrill and fear, and that is the finite arc of a life that, inevitably, ends.”

  Henry turns away from the models and looks at the prince. He didn’t expect this kind of insight from the man who only minutes ago had addressed him as Yo-Town. “You know,” he quietly answers, “I’ve often had that same thought. Whether it’s about Cash or Ray Charles or Marie Antoinette, even though the stories are often completely predictable and the endings universally known, if they’re told well enough, they leave me in the most profound, contemplative I guess, funk.”

  The prince puts his arm over Henry’s shoulder. “The inevitability of mortality, yes?”

  Henry rises and the prince’s arm falls away.

  A servant knocks at the door. He is holding a silver tray with two drinks. The prince nods. As the man approaches, the prince says to Henry, “Protein smoothies.”

  Henry accepts his glass and sniffs the drink.

  “Do you lift?”

  “I belonged to a gym in Manhattan but didn’t—”

  “Fantastic. We can train together!”

  Henry takes a gulp of the cold orange smoothie. As he swallows, he wonders if it is possible to detect orangutan testosterone in pureed mango.

  The prince points back at the models. “So what do you think, Henry Tuhoe?”

  Henry licks his lips and nods. “I think it is grand and ambitious.”

  “For charter corporate partners, like your company, for instance, the Shangri-La or Free Zone will offer tax-exempt status and other perks.”

  Henry can think of no reason why a bottled water company would want a storefront presence in the Shangri-La Zone, but says, “I would think that a lot of companies would be interested in such a deal. I admit, I’m not an expert on Galado—in fact, until recently I’d read very little about it—but from what I understand it has, if anything, resisted corporate involvement, outside involvement, industrial development, and even tourism. Is this an issue?”

  The prince takes the last sip of his protein shake and hands the glass to the servant. He shrugs his shoulders and torques his neck left, then right. Then his lips twist to the side in such an exaggerated fashion—pained? disgusted?—that Henry is certain he has gone too far. Only after the prince takes three deep breaths does Henry feel that things might be all right between him and the prince after all. “I appreciate the candor,” the prince says. “Most of my advisers are so terrified of me, and rightfully so, they go to extremes to placate, to avoid conflict.”

  “I was just curious. Not seeking conflict.”

  “Obviously, Henry Tuhoe, things are changing in my little country. We can continue as we have for centuries, shut off from the world, economically challenged but spiritually pure, while our Chinese and Indian neighbors to the north and south, the two biggest rising powers in the world, thrive. Or we can find a way to engage with the world while remaining spiritually one with the universe. We can welcome the Internet, the global brands that bring jobs and prosperity. We can begin to tap into its rich natural resources and embrace industry. Did you know that right now if a citizen of Gal-ado wants to cut down a tree—a single tree—he must first get permission from the king, or, under the current circumstances, me. And if I want to cut down a tree, I must gain permission from two thirds of Parliament. Preposterous. Do you know that until five years ago there was no television in this country? Granted, only state-run programming is permitted now, thanks to me, and it was quite a struggle, but it’s a start.”

  “Do the people want it?” Henry asks. “TV? Internet? The freedom to wield their own chain saws?”

  The prince waves him off. “They don’t know what they want, but it is coming. I have been laying the groundwork for years, making alliances in Parliament. Getting my father to champion my legislation as his. It is forbidden to talk about it, but already we have steel mills burning night and day in the valleys to the north. Coal mining to the north and south. Timber harvesting in the hills. And it has made a difference. Because of my changes, our GNP per person, which Parliament refuses to acknowledge in lieu of the preposterous and unmeasurable spiritual indicator gross national karma, has risen five percent in the last year, but it is still the second lowest on earth.

  “They want more monasteries,” the prince continues, and then points at another building on the model, a towering modern edifice of spiraling glass and steel. “I want more of this.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Royal Galadonian Academy of Ideas. Designed by the people who worked with people who did the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing. Some years off, but the Academy of Ideas itself already exists within the walls of this palace, at the very site in the country that is your place of work. One day I will give you a virtual tour.”

  “That would be nice,” Henry says, still looking at the models, surprised that, under the circumstances, he is so interested in the future of a place that three weeks ago he didn’t know existed. “What about tourism? I know it’s strictly limited, but I would think as a revenue source ...”

  “Tourism will come and it will absolutely become a source of profit. But for now, until I get the next steps of our plan in place, limiting tourism and the unwanted attention of undesirables is one of the old rules that I actually agree with.”

  Henry raises his chin in the direction of the scale models. “So this is the next step?”

  “Exactly. We first needed industry before opening the doors to commerce and development. Right now we are in discussions with dozens of leaders from the top brands and multinationals in the world. For the most part I have decided to bypass governments and political diplomacy in favor of corporate diplomacy. When you think of it, the modern CEO of a multinational conglomerate is more powerful than any ambassador, more of a head of state than any president or other despot.”

  “Is there a model in the free world that you’re patterning yourself after?”

  The prince shakes his head dismissively. “We want to be the next Bangalore. The next Beijing. The next Bollywood. Silicon Valley. Technology and industry and the arts. The Academy of Ideas. A state-of-the-art sports stadium.”

  “More democracy than monarchy, then.”

  The prince aggressively shakes his head. “Oh, no. The people don’t want democracy. The monarchy will still rule. Brandocracy, if anything. Plus, of course, we need to strengthen our army. Our nuclear arsenal.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Technically, no.”

  “So you aspire be a nonviolent Buddhist brandocracy with nuclear capability.”

  The prince considers this and smiles. “Perhaps.”

  Henry begins to laugh, but, realizing that the prince wasn’t going for a laugh, he transitions to a clearing of the throat. “Well, I don’t know what to say, other than, you know, good luck with all this, Your Highness.”

  “Not so fast, Henry Tuhoe. You haven’t heard my proposal.”

  “I think you’re overestimating my importance in the grand scheme of things here.”

  “Oh, I’m not overestimating a thing. I know who you are, and just from speaking with you for this short time, I can see that you are my kind of person. I make it my business to meet with almost every new dignitary, corporate or political, who enters our kingdom, and ninety-nine percent of them I dismiss as unenlightened, incapable of seeing the way things can be. But you and I. . . you got to admit, we totally hit it off.”

  “Sure, but—
”

  The prince puts his forefinger to his lips. “What is your principal responsibility here on behalf of Happy Mountain Springs bottled water?”

  “To set up a back-office customer service call-center operation.”

  “Exactly. And this will no doubt include the training of Galadonians.”

  “Yes.”