Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  The chaperone shakes his head. “No Gaily.”

  “I wonder how many years it took to kill it. Render it extinct.”

  “No Gaily. No overfish. No tank,” the chaperone curtly says. “You must not speak of this with the prince. And technically, for a species to be functionally rendered extinct, decades must pass before a quorum of international scientific organizations can make it official.”

  Another royal aide appears and tells them that the prince is running late. “I presume you received the message that he would be unable to power-lift with you today because he is quite busy, and he may have torn a pectoral muscle.”

  “Yes,” Henry answers. “I got the message this morning. Please tell him I’m sorry about the pec, and that if this is a bad time—”

  “Oh, no,” the aide interrupts. “The prince told me to implore you to stay. He very much wants to spend time with you.”

  ~ * ~

  Shug is taken in one direction by the chaperone and Henry is led by the aide down two long, marble-floored corridors and into another building entirely. They stop in a lounge, indigenously antique in structure yet incongruously modern in decor. Black leather couches beneath hand-carved coffered ceilings. Flat screens hang where, judging by the fade marks on the walls, royal portraits once hung. Aqua blue shag carpeting covers, presumably, centuries-old marble floors. IKEA meets The King and I, he thinks, dropping down onto a black leather easy chair. Or The Prince and I.

  For more than an hour he sits, dividing his attention between CNN on one large screen and a Bollywood musical on another. The doorway, centered between the two video monitors, serves as a third screen, on which the real-life drama of a kingdom under siege plays out. In between images of beautiful Hindu women in sheer silk gowns singing and dancing on Mumbai-soundstage clouds and titans of American finance doing the perp walk in handcuffs, he takes in the living, 3-D images of frantic Galadonian ministers and aides, groups of monks and military officers. Every ten minutes or so one of them mistakenly enters the lounge and asks, “Is he here?” or “Have you seen him?” or “Can you tell me where the crisis center is?”

  Several times a young woman in a gho enters and asks if he would like some more tea, even though he hasn’t had any to begin with. Just before the prince enters the room, three security guards in Western suits appear. One asks Henry to rise and pats him down. One performs a cursory scan of the premises, looking under seat cushions, out the windows. And the third quickly walks the perimeter of the room, waving a long steel wand that crackles with varying degrees of intensity.

  “Is he on his way?”

  The man patting him down looks up from Henry’s shoe tops but doesn’t answer.

  “Want to give me a sense of what kind of mood he’s in?”

  The man rolls his eyes and shakes his head before rising. Henry Tuhoe is clean.

  “Well, well. If it isn’t Henry Yo-Town Tuhoe. H20. Water impresario. Corporate titan. Esteemed friend of the state. And one baaaad muthafucka.”

  Henry turns and sees the prince standing at attention in the doorway. This time he’s not wearing Lycra workout tights but the full dress uniform of the commander in chief of the Galadonian Armed Forces. Henry is not sure whether he should salute, bow, or exchange gang symbols from the hood.

  Before he can attempt any of these, the prince is upon him and extending his left arm for a royal fist thump followed by a fragile hug.

  “Heard about your pec,” Henry says, stepping back. “Sorry about that.”

  “It wasn’t the muscle,” the prince tells him, touching his arm to make sure that he understands the distinction. “It was a ligament. The muscles grew so fast that the ligaments couldn’t keep up. Can you imagine?”

  Henry shakes his head. “Wow. I ... I really can’t.”

  “Come.” The prince slaps Henry’s back with his left hand. “I’m sorry for the change in schedule, but there is a great deal going on, and I hope you don’t mind if I ask you to accompany me while I make the rounds.”

  As they walk through an arched doorway at the far end of the lounge and head down another hall, a group of six advisers and security people trails ten yards behind them.

  “Tell me,” the prince continues, “what was it like coming here?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The protesters. The demonstrators. The Alliance. Were the sides of the highway a sea of red ?”

  “There were demonstrators in red,” Henry answers. “But not as many as I saw the other day on the road just north of here that runs along the river, during the official protest.”

  “Was it violent?”

  “Today?”

  The prince shrugs. Today. Yesterday. “I don’t care about when you saw it as long as it’s true.” He jabs a thumb over his shoulder. “I can’t count on them to tell me the truth anymore.”

  “Yesterday, not that I could notice. Wait—I did see some soldiers clubbing someone at a checkpoint. A young man at an intersection near the river. But other than that, nothing. And today, nothing.”

  “How about the monks? Any monk activity? Because they’re telling me that if the monks join in, I am truly doomed, in this world and the next. If they commit to the Alliance, I will surely lose the military. Or enough of it to be toppled.”

  Henry shakes his head. “I don’t recall seeing any monks.”

  “This is good. You know why all of this is happening, don’t you?”

  “People are uncomfortable with the speed of the changes you’re proposing? They’re afraid that their culture will be lost?”

  The prince shakes his head and laughs. “Wall Street. Once Wall Street went in the toilet, foreign investment dried up, and when that happened my programs, the programs that so many of them had been clamoring for, became wildly unpopular.”

  “I did hear this too.”

  “They don’t give a shit about their culture. If the markets had remained vital, companies like yours and much larger than yours would have continued to come in and we would have been able to implement the rest of our plan, which would have led to jobs, growth, and prosperity.”

  The prince stops at a window at the end of the hall. “Look,” he says, pointing to a massive construction site a half-mile away, where a concrete horseshoe-shaped edifice rises thirty feet above grade. As far as Henry can detect, no living thing occupies the site. “This was to be our Olympic stadium. Designed by a dude who helped the dude who designed the Bird’s Nest in Beijing.”

  “Is Galado petitioning to host an Olympics?”

  The prince steps away from the window, stares at Henry, and decides to ignore the question. Instead of answering, he swings open one of the large oak doors in front of them. An intense blast of light from the other side momentarily blinds Henry. He rubs his eyes as he steps through the doorway. When he looks up, he sees at the far end of an otherwise empty room a half-dozen 750-watt halogen tri-lights positioned around a small stage rigged for a photographic shoot.

  More than a dozen people are scrambling around the periphery. There is an upright industrial fan blowing toward the stage, a crafts services table, and makeup and wardrobe stations. House music thumps off the walls. “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas.

  Henry tries to glimpse what they are photographing, but there are too many bodies in the way. All that he can see is the residual flash of a camera. He looks at the prince for an explanation.

  “State-of-the-art photographic studio and soundstage, bro. Designed by a major motion picture company head from Mumbai, with technical input from the people at Industrial Light and Magic.”

  Henry nods. Behind them, the door reopens and a young woman carrying a tennis racket and a double-barreled shotgun hurries inside. Upon recognizing the prince, she stops in her tracks and bows before hustling on toward the stage.

  “Come,” the prince tells him after the prop woman has moved on. “Let’s take a closer look.”

  The stage is being dressed to look like a meadow. In the foreground a stri
p of high alfalfa grass stuck into foam blocks runs along the length of the floor. On stage right, two grips are attaching the severed branches of juniper trees to light stands. To the left, another is on a ladder, positioning a spotlight that will stand in for the sun. The rear wall is a royal blue screen that, Henry realizes, will later allow the photographer to substitute any background he or she wants behind the central image.

  Soon a small middle-aged man whose yellow-and-blue-flowered Hawaiian shirt barely covers his large brown belly approaches. His black hair is pulled back in a long ponytail, and a large digital camera hangs from a strap around his neck. He looks Galadonian, but Henry can’t be sure. He bends his entire upper body at a ninety-degree angle before the prince and Henry.

  “This is Rodrigo Spatz,” the prince says by way of introduction. “The greatest filmmaker in Nepal and for the last two years the official filmmaker to the Galadonian Crown and part-time photographer. Rodrigo, meet the American business mogul Henry Tuhoe.”

  Henry extends his hand, but before Rodrigo can grasp it the prince steps between them. “Please excuse us, Henry Tuhoe,” the prince says, and then he guides Rodrigo Spatz away for a private conference.

  Alone, Henry wanders along the edges of the set. In the back of the room, he sees the prince’s staff gathered by the doorway, watching and fretting. At the crafts service table he grabs a handful of M&M’s and begins popping them into his mouth as he continues on. He stops at an easel upon which rests a large white foam-core presentation board. Taped to the board are dozens of outtakes from the shoot. In the photos the same old and feeble man—eighty or ninety, Henry guesses—is wearing a series of costumes and uniforms, performing a variety of activities that seem to belie his age and physical condition. Saluting in a military uniform. Wearing a brown barn jacket and tossing a stick to two Irish wolfhounds. In a suit adorned with an orange royal sash, holding an infant in his stick-thin outstretched arms. And finally, in the least believable shot of the group, the man appears to be suspended in midair in a crash helmet and orange jumpsuit, clutching parachute cables. They can retouch and PhotoShop this all they want, Henry thinks—clouds, vapor trails, the curvature of the earth—and it will never look real. The only thing that appears real in this shot is the look of mortal terror in the old man’s eyes.

  “What do you think?” a woman asks from behind.

  He turns. It’s Madison Ellison. “Howdy, neighbor.”

  “How do you like our work?”

  “What is it for, AARP Galado?”

  “Clearly the lowest point in a career that seems to be reaching new depths by the day.”

  “Who is the old bastard?” Henry asks.

  Madison Ellison steps forward and puts a finger to her lips. “Shhhhh.” She looks around to see if anyone heard him. She mouths, “It’s the king.”

  “Get out. I thought he was—”

  She takes his arm and walks him away from the set. “Almost,” she whispers, stopping beside a cart filled with props: bow and arrows, a cricket wicket, a saddle. “He’s barely alive, which is why we’re doing this.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  She takes a deep breath before explaining. “With the . . . political situation being what it is, and the rising opposition to the prince claiming that he has been trying to kill the king, and rumors of the king’s death abounding, the prince thought it best that we release some recent photos that show him vital and active.”

  “Enter Madison Ellison, PR queen.”

  “I don’t want to piss him off. My home office says that if things deteriorate much more, they’ll get me out of here in a week or so.”

  “I understand there’s a blue screen involved, and they’re unretouched,” Henry says. “But with all due apologies to Mister Rodrigo Spatz, those are some of the most disturbing photographs I’ve ever seen.”

  “And you weren’t even here when he dropped the baby.”

  “No.”

  She nods. “Well, you can’t really blame Rodrigo,” Madison Ellison replies. “Since he is a filmmaker by training, not a photographer, and he was kidnapped and everything.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She takes a sip of what appears to be tea in a paper cup. “Kidnapped. About two years ago he was visiting from Nepal and apparently did some unauthorized filming. The prince had him arrested. Because his previous film had been highly critical of the government in Nepal, no one there fought on behalf of his release. In fact, some back in Kathmandu threatened to execute him if he returned. After a while the prince, who is, as you know, a huge movie fan, struck up a relationship with him, which is why, even though he is still officially being held against his will, he is recognized as the official filmmaker to the Crown, with no less than three biopics based on the prince’s life in various stages of production.”

  Henry turns and looks at the set. The crew is breaking down the pseudo-meadow props and rigging a tennis net across the stage. Rodrigo Spatz and the prince are overseeing the proceedings.

  “The prince’s idea,” Madison Ellison says. “They’re afraid we might lose the king, literally, if he does too much. So he chose tennis over hiking for the final setup.”

  “What’s with the film camera?”

  “Oh. You know. Viral videos. State TV.”

  From a screened-off area behind the stage four people emerge, followed by a nurse pushing the king in a wheelchair. An IV tube is stuck into the king’s right forearm and connected on the other end to a hanging drip bag on wheels. He’s wearing tennis whites and sneakers and appears to be asleep.

  “I have a question,” Henry says.

  “Shoot.”

  “If the purpose of this exercise is to let the people know that the king is far from dead—is indeed an extreme-sports-playing freak of nature—and if ninety-nine percent of the country has no television sets and the Internet for the most part is banned in Galado, how will anyone even know of the existence of these images?”

  Madison Ellison stands beside Henry and watches two aides rouse the king and lift him to his feet. A photographer’s assistant places a professional-quality, oversized Head titanium tennis racket into his right hand and a neon green Penn #3 tennis ball in his left. They reel out an extra ten feet of IV tubing to keep the drip stand out of frame. The king looks down at the objects and weighs them in his trembling hands as if they are artifacts from another universe.

  “This is an excellent point, Henry Tuhoe. Very astute. And if by some chance you choose to share this with your royal friend, I will hunt you down and hang you from the highest prayer flag.”

  ~ * ~

  An assistant hands Rodrigo Spatz a camera, and he manages to squeeze off a half-dozen shots before the racket slips free and crashes the first time. The second time is when an aide briefly manages to raise the racket high above the king’s head, giving him the appearance of preparing to serve a ball to, say, the Grim Reaper, or the late Althea Gibson, only to have the IV hookup tear free, causing ball, racket, and HRH the king of Galado to come tumbling down.

  Without missing a beat, Rodrigo Spatz turns to the prince, nods, and says, “I think we nailed it.”

  ~ * ~

  “Ms. Ellison.”

  “Your Highness.”

  “I see you’ve already met Mister Tuhoe.”

  Henry steps forward. “We’re, uh, neighbors.”

  “That’s right. I forgot you left your suite at the spa.”

  “I did. I thought that moving to USAVille might set a precedent for other, um, corporate visitors.”

  The prince looks Henry over, and for a moment Henry is sure that the prince knows he is bullshitting. But if he does, he doesn’t show it. “That’s an admirable gesture. I only hope it’s not too late.”

  Madison Ellison puts her hands together in front of her chest and leans forward. “I was just telling Mister Tuhoe about the Shangri-La Summit next week.”

  Henry widens his eyes at her as she continues. Shangri-La Summit?

  “I think ha
ving a Happy Mountain Springs contingent at the summit and the hospitality—the river cruise after-party would be a real asset, especially, you know, if Mister ... if Henry could be a sort of spokesperson for how the, um, process works when executed properly.”

  The prince turns to see what Henry thinks of Madison Ellison’s proposal. Over the prince’s shoulder Henry can see two men trying to reinsert the king’s IV drip while the king sits slumped and semiconscious in his wheelchair.

  “I’d be happy to attend,” he answers. “In fact, the founders of Happy Mountain Springs are coming next week to celebrate our initiative. Perhaps they can attend as well.”

  ~ * ~

  Sitting back in the lounge he waited in earlier, sipping a mango protein smoothie and watching the prince play Wii Boxing against a digital opponent.