Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “Very good, my husband. Two more provisos than wishes. Your magnanimity reminds me of the late French king’s.”

  “Although you clearly do not realize it, Cathinka, these are modern times. Whoever bestows wishes without qualification must reap the dreadful rewards of such folly. To our credit, lady, neither of us is a fool. Think on what remains to you, not on what I have wisely proscribed.”

  Cathinka yielded, sullenly, to Don Ignacio’s logic. She then bade him retire so that she could consider among the bewildering alternatives. She had several days, and she fretted the question for three of them before hitting upon a wish that promised to deliver her from the former Capuchin’s tyranny, even as it paved the way for an end to her loneliness. What her third wish might be, however, she still did not know; but, in the fatalistic words of the old Count, time would tell, time would most assuredly tell.

  Came the first anniversary of the couple’s wedding day, and Don Ignacio summoned Cathinka to his small, oppressive study to state her wish. He had been working at an electromanuscriber, but, as soon as he heard her tread on the hard-packed laterite, he turned to face her, extending his crippled-looking hands. He asked her to take them as she had done at the end of their wedding ceremony in her father’s library, but she shuddered and placed her hands behind her.

  “You must obey me if you desire your wish to come true.”

  “A sixth stipulation,” Cathinka remarked pointedly.

  “By no means. You swore a willing oath to observe the five stipulations I outlined. You may break that oath if falseness is any part of your makeup. However, unless you grasp my hands, lady, you forfeit your wish even before you utter it—for our touching effects its fulfillment, and only our touching, and so our touching is a prerequisite rather than a mere proviso. Understand?”

  “I do,” she said, stepping forward and taking Don Ignacio’s hands.

  “Then wish.”

  “Aloud?”

  “I am not a psychic, child.”

  But she had not bargained on staring into Don Ignacio’s wizened face while making her wish.

  “I w-wish . . . f-for D-Don Ignacio t-t-to—”

  “Stop stammering, Cathinka. Out with your contrived treachery.”

  “—fall-into-a-ten-year-slumber-during-which-he-continues-healthy-and-all-his-dreams-are-pleasant,” Cathinka chanted ritually. A feeling of relief, even serenity, began to descend upon her, but this feeling shattered when Don Ignacio’s hands jumped a foot into the air without yet releasing their grip on her own. A galvanic force seemed to flow through Cathinka’s body, altering the microscopic alignment of her constituent atoms. Meanwhile, the monkey-man’s eyes flashed like tiny mirrors.

  A moment later his fingers slid away from hers, and she crossed her arms in front of her belly, concealing her hands. Don Ignacio was still awake, still alert, and he rotated back to his electromanuscriber to record her first wish on the treated foolscap in his machine. It seemed that he had set up this huge formlike page for just that purpose.

  “You are a clever young woman. By modifying an important noun and subordinating a compound clause to your main one, you have compacted all three wishes into your first. Did you mean to exhaust your allotment?”

  “I did not.”

  Don Ignacio operated the machine. “Then I must note here that your first wish is for me to fall into a ten-year slumber, period. The adjective is permissible because it specifies the duration of my slumber, a matter undoubtedly crucial to your wish-making strategy. I am also noting, lady, that you have come perilously close to abrogating the stipulation forbidding any harm to befall either of us. . . . However, I admire the way you attempt to skirt the problem with a pair of sweet but inadmissible subordinate clauses. You leaven your deviousness with the yeast of old-fashioned conscience.”

  “Will you fall into a trance, then?”

  “Tomorrow, Cathinka. Give each wish a day to begin taking effect. I go to prepare a place for my slumber.” Reproachfully dignified, Don Ignacio strode from the room, leaving his wife to contemplate the degree to which she had cheated the letter of one of his stipulations. Certainly she had not meant to.

  Outside Cancer Keep, jaguars prowled and capuchins chittered stridently.

  The next morning Cathinka found, at the heart of the cloister’s overgrown garden, the pirogue in which she and her husband had floated through the jungle to the monastery. Don Ignacio was lying inside the pirogue with his hands crossed on his chest and the fur at his throat like a cluster of white lilies. He lay beneath a transparent canopy that his little cousins must have worried into place; while a cockatoo the color of new snow kept vigil on a perch at the head of the coffinlike dugout. Even in slumber Don Ignacio was master of Cancer Keep, but unless he arose before a decade had passed, her first wish seemed to be fulfilling itself. Free of the monkey-faced tyrant, she spent that whole day singing.

  The succeeding year was not so joyful. She could not leave Cancer Keep, for she had promised not to, nor could she converse with her retainers, as Don Ignacio had done. They fed her and guarded the monastery as watchfully as ever, for their lord lay slumbering at its heart, but Cathinka had no real rapport with them and sometimes felt that they regarded her as their inferior.

  Cathinka passed some time with the picture- and music-making machines in the various rooms, but the music intensified her loneliness and the activities of the people in the illuminated windows of the wooden boxes seemed silly or cruel. Moreover, she refused to touch these machines and so had to depend on the sullen cooperation of the capuchins to make them work. Presently, without regret, she ceased to rely on these tiresome wonders at all. As for the apparatus through which Don Ignacio had communicated with demons, Cathinka continued to leave it strictly alone.

  If not for the electromanuscriber, the year would have been unbearable. Even with its assistance, its marvelous ability to make palpable the most subtle nuances of her mental life, Cathinka often felt like a traveler on the edge of an endless desert. She would die before she reached the other side. She did not die, however. She made two more teakwood boxes to hold her manuscript pages, and she survived that interminable twelvemonth by concocting philosophies, fantasies, strategies, and lies. The inside of her head was more capacious than either Cancer Keep or the vast encroaching jungle.

  The second anniversary of Don Ignacio and Cathinka’s exchange of vows dawned bright and cloudless, as had every preceding day for a month. The time for her second wish had come.

  Cathinka signaled a crew of monkeys to lift the canopy from her husband’s unorthodox bedstead. When they had departed, she knelt beside the pirogue to make her wish, but hesitated to clasp Don Ignacio’s hands because his body looked so shrunken and frail. He slept, but he had not continued especially robust, and the pained expression on his face suggested that the dreams he endured were far from pleasant. The sight surprised Cathinka because for a year she had purposely walked on the periphery of the garden. It also served to remind her that she must not try to squeeze too many qualifiers into the wording of her next two wishes. Magic was a conservative science.

  Soon, though, she overcame her reluctance and took her husband’s hands. “I wish that Waldemar were here,” she said. What could be more elegant or simple? She had observed all of Don Ignacio’s conditions—for surely the arrival of a male visitor did not constitute, in itself, a breach of fidelity—and she had conscientiously pruned her wish of ambiguity and excess.

  Don Ignacio’s hands leapt, nearly throwing Cathinka off balance, and for a split instant she believed he intended to pull her into the pirogue atop him. She caught herself, however, electrified by the force that had flowed from his small body into her big-boned one. Trembling with expectation and power, she fitted the clumsy canopy back into place with no help from the estancia’s retainers.

  That night she began to fear that her wish would rebound upon her in an ugly or a mocking way. The gods had invented wishes to ensnare and frustrate people, as in the case
of the Phrygian king Midas. If Don Ignacio was a vassal of Satan, this tradition would undo her, too. Suppose that Waldemar had died. Tomorrow a corpse would arrive at Cancer Keep. Or suppose that when he set foot within the cloister, she was invisible to him because they no longer existed within the same time frame or because Don Ignacio had evilly stolen her own corporality. Perhaps she had become a ghost unable to live in the world beyond Alcázar de Cáncer. Pinching her flank seemed to disprove this last hypothesis (the pinch produced a painful twinge), but Cathinka could not stop worrying.

  Late the following afternoon Waldemar dropped from the sky into Cancer Keep. Cathinka saw him fall. He dangled from a dozen or more lines beneath a billowing parti-colored tent, like a puppet trying to escape being smothered by a floating pillow case. What a weird and beautiful advent!

  Waldemar landed not far from Don Ignacio’s bier, in a tree from which it took him thirty minutes to disentangle himself. Although clearly astonished to see Cathinka in the garden, while cutting himself free he responded perfunctorily to both her cries of welcome and her many excited questions. At one point he grudgingly vouchsafed the news that some “varlets” in a flying machine, jealous of his moiety of their cargo of “magic plants,” had thrust him into the air with only this colorful silken bag as a sop to their consciences. Waldemar cursed these varlets. Bag or no bag, they had not expected him to survive the drop.

  “Then your arrival is not the result of a loving search?” Cathinka asked.

  “I never knew where you were,” Waldemar replied, at last addressing her as if she were a human being rather than a ghost. “The Count would not say, and several months ago I left our homeland to make my fortune. The world has changed spectacularly in that brief time, Cathinka. Assassinations plague every capital, societies subordinate ancient wisdom to youthful bravado, and one upstart nation even claims that it has sent visitors to the Moon.” All his lines cut, Waldemar fell to the garden floor. Sitting there in a heap, he said, “Peril, pomp, and enterprise abound. At last, Cathinka, I am truly alive.”

  “No thanks to your ungrateful, greedy cohorts.”

  “No thanks, indeed.”

  Thus began the year subsequent to Cathinka’s second wish. It had come true, this wish. Her lover was with her again, and in a series of chaste interviews at various places around the estancia she recounted for Waldemar the events preceding their unlikely reunion. As they stood gazing on the crippled figure in the pirogue, she told him of the conditions under which she had pledged to make her three wishes, of which the important final wish still remained.

  Waldemar’s pale eyes flamed up like coals under the breath of a bellows. Must a year go by, he wondered aloud, before she could wish again? Cathinka assured him that it must. He squinted at the scrunched form of Don Ignacio as if her husband were an unappetizing entrée on a glass-covered platter. His distaste for the monkey-man seemed as thoroughgoing as her own, an observation that spurred in Cathinka a surprising pang of resentment. This passed.

  Like the world, Waldemar had changed. He was still taciturn—indeed, he spoke more sentences cutting loose his bag of silk than he did in the entire week after—but his diffidence in regard to their courtship had utterly disappeared. He took every opportunity to kiss her hand. He brought her jungle flowers in the mornings. He paced the corridor outside her apartment at night. Once having learned how to use Don Ignacio’s electromanuscriber, he prepared faultless copies of lovely carpe diem poems, which he then slid under her door or folded under the silver fruit bowl of her breakfast tray. Two of these later poems were his own compositions; they had neither meter nor rhyme to recommend them, but they burst within Cathinka’s heart like Roman candles, owing to the incandescent violence of their predominant sentiment. Had Waldemar’s translation from an arctic to a tropic clime so enflamed him? The man had begun to behave like a Tupian buccaneer.

  Cathinka did not know how to respond. She remembered that Don Ignacio’s cardinal stipulation about her wishes was that none of them violate her wedding vows. She could not succumb to Waldemar’s blandishments without breaking her word, for her lover had come to her as a direct result of her second wish. To lie with him would be to lie in an even more damning respect.

  Yet she wished to lie with him. The Tropic of Cancer had worked its amorous metastasis in her blood, and Waldemar’s every breath was a provocation as lyrical as a poem. Cathinka began to think, to think, to think. She and Don Ignacio had never consummated their marriage. That being so, perhaps she could not be unfaithful to him by disporting her still unfulfilled flesh. . . .

  Someone knocked on her door. Waldemar, of course. (The monkeys never came to her of their own accord.) She bade him enter. His pale eyes were blazing like fractured diamonds. He took her by the shoulders and pressed his case with his body rather than with passionate arguments. Cathinka broke away, and he stared at her panting like a spaniel. She was panting herself. A comatose monkey in a canoe was denying her the one boon she most desired, a commingling of essences, both spiritual and carnal, with Waldemar. What an absurd and demoralizing standoff the little beast had executed.

  “Today, Cathinka,” Waldemar told her, “chastity does not warrant so rigorous a defense.”

  “My chastity is not the question,” she replied, bracing herself against her writing stand. Not to mock Waldemar’s intelligence, she refrained from stating the true question. He repaid this courtesy by pulling a sheaf of yellowed pages from his bosom and unfolding them before her. Cathinka nodded at the papers. “What do you have?” she asked.

  “One of Don Ignacio’s logs. In it he details the events that led him, so many years ago, to save your father’s life. The Count, it seems, had been apprehended by a band of savage indios while trying to force his affections on one of their maidens. Don Ignacio bartered with the band to spare him. If you wish to adhere to the principles of your worthy sire, Cathinka, your present behavior far exceeds that lenient standard.”

  “Go,” said Cathinka imperiously.

  Waldemar bowed, but before taking his leave he tossed to the floor of her apartment the pages of Don Ignacio’s log. When he was gone, Cathinka gathered these and read them. Afterwards she wept. By disillusioning her about her father’s past, her lover had also disillusioned her about the nature of his own character. Two birds with one stone. The pithiness of this adage struck Cathinka for the first time, and she passed a restless, melancholy night.

  Now, she believed, Waldemar would abandon Cancer Keep. He was not constrained by promises or provisos, and she rued the lovelorn folly of her second wish. The sooner he absented himself from her life the sooner she would be able to marshal her wits toward a purpose in which he had no part.

  But Waldemar chose to remain. He ceased picking flowers and writing poems, but he attended her at meals and spoke pleasantly of their youth together in the distant north. Cathinka reflected that she had made mistakes in her life; perhaps she owed her former suitor a mistake or two of his own.

  These fluctuations of opinion and mood she continued to record on a daily basis with the electromanuscriber. Sometimes, at night, she could hear Waldemar operating Don Ignacio’s other weird machines—he did not require the monkeys’ aid to make them run. His familiarity with the devices disturbed her. Perhaps those playthings—rather than a concern for her welfare—had induced him to stay. She wrote and wrote, but the matter never became clear.

  On moonlit nights Cathinka visited the garden and brooded upon her husband’s twisted face and body. An irresistible impulse drew her. He seemed to be wasting away in his slumber. His bones revealed an angular girdering beneath the skimpy fringes of his fur. Like a chunk of bleached stone, his skull appeared to emerge from his eroding lineaments. The moonlight hallowed this process. It was eerie and beautiful. It was plain and repulsive. It was confusing. Cathinka found herself compulsively robing Don Ignacio’s quasi-cadaver in memories of his tenderness and patience. As his body deteriorated and his face screwed up like a pale raisin, the intelligen
ce once animating him lived again in her imagination. She likewise recalled the mystic force in his hands, the grim urgency of his gaze.

  For months, however, his hands had been fisted and his eyes closed. What if he died before their third anniversary? She had specified a ten-year slumber, and Don Ignacio had acceded to this adjective without apparent misgivings, but what if her qualifier could not infallibly enforce a ten-year sleep? The premature death of her husband would deprive her of her third wish.

  Fool! Cathinka scolded herself. The death of your husband would free you to embrace Waldemar without recourse to wishes.

  This realization did not comfort her.

  Walking back to her apartment that night, she thought she heard her electromanuscriber clattering disjointedly. Then this sound stopped. Bewildered, she proceeded to her room. Inside she found Waldemar tinkering with the device. Seeing her, the young man pulled a piece of foolscap from the apparatus and tried to crumple it in his hands. Cathinka wrested the sheet from him and read the brief document in an outraged instant. It bore on its face an unfinished story in which she, Cathinka, employed her third wish to bestow great wealth and power on the impoverished prodigal, Waldemar. His parents (this document attested) had disinherited him for his many conspicuous debaucheries, but with the wealth and power accruing from her third wish he intended to revenge himself upon them. Waldemar hastily explained that this narrative was a fiction spun out to test the efficacy of his repairs upon the electromanuscriber—which, when Cathinka put her hands to it, no longer worked at all.

  “You wrote that on my apparatus in the hope that doing so would influence my third wish,” Cathinka accused him. “But the unseemliness of your desires has caused the machine to break, exposing your villainy. Waldemar, I ask you to depart from here forever.”

  “Not until you have made your final wish.”