Tyrannia

by Alan Deniro

  They keep running. Roxy thinks she is going to make it. She thinks she’s going to be safe—though she’s still terrified, even I can sense that. More guards behind them—they hesitate. Those three works of art are worth more than a thousand of the guards’ lifetime salaries combined. In that second, Epoxy puts a hand on Roxy’s shoulder, and pushes her in another direction, away from the oncoming crush. She runs into a colder, narrower tunnel, and affords herself only one look back. The look is anguished. The halogens affixed in the ceiling grow dimmer, and then it’s almost dark, and she stops.

  The bees have kept up, and they start to luminesce. She scowls at them. The link is still there. I can’t imagine what I would do without that lifeline. She puts her hands on her knees and catches her breath in the near-dark. It must be a service tunnel she is in, for museum employees.

  She hears screams and shouts, and considers going back. But she takes a few steps, and there is dim light ahead. She starts walking forward again, her hand on the wall, which is jagged and powdery. The air’s ventilation is thin here. The tunnel curves left, then right. She is determined, which is clear from the look on her face, in her hunched shoulders and tense tail.

  When the light grows bright enough to see by, she takes her hand off the wall and starts running again to the end of the tunnel. There must be lag; the bees struggle to keep up and I see the back of her ragged shirt as she runs.

  The end of the tunnel is a rock wall with a porthole set into it.

  She presses her face against the window. She sees a hangar on the other side. A huge space, as large as my villa, with a ceiling that can’t be seen. About a dozen large-scale art installations are in the hangar—massive, bulbous. The airlock to the arid outdoors is closed. The largest installations float, and The Leviathan is the largest of them all—three blue whales conjoined at the head and attached to a hovercraft, looking like the floating petals of a gargantuan poppy flower. On their sides are embedded the complete works of Jackson Pollock. The artist, a native to the continent named Tin Hester, was funded by the Antarctic Arts Research Council to buy the paintings on the cheap, since Pollock really hasn’t been in favor for quite some time.

  It is magnificent.

  About a dozen people in gray suits work in the hangar—jetting near the larger installations and hovering like dragonflies to tweak a propulsion unit or diagnose an adhesion rivet.

  Roxy crosses her arms and tries to decide what to do next. They will find her; she is sure of that.

  No—I see it in her eyes. She is trying to figure out how to do what she already plans to do.

  This is the moment that should be flagged, sent higher up the food chain, when a predator is neither contained with other predators nor immediately threatened.

  Roxy says something, but I can’t understand it. She bangs on the window, and then takes the guard’s interface out of her mouth. She presses a few buttons on it and casts it aside. Then she retrieves something else from her mouth, from underneath her long tongue. She slaps a small patch of yellow goo on the window and she takes a few steps back. I’m told that they’ve finally made a connection with her again. They are coming for her.

  She covers her face. The door blows open. Metal shards nick her, but she manages to sidestep most of it. There’s a yellowish fog in the corridor; the goo keeps emitting smoke. Behind her, guards call for her. She calls back, but again I can’t understand what she’s saying.

  She darts into the hangar, choking but staggering forward. I can’t see her because of the mist. The guards plunge through the broken doorway as well, but they are not prepared for the mist, and they halt and begin coughing.

  I cannot see Roxy in the hangar at all, but in another minute, the hangar door heaves open, letting in the bright, unyielding Antarctic sunlight and the dry, bitter air.

  The art installations’ cables have snapped; whether it’s because of the mist, I cannot say. I am shaking. They slowly float out of the hangar: a hot air-balloon attached to a large black heron, a hybrid of a dragon and a biplane. The Leviathan is the last to leave, as the whales’ bodies rotate slowly. Roxy is still nowhere to be seen.

  That’s when my bees start to die. The view of the hangar gets fainter and scratchier, and then there is only the blank screen the color of black pearl.

  I feel feverish. I stand up and check on my wife, who is resting in the study. I see—if only for an instant—Roxy’s face in hers. That is why it is important to understand art before you buy it, to know how to see what is in front of you. But after my wife entered her coma, I became not only a connoisseur, but a patron. Commissioning Roxy with my wife’s DNA was not theoretically legal, even in Antarctica. But I would not be deterred.

  I stroke my wife’s gray locks of hair. She doesn’t stir. I feel the breath from her breathing apparatus. When Roxy broke into the study—what did she know? How could she have known of my wife?—she must have stared at my wife’s face and seen something of herself there, some unblemished vision, without the animal splicings, without the flowers blossoming inside her arms.

  That’s when she tried to unplug my wife. I found her just in time. She shrieked at me in babble—of course it was incomprehensible—and darted past me. I called the local militia and explained the situation as I struggled to keep up with her roaming through the villa. I should have known that Roxy was veering toward my wife’s old suites. She managed to break in and lock the main door behind her. When the militia finally entered the locked-off suites by cutting a hole in the ceiling, Roxy was dressed in my wife’s favorite peacock dress and had torn all of her favorite paintings off the walls—Degas, Twombly, Hals—and stacked them in a pile. My wife has always been old-fashioned; she cared little for contemporary art.

  Roxy was also wielding, with her tail, a broadsword from my wife’s extensive medieval armor collection. The first fool who dropped through the ceiling was beheaded with surprising force. Blood gushed everywhere, but Roxy was careful to put herself in front of the paintings, so that they wouldn’t get spoiled. It took a dozen militia soldiers to stun and subdue Roxy.

  That was when I decided she needed to be loaned out. I immediately sold all of the paintings that she had torn off the wall. I could not bear to have them within my villa.

  Roxy would have ruined everything with my wife. Yet I am upset that she is gone, and likely dead, because she didn’t give me the chance to ruin her.

  I exit the study and put on my suit and then go outside. There is a smog advisory around Ross Bay. Along the shore, the hills of bell heather and the crabgrass burn, only a few kilometers from the villa. No one is going to stop it from burning. There’s no point. The weeds will grow again and burn again. The air has a pink tinge; I actually think it’s beautiful.

  If The Leviathan were to come to me, I would not see it descend, until it was almost too late. What would my wife have thought of those Jackson Pollocks? Surely she would have been riveted by the sight?

  I go back inside. I try to put the incident behind me. Cashing the insurance settlement helps. Many of the works from the museum are recovered—albeit damaged—but not Roxy. I decide that I want to go shopping in earnest this time, for a work of art that, by active contemplation of it, will help ease my unease. I put out feelers for a few weeks to the best galleries.

  I cross John Priestly off my list, naturally.

  After a week, when I am ready to visit my favorite galleries in person to bargain for a sale, I receive a package, about half my height. It doesn’t list a sender. I am often the recipient of enticements from galleries. After the courier leaves, I take it to my study—it is not heavy at all—and press my hands against the black box. The sides flop open.

  Inside the package is a sculpture of me. Though only a meter tall, it is like me in every aspect. Its skin gleams white as mine gleams. Its eyes are opalesque like mine. Its hands are at its sides. I am fill
ed with both flattery and fear; flattery at the daring attempt at hyperrealism, and fear from the blank, unnerving stare from my miniature twin.

  It is staring at me. Its head has moved imperceptibly, but it now looks in my eyes. I am transfixed, despite my best efforts. I immediately desire to know who the artist is, and what the genetic provenance is. As I take a step toward it, the sculpture turns its head to one side. It’s like a glitch, or as if the sculpture is thinking or listening to an inner voice.

  Then the objet d’art puts both hands against its ears, squeezes tightly, and rips its own head off.

  As the sculpture holds its head aloft, I manage to glance over at my wife as yellow mist spews from its neck.

  Tyrannia (II)

  This is the story of people.

  This is the story of other-people.

  This is the story of other-people who roamed the land and hunted people in the caves and tunnels where the people had retreated.

  This is the story of the other-people’s collections of plucked wings and talons, which they wore.

  This is the story of those who took sides.

  This is the story of those who didn’t take sides.

  This is the story of the rumbling of the other-people as they swept across the meadows, spiky garlands on their shoulders.

  This is the story of wind-swept thistles.

  This is the story of the people’s one and the other-people’s other-one, who found concord after many trials.

  This is the story of the wide sky, and the birds that would spread their wings, but would be unable to fly.

  This is the story of what people would mark on the cave walls, and the other-people would cross out, sometimes with their own blood.

  This is the story of the one, who the people said would never amount to anything.

  This is the story of the one venturing out of the caves alone to hunt and stare at the unbutchered clouds.

  This is the story of the shapes of clouds resembling animals.

  This is the story of the snare that the one set, hoping for hare.

  This is the story of the one’s snare catching a surprised other-person by the foot.

  This is the story of the dangling other-person who was also known as the other-one.

  This is the story of the other-one’s banishment to the meadows and woods of the people.

  This is the story of the one looking down at the other-one and shaking her head.

  This is the story of the other-one’s stubborn prayers as he lay trapped.

  This is the story of the golden mushrooms that grew in common shafts, nurtured by both people and other-people.

  This is the story of the news river, which wound from cave to cave like a thirsty serpent in the territory of the people.

  This is the story of the other-one tracing the scars on his face after he was loosened by the one.

  This is the story of the other-one’s scars.

  This is the story of the long stories told on the walls by the people and the other-people, the sun shown on the walls, the battles and triumphs and failures against the giant birds, for those stories were common between them.

  This is the story of the valley where the people would have their visions of the dead who have not yet died.

  This is the story of thistles puncturing necks.

  This is the story of the other-people offering skeletons of the people in crypts far below the earth, to gods that they couldn’t name.

  This is the story of bloody vapors coursing through the tunnels.

  This is the story of the other-one looking up at the golden sky and trying to decide how to get home.

  This is the story of the other-one, after being freed, trying to decide whether he wanted to go home.

  This is the story of the other-people proclaiming that the other-one must be captured, and that any who harbor the other-one would be destroyed.

  This is the story of quicksilver bubbling in a brook.

  This is the story of the other-people clicking their plucked talons together, and listening to the wind for the footfalls of the one and the other-one.

  This is the story of the one expecting no quarter from the people.

  This is the story of how the other-people would dream of giant birds plucking their eyes and limbs.

  This is the story of how the people would dream of docile giant birds who would come to them in friendship and not enmity.

  This is the story of an empty site, a valley where the people would skin and eat bears and leave the bones for vultures.

  This is the story of the beetles biding their time in the tunnels of bloody vapor.

  This is the story of the other-people fanning out across the meadow and hearing the other-one’s hissing snores.

  This is the story of the other-one’s dream of scar creation.

  This is the story of three nameless people depicted on an obelisk that came before the people and the other-people, their faces crossed out as a warning.

  This is the story of the one hearing the other-people sprinting toward them in silence.

  This is the story of running.

  This is the story of bears ambling further up the mountain.

  This is the story of breathing.

  This is the story of not breathing.

  This is the story of the cliff above the site.

  This is the story of the other-one taking the one’s hand and, upon reaching the cliff, leaping forward.

  This is the story of the fall.

  This is the story of prayers by the other-one as they fell, doused in paints extracted from the golden mushrooms, trying to get all the prayers they could.

  This is the story of the other-one dressing the one’s leg.

  This is the story of the one thinking that she was having a waking dream while the other-one sang to her leg, imagining his head as that of a bear’s.

  This is the story of malice.

  This is the story of how the two couldn’t speak to each other, since they shared no language between them.

  This is the story of rain-swept towers dreamed outside of the caves in shadows and meadows.

  This is the story of minute differences between people and other-people.

  This is the story of the other-people coming down the tenuous footpath and capturing the other-one, and leaving the one for dead.

  This is the story of quiet prayers by the one, because the one didn’t want to appear too bold or angry in supplication.

  This is the story of what is not learned by gathering words.

  This is the story of a cindered stick against the cheek and the desire to know something.

  This is the story of a time when rescues and redemptions were possible.

  This is the story of the other-one wondering what kind of trouble he had gotten into.

  This is the story of the one’s prayers being answered.

  This is the story of the bird with antlers.

  This is the story of the bird with antlers wondering how it received antlers.

  This is the story of the clouds above opening up into a map of lightning.

  This is the story of the long journey to a cage.

  This is the story of the deep isolation that the one and other-one shared with each other, across much distance.

  This is the story of the bird with antlers indicating that the one should mount its back.

  This is the story of the other-people asking questions of the other-one inside the pit.

  This is the story of the bird with antlers darting across the meadows, gliding in short hops.

  This is the story of the bird with antlers following the map of lightning.

  This is the story of the other-one not s
aying a word as to its change of heart.

  This is the story of tiny white flowers blossoming from the seams of the scars.

  This is the story of the other-one imagining wrapping his arms around the one’s waist.

  This is the story of the silence that wasn’t meek.

  This is the story of the maw of the arterial cave that the bird with antlers approached.

  This is the story of the other-one dreaming of flightless birds within the pit.

  This is the story of the night-eaters wondering among themselves what it must be like to have a body.

  This is the story of the bird with antlers scurrying away from the cave, leaving the one at the entrance.

  This is the story of the cave walls, lined with stories of skeletons.

  This is the story of the past in the future and the future in the past.

  This is the story of the long-sloping tunnels populated by beetles.

  This is the story of the skeletons embedded in the cave walls and arranged in the outlines of winged bears.

  This is the story of the other-one hearing the echoes of footsteps.

  This is the story of the signs that the beetles gave to the one and the other-one to follow them.

  This is the story of the one knowing nothing of the other-one’s scars and memories.

  This is the story of the days within the tunnels by the one, and then the lost memories of what constituted a day.

  This is the story of how the prayer-receivers do not appear in stories, only the shadows of stories.

  This is the story of the darkness in the tunnels, and the one following the pincer-clicks of the beetles.

  This is the story of the mutual consent of clouds and night.

  This is the story of the secret stronghold deep under the earth that the other-people had captured the other-one within.

  This is the story of the thousands of gold mushrooms giving light in the massive cavern.