Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

by Gregory Maguire

  “I don’t know or care much about martyrs,” she said. “All that smacks of a higher plan, a cosmology—something I don’t believe in. If we can’t comprehend the plan at hand, how could a higher plan make any more sense? But were I to believe in martyrdom, I suppose I’d say you can only be a martyr if you know what you are dying for, and choose it.”

  “Ah, so then there are innocent victims in this trade. Those who don’t choose to die but are in the line of fire.”

  “There are . . . there will be . . . accidents, I guess.”

  “Can there be grief, regret, in your exalted circle? Is there any such thing as a mistake? Is there a concept of tragedy?”

  “Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction. Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin, if anything is—”

  “Ah—now I’ve heard the word I never expected to hear you say.”

  “Denial? Sin?”

  “No. We.”

  “I don’t know why—”

  “The lone dissenter at Crage Hall turns institutional? A company gal? A team player? Our former Miss Queen of Solitaire?”

  “You misunderstand. There is a campaign but no agents, there is a game but no players. I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism.”

  “Hah! You the most individual, the most separate, the most real . . .”

  “Like everyone else you refer to my looks. And you make fun of them.”

  “I adore your looks and I acknowledge them. Fae!”

  They parted that day without speaking, and he spent the evening at the betting parlor, losing money.

  The next time he saw her, he brought three green candles and three gold candles and decorated her flat for Lurlinemas. “I don’t believe in religious feast days,” she said, but relented to admit, “they are pretty, though.”

  “You have no soul,” he teased her.

  “You’re right,” she answered soberly. “I didn’t think it showed.”

  “You’re only playing word games now.”

  “No,” she said, “what proof have I of a soul?”

  “How can you have a conscience if you don’t have a soul?” he asked despite himself—he wanted to keep things light, to get back onto a better footing after their last episode of moral wrestling and estrangement.

  “How can a bird feed its young if it has no consciousness of before and after? A conscience, Yero my hero, is only consciousness in another dimension, the dimension of time. What you call conscience I prefer to call instinct. Birds feed their young without understanding why, without weeping about how all that is born must die, sob sob. I do my work with a similar motivation: the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety. I am a pack animal wheeling with the herd, that’s all. I’m a forgettable leaf on a tree.”

  “Since your work is terrorism, that’s the most extreme argument for crime I’ve ever heard. You’re eschewing all personal responsibility. It’s as bad as those who sacrifice their personal will into the gloomy morasses of the unknowable will of some unnameable god. If you suppress the idea of personhood then you suppress the notion of individual culpability.”

  “What is worse, Fiyero? Suppressing the idea of personhood or suppressing, through torture and incarceration and starvation, real living persons? Look: Would you worry about saving one precious sentimental portrait in a museum of fine arts when the city around you is on fire and real people are burning to death? Keep some proportion in all this!”

  “But even some innocent bystander—say an annoying society dame—is a real person, not a portrait. Your metaphor is distracting and belittling, it’s a blind excuse for crime.”

  “A society dame has chosen to parade herself as a living portrait. She must be treated as such. It’s her due. That denial of it, that’s your evil, to go back to the other day. I say you save the innocent bystander if you can, even if she’s a society dame, or he’s a captain of industry thriving mightily on all these repressive moves—but not, not, not at the expense of other, realer people. And if you can’t save them, you can’t. Everything costs.”

  “I don’t believe in this concept of ‘real’ or ‘realer’ people.”

  “You don’t?” She smiled, not nicely. “When I do disappear again, dearie, I’ll surely be less real than I am now.” She made to simulate sex against him; he turned his head, surprised at the vigor of his aversion.

  Later that night, when they had made up, she suffered a racking paroxysm and painful sweats. She would not let him touch her. “You should go away, I’m not worthy of you,” she moaned, and some time later, when she was calmer, she murmured before sleeping again, “I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don’t understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”

  She was right. He didn’t understand. He wiped her brow with a dry towel and kept close to her. There was frost on the skylight, and they slept beneath their winter coats to keep warm.

  One brisk afternoon he sent off a propitiatory package of bright wooden toys for the children and a jeweled torque for Sarima. The pack train was going around the Great Kells via the northern route. It wouldn’t deliver Lurlinemas presents to Kiamo Ko until well into the spring, but he could pretend to have sent them earlier. If the snows held off, he would be home by then, restless and chafing in the tall narrow rooms of the mountain stronghold, but maybe he would get the credit for thoughtfulness. And perhaps deserved, why not? To be sure, Sarima would be in her winter doldrums (as distinct from her spring moods, her summer ennui, and her congenital autumn condition). A torque eventually would cheer her up, at least a little.

  He stopped for a coffee in a café in a neighborhood just enough off the beaten track to be both bohemian and pricey. The management apologized: The winter garden, usually heated with braziers and brazen with expensive forced flowers, had been the site of an explosion the night before. “The neighborhood is troubled; who’d have thought it?” said the manager, touching Fiyero on the elbow. “Our Glorious Wizard was to have eradicated civil unrest: wasn’t that the whole point of curfews and containment laws?”

  Fiyero was not inclined to comment, and the manager took his silence for agreement. “I’ve moved a few tables into my private parlor up the stairs, if you don’t mind roughing it amidst my family memorabilia,” he said, leading the way. “Finding good Munchkinlander help to repair the damage is getting harder, too. The Munchkinlander tiktok touch, there’s nothing like it. But a lot of our friends in the service sector have gone back to their eastern farms. Scared of violence against them—well, so many of them are so small, don’t you think they seem to provoke it?—they’re all cowards.” He interrupted himself to say, “I can tell you have no Munchkinlander relatives or I wouldn’t comment this way.”

  “My wife is from Nest Hardings,” said Fiyero, lying unconvincingly, but the point was made.

  “I recommend the cherry chocolate frappe today, fresh and delicious,” said the manager, retreating into repentant formality, and pulling out a chair at a table near high old windows. Fiyero sat and looked out. One fretted shutter had warped and couldn’t fold back against the outer wall as designed, but there was still enough of a view. Rooflines, ornamental chimney pots, the odd high window box stuffed with dark winter pansies, and pigeons swooping and scissoring like lords of the sky.

  The manager was of that peculiar stock; after so many generations in the Emerald City, it seemed a separate ethnic strand. The paintings of his family showed the bright gimlet hazel eyes, and refined receding hairlines on men and women alike (and plucked into the scalps of children, too, in the fashion of the Emerald City upwardly yearning middle class). At the sight of simpering boys in pink satin with frizzy-headed lapdogs, and girlettes in wom
anish dark rouge and plunging necklines (revealing their innocent lack of breasts), Fiyero felt the sudden longing, again, for his own cold and distant children. Though bruised by their particular family life—and who wasn’t?—in his memory Irji, Manek, and Nor managed more integrity than these hothouse scions of a family on the make.

  But that was cruel, and he was responding to artistic convention, not to the actual children. He turned his gaze out the window when the order came, to avoid hideous art, to avoid the other people in the salon.

  Having coffee in the winter garden below usually provided a view of vine-covered brick walls, shrubs, and the occasional marble statue of some improbably beautiful and vulnerably naked stripling. However, from a flight up, one could see over the wall, into an interior mews area. One part was a stables, another a neighborhood toilet, apparently; and just within the range of his vision was the wall broken by the explosion. Some sort of twisted, thorny wire netting had been erected across the opening, which led into a schoolyard.

  As he watched, one of the doors of the adjacent school was pushed open, and a small crowd emerged, shaking and stretching into the sunlight. There seemed to be—Fiyero peered—a couple of elderly Quadling women and some adolescent male Quadlings, straplings with early mustaches making a bluish-colored shadow against their fine rose-rust skin. Five, six, seven Quadlings—and a couple of stout men who might have been part Gillikinese, it was hard to tell—and a family of bears. No—Bears. Smallish Red Bears, a mother and father and a toddler.

  The little Bear went unerringly to some balls and hoops under the stairs. The Quadlings made a circle and began to sing and dance. The old ones, with arthritic steps, joined their hands with the teenagers and moved in a widdershins pattern, in and out, as if making a clock face that reversed the clockwise movement of time. The stocky Gillikinese men shared a cigarette and gazed out the wiry barrier across the break in the wall. The Red Bears were more dispirited. The male sat on the wooden edge of a sandlot, rubbing his eyes and combing the fur below his chin. The female moved back and forth, kicking at the ball just often enough to keep the cub occupied, then stroking the bowed head of her mate.

  Fiyero sipped his drink and inched forward. If there were, what, twelve prisoners, and only a wire fence between them and freedom, why didn’t they rush it? Why were they separated into their racial and species groups?

  After ten minutes the doors opened again and a Gale Forcer came out, trim and—yes, Fiyero had to admit it at last—terrifying. Terrifying in the brick red uniform with the green boots, and the emerald cross that quartered the breast of the shirt, one vertical strap from groin to high starched collar, the other strap from armpit to armpit across the pectorals. He was only a youth whose curly hair was so blond as to look nearly white in the winter sun. He stood with legs apart on the step of the school’s verandah.

  Though Fiyero couldn’t hear a thing through the closed window, the soldier apparently gave a command. The Bears stiffened and the cub began to wail and clutch the ball to itself. The Gillikinese men came and stood quiescently ready. The Quadlings ignored the order and kept on with their dance. They swung their hips, and they held their arms at shoulder height, moving their hands in a semaphoric message, though what it meant Fiyero could only guess. He had never seen a Quadling before.

  The Gale Forcer raised his voice. He had a truncheon in a thong loop at his waist. The cub hid behind the father, and the mother could be seen to growl.

  Work together, Fiyero found himself thinking, hardly aware he could have such a thought. Work as a team—there are twelve of you and only one of him. Is it your differences from one another that keep you docile? Or are there relatives inside who will be tortured if you make a break for freedom?

  It was all speculation; Fiyero couldn’t tell the dynamics of the situation, but he was riveted. He realized his hand was open, palm up against the glass of the window. Below, because the Bears had not stood to join the lineup, the soldier raised his cudgel and it came down on the skull of

  the cub. Fiyero’s body jerked, he spilled his drink and the cup broke, porcelain shards on the buttery herringbone-laid oak flooring.

  The manager appeared from behind a green baize door and tutted, and twitched the drapes closed, but not before Fiyero had seen one last thing. Recoiling as if he had never hunted and killed in the Thousand Year Grasslands, he averted his eyes and they wheeled upward, where he glimpsed the pale blond coins of faces—two or three dozen schoolchildren in the upper windows of the school, staring down with fascination and open mouths at the scene in their playing field.

  “They have no concern for neighbors who have a business to run, bills to pay, and loved ones to feed,” snapped the manager. “You don’t need to see those antics as you enjoy your coffee, sir.”

  “The disruption in your winter garden,” said Fiyero. “That was someone trying to break down your wall into that yard, and get them out alive.”

  “Don’t even suggest it,” shot the manager in a low voice. “There are more ears in this room than yours and mine. How do I know who was up to what, or why? I’m a private citizen and I mind my own business.”

  Fiyero didn’t take a replacement cup of cherry chocolate. There were racking cries from the mother Bear, and then a silence in the world outside the heavy damask drapes. Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

  He wanted to tell Elphie what he had seen, but he held back for reasons he couldn’t name. In some way, in the balance of their affections, he sensed she needed an identity separate from his. Were he to become a convert to her cause, she might drift away. He did not dare to risk it. But the vision of the battered Bear cub haunted him. He held Elphie the tighter, trying to communicate a deeper passion without speaking it.

  He noticed, too, that when she was agitated she was the more liberal in her lovemaking. He began to be able to tell when she was going to say “Not till next week.” She seemed more abandoned, more salacious, perhaps as a cleansing exercise before disappearing for a few days. One morning, as he was stealing some of the cat’s milk for his coffee, she rubbed some oil on her skin, wincing with sensitivity, and said over her shoulder of soft green marble, “A fortnight, my dear. My pet, as my father used to say. I need a fortnight of privacy now.”

  He had a sudden pang, a premonition, that she was going to leave him. It was a way for her to get two weeks’ head start. “No!” he said. “That’s not on, Fae-Fae. It’s not all right, it’s too long.”

  “We need it.” She expanded: “Not you and I, I mean the other we. Obviously I can’t tell you what we’re about, but the last plans for the autumn campaign are falling into place. There’s going to be an episode—I can’t say more—and I must be available to the network at all times.”

  “A coup?” he said. “An assassination? A bomb? A kidnapping? What? Just the nature of it, not the specifics, what?”

  “Not only can I not tell you,” she said, “I don’t even know. I’ll be told only my small part, and I’ll do it. I only know it’s a complicated maneuver with a lot of interlocking pieces.”

  “Are you the dart?” he said. “Are you the knife? The fuse?”

  She said (though he wasn’t convinced): “My dearie, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad. It’s all too expected. Security guards watch me like owls on a mouse. My very presence provokes alarm and heightened vigilance. No, no, the part I’ll play will be a handmaiden’s part, a little assistance in the shadows.”

  “Don’t do it,” he said.

  “You’re selfish,” she said, “and you’re a coward. I love you, my sweet, but your protests about this are wrongheaded. You just want to preserve my insignificant life, you don’t even have a moral feeling about whether I’m doing right or wrong. Not that I want you to, not that I care what you think about it. But I only observe, your objections are
of the weakest sort. Now this isn’t something to be argued. Two weeks from tonight, come back.”

  “Will the—the action—be completed by then? Who decides?”

  “I don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t even know who decides, so don’t ask me.”

  “Fae—” Suddenly he didn’t like her code name anymore. “Elphaba. Do you really not know who is pulling the strings that make you move? How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Wizard?”

  “You are a novice at this, for all your status as a tribal prince!” she said. “Why shouldn’t I know if I was being a pawn of the Wizard? I could tell when I was being manipulated by that harridan, Madame Morrible. I learned something about prevarication and straight talking back at Crage Hall. Give me the credit for having spent some years at this, Fiyero.”

  “You can’t tell me for sure who is or isn’t the boss.”

  “Papa didn’t know the name of his Unnamed God,” she said, rising and rubbing oil on her stomach and between her legs, but modestly turning her back to him. “It never is the who, is it? It’s always the why.”

  “How do you hear? How do they tell you what to do?”

  “Look, you know I can’t say.”

  “I know you can.”

  She turned. “Oil my breasts, will you.”

  “I’m not that stupidly male, Elphaba.”

  “Yes you are”—she laughed, but lovingly—“come on.”

  It was daylight, the wind roared and even shook the floorboards. The cold sky above the glass was a rare pinkish blue. She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands—as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her way.

  The collapse of her reticence frightened him more than anything else.

  He took some coconut oil and warmed it between his palms, and slid his hands like leathery velvet animals on her small, responding breasts. The nipples stood, the color flushed. He was already fully dressed, but recklessly he pressed himself against her mildly resisting form. One hand slid down her back; she arched against him, moaning. But perhaps, this time, not from need?