Lanceheim

by Tim Davys

  “I am afraid that you will be overly kind,” countered Reuben. “She is my daughter, but the tuba is her idea, and she must build her career on her own merits. This becomes that much more important, because not only the outside world is going to suspect that she got into the academy thanks to me, but she as well. There will always be a seed of uncertainty. It’s really important that she knows she’s capable.”

  The jury sat silently, considering this.

  “I think,” said the Shetland Pony, “that this must be your decision, Reuben. No one else will feel comfortable deciding Josephine’s fate. You make the decision, and we will back you up, whatever you decide.”

  “McCain is right,” agreed Poodle. “That’s how it must be.”

  “Then…,” said Reuben Walrus, drawing out the words, “then…Josephine will just have to accept being kept out this time.”

  There was dead silence around the table.

  WOLF DIAZ 8

  Would you like another beer?” asked Mary-Jo Antelope.

  I nodded. The sound level in the restaurant was so high that there was no point in trying to say anything when you could nod. Mary-Jo forced her way over to the bar, and she would be coming back sooner than most; personally, I would probably never have even managed to force my way up to the counter. Two times a week the foremost of Mollisan Town’s so-called Discontented Singers appeared at Veronica’s in Tourquai, but I had never been there before. The Discontented Singers were artists who, equipped with a guitar or an accordion or sitting at the piano, performed simple songs with complicated—and long—lyrics. Often the point was aimed at our mayor, Sara Lion, but of course all kinds of authority needed to be criticized. I cannot say that I thought what I heard was either especially good or bad; I am not a musical stuffed animal.

  Mary-Jo Antelope had been in my life a few months, and I was deeply impressed by her sincerity and patience. Usually I remained unaffected—if I may express myself carelessly—by the splashing of bleeding hearts, my own included, but my experiences with Missy Starling had left certain traces. Anyone could have figured out that of course Missy would leave me for another, but when it happened at last I was nonetheless unprepared. This contributed to my being crushed.

  Even six months later I was not prepared to move in with a new female, my nerves being to some extent still in disarray. Mary-Jo, however, demanded nothing of the sort. She was comfortably unaffected, with all her hooves on the ground. With Mary-Jo there was no calculation or dissimulation, only a straightforward manner that possibly might get a little…boring…in the long run. For me, however, this was both unusual and refreshing.

  Neither of us had room to move in with the other. Missy Starling found a way to buy me out. I was staying temporarily in the guestroom at the home of my childhood friend Weasel Tukovsky, who had unexpectedly become the advice columnist at the Daily News and was making a good living at that.

  Mary-Jo understood that I needed time and care, and that was partly why she dragged me along to Veronica’s—a little distraction from an existence that consisted of duties to Adam and Maria and their Retinues, as well as my gloominess at all the lies that Missy Starling had left behind her.

  I was looking preoccupied toward the stage while I waited for my antelope and the beers. A snake was performing; his voice was nasal, and the tip of his tail was strangely involved in the performance, simultaneously a conductor’s baton and a drumstick that rhythmically beat the tambourine on the chair beside him. Some sort of insect accompanied him on the piano, but I only heard fragments of the text itself. The audience closest to the stage was polite and listened quietly, but the farther into the place you went, the higher the volume of conversation was. At the bar I am sure that no one cared about the snake’s intense song.

  “Let’s sit down,” called Mary-Jo when she came with our glasses, and we made our way to a little table that was vacant.

  With Missy Starling every silence had been a threat, an insult of some kind, if the silence was not a “stage pause” on her terms. With Mary-Jo it was different. We could sit there at our table and drink a little beer and listen a little to the snake on the stage without having it feel uncomfortable in any way. A quarter of an hour passed, twenty minutes, and I do not know if I even thought about the fact that a new Discontented Singer had taken the stage before I gave a frightened start at hearing a sudden hissing in my ear.

  “Uh…I’d like to talk a little, is that…mm…okay?”

  The snake who had recently been onstage had slithered up along the back of the chair beside me, and his eyes were only centimeters from mine when I turned around.

  Of course he did not wait for my answer. He glided down the table without letting me out of his sight for a moment. This meant that he carelessly turned his tail toward Mary-Jo Antelope. Like me, she recognized him from the stage, and perhaps she was impressed that I kept such a low profile. Judging by this, I must know a Discontented Singer.

  But I wasn’t the one who knew the snake; he was the one who knew me.

  “You are…uh…Diaz, right?”

  I nodded.

  Up to that day I had not had any snake friends, and therefore I did not know how I should behave. Should I lean forward and talk with him, or should I simply raise my voice? Even if there were no animals right next to our table, another Discontented Singer was making considerable noise through the speakers.

  “Super-sorry to intrude…mm…huh?” said Dennis. “But I know that you…uh…work with…mm…Maximilian.”

  After the police effort against the cinema—and despite the fact that a few years had passed since then—my conspiracy theories had gotten extra nourishment, and I was extremely suspicious of questions of this type. Therefore I neither confirmed nor denied the snake’s assertion.

  “I, uh, am his friend, huh?” Dennis Coral announced solemnly, but corrected himself immediately. “He is my Savior.”

  I was forced to agree.

  “He is the Savior of us all,” I replied.

  “And I know who, mm, you are. You’re the Recorder, huh?”

  I felt both disturbed and flattered. He must have seen it in my eyes, for he quickly added, “It’s, uh, Maximilian himself who told me that, huh? He told me about the Recorder Diaz.”

  “You’ve met Maximilian?” I asked with surprise.

  The snake nodded. “In the slammer,” he said.

  I took a breath. Since they had locked Maximilian up in solitary confinement, I had hardly gotten any information at all. Here in the flesh before me was an ex-convict with his own account of Maximilian’s experience in jail. The surroundings suddenly became intrusive and unworthy. No one there—the drunks over at the bar, the singer on the stage, not even Mary-Jo Antelope—fit into this solemn context. I got up.

  “Mary-Jo,” I said. “I have to go. I’ll call you later and explain.”

  And it was her strength of character to accept my action with a noble calm. She nodded, raising her beer mug in an undramatic farewell, but the snake and I were already on our way out.

  We found nowhere else to go, so for a few hours we strolled around Tourquai’s empty, broad sidewalks from which the massive skyscrapers grew up, concealing the night sky. He had a mission, but I was still the one who got the most out of our walk, I think. Dennis told me everything he knew about Maximilian’s time in prison, and concluded by recounting their spectacular flight. For someone else this might have been unbelievable, but not for me.

  In Dennis Coral’s eyes, Maximilian represented unshakable hope. Dennis had had time to think about the matter since he had slipped out of King’s Cross, and this was what he had arrived at: Maximilian had shown that the impossible was possible, that however dark the future might appear, hope—naive and ridiculous, of course, but at the same time heartening in a fundamental way—must be kept alive. Dennis had lived a life without hope, but that would not be repeated. That was Maximilian’s teaching. Never let hope die.

  Dennis revealed what Maximilian had sai
d when they left the prison.

  “If you set an arrow to your bow, uh, you can still only shoot it as far as the eye can see through force and will. That’s what he said, huh?”

  “And?” I asked. “What more did he say?”

  “Nothing more.” Dennis smiled.

  “But what does it mean?” I asked.

  “I, um, thought about it a long time,” Dennis admitted. “And I think he meant that if you want to shoot the arrow even farther, you have to dare to hope. Thus it is, uh, only in the great idea that you can take yourself anywhere, uh, that we are limited by our reality, and that it, mm, isn’t always enough?”

  Dennis continued his explanation, and I cannot say that I understood everything exactly, but one thing was sure: He spoke with an infectious fervor.

  “That’s what I am, uh, singing about, huh?” he said. “But I think I’m, uh, through singing at Veronica’s. I want to be with you all instead, huh?”

  “With us?”

  I remember the moment. We were standing outside a shop that sold expensive watches. We were by a street with six lanes, ten or so traffic lights, but not a car. It had started to get light, and my legs suddenly felt tired. I had carried the snake on my arm most of the way, because it was easiest to talk that way.

  “Mm, with you all, huh?” he said. “I’ve heard about, mm, your Retinues. I’m the one you’ve been waiting for, huh? Do you get it?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Faith, hope, and love, like.”

  “Indeed. Yes, I—”

  “If Chaffinch talks about faith, if Mink talks about love—mm, I have actually been at one of, uh, her lectures. Then I’m left, huh? The voice of hope.”

  We got no further that evening than me promising to introduce him to Adam Chaffinch, but I tried to offer as little encouragement as I could. That a Discontented Singer would have one of Maximilian’s Retinues was not an idea I especially liked.

  Naturally I could not sleep that night. The encounter with Coral had been overwhelming. I had been given a view into Maximilian’s life in prison that shook me, and the idea of Dennis Coral as the third apostle gave me no rest.

  A month earlier Adam Chaffinch had more or less gone to pieces. I had talked a good deal with Maria Mink about this, because I had expected it to happen. Adam was running himself into the ground; he was working too hard, and he disregarded my warnings. After he became ill and was in bed with a high fever for four weeks, I humbly presented the idea that he ought to ramp down.

  He took too much on himself, I said. The need among stuffed animals was great, of that there was no doubt, but if he could find another who could speak to those in need? That was exactly what I said, and now Coral showed up.

  Adam had not immediately dismissed the idea, but I could not be more specific than that. Besides, medicine should be taken in small doses.

  I am not a stuffed animal who wants to promote myself in an unjust manner, but there is no reason for feigned humility either. The first meetings between Coral and Chaffinch did not go well—they did not go well at all. Chaffinch was, and is, a stern and serious bird who, despite everything had a number of unshakable ideas about right and wrong. Dennis Coral—this homosexual jailbird who had escaped from King’s Cross, appeared as a Discontented Singer, and spoke in a manner that was difficult to imagine in connection with the word of Magnus—did not fit into Chaffinch’s templates. It took time before Adam gave in—which to his credit he never regretted—and I definitely had something to do with it.

  Duck Johnson heard the bolts in the great vault door and realized what was about to happen. They must have set off an alarm, as he expected; in reality the question had always been how much time they would have.

  Now that time had run out.

  Duck increased his pace. He had been working on one of the pallets of bills farther inside the vault, and what he did now had been his alternative plan the whole time, something to try if everything else went wrong. He emptied the pallet of bundles of bills so that a deep hollow space was formed. Just as the police opened the vault, Duck pressed himself down into the little grotto, and from there he could hear everything that happened.

  When they took Maximilian, Duck did not dare breathe. But he did not dare move later either, when the darkness and silence almost suffocated him, for fear that there were heat or motion detectors in the vault.

  The next morning they came early and loaded the pallets. They used a small truck that drove between the vault and the securities transport that was waiting by the bank’s underground loading dock. No one saw Duck or his hiding place in the fifth pallet of bills; no one looked.

  On board the truck, he had plenty of time to prepare himself. He knew that they were on their way to the Hole at the Garbage Dump, and he knew that his only chance to get away was when the back of the truck opened and dumping began. Even if the guard who was driving the truck were to see him running away, there was no reasonable connection between the National Bank, the transport, and a duck running at the Garbage Dump.

  The duck crept out of the bills, no longer even thinking about the stench, and at the moment the truckbed began to tip and open, Duck squeezed out on the side and ran away faster than he had ever run.

  Duck hid in an overturned bathtub a short distance from the Hole, and there he waited until it got dark. He had heard the stories about the Garbage Dump and the psychopathic overseer named Bataille, and he did not intend to stay longer than he had to.

  When night came, he snuck away, following one of the broad roads through the refuse toward the exit, and then continued along Eastern Avenue for a few kilometers. After that he turned south, to Yok, where his aunt had an overnight apartment that she never used. It was on mold green rue d’Uzés, and for many years Duck had had a key to it without his aunt knowing about it.

  From the beginning his strategy had been to lie low a while and keep out of the way. But after a week, Duck was completely paranoid. He imagined that animals were looking at him when he went shopping, and he seemed to recognize an otter who went past his doorway every morning from the Seminars on Faith, Hope, and Love. It was a bad spiral: The more time he spent inside his aunt’s apartment, the less he dared go out.

  Just over a year later, still tormented by his persecution complex, Duck Johnson booked time with an unscrupulous plastic surgeon who had his practice in a former garage two blocks from rue d’Uzés. Duck had to pay for the operation on credit, but nothing in life was free. The plastic surgeon executed a beak exchange and a neck lengthening that meant that when Duck left the place, he could call himself Sam Goose. This granted him a certain respect, but only a few days later the plastic surgeon, who now had a perfect hold on Duck, called and demanded payback—everything from stealing prosthetics from the city hospitals to collecting money from delinquent former patients.

  Duck carried out these unpaid assignments for four years, until one morning, the Chauffeurs fetched the plastic surgeon. It was a relief, but also left a vacuum in his life. That he did not feel any great happiness when the blackmail ceased awakened a further existential emptiness in Duck’s soul. The sudden idleness brought with it fundamental questions about who he really was and what his purpose was in Mollisan Town, and inconsolable brooding led to a long, deep depression.

  One morning a few months later, Duck’s aunt found him under the bed in the apartment in Yok in a pose for healing meditation that caused his eyes to roll back in his skull while he hyperventilated. She forced him to seek professional help immediately. It could not go on like this.

  The therapist must have rubbed his hands: On the couch lay a real challenge. After a few weeks of treatment, he convinced Duck Johnson to try to write out his anxiety.

  “Confess,” said the therapist, “get your inhibitions and secrets out. Unscrew the lid. You’ve kept your misdeeds secret so long that they are eating you up from inside.”

  But at this point Duck Johnson was too complicated a stuffed animal for this simple advice. Simply buy
ing himself a notebook and a pen and starting to write was not enough for him. True, he bought the notebook and pen, but he also bought a large pocketknife and—when he passed by a lumberyard on his way home—a couple of good-sized pieces of wood. After this, a period in Duck’s life began that was marked by manic activity. The door to the apartment on rue d’Uzés remained locked, and his aunt’s key no longer worked.

  Time passed, and Duck’s aunt became more and more worried about her nephew. She made it a habit to go past the apartment a few times each day, and soon lost count of how many weeks and months this went on. She knocked on the door, opened the mail slot, and called his name, but except for an increasingly rotten stench, there were no signs of life.

  When the door was suddenly thrown open one day in March, the aunt took a few astonished steps backward. The duck—transformed to a goose—who came out of the apartment reminded her only vaguely of the nephew she had once had. He was a wreck, he did not seem to recognize her, and with a cry of pain and sorrow she saw him stagger down the steps, never again to return.

  Where he disappeared to, as far as I understand, no one yet knows.

  Hesitantly Duck’s aunt went into the apartment—it was hers, after all—to find, on the spice rack above the stove, twenty-three small but carefully carved globes lined up next to each other. They were no larger than the spice jars beside them. She took one of them down, twisting and turning it in the daylight that fell through the window. It depicted a planet: All the globes depicted planets, in what was possibly an alternate universe. Duck had carved entire miniature worlds, with contours of continents, mountain ranges, and seas in beautiful patterns. The traces of his work were everywhere; wood chips and sawdust lay like a film over bed and floor.

  Duck’s aunt weighed the globe in her paw with admiration. This was a remarkable thing that her nephew had achieved; would it be possible perhaps to make a buck from his unknown talent? By the end of that same week the aunt had received offers from three different art galleries in Lanceheim. Without batting an eye, she then sold the globes to the highest bidder. She got seven thousand, and would thereafter always remember her nephew with warmth.