In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  “I know! You attempted to redeem my Elixir! A dismal failure as an alchemist, but what a failure! The raw material, you refined away all the wrong properties. In my own experiments, I called them my angels, because they lacked free will, and were innocent of desire. Your first instinct was to use it to discover, to learn, to interrogate your angels, but you deluded yourself you set them free.

  “Your choice of career was, of course, my suggestion. But you deserve the credit for the basic decency that gave me the idea to let you keep it, to let you... help people with it.”

  Help people. Learn things. Lies within lies. He didn’t even have to erase my true motivation, I did it myself. I wanted what we all want, love and revenge. A cult orphan, nobody’s child in a generic post-acid hippie personality cult where children were assigned to adults as punishments. With a different broken, grudging parent every few months, you get to learn ulterior motives like the Eskimos know snow.

  “Well, you’re too late,” I said. “It’s all gone. I couldn’t figure out how to make more.”

  Now, I could see his smile, but without eyes, it wasn’t much comfort. “The Elixir’s potency comes from the ease with which it penetrates the brain, and that is the secret of its rarity. It only propagates in human cerebrospinal fluid and brain matter, and its progress is exquisitely slow. In my home country, we would keep ‘cows,’ angels too used up to give pleasure, and milk them, but only a few milligrams can be had every year, unless it is allowed to ripen. This takes—”

  About four years, I thought, touching my forehead. The headaches weren’t withdrawal. The drug I had come to crave was already in my brain.

  “It’s not working inside your head, of course; there’s a process to catalyze the psychoactive properties, but you’ve given me a sizable start on a plantation in this country.”

  Fifty-two clients. Maybe the last few were just starting to have the headaches. Nobody had come to my door to complain yet—

  “You know,” he said, finishing the drink, “the most remarkable thing about the process... is that, as the fungi gradually digests it, the cow experiences some diminished function, to be sure, but remains a dutiful farm animal long after the brain is little more than a stem.

  “The Elixir is far more potent, however, from a patient who enjoys at least the illusion of free will. Your associate Carl has no forelobe to speak of at all, and yet...” He took his drink from Carl, who’d been waiting to deliver it. “How is the family, Carl?”

  “Doing real good, thank you, sir!” Carl replied, smiling.

  “So you see, the Elixir makes its own use of the brain, and yet the mind goes on, like a ghost in a haunted house. So long after you have grown weary of your own purpose in life, you may still serve.”

  He held up a grotesquely long syringe. Carl took hold of my head and pressed it firmly against the opaque black window. “Hold still,” he said. I was unable to move it at all even as the needle slid into the soft tissue beside my tear duct, up behind my eyeball and into my skull.

  It hurt like being sucked down a black hole, crushed and stretched into a monofilial string. I felt myself surging into the needle’s fat reservoir, leaving behind the hapless amateur brainwasher I’d been. I could see the straw-colored fluid dribbling into the syringe, but I was being drained out of myself.

  When he let me go, I sagged onto a bus stop bench on Park Avenue, across from the zoo. People were running past me and police cars and fire engines surrounded the park. I lay there for a while until a bus came, and I got on and tried to get on with my life.

  I spent two weeks in a motel, hiding out and listening. The news made much of Preston Marble’s death at the hands of his fanatical understudy. We all saw the video of the disheveled maniac emerging from the crowd to embrace the terrified, charismatic spiritual leader. The black rubber bulb in one hand looks enough like a grenade that two bodyguards move to pry them apart, but somehow, their actions are confused until both men are engulfed in a blanket of white fire.

  The vest stuffed with thermite cremated both men on their feet and badly burned thirteen bystanders. The resulting mess was easily enough spun to hide Marble’s conspiracy, but the narcissistic nature of the murder-suicide turned him into another punchline, another hammily-plotted cautionary fable that only proved some people will believe anything.

  I never saw Regina again, not even in my dreams of the French Play. I hope she reached the city on the far side of the lake. Nobody who’s been through what she endured should have to come back.

  The alchemist was merciful. He told me that he would come to harvest from me only when he had to, and would leave no memory of it. So long as I cooperate, I can go about my business for as long as my brain function holds out. He would leave no memory of his visits, just as he would protect my old patients. He gave me a single dose of the Elixir and told me that if I had remorse about the way things had turned out, I could fix it.

  I have recorded a new cover story, a new antibiography, and secured the necessary fake IDs to make it stick.

  When I wake up, I will tell myself who I am. But I could not resist giving myself an escape hatch. Next to the tape recorder, Resley’s badly annotated copy of Le Roi En Jaune.

  Whatever the newborn tenant of this motel room chooses, he will deny you the neat, poignant denouement you seek. He will burn this manuscript and go into the world and write his own ending.

  heelhouse

  The phone rang on the nightstand, sounding like an alarm bell signaling the end of the world. End of a poor night’s sleep, at the very least.

  It was a rotary phone, robin’s-egg blue with proper metal innards and a nest of copper wiring twisted up inside. A solid American-made piece of equipment, 25 years past its prime. The sound it made was horrible, and it kept coming with that relentless 2/4 beat. Two seconds of ring to four seconds of silence.

  A groan escaped from somewhere under a twist of quilt and sofa bed. The only thing visible of Henry Ganz was the lower half of a whiskered face peaking through the mass of patchwork fabric. He’d forgotten to pull the phone chord from the wall last night, and the anger at this sloppy oversight fired blood back into his limbs, forcing him to crawl back to the waking world. Worse yet, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing on its own. Shards of plastic and wire that had once been a nearly antique answering machine littered the corner of the room, broken under a boot heel three nights ago. So the phone would keep ringing until the caller decided to hang up, or we finally arrived at the heat death of the universe.

  Ganz could have ended his suffering and just answered the goddamn thing, but he didn’t particularly like phone calls, as they more than likely meant bad news. That or a conversation, which usually proved to be worse. But in his line of work, whatever that exactly was these days, Ganz needed a phone, good news or bad. He’d find an angle for either. That’s what he was good at, which made him the cop he once was, the reporter he became, and the high functioning degenerate that he’d always been. Always with the angle. Finding degrees even when everything was bent into a pretzel.

  After what was probably its fortieth ring, Ganz snatched the receiver from its cradle and mashed it against the blanket over his ear. The voice on the other end didn’t wait for a greeting, as he knew it wouldn’t come.

  “Secretary quit?” Victor Baumgartner’s barrel voice had a sarcastic chuckle to it.

  “Ran off and joined the circus,” Ganz rasped, unsuccessfully clearing last night from this throat.

  “You hear the news?”

  “I write the news, motherfucker.”

  “No, on TV.”

  “What time is it?” Ganz refused to open his eyes, not that it would have helped. The room was lit by a fat glass lamp with a stained shade resting on the floor next to his pull-out bed. The living room was mostly empty, as were the rooms beyond, aside from the stacks of books and newspapers that rose in dusty columns throughout th
e house. No natural light filtered through the windows sealed shut with aluminum foil. Like a Vegas casino, never letting in the outside world to remind the poor bastards bleeding their baby’s college fund at the craps table that it was time to get the hell out of town.

  “2:30.”

  “AM?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Then no, I haven’t heard the fucking news. Why are you calling me so early?”

  “Turn on the TV. KTLA.”

  “You’re an asshole, Bum,” Ganz said. He’d long ago broken down “Baumgartner” into simply “Bum,” which was far easier to say after a few cocktails. It had predictably stuck. “Goddamn Kraut bastard....” Ganz’s head hurt, just like it always did when it was time to get up and sleepwalk through another day, counting his steps to the grave.

  “You’re just as German as I am,” Bum said, feigning insult.

  “I’m Prussian, you cocksucker,” Ganz said. “I got more in common with the Polacks than you lousy fascists. How many times do I have to tell you this?”

  “As many times as it takes to make it true.”

  “I’m going back to sleep.”

  “Turn on this news first. You still have a TV, right?”

  “I’m going to shoot you, Bum. I’m going to find you and I’m going to—”

  “Then turn it on. This is a neighborhood matter, and right in your wheelhouse.”

  “So?”

  “So... the Park Plaza Hotel just ate four people.”

  ... “What?”

  “KTLA.”

  Click.

  he Hush of Pavement

  Ganz stepped out from the porch shade and hit the first cracked step of his compact Queen Anne Victorian, built just a few years on from the turn of the 20th century. Its sash windows, gambrel roof, and offset turret were par for the course for Pico Union at the time, but now stuck out like a gaudy sore thumb, looking as out of place as Ganz. With the passing of years, the erosion of architectural variety led the parade for the general decline of the area, becoming just another one of the many gang-infested urban frontwaters taken over by cheap apartment housing, cheapo strip malls, and cheapjack drug dealers. Pico Union was left to rot by inches through the gutting of post-war factory jobs that drove out the blue collars, filling the gaps with style-blind investors and immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador, on the run from brutal civil wars and therefore unconcerned with such bourgeois notions as curb appeal. Los Angeles was full of neighborhoods like this, mixed-race middle class bastions gone to shit, with a preponderance of them circling downtown like a rusted halo. Westlake, Crown Hill, Temple Beaudry, and all the Heights (Angelino, Victor, Lincoln, Boyle). South LA, which dropped the “Central” after too many black people made money off of it, and too many white people who wouldn’t lower themselves to set foot in the neighborhood thought that rap music gave the place a bad name.

  And Pico Union, where a broken-down white guy named Henry Ganz manned the sagging turret of his kitsch relic in a sad, tagged-up barrio hemmed-in by streets and freeways that sounded better on paper, defined as they always were in the hearts and minds of Good America by the ritzier parts of town they bisected. Vermont Ave to the west, the Harbor Freeway to the east. The northern border was marked by Olympic Boulevard, the south ended at the Santa Monica Freeway. No one wrote rap songs about Pico Union, as it was a ghost town in the middle of a teeming city. Not much to rhyme about. People just died here, shot drugs and each other here. Sold ass in alleyways and marked the walls with machoglyphs of indecipherable rage. Very few people truly lived in Pico Union, and that included Ganz. Just ask Bum. That prick thought Ganz sold his TV for Ripple. Bullshit. He only sold his televisions for the good stuff.

  Ganz squinted up and down the block as he walked to the gate centering his eight-foot-tall iron security fence, topped by anti-climb spikes the shape and warmth of shark’s teeth. The neighborhood was quiet, which seemed odd for three o’clock on a Friday. Or was it Thursday? Whatever day it was, the block never sounded like this aside from that sweet, brief window of time between the downtown bars closing and the dope fiends making their final rounds before dawn. Those were the times when he could really think, and turn those jumbled memories into clay-like images so real he could almost reach out and throttle them.

  He unlocked the gate, secured it behind him, and headed north up South Union Ave. He made good time, as the sidewalks were mostly clear. So were the alleyway fences and shop facades, which were normally decorated with colorful murals rendered with various levels of skill, accented by graffiti wars from the overlapping gang sets that crisscrossed the neighborhood, copyediting rival claims with deadly lines of spray paint. But most of the walls were now completely painted over by a color that seemed to be a treacle white from a distance, but upon closer inspection was a pale, industrial yellow. The color of the evaporated milk his mother used to pour out when he was a kid for everything from biscuit frosting to a cure for stomach flu. The city council had been promising to clean up the graffiti problem around the city center since the invention of aerosol cans. Maybe the wrong business finally got tagged by knuckleheads, because the paint-over was extensive, stretching up and down the block, getting into every nook and defaced cranny. The windowless front of the Diamante Mercado, which only days before featured a vibrant Aztec mural depicting brick-skinned Mesoamericans, bundles of maize, and staircase pyramids was now yellowwashed from top to bottom, removing all trace of the cultural tribute. The city council wouldn’t fucking dare mess with the Mayans. Too many potential voters were children of Chichen Itza. It had to be something else.

  Ganz strode on between the sour-milk walls, feeling now slightly detached from the neighborhood that he had loved and hated for the better part of half a century. The street level restoration seemed to drain the life from the block. Not much sound coming from apartment windows and the futbol cantinas that would normally be doing brisk and rowdy business at this hour. Even the impossibly shiny Tacos Tamix truck that posted up on 9th - specializing in such castoff delicacies as lengua, cabeza, tripa, and something similarly wretched sounding called bucha - was nowhere to be found, taking its reassuring silver gleam with it. The street children who made the pavement their everyday meadowland would have to go hungry today. He couldn’t find them, either. Must have chased the truck to more lucrative parts of the city for their fill of grilled organ meat, as everyone loved a food truck in LA. The humble had become hip. Peasants to princelings. God bless us all.

  Ganz scratched at the back of his neck, feeling the first uncoiling of The Thirst low in his stomach as he passed the Stuart Hotel and several other shooting galleries where he had rousted skagheads in a different life. He turned down 12th and up Alvarado and on toward MacArthur Park in Westlake, where a classic Neo-Gothic landmark built by the Elks had apparently decided to eat several members of the local population. Ganz walked where he needed to go these days, and caught a bus when necessary, flagging a jitney after hours. He wasn’t allowed to drive anymore, which made him even more of an anomaly, not in his own neighborhood, but in Southern California itself. Nobody walked in LA, the song said. That bullshit singer never lived where he did. Everyone walked down here, because cars didn’t grow on trees. Avocadoes and limes certainly did, but cars sure as fuck didn’t. Nor did drivers’ licenses for third-strike DUI dopes. But very few people were out walking today, and the ones that were kept their eyes down and hurried, ducking out of sight as soon as they could. The streets were different. Edgy as Ganz’s stomach and twice as empty.

  He stopped into the Araya Bodega on the corner of 8th and Alvarado for cigarettes and a walking beer, and found it deserted aside from the clerk and his boom box providing ranchero music to all customers at a shockingly high volume. Outside on the sidewalk, Ganz popped his Tecate tallboy, lit a Winston, and pulled out his notepad, an act he had performed a million times before as a homicide cop with the LAPD, then as a s
treet reporter with the LA Times. Now he was neither, but very much both, as those two jobs never completely leave a person. Protector and documentarian come up from the bones of you, and either you have the DNA or you don’t. Ganz had both in spades, and pink slips wouldn’t change that essential makeup. After two unspectacular falls from grace, he now worked on commission as a freelance writer, sometime PI, and neighborhood fixer for anyone Bum – plugged in as he was to the aristocratic cream – sent his way, which usually meant Hollywood location scouts looking for that “authentic gangsta vibe,” or a greenhorn homicide cop working a new lead about MS 13 or 18th Street. Ganz couldn’t hold down regular work. His nerves wouldn’t allow it, courtesy of the Mix Tape Murders case he worked 25 years ago that cost him his job and then his marriage and then everything else that mattered. This was followed by a brief stint at the Times, where he worked for City Desk Editor Victor Baumgartner, who kept his Pulitzer hidden in his desk where a bottle should have been. Bum was a grinder like Ganz without all the toxins, and Ganz liked him instantly. The feeling turned out to be mutual, but after blowing too many deadlines while holed up in his home with Johnny, Jack, and an array of loaded firearms, Ganz was let go. Now he wrote when he could, selling local interest stories to the Times, LA Weekly, various pay blogs and any other outlet on whatever platform that had the guts to publish unvarnished tales from the seamier side of diamond town. Ganz interviewed hookers, dope fiends, grieving mothers – anyone who fit the story or had a story to tell. Today, he’d be covering a carnivorous boys club turned hotel overlooking the city’s first leisure park. Ganz thought he smelled horseshit, as marketing mad men were clever these days, but he also knew that Bum wouldn’t yank him from the safety of his reinforced domicile for an unsubstantiated lark. This was one of those Weird Stories, and Bum knew that Ganz was the guy to write it, as much for Ganz’s talent as for the fact that the poor schlub needed to eat – or drink – and Bum wanted someone at the scene before the story got stale. Ganz was the obvious choice. Hence, the phone call. And now the walk.