by Guran, Paula
Buzzz. I go to the wall and press the button to see out. Three men stand at the door downstairs. They wear suits, old-fashioned but not in a dowdy way. You thought you had run ahead of us, say the steep white collars, the strangely-fastened cuffs, and the fit, the cut of those clothes; even a goat-boy can hear it. But our power is sunk deep, spread wide, and knotted tight into the fabric of all things.
The closest one takes off his sunglasses. He calls me by my army name. I fall back a little from the screen. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“We must ask you some questions, in the name of His Majesty the King,” he says. He’s well fed, the spokesman, and pleased with himself, the way boss-soldiers are, the higher ranks who can fly away back to Boss-Land if things get too rough for them.
“I’ve nothing to say to any king,” I say into the grille. How is he onto me so quickly? Does he have magic dogs as well?
“I have to advise you that we are authorized to use force.”
I move the camera up to see beyond them. Their car gleams in the apartment’s turning circle, with the royal crest on the door. Six soldiers—spick and span, well armed, no packs to weigh them down if they need to run—are lining up alert and out of place on the gravel. Behind them squats an armored vehicle, a prison on wheels.
I pull the sights back down to the ones at the door. I wish I had wired those marble steps the way the enemy used to. I itch for a button to press, to turn them to smoke and shreds. But there are plenty more behind them. By the look of all that, they know they’re up against more than one man.
I buzz them in to the lobby. In the bedroom, I take the pistol from my bedside drawer. In the sitting-room lie the remains of the feast, the spilled throw-rug that the princess wrapped herself in as she talked and talked last night. I pick up the Bic and click it twice. “Tidy this up,” I say into the bomb-blast of silver, and he picks up the mess in his teeth and tosses it away, and goggles at me for more orders. He could deal with this whole situation by himself if I told him. But I’m not a lazy man, or a coward.
The queen’s men knock at the apartment door. I get into position—it feels good, that my body still knows how. “Shrink down, over there,” I say to the silver dog. The light from his eyes pulses white around the walls.
Three clicks. “Fetch me the king!” I shout before the gold dog has time to properly explode into being, and they arrive together, the trapped man jerking and exclaiming in the dog’s jaws. He wears a nice blue suit, nice shoes, all bespoke as a king’s clothes should be.
The knocking comes again, and louder. The dog stands the king gently on the carpet. I take the man in hand—not roughly, just so he knows who’s running this show. “Sit with your friend,” I say to the dog, and it shrinks and withdraws to the window, its flame-fur seething. The air is strong with their spice and hot metal, but it won’t overpower me; I’m cold and clever and I know what to do.
I lean over the king and push the door-button on the remote. The queen’s suits burst in, all pistols and posturing. Then they see me; they aren’t so pleased with themselves then. They scramble to stop. The dogs stir by the window and the scent tumbles off them, so strong you can almost see it rippling across the air.
“You can drop those,” I say. The men put up their hands and kick their guns forward.
I have the king by the neck. I push my pistol into his mouth, and he gags. He doesn’t know how to fight, hasn’t the first clue. He smells nice, expensive.
“Maybe he can ask me those questions himself, no?” I shout past his ear at the two suits left. I swing him around to where he will not mess me up so much. “Bring me the queen!” I shout to the golden dog, and blow out the back of the king’s head. The noise is terrific; the deafness from it wads my ears.
The queen arrives stiff with fear between the dog’s teeth. Her summery dress is printed with carefree flowers. Her skin is as creamy as her daughter’s; her body is lean and light and has never done a day’s proper work. I catch her to me by the shoulders. One of the guards dives for his gun. I shoot him in the eye. The queen gives a tiny shriek and shakes against me.
The dogs’ light flashes in the men’s wide eyes. “Please!” mouths their captain. “Let her go. Let her go.”
I can feel the queen’s voice, in her neck and chest, but her lips are not moving. She’s trying to twist, trying to see what’s left of the king.
“What are you saying, Your Majesty?” I shake her, keeping my eyes on her men. “Are you giving your blessing, upon your daughter’s marriage? Perhaps you should! Perhaps I should make you! No?” My voice hurts in my throat, but I only hear it faintly.
I take her out from the side, quickly so as not to give her goons more chances. I drop her to the carpet. It’s all coming back to me, the efficiency.
“The prince!” I command, and there he is, flung on the floor naked except for black socks, his wet man wilting as he scrambles up to face me. I could laugh, and tease him and play with him, but I’m not in that mood. He’s just an obstacle to me, the king’s only other heir. My gaze fixes on the guards, I push my pistol up under his jaw and I fire. The silent air smells of gun smoke and burnt bone.
“Get these toy-boys out of here,” I shout to the dogs, even more painfully, even more faintly. “Put the royals back, just the way they are. In their palace, or their townhouse, or their brothel, or wherever you found them. My carpet, and my clothes here—get the stains off them. Don’t leave a single clue behind. Then go down and clear the garden, and the streets, of all those men and traffic.”
It’s not nice to watch the dogs at work, picking up the live men and the dead bodies both, and flinging them like so many rags, away to nothing. The filthy dog, the scabbed one—why must he be the one to lick up the blood from the carpet, from the white leather of the couch? Will he lick me clean too? But my clothes, my hands, are spatter-free already; my fingertips smell of the spiciness of the golden dog, not the carrion tongue of the mangy one.
Then they’re gone. Everything’s gone that doesn’t belong here. The carpet and couch are as white as when I chose them from the catalogue; the room is spacious again without the dogs.
I open the balcony windows to let out the smells of death and dog. Screams come up from the street, and a single short burst of gunfire. A soldier flies up past me, his machine-gun separating from his hands. They go up to dots in the sky, and neither falls back down.
By the time I reach the balcony railing, all is gone from below except people fleeing from what they’ve seen. The city lies in the bright morning, humming with its many lives and vehicles. I spit on its peacefulness. Their king is dead, and their prince. Soon they’ll be ruled by a goatherd, all those suits and uniforms below me, all those bank-men and party-boys and groveling shop-owners. Everyone from the highest dignitary to the lowliest beggar will be at my disposal, subject to my whim.
I stride back into the apartment, which is stuffed fat with the dogs. They shrink and fawn on me, and shine their eyes about.
“I want the princess!” I say to the golden one and he grins and hangs out his crimson tongue. “Dress her in wedding finery, with the queen’s crown on her head. Bring me the king-crown, and the right clothes, too, for such an occasion. A priest! Rings! Witnesses! Whatever papers and people are needed to make me king!”
Which they do, and through everyone’s confusion and my girl’s delight—for she thinks she’s dreaming me still, and the news hasn’t yet reached her that she is orphaned—the business is transacted, and all the names are signed to all the documents that require them.
But the instant the crown is placed on my head, my rage, which was clean and pure and unquestioning while I reached for this goal, falters. Why should I want to rule these people, who know nothing either of war or of mountains, these spoiled fat people bowing down to me only because they know I hold their livelihoods—their very lives!—in my hands, these soft-living men, these whore-women, who would never survive the cold, thin air of my home, who would cringe
and gag at the thought of killing their own food?
“Get them out of here,” I say to the golden dog. “And all this nonsense. Only leave the princess—the queen, I should say. Her Majesty.”
And the title is bitter on my tongue, so lately did I use it for her mother. King, queen, prince, and people, all are despicable to me. I understand for the first time that the war I fought in, which goes on without me, is being fought entirely to keep this wealth safe, this river of luxury flowing, these chefs making their glistening fresh food, these walls intact and the tribals busy outside them, these lawns untrampled by jealous mobs come to tear down the palaces.
And she’s despicable too, who was my princess and dazzled me so last night. Smiling at our solitude, she walks towards me in that shameful dress, presenting her breasts to me in their silken tray, the cloth sewn close about her waist to better show how she swells above and below, for all to see, as those dignitaries saw just now, my wife on open display like an American celebrity woman in a movie, like a porn queen in a sexy-mag.
I claw the crown from my head and fling it away from me. I unfasten the great gold-encrusted king-cape and push it off; it suffocates me, crushes me. My girl watches, shocked, as I tear off the sash and brooches and the foolish shirt—truly tear some of it, for the shirt-fastenings are so ancient and odd, it cannot be removed undamaged without a servant’s help.
Down to only the trousers, I’m a more honest man; I can see, I can be, my true self better. I take off the fine buckled shoes and throw them hard at the valuable vases across the sitting room. The vases tip and burst apart against each other, and the pieces scatter themselves in the dogs’ fur as they lie there intertwined, grinning and goggling, taking up half the room.
The princess—the queen—is half-crouched, caught mid-laugh, mid-cringe, clutching the ruffles about her knees and looking up at me. “You are different,” she says, her child-face insulting, accusing, above the cream-lit cleft between her breasts. “You were gentle and kind before,” she whispers. “What has happened? What has changed?”
I kick aside the king-clothes. “Now you,” I say, and I reach for the crown on her head.
My mother stirs the pot as if nothing exists but this food, none of us children tumbling on the floor fighting, none of the men talking and taking their tea around the table. The food smells good, bread baking, meat stewing with onions.
It is a tiny world. The men talk of the larger, outer one, but they know nothing. They know goats, and mountains, but there is so much more that they can’t imagine, that they will never see.
I shower. I wash off the blood and the scents of the princess, the bottled one and the others, more natural, of her fear above and of her flower below that I plucked—that I tore, more truthfully, from its roots. I gulp down shower-water, lather my hair enormously, soap up and scrub hard the rest of me. Can I ever be properly clean again? And once I am, what then? There seems to be nothing else to do, once you’re king, once you’ve treated your queen so. I could kill her, could I not? I could be king alone, without her eyes on me always, fearful and accusing. I could do that; I’ve got the dogs. I could do anything. (I lather my sore man-parts—they feel defiled, though she was my wife and untouched by any other man—or so she claimed, in her terror.)
I rinse and rinse, and turn off the hissing water, dry myself and step out into the bedroom. There I dress in clean clothes, several layers, Gore-Tex the outermost. I stuff my ski-cap and gloves in my jacket pockets, my pistol to show my father that my tale is true. I go into my office, never used, and take from the filing drawers my identifications, my discharge papers—all I have left of my life before this, all I have left of myself.
Out on the blood-smeared couch, my wife-girl lies unconscious or asleep, indecent in the last position I forced on her. She’s not frightened any more, at least, not for the moment. I throw the ruined ruffled thing, the wedding-dress, to one side, and spread a blanket over her, covering all but her face. I didn’t have to do any of what I did. I might have treated her gently; I might have made a proper marriage with her; we might have been king and queen together, dignified and kind to each other, ruling our peoples together, the three giant dogs at our backs. We could have stopped the war; we could have sorted out this country; we could have done anything. Remember her fragrance, when it was just that light bottle-perfume? Remember her face, unmarked and laughing, just an hour or so ago as she married you?
I stand up, away from what I did to her. The fur-slump in the corner rises and becomes the starving gray, the white bull-baiter, the dragon-dog with its flame-coat flickering around it, its eyes fireworking out of its golden mask face.
“I want you to do one last thing for me.” I pull on my ski-cap. The dogs whirl their eyes and spill their odors on me.
I bend and put the pink Bic in the princess’s hand. Her whole body gives a start, making me jump, but she doesn’t wake up.
I pull on my gloves, heart thumping. “Send me to my family’s country,” I say to the dogs. “I don’t care which one of you.”
Whichever dog does it, it’s extremely strong, but it uses none of that strength to hurt me.
The whole country’s below me, the war there, the mountains there, the city flying away back there. I see for an instant how the dogs travel so fast: the instants themselves adjust around them, make way for them, squashing down, stretching out, whichever way is needed for the shape and mission of the dog.
Then I am stumbling in the snow, staggering alongside a wall of snowy rocks. Above me, against the snow-blown sky, the faint lines of Flatnose Peak on the south side, and Great Rain on the north, curve down to meet and become the pass through to my home.
The magic goes out of things with a snap like a passing bullet’s. No giant dog warms or scents the air. No brilliant eye lights up the mountainside. My spine and gut are empty of the thrill of power, of danger. I’m here where I used to imagine myself when we were under fire with everything burning and bleeding around me, everyone dying. Snow blows like knife-slashes across my face; the rocky path veers off into the blizzard ahead; the wind is tricky and bent on upending me, tumbling me down the slope. It’s dangerous, but not the wild, will-of-God kind of dangerous that war is; all I have to do to survive here is give my whole mind and body to the walking. I remember this walking; I embrace it. The war, the city, the princess, all the technology and money I had, the people I knew—these all become things I once dreamed, as I fight my frozen way up the rocks, and through the weather.
“I should like to meet them,” she says to me in the dream, in my dream of last night when she loved me. She sits hugging her knees, unsmiling, perhaps too tired to be playful or pretend anything.
“I have talked too much of myself,” I apologize.
“It’s natural,” she says steadily to me, “to miss your homeland.”
I edge around the last narrow section of the path. There are the goats, penned into their cave; they jostle and cry out at the sight of a person, at the smells of the outside world on me, of soap and new clothing.
In the wall next to the pen, the window-shutter slides aside from a face, from a shout. The door smacks open and my mother runs out, ahead of my stumbling father; my brothers and sisters overtake them. My grandfather comes to the doorway; the littler sisters catch me around the waist and my parents throw themselves on me, weeping, laughing. We all stagger and fall. The soft snow catches us. The goats bray and thrash in their pen with the excitement.
“You should have sent word!” my mother shouts over all the questions, holding me tight by the cheeks. “I would have prepared such a feast!”
“I didn’t know I was coming,” I shout back. “Until the very last moment. There wasn’t time to let you know.”
“Come! Come inside, for tea and bread at least!”
Laughing, they haul me up. “How you’ve all grown!” I punch my littlest brother on the arm. He returns the punch to my thigh and I pretend to stagger. “I think you broke the bone!” And they
laugh as if I’m the funniest man in the world.
We tumble into the house. “Wait,” I say to Grandfather, as he goes to close the door.
I look out into the storm, to the south and west. Which dog will the princess send? The gray one, I think; I hope she doesn’t waste the gold on tearing me limb from limb. And when will he come? How long do I have? She might lie hours yet insensible.
“Shut that door! Let’s warm the place up again!” Every sound behind me is new again, but reminds me of the thousand times I’ve heard it before: the dragging of the bench to the table, the soft rattle of boiling water into a tea-bowl, the chatter of children.
“You will have seen some things, my son,” says my father too heartily—he’s in awe of me, coming from the world as I do. He doesn’t know me any more. “Sit down and tell us them.”
“Not all, though, not all.” My mother puts her hands over the ears of the nearest sister, who shakes her off annoyed. “Only what is suitable for women and girl-folk.”
So I sit, and sip the tea and soak the bread of home, and begin my story.
Perhaps death is neither as easily defined nor quantified as we might think . . .
Tell Me I’ll See You Again
Dennis Etchison
Say it happened like this:
All the lawns were dry and white that day. Cars hunkered in driveways or shimmered like heat mirages at the curb. Last summer the four of them had tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk. This year it might work. As she walked past Mrs. Shaede’s rosebush she noticed a cricket perched on the bleached yellow petals. When she stopped for a closer look the insect dropped off and fell at her feet. She studied it, the papery body and thin, ratcheted legs, but it did not move again. So she reached down, picked it up and slipped it carefully into her shirt pocket.
At that moment there was a rumbling in the distance.
She knew the sound. Mr. Donohue’s truck had a bad muffler. She glanced up in time to see it pass at the end of the street. A few seconds later a bicycle raced across the intersection, trying to catch the truck. The spokes flashed and the tires snaked over the hot pavement.