Kingdom of the Young
Page 1
The true Lesson of the Master, then, is, simply, never to venerate what is complete, burnished, whole . . . never to worship ripe Art or the ripened artist; but instead to seek to be young while young, primitive while primitive, ungainly when ungainly—to look for crudeness and rudeness, to husband one’s own stupidity or ungenius.
—Cynthia Ozick
Copyright © 2017 Edie Meidav
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Meidav, Edie, author.
Title: Kingdom of the young / Edie Meidav.
Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039500 | ISBN 9781941411421 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3563.E3447 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039500
Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
BELIEVERS
Kingdom of the Young
Romance; or, Blind in Granada
The King of Bubbles
The Buddha of the Vedado
KNAVES
Quinceañera
Beef
Catullus
I Never Had Any Problem with You
The Golden Rule; or, I Am Only Trying to Do the Right Thing
Modern Parables #1: Theft
DREAMERS
Dog’s Journey
Koi
Talent
The Christian Girl
CODA
Questions of Travel
Daughter of California
BELIEVERS
KINGDOM OF THE YOUNG
(10:15–10:35)
He is marching but losing the point, the rest of us falling behind the leader who can’t help the slightly affected pointing lift of his left foot as he marches. Our commander, but we can’t help noticing that about a half mile ago he dropped his pince-nez and none of us want to go pick it up and, true, at one point we swore allegiance to him, his bounty our bounty, his bread our bread, his trouble with the knee ours, but the problem has become that he is losing the point of the mission, having begun to hallucinate at night which means we see him through the pigskin tent, that strange gas-lamp silhouette of him hunchbacked and walking about with one strange pointing foot, and when he sleeps, he turns and cries the worst sort of epithets, things which, were you to hear them on a conventional battlefield, might chill your spleen to such an extent that you’d want to turn tail. Except turning tail is one thing we never do, he is our commander and not only have we sworn lifelong fealty to him, we promised we would make his time our time, his fantasies of bringing the enemy to their rotting knees our own, he is what we’d dreamt when still prone to childish pursuits such as fly-wing-burning and other wholesome occupations. Our commander, true, but inside him opens a great abyss which questions whether this whole mission is doomed, whether we will cross the mountain range and desert pass before finding the oasis, from there stumbling upon the absconded king’s hideout at which the king, that dread king, will be beheaded with one fell swoop of our commander’s knife, and, at this juncture, this is what I want to know, will there be an understanding among our whispering horde of how we should continue? It is hard to know how to play the thing right, our commander says when most confessional, pulling his beard late at night, whether one is to push or pull, slide or slip, run or renegotiate. And only a few of his trusted advisers, I among them, are allowed to hear these ostensible innards of his mind which runs on tracks so anointed that when he was six, I still just a wing-burner, our commander was already called a world leader and by the time he was twelve, he led a small troop, outdoing his father who only came to his own ruling post at seventeen. Now our commander is thirty, which seems to us quite old, and we believe he is fading somewhat in his impulses, questioning not only the motives of the entire project, but also, and far worse, starting to turn a suspicious eye upon each of us. It is not as if he lacks for good men in his troops: we number in the hundreds and have mastered archery, musketry, the art of hanging our laundry in orderly lines so that no one gets confused and takes another’s codpiece. We are disciplined, polished to a high degree of spiff, the kind to understand what it means to look down someone’s barrel and undertake war without falling into being the bleeding hearts who so often think first of their enemy’s constitutions, wives and neighbors, pumping hearts and viscera, such thoughts and considerations those of lily-livered warriors who find it hard to withdraw sword from scabbard, intention from dormancy, action sloth. The problem with our troops is not our lily livers, no, rather that we have begun to pick up the malaise of our master, and we believe this has to do with our commander turning thirty, an age which makes us just as wary of him as he is becoming of us. We believe that when we come to the abandoned oasis and idyll of the dread desert king, we may actually kidnap the king ourselves (the king who, after all, is twenty-seven, deserving therefore to live at least a few more years), and will swoop that king, however aged, into our midst, buoy him aloft, carry him back to our kingdom where we will set up once again a kingdom solely of the young and for the young, a kingdom ruled by the young, and in our kingdom children shall frolic and beautiful narcissus flowers shall grow, and when the stems turn milky white and show signs of dying, we will dispatch our gardeners, men and women sensitive to signs of senescence, so that they may lop off whatever it is which might remind us that we too are not immune to the yearly march. We will paint our maidens fresh and rosy and when they too reach the wrong age, we will politely show them the exit. When bread grows stale, as men and women begin to stumble when reaching for a certain fact—what they had for breakfast yesterday morning, where they left their keys, how to make apple brown betty, how long it might take to travel to the neighboring kingdom if one were to harness two midsized and healthy moose for the journey—we will do what we can to bring them in line and also, always with the highest standard of courtesy, remind them with our gentle nod about all the joys farewell contains. And from the doorway will extend a chute, lined with greased velvet to make the passage all the more pleasurable. When those who have reached the age at which they besmirch our kingdom’s ethos must leave, they will find the chute to be a not unpleasant midway, a furry but lubricated liminal zone in which one might reflect on errors. And once our former neighbors have slid down to the very bottom, there they will find further chance to reflect, in the form of a large reflecting pool, and along the perimeter of that reflecting pool filled with floating grayed narcissus flowers, with discarded bread crusts and lost watches, all those who have left our kingdom—we will not call them rejects, we never call anyone a reject—all of them will be free to sit and pull at their paling beards, scratch balding pates and keep their thin old-person ankles warm. Reflecting, our former neighbors, whom we would never in a million years call rejects, will marvel at all they got to see in the brief sweet span of their youth, free to rejoice at all they still recall, watching calendar pages fly off into their sputtering faces as in an old movie 1 2 3 4 5, mostly free to contemplate what exactly their sins were, all amounting to a particular sum: what they have done to abuse time. You see, even as I’ve told this story, using up precious minutes, the fact remains: we have no time for such sinners in our holy kingdom of the young.
ROMANCE; OR, BLIND IN GRANADA
She was a bohemian girl with lots of life to live fast. Only in her early twenties but making up for time lost to who knows what. To books or the slow Cheshire-cat vanishing act effected by her best friend, to a dreamy childhood with the wrong doors unlocked like her outsize painting ambition or the inability to trust those she knew, apart from her great-uncle of the round head and romantic aspiration who died but first told her in his French accent that he wanted to leave her a little money saved up from teaching so that when she found herself alone in a funeral-home room with his ethylated body, he appeared to wink and say go ahead now, enjoy yourself the way I always meant to. Her uncle who read books in many languages and taught English to foreign girl students from Asia while never foregoing his strong Sex Appeal cologne because how could he keep himself from falling in love with students to the point that the cashier at the local cinema knew him by the line he used whenever he took a new one out: But are there bigger discounts for sexy senior citizens? He had gotten poorly embroiled with the last Korean student who would not so much as kiss him if he did not marry her, saying: The cow won’t give milk unless you feed it, this student his greatest disappointment since only death separated him from the love he thought might one day still be his, a love first whispered by French poetry and later mouthed by smoke rings in American kisser films he’d managed to see back when the Congo was still the Belgian. He had once dreamed of becoming a painter in Tahiti and so there remained a whole heap of unused pleasure in him which he ended up bequeathing the girl. With this sum she planned to go to Europe because she too had read a book about an enchantress in Spain and a book about traveling boys and hijinks that made escaping the slate-gray a correct course of action. While everyone had told her stories about the Alhambra in Granada, saying so determinedly it really was the place she had to go, a near peak of European civilization, the last place in which so many ideologies about love and faith interpenetrated, such possibility flourishing in that moment if you could only travel back and alter later history in which all streams continued in their straitened way. But you must go to Granada, they chimed, while she kept opening her Spain guidebook to the quotation from the medieval king who said there is no pain worse than being blind in Granada and so it was confirmed, the message, especially as both parents had started to dwindle at their edges, death moving in toward the core: clearly there was no pain worse than living life too slowly.
Once there, she bought a small guitar from a courtly guitar-maker who asked if she would like to come by some night despite his wife and colicky grandson while also not knowing where someone might take guitar lessons authentic to Andalucía. Leaving the guitar-maker’s small cramped studio, carrying the guitar, she nonetheless felt as if she were in a story she had read as a child about a happy pig named Pearl who carried in her satchel a magic bone, and the girl meant to speed life a little by getting coffee on her way back to a hostel populated by Viking descendants when instead a gypsy intercepted her with his El Greco face, all massive drooping eyes and aquiline nose as he unhanded her of the new guitar and started singing to her right there to her in the Plaza Mayor where she knew she had landed in the very center of the thing she had envisioned but had not named.
You have killed me with your walk, he sang, strumming her guitar, stretching it out—camino—o—o-o, chin wobbling at each O. Behind each tremble, a gaggle of ancestors lined up with the question of whether he could live up to them. He did his best. After his song was done he asked with some seriousness if she might come live with him in the small caves up above where tourists walk, white dwelling caves honeycombed into the hills facing the Alhambra which perhaps a king had made as a testament of love to his wife, a story that endured in a way that made her question if she would ever really know what it meant to fall in love despite her schooling in all the songs, because what had she ever known? Granada was either stripping her bare or layering on a new scrim since she was feeling more or at least someone else’s more. While the gypsy sang premature songs of love her way, she had almost been able to see him or had been looking at him through blinds, unsure since both possibilities melted as he sang, and of course it was both risky and imaginary to throw yourself into another’s thrall when anyway wasn’t it always chemical? She had been curious about people throwing their hats down before her but didn’t know if she had ever thrown down anything or just responded. Was she to be so deprived of experience? Love, to love, to fall in love. She had climbed mountains but never fallen. Others had been obsessed, sometimes with her, and was she only to know escape and absconding? Yet what was the strange thrill of the gypsy singing to her? It had to do with all stories conjoining in a spot just above her navel as if she were not on the road seeking but at both source and end, dead center inside a kaleidoscope. This itself is a story about the problem with the picturesque and how it links with the picaresque, and how certain girls are prone to confusing the two, going out to wander the landscape with something like one of Claude Lorrain’s mirrors turned backward at the landscape. If something seems correct enough in its set details they forgive enough to think: here might lie fulfillment, the idea working until fulfillment itself gives them the lie.
At night the gypsy and she did the deed, only one of them blushing in the dark on the floor in the gypsy cave though somewhere she was also numb because she didn’t stop to ask what, for all his singing about her eyes and voice, her smile and a chance at amor, amor, what about him was fulfillment? She had chosen this, it was no rape, he was dead center with her but was there any vastness other than mammal embrace or the satisfaction of being in a cave with an avatar of Granada reaming her out of thinking? There was something they both tried to extract on the unseen side of the other, a mystery she would never solve ever, his animal breath in her ear, her face on the stone floor, the two of them more ancient because of the Alhambra beyond the window, the girl imagining him her conqueror while at the same time being the filmgoer curious about what the next scene in the movie would bring. She almost knew enough to name it and woke the next morning inquisitive, her cheery guitar next to her in its opened blue plush case, one she loved as it also seemed to promise an interesting future. The gypsy took her to a special tetería where they sat on beaded pillows and he drank Moroccan tea broken only by song when he needed to illustrate a point about love, attachment, loss. What did they talk about? Guitars, his family, I love you so, singing in full display, throat full, eyes flashing. Midday they went to see his stern aunt rehearsing and there encountered the source of the wobble, the quirk coming from another singer, his romantic uncle. To sing gypsy guitar, you had to hurt and when you hurt most you were to open your mouth wide and let out the longing she had read about, duende another flame over centuries. How good to hurt and know loss, to feel passion-ion-ion, tremble, vibrato, melisma, words that appeared in the girl’s head like keepsakes from another realm. There she was deep in the cave with the gypsy family, a dusty moment out of time only she got to applaud since no one had any idea where she was, while no one in the gypsy caves seemed surprised to see her, the acceptance traveling far enough to create belonging. She had come along, toting her guitar as both a coin of the realm and earnest passport, something they had never seen held by a tourist. The aunt happened to be a beautiful narrow stern bird skilled in fortunetelling who grasped the girl’s rib cage and waist to calibrate the instrument, telling the girl she could be useful not at babies but at dancing. Meaning the girl lagged only a few centuries behind. Was this then the story the girl was in, in which she would learn to be a flamenquería from this stern woman who brooked no fools? Good at dancing, bad at babies, fallen in love? Late afternoon the gypsy brought her to the small blue-painted subterranean room, blue to keep away the evil eye, in which his mother perhaps lived with his older sister and a bunch of children with parentage impossible to align, in order for the gypsy’s mother to explain to the girl all the grimy details of one granddaughter’s illness with such compelling force that her eyes ba
rred any new story, despite the chaos around her capable of fixing on one tale with its point shriveling away, one the girl felt she almost reached but did not. No es comprensible, she wanted to say, instead saying, yes, claro, I understand. Afterward, along the road back to the gypsy’s little cave, he beckoned her to stop at a small counter of a restaurant where they shared a cheese sandwich as if already a couple with life behind and ahead in which he would wear his wifebeater t-shirt, his skin glossy under her fingertips, and later with her useful waist she would dance for his aunt but really for him, and on her epitaph you could read about acceptance, belonging, having traveled far from your original ideas. When it came time to pay for the meal, she told the counterboy, another cousin of the gypsy, that it was her gift. As if on cue the gypsy unrolled a song about how he could never thank her for the brightness of her eyes, a song perhaps made up on the spot despite the legacy of the chin wobble. In the full of afternoon they went back to his cave in theory to put her guitar down but more to lie once more on the floor of the cave and spill acrid red wine from a leather bota into their mouths before entangling, rectangles of sun stretched long over skin, his chest almost a smooth boy’s though light caught the end of each hair, her foreigner’s hand rippling over the brilliance. You will learn guitar well, he said, laughing. Did a bubble of a question start in her throat then? When they were done, she emerged into an unusual hour, everything lit from within, little fairy lights popping on, strung up outside the white plastered cave doors facing the Alhambra, the palace tucked into its hillside just as they were tucked into theirs. Everyone along the gypsies’ winding cobblestoned road up the mountain knew flamenco was good business. Produce romance for people and they get happy, said her gypsy, they pay more. Every little cave they passed had candlelit tables for two. Candles are important! he started to sing, hand on the back of her neck where only an hour earlier he had been holding her down. Now she knew he was making everything up in the received mode, his family singing him as it had sung for generations while she felt so moorless. As the sun sank behind the Alhambra, the tourists started to rise in an obedient swell, twos, fours, family units up into the ark of romance, craning their necks, and through their eyes she saw the charm of the day lit up, the glowing white of the caves and she in it with them, able to see both tourists and gypsies, the double frame giving her courage less about some story and more about this life of hers not skulking to the fringe of things. All this had happened in little more than a day. Her insides sore but in a good way, a tiredness under her eyes carrying everyone else’s reportage though she no longer had to tote around the contours of herself. The gift the gypsy had given her was dissolving a bit and she wished to help the cause of dissolution by welcoming the craning tourists into the aunt’s cave while standing aside so as not to take a seat from paying customers while the stern bird began her dance, heels tatting a pulse as the tragic face twisted to tell of horror, loss and union so doomed you too could live at the molten core. The gypsy played with his uncle and because this time the uncle gave his all the gypsy did too, fusing in music so that the tourists shivered in the cave because they too lived at the heart of experience, Spain, the Roma. After, she helped fold seats and then went back to a different uncle of the gypsy’s and until late, for free, for no other outsider but her, bands of gypsies drank and sang, making ribald, inclusive comments that named her almost an honorary man due to foreigner status, one of few women in that room, so many rough hands placed over hers to teach her guitar, because she was the ilk of girl who was going to learn flamenco guitar. The next morning by some arrangement she did not quite understand they went to some other uncle’s cave, bigger and better whitewashed, where the uncle told her he was the last of a rare line of seers while her gypsy stood by. The uncle explained that he needed to look right below her breasts to determine her fortune and because she was very much midexperience she lay on the table, shirt off, letting the uncle tell her fortune from small invisible marks he could ascertain only if he got close enough to either kiss or scrutinize her skin, all while her gypsy stood looking out the door with his face telegraphing an important errand he had almost forgotten and in this the question in her throat grew, she wanted to ask something but had no clue how to form it.