Mandragon

by R. M. Koster

  Gili-Gili smoked sixty Khedive brand cigarettes a day. He held them between his ring finger and his pinky, and made a fist, and drew the smoke in through his hand, because “A Muslim’s lips must never touch tobacco.” Be sides chess, he liked young boys, and wished I were a fake hermaphrodite.

  The Double-Sexed Miracle stood on Gili-Gili’s right. In my boy-girl outfit. While my barker, who was dressed in medical whites, spieled up a crowd:

  “See nature mystified, the sexes in confusion. Science is baffled by this case, ladies and gentlemen, but Professor Tandprugel of Stockholm has agreed to attempt an operation, if we can raise sufficient funds to pay the passage. Adults only! Absolutely no pregnant women will be ad mitted! We must take every precaution lest this frightful deformity occur again.”

  When the barker had sold enough tickets to warrant a show inside, the Miracle went back of the curtain and disrobed, lay down in a barber chair at the bottom of a small, steep amphitheater. Don Lorenzo had a parade girl done up like a nurse to show me off. Hung my heels up in gynecological stirrups and draped me with a sheet, and when the audience was in and settled, drew the sheet up. Folded it neatly on my chest, keeping the nursiest of straight faces, then turned the chair while the “doctor” directed attention to my amazements.

  Which were now and then the target of cigar butts, or chewing gum spat out from the front tier. Especially when the sister of mercy reached down over me and spread my thighs. She did that on the second slow revolution. Stops the chair. Reaches down and pulls my thighs apart, though with my heels up in the stirrups there was no way for me to close them if I’d dared to. Holds my penis up with thumb and forefinger. Lays it back on my pubis and spreads my slit. Straightens and turns the chair another 45 degrees, so that Double-Sex was posed for about a minute before each eighth of the audience. Then another slow turn, and then another. And a fifth and a sixth, if the public wanted.

  All very clinical, very scientific. The “nurse” cool and mechanical, the “doctor” spouting pseudo-medical blah and gesturing with his pointer. Most educational and proper, except of course for the cigar butts and the gum, the jeers and jokes, the squawks of “Do we get to fuck it?”

  Around and around. Around the circle of tiered benches. Around the ring of leering faces. Around each little country. Around the Caribbean. Around and around.

  12

  And now I’ve spiraled back. Powerless; in the morning I go on display, exposed and degraded; for the general amusement of the populace. Then I’ll stop spiraling for good, spun off the wheel.

  Up at the window for a little. Tired of flipping over and flipping back, of regurgitating and restomaching lost time. Glass weeping condenses humidity, but I can see out. Pull the drape back, lay my forehead on the pane. Cup cuffed hands about my eyes to shield the lamplight. Here, where the driblets are sparsest, I can see out. The courtyard where they’ll hook me to the patrol truck. The steel door they’ll slide back to let us out. The wall, and beyond it a strip of street. The tenements, and above them a cloud smudged sky.

  Café on the corner to my left. L-shaped tile counter four steps from the gutter, metal stools plugged into the cement. Six, seven figures. Guardias from the comandancia between shifts. Whores between shifts at the cantinas dockside. Drinking coffee, scarfing rice and beans. Exchanging sneers and wisecracks, winks and banter. Wearing the warm night. Programmed from their loins, so that the puffed-chest swagger, sway-hipped strut, parade in their speech and faces even while they’re sitting. Hormones ruling their lives as power ruled mine.

  Or so I imagine. No steamy heat up here; too far to make out gestures or expressions. Figures seated at an L-shaped counter, washed by tears of condensed humidity in the hard, past-midnight glare of fluorescent tubes.

  Place will be doing a good business before sunup, when the crowd collects to see them trot me out. Coffee and empanadas for brown-faced people in cheap cotton clothing, the mulato-mestizo crowd of a Latin town. They’ll fill the walk and spill into the gutter, peer in toward the steel door. Good vantage really, better than Avenida Bolívar. Glim me close up while I’m fresh, and lots of time to settle round the TV screens before I start dancing. Mandragon’s last gift to them, an interesting morning. Back in show business again, I’ve spiraled round.

  No stars. Get rain before dawn, but the morning will be clear. Mandragon knows. Ought to have told Colonel Guadaña. That I’ve witnessed the event and can vouch that there’ll be excellent weather. First public strangling here since General Luna’s, ninety-odd years ago. Have to be concerned that it might rain. Empty spots in the stands and on the seawall. Angela hunkered under a butlerborne umbrella, stately composure mangled, loveliness masked. Band and presidential guards all sopping, creases soaked from their trousers, tunics soggy and stained. And the condemned shivering like a doused kitten. Lose half the effect if it rained, and I should have set the colonel’s mind at ease.

  Or at least tried to. He might not have believed I’ve toured tomorrow, but I should have made the effort. Cooperating with authority is consistent with my state. I cooperated with my “nurse” and “doctor.” I did exactly as Don Lorenzo said. Until power chose me, anyway, and now I’m powerless again, I’ve spiraled round.

  Round and around. Off shift, on shift, off shift. At the comandancia or the cantina, at the Rotunda of Astounding Miracles. Misery, mastery misery: all pointless. Be out of it in a few hours, spun off the wheel.

  Mistake was taking Don Lorenzo’s offer. Made the wrong choice. Best have said no. Best have stayed in Zito’s truck. Turns out I never went anywhere, just round and around.

  13

  No pointless spiraling for Angela. Angela stayed put, on Dred Mandeville’s estate in the Nezona mountains.

  The revised standard version of her life denies this, but Mandragon knows better. The revised standard says she never lived with Mandeville, never set foot in his retreat, contends he merely gave her transport to the States, where she at once entered a convent and remained, doing anonymous good works as a lay sister, until Sancudo sent for her and married her. Vatican confirmation of this fiction cost Dred a bundle.

  Staging Angela in his fantasies cost much more. Hollowed out a mountain and domed the cavern with an artificial sky. Created a garden out of artificial trees and vegetation, and stocked it with robot animals so cunningly devised no one could tell they weren’t real. Angela walked among them, naked as Lilith.

  Date palms bending near a well of living water. Fig trees heavy with leaf and fruit. Grape blossoms, beds of spices, orchard of pomegranates. And Angela walking beneath the cedars, stately as the stag that marched before her, graceful as the gazelle that paced at heel. High breasts and waist-length yellow hair. Lithe narrow tail in the cleft of her firm buttocks. I’ve seen her there! Mandragon knows!

  From a control room banked in TV screens Dred could manipulate his robots. Speak from their mouths, see from their eyes through miniature cameras. He could direct the artificial sun in different courses, alter the phases of the artificial moon, compose the artificial stars into new zodiacs. He could make rain and toss down lightning, ripple and quake the artificial earth. He could scour the firmament with comets, project his face an acre wide across it, shake it with the thunder of his word. Or he could require some heavenly music, and as many hours as he wished of tranquil twilight, and descend in person, his gaunt and lofty frame robed in white linen, a diadem of gold on his broad brow. To bless his beasts that came to kneel before him, to chat and frolic with his demons.

  Outside, Dred had to suffer the existence of competing deities. Vachel Mundt, Thanatasis, Krapunkian. His garden was properly monotheistic.

  When he bought Angela and made his garden Dred was still functioning in public. Visiting seats of government and finance. Chairing his boards. Touring his fields and his refineries, inspecting his factories and labs. But he returned more and more often to Nezona, and remained there for longer and longer stays. For the pleasure of the place, from the pain of being elsewher
e. An unknown malady was gobbling his pigments. The handsome youth who’d built an empire around a single oil lease willed him by his father was now a prematurely aged albino, with skin like leprosy, and the blood-red eyes of a crazed bunny. As he piled billion upon billion, he was less and less able to bear sunlight, more and more revolting to human view. And so he moled into the mountain, and ruled his empire by phone, and played with Angela.

  She didn’t find his aspect loathsome. When Angela looked at Dred Mandeville, she saw money.

  He coupled with her in his own person, and by proxy through his robot beasts. His ram and his bull covered her. She was feathered by his peacock and his swan. He built her an Adam that would heed her whistle, that she could operate by a keyboard on his back. This first Adam was a marvel of workmanship, but they grew weary of him after a time, and so Dred had another kidnapped, a handsome fellow in his early twenties, a perfect physical specimen but mentally retarded. The kidnappers told him his parents were sick of caring for him and had ordered him destroyed. Then they stood him against a wall and aimed a tommy gun filled with blanks at him, and as one fired, another shot him with a tranquilizing dart. When he came to, naked in Dred’s garden, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

  What else could he think when a great face in the sky proclaimed it? when the tiger that bounded up to him was tame, and capable of speech, and spoke his name? when an angel came to him and told him that God loved him, and took him in her arms and made love to him? What fun Dred and Angela had with that poor moron!

  But like everything else he grew tiresome after a while. Dred had him drugged and shipped back to this world, set down at midnight on a corner near his home. No one be lieved his ravings about heaven.

  Business too. Dred entertained statesmen from the countries where he had investments, or wanted concessions. And his interests benefited, oh yes, oh yes. I’ve watched the process. I’ve witnessed the effect. Felt it myself from a trance in Otán Province. Tasted. So docile, those powerful men, after Angela attended them. Tongues lolling. Eyes glazed with bliss. And other oil companies had the devil’s time competed with Hirudo once Dred began receiving sheiks and emirs. For them he had his biosimulation lab run off a line of comely robots of both sexes. Angela was consulted in their programming, and Dred’s guests agreed, potentate for potentate, that the immortal houris of the Prophet’s Paradise could hardly be more pliant or beguiling, or show a more delightful blend of enterprise and servility. Each got a romp of virginal companions, whose plastic skin was lifelike and perpetually youthful, whose clever circuits held all the mysteries of love. His forever, to have and to hold back in Qatar or Oman, along with a technician paid by Hirudo Oil to keep them romping.

  Dred’s fellow gringos too, they weren’t slighted. The estate had a baronial lodge and a championship golf course, kennels and stables, a hunting preserve. It had a heated swimming pool, a sauna, and a gym; a French chef and a vast wine cellar. Invitations were prized by senators and admirals, by chiefs of industry and molders of opinion. Dred never entertained them personally, but they weren’t offended. They praised his delicacy. Shared his retreat, they said, with men he respected, but not from any wish for favors.

  Early to rise, early to rest. Healthy relaxation in rustic luxury. But a gentleman might be lightly drugged at dinner. And zipped sleeping from his room into the garden. And there amused by Angela, as in a dream. Then he’d be drugged again, and bathed, and returned to his bed. So that he never knew for certain, till it was too late, if his joys were real. So that Nezona kept its Boy Scout image.

  Dred watched the cavortings on video. He filmed them. Sometimes he lent an unseen hand. Angela knew, still knows, how to draw a man’s secret yearnings from him, and Dred furnished props when they were needed. He had a wide-screen Technicolor film of the governor of Missibama being flogged and sprinkled by a black show girl. He had the commander of the Nuclear Annihilation Force indulging his taste for Asiatic lads. He had the Reverend Charlie Biscuit dorking a billy goat, whose horns were imprisoned in a bramble thicket, whose throat the preacher slit at the moment of truth. His guests included men still relatively young and unrewarded, who he thought might be destined for high office. Two of his movies were later screened by their stars in the White House.

  And yet the world remained somewhat intractable. Despite his money, despite his garden, despite his films. It didn’t always dance to his baton. Sometimes money’s voice was laryngitic. Sometimes favors were forgotten. Sometimes a cooperative man died or retired suddenly, and was replaced by a man Dred didn’t know. Sometimes a man refused to be blackmailed. Sometimes one couldn’t be corrupted, or another, who was willing enough, couldn’t de liver. Not often, but Dred had never considered adapting to the world, or bearing its stubbornness patiently. When the world got out of step, Dred got annoyed. In the early Fifties he got so annoyed with a certain prime minister he spent a fortune, and a lot of time, having the man deposed and put in prison. After that he prepared himself to deal with annoyances on short notice. He turned part of his Nezona retreat into an assassin factory.

  Factory. First-rate assassins are fanatically loyal. Loyal to the death, their victim’s and their own. Such people can’t be hired on the market. Have to be made. Dred had a file of likely prospects assembled, put people to work on conditionings and control. Then he chose his instruments and took them over, picked them and ruled them as power once picked and ruled me. The infallible technique, a device planted in the skull that gives direct access to the instrument’s brain, wasn’t perfected for years. Meantime Dred’s doctors made do with reward and punishment, pleasure and pain. And Angela, who melded art to science. With Angela’s help Dred’s plant turned out a line of top flight murderers, who removed a score of annoyances over the years. Most never got caught, the others were lone madmen.

  Angela’s help was easy enough to get. That took only money, and Dred had plenty. Money excites her. Physically. A stack of ingots, the touch and smell of bundled bills, and her breasts flush, and her juices begin flowing. Man dragon’s watched it. I’ve felt it in my own hide. And money keeps her young. Fifty-odd now, but you’d never know it. Looked nineteen till she was thirty, and from then on she’s looked twenty-five.

  Dred’s empire grew. His fields and refineries multiplied, his companies brought forth subsidiaries. Waylaid competitors and raped them. Kept them in harem. His money hawked round the world and taloned up resources; beaked in discoveries and crapped new businesses. Mandeville Biosynthetics. Mandeville Lethatronics. His bankers manipulated currencies, his brokers juggled stocks. His factors fiddled with supply, portioning out now dearth and now abundance. His advertising men finagled demand. His voice over the phone, his coded messages, brought peace or panic, misery or ease. His seclusion made him mysterious, confirmed his hold over subordinates, increased his status among the other gods. And yet his life remained uncertain. Infinite appetite, but not infinite power, so always in danger of reaching past his grasp. Then even Nezona wouldn’t be safe for him.

  For a time in 1963 it seemed he’d reached too far. Just for a time, and then the danger passed, but that year he began looking for an escape hatch.

  And that year I fell ill, and power chose me.

  14

  Mid-April, 1963. Amichevole’s Universal Circus lay outside the provincial capital of Huacho in northeastern Ticamala, in a fallow field beside the Pan-American High way. I was about fourteen then, and sickly.

  I had been sickly since I joined the circus. Nervous, asthmatic, subject to fits. But that year my health worsened; my heart fluttered, my digestion was disordered. I was morbidly sensitive to light and noise, had spells of vertigo and sudden weeping. And fearful headaches lasting days on end. Sustained explosions deep behind my eyes, and the sensation that my brain was fragmenting outward in tiny morsels. Always, too, a strange sense of foreboding. Something immense and terrible was rushing toward me, but if I fled it or resisted it I would die.

  I lived and traveled with Re
bozo, a large, loose-jointed mulatto three or four shades lighter than me. With his Pomeranian, Bebe, he did a marvelous parody of Zito’s cat-and-bear act, and that year he had begun training a pair of ducklings.

  Rebozo was mute; that is, he didn’t speak. He’d been, they said, a fine trapezist, and trainer of acrobats, but one of his protégés betrayed him so terribly he lost the confidence for flying, and stopped speaking, and took up training animals and clowning. Pain, which sometimes toughens, left him tender. He was too wary to form bonds with people, but he felt sympathy for those who suffered. When I came to the circus, he took me in. I was almost an animal anyway.

  He too. We lived and traveled together like a cat and bear in Zito’s truck. No emotion between us, a coexistence of solitudes.

  One morning, about an hour before I was due in the Rotunda, I left Rebozo’s van, left the field and walked into the forest. Walked past Rebozo and his ducklings, past Magda and Sandor’s trailer, and out across the highway into the trees. Or so Magda and Sandor told me later on. I don’t remember leaving the van. I don’t … Wait!

  • • •

  Slight brown-faced figure on an empty highway. Hair clipped short on the right, and on the left conked and set in glossy waves. Boy or girl, depending on the profile. Me!

  Gravel shifting under canvas shoes. Expanse of loose gravel about a yard above the field, like a low dike between it and the forest. Dark trees, and above them clouds gathering for the daily noon shower, but hazy glare around me. Specks of silicon glittering in the chopped rock. Oblong blotch of shadow to my left front. I walk as though drawn by an invisible cord joined to the waist of my cotton trousers. Cross the highway. Disappear into the trees.