400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “Well!” said my mother, trying to hide her improper amusement from the P.M.

  “Then it’s your fault,” said Arquinian.

  “I haven’t killed a soul.”

  “You haven’t patched things up, either. This is juvenile behavior.”

  He shook a finger at me, as if I were still a child to be reprimanded—but I seized it and bent it backward, out of view of my mother, watching his face whiten while I whispered.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, Arq. She’s irrational. How can I reason with such a girl?”

  “I’ve reasoned with far worse, young man, and so must you. She must be stopped. This war especially must stop.”

  I relinquished his finger, now properly sprained, and he took it away without showing his distress. But the blood had drained from his ultimatum:

  “If you don’t do something, Prince, we might turn you over to her.”

  “Oh, leave him alone, Arqui,” said my mother. “We’ll do nothing of the sort.”

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  I peeked out the window, saw that we’d reached the city. “Look, there’s nothing I can do if her father sends armies on her word. The whole family must be insane. I’m surprised you’d risk me in negotiations. She killed my consort, that’s what started it.”

  “You think I don’t know you better than that?” said Arquinian.

  “I don’t care what you know.”

  With that, I unlatched the door and leapt to the street. The Prime Minister and my mother, for once in accord, screamed after me, but Arqui didn’t dare leave his movable fortress. He ordered the drivers to give pursuit, but a military procession, brass horns blaring, marched in the way and several foot soldiers vanished beneath the tank treads before it could be halted. I ducked into an alley, leaving familial duties behind, and dodged through street after street, thankful to be home again.

  All I needed now was a place to stay.

  * * *

  For three days I hid in a garret, writing sentimental battle odes and drinking cheap wine. I could find none of my old slumming companions to drink with me. For all their brave treasonous talk and rebellious posturing, they had conceded quietly enough to military induction and now were soldiers, mired in mud and gulping gas at the front, too stupid to command planes or even to push buttons in proper sequence from the safety of underground bunkers.

  My greatest poetry was penned during the endless hours of midnight airstrikes. I was touched by the Princess’s persistence in striking at the heart of my land. It suited her twisted sense of the romantic. I hated to think she had inspired me, and I fought the idea with increased quantities of wine and pills, but the constant explosions were anodyne to my melancholy, and for the first time in my life I found myself able to harness my passions. However, waking one sunset to reread my morbid ballads, I began to wonder if she might have been correct in drawing parallels between us. My longest poem was a complex conceit in which ballistic equations were subtly derived from, and thinly concealed, the curves of her figure, the clash of phosphor lightning in the highlights of her hair. It ended on a black battlefield, and by the time I laid down my pen, I was shivering in an erotic fever.

  Unable to purchase wine or water, and starving for breakfast, I left the confines of that close little room. The smell of bodies and cordite played a part in sending me out into the streets and back to my family, who had by now moved into the Emergency Palace.

  The Emergency Palace was a perfect replica of our usual homestead, except that every one of its ornate windows opened onto nothing but dirt, rock and roots. It held the same temperature year-round, wherefore my mother preferred it to the regular Palace. Her shingles rarely bothered her here.

  “I’ve come not to surrender,” I told her as she sat in state among her fawning courtiers and slightly more dignified lapdogs, “but to state my case.”

  “Really, dear, it’s no concern of mine. Shall I tell Arqui you’re here?”

  The Prime Minister had overheard my announcement. He appeared from behind an electric arras, eyes alight at the words with which I greeted him: “Set it up, Arq.”

  And so that very night I was flown to the front over what appeared to be a scale model of luminous craters and stalled war machines. Naturally the Princess could not wait for a reasonable hour; but then, I was not interested in waiting. I wanted to see what would come of the affair.

  At an underground airfield I was transferred to a war-scarred limousine which was chauffeured up a slight ramp to that perpetual amusement park whose theme is war.

  A cease-fire had been called to facilitate negotiations, but plainly the land had been in some upheaval. Fires of hell fried the obsidian sky, leaping above generous mounds of cadavers, the usual battlefield fare. Although it was summer and no rain had fallen for weeks, the earth showed soaked and sprouting a crimson mildew in the headlights. Upturned helmets lay scattered on the road like battered tortoise shells, dippers full of blood. The tangled bodies became less distinct from the muck as we crossed into no-man’s-land.

  And there in the worst of it, like a neon saloon in a nightmare, the Princess had parked her bus of state. As we pulled alongside, I commanded my aides to wait calmly no matter what happened. I gave thanks for my tall boots as I waded through the massacre to the bus. A chauffeuse was out polishing the windshield while another took a chamois to the chrome fenders. Mangled hands like squashed starfish reached out from under the tires.

  Instead of knocking, I pressed my face to the glass folding door and said, “I hope you appreciate this.”

  She opened the door with a shiny lever and gazed down at me from the plush driver’s seat. If I had expected her face to be streaked with tears or otherwise ravaged by my rejection, I would have been disappointed. Her demeanor was military, unperturbed.

  As I climbed in, she said, “Before you say a thing, let me assure you that I have considered your desires before my own. I know that you, like myself, might thrive on new pleasures—while retaining certain favorites to which you may return again and again without exhausting their fascination. Therefore, I offer the portable services of my bus. This is only a taste of what awaits you at home.” She pulled aside a curtain that hung across the cabin, unveiling a living gallery of nudes smeared with fluorescent body paints and soaked in ultraviolet light: a lurid spectrum of humanity, displaying a variety of genders, some surgical. I was touched to see she had included a sex-anemone, for my Nanny and first mistress had possessed one such; although while Nanny’s had been a graft, moored in her flesh, this anemone was detached, a lonely polyp growing from a pair of fleshy vegetable thighs, devoid of personality. For the Princess, while she might concede to the pleasure-giving powers of many unexpected elements, would never allow any of them to compete for my intellectual attentions. Her human slaves, to similar effect, had the dull grins and sunken temples of the lobotomized.

  “There should be something here to suit you,” she said.

  “You overestimate my appetite,” I replied. “How can I consider pleasure in this setting?”

  I leaned past her and switched on the headlights. A bright swath of charnel horrors appeared before us. It been there all along.

  “What can you offer them?” I asked.

  Her body began to shudder, wracked by spasms welling from her womb. Only her eyes remained unmoved, fixed on the scene beyond the windshield. She snagged my wrist in her nails, gasping, “Please, Prince, take me.”

  “Say ‘fuck,’ dear. ‘Take’ isn’t your sort of euphemism.”

  I considered refusing her, as I had refused the offer of her living cargo. But the blood and the sweating night and now this honest show of desire had worked me up to a fine point. I gave her what she asked for, while she stared out the window at the field of death which was all that would ever issue from her womb. I could not look at it myself. I turned my head to the wind-wing and watched the chamois moving slowly back and forth in the hand of a chauffeuse whose doe-like eyes held mine until
that trembling instant when, eyes closing, I jerked and forced the Princess into the horn.

  The wailing summoned my guardians from the car. They stood before us, knee-deep in bodies, their guns erect but blinded by the headlights.

  “Turn out the light,” she said, hitching herself back into the seat.

  I did so.

  “Come home with me, Prince.”

  “I can’t do that. You’ve been unfortunate enough to meet me at the height of my reckless youth. This is the only time I have to be wild and passionate, to develop the emotional artistry that must serve me in the slow grind of petty politics.” I lifted her hand and kissed it. “Should I apologize for winning your heart? It’s a skill of mine, honed to perfection—too sharp, I think—but I will put it aside when I put on the crown.”

  “Why can’t you be like other men?” she said, rising from her ultraviolet pout.

  I laughed. “Now I understand the devastation on your other borders. You’re entrenched in the affections of ‘other men.’ Would all those wars end if we married?”

  “I will always hate the others, but not as I hate you. You’re the only one who dared run from me.” Uncomfortable with all those nudes watching us, I pulled the curtain closed again. “I was trying to preserve the landscape.”

  “Fuck the landscape. You can’t pick a bouquet without gouging the earth.”

  “And you’ve picked me a lovely bouquet of bloody flesh.”

  “I? Pick flesh for you? I’m not courting you, Prince.”

  “What do you call this?”

  She sat back and stared haughtily at me. “Negotiation.”

  “I shouldn’t have come.”

  She smiled. “Are you always so moody after sex? I’m sure you’ll feel differently tomorrow. We’ll get an early start, take a slow drive through the wine country. . . .”

  “There’s not much left of it, judging from the photographs I’ve seen.”

  “You shouldn’t have retaliated. You’ll spoil our honeymoon.”

  “I didn’t start this war.”

  “Yes, you did. By running. Your country can’t be too pleased with its Prince. Who’ll follow a coward? If you don’t give me what I want, this war will go on forever. I’ll assassinate my brother—I’ve been poisoning him slowly anyway—and the power will stay in my hands. I’ll never marry. I will destroy you. The generation that grows up beneath you will be born to attrition. Society has a long memory for blame, and they’ll lay their lot to your cowardice. It will be your war then.”

  “My very own personal war?”

  “Which you can’t fight without approval. The people will count the bodies and weigh them against yours. You have only one, and you’ll lose it.”

  I sat down on the topmost step and rested my chin in my hands. “I don’t know anymore, Princess. You have my mother’s approval, don’t you?”

  Her laughter rang like a cracked bell. “This marriage, my darling, was arranged long ago. I’ve merely tried to reconcile you to it. I think it’s something we could both enjoy. It wasn’t my idea, you know. We’re so alike that you should have guessed I wouldn’t look forward to putting my neck in a yoke, regardless of the partner.”

  “Not your idea?”

  “Do you think that two children would be allowed to plunge their countries into total war? Our parents have let this war come about, prince, in order to draw us together.”

  My hair prickled. “Who told you this?”

  “I discovered it clue by clue, over the years. It’s obvious when you comprehend the pattern.”

  I rose from the steps. “But how can you go along with it, knowing what you do?”

  Her eyebrows arched up. “It suits me. By playing along, I get all I desire. Best of all, I get you.”

  “A lousy trade. You’ll sacrifice your freedom and then you won’t want me. Not on our parents’ terms, you won’t.”

  I was glad to see her considering this.

  “Look,” I said, “what if I said you can have me? You know that in the only way that matters, I am already yours.”

  She leaned closer. Her chauffeuse watched us with eyes like moons. “Yes?”

  “But I don’t want to live in your land, Princess, and admit it, you have no fondness for mine. If we married, you would have to live in my country.”

  “We can break with custom.”

  “If you follow it now, even to get what you want, tradition will trap you forever. Listen, my bloody darling. Listen to what I propose.”

  Her hand slid into mine.

  “Pitch the war with all your will,” I said. “Drive your father until he howls. Be a cancer in his heart. Attack, my love, and never stop. Let there be ever newer weaponry, mountains of bodies. Let our love never stagnate in treaties. If we forsake peace, we can slake our lust forever.”

  She looked out over the ragged fields, the sloppy graves. I could see my vision playing in her eyes. How easily it would spread, out of the wine lands and over the hills, blighting crops and felling forests, drenching the world in blood.

  “And you’ll be mine?” she asked huskily.

  “Yes, yours always. We will meet thus, in the midst of death, pretending to discuss the terms of an impossible peace. For as long as we have each other, peace will never come.”

  “You are mine!”

  “And you are mine, Princess. And now there is something we share.”

  “A war.”

  “Our war.”

  “Yes.” Tightening her grip, she pulled me in again. “Yes.”

  When I finally descended from the bus, my escorts stood stiffly around the limousine, sucking on perfumed cigarettes. They gasped at the sight of blood on my face and hands, the nail marks and bruises. The Princess’s bus roared and lumbered away, grinding through the carnage. I watched it until the taillights vanished, and thought I heard gunfire beginning in the distance. They couldn’t know it yet, but the cease-fire had ended.

  “There was trouble?” asked an aide.

  I pushed past him to the car, saying brusquely, “There will be no truce, no compromise. Take me home.”

  * * *

  “Wartorn, Lovelorn” copyright 1991 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in There Won’t Be War, edited by Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister (1991).

  GASOLINE LAKE

  The dachshund looked like a slab of ancient beef jerky, dabbed with glue and rolled in lint. It teetered on three stumpy little legs that had dried in unnatural positions while the fourth had cracked clean off, leaving a bit of slightly ragged hem, dog fringe. Though there didn’t seem to be much need for a flea collar, one hung around the petrified neck like a reminder of better days for dog and fleas alike. The eyes were dusty raisins. There was no way to examine the mouth without broken jaw bits ending up in either hand, but the muzzle was slightly parted, and the tongue could be seen to have receded all the way back into the dark cavity of the throat like a frightened snail. The dachshund felt warm to the touch, but that was from being left sitting in the sun. If you sniffed your fingers after stroking the hard brown flanks, you could still detect a faint, undeniable odor of dog.

  “This is Fritzy,” said the Rehydrator.

  Everybody stepped back from the display table at this announcement, as if it were obscene that something so dead should bear a name—and especially a name spoken with such obvious fondness.

  The people of Gasoline Lake, Oregon, looked with renewed suspicion at the bulky truck and the man who had driven it into town in the heat of this December afternoon, when ordinary folk were just rising from a daylong sleep in cool bunkers. They had heard of Rehydrators, but never seen one. What he wanted here was anybody’s guess. The tall, gaunt man wore a shiny new Mylar hat out from under which poked wispy strands of thin red hair. His nose was badly burned. He wore a robe of white fabric, blousy enough to hide all the pore-sucking pumps and reprocessing tubes he must be wearing beneath it. Most of the Gas Lake gawkers were hardly so modest, even in late afternoon; they wore their pisspores
proudly, in plain sight, and, where not sucked at by the conservation suits, their skin was painted with sunban oils, or artificially blackened by melanin therapy. Facial features showed a mixed crowd of Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, and Pacific Rim. The Rehydrator scanned them as if they were a book he’d heard curious things about and immensely looked forward to reading.

  “Fritzy was born in Gasoline Lake,” he said. “If you check his tags, you’ll see they were issued right here about twenty years ago. Expired by now, I guess. I’m just bringing him home, folks. Bringing him home.”

  “I’ll give you fifty bucks for it,” said Earl Taws, owner of the Miscellany Market, whose display window was crowded with deflated soccer balls, purses of cracked pink plastic, faded Hello Kitties, unstrung squash rackets, and other dusty, sun-bleached objects. “It’ll go good with my new wooden Indian,” he said, at which there was general laughter.

  “That’s a generous offer, sir,” the Rehydrator said, “but I’m afraid this dog is not for sale. It’s a gift. A gift to your town’s benefactor, Galvin Orlick himself.”

  “Galvin Orlick?” The name went up from every mouth.

  “Fritzy here was Mr. Orlick’s dog. I’m returning him to his rightful owner.”

  “Galvin Orlick’s been deader than that dog of his for twenty years, mister.”

  “Dead, you say?” the Rehydrator asked, with a broad wink at all of them. “What makes you think that Fritzy’s dead?”

  “Well, shit,” said Marlys Runyon, giving the dachshund a sound whack with the back of her hand. “How did I get that idea?”

  Everyone laughed, and Marlys squinted at the Rehydrator with an ironic grin, the end of a long string of baccorish clenched in her brown, steadily chewing teeth.

  The Rehydrator laughed right along with all the rest. “And Galvin Orlick is dead, you say? Now, how did that happen?”

  “Just like his dog here,” Marlys said. “He dried out.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say, and to that, I have this answer: what’s been dehydrated can be rehydrated. I have no doubt that was Mr. Orlick’s original intention—both in his case and in Fritzy’s here.”