King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  He stared at her. “You could say that about digestion. It stops when you have stomach cancer.”

  “But digestion does something.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “How about the appendix? I mean, sometimes nature can goof.”

  This was the time of evening at which every moment was discernibly darker than the last. You could watch sky and woods and water merging into a single night before your eyes.

  “Do you know that in all of nature only female human beings, apes, and a few monkeys menstruate?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Cornell. “I have never done research into the matter.” He hoped he didn’t sound bitchy. But it seemed to him a waste of time to worry about what couldn’t be changed.

  Now he could see her mainly by the glow of the fire behind them, which, though it had gone mostly to embers, was brought to flame by random gusts of wind, a wind which had also begun to chill him. He buttoned the collar of the chambray shirt. On the storekeeper’s advice they had also bought woolen shirts, thick and loose as jackets. In a moment he would fetch them from the car, as well as the lantern and the sleeping bags.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  She extended her legs from the mattress and shook her body from the waist. “No.”

  He rose. “I better get the rest of our stuff before it’s too dark to see.” He went down to the car, stumbling sometimes en route. The trunk had an automatic light in it, and he soon found what was needed.

  But though they had bought the lantern and a gallon can of kerosene, and filling the former from the latter was simple enough, he did not understand how to light the wick. He kept striking kitchen matches against the box and dropping them down the glass chimney, but they invariably went out.

  He would not call her to help with that. He had botched the woodcutting and since been useless. He knew usefulness mattered to her above all things because of the complaint about menstruation: there was no utility in it.

  He lifted the can and poured kerosene down the chimney. Next time the match took hold—so violently he dropped the lantern into the trunk. It broke and the fire spilled from it and ran across the piled sleeping bags, and somehow the kerosene can had gone over on its side as well and the entire trunk was immediately ablaze with a yellow, smoking fire, driving him away with its heat.

  From the knoll he heard the girl shout: “The lake!”

  Yes, water was the answer. “Bring a pot,” he yelled, dashing to the shore. She came down her path and met him there. She carried nothing. There was lots of light now.

  He was incredulous. “How will we carry the water?”

  She screamed into his face: “Get in the lake! The gas tank will go up.”

  They ran through the shallows. Within thirty feet the stony bottom dropped off abruptly, and they both went under for a moment. During this second the car exploded. As Cornell came up, the fiery fragments were moving through the air, some in his direction. He reached over and pushed the girl’s head under and followed her.

  On his reappearance, he felt the heat on his face. There was fire in the tops of trees as well as in the underbrush, and up on the knoll the tent was ablaze.

  For an instant he could not find the girl, then discovered he was still holding her under. He let her rise. She spluttered and gasped and clutched him around the neck. It took him a while to understand she was choking him. He broke her hold and pushed her to where the shelf began, forced her to lie supine in the shallow water, with just her nose out. Meanwhile, kneeling there himself, half exposed, he felt as though he were being sunburned. The whole world seemed to be on fire just beyond the rocky beach, and the heat was intense off shore.

  He ducked his face occasionally, but whenever he did so, loosing the pressure on the girl’s trunk, she tried to struggle up. At last he had no choice but to punch her in the jaw. She fell back into his left hand.

  She came to later, but finding herself securely held in shallow water, she did not return to panic. He rolled her over then, and with their elbows on the bottom and their legs floating, with frequent duckings to keep their faces and shoulders wet against the heat, they watched the total consumption of their worldly goods.

  At last the conflagration settled down, what was left of the car burning less ardently. The remains of the tent, which had been quickly consumed, smoked in growing obscurity. The treetop blazes had mostly gone out, and the brush fire had retreated into the woods, where it seemed to be guttering. Cornell remembered with gratitude the morning rain that had soaked them and left the forest damp.

  Neither had spoken since her accurate prediction that the gas tank would explode. He had no gauge to measure how long ago that had been.

  Finally he said: “I really did it that time.”

  She splashed her legs. “You saved my life. I never learned to swim.”

  With the dwindling of the fire, it was getting dark again. The crescent moon had come out when it wasn’t needed, and now was gone.

  He said: “I would have been blown up without your warning.” He got his feet under him and rose from the water. “I think it’s O.K. to go in now.” He put his hands out for her.

  He stayed where he was for a moment, surveying the shore and saying: “Wow.” They started to wade in. He said: “We’ve got nothing left.”

  “We’re not dead.”

  “No thanks to me.”

  She stopped two paces from land, the water not quite covering their toes, and told him firmly: “All right, it was your fault. Because of you we are up shit creek without a paddle. So you owe me something, and here’s what I want: your promise you will never mention it again. You did it, and it was outrageous and inexcusable. And I will only forgive you if you forget it.”

  She marched onto shore, a stanch little dripping figure in what was left of the several firelights. He ran to catch up, his sneakers squishing. She stopped some distance from the blackened and torn car, which still emitted quite a bit of heat and also an odd stench.

  “What I regret most is that all the liquor’s gone.” She turned on her bare heel and climbed to the knoll, Cornell following. A gust of wind caused the ashes of the tent to glow.

  “Hey!” She crouched and looked alongside the campfire which had been so hard to light. It seemed to be out now. “The skillet’s all right and the pans.” They had stacked them with the cutlery and metal plates and cups, to be washed next morning.

  She stood up exultantly. “We’re still in business.” She strode further and yelled again. “One mattress is still O.K.”

  Cornell squished there. The other mattress had sustained a great burn in the middle, probably from one of the flying fragments of car, and was largely blackened and totally shriveled. But the one from which she was now brushing dead ashes seemed sound.

  She sat down on it. He joined her, beginning definitely to feel chilly now.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s see where we are. Tomorrow we’ll search the ashes for the axehead. If the fire hasn’t destroyed its temper, we can make a new handle from a branch.” She patted her pocket. “I still have the jackknife.” She socked her hands together. “I left the saw over there after cutting those logs. It will be O.K.”

  Cornell shivered and crossed his arms. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

  “We’ll look in the wreckage of the Rolls for fragments of metal that can be used as arrowheads to kill animals. We can make a bow from an elastic branch and your shoelaces.” She had never worn her own sneakers; they had been in the car, along with the senator’s jacket containing the senator’s wallet.

  As if he weren’t sufficiently wet, he was struck by a drop of water. “Oh, no!” he wailed. “It’s starting to rain.”

  “That can’t hurt us.”

  With the water falling on him, it occurred to Cornell that there was something awful about how she coped so lustily whenever he was at a loss, whereas he could perform effectively only when she was in trouble, as during the near-drowning. It seemed on the one hand to
be a kind of competition, and on the other, a reciprocal arrangement, an alternation of assertions and recessions.

  Despite the rain, she was still thinking positively. “With axe and saw, we can build a shelter, even a real cabin in time. We don’t need nails. We can notch the logs together.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I just hiked back to that store? That woman seemed a pretty good sort. Maybe she’d give us credit.”

  “I wouldn’t ask that cunt for anything,” the girl said emphatically. “I know women. I’ve been one all my life. She wouldn’t give you the sweat from her crotch. Besides, how would it look if after arriving in a Rolls Royce, you had to come back on your knees asking for charity?”

  “Is this the time to be proud?” Cornell asked.

  She was glaring at him, insofar as he could tell in the dark. “We’ve got our chance now to prove what we can do on our own. We don’t need any of them.”

  Cornell was strangely stung by this remark, although it was general and not personal. “Why are you so bitter?” he asked jealously, bitterly. “You’ve always been a woman. You’ve had all the privileges, all the power. You’re one of them.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then: “I asked you to forget about your mistake.”

  “How can I?” he shouted. “The reason I dropped that lantern was because all my life I’ve been told I couldn’t understand hardware. I couldn’t figure out how to light that rotten thing!”

  “You drove beautifully.”

  “You said that car could drive itself. After a whole day behind the wheel, you had to tell me how to back it up. You sawed the wood and made the meal and told me to get in the lake when the fire started.”

  He paused. The rain was pouring down his body and he was going mad with shame. He came out with it in a rush: “I need you, and I hate you because I need you.”

  She said, in a taunting, infuriating tone in view of his desperate confession—for she was not generous at all, she was the same old oppressor: “And what are you going to do about it?”

  He reached blindly through the falling water, twisted her around, got two hands on her blouse and tore it apart. He expected resistance then, and raised a fist to knock her teeth out, but she was instead doing something with her shoulders, perhaps readying a dirty judo trick to catch his hand and break the wrist—he would not wait for it, but sank his hands into the waistband of the skirt and ripped it away, and then tore at those schoolboy panties.

  Meanwhile she had encircled his neck, trying to strangle him again as when drowning, but he had no urge to preserve himself now; let her choke away, he would kill her first, and his hands went to find that vital place wherein he would do murder.

  It was soft and moist and quick, yet did not retreat but rather came to him like an urgent mouth. He reclaimed his fingers before they were ingested, went to his own core, and found it already denuded and occupied by both hands. If she could not strangle him she would emasculate him, excise him at the root: the realization of the old nightmare, perhaps even a relief.

  He did not fight, for there was no pain but rather the burgeoning of force, status, ambition, the perverse values which he honored in his delirium. He was drawn forward and he was met, and briefly obstructed, then something parted like a veil; she cried out, and he was swallowed alive by that which he would kill.

  He worked with his whole person to resolve that paradox. She was in combat now, at the eleventh hour, writhing, battering against him, as if she, with that small body, could dislodge his mass. Her fingernails were incising his back, her heels hammering his legs. He was immune to, amused by, these pathetic gestures. His power was ever rising, he was adamant, invulnerable, brutal, and masterful beyond any dream. The moment arrived at which, with one supreme thrust, he demolished her and reigned as absolute tyrant of the world.

  And then, all at once, he lost it all. In killing her he had destroyed himself as well. He fell back onto the stony ground and sobbed into the water falling from the sky.

  “Our other crimes were nothing compared to this,” she said, just below his chin. He realized that she had crawled on top of him, her head on his chest.

  “You’re not dead?” He stroked her narrow back, which was slick with water. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Of course!” She nodded vigorously, even with enthusiasm, banging her chin on his breastbone: that hurt.

  “Wasn’t that it?”

  She hugged him and wriggled. “That was it.” She squeezed him and added: “So far as I know.”

  “I guess it doesn’t kill a woman, then.”

  “I guess not.”

  “At least not right away,” said Cornell. Her body was deflecting most of the rain from his. He ran his fingers along the wet trough of her spine. “But what about if you contract pregnancy?”

  “Do what the rabbits do, I guess.”

  She wasn’t disturbed in the slightest. He remembered now how nothing worried her: she was ready to build a cabin with a broken axe and kill animals with a homemade bow.

  She said: “That’s a lie that childbearing will kill you. It doesn’t kill a rabbit. And there’s a tribe of Indians in South America who do it all the time.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I read about them in National Geographic.”

  “That’s fantastic,” said Cornell. He thought it was unfair of him to get all the advantage and wanted to roll over to protect her from the rain, except he would be too heavy.

  “Anyway, I don’t think it happens every time you do it.”

  “What?”

  “That you get pregnant. I mean, at least they tell you that when you’re a woman, so you won’t get too scared if you’re raped.”

  Cornell’s hands had slid onto the halves of her wonderful behind. “I guess that’s what I did,” he said. “Raped you.”

  She put her hands on his chest and pushed up. “Like hell you did.”

  He was relieved. “That takes a load off my conscience.”

  She lowered herself and snuggled in. “You have a tendency both to blame yourself for disasters and boast about accomplishments that you are not wholly responsible for.”

  He shrugged with her on him. His chest was strong enough for that. He decided not to argue. She really had a more attractive image of him than he had ever been able to conjure up.

  As if to prove this theory, she said: “But there’s nothing that you can’t do. Once you were shown how to light a lantern, you could do it every time. And you can build a cabin too, and kill animals.”

  “Me?”

  She said irritably: “How in hell am I going to do it if I give birth?”

  “Maybe that won’t happen from doing it once. You said that yourself.”

  “Then we’ll keep doing it.”

  “You’re nuts.” But he had another response between his legs. She tried to stay on top. “You’re too damned heavy!” But he easily rolled her over.

  “It’s time I caught the rain,” he said. And he inserted himself this time. If he was going to be builder and killer, he could be boss once in a while.

  Also, he was the one with the protuberant organ.

  Woman was God’s second mistake.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1895

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  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resembla
nce to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1973 by Thomas Berger

  Cover Photo by Awarding Book Covers

  978-1-4804-6851-1

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