My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give me back the soul I had
when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
—Frederico Garcia Lorca, from “Ballad of the Little Square.” Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili
The ranting of the old crone had been assaulting the King’s ears for weeks. By now, he figured, the madwoman’s words were drilling in his brain like an army of moist and destructive organisms, the kind of things he’d seen writhing under a microscope on the Discovery channel.
A sneeze carried to him from a distant chamber; the Queen had a cold. A moment later he heard clapping, and then a snippet of a cheerful tune from some insipid third-rate musical. The odd bird he had married would dance and shake her pom-poms (improvised from shredded newspapers) and sing alone to her heart’s content. Bodies stacked like cordwood outside the walls, and his daft Queen remained the picture of happy oblivion.
The woman never seemed to sleep. The King heard her solitary revels long into the night. She was getting wine from somewhere, he was sure of that.
He had a headache. The smoke from the pyres had fouled his lungs. There was nothing to do around the damned place but walk the dark, endless, piss-reeking halls. He’d had it with horses. All of his old chess partners were either dead or in exile. What a dreadful life, he thought. So boring, even with all the commotion and the dying. His lunatic son served no one but God, and had burned every book in the castle. Not that any of them had been worth a damn.
God Almighty, how the King hated writers.
If he could keep any of his enemies straight, if he could just pinpoint which of the scoundrels had planted so many crazy ideas in his wife’s head, he’d have the guilty party flayed and strung up from a dying tree. At the risk of offending God he had already banished his lunatic son. He’d been hearing stories for weeks that the wrong-headed fool was wandering in a sackcloth and living in the surrounding woods.
By God, the King felt pinched and set upon from all sides. He was thirsty as the devil himself for a can of Coca-Cola, and there wasn’t a damn thing left to eat in the place but rancid roast meat, stale bread, and Frito chips.
His only daughter had run off to Brussels with a rock and roll musician who favored impossibly snug trousers.
The King didn’t have a single hobby that could sustain him. He’d been an obsessive counter for years, but he was even tired of counting. He’d saddle a horse and ride right out from under his miserable life if he wasn’t such a poor horseman and so damnably overweight; what a mess he was. He wouldn’t doubt he was carrying 20 stone on his tortured frame.
Listen to that: now the foolish woman was laughing herself sick. He went to the door of his chamber and listened. Oh, something was entertaining enough, by God, in this baleful world. Not another sound beyond the lunatic raving of his wife, her ruckus cruelly amplified by all that emptiness and stone. If he could find anyone left to do the job he intended to have the Queen’s head cut off first thing in the morning and her body dragged deep into the dark woods by oxen. He would have her buried; it was the one concession he would make: he would not have her body flung upon the reeking piles of the common dead.
The King made his way to the North tower and gazed out at the wreckage time had made of his kingdom. He could see the bobbing torches borne by the roving bands of marauders, the lot of them tearing around on those destructive motor buggies he’d seen all over the television. A stinking, sickening cloud hung low over the wretched scene. The loud guitars and absurdly booming bass of loosed anarchy blasted from the portable stereos in the impromptu trailer encampments that were now scattered throughout the dark woods, each of them, it seemed, more squalid and libertine than the next.
The King was weary beyond words. There was no end to his misery. His campaigns of freedom and righteous vengeance had bequeathed him a kingdom of resentful refugees and imbeciles. He needed a new line of work.
There was no one left to talk to, no one he could trust. Even the ghosts had stopped talking to him; they now avoided the area around his chambers altogether, having apparently grown tired of his labored breathing, his ceaseless monologues, and the sorry spectacle of his naked rambles in the wee hours.
He wished like hell he had joined his old friend Ruckert, who had bought himself a Winnebago and was now armed to the teeth and living in the high desert somewhere. While the King sat there in his dark and drafty castle, surrounded by death and lawless disorder on all sides, Ruckert was probably drinking a cold Budweiser and watching his beloved Wolfhounds gambol in the sand. Oh, you could always be certain of that: Ruckert was indisputably the brainy one of the bunch. The rest of the old gang had either hung or gone to the chopping block.
The King lit a candle and took a piss from the small window next to his bed. He could hear his feeble offering rattling in the leaves far below. The fires were still blazing in the woods, and the music was raging louder than ever. The fleeing servants, he imagined, had already stripped the place of everything of value, and he imagined that the marauders would come for him soon enough, their murderous rage now driven by little but habitual stupor, inebriation, and boredom.
They were welcome to what was left of him. He would content himself with the knowledge that he had been King, and that for damn sure still counted for something in this world.
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