In the Court of the Yellow King (33 page)

We kept a suitcase full of Iranian currency—fifteen hundred dollars after exchange—and two pounds of hash. We pursued the experiments elsewhere—shoplifting, dining and dashing, pharmaceutical burglary, etc. Much was learned.

But this last one... it was everything we hoped for and deserved.

I saw this really long, odd-shaped, expensive-looking case on a played-out Cathay Pacific from Bangkok and figured it for something fun. Maybe a musical instrument. I wasn’t looking for money, though I was broke and hungry. I wanted secrets.

I was dressed in a distressed linen suit, perfect for humid tropical climes, and a Panama hat with a snakeskin band. The dissolute young sex tourist, bringing back only viral contraband incubating where no customs agent dare search, or the callow expatriate, returning to liquidate a deceased parent’s estate before returning to kick the gong around with the ladyboys of Patpong.

Already a scrum of vultures from the next flight were converging on the belt in anticipation of a fresh bag dump, providing plenty of cover from airport security, who had not once asked to see a claim check.

I was on the far side of the belt with a clear shot for the doors. Naomi waited at the curb in her ketchup-red Sentra with a bungee-cord holding the trunk shut. I passed “security” when I noticed I’d grabbed the wrong bag. This one was beat up, dull matte-black brushed steel with three key locks on it. It was too late to turn back, so I ran with it.

Three guesses what was inside.

Naomi and I went to a Shakey’s Pizza in Culver City. Her dad was a retired cop upstate, but she learned how to pick locks to steal her classmate’s Ritalin and weed in middle school. She got it open before our pie arrived and I lost my last ball on the ancient Zardoz pinball machine.

Neither of us knew French, so we couldn’t read the greasy, piss-stinking diary. We got disgusted by the pictures of naked or near-naked Thai boys posed in rice paddies, in muddy alleys, in brothels, coatrooms, and riverbanks. Everywhere this guy went, he must have paid boys to drop trou for a photograph, prologue to fuck knows what. Maybe he paid them in something other than money, for all of them had the same dreamy, vacant expression, eyes drooping shut or fixedly staring up at the contents of their own skulls. I was never so fucking glad I couldn’t read French.

I wanted to go back to LAX and play our favorite game, Spot the Pervert, but he wouldn’t make it easy by going to security. He’d run straightaway he suspected they were onto him, I reasoned, and anyway, I got to the bottom of the suitcase and found the big bottles of weird yellow-gray powder.

Naomi wanted to snort it. I wanted to consult the diary first. Only the thought that it could be cremains, deadly insecticide or uranium, dissuaded us from a trial bump.

And the rest, as they say, is history.... When they don’t want to talk anymore about how the chance discovery became destiny, or whom you ran over on the way.

In less than six weeks, I had learned enough French to know what I had, and what kind of monster I took it from. Don’t believe that I tried to turn evil to good, to redeem it or myself, by going underground and turning the Elixir to a cult deprogramming tool. I could’ve become the greatest pornographer in history or a revolutionary therapist, a salesman, anything.... But I only wanted to learn what people were made of.

Another experiment.

In the interest of science, Naomi and I tried an intramuscular injection of fifty micrograms in solution of the Elixir. That was his name for it.

I don’t remember anything after that. Naomi was gone when I came down. I never saw her again. I freaked out and took off and I hid out here and there and everywhere, shedding myself on the road until I was only the Deprogrammer. I believed that the euphoric migraines that overtook me almost like menstrual clockwork every few months were flashbacks, withdrawal symptoms, but I never tried it again.

Using the powdered Elixir, I delivered fifty-two prisoners of cults and successfully converted all but two of them into reasonable facsimiles of their old selves, minus a traumatic scar or an empty hole that made a cult seem like a good idea. I fixed them.

After four years, my supply of the Elixir was nearly used up. I had a sample tested once and learned it was a fungal derivative, but I’d never successfully cultivated the spores. Nowhere near close to having learned anything real, I was looking at retirement.

Carl came within seconds of my recovering enough to page him. This was because he and his family lived in the motel... and also because his “family” didn’t really exist, except as an elaborate skein of posthypnotic suggestions. (Carl was my first patient. Mistakes were made.)

Nothing like this, though.

Carl let me get it out of my system. Just apologized and said he didn’t see her leave.

Nobody ever escaped from the motel before. An unrehabilitated product would go running back to the cult, which might choose to go to the police. I would have to call the client to let him know his wife was missing with a head full of nameless psychogenic drugs.

Richard Resley, PhD, was a professor of nothing so mundane as one discipline, a postmodern
en
fant terrible
who could never be contained by one campus, let alone one bed. The first article pulled up by a Google search called him the Deacon of Deconstruction. I had to get into the double digits to find things I wished I’d known before I agreed to abduct his wife.

I deployed Carl to look for the product and drove into the city to meet with Resley.

He was being interviewed at the local public radio affiliate, but agreed to give me a few minutes between demolishing colonialist patriarchal dialectics and delineating new paradigms for a chubby ash-blond postgrad who looked ready to jump his boring bones.

He took it well.

“So, she is no longer your responsibility then.” He nodded to me, turned to go. “She is very headstrong. I trust you did your best.”

I took his arm, sure he wouldn’t want his pet coed to hear what I had to say. “I won’t try to complicate the situation any more than it is, if you’ll just tell me why you’d pay good money to have your wife deprogrammed from a cult that
you
still belong to.”

His face tightened. “I suppose there’s no point equivocating. My interests and Preston’s are still deeply entangled, though I was never as devoted to his philosophy as my wife.” Air-quoted
ph
ilosophy
, the prick.

Resley coauthored three major studies of “psychocultural engineering” with Marble two decades ago, just before he left UCSD and started his sewing circle. Never publicly connected to the cult, but the pattern was there, if you were paranoid enough to see it. “So, you get all the benefits and none of the starvation....”

“My antibiography wasn’t all that long. Preston is doing some extraordinary things with expanding human potential, and I’ve been privileged to witness some of it. Listen, this is beginning to sound an awful lot like some sort of blackmail attempt....”

“It’s not. Your wife disappeared in the middle of a session. She’s extremely suggestible....”

“I could’ve told you that,” he said. “Listen, if you’re so concerned, why not go to the police? I’m sure they’d be very thorough in locating her, once they sorted
you
out.” Impatiently, he sped up and crossed the street just ahead of a truck loaded with liquid CO2.

I gave up chasing after him. Just stopped and shouted in the street, “Was it you or Marble who turned her onto the French Play?”

“Jesus fucking
Christ
!” Resley whirled and came back up to me where I waited on the curb.

I couldn’t resist. “She dreams she’s acting in it. Says she was in another play, too, where somebody tried to get her to kill somebody—”

He hit pretty hard for a middle-aged college professor. The punch folded me into his shoulder, which shoved me back onto the curb.

His face was frozen milk. I smelled urine, and it wasn’t mine. “Stay the hell away from me or I’ll call
my
police. Would you like that?”

I watched him walk away. The postgrad skipped after him, looking sideways at me as she followed him to his office.

I could’ve left it alone. Nobody was paying me to press further. I didn’t like being used, but if Ex Libris wanted to play games, they would have been subtler about it. The easiest explanation, that Mrs. Resley had been a plant to spy on my methods, would explain it all if anyone had ever gotten up and walked away in the middle of an Elixir session.

One person had, and I never saw her again. And no one under the Elixir had ever successfully dragged me into their head. And I had heard only once before of the French Play, in the journal I found with the Elixir.

“And the games! Such delightful e
ntertainments our pr
etty toys gave us
...
Ne
ver has the French P
lay been performed w
ith such abandon, as
my little troupe put
on for the Khmer Ja
une Festival. Every p
erformance consumed
a raft of Cassildas,
a platoon of Thales,
and taxed my art to
its core. Such ecstas
ies, such wondrous pi
tiful pain! My dolls
laid so bare the vei
led face of power an
d desire that the Pa
llid Mask wept tears
of priceless ichor
and the Hidden City
beckoned beyond the
rotten red moons
...
We
all saw it, and behel
d the colorless, cold
corona of the Crown
of No Nation....”

The K
ing In Yellow
was only one more bullet point in an inventory of depravity that yawned at pedophilia and cannibalism. I tracked down and attempted to read it back when I was still trying to find out what I had, but I couldn’t tell you what the big deal was. My memory of it was like a hole in a pocket. I ran down a copy at a Xian Science Reading Room where the curator owed me a big favor.

I put out an underground APB on my car with some contacts in the repo and private security industries. I prowled the Ex Libris chapterhouses in Ocean Beach and Encinitas. I got nothing and nowhere, and hoped for better news from Carl when we met at a taco shop on PCH. He had ignored my calls all day, so I assumed he was either busy or had lost it. He was always losing things when I forgot to remind him.

He looked like he’d lost a lot more than his phone. He sat down next to me on a picnic bench out front. The surfers and landscaping grunts had all gone and the shop was deserted. On the wall, they had that mural in every taco shop, of the dead Indian prince on the woman’s lap, an Aztec Pieta....

“I found her,” he said.

I lit up. I asked her where, how, why didn’t he tell me on the phone?...

He rubbed his eye, looked absently at the smear of blood on his fingertip. He took out a picture. It was creased and faded. He stared at it, cupped in his big, shaky hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?...”

Where
was she?
I asked him.

“She’s everywhere,” he said, and dropped the picture on the scarred wood table. It wasn’t Regina Resley. It was a picture of an emaciated, bald effigy that it took me several seconds to recognize.

It was hard to make out just what he was saying. Words didn’t come easy, but he wanted to know what I did to him, to his daughter. Why did he have false memories of another family in the desert, and what was his real fucking name, please?

Before I could think of an answer, he let out a desolate sob and lunged at me, hands around my throat.