In the Court of the Yellow King (34 page)

Did I leave that part out?

Carl. I didn’t let myself think too much about who he was or where he came from. It was so upsetting, I resented him if I even thought about it, because it never bothered him, and if anyone could fix me so I didn’t remember about Naomi either, than I would have. I was jealous of Carl, because he had someone to fix him.

Carl came looking for his daughter about a month after the Incident. I had split town and was hiding, but he was a retired cop and a widower with nothing else to do. He wanted to know where his daughter was, and since nobody else knew and I was her good friend and had fled right when she went missing, I had a lot of explaining to do.

Instead, I stabbed him in the neck with a syringe of Elixir. I was still haphazardly translating the journal with a big Larousse French dictionary, and I was seriously considering throwing all of it in the ocean and starting over.

But then I had an ideal subject. It was easy to erase memories, but putting something in its place... that took nuance. Starting with Carl, I had gone from something resembling a sleepwalker to someone who believed quite firmly in the fantasy of a normal daily life I had given him, who enjoyed the love of a family in his head every night while he lay alone in a motel room. He was probably happier with my lies than when his wife and daughter were alive.

But try to tell a man that when he’s strangling you.

None of my safewords worked. Not even the nuclear one, the name of his daughter. Breathless, I gasped them in his ear, but he was a me-killing machine. More in sorrow than in panic, I took out the injector pen I’d mixed for Mrs. Resley and stuck it in his left armpit.

He went limp, crushing me on the table. I rolled out from under him and sat down, composing my thoughts. The taco shop workers watched me through the window. Cars passed on the street.

All my work ruined. Her name should have shut him down, but he had found it, and come back for me. I couldn’t accept that my programming had simply come undone.

To rebuild what he was would be impossible... his identity was a patchwork stitched together ad hoc over the last four years. I could leave him blank, but someone would come looking. A man with no memory is interesting, while a man with sad memories can’t be buried fast enough. Far easier to restore him to where he was when I found him, with a few hasty updates to account for the missing time.

You’ve been
drinking and drifti
ng ever since you fo
und out your daughte
r Naomi had died of
a drug overdose. But
now, it’s time to go
home, to pick up the
pieces and live your
life.

I gave him a little more off the top of my head, then put some cash in his wallet. I asked him who did this to him. Who gave him this picture of Naomi, digitally dated four years ago.

Even under the Elixir, he could not, or would not say. The words he seemed to mouth but could not speak aloud, I could only guess that they were,
Your Master.

I spent the next several hours hiding out from the Plot, trying to figure out what to do next. Waiting to see who tried to fuck me up next.

Reading the French Play.

Like naked celebrity photos or instructions for making a nuclear weapon, you can find no end of fakes and fragments of the French Play on the Internet. But all the versions out there are counterfeits, malware or worse. All the printed English translations, burned and scandalized, omitted much, and if an editor only suffered a stroke or a nervous breakdown in the process, he was lucky.

I felt something for Regina Resley that I had not for any of my other products. She was beautiful and smarter than me and she stood at the heart of everything I had thrown away my life to discover. How could I not fall for her?

That’s what I told myself, but I loved her as I loved mystery, and because chasing after her lost me in a story less pathetic than my own.

There’s just the stories, and people weave them to trap a bit of reality and tame it, and people get trapped in the stories and think they’re taming the world and playing it like a game to get what they want, like shaking a gourd and doing a dance to make it rain. Sympathetic magic. Spill blood to make it rain, so it’ll rain blood.

Stories do all that for us, and what do they ask in return?

I didn’t own a copy. But I figured I for sure knew who did. The condo in Hillcrest had three pet grad students in it. None of them were wired Ex Libris drones, just the new crop of coeds from which Resley had once picked Regina. No wonder he didn’t miss her.

I didn’t have to search Resley’s office. It was on the desk in plain sight, nicely annotated with Post-it tongues sticking out of the crumbling, acid-etched pages. He was nowhere to be found, so I sat behind his desk, donned a pair of rubber gloves and started to read. I don’t think I got through the dramatis personae before I blacked out again.

I sat upon a threadbare throne hidden behind a moth-eaten screen as the curtain fell. A river of parchment skin and brittle bones rattled applause out of the void beyond the footlights.

“You were marvelous,” she said. She took the gold-trimmed tails of my cloak and slit them with a straight razor.

My hands went to my face and touched the mask. It wouldn’t come off. Her hand on mine was colder than the razor. “It’s a short intermission. Do you want them to see your naked face?”

I had to search for my own voice. The Lines hung in the air like the promise of plague. “In the... in the last play... your husband hired me to turn you against your master....”

Her hands went to her face. The razor sheared away a wing of her bangs. “Oh, look what you’ve made me do... You’re gnawing at my motivation again.”

“I’m sorry, Regina. I only wanted to know....”

Her eyes went blank and blind. “We’re here now, and that’s all that matters. We don’t ever have to leave...
so long as we play
.”

She returned to tattering my wardrobe, hysteria whickering in her throat so I didn’t dare press. “All of this to be gotten through... all these scenes... As if any of it matters... But our reward...”

“What do we get? What comes at the end?”

She looked up from her work and kissed my frigid mask. “Why... you do!”

“In the next act... I can’t recall the lines... but you... you’re going to murder someone?...”

“Imagine that! I couldn’t murder my own shadow.... Even when She almost... No, you won’t...”

Agitated, she cast about with the razor. “He’s not going to find me here. You won’t tell, will you? If he doesn’t, if we get to the end, then we can go and live where everything has already happened, but we’ll remember, won’t we? The black starshine won’t... The sun beneath the sea... It won’t forget us, because we’ll stop it, we’ll never have to be born again and we’ll stop them, the stopping stoppers... stop...” The words seemed to come apart in her mind. She looked at me in alarm, the razor clenched in a white, birdlike fist, her soft white wrists cobwebbed with hesitation scars. “Oh my Lord, I’m undone.... I have forgotten my lines! He’s coming to correct us....”

The screen around us was hoisted into the gallery. The throne withdrew on whimpering casters with me on it, leaving her trembling alone on the boards when the curtain lifted. She threw up her hands and told me to run just before she dissolved in the pale yellow light.

I looked up from the book, my thumb jammed into the last act. He must’ve come while I was... reading? Sleeping? He sat on the leather couch under the picture window overlooking the park. He was wearing the same plum worsted wool suit he had on at school, which was fortunate. It hid the stains.

Resley had no face. Everything from ear to ear, from hairline to chin, was stripped away in a frenzy of slashing, flaying strokes that left only ribbons of gristle dangling from his naked skull. The worst of the mess lay strewn across transcripts of phone conversations with me that lay in his lap.

Two grad students were waiting in the hall. “We’ve called the police. You really should wait here.” They didn’t stop me leaving. They shot me with their phones as I fled the scene covering my face with the French Play.

Marble was slated to speak to a few thousand at the Extensions Festival, a massive New Age, human potential snake oil block party on the Prado, by the zoo. I left my car in the zoo lot and cut through eucalyptus groves and twisting canyons to the backside of Balboa Park.

Yellow-gray clouds draped over the park, clammy fever sheets gravid with rain that couldn’t fall. Shadows seeped up out of the decaying Spanish colonnades, alcoves choked with morbid satyrs and defaced saints, faces gouged off and bearded in graffiti and guano. Hotter in the shady arcades than under the stricken sun.

I heard the watery echo of amplified voices lapping at the walls everywhere in the park, but it took me a long time to locate it. A cohort of grad students surrounded the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. A screenwriting seminar had bussed their dupes in, so the crowd overflowed the pavilion and swamped the Prado and forked around the goldfish pond to back up against the botanical gardens. And everywhere among them, you could see the earbuds of the ones already listening to his voice, his brainwaves, telling them how to be not just the heroes, but the authors of the story of their lives.

They followed me right into the Model Railroad Museum. One of them shot me in the hand. The projectile was the size of a pub dart. My hand went rubbery and spasmed out from under me as I climbed up onto the tabletop model. I tripped over Cajon Pass, kicked a hole in Mt. Palomar and wrecked the Santa Fe Super Chief. Ancient volunteer engineers in blue caps tried to pull me down, but I staggered towards the HO-scale downtown, intent on stomping Balboa Park, crushing the shoebox-sized replica of the Organ Pavilion and its tiny plastic Preston Marble before Regina could find him. I only made it as far as Fashion Valley. I collapsed on my face and had to be dragged out, numbly clutching two fistfuls of broken boxcars.

Tranquilizer darts. Seriously. It’s heartbreaking to devote your life to abducting people efficiently and safely, and then to be taken by sadistic amateurs.