Tyrannia (2 page)

After a time, though, the man’s body becomes an ecology of many shadows. The birds use his breakages as terrain. His belly button has widened to a glade, with bamboo shoots along the water’s edge sprouting upward from the intestines. The beetles ferment the organs. The man’s site is full of what he left behind: glades, a ring of boulders on his thigh that used to be kidney stones, hoisted upward by beetles and plucked by the birds. And the jutting rib has petrified into a promontory overlooking the babbling pool.

The birds are somewhat satisfied but they rub their heads together, clean each other’s feathers, and take a few deep breaths before starting on the cottage. With bone, with cartilage, they construct the foundation on, and as part of, the man’s chest. When they are done, a pocket of air, long hidden inside the man’s lungs, is released by the construction, and a draft rises up from the basement to the skeletal roof.

The emperor himself feels a slight tightness in his chest as he reads a novel by the fireplace, bearskin rugs at his feet, ensconced in his cottage as preparations are made for another wave of counter-insurgencies. The preparations are made in the capital, in the seat of government, far from the idylls of his retreat, with its glades, deep and contemplative limestone pools, delightful caves, rings of boulders, and crags arching out of the mildly tilled earth. He doesn’t care much about the twinge’s existence. They always pass like clouds. His novel is an adventure about a group of scientist-conquerors who come across a secret civilization on a remote island, far away from the tradewinds. They are surprised to find that the island denizens, powdered in gold, have been expecting them.

As he reaches that cliffhanger, he feels the tremor again in his body, and it’s then clear that the vibrations are not coming from within his body, but rather from outside of it, outside of the cottage. But instead of beginning an investigation of the noise, he falls asleep there, the novel propped on his chest, hands folded on the novel. He snores as a trace of saliva trails down the corner of his mouth. And the sun sets over him and his dreams of terror-birds lording over the island jungles, and the necessary dreams of war that every emperor must have, which will terrify him—until, upon waking, they are forgotten.

As he sleeps, the sun sets over the thousands of corpses in the valley, of all shapes and sizes, which now surround the cottage. Or rather, the cottage has arrived to be surrounded by the bodies. Bodies that used to be mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters are on every compass point around the cottage, bodies that, when they had working mouths and voices, had given the wrong answers to the wrong questions. The emperor keeps sleeping though, as the wind rustles through their rags. He keeps sleeping through the squawking of birds as they begin their flight from the site that the emperor’s cottage now inhabits—scraping their talons on the slate of the cottage’s roof. He sleeps as the bears amble away, on a journey back to the land where the trees have leaves and needles and smell good. It’s a long journey.

And underneath the cottage, the man is in the soil, no longer having what he used to have. The beetles are carrying his secret breath and dreams throughout the valley. And all the beetles are dreaming the same dream as they burrow. They are dreaming of the emperor, how he will waken right before sunrise—from that smell, what is that smell—and look out the window in the drowsy gray to see what the sun will bring.

A Rendition

Patrick was a key component of their plan. His first order of business was cleaning out his mom’s minivan. His mom was at a business conference somewhere warm. He parked the mini-van in the driveway and opened the liftback. He then removed the boxes of his mom’s sales brochures, his sister’s field hockey equipment, and a wasteland of empty pop cans and potato chip bags. It was clammy and cold outside. After putting all of the junk down in the garage and throwing the trash away, he ran the cord for the vacuum cleaner to the minivan and gave the whole van a good cleaning, and then sprayed the fabric down with Febreze. The plan didn’t need the fresh scent of “Mountain Rain” to work, but he still wanted to make sure the van didn’t smell bad for the rendition.

He was feeling well-rested and ready, in the middle of a week of unpaid leave of absence. He was a custodian for the university where he used to study, where the professor taught. His supervisors were more than glad to give him the leave; he hoped he would have a job when he came back.

After he finished and parked the van in the garage again, Tristana called him. Tristana was his ex-girlfriend, though they were still on good terms. They had to be, in order to fulfill the plan. She was in the paralegal program in the university—where he used to study, before he got kicked out—and worked as an administrative assistant in the law school. More important, she worked two offices down from the professor.

“Yeah, so.” Tristana sighed. “How do you feel?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“Are you feeling angry about the professor? Rageful? I mean, you’re not going to let your emotions get in the way of things?”

“I don’t think so,” Patrick said. For him, executing the plan was never that much about a sense of righteous anger. Sure, there was an abstract belief in a just cause, and in a way he was afraid of the professor, though the professor himself, aside from his ideas, posed little threat. And he wasn’t even really afraid of getting caught. Instead, the plan for him was a form of self-discovery, to throw himself into a project that would define who he was. Doing this, he would see himself in a different light.

“Good,” Tristana said. “I think of emotions as little as possible. They really cloud things.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’ll meet at your place at dawn—uh, that’s 5:57. Got that?”

“Got it—oh shit.”

“What?”

“I forgot to tape up the windows of the minivan.”

“Well you better get on that. I gotta fill out some briefs now. Later.”

“Later.”

When he was in line at Walgreens with the tape, he got a call from Evan, who was the bona fide leader of their group. He was a real anarchist. He went to a lot of protests with bags of blood to throw at police. He had been arrested seven times and Patrick wondered if he was sleeping with Tristana.

“How are you feeling?” Evan said.

“Tristana asked me the same thing.”

“She would. We’re like, one mind,” he said. Then, “We’re all like one mind.”

“Uh-huh. I feel fine by the way.” He fumbled in his pocket for a dime to finish paying for the duct tape. The woman behind him with two kids pulling at her knees rolled her eyes. She would never know about the plan. And the cashier giving him the receipt and the bag with the duct tape would never know about the plan.

“What, you going zen on me?” Evan said. He said zen like it was a curse word. “I don’t want you to feel ‘fine.’ You have to, you know, listen to your heart. And your heart should be fucking pissed.” Evan and the static on his end intertwined, as if the hissing interference was coming from his throat.

“Okay,” Patrick said. “Listen. I’m angry. You can’t hear it on the phone, but I am.”

“Patrick, this is going to be great,” Evan said. “It’s going to be a fun weekend. The farmhouse, it’s nice. It’s really nice. I have a ton of beer too.”

“That’s good,” Patrick said, though he didn’t know if he would be in the mood for getting wasted while executing the plan.

“Okay, look, I have to go,” Evan said in a slightly exasperated tone, as if Patrick was the one who had called him. “I have to print out the manual at the copy shop.”

“Great, see you tomorrow.”

Evan hung up and Patrick laughed as he started up the van.

Back in his driveway, he got to work on the windows. The air was still damp, so he wasn’t sure if he was getting a good seal with the duct tape on the window. And the tape was clinging to the newspaper. After about a half hour, he got all of the back windows taped up with the newspaper. He tossed the duct tape roll onto the front seat. They would need more of that later. He lay in the back for a few minutes, watching the translucent light filter through the news of the world and its ads. Only the ads for flat-screen televisions would not let the light sift through, black rectangles like those monoliths from 2001. At last, he closed his eyes. He was excited. He was starting to feel something.

“Is that Febreze?” Evan said while Patrick was driving the van.

“Yeah,” Patrick said. Evan was wearing his black bandana over his nose and mouth, so Patrick wasn’t sure how he could smell anything.

“It’s nice. Really nice.”

They were on the outskirts of town, past the last outposts of the higher-end outlet malls. Patrick was driving the van well within the legal speed limit. Evan and Tristana were in the back seat, and the professor was lying down in the back-back. The duct tape, the interrogation manual, and their box of clothes and sundries were riding shotgun. Evan’s uncle’s old farmhouse was about fifteen minutes away.

The professor started flailing around and mumbling.

“Hey, hey,” Evan said. “Sit.” He leaned over the seat and beat the professor on the shoulder blade with his billy club a few times. The professor screamed, though the duct tape muffled most of the sound. Tristana laughed, and ran her hand through Evan’s stringy braids. Patrick turned his attention back to the road. He would have thought that the minivan might have attracted more attention on campus, but on Monday morning there were few students and workers around. The execution of the first part of the plan was flawless.

“I have your dossier in the front seat here,” Evan said. “You’re, like, a fucking monster.”

The professor bucked his head around. His glasses flew off his face, underneath the seat.

“Whoa, you’ll break your glasses, professor,” Tristana said. She leaned down and fished under the seat for the glasses. Patrick watched her from his rearview mirror and saw her T-shirt ride up. He saw the tattoo on her lower back—a series of Sumerian cuneiforms that she told him was the ancient word for freedom—for the first time since they broke up. Tristana found the glasses, folded them, and put them in her purse.

There was a long honk outside and the flash of a white roofing van. The van was inches away from the window.

“Jesus, Patrick, you ran that stop sign!” Evan said.

The other van stopped, and then sputtered forward in the intersection again.

Patrick wasn’t sure whether to slow down more or speed up.

“Sorry, sorry,” Patrick said, his face flush. He sped up. “That sign . . . it wasn’t there a couple weeks ago.”

He knew the excuse was itself incompetent.

“What the fuck would have happened . . .” Evan began, but Tristana put a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Evan. No harm, no foul.”

Evan sighed and then leaned over the seat. “What do you think professor? What is your expert opinion? No harm, no foul?”

The professor didn’t say anything, and couldn’t say anything. The one-way banter continued until they reached the farmhouse, but Patrick didn’t pay attention to any of it, focusing on the road with the efficiency of a vice.

The farm was desolate, set in a sloping valley with an abandoned apple orchard. Evan said that there were limestone caves underneath the main house. His great-great uncle had mined a tunnel that connected the storm basement to those caves. “No one knows where they end,” Evan had said in one of their planning sessions in Tristana’s flat. No one had lived at the farm for ten years, and in that time, the house and the other buildings had fallen into severe disrepair. The front porch of the house sagged and bowed. The front door was ripped off and an upside-down lawn tractor blocked the gap. The grain silo, shorn of its shingles, looked like a stone obelisk from an interplanetary civilization. The barn’s paint was fading, and many of the fence posts on the property had been knocked over or driven over.

“We’re home,” Evan said. “Park outside the barn.”

Patrick parked there and the three of them got out. Evan opened the back hatch and yanked at the professor’s collar, pulling him out and to the ground.

“Black site,” Evan said. “Black site. You are now leaving the United States of America. You are in the Kingdom of Tyrannia now.” He pulled down his bandana for a second and scratched his nose. “You are not a citizen here. You don’t have any rights here, on account of the accords that our country has signed with the underworld. Do you understand?”

The professor looked up at him and said nothing.

Evan laughed. “All right, all right. I’m throwing a lot at you. Come on.” He took the professor by the shoulder and helped him up, almost helpfully. The professor complied. Evan had come up with the name of Tyrannia during one of their brainstorming sessions. Patrick felt like he was watching a movie on DVD, with a bored director’s commentary having a distant opinion on whatever they were doing. We chose the farmhouse on account of the caves. It was a great set. A great set. Uh, and we knew the professor would be scared there . . .

“Patrick can you get the stuff in the front seat?” Tristana said. She had put the professor’s glasses on her forehead.

“Sure.” What was Patrick’s motivation? Well, that’s a good question.
He took a class with the professor—a long time ago—and that’s why he was expelled, because he plagiarized his first paper in the class . . . uh, I think it was on the separation of powers . . .

“Thanks.” She gave him a warm smile that he knew was manipulation, but he didn’t care. He took the box and shut the door with the back of his heel. As he went up the stairs, Tristana called out from inside the house, “Watch out for that last step. You’ll fall through.” Patrick edged around the step and then the upside-down tractor. He could hear the other three in the basement. The living room had been a hideout for local kids with BB guns, beer, and huffing addictions—targets taped up on the walls with bull’s-eyes blasted through on the outlined heads, breasts, and groins; shattered bottles of MGD littering the floor; glue canisters. In the kitchen there was a twenty-year-old snowmobile and the oven was ripped out. He went down the stone stairs, and the air changed from being rancid to something colder and cleaner.