Vacation

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “Let me explain. One of our operatives—”

  “If this is another one of your tests or your tricks, tell me right now.”

  “I could promise you, but I find it unlikely that an assurance from me would convince you of anything.”

  “You’ve only lied to me in my dreams. Promise me.”

  “Very well. I promise this is neither a test nor a trick.”

  “Thank you.”

  She winces. “As I was saying, one of our operatives is a citizen in one of the more affluent Tic countries. This operative is the boyfriend of President Dominik. Due to these circumstances, President Dominik has had a change of heart, and now wishes to aid the Garden in any way he can. The President isn’t a powerful man by any means, but as a figurehead, he does have certain opportunities to influence society. He’s agreed to stray from his prescribed script when addressing his country, and announce that the leader of a terrorist organization known the Garden has been captured, and will be executed.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “All the good we’ve ever hoped to do. Through execution, I’ll be given the chance to become a martyr.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “After my death, all of our whistleblowers will speak out in every Tic country. They’ll inform the public of the truth about the Garden and the Vacation and the Meek. The public eye produced by my execution will keep the whistleblowers safe. If our operatives start dying, the citizenry will become that much more curious and suspicious. In the end, the Garden will be viewed, not as a terrorist group, but as a champion of truth in a world of lies. My death will stand for the atrocities committed by the Tic world. And when someone dies for you, you’re more likely to fight for the lives of others.”

  Now I do understand, and I wish that I didn’t.

  Marionettes dangle from strings strung across the room. With the air blowing inside, they rock back and forth together. I spot one that looks like Odin. Then I see Noh. Pari. There’re other faces I recognize. And most, I don’t.

  “They’re the characters of my life,” Laetitia says, on her coffin. She’s sanding away at a marionette in her lap. “I’m guessing you’re not here for another joke.”

  “No,” I say. All the way to the coffin, I’m bumping against body after body. They’re so close together. Finally, I sit beside her, and the tiny people settle down in my wake. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “There may not be anything you can do.”

  “I can’t give up on her.”

  “Of course not. I just don’t want you to blame yourself if she ends up accomplishing her mission. And I’m afraid she will. The way I see it, she’s too stubborn to change her mind. The story she’s written for her life, it’s set in stone.”

  A tomb stone, I think. And that’s sort of a joke, but I don’t laugh or smile.

  She says, “God knows I’ve tried to talk her out of the way she lives her life, but she can hardly stand to be around me. We’re a close-knit bunch here in the Garden. We put on plays. We have sing-a-longs. But Noh won’t play in the reindeer games. She may have tried to disconnect herself from me, but she failed. She’s an important person in my life, and even if she dies, she’ll always be a part of me. You will too, honey.” She twirls the marionette on her lap and he looks at me. He’s me, with a big head, and a long skinny body, and long skinny limbs. The cross-eyed caricature she drew of me, now in wood form.

  All I can think to say is, “Thank you,” so I do.

  The first time I enter Odin’s room, he’s straddled by Pari. The second time, after Pari speeds by me a few minutes later, he’s fully wrapped and sitting on his coffin.

  “Man, you’re supposed to knock,” he says.

  “You don’t have a door,” I say.

  “You know what I mean. Announce yourself or something.”

  “Sorry.”

  “By the way, dude, what the fuck are you doing here? I thought you got put back in the Vacation system.”

  “I was. I got out.”

  “How?”

  “Jack.”

  “Cool.” He tugs at the knots in his hair. “Why’d you come back?”

  “I heard about the execution.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it great?” He swats the thought away. “Not great that she’s dying, but you know.”

  “I want to stop her. I don’t know how. I thought you could help me think of something.”

  He shakes his head. “Dude, this has been her dream for a long time. Even if I could take this away from her, I don’t think I’d want to. People have died to make this possible. My friends have died.”

  “I don’t want to keep her from doing the right thing, but I don’t want her to die.”

  “Dude, sometimes dying is the right thing.”

  Now I realize why Odin and the others never eat with Noh or talk with Noh when they don’t have to.

  To them, she’s already a ghost.

  This is a trauma they’re prepared for.

  Part 20

  Noh rests with her back against the wall, inches from the dead animals curled up inside. Her hands lie on the cold ground, upward and curled like two flowers. Two wilted flowers, that you want to save, but there isn’t any water. She stares at the black in front of her, and when you focus on darkness, your expression never changes.

  I sit beside her. This is the part when I’m supposed to give up. When I beg Noh to send me home again.

  She doesn’t face me, but she says, “You understand language. Perhaps you can clarify something for me.”

  “What is it?” I say.

  “The word fatal. Why is it that a term which relates to fate has come to be associated with death?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is death the only fate we as human beings think about? We’re so preoccupied with fighting death that we often stop enjoying life as a consequence. Death is such an ordinary element of reality, and yet we treat it—”

  “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to die.”

  “I already explained the—”

  “You can fake the execution.”

  “Yes, it would be possible to fake my death. However, my martyrdom will become a symbol for the death of the old systems. If I were ever found alive again, the consequences would be devastating. To prevent this I’d have to live in a place where there would be absolutely no chance I could ever be found out. I don’t want to live that life. If I were alone and useless, my lists wouldn’t be enough to keep me alive.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true, Bernard. I am proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I do believe that the ends justify the means, but I despise who I’ve had to become in order to succeed. Without the Garden, I couldn’t live with myself.”

  “You may call it an execution, but you’re committing suicide.”

  “In a sense.”

  “I get it now. All the tests, all the manipulations, everything you put your acquisitions through, that’s you trying to get everyone to hate you. You don’t want anyone to get too close, because then it would be harder to die.”

  And this is me, trying to despise her like she despises herself.

  It doesn’t work.

  You make a lot of choices in life, and you feel damn powerful. You feel in control. But in this life of choices, none of them really affect the systems that govern your life. In this life of choices, you don’t choose how to live it.

  Because the way of life is The Way of Life.

  And that’s why, when I think about how Noh manipulated me, I can’t hold onto my anger. Because I’ve always been manipulated. And I’ve been lied to.

  Noh doesn’t work that way.

  She manipulates me, but after each instance, she points and says, “This is the string I used.”

  This is the dream device.

  This is the lie.

  This is wh
y.

  In these catacombs, among the smell and taste of death, within the rotting history of this place, Noh’s a breath of fresh air.

  She’s a commercial that shows you happy people skipping through a field of flowers, and the narrator says, “These pills aren’t a cure for anything. They hinder some symptoms, but they cause others, so that we can sell you more pills. All we really want is your money.”

  She’s a politician who gets your vote and then says, “I’m really a lapdog for the oil companies. I’m going to do what they tell me to do, no matter how many lives it costs.”

  She’s a parent who waits till after Christmas, then says, “By the way, Santa Claus isn’t real. Neither is the Easter Bunny. And there’s something we never told you about your sister.”

  The next time I see her, I’m a teacher again, and she’s my book of the day. In her room, I sit in the chair across from her, and begin my lecture.

  “You have no reason to make yourself out to be a monster,” I say. “Yes, you’ve done some terrible things to people, but you do it for the world. For the people in the photographs.”

  “I do it for myself,” Noh says.

  “You keep the doors of the Garden closed for yourself, even though it breaks your heart? You live with guilt everyday for yourself? You manipulate others for yourself?”

  “I’m a deceitful person.”

  I lean forward, as if this will help. “If you were, you wouldn’t be so open about your deceptions.”

  She stares down at her hands, where her pencil and paper usually rest. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but it’s no use. My intentions may be good, but I am a monster, and I need to be destroyed by the world that created me.”

  Yeah, she’s right about one thing. She is a monster, because a monster by definition horrifies others.

  I remember sitting on the terrace with a teacup warming my hands. Every other part of me felt cold.

  “I’m sorry,” Krow said, with the moonlight trembling on her hair. “I should’ve told you I’m a lesbian.”

  “It’s ok,” I said. “I shouldn’t’ve assumed.”

  “We got along so well. It’s my fault for not assuming.” Her hair shuddered in the wind. “This may sound idiotic, and I’m sure it is, but I never thought someone like you would ever feel that way about me.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “Someone…normal.”

  “I’m not normal. No one’s normal. The fact that we have to strive to be normal proves that we’re not.”

  “You’re right. I’m still figuring that out.” She stared at the quivering moon in her cup. “That’s why I treated you so badly when you were my teacher. To me you were that normal person I could never become. I didn’t hate you because I thought you hated me. I hated you because you made me hate myself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, of course. You didn’t make me an outcast. You didn’t know why I was lashing out.”

  And I never asked either.

  I remembered the feeling I got as a kid when I accidentally said a dirty word in front of you, mom and dad. Krow must have felt like a dirty word all the time.

  She said, “One day I had to accept the fact that the world isn’t going to love and embrace me for who I really am. I have to do it myself. I’m still working on it, but I’ve come a long way the past few years.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I still have doubts that I’ll find anyone, but I’m beginning to think I deserve to be loved.” She leaned back in her chair, and she might have fallen, but I wasn’t afraid.

  “I’m glad,” I said, and brought the cup to my nose and took a long whiff and didn’t drink.

  She is a monster, because a monster by definition horrifies others, and it’s always the world that puts the horror in the monster, not the other way around.

  If Noh were music, she’d be a song that gets stuck in your head, and when it plays over and over enough, you notice things you never noticed before. You say, this is good. Or, this is one of my favorite songs. And every once in a while, you say, this is definitely a classic. Or even, I can’t imagine my life without her words going into my head.

  But Noh isn’t music, is she? She’s a living, breathing human being, and that means she can stop being a living, breathing human being. Noh has the potential to become nothing but a memory.

  Noh and nothing don’t belong in the same sentence.

  I join her on the blue tarp, where she’s sitting cross-legged without a bowl on her lap.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” I say.

  “I want to appear more dilapidated for the camera,” she says. “There’s nothing like hunger to arouse pity among a gorged populace.”

  I take her hand in both of mine, and she’s cold.

  “Don’t do this,” I say. “There has to be another way.”

  “This is my gift to the world,” she says.

  Sometimes, to admit the truth to yourself, you have to dwell on the feelings until it hurts.

  Sometimes the truth requires a little torture.

  The truth is.

  The painful truth is.

  Her execution may symbolize the end of lies, but to me, this is a suicide that represents the agony of heartbreak.

  I decide not to let the truth die.

  “I love you,” I say, and I’m not lying, because when you’re in the process of doing something good for someone, you don’t have to lie.

  I know this moment hasn’t previously appeared on any of her lists, because of the smile she’s trying to keep inside.

  I also know that sometimes you need unforeseen blessings to feel as if your life is a full one.

  She doesn’t pull her hand away, but she says, “I wish I could believe that.”

  “I love you,” I say.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Then why did I come back?”

  “Because you don’t wish to return to your old life. Because you would rather surround yourself with harsh truths than quiet lies. Because you’ve seen the photographs and you want to do more than the Assignment I gave you.”

  “I came back to save your life.”

  “That doesn’t mean you love me. You may think you do, but you don’t.”

  “It’s not for you to decide that.”

  “Perhaps not, but I know who I am, and I know that this person isn’t lovable.”

  “I know who you are too. I know your deep dark secrets.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Fake your death. I’ll go with you to the end of the world. I’ll make your life worth living.”

  “You would resent me for disconnecting you from humanity.”

  “I don’t need humanity.”

  “You say that now, but you don’t know what it feels like to be separated from the world.”

  “I love you, Noh!”

  “No.” Stimulus-response. “You can’t.”

  Another dead-end.

  The question now is, how do I prove my love to a woman who’s unable to trust anyone or anything?

  The obvious answer is, I can’t.

  Maybe God made a mistake, and he knows it.

  Maybe before a god can become an all-knowing, all-seeing God, he has to create something to know about, and to see. So he reads up on how to create a Universe, and does the best he can, but in the end, no matter how much he wants to be a good God, no matter how hard he tries, things don’t turn out the way he planned.

  In fact, everything goes to shit.

  And he could blow everything up into little bits, but he doesn’t, for the same reason people don’t blow up cemeteries.

  But now, he feels horrible. He knows everything and sees everything. And he’s been traumatized like a motherfucker.

  So maybe he collects souvenirs made of gold, and he tells himself he’s connected to the Universe, when he really isn’t. Or maybe he takes pictures with his mind. Of happy moments. Of beautiful statues
and naked women and blooming forests. Or maybe, he runs into his room and closes his door and hides under his covers, like he did when he was a boy, before he was God.

  He lets the good things people say about him seep through the walls, while he tries to fall asleep. He listens to the songs and the prayers. But even after these lullabies. Even after they say, “We still love you.”

  Maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t believe them.

  Part 21

  A marionette me and a marionette Noh hop down on the dirt beside me.

  “I love you, Noh!” the tiny me says, in a tiny voice.

  “Me too!” the tiny Noh says. “Let’s have babies!”

  “Okay!”

  The two wooden bodies bump into each other, once.

  “That sure was fast,” the tiny Noh says.

  “Sorry.”

  The two collapse, and Laetitia joins me sitting by the herbs. “If it’s any consolation, and I know it isn’t, I believe you. That you love her.”

  I cradle my ridiculous wooden self in my hands. He doesn’t do or say anything. “The worst part is, and the best part is, I think she might love me too.”

  Now the real Noh approaches. She takes her puppet, because she always takes what she wants. What she convinces herself that she wants. The puppet dangles by the arm at her side. “I told you not to use me in your plays.”

  “I know,” Laetitia says.

  Noh tosses the puppet onto the stone floor, with the engravings of smiley-faced bugs. She kneels and strikes a match. I didn’t see her take it from her pocket, so maybe it was already in her hand. She lights her tiny self on fire. And this may be a dumb metaphor, but at this point, she doesn’t seem to care.

  And reading this, you might picture her with an angry or satisfied look on her face.

  Don’t.

  She’s looks the way I know you did, mom and dad, when the doctors told you that Aubrey was dead. The way I did when I realized why.

  “I’ll just keep making them, you know,” Laetitia says.

  “I know,” Noh says, and stands, and turns away. “Goodbye.”

  Even when she’s gone, she just keeps on burning.

  Here’s the part when I’m supposed to give up trying to talk Noh out of it.