The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  The child was promptly moved into the dark, cramped addition so that the nursery could be set up. Lying beneath mountains of covers, her nights were filled with terror. When the wind would blow through small chinks in the walls, it made the sound of someone murmuring. In her mind, the noises became words, and she imagined the voice to be that of the Devil, spewing out a steady string of threats and curses. When she told her parents about this they told her not to be foolish, but when she confided her fears to the Calabrias, a family of devoted Roman Catholics, they nodded silently and made the sign of the cross. When she would go upstairs for lunch and dinner, Dorothy was asked to sit at a separate table from the rest of the family. At night, if she was finally able to sleep, she dreamt that a flood came and washed away her room or that a terrific gust of wind toppled the weak structure, burying her alive. Even though the child had become a nervous wreck, she knew that much of what she feared was only in her mind. But when something began galloping across her bed in the middle of the night, she discovered that her room had become haunted by a flesh-and-blood creature. She would awaken to footfalls on her covered legs and scream, but the wind passing through the sieve that was her room would snatch her cry and carry it away before anyone could hear.

  Determined to find out what it was that paid a nightly visit, she forced herself to stay awake. When she felt its presence, she quickly lit a candle. The sudden light revealed an immense black rat sitting at the end of her bed. She thrust the flame toward it and it screeched and dove onto the floor. Only when the rat had invaded the other part of the house, and was seen by her mother, did anyone believe in its existence. By this time she had spent many sleepless nights warding the thing off with the candle. Of course, traps were set. It was on a Sunday that the entire family heard one of the traps snap shut and then the place filled with the rat’s agonizing screams. They ran to the kitchen and saw it flopping around in the trap by the garbage can. The rat was so huge and vicious looking that no one knew what to do. They simply stared in disbelief as the rat chewed its own leg off and then fled, running on a bloody stump, into the bathroom. Dorothy’s father slammed the bathroom door shut, trapping it inside, while her mother ran upstairs to the Calabrias to fetch Mr. Whitey.

  Mr. Whitey was a deaf, long-haired cat as big as a small dog. He had a fierce reputation in the neighborhood for never losing a fight, and was well known for leaping onto the back of a certain German Shepherd, digging his claws in and riding down the block. Mr. Whitey was thrown into the bathroom with the rat and almost instantly a battle ensued. They could tell by the noises that the rat had taken refuge in the big old bathtub that stood atop four porcelain lion paws. The Calabrias made the sign of the cross, Dorothy’s mother stared rigidly at the door, and her father forgot more than once what he was doing. Dorothy herself has said that at one point she broke down and began screaming along with the screams of the beasts. In the end, the rat was dead and Mr. Whitey emerged, three-quarters dead himself.

  Mr. Whitey died soon after the war in the bathtub and, unfortunately, so did Dorothy’s father. The lead poisoning, contracted by working with paint for most of his life, infected his blood and swabbed three layers of enamel on his reasoning. He had grown more and more demented, wandering off jobs and winding up three towns away not knowing how he had gotten there, spilling his beer down the front of him, and cross-stitching thin air instead of his craft. When there was nothing left of him but a shell that walked and mumbled, he stayed home with the child during the day and the job of caring for him was given to her. She fought a hard battle, leaping on the back of death and riding for weeks. In the end, her father died in his chair one night, his skin having turned slightly green from the blood dyscrasia. That spring, her mother, only weeks away from giving birth, lost the baby to a miscarriage. So Dorothy moved back into the finished nursery that was her old bedroom.

  Times were very bad then and existence was always hand-to-mouth. It was at this time, I believe, that her counting continued on past the goal of Sunday, the tally stretching outward indefinitely.

  At the time I wrote this story, I was reading Freud. While doing so, I was not overly concerned with whether I believed or disbelieved his theories concerning the workings of the human mind. Freud, for whatever merit (or lack there of) his theories have, is a terrific writer with a real flair for the dramatic and the unexpected. The book Three Case Histories was one that took hold of my imagination. It offers case histories of “The Wolf Man,” “The Rat Man,” and “The Psychotic Doctor Schreber.” All three of these cases are broken down into the same structure. First, the “problem” is presented (or the individual’s mania and how it manifests itself), and then Freud lays out his analysis. The funny thing is that the analysis, in its reasoning, is often more bizarre than the strangeness of the given patient’s condition. In “The Woman Who Counts Her Breath,” I applied Freud’s structure to the investigation of a character’s personality. One thing Freud was definitely right about is that there are always mitigating circumstances, powerful forces from our early lives that have made us what we are. To delve into them, to study the why of people, often leads to understanding more about their (and our own) humanity.

  At Reparata

  Everyone remembers where they were when they first heard that Queen Josette had died. I was standing in twilight on that cliff known as the Cold Shoulder, fly-fishing for bats. Beneath me, the lights of the palace shone with a soft glow that dissolved decrepitude into beauty, and a breeze was blowing in from the south, carrying with it the remnants of a storm at sea. I had just caught a glimpse of a star, streaking down behind the distant mountains, when there was a tug at my line followed hard by a cry that came, like the shout of the earth, up from the palace. I heard it first in my chest. Words would have failed to convince me of the fact, but that desperate scream told me plainly she was dead.

  Josette had been an orphan left at the palace gates by a troupe of wandering actors. She arrived at a point in her life between childhood and maturity, wondrously lithe and athletic with green eyes and her dark hair cut like a boy’s. I suspect she had been abandoned in hopes that her beauty and intelligence might work to make her a better life than one found on the road. This was back in the days when Ingess had just begun to build his new court from society’s castaways. Upon seeing her, he pronounced she was to be the Lady of the Mirrors, but we all knew that she would some day lose the title to that of Queen. The drama that brought her to this stately affair was ever the court’s favorite spectacle and topic of conversation.

  Her hair grew long and entangled us all in her charm and innocence. Ingess married her on a cool day in late summer five years after her arrival, and the Overseer of Situations released a thousand butterflies upon the signal of their kiss. We all loved her as a daughter, and the younger ones among us as a mother. She never put on airs or forced the power of her elevated position, understanding better than anyone the equanimity that was the soul of the Palace Reparata. Her kindness was the perfect match for Ingess’s comic generosity.

  With her passing, His Royal, as he had insisted on being called, came apart like light in a prism. I sat four nights in succession with him in the gardens, smoking my pipe and listening to him weep into sunrise. The quantity of tears drained him of his good looks and left him a haggard wreck, like some old crone, albeit with shining, blonde hair.

  “See here, Ingess,” I told him but could go no further, the logic of his grief too persuasive.

  He’d wave his hand at me and turn his face away.

  And so the world he had managed to create with his pirate ancestor’s gold, his kingdom, suddenly lost its meaning. Before Josette had succumbed to the poison of a spider bite, Reparata was a place where a wandering beggar might be taken in at any time and made a Court Accountant or Thursday’s High Astronomer. Every member of the palace had a title bestowed upon them by His Royal. There was no want at Reparata, and this made it an oasis amidst the sea of disappointment and cruelty that we, each in his or her
own way, had found the world to be.

  Never before had a royal retinue been comprised of so many lowly worms. The Countess Frouch had been a prostitute known as Yams in the nearby seaside town of Gile. His Royal welcomed her warmly, without judgment, as he did Tendon Durst, a round, bespectacled lunatic who believed beyond a doubt that he was joined at a shared eye with a phantom twin. In a single day’s errant wandering, Durst had set out as a confirmed madman and ended the evening at the palace with a room of his own and a title of Philosopher General. We had never before seen someone speak simultaneously from both sides of the mouth, but that night he walked in his sleep and told us twice at once that he would never leave Reparata. We all shared his sentiment.

  Even Ringlat the highwayman, hiding from the law, performed his role of Bishop to the Crown righteously. Our lives were transformed by a position in society and whatever bizarre duties His Royal might dream up at his first encounter with us, standing before him at the palace gates, begging for a heel of bread or the eyes from that morning’s marsupial dish. Times were bad everywhere, but Ingess was so wealthy, and Reparata was so far removed from the rest of the world, no one who wandered there and had the courage to ask for something was sent away. We lived long bright days as in a book and then, with a fit of narcolepsy, the reader closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  If we ever had intentions of fleecing His Royal, the time of his mourning was the perfect opportunity. Instead, we went about our jobs and titles with even greater dedication, taking turns keeping an eye on our melancholic leader. My full title was High and Mighty of Next Week. Ingess, beneath his eccentric sense of humor, must have known that it was the only position vague enough to tame my impulses. On my own, I, who had never done an honest day’s work in my life, created and performed a series of ritual tasks that gave definition to my importance at court. Gathering bats in order to exterminate the garden’s mosquitos was only one of them. Another was dusting the items in the palace attic.

  On Mondays I would usually spend the mornings making proclamations, and on the Monday following the death of Josette, I proclaimed that we should seek some medical help for His Royal. He had begun to see his young wife’s spirit floating everywhere and was trying to do himself in with strong drink, insomnia, and grief.

  “I see her next to the Fountain of the Dolphins as we speak, Flam,” he said to me one night in the gardens.

  I looked over at the fountain and saw nothing, but, still, the frantic aspect of his gaze sent a shiver through me.

  It turned out to be the first proclamation of mine that was ever acted upon. I got high and mighty on the subject and didn’t wait until the following week. Carrier pigeons were sent out to all the surrounding kingdoms inquiring if there was anyone who could cure the melancholy of loss. A small fortune in gold was offered as the reward. I changed my own title to Conscience of the King and set about to do all in my power to cure Ingess, if not for his own good, then for the good of the state.

  While we waited for a reply, His Royal raved and stared, only stopping occasionally to caress the empty air. His mourning reached such a state of hysteria that it made me wonder if it was natural. I had the Regal Ascendiary, Chin Mokes, a five-time convicted forger, take over the task of signing the royal notes of purchase in order to keep the palace running smoothly. A plan was hatched in which one of the women, well-powdered and bewigged, would dress up like Josette and, standing in the shadows of the gardens, tell Ingess to stop grieving. After the Countess Frouch laughed at us in that tone that could wither a forest, though, we saw the emptiness of our scheme.

  Two harrowing months of sodden depression slithered by at a snail’s pace before word finally came that a man from a distant land, a traveling practitioner of medicine, had recently arrived by ship in Gile. Frouch and I went in search of him, traveling through the night in the royal carriage, driven by none other than Tendon Durst. Though I was wary of the philosopher’s sense of direction, his invisible brother was usually trustworthy. We arrived at daybreak by the sea and witnessed the gulls swarming as the fishing boats set out. “Do you think it is a good idea that you came back?” I asked her as we left the carriage.

  “It’s a test,” she said, as she adjusted the position of her tiara atop her spiraling platitudes of hair and stamped out her cigarette. Heels were not the best footwear for the planks and cobblestones of Gile, but she wore them anyway. I thought the mink stole a little much, but who was I to say? To look the Conscience of the King, I wore one of his finer suits, a silk affair with winged collar and matching cape. In addition, I borrowed a large signet ring encrusted with diamonds. We left the Philosopher General in deep meditation and went forth as royalty, past the heap of fish skeletons, toward the boardwalk that led to the tavern.

  The tavern keeper had known the countess in her earlier life and was pleased to see her doing so well. We asked if he had beheld the foreign healer and he told us he had.

  “A short fellow,” he said, “with a long beard. All he wears is a robe and a pair of boots.” The tavern keeper laughed. “He comes in every day a little after sunrise and has me make him a drink he taught me called Princess Jang’s Tears. It ends with a cloud of froth at the top and a constant green rain falling in a clear sky of gin toward the bottom of the glass. I’d say he knows a thing or two.”

  I ordered two of them for us, using gold coin as payment. The tavern keeper was ecstatic. We sat by the large front window that looked out across harbor and bay. Neither of us spoke. I was contemplating my transformation over the past years from unwanted vagrant to the executor of a kingdom, and I am sure by the look in Frouch’s eyes, she was thinking something similar. The strange drink was bittersweet, cool citrus beneath a cloud of sorrow. Then the doorbell rang and our healer entered.

  The tavern keeper introduced us, and the healer bowed so low as to show us his star-shaped bald spot. He told us his name was unimportant but that his reputation was legendary even on the remote Island of the Barking Children.

  “You are far flung,” the countess said to him, “but can you cure loss?”

  “I can cure anything, Countess,” was his reply.

  “Death?” I asked.

  “Death is not a disease,” he said.

  He agreed to accompany us back to the palace if we would have a drink with him. The tavern keeper created a round of Princess Jang’s Tears on the house, and we sat again at the table near the window.

  “I feel you have a strong connection to this place, Countess,” said the healer.

  “You’re as sharp as a stick of butter,” she said and lit a cigarette.

  “Do you regret your days here?” he asked her.

  “If I did, I would have to regret life,” she said, turning her face to the window. Princess Jang’s Tears were not the only ones to fall that morning.

  The healer nodded and took his drink in a way that showed me he might have a regret or two himself. My hope was that these disappointments did not stem from the health of his patients.

  We rode back to the palace in perfect silence. The healer sat next to Frouch, and I across from them. As the carriage bounced over the poorly maintained road from Gile, I studied the man we had hired. His face, though half-hidden by a gray beard, showed its age yet still shone with a placid vitality. I knew he was smiling, though his lips did not move. On the palms of each of his hands were tattoos of coiled snakes. The robe he wore did not appear to be some form of foreign dress but in all reality a cheap, flannel bathrobe that might be worn by a fisherman’s wife. Around his neck hung an amulet on a piece of string—an outlandish fake ruby orbited by glass diamonds set in a star of tin-painted gold. His small burlap sack of belongings squirmed at my feet.

  “The young man’s grief will consume him if I don’t take drastic measures,” the healer said to me after he had spent a day studying His Royal. We sat in the dining hall at the western end of that table which was so long and large, we at court called it the island. It was late and most of the palace was asleep. I si
pped at coffee and the healer crunched viciously away at a bowl of locust in wild honey that the palace chef, the Exalted Culinarity, Grenis Saint-Geedon, once a famous assassin, had been so kind as to leave his bed to prepare.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Do you see what I am doing with this bowl of holy sustenance?” said the healer, a locust leg sticking out of the right corner of his mouth. “It will eat out his soul.”

  “Will he die?” I asked.

  “That’s not the worst part of it,” said the old man.

  “What are these drastic measures?”

  “Let me just say, once I have begun, you will wish you hadn’t requested I do so,” he said.

  “Can you cure him?” I asked.

  “That,” he said, lifting the bowl to lick it, “is a certainty that has roots in the very first instant of creation.”

  Either this man was an idiot or so great a physician that his method and bearing were informed by some highly advanced foreign culture. His dress and the manner in which he ate did not suggest the latter, but my most recent glimpse of Ingess trudging like a somnambulist along the great hall was enough to convince me that the healer’s diagnosis was correct. His Royal had shriveled miserably and was totally despondent. Even that blonde hair was now disintegrating into salt and floating away in his lethargic wake.

  I feared the countess would lash me with her laughter when she heard of my decision, but I told the healer right then, as he set his bowl back on the table, “Do what you must.”

  Then the old man’s lips moved into a wide grin to reveal a shattered set of teeth. He lifted the amulet from his chest and kissed the audacious ruby at its center. “You’ll live to regret this,” he told me.

  “I already have,” I said.

  The next morning I had to address the assembled royalty of the court of Reparata on the subject of Ingess and his treatment. We met in the palace theater, all fifty-two of us. I took the stage, again dressed in the fine clothes of His Royal as a way of adding authority to my words. Miraculously, Frouch spared me as I apprised them of my decision, but the others were very skeptical. How could they not be—they had seen and met the healer.