Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  ‘That would be ironic,’ I say. ‘If you were, like, a pig who was hosting the stomach that would eventually digest you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Patch says. ‘Very ironic.’ He takes a big swallow from his drink and gives Ward a sidelong look.

  ‘Eventually,’ Patch says, ‘There won’t be a need for the things that you people do.’

  One thing that I’ve learned over the years: a discussion of what ‘you people’ do is almost never productive. I make no apologies for my various employers. I don’t align myself with them politically or morally or emotionally: I’m neutral.

  ‘Do y’all have any wasabi peas?’ I say. ‘Or snack mix of any kind? I’m having a craving.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Patch says. ‘Ward? Do we?’ And Ward gives him that Wait-did-you-just-talk-to-me-like-I’m-your-servant look, and it’s like the body language of a married couple, I think. What? I didn’t do anything! Patch’s body says, and Ward’s body goes, Fine, we’ll discuss this later, and he gets up from his chair with chilly dignity, hands Patch the bong, and goes into the house.

  ‘Oops,’ I say. ‘I hope I didn’t…’

  ‘Don’t comment,’ Patch says, and glances over his shoulder toward where Ward has disappeared. ‘Just leave it, okay?’ He looks down at the bong in his hand and sniffs the lip of it. ‘Ugh,’ he says, wrinkling his nose, and he puts it down by the leg of his chair.

  ‘You say ‘ugh’ a lot,’ I observe, and Patch gives me a long look.

  He tilts his glass back and drains it and crunches a piece of ice between his teeth.

  ‘Ward!’ he calls. ‘Would you mix me another drink while you’re at it?’

  I stretch out my legs and flex my toes. I’m no lightweight, but it’s unusually strong weed and I find myself just floating there silently until I notice that Patch is giving me a rueful look and I feel guilty, or I feel like I’m supposed to feel guilty. Not entirely sure what I could’ve done different.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ I say. ‘Are we okay?’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘We?’ he says.

  ‘You and me,’ I say. ‘We. Are we okay?’ I say, and he lets out a short laugh.

  ‘Why wouldn’t we be?’ he says, and I shrug.

  ‘Look,’ I say. ‘I just don’t want you to be resentful. I didn’t advise this, but you took the deal, right? You made the choice. So now we’re having a business transaction. I hope that doesn’t interfere with our friendship.’

  ‘Where did you get the idea that I’m resentful?’ Patch says.

  But then Ward comes loping onto the deck, and Patch falls silent. Ward has his long, ropey arms extended, with a drink in one large hand, and a pink candy dish in the other. He gives Ward the cocktail and thrusts the dish towards me. There are five wasabi peas in it.

  ‘Thanks, Ward,’ I say, and when he looks at me I am reminded of the news stories I have read, about the chimp that ripped off a woman’s face. I give him a gentle smile.

  ‘So tell me,’ Patch says, at last. Ward has settled onto Patch’s chair, his dark-haired ape arm draped across Patch’s shoulder, and the two of them are staring at me inscrutably. ‘What do you know about our employer?’

  ‘Well,’ I say. I consider. ‘They’re not really my employer. I’m just a middleman. A headhunter, as it were.’

  ‘Ugh,’ Patch says, and makes a gesture at Ward that involves some chopping motions. ‘Headhunter,’ he says.

  ‘It’s what they call it,’ I shrug, and pop a dried pea into my mouth. ‘And I don’t really know anything about them. It’s best from my perspective if I don’t.’

  ‘Do you trust them?’ Patch says.

  ‘Inasmuch as I expect them to pay me what they owe,’ I say. ‘Otherwise, no.’

  ‘I see,’ says Patch. He takes a sip from his drink and a droplet of cocktail hangs in his goatee. ‘So I shouldn’t trust them either, I suppose.’

  ‘Dude,’ I say, ‘that’s up to you. You’re the one signing a contract. Like I said, I’m just a middleman.’

  He and Ward look at one another, and Patch taps his two index fingers together, which I guess is maybe the sign for ‘middleman.’ Ward snorts softly, and then they have a short, heated exchange that I can’t follow, except that I recognize Ward making the ASL sign for ‘how many’: he holds out ten fingers and makes a puzzled look. Patch nods.

  ‘How many do you have down there?’ Patch says, and I sigh. I was hoping not to go into all that tonight.

  ‘Three,’ I say. They are all males this time—two Caucasians and an Hispanic—that’s all I know about them. They are under sedation, ready for surgery, and it’s ultimately not my business to think about them. Usually, I’m not even directly involved in deliveries, and I prefer it that way.

  ‘Look,’ I say. ‘As far as I know, it’s always going to be three. But that’s stipulated in your agreement, so…’

  ‘I was just curious,’ he says. ‘Because they told me there was the possibility that there might be four.’

  ‘Huh,’ I say. ‘That’s weird,’ and then I hesitate. ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘They contacted you already?’

  He makes a little shrugging expression with his lips—a moue, I think it’s called—and looks sidelong at Ward. There’s the joyful buzz and chirp of insects and frogs. Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, they are singing.

  I don’t usually do drop-offs like this. Usually, I only make the arrangements, and someone else takes care of shipping the consignment. In this case, I assumed that they asked me to do it myself because they had some concerns about Patch. Basically, I guess, they wanted me to make sure that Patch followed through.

  The truth is, I haven’t actually looked in on the shipment. I glanced in before I left, and I counted three containers, but maybe it’s possible there were four? It makes me want to double-check the bill of lading, which I think is down in the glovebox in the cab of the camper.

  ‘I can double-check, if you want,’ I say, but Patch only shrugs. He stares at me in that way he has, that look of someone who’s waiting for you to get the joke.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Patch says. ‘It can wait until morning.’

  I’m getting a little ping of paranoia needling me now. It’s probably just the marijuana, but the back of my neck prickles.

  What if I’m the fourth? I hear myself think. Is that what he’s trying to tell me? Is he trying to warn me that the office asked him to take me out?

  It would make sense in a way, I think. There had been some irregularities with that deal in Pittsburgh, and a few other times when it seemed I’d rubbed someone the wrong way, and if I’d been smart I probably wouldn’t have taken another job from them—

  Patch and Ward are nuzzling quietly while I’m thinking this, the two of them sitting there and Ward smoothing his long fingers across Patch’s bald scalp and staring into each other’s eyes, and I also have the realization that they are definitely involved romantically.

  Holy shit, I think, is it possible they are fucking? I spend a moment considering how that might configure itself in terms of positions, and then I circle back to wondering if Patch has been hired to kill me.

  Maybe he’s giving me a chance to run, I think. He’s telling me the company wants him to kill me, but he’s giving me a hint.

  Ward holds out his long-fingered hand and Patch traces along Ward’s palm as if he’s reading his fortune. They’re not looking at me at all.

  But why would Patch tip me off? It’s not like Patch to be sentimental about an old friendship. If he did make a deal with the company, it wouldn’t make sense for him to—

  I let this swirl around for a few moments as the two them canoodle.

  Then I get unsteadily to my feet. I’m quite a bit more stoned than I expect, and I can’t help but think that maybe, okay, I have been dosed with something. The cereal? The almond milk? The wasabi peas?

  ‘Dudes,’ I say, and clear my throat. ‘I have to use the restroom.’

  The bathroom is long and narrow, made up almost ent
irely of black and white marble. There is a square sink, and a toilet and a bidet and a small, tasteful hot tub at the end. Behind a Japanese paper shoji door, there is a shower. There is a shelf of sumptuous white towels. There is not, however, a window.

  I sit down with my back to the door.

  This is crazy, I think. If Patch was going to kill me, he certainly wouldn’t give me a warning. I tell myself: you’re being paranoid!

  But my head feels unpleasantly swimmy—not like pot, I don’t think. Like something stronger. I look at a picture on the wall above the hot tub, and it doubles, wobbling gelatinously. It takes me a while before I realize it’s another of those needlepoint wall hangings, like the one in the kitchen: Lowcountry Tidings, it says, and I stand there wavering. My intention is to go to the sink and splash some cold water on my face, but instead I feel myself sitting down on the floor. That feeling of lying back on a merry-go-round and looking at the sky, sensation of the ground rotating underneath you—vertigo, I guess. Blurred vision. Difficulty concentrating.

  For some reason, I find myself thinking again of that chimp, the one with the mummified baby, the one carrying the bone. It means something, I think, but not what you think it means—it’s not grief, I think, but an older, harder emotion, primate emotion that we don’t have a word for, but we recognize it…

  And then my chin hits my chest and I startle awake.

  I can hear Patch and Ward in the kitchen. I guess they’ve come back in, there is clutter of ice being shaken in a glass. ‘Ugh,’ Patch says. ‘Are you kidding me? Ward, please!’

  Then Ward makes a low, soft sound, I guess I would call it a kind of purr.

  ‘Oh,’ Patch whispers. ‘Oh my God!’

  There is some grunting and some wet lip sounds that sound very much like soft-core porn.

  I keep my back pressed to the bathroom door. ‘Oh,’ Patch says. ‘Uh,’ and I’m literally holding my eyes open with my fingers. My head nods and I whiplash awake. I pinch my forearm.

  ‘Stop,’ I hear Patch murmur. But he doesn’t mean it. ‘Oh baby,’ he whispers. ‘Stop.’

  TAPROOT

  M. R. CAREY

  THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN OF THE EASTERN CHURCH, Hagia Sophia maintained its identity as a Greek orthodox cathedral and the seat of power of the ecumenical patriarchs until 1543, when the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. It then became a mosque, a radical but logical repurposing which determined its fate until the modern era and the rise of

  Betty Howard closed her guidebook and slipped it back into her purse. The modern era, in all its forms, failed to excite her. She was hard put to see herself as a part of it.

  St. Sophia did excite her, with its mixture of spikes and curves and the gorgeous, half-organic complexity of its shape. It was like some huge flower that had grown up in the heart of Istanbul, rather than something that had been built by human hands.

  Her father, more prosaically, translated for her the words of the plaque on the wall beside the door, which said that the building had been reopened as a museum four years before, on the 1st of February 1935. ‘No doubt this is part of Atatürk’s drive to secularise and modernise his country,’ he commented. ‘A goal one can only applaud. But the standing collection is said to be very poor. I am reluctant to pay 200 lira to see a few flood-damaged statues. You may buy some postcards of the interior, Betty, if you wish to get an idea of it.’

  Her father still spoke to her as if she were a child, though she was now in her twentieth year. More dismayingly, Betty often found herself behaving like one, forced by his preconceptions into a set of complementary responses. It had been different before her mother died, and before she herself fell ill. She seemed in the intervening year to have grown backwards. Where once she had had an incisive mind and a willingness to use it, now she subsisted on a kind of bland and textureless kindness that kept her—at the best of times—half-asleep. Perhaps she would literally devolve back into an infant, sucking her thumb and reciting nonsense syllables. Sometimes she could almost feel it happening.

  Now, for example, when her father’s casual permission to buy souvenirs filled her with disproportionate excitement. Betty glanced up at him, to gauge how liberally she might interpret this invitation. If he chanced to be in an expansive mood, it was possible she could extend her remit and buy one of the brilliantly painted icons or clever tin miniatures of the cathedral that were also on sale.

  The signs were not promising, however. Adrian Howard’s expression was cold and distracted. His black tie, moreover, was still tightly knotted, and he had not removed his jacket. If he made no concessions to the stifling heat of the Turkish noon-day, it was unlikely he would offer many to Betty’s souvenir-hunting.

  But temptation was pressing itself upon her. As soon as her gaze went to the trinket-sellers who stood before the doors of St. Sophia, they had closed in like fish in a pond when breadcrumbs are scattered on the surface. Smiling and jostling, they held up enticing and wonderful things, pictures and carvings, plates and bowls and leatherwork. They shouted their prices in diminishing series.

  Adrian grimaced, as though at a sour taste. ‘Disgusting,’ he muttered. ‘Give us some room, you brutes!’ Forgetting that he had said Betty might make a purchase, or else changing his mind, he strode around his daughter in a half-circle, waving his arms to make the trinket-sellers scatter. He was not careful. Some of the sellers had set out their stalls on the ground, arranging their wares on spread blankets or tablecloths. Adrian’s brightly polished black Oxfords made havoc with these modest displays, causing their owners to yell in alarm and protest.

  ‘Daddy, you’re stepping on their things!’ Betty cried out.

  ‘These gewgaws?’ Adrian’s voice was thick with contempt. ‘If they sell one piece to an American tourist like us, Betty, it will buy another bushel-load tomorrow. Don’t spare a thought for them.’

  But Betty was dismayed. She had a kind of instinct for desperation, as of one sufferer recognising another, and she saw in the faces of the men whose stock was trampled that it would not be so easy to replace as her father thought. Impulsively, she opened her hand, letting the banknotes he had given her, all low-denomination, fall to the ground. Some of the money, at least, might find its way to where it was needed.

  In the meantime, unfortunately, she only made the crush and the chaos worse. The trinket-sellers fell on the crumpled currency notes with alacrity, pouring in now from all sides. ‘All things have consequences that were not intended,’ her mother Mhairi had said to her, in a raw, scraped whisper, not long before she died. ‘I should never have come here. But if I hadn’t come here you would never have been.’

  Adrian yelled a curse he could not have intended his daughter to hear and swatted at the trinket-sellers with futile rage. The two of them were at the centre of a maelstrom now. A roiling wall of people separated them both from the street and from the door of the cathedral.

  ‘Let me get you out of this,’ said a voice whose accent, though rich and strange, was not Turkish. A hand took hers, and tugged gently. Betty let herself be led.

  And found that she was passing through the crowd at a speed that seemed impossible. Pressing bodies offered no barrier to her. Neither did the traffic on the Kabasakal Caddesi, whether drawn by horse or ox or internal combustion. She and the pale man (or was it a woman?) whose hand she held seemed to glide over the ground much faster than the movement of Betty’s feet could account for.

  Through the wall of the building opposite.

  Across a courtyard, and then another, gathering speed as they went.

  With a small shriek of panic, Betty pulled her hand free. The momentum she had accumulated was gone in a single heartbeat, but when she stopped, all at once, she was leaning very far forward. She fell down on her hands and knees, sent sprawling on rough, packed earth.

  The air behind her was alive with whistles and shouts. In front of her, a small boy and a smaller girl, both very dark-skinned and very raggedly dressed, stared at her in s
ilent amazement.

  ‘H-hello,’ Betty faltered. ‘Do you speak English?’

  The children only turned and ran away.

  Betty looked at her hands. They were bleeding. She thought they should be shaking, too, given the strangeness of what had just happened, but they were surprisingly steady.

  ‘Burada, beyfendi!’ a man’s voice yelled. Other voices took up the shout. ‘O burada!’ ‘Here! She’s here!’

  Adrian arrived at a run, his hair and eyes wild. ‘Betty!’ he exclaimed, hoarse with running. ‘Where did you go? What possessed you to run away like that?’

  ‘I didn’t run away, father,’ Betty corrected him. ‘Someone ran away with me.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Adrian said. ‘If there had been anyone, I should have seen them. You must not say such things.’ She thought he might offer her a hand, to help her to her feet, but he turned, instead, to the men in khaki uniforms who had assisted him in his search. He thanked them in both English and Pontic Greek. Money changed hands. And Betty climbed up out of the dirt unaided.

  The khaki uniforms were everywhere in the city. Betty didn’t know whether the men were police officers or soldiers, but the distinction seemed an idle one to make when the whole of Europe was swept up in rumours of impending war. The police, after all, carried the same guns that the soldiers carried. And if Herr Hitler came, most likely their remit would be very little different. And their fate, for that matter.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Adrian demanded, when Betty was upright again.

  ‘I am a little dishevelled, and I have scraped the heels of both my hands,’ Betty told him. ‘Those things aside, I’m quite well. But I wasn’t lying, father. Someone took my hand and dragged me here, at great speed.’

  Her father frowned. ‘I find that hard to believe,’ he said. ‘There was nobody near us apart from the trinket-sellers. Was it one of them?’

  Betty thought of the narrow, milk-white face that had floated beside her. The ash-blonde hair and pale grey eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe so.’