Tyrannia

by Alan Deniro

  I see, farther off through the trees, the gendarme who blew himself up—though he really wasn’t a gendarme—shoot a kid in the face.

  “Hey!” I say, running toward them, winding through trees. “Hey!” The kid falls back and drops the Game Boy. When I get closer I see that the other boy is also on the ground, twitching, poisoned. The gendarme moves to pick up the Game Boy, paying me no mind. Because I am still far away, I throw my knife at his hand, which slices it off. He doesn’t scream—why should he?—but instead throws his gun at me. The gun slices off my right hand.

  “You know,” I say, feeling nothing except an itch inside my other hand, “that is really not fair.” I pick up my hand off the forest floor and after stuffing it into my pocket, pick up the gun. When I reach the cop, he is hunched over the Game Boy, trying to balance it against his knee and start it up.

  “There’s no game in there,” the shot boy says, sitting up. A gosling sleeps in his caved-in skull. “I threw it over the roof.”

  The cop shushes him. “Do you mind? I’m trying to get this thing to work.”

  “Into the water treatment pool,” the boy continues. “There are a lot of fish that live in there. I was hoping one of them would eat it. And then one of them did!”

  At this the cop closes the Game Boy and looks at the boy. “Who ate it?” His severed hand lunges toward my face, but my own hand flies out of my pocket and meets it in mid-air. They spar, fingernails clicking.

  “A white carp, big as me!”

  Then the cop lunges at the kid, but the other kid wraps his arms around the cop’s legs. He falls over.

  “Who do you work for?” the kid says, pounding his fists against the cop’s back. “Who do you work for?”

  I pluck the Game Boy from the ground and keep walking. From the stump of my severed hand grows a clutch of blue peonies. The stems tickle. I move in further. There are geese sleeping underneath the trees, but I don’t want to disturb them. I walk for about ten minutes or so until I reach the wall. It’s too high to climb. The trough ends at the wall at a little groove, where the water trickles to the other side. I crouch down and try to see what’s there, but no luck. I put my good hand into the water and try to feel where the water goes, but I’m only able to squeeze three fingers in. Then I feel someone else’s hand on the other side. We fumble around for a second in the cold water and then we both retract. I press against the wall and listen, and hear breathing.

  He makes the first move, though, the first recognition. “Jackson?” he says.

  “Holland? Oh my God, where are you? Are you all right?” I say.

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Really.” His voice is on the faint side.

  “Uh, where are you again?” I ask.

  “Right next to you. Just a little farther out. In the desert.”

  “Right.” I want to figure out what to say to him. There were so many times we found ourselves in war zones, trying to inflict policy on strangers. We never had the chance to test our partnership. And now that partnership is over.

  “I can’t talk long . . .” he says.

  “So . . . how are you?”

  “Oh, pretty good,” he says. “I’ve been wandering the desert a lot. Writing poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Sure. Do you want to hear one? It’s short.”

  “Okay,” I say, studying my flowered hand.

  The heart’s falcon flutters over the blotter

  A forced battle does not crown a victor

  Innocent amusements are found wanting

  The sparrow glides in terror

  “I like it,” I say. “I don’t know too much about poetry, though, I have to admit.”

  “It’s a struggle,” he says. “But thanks.”

  I want to bring us back to the matters at hand, before they completely slip away from us. “They’re going to torture me, Holland. When I wake up. They’re going to send me to Nome and interrogate me about the garden—”

  “Yeah, about that . . . Here, take this.” He lets go of my hand and pushes a game cartridge through the watered slot. I pick it up. The plastic is fog gray and it’s a bit heavier than what I would have expected. There’s a small pearl eyelet mounted on the wider edge of the cartridge.

  “It’s wet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’ll still play. You have the Game Boy, right?”

  “Yeah. Where . . . where did you get this?”

  “I got it from the mouth of great trouble. But, listen, don’t play the game until you’re ready. Okay? Promise me that?”

  “I promise.”

  “You sure? You might not be able to go back.”

  “I said I promised, Holland. Jesus.”

  And this, at least, gets a laugh from him. “Okay. Okay. Do you remember how we were recruited, back in the day?”

  “A little.”

  “We were failures at the police academy, Jackson. I mean, we were at different academies, but same difference. Why were we chosen to be ghosts?”

  “Because we were bullies and horrible detectives who thought we were great detectives,” I say.

  “Okay. Close enough. We never really detected anything, did we?”

  “Not really. But how about now?”

  “It might be a little too late for that. I have to go now.”

  I know I’m never going to speak to him again. “Holland! I can jump to the other side!”

  “You can’t.”

  I’m not even sure if I want to. But I put the cartridge in my coat pocket and try to leap up over it. It doesn’t look that high. I go about twenty, then thirty feet up, and the wall’s edge is just beyond reach.

  “I told you,” Holland says after I land, trying to catch my breath. “It’s okay. You’re not ready to go outside the garden. Look, just watch what you see, and you’ll be all right.”

  “Watch what I see,” I say, with disbelief, as if the conversation is finally catching up to me. But then he’s gone.

  I lean up against the wall again and hear birds rustling and chirping on the other side. I close my eyes. When I open them, I see a little paper boat coming toward me in the trough, from the direction of the swimming pool. The jinn is inside. I move out of the way of the miniature canal. His arm isn’t as badly damaged as I thought it would have been. I smell ginger and incense. His paper boat has a stiff sail, but when he gets closer to the grooved opening in the wall, he scurries to collapse and lower the mast. As he passes, we look at each other, but I can’t tell, for the life of me, what he’s thinking. He manages to lower the sail in the nick of time and then, so he doesn’t get decapitated going under the notch in the trough—which is rather low—he lays down in his boat and crosses his arms on his chest, like a vampire leaving paradise.

  I then realize that the cartridge that Holland has given me will not be there when I wake up. Nor the Game Boy.

  Because they are not real.

  The moon is so bright. It’s not asking a thing of me. I put the cartridge in the Game Boy and press START. I sit and wait against the stone wall for about a month. Frogs sit in my lap and lumber away. Geese land on my shoulders and sleep, and depart again. Bees pollinate my peonies, and die, and the descendants of those bees come back to the hand. I’m waiting for the moon to turn new, to vanish. When it does, and I can’t see anything, not even a single flower in front of my face, I have a conversion. In the darkness I’m shot through with a joy that I don’t deserve.

  But as to what I’m converting to, that will always remain a mystery.

  The Wildfires of Antarctica

  I loaned Roxy: Shark * Flower to the Antarctica Institute for the Arts because I wanted a better life for her; at the same time, it soon became apparent that the same problems that vexed me in regards to her behavior would trouble the mus
eum. Although she was out of my hands I still carried an interest in her well-being, as well as an aesthetic sense of pride, and an interest in whether her time in the museum would appreciate her value.

  Was it punitive on my part? I suppose it was. But she was the one who threw everything away. Roxy once had everything she ever wanted: protection from thieves, food.

  There are many others like her in the museum—though no two alike; that indeed could be a journeyman’s definition of art—and I was assured there would be opportunities for supervised interactions with other objets d’art with her same level of genetic provenance. And no expense would be spared in her preservation. Her display case contained the ambient full-spectrum lights that she needed for the chrysanthemums and poppies and amaranths to grow along the seams of her arms. Roxy would not be able to harm herself or others with her serrated molars, since they were capped; when they shed, the cap would grow with the new tooth. (The museum and I agreed to a 50/50 split on residuals for the aftermarket sale for the teeth no longer in her mouth, for the scrimshaw of majestic oaks the artist had encoded there.) A daily spore spritz-and-dry would keep her hair—coarse on her crown and spine, ultra-fine on her arms and legs—from losing its luminous sheen.

  And of course the museum gave me the opportunity to watch her every hour of the day. The surveillance bees would always be with her. I was a busy man, but I rarely left the villa, so I often checked on Roxy throughout my day. It soothed my soul.

  Here is Roxy sleeping, curled up in a ball in the corner of her case, the bees bobbing around her head.

  Here is Roxy eating a block of nutrience, then another.

  Here is Roxy in the greenhouse yard—named the Van Gogh Arboretum—with a soothing panorama of the Dutch countryside circa 1900 all around her. The museum, of course, is in West Antarctica, and the Dutch countryside is underwater, but Roxy has no way to know of these affairs. She hangs from her tail from one of the oak trees (a predisposition on her part that the artist cleverly integrated into her DNA) and swings gently, watching everything. There are only five or six other pieces of the collection allowed in the greenhouse at the same time. I certainly have interest in seeing what else is being accomplished in the field, and by whom. Two particular pieces catch my eye: Mareanxerias’ The Epoxy Disaster of Late Model Capitalism (a hairless golden bear cub with horse quarters) and Paint! Paint! Paint! (a taxidermied wolf head attached to a cherry-colored, wheelless motorcycle chassis and eight spidery legs) by the sublime master Ya Li.

  Epoxy and Paint always stand next to each other, and rarely exercise or relax. Their legs twitch. At first I think it is a glitch but after a museum guard attempts to separate the two, I realize that they are communicating to each other. The two shuffle apart before the guard can reach them but slowly gravitate back together after his departure. This occurs over the course of several days during their hour-long stays in the Van Gogh Arboretum.

  Roxy begins to find this curious. She has never been willing to make the first move with anything, but one time she presses her body against the glass of the panorama, close to Epoxy and Paint. As if trying to capture the false sunlight in her body. (She does not photosynthesize.) Eventually Epoxy and Paint look over at her in unison, and soon the two in conversation-by-tapping become three, though I have no way to know how Roxy has picked up on such a vernacular, since she was never taught such things in my villa.

  Still, this is worrisome. I alert my concierge at the museum and soon enough several guards come into the Arboretum to put a stop to this extraneous socialization. They are heavily armed with nonlethal coercive wands. Roxy sees them approach and her nostrils flare. I try to connect to my concierge again to warn the museum staff but before that can happen, Roxy wraps her tail around one of the guard’s necks and snaps it.

  Roxy tries to dash away, but nano-netting swoops down from the ceiling.

  Even Epoxy and Paint seem scandalized. They try to disentangle themselves from the melee, but are caught in the netting as well.

  Roxy’s access to the Arboretum is revoked, and a guard is in sight of her display case at all times. I should feel horrified and disappointed, but I am not. Because I know that Roxy’s errant behavior is deep-seated and incapable of being cured. I once tried instilling discipline into Roxy by telling her which rooms she could and couldn’t enter in the villa. The kitchen: only when it was time for her to eat. The foyer: only when guests were present for a reception and she was beckoned to remain motionless there. The study: never, under any circumstances. The library: never. My wife’s rooms: never.

  But she never listened.

  The next day I send an invitation to Roxy’s artist for a light afternoon lunch at the villa and a leisurely suborbital artillery firing. He agrees. I can tell he is reluctant.

  Artists are a necessary evil in my world.

  John Priestly—such an old-fashioned name—flies in from New Yellowknife. His skin has a bluish sheen to it, and I can’t tell whether that is from a side effect from his latest anti-aging treatments

  or preparation for using his own body as a genetic canvas yet again. Perhaps they are the same thing.

  On the rooftop overlooking the burning hills, we sit down for lunch and I ask him about a possible restoration job of Roxy. One, would this be feasible with a minimum of cost overruns, and two, would this decrease her resale value at auction?

  He sips his tea and stares at me for a long time. “Roxy: Shark * Flower,” he says at last, “is far more perfect than you can ever imagine. I wouldn’t dream of altering her, not a single strand of code.”

  I smile and recount her latest exhibition of aberrant behavior, perhaps laying the blame for her disposition at his feet. After all, I have always believed the artist has a certain moral responsibility for the very act of creation.

  John leans forward and pierces a grape with his fingernail. He draws the grape to his mouth, as if he is a poison-tester. “Each piece of art is unique, and has a different effect upon each person who encounters the work. Would you have asked Goya to make Saturn Devouring His Son a little less violent? Perhaps, you know, ‘tone it down’?”

  I tell him, this time without a smile, that I paid 500 million for Roxy, and that he’s no Goya.

  He laughs. “No, no I am not. No one is, anymore. Not even Ya Li.”

  I stare at him, and tell him that maintaining his artistic integrity is all well and good, but that Roxy is slowly becoming a menace, if she is not one already.

  “And how do you not know that this, too, is part of what makes her beautiful?” He shakes his head, and speaks to himself, as if I had suddenly disappeared, and he was left alone in a stranger’s house. “I once thought like you did. I worked so hard on my craft, and to make sure that people like you remained pleased. But now . . .

  no.” He is sure of his rightness, and I find this frightening.

  I stand up, and he follows suit, and shuffles to his helicopter without a farewell. It turns out that we will not be shooting satellite armaments into the ruins of Buenos Aires—together, at least. I discount his outburst as mere petulance. He loves his helicopters and studio-fortress and fame too much. He will never change.

  After a week of constant confinement, Roxy appears to have calmed, though her behavior is a bit erratic. She paces, she sleeps, she makes tiny trilling noises from the back of her throat. She tips her head back and laughs. I have never seen her laugh before. A troupe of teenagers from New Dubai traipse through the museum halls, disinterested in any of the work, soldiering on as if polar explorers from another century. As they walk past Roxy—the tour guide wisely decides not to dwell on her—she splays herself on the glass of her case and bares her teeth, her double line of fangs.

  All of her teeth are uncapped.

  Several of them begin shrieking, placing calls to their parents and nannies to rescue them. The tour guide fumbles with the emerge
ncy response interface attached to her arm. A sleeping gas fills the case and fogs it. Roxy struggles and lashes out, longer than I thought would have been possible, until at last she slumbers. She is taken to the Department of Restoration.

  The next morning I decide then that I need to buy some new art to clear my head. A fresh start for my collection.

  As I make preparations to fly to Cape Adare—my favorite gallery spot—I wonder how Roxy will respond to restoration. John Priestly would have been the ideal candidate for the task, of course, but that is out of the question. The museum has the best team on the continent. So they say. I hear that Epoxy and Paint are in restoration as well. The atmosphere has been growing more chaotic in the Arboretum, even with Roxy’s absence: more scuffles with guards, more cunning attempts at communication with other pieces of art.

  In a way I am already beginning to say good-bye to Roxy, as a squandered investment to write off. It will hurt, but not as much as these constant tantrums on her part. Art, above everything else, is a sign of one’s station in life, and it is difficult to properly display one’s station if there is not decorum.

  I am about to put on my favorite art-buying suit and go up to the helipad, but I get a ping from the museum.

  Roxy has escaped.

  My body trembles. I desperately want to harangue the museum concierge, but instead I hang up and retreat to my study. I turn on the camera view of Roxy and breathe a sigh of relief: the surveillance bees are still active.

  I see cacophony. An alarm has gone off and Roxy is running, alongside a galloping Paint and Epoxy, past display case after display case. Many are opened and empty. A museum guard stands in front of them, sparks flying off his gloves. Paint leaps forward in an arc and punctures the guard’s heart with one of his legs. Roxy fumbles through the guard’s red uniform, and rips the interface patch off his arm, and puts it between her teeth.