Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  What troubling nights those were for us! At five a.m. the sidewalks would be crowded with townsfolk taking the walk of shame back to whatever was left of their families. The men’s underwear would look as if someone had dumped a cup of yoghurt in them. The women would stare vacantly, stricken smiles on their faces, futilely holding their now buttonless blouses together with trembling hands.

  As for the matrix of computers that made this lubricious commonality possible, it was as if it had a virus that was more like a venereal disease than something requiring a security patch. Something had contaminated the inner mind of the digital realm, creating a sort of alphanumeric fever-dream where a deviant /PCI0@0/SATA@A/PRT0@ in the Universal Device Tree had been uploaded into all of these poor folk, complete with peculiar tendencies. Yes, again, contagion! And yet, for those involved, there was nothing artificial or consumer-electronic about their experiences. For them it all felt more like the revelation of an ancient identity, something to be found at the apexes of pyramids while a priestly caste looks on. This identity had long eluded them, but now it was very near and very clear and very, very dear.

  “So this is what I am,” they said, and smiled.

  And so, with cheerful resignation, they got on with it.

  9.

  “What is most holy in me is delivered up to mockery.”

  —JOHANN FICHTE

  Her name was Felicité. You don’t know her, but you know of her. She was that woman of great power and wealth alluded to by the Masked Messenger. It was she who sent him on his errand.

  To her less-than-familiars, she was the forbidding Queen of Spells. Her ancient and noble clan had long ago established their demesne on the tiny Isle of Islay in the Outer Hebrides. They fell in love with Islay, a place of fairies, magic, and mystery. They soon learned the dark arts of the island, and over the generations these occult skills were enlarged, perfected, and at last given to this precocious young girl. A great dark power was hers, but she never used it for dark purposes. For she was not interested in the wizardry of skulduggery and political machinations; rather, she was a sort of wizard poet. Like Manfred, she could summon any spirit she liked, but she could also create beneficial spirits and name them.

  Her wisdom, like the Buddha’s, was “do no harm,” and she didn’t. Well, not on purpose, she didn’t. But, as you will have observed yourself, once you start doing things, other things follow, unanticipated things, and these are frequently such as can be accurately described as harmful or even catastrophic. Things accumulate and stumble drunkenly, by which point if there hasn’t been some sort of bloody muck-up, it’s a miracle, a real bewilderment. Call me gloomy, the Queen always did, but that’s how the world looks to me. “The best procedure is to sit on your hands, hold your breath, and hope for the best,” I’d say to her. She’d just stare at me and shake her lovely head sadly and say, “You disappoint me!”

  “Oh, bright eyes!” I’d retort.

  At any rate, it was she created the somber messenger and sent him on his baffled way to N— and the Marquis. In saying that she, the Queen of Spells, had made this messenger, I do not mean to say that he was for her a mere piece of wizard gadgetry, some hollow husk into which she had sighed her sweet but indifferent breath. She didn’t make many of the perplexed golems, but when she did she always did so reverently. She cared about her guys, is the way I’d put it. She even went to the trouble of giving them names (in this case “Percy”), even though they rarely remembered them. She sent them on their missions with some anxiety, knowing that what she asked of them might be dangerous, and knowing just how poorly prepared they were to deal with the busy, self-seeking, and malign world of humans.

  On the subject of these malign humans: I have learned that when a certain kind of human would discover that the Queen’s creations were not-quite-human, something seemed to click in them, click in a wrong sort of way, click as in: “What I’m hearing here, Mrs. Islay, is that I can do just about anything to this puppet without any moral considerations. Right? Am I missing something? If I’m understanding this…what would you call him? This moist duffel bag [!?] is more like an inflatable sex doll than he is like us humans. (Well, maybe not more like a sex doll than Marcia over there, but still, you know what I mean. By the way, can someone see if she’s still breathing?) So yessss, by all means, you may leave him here. We’ll take good care of him. I may even tap a keg of Old Style and invite some friends over to celebrate his presence among us. Oh, one last thought, does this thing have a memory? I mean, could it like testify?”

  Anyway, in order to make her more recent creations, like Percy, feel a little safer in their work, keep them a little further from the predations of the wrong sort of human, she also created a small army of companions for support. They were too tiny to offer physical protection, unfortunately, but they could provide moral witness. For some reason, their little staring eyes did dampen the enthusiasm of the moderately horrible humans. (The utterly horrible didn’t care if they watched or not. They even seemed to like an audience.) Unlike Percy, once these tiny companions had served their modest purpose, the chaps were usually vacuumed up, recycled, or otherwise rendered as livestock feed or nutritional supplements.

  But this was all several months ago, now. She had said to Percy, “Deliver this message to the Marquis of N— in Illinois, USA. If all goes well, he will give us a royal brevet allowing ourselves special privileges.” It should have taken no more than a week, even if processing the little companions had delayed things at customs.

  And in this case there was quite a delay. To the customs agents and airport security, Percy’s companions looked like a bunch of wind-up toys set loose—running into one another, falling down—and Percy had his hands full as they staggered around the room. The federal marshals screamed at them to drop or step back or raise or spread, they couldn’t seem to agree on what they wanted, nothing of which the little darlings understood, bless them. They were cheap things and tottered stiffly when not on their horsies, and, from a security perspective, why weren’t they suicide bombers, maybe? With little tiny explosive vests capable, say, of blowing up a Kleenex box. I’d say the U.S. agents were entirely in the right when they shot a few of them, just to test their mettle. Unfortunately, as with the trigger-happy Marquis just a few days in the future, the cops seemed to get carried away, and soon there was a regular police riot, with bullets flying around errantly as if Fearless Fosdick were doing the shooting. In the final body count, a regular variety pack of foreign nationals of the “little brown” sort were killed along with the leprechauns on horseback. Of course, being in any sense threatening was often worse than mere death in those days of extraordinary rendition, ghost detainees, black sites, torture by proxy, and extrajudicial detainment. In fact, once the little fellas were given entrance to the country, there was a worrisome little fella remainder, those who were KIA or arrested. The Masked Messenger tried to pursue the issue, knowing how unhappy Felicité would be if she started getting postcards from Guantanamo, but the Feds took a hose and squeegee to what was left of the kills, and Percy and his remaining companions were escorted out of the terminal and into waiting vans with blackened windows.

  Well, anyway, that was their hard luck, the little fellas, and after all they weren’t real, even if they were prone to tears, and so I won’t waste any more of your time on them. It’s not as if the mayhem got on CNN or anything, although it might have minus the White House news blackout. But I do hate to think of the unaccounted leprechauns in an open cage somewhere south, sweltering behind their little masks, squatting in their own shit on a concrete floor, little black bags over their heads, sobbing while Chihuahuas sniffed at their crotches, while overhead indifferent palm trees waved, as if they saw an old friend at the other end of the beach.

  But then, for reasons not even she could explain, she forgot about Percy. Distracted? Was he like a pan of milk she’d been heating absentmindedly until with a start she smelled it overflowing into the flames and burning? Whatever th
e case, eventually his absence worried her. The little men didn’t concern her. If they’d returned, she would just have melted them down in the big pot out back until they were once again the flabby cack that they’d come from. But she had plans for Percy.

  In her mind, Percy had potential. He was what she called a “good one.” She honestly thought he would do well at one of those technical institutes that the Americans were so pleased with. He’d have to apply himself because, hard as she tried, she could never quite make her creatures anything like what you’d call bright. Still, she could just see him in a little cubicle, his happy workspace, his computer before him, smiling in a way that was both happy and idiotic. How proud she’d be! The only thing she worried about was his tendency to be a little melodramatic. Even though he was not really alive as such, in any strict sense of alive, he had this strange habit of claiming that his life was in danger. This sometimes made things difficult for him in the midst of the little chores he was given. Stranger yet, when he got that way, there was just no reasoning with him. Once he got started, it was all atrocities (that was a favorite) and bloodthirsty fiends pursuing him, threatening to cut his throat. It was disturbing to a lot of the people he met. She probably should have given him a little card to hand out explaining his peculiar behavior, as if he were just someone with a theatrical case of Tourette’s.

  Eventually, even though she hated to travel, she decided that she had to go after him herself. You are probably wondering why she didn’t just send another golem out after him, but she’d tried that in the past and it didn’t work. After a day or two, the searching golem would return and say, “Let me get this straight. Someone is looking for me, right?” “No! You are doing the seeking!” And off he’d go only to return a few days later, saying, “Okay, could you go over that again?”

  No, that would not do, especially for a creature as important to her as Percy. So she said, “While the nigh thatch smokes in the sun-thaw, and the eave-drops fall in the trances, let my secret ministry be done with radial arm saws!” And so saying she traced his route to distant N— determined to find him, set him up in an apartment, and enroll him at Corn Belt Community College. This was all she really wanted from the Marquis and his brevet: a little help signing him up for some vocational courses that would allow him to be not merely a wizard’s golem but a suitably employed data drone.

  How Percy or the Marquis could have got such a simple purpose messed up was beyond her. But even as fond as she was of the “instant peasants” (her term) that she created, she knew that they almost never did anything entirely right. There was always a sort of messy surplus, a gory shirttail hanging out the back and leaving a trail of blood behind.

  10.

  “There are ancient and modern poems that breathe the divine spirit of irony throughout…there is in them a truly transcendental buffoonery.”

  —FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

  Anxious about the approaching meeting with the Queen of Spells, the Marquis asked Rory if there had been any omens recently in the form of prodigies that might provide a sense of what to expect. Rory’s face drained of color, and he stared at his interlocutor, hanging fire.

  “What in the world is the matter? You’re hanging fire,” said the Marquis.

  “I’m afraid to say, sir.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “There have been such prodigies, sir, and many of them.”

  Now it was the Marquis’s turn to drain of color.

  “Well, you’d better tell me then.”

  “Yes, sir. First, sir, remember that these were told me by simple and superstitious people.”

  “Oh, you mean over in Peoria. Those people barely know to live in houses.”

  “There and elsewhere, sir.”

  “All right, then, get on with it.”

  Rory took out a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled notes.

  “First, it was reported in Leroy that a vine shoot burst into flame. It rained chalk in Downs, and blood in Funk’s Grove. In Springfield a statue of Abraham Lincoln moved forward of its own volition. Finally, a cow in Towanda talked.”

  “Good Lord, what did it say?”

  “It said, ‘I am one who eats her breakfast watching morning glories. ’”

  “Obviously!”

  “I think the point is that it talked at all.”

  “Understood, but all the same, if it’s going to go to the trouble of talking, it ought to say something worth hearing. Not just ungulate banalities.”

  “As you like, sir. If I may, ungulate is a very fine word. I thank you for it. I shall share it with my wife this evening.”

  “Rory, you’ve been working for me for many years and I did not know you had a wife. I thought you were of another persuasion.”

  “Sir?”

  Awkward pause.

  “The jocose persuasion, of course.”

  “Ah, jocose. I thought you might be suggesting that I was a faggot.”

  “Rory!”

  “Shall I proceed, sir?”

  “Go ahead, but be careful. We don’t want to create an uncomfortable work environment for the cleaning bitch. The feds are watching because Tuesday the Laotians in security beat some spics, and the next day the greasers in security beat some gooks. I don’t mind that, but once the courts get involved…the paperwork!”

  “Sir, you quite amaze me.”

  The Marquis nodded humbly.

  “It’s the aura of nobility.”

  “Quite so. Then in Lexington there was a great commotion because a child in the womb shouted, ‘Hurrah! ’”

  “My God! A fetus, you say? What was he hurrahing?”

  “I cannot say, sir. A fetus shouting anything was sufficient, I believe, to catch their simple attention.”

  “True enough. But I wonder how they heard it. I mean, just how loud could a little fetus, a mere tangle of unresolved coding, be?”

  “That’s what I said, sir, but there were many that claimed to hear it quite clearly. They said that the youngster was celebrating General Beauregard’s victory at First Manassas.”

  “Little late for that, isn’t it?”

  “The South, it is said, will rise again.”

  “So I’ve heard. Well, is there more?”

  “Oh yes, sir, there’s always more. In Chenoa, a woman changed her sex.”

  “To what?”

  “She is now a dog being rained on.”

  “Does she call that a sex?”

  “I asked her that and she said, ‘I am whitened bones in a field. ’”

  “That is not a prodigy. She must be one of the homeless lunatics that I’m supposed to do something about, God knows what.”

  “In Pontiac an altar appeared in the sky with men in white robes around it.”

  “That’s better. Pontiac has always been a reliable place. A very sober lot, the Pontiac.”

  “In Peru, graves yawned and yielded up their dead.”

  “Wow!”

  “And in Eureka, fierce, fiery warriors fought in the clouds, and drizzled blood on the town. The noise of battle was hurled this way then that, in the air, and horses neighed while ghosts shrieked and squealed in the streets.”

  “That’s terrific! Those are what I call omens!”

  “There’s more. In Dwight, a swarm of bees was mistaken for an invasion of armed men.”

  “Oh, come on. Now you’ve ruined everything. A swarm of bees? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Not for the townspeople who slaughtered their own wives and children, despairing that they would fall into the hands of the bee-like barbarians.”

  “Are you making this stuff up?”

  “Sir, you asked for prodigies.”

  “Yes, but real prodigies like armies fighting in the clouds.”

  “Please not to blame the messenger, my liege.”

  “All right. At long last, is that all?”

  “Yes, sir, except that in Streater the soothsayers required propitiatory rights and full-grown victims were sac
rificed.”

  “Full-grown what? Not people, surely.”

  “Yes. The priests said it was done because they were too many.”

  “Too many people?”

  “‘Too many people in Streator’ is the way he put it.”

  “That’s awful, but just like those priests. Between you and me, I see their point. I mean about Streator.”

  “You may be consoled to know that the sacrifices were followed by a period of prayer led by the Mayor.”

  “Mayor Cachesex? That drunk?”

  “Sir, it is said that a flower dies even though we love it, and a weed grows even though we do not love it.”

  “Oh, this is hopeless.”

  “Did you know that in Joliet a man of livid hue on the city planner’s staff found that his late model, low mileage, foreign import (a Kia, to be exact) had been replaced by a one-horse chaise once known as a cabriolet? And all while he ate his supper.”

  “Won’t you please shut up!?”

  “I won’t claim that as a prodigy, but I do think it bears looking into.”

  “Well, I won’t look into it, if it’s all the same to you. Nonetheless, this little talk has calmed me, perhaps because you are so stupid that if worse comes to worst I’ll be happy to die just so I won’t have to listen to you anymore.”

  “Sir!”

  “Ah, Rory, the valiant only taste of death but once.”

  “Indeed that’s so, sir!”

  11.

  “We are shackled to this bomb we call the body.”