by Curtis White
—PLATO
Once at the Marquis’s château, it was much easier for the Queen to gain entrance than it had been for the hyperbolic Percy. It helped that she arrived at an appointed time and in the middle of the afternoon. Rory answered the door. There were no lies about the wrong house or the wrong marquis. She was admitted with a deep and respectful bow.
“Right this way. The Marquis is expecting you.”
Actually, dreading would have been a better word.
The Marquis had many reasons to dread a conversation with Felicité, none of them having to do with omens. His anxieties were particular and substantial. He dreaded her visit because he resented her and would have a hard time not showing that fact. He resented her because she was a queen and somehow he was just a marquis. In his envious mind that made his title sound too much like he was a mere small-time founder of one of those newfangled startup firms that don’t actually seem to make or sell anything in particular. Companies with names like Kinetic Dispositions, Ltd. If you were to ask this founder just what his company did, he’d say something like, “We articulate systemic dispositions when underlying complexities are obscure. You’ve probably seen our work in relation to triadic analyses of abandoned market vistas.” Later, back in his gaudy corner office, the founder smirks and plays Angry Birds on his telephone, just as our do-nothing Marquis whacks Halo aliens. The difference, of course, is that Kinetic Dispositions will shortly offer an IPO and its founder will retire a billionaire, while the Marquis will be stuck in his decaying château with no one to talk to but Rory.
Although he disliked this feeling, this diminution, this confusion about his own legitimate rank, it was in truth the underlying reality of all historic nobilities: they have power, they have wealth, but they have no idea how to explain why that’s so, how it happened, or what good, exactly, they do, if they do anything at all beyond protect their own prerogatives behind a miserable façade of lying abstractions. The only difference between the ancienne regime and the modern financier, our corporate plutocrat, is that the old nobility played whist. That was the subconscious confusion for our Marquis: at some dim level of his mind he knew that he should be playing card games, looking out over a meticulously geometrical garden, snorting snuff, and signing off on decapitations. Instead, he was living in total abstraction, an almost metaphysical isolation amidst stands of corn or their stubble, and addicted to killing digital ghosts while smoking hashish. The world had gone wrong. Here, the peasants owned all the land, and the nobility had a front lawn. How much more at peace with the world he would be if he had a guillotine.
In relation to the Queen, his resentment was even heavier on his heart. Why did she get to be a queen? Why did she live on a romantic island of sages and sorcerers changing the course of history and influencing weather systems while he was in some midwestern gulag wondering what exactly the farmers did all day? He liked being The Marquis, and he liked lording it over the homeless and the droids in their lackey carrels over at Corporate South, about as alive as eggs in a carton. But when he was visited by a noble of superior rank, he knew he was just another rube. He knew that after the Queen’s visit he’d have to find his therapist’s cellphone number, and set up useless counseling sessions that would stretch into infinity, and talk about how his daddy was a real marquis, the real deal, but that he’d always felt so very small and weak, only a little marquis. All that pathetic talking, and revealing, and making-humble with someone whose only claim to credibility was an MA gained after twelve years of night school at North Southeastern Illinois State Extension Campus for Non-Traditional Students in Joliet, where classes were held in unused meeting rooms at the federal penitentiary. All this when what he wanted was so simple: to feel omnipotent. To own everything. To be ubiquitous. And fucking queens from mystical lands made that difficult.
Worse yet, there was the power issue, the puissance issue. The Queen, he well knew, could actually do stuff. She could put the hammer down. If she wanted shock and awe, she had it. She didn’t just brag to the peasants about it with no more follow-through than what an adolescent acquires from his Game Boy. All he had was a ridiculous “security force” mostly composed of minimum-wage day laborers, a mixture of Haitians, Nicaraguans, Sudanese, and, since Iceland had been put into receivership by the World Bank (its people ejected, put out in the North Atlantic in great flotillas of human flotsam) a whole lot of super-clean blond people who didn’t like sitting next to or being touched by the sullied Haitians. Which would have been great, the Icelanders were so pleasant to look at, a real feather in a marquis’s hat, except that they were so depressed and drank so many vodka slushies and just sort of spent their days running their tongues along the soiled rill of the world, that in the end he preferred the Haitians, especially when they spent their lunch hour sitting on the curb running their hands over their weathered faces and rheumy eyes. They were colorful and exotic, and they made more firm the fact that there was still a difference between a nobleman and his peasants.
Anyway, this security force was adequate for the purposes of driving poor people off the Marquis’s front lawn—as when the Occupy the Marquis people were around—but other than that they were a joke. A violent joke, but a joke. These day-labor goon squads really got off on violent repression, never mind that if they didn’t get the “c’mon” sign to get in the pickup truck the next morning, they’d be among the lumpen mass themselves, driven around with cattle prods, billy clubs, and rubber bullets by the very people they themselves had brutalized the day before.
All of this—what? security simulacrum?—made the Marquis disconsolate. He couldn’t even afford to buy Tasers for his agents. But what he most wanted was not slaughter in Halo, not Haitians beating people on the front lawn, he wanted a secret police. How important and generally puissant that would make him feel. He fantasized about the conversations he would have with his Midwestern Metternich.
The Marquis might say, “Oh, so you take the rascal away in the middle of the night, his wife and children grasping at his feet, and you put him in secret confinement. Then in the morning when the abandoned wife and children complain to the non-secret police, they can claim that they know nothing about it. They’ll say that he must have been up to something dangerous and now his family must suffer for his folly. They’ll say that he was probably kidnapped by a drug gang. This is very clever, isn’t it? And then you do whatever you like. Surely torture is involved? Yes, why not indeed! Is it possible that you reserve a special day each month for visitors? I don’t mean to be imprudent about this, but does it ever happen that, say, an important person could pop over just to see how it’s done, the torturing? Not to interfere, but just to satisfy his noble curiosity? Yes? Lovely. What time do these torture sessions ordinarily begin? Not too late, I hope. Ah, I see. That would cut into my late-night Halo sessions. Well, could you do a little special one for me at, say, sevenish?”
* * *
—
Back to the Queen. As you know, the Marquis consoled himself about his powerlessness through his growing prowess in Halo, but when in the presence of someone capable of real violence, virtuosic violence, even he, deluded though he was, knew that Halo-power was a lot like thinking you had a steady girlfriend because you paid $5 to watch a teenager go ’round the world with a vibrator on her webcam.
But all these reasons were just background noise, like an interstellar hissing, for his real reason for dread. He was pretty sure why she was coming, and he was pretty sure it had something to do with the visit of that strange masked man a month or so back. The idea of that conversation was, in a word, terrifying.
I am not being hyperbolic when I say that the Marquis was terrified. For he had a little guilty secret, and he had a sad sinking feeling that he was about to be busted on it. His secret was this: the card that the masked man had presented to him was not blank. It had a message, all right. The message was indeed from a powerful woman in the Hebrides, the Queen of Spells, and it was a simple request that the Marquis bring his authorit
y and influence to bear in order to get Percy registered in some sort of computer-technician program at the local community college. No doubt she thought that her request would have been taken up as a part of his routine constituent services. At the very least he should have been able to get the college to drop the out-of-state tuition.
So, for something so simple, something so obviously not requiring anything extraordinary, why had he—on the spot!—made a decision to claim that the note was blank? Well, it’s an easy question to ask now, but then he thought that his little fib would play out without incident. He sure didn’t foresee the sort of existential quandary that the moustachioed golem would be thrown into, getting himself lost, and for sure for sure he had no reason to think the Queen would actually care about such a self-evident dweeb. He had assumed that the letter was itself merely the Queen’s own constituent service to the forlorn masked man. In short, every instinct told him that he could write this one off, dodge it, without any negative consequences. Least of all did he suspect that the Queen herself would soon appear at his threshold, her mouth full of galling questions.
But this still doesn’t say anything about why he claimed that the message was blank. The short answer is that he didn’t want to be bothered by yet another needy person. That is why he had a security force, after all. He had other priorities and other goals: he wanted to be a Halo Legend. From the first moment that he’d heard that there were such people, Legends, that they had the most famously quick reflexes and deadly accurate mastery of all forms of Halo weaponry, he knew that he would devote his life, his whole life, his very quintessence, to this great purpose. If he was physically stuck in a corn state, he could still be a Legend in cyberspace, in the Cloud, a great hero spoken of in only the most reverential tones in the digitally transcendent world of Halo. It made him teary just to think of how glorious he could soon be.
The fact that a hireling and feckless dummy like Rory could kick his ass now and into every conceivable future that did not include the amputation of his thumbs was an inconvenient fact that he simply did not allow himself to think about. And the fact that Rory, good as he very probably was, was nothing near a Legend, that, too, he ignored. So, the basic reason was the most obvious and petty: he didn’t acknowledge the message because he had to tend to his vanities.
But there was another, subtler reason, to wit: he was convinced of his own impotence. In his darkest night of the soul, he felt that he could barely push the salt shaker across the table with a rigid index finger. Really, in the end, Halo was his last hope because in it he was only required to push buttons with his fingers. Lacking that, there was only terrified paralysis, staring into the void, a little drool gathering on a stubbly chin. Rory could have him dunked in amber and set out on the lawn, an umber icon for the peasants to hang garlands on and cry, “Miracle! Miracle!” when the Marquis’s hot tears made their sad way down his cheeks.
This conviction of ultimate impotence made it obvious to him that were he to go to the admissions office at Corn Belt Community College, he would be shown the door.
“Mr. Marquis, Corn Belt does not admit, what do you call ’em, the merely human-like. No golems, no clones, no zombies, no replicants, and no astral emulations. We admit humans. Humans looking to better themselves in a difficult economy. Humans looking for job training so they can pay their mortgage, pay their taxes, and put food on the table for their children and the occasional derelict mother-in-law. I don’t understand why this phantom-in-flesh would even want a job. Does he even eat? Has he been properly microchipped by the INS? You know, GPS implants are required before enrollment for out-of-state students.”
“But this is what the Queen of Spells has requested for her Thing. What will I say to her? What will you say to her?”
A smile of industrial-strength condescension.
“Well, the Queen should know that Corn Belt Community College has its own standards and, most importantly, its own Trustee-approved procedures. This would violate procedure. Can you can please communicate that robust fact to the Queen? Surely, she will understand the concept of ‘best practices’ even if it’s a little above your pay grade. I’m sure she consults best practices when herding the fairies, or what have you, out there in the Hebrides. By the way, where are those damned islands? Do you know?”
“What if I, your Marquis, demanded it?”
“Please, Mr. Marquis, for my sake, for your sake, don’t go there. Don’t take that route. Don’t cop that attitude. If it helps (because it does help me), just say to yourself ‘policy.’ Say it over and over. Close your eyes. Take deep, even breaths, slow everything down, find inner calm, and say ‘policy. ’”
That was what the Marquis expected and what he was sure, correctly, he would find at dear Corn Belt: humiliation at the hands of the admissions staff. They probably wouldn’t even let him talk to the head of admissions. He, after all, had real power, and lived in haughty isolation, at the end of a long sheetrocked hallway, the door guarded by a single sentry, who asked of all comers, “Who dares?”
“Policy, policy,” he said to himself, closing his eyes.
I should tell you that, based on my own extensive experience, this is exactly what college bureaucrats are like, but, frankly, I never met one this articulate and self-knowing. I never met one with such a shapely and muscular philosophy. Otherwise, my feeling is that college administrators and their bureaucrats should be shot on sight like the zombies that America’s youth are so fond of gunning down these days.
12.
“Tiberius complained that to be emperor was to hold a wolf by the ears.”
—STRINGFELLOW BARR
Well, like any dreaded thing that one imagines so far off that it will never actually arrive, the time arrived. The Marquis and the Queen of Spells sat opposite each other in the Marquis’s private chamber.
The Queen was not dressed like something out of the dank past, some darkened druidess. She was dressed in knock-off Izod and Lacoste sportswear that she had picked up just that morning, after breakfast at the Denny’s restaurant at College Hills Shopping Mall. While eating a Grand Slam breakfast, she saw a TJ Maxx across Veteran’s Parkway, which street, at great risk to her life, she crossed on foot. She loaded up on $10 polo shirts and $20 blue jeans, and called a taxi to get her back safely to her motel. She couldn’t wait to show the sporty vestments to her pals back on the Isle of Islay, where strip malls and discount stores were a vexed fantasy.
Her Spellness was taken aback by the Marquis’s room. The walls were yellowed and the paint was peeling around the heating vents. There was a large brown spot of water damage in an outside corner of the ceiling (standard feature with old galvanized plumbing). The furnishing was just a few mismatched and threadbare armchairs, and a couch so stained and sunken that not even the Marquis’s matted and petulant cocker spaniel would sit on it. In the center of the room was this enormous monolithic thing over which a king-sized bed sheet had been thrown. That, we know, was the wide, wide, widescreen television console and all manner of Xbox paraphernalia. For obvious reasons, the idea that the conversation might somehow turn to Halo terrified the Marquis. He knew he’d break down and confess to the slaughter of the little ones, the masked man’s delicate and defenseless companions. As for the TV itself, you could feel its radiant indignation at being covered as if it were something to be ashamed of. Even though its plug had been pulled, you could still see a pale glow just behind the sheet where it sulked in resentment.
The Marquis himself was dressed in the fabric of royalty, but it was tattered, as if he’d been given the stuff by a local theater company that was cleaning out its closets. (“Hey, maybe that bitch the Marquis would like this moth-eaten stuff.”) Worse yet, his hair was long, oily, and uncombed. He’d shaved, but it appeared that he’d used an old razor; there were stubborn spots where you could still see a week’s stubble asserting itself. As for his teeth, he was a dental hygienist’s nightmare: the plaque on his lower front teeth had scaled the teeth nearly
to the top, and his gums were bright red with infection. (Thus the just deserts of the hash-smoking habituated gamer.) Finally, he seemed nervous and twitchy, as if he were working on his second pot of coffee or his third dose of Benzedrine.
“Obviously,” she thought to herself, “recent years have not been kind to the American nobility. It’s easy to imagine how something could go awry for Percy.”
At any rate, they were seated now.
“W-w-welcome,” he said, as if what he meant was “Don’t hit me!”
She shifted her shoulders and turned her head, increasingly skeptical. At last she said, “Monsieur le Marquis, I have a problem, a concern, that I’m hoping you can help me with.”
“F-for sure.” He smiled, mean and sniveling.
“A few months ago, I sent to you a denizen of my domain. He carried with him a message. He was not strictly speaking a human, although he should easily have passed for one. He was in fact one of my little creatures, surely you’ve heard of them. At any rate, he has not yet returned. Did he meet with you?”
The Marquis tried to remember what he did with his face when he was thinking. He settled for the sort of expression used when looking for something that has rolled under a bed.
“Several months ago, you say?”
“Just a few. Two, maybe.” She felt a little creepy on this point. She herself wondered why she had been so late in looking into the matter. The Marquis sensed it might be a weakness, something that might help to exculpate him, should push come to shove.
“That’s a lot to expect of my poor old memory.”
“Please try.”
“Okay.”
The look of trying.
“He would have been dressed all in black. And he is fond of wearing a mask like the old Zorro TV character, if you remember him. His name is Percy.”
