Crackpot Palace

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Kroncha, to the hunt,” said Ganesha, his color changing again, blue and red swirling through moon-white and mixing.

  The rat rubbed its eyes, stood up, and jumped down to the ground. As Ganesha squatted upon Kroncha’s back, the rat asked, “A demon?”

  Ganesha now brandished the point of his broken tusk as a weapon. “Correct,” he said. Kroncha inched forward, building speed.

  Chloe was stunned by what she’d seen. She wanted to follow but was unable to move.

  “I suspected as much from the moment she refused the modak,” said the rat.

  Ganesha nodded and they were off.

  It wasn’t until god and vehicle were just a faint smudge of brightness weaving away through the trees that Chloe overcame the static in her head and woke from amazement. The thought that called her back was that the demon could easily return and she would have to battle it alone. She tasted adrenaline as she bolted from the bench. Across the clearing and into the trees she sprinted, afraid to call out for what might be watching.

  At one point, early on, she thought she would catch them, but Kroncha moved deceptively fast and suddenly the path had disappeared. The ground was uneven and riddled with protruding roots. She hurried as best she could, still driven by fear. “Where’s my day?” she whispered. The night was getting cold. She passed through a forest she’d not known existed, waiting for the demon to pounce at any moment and thankful for the moonlight.

  The trees eventually gave way to a sandy mountain path littered with boulders. She knew there were no mountains within a hundred miles of where she lived. “I’m in a dream within a dream,” she thought, and climbed up onto a flat rock to rest. Her legs hurt and she realized she was exhausted. She lay back and looked for her star, but it was lost among the others.

  “If I fall asleep here and then wake, I’ll wake from this dream and be back at the picnic table in late afternoon,” she thought. She closed her eyes and listened to the breeze.

  She knew she’d slept but it seemed only for the briefest moment, and when she opened her eyes she groaned to see more night. There was soft sand beneath her, not rock, and it came to her that she was in a new place. Remembering the threat of the demon, she stood quickly and turned in a circle, her hands in fists. The moonlight showed, a few yards away, a mountain wall with a cave opening. Within the cave, she perceived a flickering light.

  “It’s in there,” she thought, and at that instant, Ganesha’s broken tusk appeared in her left hand. “We must destroy it,” she remembered him saying and realized that she’d never retrieve her day unless she confronted the demon. An image came to her mind of her mother making meat loaf and it weighed her down, slowed her, as she moved toward the opening in the mountain. She fought against it as if against a strong, silent wind. And then a cascade of other memories beset her—Simon, her father, her condescending English teacher, a group of kids snickering as she passed, her image in the bedroom mirror . . . Still she struggled, managing to inch along, drawing closer to the light within. At the entrance, she hesitated, unable to move forward, and then holding the tusk in front of her, point out, she swung her arm, slicing a huge gash in the malevolent resistance. There was a bang, the myriad bubble eyes that composed her demon exploding, and its power over her bled away quickly into the night.

  The cave’s interior was like a rock cathedral, the ceiling vaulting into the shadows above. Instead of the demon there was a shining blue woman holding a lotus flower, floating six feet off the ground. She wore a jade-green gown and a helmet made of gold. The blue vision smiled down upon Chloe, and the girl felt a beautiful warmth run through her, putting her at ease and filling her with energy.

  “I am the shakti,” said the blue woman.

  “The power?” asked Chloe.

  The woman nodded. She motioned for the girl to sit at the table between them where lay a blank sheet of paper. Chloe sat on the stone bench and turned the tusk around in her hand, from a weapon to a pen. The shakti gave her light, and she wrote, the tusk moving like an implement made of water over the page, birthing words almost before she thought them.

  A Week of Faces in the Trees

  I saw her there

  with flowing hair

  green against the blue

  A woman in a tree

  a woman of the sea

  and then I thought of you

  Her tail of leaves

  swam through the breeze

  she nodded into light

  Her eyes were figs

  her fingers twigs

  outstretched as if in flight

  Then I thought of you and me

  alone together by the sea,

  beneath the sun some time ago

  We found blue glass there

  amid the clumps of mermaid hair

  and I quoted Edgar Allan Poe

  “Everything we see and seem

  is but a dream within a dream.”

  You smiled and shook your head

  When summers into winters passed

  through every different color glass

  I learned the lie in what I’d said

  The woman in the tree is gone

  Out beyond the blue beyond

  I turn away and slowly walk

  Wondering tomorrow what I’ll see

  who the blowing leaves will be

  what I’ll have to say to me when we talk

  Back in the late afternoon, at the picnic table in the thicket by the lake, Florence folded the piece of paper that held her poem and slipped it into her back pocket. Then she capped her pen and climbed up on top of the table to sit with legs crossed, staring out at the sun’s last reflection on the lake. She had a smoke and watched the world turn to twilight, the stars slowly appear. Among them, she was surprised to be able to identify her own, and she reached up into the sky for it. It burned in her hand at first with a cold fire, but as she drew it toward her mouth, it became the sweet modak.

  “A universe,” said Kroncha, sitting at the foot of Ganesha’s throne on the floating platform in the Sea of Eternity. “She’ll have no room for meat loaf tonight.”

  Ganesha nodded and his stomach jiggled when he laughed, the echo of his mirth pervading a million realities, crumbling a million obstacles to dust.

  A Note About “Ganesha”

  I’d been researching the figure of Ganesha for a while, thinking about writing a story about him but never really feeling like I’d gotten to the bottom of things. While I was looking into this stuff, I had a student in my writing class, an older guy. He was a retired doctor who’d been born and raised in India. He was a good guy, had a great sense of humor. We used to talk after class a lot. One day I asked him about Ganesha. He knew a lot about the god and pointed out certain authentic texts on the Internet about him. He also had some cool ideas about Ganesha’s significance in the modern world and his relationship to the phenomenon of computing due to the fact that he was able to take down the Mahabharata from Vyasa without pause and with full understanding. At the end of the semester, after the last class, I asked him what he thought about my writing the story. He didn’t say anything for a while, but eventually he said, “If you write it with an open heart, Ganesha will accept it.” In the moment, I thought, “Solid,” but on the drive home that day a question slowly dawned on me, specifically, “What the hell did he mean by ‘an open heart’?” I never saw the doctor again, but I thought about his statement for a long time before I could write the story. It is undoubtedly the story of a cultural appropriation. What happens when we adopt aspects of other cultures and incorporate them into our lives in a way perhaps not fitting their original intended meaning or use? Is this always negative or, if one goes about it with an open heart, are there worthwhile things to be learned? This story appeared in the anthology The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, the last in a series of four YA books (The Green Man, The Faerie Reel, Coyote Road) edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and illustrated by Charles Vess. I loved working on the stories f
or them.

  Every Richie There Is

  Richie’s left arm doesn’t work; neither does his face. The arm hangs limp, like the catch of the day, but the face, like a maniac appliance, clicks through far too many major emotions in the course of a minute. You see every Richie there is in the time it takes for him to proudly reel off the first and last names of all of the executives he has met while working for the last thirteen years in the print shop at Mrs. Paul’s fish stick factory. It’s like a Richie train passing before your eyes and your first reaction is to want to run home and sharpen a screwdriver.

  He rents the downstairs of one side of a duplex next door, and our places are separated by only a narrow concrete driveway that we share. The house he lives in, like some ancient druid earth mound, is a magnet for tragedy. There was a woman who used to live upstairs who tried to commit suicide after she jilted her boyfriend and he succeeded in killing himself. After he was gone, I heard her sing love songs at the top of her voice along with the stereo. Then she took some pills and broke all the plates. There was a young pregnant mother with bad teeth and three kids who was addicted to alcohol and smack and who, after she fled in the middle of the night, was being hunted by the FBI. One night, after she had the baby, she asked me to go to the bar and buy her a twelve-pack of beer. Thinking of the child, I refused and gave her all my cigarettes instead. There was a stoned-out Laurel and Hardy couple who sold satellite dishes. During the day they were filled with hippie sincerity but they duked it out every Saturday night. And there is the woman who lives above him now, Patty Playpal, whose boyfriend socked her in the face because he couldn’t stand her incessant, coke-fueled blather for another second. Richie, fifty-four, with a ball-peen-to-the-forehead personality, must have felt this place drawing him across time and space the way a trout feels the persistent tug of the hook.

  Suzie is his only companion. She’s dark and noble and has a wide ass. Her collar is black, studded with chrome points, and her favorite thing, next to Richie, is a rubber cheeseburger. He comes home from lunch every day to walk her and at night he takes her to the park. When he’s not yelling at her to stay out of the road, he slips her button-size pizza snacks. He does all of the talking and she does most of the barking. You can see he’s a lonely guy. In fact, he exudes loneliness like a gray perfume from his Sears work pants and stretched out T-shirts, from the hair that peeks out of his ears, and his laugh that is like the cry of someone falling from a skyscraper. Whenever he sees my wife or me outside, he’s immediately there with some dry-ass conversation about home heating bills or methods for flea eradication. He must watch us all the time. When we take the kids and dog to the park, we are there no more than ten minutes before Richie shows up, wondering why he saw me out of work on the previous Wednesday at two thirty in the afternoon. I tell him I was watching the kids, and this brings on his raucous Saint Vitus dance of mirth as if he were a child on the verge of wetting his pants. We keep the boys at a distance for fear that someday he will explode or catch on fire.

  Over the past year, I have been caught in many a discussion with Richie. They are one-way affairs, since he is the expert and you are in need of his knowledge. Most of these lost moments are spent on how he was able to save money. He shops at three different grocery stories—one for meat, one for treats, one for paper products. I tilt my head to the side and nod as if he is relaying the recipe for eternal youth, but all the time I’m waiting for him to take a breath so I can cut in and say my good-byes. While I wait, I’m picturing him—evangelical late-night television, blue clouds of generic cigarette smoke, and half a bottle of store-brand diet orange. Richie likes his treats. “You know, your Yodels, some fudge swirl ice cream, pretzel rods,” he says. His kid brother “blew his brains out with a shotgun.” This story is always punctuated by a long, sophisticated exhalation of cigarette smoke. His ex, Barbara was “the finest gal in the world.” “Never loved her, never really loved her,” he repeats like a Greek chorus. The woman who lives above him tells me that when he knows she is home he jerks off and moans loud enough to rattle her bathroom fixtures. Once a month, he tells me either a racist story or one in which a guy has an incredibly big dick.

  I often wonder why I feel obligated to talk to him. A lot of times when I know he is outside in his front yard, I stay in or go out the back door. I have a wife and two kids and a demanding job, so why do I have to care about Richie? Pity is a dead little animal in your heart. I’ve really wanted to tell him, “Look, Richie, you’re a big loser. You’re a boor, a moron, and a pervert.” But now Richie has cancer, and he is half the Richie he used to be. Sorrow is bad enough, but sick sorrow—get me a cross and a wooden stake. His kidney has been removed and three inches of his left thigh bone have been eaten away. He needs crutches to get around and spends all his time sitting on his couch, watching the women’s workout shows and listening to, as he puts it, “the light classics.” When my wife or I leave the house, he cannot come out any longer, but I know he is in there, watching. At night I hear Suzie, jingling her collar in the tiny backyard, and the sound of Richie blubbering travels through the wall of his house and up the canyon of the driveway into my attic office window. These same sobs I heard once before, long ago, from a child lost at the World’s Fair. The first night I heard Richie, a bat crawled through the hole in our bedroom ceiling and flew low and silent, circling in the dark.

  The doctors have rigged Richie with a shoulder holster device that slowly emits an experimental drug into his system. If it is supposed to make him appear yet more grim and withered, melt his face to a Kleenex-thin skin that fits his skull like a driving glove, it’s working. He labors feverishly at a little table, figuring and refiguring his bills with pencil and paper, and reading, as if studying for a final exam, every scrap of information from the insurance company.

  When he calls, I never recognize his voice. “Who is it?” I ask, and he says, “It’s Bitchy Richie,” shrill and defensive, almost daring me to despise him. In recent calls he has told me about his past addiction to methamphetamine, his two marriages, his grown sons who tell him he was a failure as a father. When I can’t listen to any more of it, I ask, “How’s the leg?” My wife says he is confessing his life to me over the phone. Carrying Richie’s sins must change me in some way, because every night my three-year-old comes to sleep in our bed with us. I wake in the middle of the night and he is patting my shoulder. The only time I do not have Richie somewhere in my head is when I’m killing bats with my son’s toy broom. They come every night now, and I can’t afford to fix the roof.

  One night I wake to the whisper flap of leather wings and have a premonition that Richie will die during a blizzard. After a couple of days Patty Playpal upstairs will take the coke spoon out of her nose long enough to smell something bad and finally notice Suzie howling above the drone of her own monologue. She will find the remains of Richie hunched over his table, about to make the final calculation. I don’t think I will be moved to go to the funeral, definitely not to the wake. I can always say the kids have colds. After that, I will be expecting his ghost for a few months. Not horrifying—perhaps just a glimpse of Richie at midnight, in the park, calling for Suzie, who has remained behind. Then, when that’s over, I’ll think of him from time to time, probably in summer, because he used to let me borrow his electric lawn mower. My memory will grasp the whole sad Richie saga for an instant, and I will get up off the stoop and go in for supper. Maybe that night, when the kids are sleeping, I’ll say to my wife, “Remember Richie?” She’ll shiver a little and shake her head, and then the two of us will bust out laughing.

  It’s so hard to do good in this world, so hard to love and keep oneself aloft. Every day I pray that Richie will go away to the hospital so that I can forget about him and pretend that life is more than just an experimental drug. He doesn’t call anymore and his crying has grown weaker. I paid the guy who lives behind me to climb on the roof and patch the place where the bats were crawling in. The rain still leaks through, but we ca
tch it in buckets and flush it down the toilet. My sons grow bigger every day, and I watch vigilantly so that I can snatch away their loneliness before they notice it. I am constantly telling my wife how beautiful she is. I listen to her carefully, trying to find the person she was before we met fourteen years ago. All the dreams I have now are of some northern land with massive hills and overcast sky. I am there alone on business and can only speak to my family by phone. Each night it becomes more and more difficult to remember the name of my hometown, my number, my reason for being where I am. The people on the street are few, and when I ask them where the bus station is they snicker and give me bad directions. When awake, I’m keenly attuned to coincidence, searching wood grain and clouds for faces, trying with all my heart to rediscover my place in the story.

  A Note About “Every Richie There Is”

  This story, which first appeared in the literary journal Puerto Del Sol in 1993, is basically true. For those who have read my previous collection, The Drowned Life, the final story in that book, “The Golden Dragon,” takes place right around the same time, when we were living in the same duplex, and involves one of the same characters. If the mood ever strikes me, I have at least one more story to write about that time, and it is about the house that the character Richie inhabits in this tale. That story is a ghost story, as, in a way, both “Every Richie” and “The Golden Dragon” are.