“Butts belong in receptacles appointed for the purpose, Cummings. Park yours here. Drink.”
Cummings would not give up without a fight. “I have breakfasted already, sir.”
Rat was equally adamant. “Drink.”
Cummings complied. Far from turning to dust upon his tongue, as he had anticipated, the nectar was especially sweet, evocative of adjectives to which he had no ready reference. “Bloody good, that.” He startled himself with the remark.
“So it is. Attributable, no doubt, to the spirit with which it was prepared. That of a desire to serve. Now,” said Rat, placing the tray upon a table Cummings had earlier drawn forth for the purpose, “eat up.”
“But what about you, sir?”
“What about me indeed,” Rat replied, his eyes once again drifting toward the camera lens. “That, to borrow a gag from Shakespeare’s dog Abedegdod, is the question.”
Cummings, his reservations evaporating with every morsel, tucked in to his breakfast with a surprisingly good appetite. “Hamlet,” he said with his mouth full. “The famous soliloquy in act—”
“Stow it, Cummings.”
Cummings stowed it.
“You will recall that I have remarked subsequent to previous episodes, that mine has not been a life of service, or sentiments to that effect?”
Cummings attempted to clear his responsorial apparatus.
“Just nod,” said Rat.
Cummings nodded.
“While I am not entirely at fault—a certain amount of the credit for the kind of person I was must be accepted by the society of my time—I was, nevertheless, the product of my own design.”
Cummings nodded again, ruminatively.
“Well, henceforward I’m altering that design, Cummings. This latest installment showed me, and none too subtly, what I am. Rather what I was. A slave to the popular media and low public expectations. I did not utilize my allotted portion of talent to produce art—the purpose of which, I see now, is to elevate the consciousness of he who perceives it—but rather to shock. To debase and degrade. The purpose of which is to make the public feel moral by comparison and, not incidentally, to make a pile of money.”
This came as no surprise to Cummings who had, early in their career together, been treated—rather subjected—to an impromptu rendering of some of the Occupant’s fruitier offerings. He masticated quietly.
“There is no depth to which the protagonist of my latest experience would not have sunk in order to achieve similar objectives.”
“Ratings, sir?” Cummings speculated.
“Call it what you will: Ratings. Approval. Validation. Fame and fortune. It’s the same monkey in many suits, Cummings. All derivative of the paradoxical need to convince others that one is not what one knows oneself to be. To pull the wool over the collective Eye. To make oneself the center of the universe. Well, since emerging science suggests that the center of the universe is a black hole—a cosmic colon, if you will—this is not so lofty an aspiration as it may appear on the surface.”
“It is a philosophical thought, sir,” said Cummings, “stimulative of the Purkinje cell and its attendant dendrites.”
Rat let the neuroanatomical reference pass without comment, especially in consideration of the fact that whether or not the cerebellum had other than purely motive responsibilities was, as far as he was aware, still in dispute. “Nor would I have scrupled at plumbing similar depths. You must understand, Cummings, that competition is fierce. In my day the public appetite for artistic excrement of the kind I once produced is insatiable, and legion are those who feed it. The rewards, measured strictly in dollars and cents, are appreciable.”
“I am sorry to hear it, sir,” said Cummings who was, once again, arranging Rat’s bedclothes and patting his forehead, which action seemed to produce a groggy haze in the Occupant’s brain.
“Another day come and gone, Cummings?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I entertained you?”
“You never fail to give satisfaction in that regard, sir.”
“Glad to be of service. I wonder where I’m off to now.” His eyes roamed the room in search of a reflective surface, and found a wall-sized mirror in which the image of his soul was alternately writing upon a scroll and looking about the lofty ceilings of the palace bedroom for inspiration.
The Princess Who Never Knew When
The twentieth and twenty-first nights
Once upon a time, in those days when princes and princesses were so numerous you couldn’t swing one overhead without hitting several others, when fairies and dragons and elves littered the landscape so that it was very difficult to mow the lawn, those days, in short, when kings and queens were common as beans and sentences ran on forever, there lived a particular princess.
“Not surprising,” you say. “Nothing to write home about.” “Ho-hum,” you say. “Another princess.”
Well, were this just your ordinary run-of-the-mill princess, you may be right. But such was not the case and that, as they say, is the crux of the story.
It all began when the Princess was born and the King and Queen, so pleased she’d arrived with the customary inventory of fingers and toes and what-not, decided to throw a party for her christening.
Of course, they had to invite everybody who was anybody, or somebody would be offended. And top of the list of people not to offend were the fairy godmothers. The Queen’s parents, Fred and Ethel, when she herself was newborn, had neglected to invite her unsavory aunt Putruda to her christening. Not de rigueur, if you take my meaning. Not at all The Thing To Do. The upshot being that the nasty old bird transformed herself into a crow, flew in through the bathroom window and alighted in front of the bassinet.
You could say she was in a fowl mood. No sooner had she resumed her natural state (and there are some who would argue that the crow had been an improvement) than she started casting spells hither and yon by the mouthful, the future Queen herself, small and unknowing though she was, being the principal recipient. To make a long story short, the whole thing involved a spinning wheel, a finger prick, a tediously long nap, a handsome prince, a kiss of earthshaking proportions and all sorts of things no one wished to see repeated. So, needless to say, special care was taken to omit none of the current crop of fairy godmothers.
Unfortunately, Fate was lolling about on a cloud that day, having nothing better to do than ty knots in the silver lining, decided to toss a wrench in the works. Thus, the invitation to Probosticus, the most powerful fairy godmother of all, naturally fell behind a filing cabinet in the mail room.
Well, understanding and forbearance not being chief among Probosticus’ dainty attributes, she showed up at the christening and took over the show, just as the second fairy godmother was about to bless the Princess.
The wicked old crone bent over the cradle and, smiling a toothless smile, said: “What a pretty child.” Though she spoke softly, her words echoed to every ear thanks to the cathedral’s excellent acoustics. Everyone held their breath. She stood up suddenly and, to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, cried: “That is my blessing!” She employed a theatrical pause. “Beauty,” she said, and she sounded just like the witch in The Wizard of Oz when she says: “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” She turned again to the Princess and stroked her soft baby cheeks with her crooked old fingers. “Unbearable beauty. Indescribable beauty. That is my gift to you.”
That was it. She stood up and walked slowly down the aisle, casting a few scalding glances here and there before turning into a newt and slithering down bewteen the cracks in the flagstone floor.
Everyone—having taken a quick check to make sure all their body parts were accounted for and there were no members present that hadn’t been there before—sighed a sigh of relief.
“Well,” said the King to the Queen, “that wasn’t so bad, wot? Beauty, I mean. There a worse things, eh? Two heads. Scales. Tomato aspic. Democracy.”
“At least we won’t
be sleeping for another hundred years,” said someone in the crowd, to which everyone agreed heartily. “That was some kiss,” whispered the Queen to the King in an aside, referring to a memorable event in the past.
“Talk about morning breath,” the King replied, and the Queen stuck him in the ribs with her scepter.
Only the second fairy godmother seemed to know which end was up. She knew that beauty, not tempered with wisdom and grace, could be just as much a curse as an armload of dead squid.
She stepped up to the cradle and whispered something only the Princess could hear. “I bless you with changing,” she said, “until you learn the secret of true beauty.”
And that was that. At least for the time being.
The Princess grew and as she grew became a bit of a tomboy. Now, had she preferred the company of girls the make-up would have hit the fan much sooner, because girls would have been jealous of her and talked behind her back and been nasty and catty because that’s the way girls have fun. Instead, she played outdoors with the boys and, since they always called her “pig-face” and “squirmy” she never got the idea that every day brought with it a fresh load of pretty and dumped it on her. Neither did anyone else, quite frankly, for her face was almost perpetually covered with mud or some other foreign substance.
As it turned out, however, this Probosticus didn’t fling her spells in vain. She knew her stuff.
One day the Princess, whose name, incidentally, was Eleanor, was out playing fetch with her chums. The object of the game was that one of the boys would throw a stick or some similar object and Eleanor would fetch it. There were no dogs in the kingdom, you see, and only royalty was allowed to fetch. And with Eleanor it was an art. This being the case, she exhibited no hesitation when one of the boys threw the stick halfway across the lake.
In she went, clothes and all, swam out to the stick, snatched it in her teeth and paddled back toward shore.
The sky was blue. Woolly clouds fluffled across heaven like happy little sheep, birds chirped in the trees. There was, in other words, in nature at large no foreshadowing of the calamitous events unfolding.
Eleanor sloshed into the shallow water where, after a brief tussle, two of the boys managed to retrieve the stick from her mouth. Exhausted by her endeavors, she was bent over, her hands on her knees, dripping into the quiet water. It was then, for the first time, she noticed—really noticed—her reflection. The image was enhanced by the absence of the usual layer of debris that had been washed away.
“Wow!” she said.
“Wow!” said the boys who, coincidentally, arrived at puberty at that precise instant and, in another, they were on their knees pledging undying love and proposing marriage.
All except Butch. “Come on, dogsbody, fetch!” he said, swinging the stick in the air.
Eleanor ignored them with regal impunity as she waded from the water with a faraway look in her eyes. “I must put on a dress,” she murmured.
The Queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey, when Eleanor squished in, still in a daze.
“Oh, Elly,” said the Queen with her mouth full. “You’re dripping on the carpet.” It was then her limpid pools alighted on the Princess’s visage. “Oh, my!” she said breathlessly. “You’re beautiful!”
“Wondrously,” Eleanor appended as she drifted across the hall and up the winding marble stair to her room.
“What do you make of it?” said the Queen to the King that night at dinner.
“Of what?” said the King. “Would you please pass the peanut butter.”
“Of the Princess,” said the Queen, passing the requested condiment. “Seems old Probosticus’ blessing kicked in with a vengeance.”
“Well,” said the King, “it was bound to happen. I mean, you’ve got to say this for those old girls, they don’t waste their spells and incantations. Still, it could be worse. That reminds me . . . I was thinking—”
“Oh dear,” the Queen interrupted, “that always gives you headaches.”
“It just dawned on me, then, you’re a hundred years older than I. In fact, everyone around here who’s over twenty is at least a hundred years older than I am. Your mother, for instance—”
“Shut up and eat your sandwich,” said the Queen.
In the days that followed, the whole of Europe was aflame with talk of the Princess’s transformation. This was because princesses, taken as a whole due to inbreeding, tend to be pretty hard on the ocular nerves, and none too bright in the bargain. So news travels fast when one crops up that is something less than a gargoyle, which is why princes (no prize commodity themselves, truth be told) were pouring into the country by the cart load.
“Well,” thought the King, “this is all working out splendidly. Eleanor can have her pick of the finest young men in the land!”
And so he and the Queen trotted their daughter out onto the balcony every afternoon about teatime so the latest arrivals could gawk at her and she at them.
Generally it happened this way: a huge crowd, consisting mostly of princes and their non-unionized retainers, would assemble in the palace square some hours before dawn and begin to jostle one another for the best viewing position. There were wealthy princes with camel-loads of expensive gifts, and poor princes with naught but their name to own. There were handsome princes, athletic princes, smart princes, dumb princes, weak princes, strong princes, all seeking the Princess’s hand and its full complement of attachments and appendages in matrimony.
Eleanor, however, would have none of it. The more princes she saw, the fewer princes she wanted.
One day, after the crowds had gone, the King and Queen were standing on the balcony, wondering where they had gone wrong when a shrill voice pierced the early evening quiet. “Hey!”
The Royals looked down upon the upturned face of a downcast lad who stood in the middle of the roundabout in the square below where he had been walking back and forth and up and down in circles of consternation.
“Are you addressing Us!” said the King, taken aback at the affront.
“Ain’t the P ever comin’ out to play again?”
“The P?” said the King.
“The Princess,” said the rotund little boy.
The Queen raised her nose as if she smelled something bad. “The Princess is far too beautiful to come out and play . . . especially with you.”
“Who?” said the boy. “Ol’ pig-face?”
“Guards!” cried the King and, before he knew it, Butch (for it was none other) was extricating himself from the moat.
“Princesses,” said Butch, for whom the dowsing was the closest to a bath he’d come in a long while, “who needs ’em.”
All this time the Princess had been sort of floating around like someone in a dream. She spent a lot of time staring into the mirror because she, too, was captivated by the beauty of her own image. But it hadn’t really hit home that she was looking at herself. It was as if she was looking at one of those under-clothed objects on the cover of the ladies’ magazines in the supermarket checkout lines. One day she was trying out a new wall-sized mirror she had ordered when it hit her, like a bolt from the blue, she was beautiful! She stared with widening eyes. “It’s me!” she whispered. “It’s me!” she cried. “I’m the most beautiful thing in the world!”
Well, humility does not follow naturally on the heels of such a revelation. Nor did it now. Suddenly she got the notion that she was the greatest thing since mixed nuts, that God, in scraping her together, had done His best and could now retire with a deep sense of satisfaction. “I should build a temple where people can worship my beauty,” she decided, still staring at herself.
Apparently it’s one thing to be beautiful and quite another to get an attitude about it, for no sooner had the words left her perfectly formed, ruby-red lips than her neck grew three feet. “Eeeeh!” she screamed in a high pitch that can only be achieved by someone with a three-foot neck. “What’s happening!”
The next instant, however, she was her n
ormal, beautiful self, though she did have a bit of a lump in her throat, and she’d broken out in a rather robust glow. Tears of astonishment stood in the azure pools of her exquisitely-spaced eyes.
“Huh?” she inquired. She looked at herself in the mirror again and, in no time, had convinced herself her imagination had been playing tricks on her. Time only served to strengthen this impression. As she continued to gaze at herself, the whole temple scenario began to reassert itself in her daydreams. “I shall have my face put on a coin,” she thought. “But what sculptor could capture the radiance of my beauty? They are only mortal.”
Before you could say “heads-or-tails,” her neck did another giraffe impersonation, with the added attraction that her head had turned into a large coin with her face on one side and her bottom on the other.
She remained thus for several seconds until it occurred to her she was no longer beautiful. Rather far from it. No sooner had the realization dawned when “bop!” she was back to normal.
“My goodness!” she gasped. “There’s something fishy going on here!”
You’ll notice we have nowhere implied the Princess was a quick study. It often took a while for the water to boil, once the heat had been applied. Nevertheless, she stared at herself and thought, and thought, and stared until “Bingo!”
“I’m magnificently beautiful!” she said, and Fwuff. She grew a pig’s snout, and her ears inflated to twelve times their normal size, and another eye appeared in the middle of her forehead. “I’m not! I’m not!” she cried.
Zlot! The whole process played double-time in reverse.
She studied herself in the mirror again, a little stunned. Then, slowly, a mischievous smile spread across her face. “There must be something more beautiful than I, somewhere.”
Trupplezlot! Her neck became a stem and her face a flower. “Not!” she said in a flowery little voice and—sthwert!—she was herself again. Suddenly she was reminded of stories about what the good fairy had said at her christening. ‘I bless you with changing . . .”
“Until you learn the meaning of true beauty.” she quoted aloud. “It’s magic! If I start to think how beautiful I am, I lose my beauty!”
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