Force Majeure

by Daniel O'Mahoney

  Esteban kept his furniture and effects comparatively neat, but there was dust everywhere, dust and pin-ups, though he spent a first twitchy minute leaping around the room unpicking the worst examples from the wall. A mannequin – bald and female – was posted vigilant at the window, dressed in a heavy bearskin coat. Kay sat on a chair beside her, close to female company. Esteban plumped for the chair at the desk and studied Kay as she unlaced and shed her boots. The bed, close by, was tucked and made neater than the cots in Azure’s rooms ever seemed to be. She wondered how recently it had been used, in any capacity.

  ‘Welcome to the Bureau of Appearances,’ Esteban said, throwing his arms wide, and it was impossible to tell if this was enthusiasm or irony.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘Daft? This is daft.’ He patted the top of his desk. ‘This is the Bureau of Appearances. Not what you were expecting?’

  She shook her head, humouring him.

  ‘There is,’ he admitted, ‘an office in one of the Follies, but we meet there only in emergencies. We do it our own way, mostly.’

  ‘Yours,’ she noted, ‘is very informal.’

  ‘Maybe. The other three in the Bureau aren’t much better. There’s been no census in Candida since Doctor Arkadin’s heyday, and even he admitted defeat. He left his domesday book unfinished. Some things you just don’t count.’

  ‘Candida,’ Kay said, smiling (though not too much) at her own joke, ‘makes no census.’

  ‘There you go. You’re looking good, by the by. Your clothes, as is. You’re settling.’

  I hope not. Still, she decided she must like him. She wouldn’t have come all this way, with all these bottles, if he hadn’t some charm or glamour or prestige. ‘How do you become an officer?’

  Esteban rose and slipped off his jacket, which he draped over the outstretched arm of the mannequin. ‘There are the usual rites of passage. You have to memorise certain scriptures word-for-word. You must be able to run through the woods without breaking a single twig beneath your feet. You must throw a spear into the ground and hide behind it so that no part of you can be seen from any angle. There’s a special rock that looks like an old misery-face you must make laugh. The usual six impossible things. The bollocks.’

  ‘What about for real?’

  ‘For real, you present yourself at the academy, and if no-one has a serious objection – and no-one includes the boss of you, the-Lady – and if challanco says so and you’re no trouble-maker or fire-raiser or lizard-in-a-human skin, then you get in with a wage and a pension of trust.’

  ‘Challanco?’

  ‘Boojum.’ (As though that explained it all.) ‘And you must be able to sign your name and forswear the use of swords and pistols in your duty. And you must be a poet, because that’s an official function, and once a year we subject each other to the dreadful doggerel that we’ve churned out in our spare time.’

  Kay pushed herself forward and asked: ‘Is it an essential requirement of the job that you have a penis?’

  He laughed. She was glad he laughed. ‘No. Do you fancy joining up?’

  ‘I might do.’

  Suddenly serious, he dropped his body onto the bed beside her. ‘There’s no might. The Office of the White Horse is a calling. It’s not the stuff of whims. It’s something that seizes you, so you know for certain that this is what you want to be, no matter how stupid or ridiculous the job seems.’

  ‘Like priesthood?’

  ‘Like sainthood,’ he insisted. His whole face spoke of it, his mellow eyes sunk in the smooth ovals above his cheekbones, his lips pressed tight as if slowly crushing a flower down into flatness. ‘Without the celibacy,’ he added.

  They emptied the first bottle.

  ‘Are you working tomorrow?’ Esteban asked; he was on his hands and knees scrabbling through his cupboards. The detritus of his life was building up into a shanty around his legs. Kay, now certainly drunk and no longer hiding it, watched with an amused eye and didn’t laugh, out of fear she would never stop.

  ‘Tomorrow, yes, but not too early. I can hang around.’

  ‘I know I have a board somewhere, I have all the pieces.’ He looked up from his cupboard door eagerly, and the light cast from his bulb revealed every trim, bristling hair on his crown. ‘War in Heaven goes on for years.’

  ‘I’m very bad; I play short games.’

  ‘Cards!’ he yelled, brandishing a pack at her.

  ‘You don’t use normal ones here. I know, Luis showed me.’

  ‘Did he teach you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t get it. If I don’t get it, it can’t be got.’

  ‘You are not,’ he told her, ‘a stupid woman.’

  ‘In spite of appearances.’ She believed she was enjoying herself. That was true. Even through the drunken fizz and tremble, she knew she was having a good time being friendly, being foolish, being nothing. She could put away Prospero and her anxieties. After a month, she was finally picking at the scab of Candida, exposing the bloody lump beneath, the humour.

  Esteban lay flat now, his cheek pressed up against a rough exposed floorboard. ‘Tomorrow,’ he crooned, ‘the very first thing tomorrow, I will fix your friend’s bicycle and she can become a bird. Better than an officer, that is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No sodding poetry.’ He sighed. ‘Just birdsong. Birdsong and wings.’

  More bottles. She relaxed. She felt herself unravelling. She undid the flower from her hair and tucked it into a crack in the mannequin’s scalp. Esteban taught her to understand Candida-cards, but she failed to grasp the detail; the cards were printed on a material that didn’t absorb the warmth from her skin. They chatted. She lowered her guard and, in a moment of holy hush, unfastened two of the lower buttons of her blouse and revealed her most secret, most embarrassing feature: her shallow belly-button, a faintly-impressed pucker that might have been made with the gentle point of a compass. Good-natured, Esteban laughed. Hazily, they watched the dwindling line of the final bottle, until there was nothing left.

  ‘I. Don’t. Believe. He. Was. Real.’

  ‘Why would you say such a thing?’ Esteban asked.

  ‘Because it’s true. I don’t think he was ever here. I know, I know, he lived less than 200 years ago, but even that far back he could be made up. All the details. He’s just a name. Arkadin.’

  ‘Doctor Arkadin.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that there was an expedition. We know he lived, but we don’t really know if he founded Candida. You said yourself, parts of it are older than him.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Yes, maybe. You know, I asked Luis if he’s got a copy of Arkadin’s journal, and he wasn’t sure. He’s read something; heaven knows what. A journal. By Anonymous.’

  ‘By powers unknown and invisible.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘By the secret masters that created the world and control our every move. By Plato’s shadowcasters, riding our dreams. By the professors of Punch and Judy with their hands in our knickers. By powers so creepily occult that they stopped existing just to spite us. By God-the-Dragon herself.’

  ‘Stop it, you git!’ she protested.

  They moved into a drunken twilight, into the age after the alcohol had run out but before they fell asleep, when sobriety could creep up on them. Kay was still dizzy in her mouth, in her stomach and in the muscles of her head. Their argument was conducted in whispers and darkness from opposite sides of the room. Esteban had given her the bed, his dreamspace, and settled down in his armchair for the night. She lay still and made a little cavity of warmth around herself.

  ‘Yes, I’m making fun of you.’

  ‘You really can’t be trusted with a responsible position.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You’re a kid. You�
�re a child in a man’s body.’

  ‘This is my second childhood.’

  ‘I knew so. I knew so as soon as I saw you.’

  ‘Yes, and I know something you don’t.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘That would be Doctor Arkadin. He is real.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Because I’ve met him.’

  A part of her was telling her sleep. The pillow was dense and soft. It absorbed her head.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I met him when I was a boy.’

  ‘Even when you were a boy he would have been pushing 200.’

  ‘Have you thought I might be older than I look?’

  ‘No.’ Pause. ‘Go on then, what happened? What was he like?’

  ‘He spoke to me. He told me important things. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember his face or anything about him.’

  ‘He’s a big blank.’

  ‘But he was real. He held my hand. You remember someone’s touch even if you forget the rest.’ Pause – she thought he’d dropped off – then: ‘He was recruiting me. That was it.’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Do you want to know why I keep coming to the old free house?’

  ‘Not tonight. Go to sleep.’

  Sleep.

  In Candida, Kay dreamed, in Candida (where dreams are true).

  For the past week she had dreamt of Xan, every night. She knew him more intimately in her imagination than she did from their few minutes together in the cell. In dreams, he came to her like an old friend or a childhood memory. He took her to the high point of the city and paralysed her tenderly and stripped her tenderly and mounted her tenderly. There was no join between their bodies. Their skins, reflecting one another, met seamlessly, and her consciousness flickered from her to him and back again, until it was no longer possible to tell who was who.

  She had never been in love before. That poison.

  Xan lay gasping and red on the brickwork, steam rising from his body. ‘When I was at school,’ he said, ‘there was a girl who claimed she used to be a boy until a wizard kidnapped her, locked her in a tower and cut off her dick. As you do.’

  Her mouth filled with laughter and phlegm; she had to cover her face.

  ‘We must have gone to the same school.’

  And Esteban was watching them – no, watching her – and his face was haunted.

  It stops being a dream about Xan and becomes a dream about Esteban, as he is now. This is, after all, her first night away from the old free house since she arrived in Candida, and her body adjusts to new surroundings. Kay has her head in his pillow, where his dreams and fantasies have soaked. She flits from the bed into his skin and watches herself through drowsy but unsleeping eyes. He has an unshiftable erection. She feels it as a hungry alien graft, a parasite in control of his entire body.

  There is something of the hero in Captain Milo Esteban. He’s morbid and romantic. There is an attractive woman lying under his bedclothes and those sheets are an invisible country to be conquered. He fondly imagines the folds on the blankets, faint lines in the gloom, as a labyrinth that all champions must pass through to reach the centre, where the captive maiden is staked out as dragon-feed, where the treasure lies buried, where the minotaur lurks.

  No.

  No, she’s the real deal. She’s not a prize or a riddle to be solved, no, she’s not a virgin or a monster, no, she’s not territory to be seized and tamed. She’s complicated in flesh and spirit. She’s a human animal. His head is full of her, of the pheromone signature of her pores, of the memory of the curve of her breasts below her clothes, of the tiny movements of her hands and her head as she talks. He wants to know the taste of her mouth and her sweat and her inner thigh.

  There’s water-pressure at the base of his stomach and alcohol fizzling away in his system. His bedroom, though cool, is stuffy, because they’ve used all the air in arguing. He goes to the bathroom to relieve himself, then returns to stand over her sleeping body while one hand rubs the back of his neck and the other cups his genitals through the line of his trousers. Embarrassment. That’s what he’s feeling. Embarrassment and self-loathing.

  ‘You found her then?’

  He looks to his side, only mildly surprised. ‘Is this her?’

  ‘This is her,’ says his guest. Esteban paces to his desk and takes out challanco’s envelope, torn to expose padding. Grey wood pulp sheds like confetti on his floorboards. He hasn’t looked through it since he received it – two days after his defeat at the hand and the broomstick of Ernesto (spit!) de Broca, one day after his meeting with the dreadful chatelaine-witch of the old free house. The ghost of the stroppy little messenger-bird haunts him about her bike, and there are more Appeared, always more Appeared. Were there people left in the real world anymore?

  He had, by this time, already forgotten Kay. He was full of lost love and hopeless lust.

  At that precise moment, he was thinking: ‘I need a prostitute. A simple, common prostitute, selling herself on a street corner. Not a witch, just a whore; not a carnival, just a brothel; not the Mystery, just an uncomplicated shag. The Gestapo Twins always ambush me on the way in. They’re making fun of me. Frankly, they don’t get it up for me.’

  He was sitting at his usual table at the Café Andelsprutz. He always left a spare chair in the hope that someone would join him. He was not at all surprised to find the man sitting opposite him, the same man he has in his room now, black-coated, black-hatted, otherwise vague as a poem written on water.

  ‘Captain Emilio Esteban?’ he asked.

  ‘This is me.’

  The newcomer laughed, and the silence of the city strangled the noise. ‘Who is it that runs in the woods?’

  Esteban scrambled from his chair, dropped to his knees and choked on the answer: ‘The fawn and the poet and the warrior of the old country.’

  The next ritual question, insistent: ‘And what is the secret of Candida?’

  ‘This is the young land over the sea in the West.’

  ‘And who were the architects of the city?’

  ‘They removed themselves from all the histories, and we call them dragons.’

  ‘And who is it that sits upon the dragon throne? Whom does it serve?’

  ‘You, sir,’ Esteban said, his eyes fixed on a face he knew would slip away with the morning dew.

  Doctor Arkadin popped his tongue. Disappointment. ‘You’re an idiot.’

  Esteban felt dislocated, as though he hadn’t left his flat and was in fact kneeling by Kay’s sleeping body with his face pressed close into her heat. (But this is still some weeks in the future, and the realisation almost shakes him out of his dream, and Kay out of hers.)

  ‘Little wonder you’re all such dismal poets.’

  ‘I thought you wrote the officers’ oaths.’ An afterthought: ‘Sir.’

  ‘I went up to Cambridge in a sunless year and came down full of oaths and pledges. I’m only mortal. I was made by my mistakes. Captain, will ye follow me please?’

  ‘Where to, sir? And why?’

  ‘Does it occur to you that the officer corps of Candida lacks the discipline or the sense of duty you’d expect from a formal army?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Do you think this should be corrected?’

  ‘Now that you mention it –’

  ‘Ah, please follow me, Captain, because I asked politely. A great fear is upon me, a fear for the future of this city and what might be done to it.’ He turned to move away – and this was his one distinctive feature, the limp he’d acquired after driving a gangrenous nail through his foot on the boat from
Ireland – but stopped and turned and raised a warning finger. ‘If you must address me, then call me doctor.’

  ‘And you can call me idiot, doctor.’

  Then they were in the vaults, the great warren of tunnels and archives and shelters beneath the city that had been excavated for fear that the continental wars of the new century – now the past – would reach into the mountains. Esteban had been here before, of course, at least at the junctions where they intersected the lower storeys of the academy, but he still found them oppressive and claustrophobic. (Kay felt the knot tighten beside her breast, pain like cancer.) The only sounds were the lonely drip of distant water and the soft Dublinese from the doctor’s mouth. Their feet made no sound on the stone floor, not even the doctor’s drag-limp – he walked without a cane and refused Esteban’s offers of help. The vaults were whispering galleries.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like to ride a dragon?’

  ‘I can’t say that I believe in dragons, doctor.’

  Despite the honour, or perhaps delusion, of Doctor Arkadin’s company, Esteban’s thoughts were still turned to sex. He imagined himself as a knight, slaying dragons to rescue grateful and willing virgins. The virgin and the dragon were the same. She embraced him with biting claws, her eyes were coal-red and her pores sweated gold.

  Doctor Arkadin chuckled to himself. ‘There are no such thing as dragons. They don’t exist, and it’s their non-existence that gives them power over us. They ride us in our dreams and our accidents. The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. We – you and I – everyone in this city, even our enemies, are at the mercy of forces we can’t control, and our only consolation is the knowledge that those forces are tormented and bedevilled by monsters of their own. You should wonder. This is our door.’

  There was no door, just the gap. For that moment, at least, Doctor Arkadin was a huge man; his bulk filled the jamb and hid the interior, but Esteban, squeezing after him, smelled cooled oil, soot and stale electricity. The doctor was an engineer, and this gap had the smell of an abandoned forge. Rag carpeted the floor and scuffed beneath his feet. On the workbench-altar, in its column of light, was the brass-headed god that Esteban had heard described but never seen before with his own eyes.