The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  “Do you wish so much to leave me an orphan?” She stares at him, this strange man whom she loves and has never really known. “I beg of you. This is only a senseless, romantic insanity.”

  A musket ball thumps into the front door with the sick sound of splintering wood. No one moves.

  “Sire.” Nonce’s voice is low and urgent. “We still have time. Will you reconsider?”

  A stillness descends on the room, then, an instant of balanced forces, as if each of their decisions—king, princess, butler, valet—has canceled the others out. A window breaks somewhere, glass tinkling into silence. The moment of anticipation when the dropped object seems to hang motionless, waiting for gravity to arrive. And then it does and she feels something tearing in her chest, pushing her to her feet as she thinks of her hours of study and effort, now crystallized as signs pointing to this moment, of what can still be saved.

  “Then if you will do nothing, I shall!” She whirls in a white blossoming of petticoats and runs out of the room.

  “Damn.” Louis Toledo sets down his glass, mopping his forehead again with the handkerchief. His hands are trembling, he notices, and to hide their flutter he draws the small pistol that he had concealed in his pocket.

  “Make sure the carriage is ready,” he tells the butler. “You and the princess must escape. See to it that she is not harmed. Take her to Boston, as we discussed.”

  For a moment, it seems as if Nonce might object—but he does not. Bowing his head, he shuffles out of the room. The valet follows with relief.

  The king adjusts his sash and positions himself in the center of the room, facing the doors. The two bodyguards move to flank him. Outside, the sound of fighting is very near now.

  “The king is dead,” he says softly to himself. “Long live the king.”

  The front door bursts open with a crash, showering splinters into the room.

  Somewhere downstairs, her heart pounding, Cheri-Anne throws a switch.

  A moment later, the world explodes into fire and light.44

  SITTING IN Paolo’s nighttime apartment, she finishes this story and for a moment all three are silent, lost in the skein of what has been said. She looks over at Peter, expecting to see incredulity or some harsh judgment on his face, but he is staring out the window at the darkness beyond. Paolo methodically smokes a cigarette.

  “It is a good story,” the Italian murmurs at length. “This is how it seems for me too, when I remember Italia—so long ago now, it is like a fairy tale.” He sighs. “So this is how you come here?”

  She nods.

  Peter knows that he should say something, but is at a loss for how to respond. He feels that in some way, with this story, something has changed. He thinks: like the easing of a knot, but then doesn’t know exactly what this image might signify.

  How to find a place for the inexplicable in the world, he thinks, to make room for what defies all common sense? But then, he reflects, studying the solemn lines of her face and remembering the touch of her lips, maybe it’s always the inexplicable things that matter most. He reaches out, covering her hand where it lies on the table with his own. She squeezes his fingers for a moment before glancing up at the Italian and drawing her hand away.

  “Thank you,” he says. “For telling us, I mean.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “And now—” Peter starts.

  “Now we sleep,” Paolo interrupts, yawning.

  “Sleep,” she echoes. Abruptly the long shadow of the day before, its recesses of tension and fear, envelops her in exhaustion. “Paolo, you are a genius.”

  And they do: she on a cot behind the kitchen stove with the children, dreaming of her father, who melts and transforms into an unrecognizable stranger before she can reveal some essential thing to him. Peter, restless on a folded blanket on the living room floor, dreaming of a house, and Tesla’s face in flames.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE DOOR IN THE EARTH

  AT LAST I’M ON MY WAY. SEATED ON A JETLINER HEADED EAST, I look through a porthole at the vast landscape of clouds and sky. My neighbor in the next seat, an overweight woman wearing a hideously purple sweat suit, tries to strike up a conversation by asking if I think we will arrive on time.

  “We will come to claim our cast-off bodies,” I tell her, “but it would not be just if we again put on the flesh we robbed from our own souls”—which, as I’d hoped, puts an end to our acquaintance (Dante seems to have that effect on people), leaving me free to study the passing clouds. Ten thousand feet below, beyond the citadels of white cumulus, forested mountain ranges spread like gnarled roots across the distant countryside. Watching them pass, a sudden sense of familiarity prompts me to flag down the nearest air hostess.

  “Excuse me,” I ask, “can you tell me where we are?”

  “We should be passing over Coeur d’Alene, right about now.” She smiles blandly. “Is there anything else, sir?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  She wheels her cart away and I turn back to the landscape, recalling how once—lifetimes ago—I sat on a river outcropping, somewhere in these mountains, gazing up at the sky. As a boy, I remember wondering what it might feel like to be a bird, wheeling above the clouds and mountain landscape. Back then, the height of a hawk’s ascent seemed as unreachable as the moon.

  Now, flying over the Idaho wilderness, I think of this past and the impossible chasm of years that has made that young man seem like a third-person stranger, and find myself wanting to laugh and cry. It’s moments like this that leave me feeling like the punch line of some ridiculous, cosmic inside joke. Because certainly I couldn’t have foreseen, or chosen, any of it: not the things that chased us like criminals through New York, or these strange shipwrecked years of living without you, and most of all not the consequences of my terrible choice, on that terrible final day.

  PETER WAKES to the clatter of cheap earthenware on wood. Opening his eyes, he sees Paolo’s wife—he can’t remember her name—setting down a plate of toasted bread and a teapot on the living-room table. He sits up, blearily scratching the stubble on his cheeks. She gestures silently at him and then the food.

  “Thank you.” He smiles at her. “And for letting us stay. Won’t be much longer now, I guess.”

  She stares at him with dark, expressionless eyes—then turns away, disappearing through the kitchen into the bedroom. A moment later she emerges with the children in tow and, with another silent glance at Peter, leaves the apartment.

  He climbs to his feet, stretching, stiff from spending the night with only a blanket between himself and the floorboards. Pulls on his clothes and laces his boots, shivering in the morning cold. He pours a cup of tea and gulps it down, standing in the middle of the room. The weak, early sunlight, the warped floorboards, quiet, and the cracked yellow plaster of the walls.

  It’s over, he thinks, it’s time to go.

  Standing in the chill living room, he waits for the sense of relief that this realization should bring: a chance for safety and escape. Maybe even a happy ending with her by his side, if such things are possible. And the relief is there, all right, but also with it, strangely, a wash of diffuse sorrow at the sight of Paolo’s shabby apartment in the morning light. The echo of some imagined moment, years from now, and its ghostly, far-flung distances: that this may be the last time he sees this place, this city.

  Stepping into the doorway of the cramped kitchen, he realizes that she is still asleep on one of the cots beside the stove. Eyes closed and unmoving, gripping the blanket with one hand, he is shocked by how young she looks, the intensity of her waking self stripped away. She stirs and opens her eyes, peering up at him, her dark hair a tangled halo around her face.

  “What . . . ?” She takes in his coat, hat, and boots. “Are you going somewhere?” Her words blurred with dreams.

  He nods. “Going out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Buy us train tickets.”

  She
looks at him and then nods before burying her face in the pillow again.

  For a second, standing in the doorway, Peter feels an urge to cross to her side, put his arms around her, and who knows what could happen from there. . . . But some voice of caution stops him, murmuring not yet, time enough for all that when you’re both safe.

  He hesitates, and then turns away. Pocketing a piece of bread from the table in the living room, he strides out of the apartment and down to the street.

  Outside, the jangling movement of New York, the cries of pedestrians, jostling traffic, the high blue stillness of the winter sky. Along the crooked streets lined with decrepit buildings where Paolo lives, across the refuse-laden expanse of Washington Square, then north along the meridian of Fifth Avenue. He boards an omnibus, watching through the windows as the buildings grow taller and more ornate, stone façades replacing swaybacked lathe-and-plaster. Half an hour later, he disembarks across the street from the vast bulk of Grand Central Station.

  Standing in the doorway of a shop, trying to make himself invisible, Peter surveys the crowd of passengers who pass between the pillars flanking the station entrance, the stalls of vendors, knots of beggar children, and shouting porters with their mountains of luggage. Before coming here, he’d imagined—felt a sick certainty, in fact—that Tesla or Morgan or the police, or maybe all of them, would have lookouts posted near each likely point of departure from the city, waiting for the two of them to appear. But after half an hour spent watching the building’s entrance, he decides that the train station isn’t guarded—or else, guarded in ways too subtle for him to see.

  Teeth chattering from standing in the cold, he gathers his courage and drifts up the steps of the station. His heart catches as he passes through the door, half expecting a heavy hand to descend on his shoulder—but no one notices. Invisible among the crowd of travelers, Peter makes his way through the enormous open space of the lobby to the ticket booths on the far wall—where, waiting in line, he tries to keep his eyes fixed on the floor and his expression blank. Still, he can’t stop himself from glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. Then, abruptly, he is standing at the counter and the clerk behind the wrought-iron cage is asking for his destination.

  “Chicago,” he says, throat tight and dry. “Two tickets, one way. Third class.”

  “Forty-two.”

  Feeling utterly exposed, Peter extracts the roll of crumpled bills from his boot. The clerk passes back the tickets and his change. Peter takes them, turns away. And then somehow he is outside on the street again. The slips of paper that mean escape in his pocket: a minor miracle. He staggers away, drunk with relief, fighting the urge to break into a run.

  He boards the omnibus back toward Paolo’s apartment. All that’s left now, he thinks, are a few final preparations. Buy a suitcase for appearances’ sake, maybe, even though they have nothing to put inside. A good meal, and then catch the evening train. Nothing more. Except—it strikes him suddenly—for the matter of good-byes. When he’d left Idaho, it had been a rush without a single proper farewell, but this time—

  For a moment he debates riding the omnibus to its final stop, near City Hall, and walking to the river as some parting gesture to New York itself. But there isn’t time, he reminds himself. And whatever the city was trying to tell him—the almost-meaning he’d felt at the sight of its buildings and bridges—is a secret he will never understand, or will only discover somewhere else, in another form.

  The horse-drawn tram creaks to a halt. They are near the Canal Street subway-works—and these good-byes, Peter decides, can’t be ignored. Shouldering past the other passengers, he jumps off the omnibus and starts toward the excavation site.

  Walking down the streets in this part of the city, looking up at their disconnected details—the tangle of wrought-iron fire escapes, hurrying pedestrians, the painted signs of stores—he thinks of how it has all changed since his arrival, a few months ago. All these things, that were once embodiments of his own loneliness, have now become familiar, already layered with remembered moments. On a break from work, smoking newspaper-cigarettes with Michael, Tobias, and Jan. Silent walks with the older mechanic, Neumann.

  He turns a corner. Down the street, he sees two figures outside the wooden fence around the excavation site—and stops abruptly, a sense of danger registering before the fact of recognition. Tesla, in his usual eveningwear, is standing beside the neatly dressed little man who visited Peter’s apartment. Peter ducks back around the corner and presses himself against the brick wall of a building.

  From this vantage he watches as the two men talk and gesture at each other. After a moment they walk off together in the opposite direction from his hiding place, and he realizes that he has been holding his breath. He straightens, heart hammering, and tries to consider what this might mean.

  A hand descends on his shoulder.

  Peter whirls, fists clenched—and finds himself staring into a pair of bloodshot eyes. For a suspended instant, time stops. Then he recognizes Josiah Flocombe. He takes a step away from his old subway-crew foreman, nerves twanging with adrenaline.

  “What—” Peter forces himself to draw a breath and smile at the other man. “How are you?”

  “Can’t complain.” Flocombe shrugs. Although his tone and expression are casual enough, Peter imagines a tension between them. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Been keeping yourself busy?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well.”

  They stand awkwardly regarding each other, and for an instant Peter is oddly reminded of his first day at the subway-works—that initial glimpse of Flocombe, sitting on a pile of rubble.

  “Well,” the foreman says gruffly, “I expect you’ll be going now.”

  “I thought—” Peter begins.

  “Might want to take your portrait with you.” Flocombe pulls a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket and offers it to Peter, who accepts without thinking. “Take care of yourself,” the foreman says. He nods, then turns and walks away, back toward the construction site.

  Left off balance by this exchange, Peter watches him go before unfolding the scrap. On the page, he finds his own likeness looking back at him—a sketch of his face, next to a sketch of hers. With detached fascination he reads the text beneath: “Suspected of Sabotaging Subway Lines . . . Wanted . . . Reward . . .”

  Feeling suddenly lightheaded, he looks up. Down the block, Peter notices for the first time that two hulking guards are standing outside the excavation site gate, heavy truncheons strapped to their wrists—a different species entirely from the bored, slouching company watchmen who occupied this post before.

  Concealed around the corner and pressed against the building wall, Peter is thinking furiously. Something isn’t right here, he realizes. The unwatched train station, the now heavily guarded subway-works—what’s happening doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t come close to adding up, unless—abruptly he turns and starts running, back toward Paolo’s apartment.

  TO MAKE herself feel useful, she has decided to sweep the living room floor of Paolo’s apartment. In theoretical terms, the broom that she found in a cupboard, and the dust-scoop that accompanies it, make perfect sense. In practice, however, the sweeping project is one problem after another.

  The implements are unwieldy, the broom knocking her in the face with every gesture, and the dirt refuses to stay still, the piles of debris she gathers from beneath the furniture scattering before she has a chance to deploy the scoop. Housekeeping, she has decided, is harder than calculus.

  Still, she perseveres, telling herself that one way or another, these are things that she will have to learn. They are leaving the city to start a new life: this is the realization she has been grappling with since she woke in the Italian’s kitchen. And when she pictures Peter as a companion, the idea of finding a place in this world feels almost like what she has been searching for, without knowing it, all along.

  And with the mechanic by her s
ide, she can almost believe that anything is possible. A chance to begin again, she thinks, for the kind of freedom and happiness, together with Peter, that the strictures of life in Ohio could never permit. If only she can master the countless everyday things she has taken for granted until now, like the trick of sweeping the floor. Then the door bangs open as Peter enters, and with a sense of relief she abandons her task.

  He sits at the table, out of breath, cheeks flushed with the cold, and she crosses to stand near him.

  “How are you?” she asks. “Where have you been?”

  “Train station. Then the subway-works.”

  “Oh, really?” She says this brightly, trying to sound like—she stumbles mentally, then pushes ahead—an ordinary woman, from his world. “What happened?”

  Peter doesn’t answer, staring at the surface of the table.

  “I’ll make you some tea,” she announces, bustling into the kitchen.

  In preparation for his arrival, she has all the necessary equipment laid out—tea, kettle, cups. Dumping a few fistfuls of the dried leaves into the kettle, she sets it on the stove and waits. Nothing happens. Of course, she realizes, there should be a fire in the stove. After a brief rummaging she locates matches and coal, in the bin next to the washtub. The coal streaks her hands black when she scoops it into the stove, but she wipes the smudges off with the hem of her dress.

  Now, though, the coals are not lighting. Which makes sense, she realizes, given the low air-to-fuel ratio in the little chamber of the stove, plus the relatively high adiabatic combustion temperature of the coal. Glancing around the kitchen, she sees a pile of newspaper and a bottle of some brown liquor on a shelf. She crumples the paper and sets it on the smoldering coals, then nestles the bottle in the newspaper—which will evaporate the alcohol, she thinks, which should burn hot enough to set the coal ablaze.