The Coming of Bright

by Sadie King

The anthill and the kagya plant need not thank each other. The saying symbolized symbiosis, how the plant provides food and shelter for the ants, and the ants help protect the plant from over-grazing. A truly mutual relationship, rendering gratitude unnecessary. For gratitude is a sign of a debt—in a relationship of equality, neither side is indebted to the other. Love bears no debt.

  Victor still bore her a debt—a debt of repentance. And she expected prompt payment. Her first day back in his class was a Wednesday. There was Jack, looking very concerned, whispering well-wishes in her ear like sweet nothings. Victor must have revealed something to him of her condition. And there was the devil himself, not neglecting her in the sea of faces for once, his own face awash with gratitude and relief. So much energy of connection passed from him to her that the rest of the class barely got a glance. He knew better than to riddle her with Socratic questions though. He left her alone.

  At the end of class, Jack gave her another note from Victor. She took the liberty of reading it after she and Jack had parted ways outside the hall.

  I may not have my Cupid, I may not have my Psyche—but imagine how thankful I am that I still have you. Shall I be your Cupid and you my Psyche, now that the ivory is gone? I will heal you with a kiss and you will heal my soul with your self. Let the truth resume where we left it. Ask of me another question and you will see my soul. Anything and everything tonight, Goddess of my Soul. And I have a piece of thrilling news to share.

  V.

  No, no, no—it would not be that easy. He had a debt to pay that no kiss could dissolve, no shudder of ecstasy could erase. In its infancy, love could be purely physical, but in its adulthood, love had to mature beyond the body. And so she replied.

  Love is nothing without proof. You of all people, a master of Law and a student of Eros, should know that. I will not come tonight. At the meeting on Sunday, you must renounce that atrocious Act, the one you know I hate. And then I may come to you for the answer to my question. Or I may leave it unanswered and assume the answer lies in the mirror.

  Who do you love most in this world?

  Sunday night, Victor opened the meeting with some run-of-the-mill business. Two people were getting bumped up the hierarchy. Jonah Spiegel, a 2L and a rising star in anti-terrorism law, got the lictor’s ax burned into his chest. Next up was someone much older than Caesar himself, a septuagenarian professor of Admiralty Law, Professor Purcell Chase. Professor Chase had finally reached the organization’s ninth tier. He’d been stuck at Consul for over a decade because of his apathy toward the politics of the group, its higher calling. Too landlubberish. But the key to the success of the Juris Club was politics—to see their glorious Second American Revolution come to pass, its members they had to be lobbyists, they had to be agitators, they had to be warriors. Someone like Professor Chase was fortunate even to make it to Prefect before making it to Woodlawn.

  “Fellow Blackcoats, lend me your ears.”

  Shit, Caesar sure did know how to play his Shakespearean role to the hilt. Wherever he was, heaven or hell, Shakespeare would be beside himself. He was probably in hell—thanks to one pun too many about tits and testicles. Even if, by some miracle, Shakespeare had arrived before the pearly gates, he had probably volunteered a saucy joke about the size of St. Peter’s peter. And gotten himself banished forthwith to the lowest circle of perdition. Zora was sure Victor was well on his way there himself. She wasn’t necessarily displeased about that fact, or what he had done to her physically to get onto that downward road.

  “I have portentous news. Senator Brown and I have had a fruitful discussion on the phone about the timing of the REVAMP Act. We both agreed it’s premature to introduce it now, when the political climate isn’t favorable for its passage. So he’s going to be withdrawing the bill from the floor of the Senate.”

  As he spoke, a glint of a smile played upon the lips of Caesar whenever his glance turned to his lover. This was not lost on a certain Magister in the room. Vane had the insight, the clairvoyance, of a perpetually resentful sibling. He immediately surmised that Victor was saying all of this, was doing all of this, for Zora’s benefit. And he was as right about that as he was enraged. Over his dead body would his own brother sacrifice their ideals for a woman, no matter how sensational a fuck she might be.

  Vane stood, slightly quivering.

  “Caesar, this will not stand. We already have enough votes in the House and Senate lined up. You know that as well as I do. Our members have been working for months to get those votes. President Heath will sign the bill. Now you’re going to throw it all away. I demand to know why. Maybe you have been corrupted.”

  He looked down upon Zora with infinite contempt.

  “The decision has been made brother. I already explained why. We need the will of the people behind us. We just don’t have it.”

  Veins began to pop out on Vane’s neck and face; his tone began to crescendo.

  “The will of the people? We are the will of the people! Or have you forgotten that? Have you forgotten how to be our Caesar?”

  The question was clearly rhetorical, and he answered it clearly himself.

  “Yes, you have forgotten. You are too weak to lead! Too weak!”

  The pretense of Roman authority disappeared, flew away, and it was simply two brothers, one elder talking to one younger. Trying to maintain the power that drips from blood.

  “Brother, we’ll talk about this in private. I’ll listen to you. You have my word. Trust me.”

  It was too late. A new light, a brilliant radiance, had appeared in Vane’s eyes. A flame that Zora had seen once or twice in the patients at Wellcome. The incandescence of the God of Madness.

  Vane rushed forward and sprang like a beast of prey at Victor. Zora saw something utterly unfamiliar in Victor’s face: fear. The elder brother had been secretly afraid of the younger, and was now openly afraid. What events had transpired in their childhoods, what wrongs could have given Victor such terror of his brother, Zora could only imagine.

  Victor backed up, tried to push Vane away, Vane reduced to the bestial level, simply screaming over and over, “Weak! Weak! Weak! Weak!” He had the strength of a hunger-crazed leopard, and quickly overpowered Victor, knocked him to the ground. His hands closed around his brother’s throat and he choked off the air that flowed within. The breath of the only person left in the world who loved him. Victor’s face had a look of panic and pity and death.

  These things happened in mere moments. For what seemed like an eternity, enveloping Vane’s violence, his insanity, the rest of the room had retained an eerie calm. Finally, in actuality only seconds later, several people jumped from their seats, jumped on Vane, tried to pry him off Victor.

  They couldn’t. When they lifted Vane, they lifted Victor with him, as though the hands of the younger brother had become inseparable from the neck of the older. They tried to pummel Vane, but his body absorbed their blows without effect. He actually seemed to absorb their force into his own, becoming stronger, more determined, as they attacked him. Victor’s body started to flop pathetically about. He was struggling with the last light in his brain to stay conscious—the boundary between light and dark was close, and then soon after, the boundary between life and death.

  Suddenly a dull crack reverberated around the room. Vane fell over onto his side, off of his brother. The body of the younger brother started to flop like his brother’s had, convulsing, and blood started to pour from a wound on the side of his head. It pooled around his head like the halo of a fallen angel.

  Jack stood over both brothers, holding the ivory gavel. He had swung it with every ounce of strength he could muster—with the grim resolve of a slaughterhouse knocker about to kill a thousand-pound bull. The blow had been more than strong enough to kill Vane, but the gavel had hit Vane’s head at an angle, deflecting enough of the force to keep him alive. He would merely have a nasty concussion and a hefty scar where the gavel tore off a piece of his scalp.

  Victor sat up and whe
ezed, throwing spittle everywhere. He had petechial eyes. The bloodshot look of the strangled, of the dead, of the damned. He looked down at Vane, who had already stopped convulsing and was breathing normally. But still bleeding profusely.

  “Don’t call the police.”

  Nobody had called yet. Phones had to be off during meetings, Caesar hated the fucking things ringing while he was pontificating, and in the commotion of Vane’s attack, nobody had yet had the presence of mind to call the authorities. Strange for a professor of law to want to shun the law, but not very strange for a man whose brother lay bleeding before him.

  “Jack, cover him up with his jacket and help me prop him up. We’ll take him to my house. Will—”

  Victor turned to a Praetor in the shivering huddled group, William Basker, a new assistant professor at FLS known for applying game theory to contract law.

  “—take a couple other people and clean up this mess. Don’t say a word of this to anyone. This is between my brother and me. We’ll deal with it.”

  Zora came up to Victor, put her right hand on his forearm, her other hand on his hand. She motioned that she was going with him. Would not leave his side while he was most in need of her there, of companionship, of solidarity, of the transformative power of a warm touch and an earnest word, given and spoken in love. As she knew he would not leave hers.

  He gently pulled away from her.

  “No, my love, it’s better that I deal with Vane alone. Come in a few days. Vane will be fine by then. Wait a while. But come. I need to talk to you. And answer your question.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Victor was not in class the following day. Nor did he show up on Wednesday. Another Distinguished Professor took his place, played his proxy. A woman by the name of Magenta Brooks. She was 57. The H. S. Ward Professor of Law.

  Professor Brooks shunned public humiliation of students. She was to law what Dr. Weaver was to psychiatry. A maverick without a cock. Thank God. She asked the class to call her Magenta. They would call her any color, or any name, she wanted. She spent the first fifteen minutes of Monday’s class explaining her title—she was proud of that title, and wanted everyone to know it. It wasn’t arrogance, it was education.

  Back in the mid-20’s, there was a fraternal order that pretty much every rich connected man in the state of Texas belonged to. The Woodmen of the World. Yes, that’s what they actually called themselves. Like they were fucking lumberjacks. Jackasses would be closer to the truth. The only wood they ever knew was from a Tijuana Bible.

  So where does H.S. Ward fit into this? Jesus, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not presume to rush the story, to rewrite history. We’re not the Woodmen. But a lawsuit involving the Woodmen did reach the Texas Supreme Court, where all the justices were Woodmen themselves—each and every one of those jackasses had to recuse himself. The governor tried for months on end to find replacement justices, and guess what—he could not find a single qualified judge in the entire state who was not a member of the Woodmen. The Woodmen were like a plague of locusts, incredibly wealthy and marginally manly locusts, filling up the halls of power.

  The governor’s solution to this dilemma? Appointing an all-female Supreme Court to hear one case and one case only—the Woodmen case. Hortense Sparks Ward was the Chief Justice of that Court. An all-female court in those days was a shock. Not so much of a shock—the fact that the Estrogen Court ruled in favor of the Woodmen. Imagine the blow to women’s rights in Texas if they had ruled against the most powerful fraternal organization in the state. It took until 1982 for a woman to serve on the regular Texas Supreme Court. If they had ruled against? For the Woodmen, hell selling ice cream would have been too soon.

  Lucky for her—or should it be unlucky instead?—Zora had her very own Woodman. Had that jackass fatally impaired her judgment? After less than a week, she was starting to feel, despite herself, the invisible pull of the absence of Victor in her life. With him she had experienced every level, every form, every blossoming of intimacy that a woman can experience with a man, short of conjugal bliss.

  Ah, conjugal bliss—she suspected it was a myth anyway. A myth she wished her life could be. He deserved her, and she him. He had suffered under her power as she had suffered under his. And, most importantly, he had made strides, real strides, to escape the shackles of the fatal flaw of every great man—hubris.

  At the same time, she was too insecure in her womanhood to believe in his love without proof, absolute proof—proof that he was capable of the love she wanted to believe in. She could not be sure that behind his honeyed words did not lurk a bitter heart. He had once called her his Pandora, and she desperately wanted to pry him open, to peer inside his hesitating heart, to know his hidden alchemy as a man.

  In answering her question about who he loved most in the world, would he be able to find a way to prove to her that there was more to his love than gilded words, than gilded touches?

  Seeking and terrified to find, she arrived at his door that Friday. One pressing question before any others:

  “Is Vane here?”

  If he were, she would no longer be.

  “No, he left yesterday.”

  He had her at No. Halfway through his sentence, she was halfway to his living room. He continued talking, following her.

  “We’ve come to an understanding. He won’t challenge me openly at meetings, and I’ll elevate him immediately to Patrician.”

  “You’re fucking crazy Victor. Think about it. You get incapacitated, he’s Caesar. You disappear, he’s Caesar. You die, he’s Caesar. Next time it won’t be heat of the moment, it’ll be premeditated. And Jack won’t be there to hit him over the head.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s not as dangerous as you think. A shitstorm of a temper, yes. It was worse as a boy. He tortured things, animals. He liked to wound birds and then tear off their heads. Our parents had to commit him to a facility. He’s better now. Now he only hunts animals.”

  Victor laughed. Zora didn’t.

  “Sanguis caecus. Don’t forget that.”

  “Blood is blind, yes I know. And thicker than tequila. Better leave the wordplay to me. You know what a cunnilinguist I can be. Want a taste?”

  He began to lick his lips, slowly, wetly. Trying to change the subject. Not to mention practice and perfect his special kind of linguistics.

  “Victor, shut up. And stop licking yourself like a lecher.”

  She was so far out of the mood that it would take a lot more than an arrow, Cupid’s or Victor’s, to get her back into it. He gave his lips one last hopeful wetting and then his tongue retreated inside his mouth.

  “Now what’s this surprising news you have for me?”

  “I have a letter I want you to read.”

  “Fine—but I hope you hid your Japanese knives this time.”

  “Truth be told, I did. It won’t be quite so easy for you to make my blood see the light of day.”

  Really, how resourceful would I have to be? Your fountain pen alone would be more than enough. Fountain pen—fountain of blood.

  Victor retrieved the letter from the kitchen counter and handed it to her. She unfolded it, immediately noticing the White House letterhead. At the top in royal blue was the Presidential Seal. Beneath that, The White House, and lower still, Washington. The letter was handwritten.

  Dear Victor,

  Your student’s letter was just the spark we needed. I’ve signed an executive order releasing Dorothy Krause from custody. Effective one week from today. You seem to believe she’s innocent and I trust your judgment. If we get too much blowback from the media, from families of the victims, we’ll turn her into a symbol. A pathetic creature who was railroaded and scapegoated by the system. Your student’s letter will be perfect. We’ll give Dorothy a human face. Offer up something poignant about the ill treatment of the homeless in the legal system. Use your pulpit as a law professor to support her release. I know I can count on you; you know you can count on me.

&
nbsp; Always, Becky

  Victor never ceased to amaze, and when it came to power, never ceased to sicken. Here he was, with the President of the United States writing to him like a schoolgirl with a crush. Zora guessed that President Heath probably wished she were standing in Victor’s house at that moment, in Zora’s place, eager to be squired and screwed by her Caesar. Oh, Caesar. Harder, Caesar. Fuck me, Caesar. When the Founding Fathers used Rome as their inspiration, that probably wasn’t what they had in mind. Come to think of it, they probably didn’t have a woman President in mind either. Well, screw them.

  More troubling than the thought of Victor screwing the President—and it took a hell of a lot to be more troubling than that—was the release of the Gatekeeper. Zora had made it very clear in her letter that she did not support a full pardon for Dorothy, full liberty.

  A tragically sick woman with a vile and violent mind who needs treatment instead of a cage.

  Those were her words. Apparently President Heath had gotten a little ahead of herself in her desire to please her fantasy Caesar-cum-lover. Now she had unleashed a murderous madwoman, a bloodthirsty lunatic, upon the general public. God, what an unholy bitch. Zora was not thinking of the Gatekeeper this time.

  “You’re not actually going to support this, are you? We both know she needs to be locked up somewhere, somehow.”

  “It’s more complicated than that Zora. Rebecca has done me a tremendous favor—”

  If he said anything too nice about the President, Zora might have to make a move toward the fountain pen.

  “—and I’ve always had doubts about the case against Dorothy.”

  “I don’t understand. She hoarded the hands and feet of her victims. She collected body parts, Victor. It should terrify the hell out of you that she’s going to be released. More people might end up dead. Minus their hands and feet. And eyes.”

  Zora left unsaid her own role in the whole debacle. Like the President, she had been doing him a favor. Fuck, how did he get such smart, talented women to do such idiotic things for him? Zora had never even considered the possibility that the Gatekeeper might come out of this process a free woman.