Sometimes I write things

The little old man was coughing into a handcloth when we came in. He gestured, mid-cough, to a low sofa across from his divan, and we sat, and waited expectantly. The coughing went on for some time, and more than once the little old man — Dr. Key — waved away our nervous and self-conscious attempts to offer him water or a slap on the back. Minutes went by, before he stopped shuddering and pulled the handcloth away from his face.

In the dim light of the evening, for there were no lamps in Dr. Key’s room, I saw a thin line of phelgm stretch from the handcloth to his face as he separated the two. After a moment it snapped back and I lost it.

“This is a story about a man who became a god,” Dr. Key said, ignoring our half-murmured inquiries as to his health. “And it is not an easy story. It is not easy to tell, for my memory has decayed into a sort of sieve for knowledge. But for my daily dose of chamba, I would by now have faded into a wisened and elderly oblivion. I saw some of the story firsthand, and what I didn’t see myself I was told by them who did the deeds, or else them who saw them who did the deeds. So I am closer to the story than Prince Jim, and when I die no one will know the whole truth.

“In those days the city was a different place. This was eighty years back, when I was a young man and my generation hadn’t seen war or famine. I wasn’t born in the city. I grew up in Egg, which doesn’t even exist any more. It used to be five hundred miles east of here, on the other side of the company’s mountain. Fields and fields of corn, stretching further than you could see, further than you could hope to walk. Summertime I remember the sun came up in the morning about an hour after it set, and when you looked up in the sky it was just you and the sun, the only two people for miles around. Summer days were hot, and we spent them in the shade learning lessons: how many apples you have if I take three, or whether you’re different from me, or different than me. Two, to, too. The battle of Pawtucket was in May of 1781. And so on.”

Dr. Key paused for a sip of water from the carafe on the floor next to his divan. Afterwards he didn’t resume speaking right away, and we spent a handful of tense seconds wondering if he was going to keep his promise at all. One of us had leaned forward, working up the nerve to ask him, and when Dr. Key started talking again she sat back with a start.

“In the mornings and the evenings, now, those were the best times. It wasn’t too hot or bright, and the corn all around was like an orderly jungle. There was three feet of clearance from every cornstalk to its nearest neighbor, plenty for kids like me. My elder brother Yane tripped, he must have been seven or so, he tripped and fell and knocked over a stalk and damaged two more. Our father whipped him until he bled, for that. Most times we did something, we got no dinner. But the corn was special. It was sacred.”

We weren’t mollified. We hadn’t come here, after all, to hear Dr. Key ramble on about his idyllic childhood with corn. Glances we exchanged, worried looks. We weren’t very subtle about it; we thought the old man wouldn’t see them, that he would be half-blind in the dimming light. He wasn’t, and he snorted.

“I said it was not an easy story to tell, didn’t I? Have a little bit of courtesy for an elder, and let me work it out the way I choose to. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay here. It’s all the same to me. Let Kimmy have the final word, fine.”

It took Ange, who had contacted him first and whom he’d known the longest, several minutes to apologize fervently enough. She cajoled him into continuing by whispering into his ear. I didn’t want to think there was anything unseemly happening before my eyes, not for this, but she was an adult and knew what she was doing. There was a strange energy in the room by this point. He was old and feeble, and we were young and strong, and he had something we wanted, and the only question was what we had that he wanted, and whether he was going to get it.

“I was twelve years old,” Dr. Key continued eventually, as if there had been no interruption. “Twelve years old when I came to the city.”

Dr. Key sipped again from the carafe on the floor next to his divan. I got a whiff of it when he set the carafe down a little too carelessly and splashed a small amount out the top. It smelled like vodka, not the water I’d at first assumed he was drinking, and it made me feel a little queasy.

“You don’t know what it was like, of course,” Dr. Key resumed. “You’ve been in the city your whole lives, haven’t you? Maybe you took a trip someplace, saw what’s left of the country, but you grew up here.

“For me, it was different. Me and Yane. We came to the city together, for the big fair. They don’t even have fairs any more, not like they did when I was young. That was the year my father grew an ear of corn four feet long. He was fit to burst with pride. He had its picture taken, and while the photographer was on the meter, my mother cajoled him into letting me and my brother get photographed, too.”

At this point Dr. Key broke off, and said that he had a print of that photograph somewhere, and if we would wait he would find it. It took five minutes for us to get him talking again.

“So we went to the fair, Yane and me and the ear of corn. We took a neighbor’s car. Old Man Mosey, lived across the way. Our father wouldn’t be separated from his crops that long, and our mother had to look after him. Yane was fourteen and I was twelve.

“Three days in that little car getting to the city. Yane drove, and I held onto the ear. The road was a new thing back then, and it’d be concrete for a stretch, then gravel, then tarmacadam, then dirt. The car ran off kerosene, and I was scared to death we’d run out in the middle of some stretch of nowhere and starve to death, but Yane had seven dollars for the trip, and there were plenty of fueling stations. Nowadays you have to be a certain age to drive and have a permit, don’t you?”

There was a pause, as none of us realized this was not a rhetorical question. Eventually we admitted we didn’t know. None of us drove; we were city kids.

“Well. Well.” Dr. Key took another sip of his drink, whatever it was, before working up the energy to continue. “After three days we came over a hill and saw Else City’s skyline, and it left us breathless.

“Imagine, imagine you’ve spent your whole life never seeing an animal bigger than a cat. Rats, mice, little yipping dogs, baby pigs, all those things, but no sheep, no goats, no cattle, no horses. Now imagine seeing a bull elephant for the first time. That was Else City. Yane nearly drove the car into a tree.

“Then once we saw the city it took hours more to get to it. We were coming down out of the eastern face of the company’s mountains, remember, so we had a lot of elevation. And the city just, it seemed to grow and grow. A huge city of towers, it looked like to us. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there’d been dragons nesting on the rooftops or if it rained red wine in the afternoons.

“When we finally made it to the fair, when we saw something that had actually been designed to amaze and impress, that was when we started our run of bad luck.”

“That was in the last year of the old calendar. 1904, the year of the Tumult, which was if you ask me overrated. Just a mob of foreigners in foreign countries doing foreign things. The Tumult didn’t reach here, to speak of. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was talking about the fair.”

Someone, I don’t know who, maybe Bly, muttered something about Dr. Key being perfectly free to skip ahead in the story. For once the old man ignored it, though, and launched into his description of the fair.

“It was unlike anything before or since. Planning started in 1879, years before I was born, when my parents were barely more than children. Really it was the third fair. The first one, in 1884, strictly local to Else City. They closed everything down for a week and everyone decorated their houses with pictures and bunting, but there weren’t any marvels to speak of. Second fair, 1894, Else City invited everyone else up and down the seaboard to send revelers, and the revelers all brought trade goods and art objects, and they built a shantytown with wooden towers and canvas tents. On the last day they tore down all the tents and towers and made a bonfire, and Yane used to tell me that he saw that bonfire, it was high, he could see it despite the hundreds of miles and the mountains in the way. That fair had prizes for animals and vegetables, too, which was why our father sent us to the third fair, the real fair, with his best corn.

“But it was so much more! There was a palace made of glass and metal, lit up with hurricane lamps and music playing, people dancing. Fireworks they shot off every night, and in the day there were dog races and trick shooters and choir music and a rodeo-show and… God!”

Dr. Key startled us all by suddenly sitting bolt upright.

“Balloon rides!” he cried. “I hadn’t thought about that in decades! Balloon rides and electicity exhibitions and… oh, so much, so much to see! You could spend a month there and not see all of it. It was funded by donations from every city in the world worthy of the name, and they all sent their best and their brightest.

“And the food! Oh, the food. There were fruits I had never seen before, and maybe that’s not saying much, but there were fruits I haven’t seen since, and meat with spices on a stick that you dipped in oil, and sweet hard candies wrapped up in a paper that dissolved in water and turned the water to chocolate! There were tables and tables with free grapes, sent up the coast from the vinters, and anyway that was our bad luck. Too many grapes!”

Dr. Key had been speaking faster and faster, becoming more and more agitated. After his cry of “too many grapes,” he paid for it with a long, long coughing fit. He fell back onto his divan, and for some minutes tried to speak, but couldn’t. He held his handcloth in front of his mouth, and coughed wet into it, and soon it was sodden with thick green phlegm flecked with black.

We were understandably concerned, and tried slapping him on the back, which didn’t help, and attempted giving him water, which he couldn’t seem to drink, and generally we acted concerned and stood around, unable to help.

Eventually he came back down, and surprised us by apologizing for his illness and age and infirmity, which of course made us all the more uncomfortable as we tried to reassure him. Still, the hour had become late, and Dr. Key clearly wasn’t up to continuing his story that night. Therefore we promised to return the next day at noon with his chamba, and he in turn vowed to admit us, and eat the chamba, and continue his memoir about a man who became a god.

We met early, or to be more exact, we agreed to meet early. In point of fact only Jula and I were at the automat at the appointed time. We didn’t have much to say to one another, so pooled our cash for a newspaper and busied ourselves reading the news of the day. Bly and Ange and Mert stumbled in just as the prelunch sirens were starting, and we gathered that Bly had cajoled the others into a sleepless night dancing on the water. Ange’s eyes were bloodshot and she didn’t try to hide her hostility.

But she had chamba, and after a shot of espresso Bly stopped trying to provoke her, and we didn’t want to be late for our appointment with Dr. Key. Jula suggested that we try to present a more united front towards Dr. Key, attentive students and virtuous young people, and Ange scoffed and said it was self-evident that we ought to pay attention while the old man was talking, and Bly muttered something I didn’t catch but Ange did, and she told Bly to keep his mouth shut that day, and the rest of us didn’t want to keep Dr. Key waiting, so we didn’t let them fight.

We made the short trip from the automat to Dr. Key’s hovel, and just as it had been the day before, the front door hung open. Ange went in first, with the rest of us behind her, and we found Dr. Key on his burlap divan, just as we left him. He looked to be dressed just the same, and I wondered if he’d moved at all overnight. He was making an awful noise with his lungs when we came in, sort of snoring or snorting, and I would have thought he was asleep except he waved when he saw us, and gestured plaintively for the plate of chamba in Ange’s hands.

The rest of us stood back, self-counsciously looking at our feet or sipping espresso from the automat or sitting quietly on the concrete floor where we’d listened to the doctor the day before, but Ange had the task of feeding him the chamba. Dr. Key had long since lost his teeth (we hadn’t gotten to that part of the story yet but surely it was coming), so the cubes of chamba had to be mashed up with a fork, which Ange helped him with.

After the first of the chamba dissolved in Dr. Key’s mouth, he coughed and spasmed and if Ange hadn’t been ready for it he would have knocked the plate away and scattered the chamba on the floor. Then he couldn’t find his handcloth and coughed up phelgm into his hand, and Bly ran and found a handcloth for him. And of course he apologized for the coughing and all, and of course we all sheepishly assured him we didn’t mind in the slightest and he shouldn’t think twice about it, which maybe we weren’t very sincere about.

At last, though, we’d exchanged basic pleasantries and he’d told us to throw out our cups of espresso because the smell made him ill, and Mert ran and got some lemonade, and we all sat down and he started telling us the story. At first Dr. Key couldn’t remember where he’d left off, and then neither could we, and then I said there had been too many grapes, and that got him going.

“Too many grapes! The year was 1904, the place was the great fair, and Yane and I and Dad’s ear of corn, we were on our own for the first time. I was telling you about all the attractions, but I hadn’t got to the best part. The vineyards down the coast had taken a fraction of their harvest and sent the grapes to the fair, some fresh and some as raisins. Free for everyone. Even after the thousands of fairgoers had eaten their fill, still more than I could count. Yane insisted, for the first three days Yane insisted we conserve our money, not buy any of the special concessions at the fair. Just eat grapes.

“We had only eaten grapes a few times before, and never raisins, and we went too far with it. I woke up early in the morning on our fourth day there, felt like there was an animal inside me, a squirrel or something crawling through my gut trying to get out. We were staying in a cheap hostel, the two of us in one room with no plumbing and a little balcony about two feet wide… now, understand that on that balcony we had our clothes airing out, and our shoes, and also Dad’s corn.

“I woke up, veteran of the raisin wars, crawled out onto the balcony and ruined our shoes. Yane woke up when he heard that, and saw me ruining our clothes. The sight was too much for him, and he tried to spew out over the balcony to the ground, but didn’t make it, and ruined Dad’s corn.”

Dr. Key chuckled, and sipped from his carafe. I noticed that it was more than half-full, although the night before we’d watched Dr. Key nearly empty it. I glanced over towards Bly, and I saw he was literally biting his lip to keep from laughing. Everyone else had a sort of shocked-confused expression on their faces.

At least Dr. Key didn’t seem to notice. “That was why I stayed in the city,” he explained. “After that bad luck. I ruined the corn, and spoiled our clothes. Yane went back to the farm. I didn’t hear from him again for years and years, but I figure our father wasn’t happy about that corn. I got a few bucks from him and saw him off, and then I had the rest of my life to look forward to, the rest of my life in Else City.

“Now to be fair I had considered running away from home many times, and looking back on the boy I was then I maybe let myself decide I couldn’t go home again. Our father wasn’t an evil man, he wouldn’t have whipped me rawer than I coulda take. But I wanted to see the city, and the few days we’d been there we’d barely scratched the surface, just wandering the fair and the streets closest to the fair. So there I was, young and dumb and eager to learn, ready to make my fortune like the hero of a novel.

“Then the Tumult started, and the way people were talking, I thought maybe I’d made a bad choice.”

Dr. Key took several sips from his carafe, and stared moodily across the room. We shuffled a little bit. Kneeling, especially on the bare concrete floor of that hovel, became uncomfortable with time. I moved into a half-lotus position, which I’ve always found comfortable. Jula, next to me, put her hand on my shoulder to steady herself while she moved from a kneeling position to sitting cross-legged. I resented the seeming familiarity, but not enough to make a fuss. Especially under the circumstances, it wasn’t worth the bother.

Magnanimously Dr. Key permitted us to resettle before resuming the story. “I was broke and young,” he began, and then coughed wetly, and had to start over.

“I was broke and young. Now I am old and broken, but then I was young and broke… I spoke the language, but with a thick farmer’s accent, and anyone looking at me could have told me where I was from and how long I’d been in Else City. I didn’t know any of this at the time, I thought I was being clever, but I was a hayseed among ants.

“Scarcely a week had gone by before I was recruited into the Slingers as a piper. I was standing on the edge of the Finery, which in those days was called Silver Dreams Park. I’d slept in the park the night before, and I was starting to look pretty rocky. I had, initially, I had the idea that I could live off the streets, lift a pie off a windowsill, steal clothes off the line, call no man mister.

“That did not work out. I’m sure things haven’t changed so much in this city that pies and clothes are freely available, lying out for random children to collect? ‘Course not. Things have, after all, gotten worse… not better. Back then, before Black Water… I didn’t get my throat cut and my shoes stolen, but I didn’t have very nice shoes.”

Dr. Key drank some more, and then leaned back in his divan and didn’t say anything.

“Last time I was at the Finery, there were jugglers. And a man with a trained dog that jumped through hoops, and danced when he played the rumble-drum. That must have been late in the Blink, though. What is it like, now?”

We all looked different kinds of askance. The truth was, I’d never been to the Finery, and in fact none of the other had, either, unless they were little children at the time, back during the era of the Miss. Ange and Mert started talking at about the same time, and Mert clammed up so it was Ange who told Dr. Key that the Finery had been under a foot of water for seven years.

“The Floodway,” Dr. Key said, realizing his mistake. He took a long swig from his carafe, and started to say something else, but then another coughing fit came upon him, and he shook and made thick barking sounds and sobbed a little bit.

Once the old man had calmed down, Bly said something to the effect of maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, and Ange snapped at him before anyone else could respond. And then, as if nothing had happened, Dr. Key started telling us about how Silver Dreams Park had looked, back in the day.

“It was, what, years ago. Long time ago, before the War. There was more green space then, dozens of parks. On the outskirts of the city there were fields with cattle. So the Finery, I mean, Silver Dream Park wasn’t special, it wasn’t a place that stood out. It was just a nice grassy place, with trees in the middle. There was some kind of idea of conserving natural habitats, and in the center of the park there was a space of about an acre, marked people weren’t to go into. The groundskeepers left that central space alone, and only clipped the lawn near the walking-paths around the edge.

“On the sacred day, there would be street performers in the park. Buskers, I mean. I guess not street performers…” Dr. Key scowled. The confusion over the Floodway had shaken his confidence, we thought; he was no longer certain he could tell the story effectively. This was not a problem we his audience could solve for him, however. All we could do was sit and listen, and possibly smile encouraging smiles.

Dr. Key closed his eyes. “It was a warm day, early summer, and the park was full of people. There were tents set up, where vendors sold the sheet-music played by local musicians. Blue and purple banners. It was a street festival. This was after the fair had ended. Just a little local festival, hardly anyone from outside the neighborhood. Brass band music.

“I slept in the park the night before, up one of the trees in the wild spot in the middle. I got a rash off some kind of vine, not sumac, something else. I hadn’t eaten a decent meal since we left home. I had on the same clothes I’d worn for a week or more. I must have looked terrible.

“Beautiful girl, in a white dress, red ribbon in her dark hair, she comes up to me. She was older than me. Probably twenty or so, at the time. Figured me for a likely one. Said hello there boy, and I was so dumbstruck anyone that pretty would be talking to me, I don’t know what I said back. Something stupid, I’m sure, I’m sure.

“Up she took me, out of the park, across the street to her friend. Friend turned out to be wagoneer. Wagoneer tied me up and put me in his cage, gave the girl a nickel, and the next I knew I was piping for the Army of the Else.”

As he summarized his forced induction into the pipers, Dr. Key began to chuckle, and the phrase ‘Army of the Else’ was punctuated by a tight laugh. I had only the vaguest idea of what the Army had looked like, pre-Blackwater, and was tempted to ask follow-up questions. Jula beat me to it, though.

“It’s different now, I know, but in those days the Army of the Else didn’t have a standardized system of ranks. There were… groups, you’d say. Regiments, companies, troops, legions, centuries, they had different names and were ranked by different schemes, and the heads of one company would take orders from the heads of another, and so on up into a hierarchy. We always called them ‘families,’ but other soldiers had different names, and, and I don’t know what the seniormost officers called the units, if they called them anything.

“Wasn’t a very good system. It creaked, when I was in the Army, and that was before Blackwater. Now everyone is in a symmetrical hierarchy, in the Army of the Else, and the officers aren’t voted on by the subordinates, and…”

Dr. Key trailed off, and took a sip of his drink. I was more and more certain that he was sipping some dreadful and powerful liquor. I believed that I could smell it, once I was paying attention. It was a sort of lemonade smell, and I thought I recognized it from somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where.

“I was a piper. I piped for the Rightly Guided Fifth Family of Horsemen,” Dr. Key said. I wrenched my attention away from the olfactory and back to the verbal. “There was a Rightly Guided Eighth Family of Horsemen, I found out much later, orthagonal to us in the Army of the Else’s lines of command. We didn’t have business with them. No one in the RGFF ever mentioned them. And, and I don’t know what happened to the other six families, if they ever even existed. That’s how it was, in the Army of the Else. Your family had a name and a history, you didn’t question it.

“The wagoneer who inducted me grabbed two other boys my age, and brought us into the main camp, out past Fletcher. There were about fifty families camped there at any given time, about two-thirds of the Army of the Else. Most of the families were bigger than the RGFF, with a hundred or more fighting men, but the RGFF was elite: Cavalry. In those days, that meant something. I had a horse of my own, soon enough… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Me, Algus Bland, and the other boy were led into a big muddy place in the middle of the camp, and left trussed up in the cage for an hour or so while the wagoneer looked for a man to sell us to. He didn’t say so, of course, but now, I was raised on a farm, but I wasn’t a fool, no sir, and I figured I was going to be prenticed a soldier, and I figured I could do worse. On the one hand, I knew soldiering was mostly making camp and breaking camp and cooking and hauling and marching and hardly any getting killed, and they gave you decent pay for fear you’d revolt and they gave you good medick, for fear you’d die before the war was over. So it seemed like a pretty good life to me, and I was mainly wondering when they’d let me out of the cage and give me some stew and a red coat and a sword or pistol.

“Algus… I didn’t know his name then, he was just a fat boy with greasy hair and a broadsheet rolled up in his pants… Algus felt about the same way as me, so he was just lying back killing time, and maybe that was when we started talking and I found out his name. I don’t remember… it wasn’t long past then, though. Algus and me were close for a long time, long time…”

Dr. Key slowly eased himself up and rose to his feet, muttering about having a surprise for us. Ange said he shouldn’t go to any trouble, and Jula got up to help him, while the rest of us just sat tight, afraid of offending the old man. He ignored Ange and Jula both and stumbled into the other room of his shack, coming back almost immediately with a faded tintype in hand.

We dutifully rallied around him. “That’s Algus,” he said, pointing. The tintype showed two seated figures, a man and a woman, not much older than us. Maybe younger, even — it was hard to judge, with the picture so old and their dress and hairstyles so archaic. The man was in some kind of gaudy dress uniform, as if he was in a marching band, and the woman appeared to be wearing two dresses, one over the other.

We passed around the tintype and cooed over it. Jula commented on the girl’s dress, said it looked hot. I made a joke about it really being two dresses, but nobody laughed. Bly asked Dr. Key what the girl’s name was, and he didn’t answer right away, and when he did start talking it wasn’t about the girl, so I figured either the old man couldn’t remember, or else she was somebody famous. She might have been and we wouldn’t have known; the tintype was blurry around her face. It was blurry in other patches, too, so I didn’t immediately assume Dr. Key had defaced it, or anything.

“Jimmy, though, he wasn’t going to go along. Algus and me were fine with prenticing soldiers, but Jimmy wouldn’t do it, even then. I didn’t know it was Jimmy, though. When I saw him again I didn’t recognize him, he recognized me. But that was years later and we’d grown up.”

Bly almost interrupted Dr. Key with a question, but Ange elbowed him and he turned it into a cough.

“Algus and Jimmy and me in the cage. Jimmy was all bloody, with skinned knees and elbows and a black eye and a fat lip and more than that. I figured the wagoneer had done it to him. He was quiet the whole time we were in the cage, sulking, you know.

“I wondered why he’d been so hell-bent on staying out of the army. He was wearing, this is how I remember it, mud-caked rags. Bare feet with big sores on ‘em, like he’d been living in mud. Hair all greasy, he looked awful. If I’d been more savvy maybe I’d have put two and two together, but I just figured him for a bum, crazy street boy like I figured they had in the big city.

“Before too long, wagoneer came back with Sip. Sip was the master-of-hounds of the RGFF, which means he was in charge of us. Not us the whole army, us the boys. He was responsible for the prenticed boys and the dogs, too, and the camp girls and the tents. He was maybe thirty when we joined up, but I remember him older, how he looked just before Blackwater. Florid, big gut, hair mostly gone except for his mustache… sometimes looked like he ought to be a vicar or bean-counter, not a soldier. But he was fast enough to catch us, and once I saw him split a rail with a thrown axe from thirty yards off. He had a running start, then, but still…

“So we were in the cage, and the wagoneer brings over Sip, and Sip starts in on the welcome-to-the-family talk, and he’s getting to the part where he says, if we run, he’ll, if we run, he’ll hunt us down and cut off our little fingers the first time, and our tongues the second time, and we’re in for a tough life but blah blah blah. And I’m waiting for him to finish, and Algus too, but Jimmy starts screaming at the top of his lungs, real piercing, till the wagoneer whaps him through the cage with a sap.

“Sip didn’t like that, and he and the wagoneer went off to argue about whether Sip was going to pay for three boys or only two, and that was when Jimmy went for it.”