Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach
“Quiet,” the mystic said softly, stroking the back of his head.
“But I am weak, Mother,” the king said. “I no longer go out to war with the rest of my tribe. I stay safe in my tent while I send others to die.”
“When you were a warrior, you feared death, yet still you fought. As a king, you fear being called a coward, yet you do your duty and remain safe in your tent for the sake of your tribe. Be at peace, my son, for I have read your soul in the cards. You are a brave man.”
And though the words were simple, the king felt them land with the certainty of arrows in his heart. When he returned to his palatial hut, he couldn’t help but rouse his beautiful queen. Even in the wan light, she could see the joy in his face.
“You must speak with the mystic,” the king said. “She has made a new man of me.” And then he took the queen in his arms and kissed her with the passion of youth.
The following night, the queen put on her many furs and ventured out into the woods. It had been a long time since she had been allowed to travel alone. Only as a young girl, before she’d been betrothed to the king, had she had such liberty. Unlike her husband, the queen had no fear of the darkness. In fact, she felt herself growing lighter with each step she took. She let fall her furs so the cool air could wrap itself around her bare limbs. She shimmied up trees so she could see how the moonlight glittered on the canopy of the forest. From one of these perches, she sighted the mystic’s encampment, and she approached it like a child told to go to bed, sneaking back downstairs to listen to the grown-ups speak of grown-up things.
At first she was confused, because there was no woman in the glade at all. Instead a man sat on the tree stump, smoking a long pipe and watching the stars. It was her father, who’d brokered her marriage to the king many years ago. He’d been dead many a year now. She ran to him, leaped up on his lap, and buried her head in his shoulder.
“Quiet,” the mystic said softly, stroking the back of the queen’s head.
“But I am weak, Father,” the queen said. “I fantasize of a man who isn’t my husband, that we will run away together and leave everything and everyone behind.”
“When you were a girl, your greatest joy was dancing alone in the woods, yet you allowed yourself to be married when duty demanded it. As queen, you dream of escape, yet you accept the confining yoke of leadership. Be at peace, my daughter, for I have read your soul in the cards. You are a brave woman.”
The queen did not skip back through the forest, though she knew she could have if she’d wanted to. Instead she walked slowly, savoring these last few moments alone. The sun was coming up, and she slipped into bed just as the king was waking. He always rose early, to ride the length and breadth of the tribe’s territory and ask after the welfare of his subjects. She had never loved him more than she did at that moment.
“Did you meet the mystic?” he asked.
“Yes. It was wonderful.”
“Good.” He kissed her forehead. “We have one more reading to bestow. Who do you think should receive it?”
The king and the queen decided that Klaus the Dragon’s Head, who had done so much for their tribe over the years, deserved the honor.
When Klaus received the news, he was disappointed. He had no interest in speaking with some madwoman in the woods—not when he could be back in his hut, soaking in his steaming bronze tub of lavender-scented water with a few slave girls. Also, this gift that the king and queen deemed “priceless” might cost him other, more conventionally valuable gifts (that golden ax Christos had received would’ve made for a much better prize). Still, Klaus knew he could not refuse the offer, so when night fell, he begrudgingly entered the forest. He did not notice the stars or the moon. He didn’t skip or climb trees, nor did he tremble with fear at the hoot of an owl. He arrived in the mystic’s glade in half the time it had taken either the king or the queen. There, his last hope—that he would meet the beautiful woman with the white streak in her raven-black hair—was dashed. It was a little girl waiting for him in front of the tree stump. Her hair was silver, her eyes the color of the ocean, and her expression was imperious and patronizing.
“Child, where is the mystic?” Klaus asked.
“I have read your soul in the cards,” the girl said. “Are you prepared to hear your judgment?”
“I suppose,” Klaus said, picking an errant piece of goat meat out from between his two front teeth.
“You must be certain. Because it is more likely that you are prepared to hear what you have always heard. That you are the bravest among men. That your strength is beyond measure. That you are quick and clever and gallant. But this is idle flattery. This is small minds chattering to themselves. I offer you the truth.”
Klaus noticed an unfamiliar gnawing at the bottom of his stomach. He wouldn’t even have been able to give it a name, so novel was the feeling. But the queen would’ve recognized it. She had felt it the moment that her father told her she’d been promised to Uthor. And the king would have recognized it too. He’d felt it every day he went out into battle as a young warrior.
“Out with it,” Klaus said, only why was his throat so very dry?
“Very well,” the girl said. “You are a coward.”
“Me? A coward?” Klaus laughed his usual laugh, the one that echoed like a thunderclap as he charged toward his enemies. In the glade of the mystic, it sounded thin and false.
“Yes.”
“You are new to this region, little girl, so perhaps you haven’t yet heard tales of my triumphs. At the Battle of Crossed Eyes, I was disarmed early in the day, and I went on to kill twenty men with my bare hands. At the Battle of Blood Creek, I was responsible for the blood creek in question. At the Battle of Death Hill, I was shot full of so many arrows that some of my own tribesmen mistook me for a gigantic porcupine. I am the first to lead any charge, and the last to leave the battlefield. I am Klaus, the Dragon’s Head.”
“And I say again you are a coward, Klaus the Dragon’s Buttock!”
This short sentence struck Klaus like a fist to the gut, and he fell down onto his knees.
“You lead the charge because you wish to be known as the man who leads the charge,” the girl said. “You have never feared the dark, and you have never feared pain, and you have never feared the enemy. And where there is no fear, there is no bravery.”
As the girl continued to speak, Klaus imagined himself shrinking, word by word, inch by inch, until he felt certain he’d become a tiny child, younger even than the mystic.
“There is only one thing that truly frightens you, Klaus the Dragon’s Testicles.”
“What is it?” he asked, truly desperate to know.
“The moment when the last bard singing of your exploits holds his hand to his heart and keels over. When the last man who heard those songs is laid to rest in the ground. You fear oblivion, Klaus the Dragon’s Arse. And every time you run headlong into battle, you are running from that fear.”
“Tell me what to do,” Klaus said. “Teach me to be brave.”
“I cannot.” And for the first time, there was at least a spark of sympathy in the mystic’s eyes. “Your reading is done. My debt to your people is repaid.”
For a moment, a bank of clouds covered up the moon and the stars, cloaking the glade in darkness. When the light returned, the mystic had disappeared. The only sign that she’d ever existed was a single white card left on the stump. It showed a smiling man in motley holding a dragon’s-head staff: The Fool.
Klaus did not return to his tribe that night, or ever again. People said that the mystic must have fallen in love with him, and they’d run away together. Other, less romantic folk said that he’d been beset by a large group of highwaymen on the way home and killed. Months passed. The stories of Klaus the Dragon’s Head grew into legends, told to the youngest warriors of the tribe, to inspire them before battle. Years passed. While the legends of Klaus were no longer told in the tents of war (having been replaced by the valorous history of Kong
ARRESTED
OKAY, I’LL ADMIT THAT I didn’t write every word of that at the time, but I did get the broad strokes of the story down. (And you can’t expect me not to give these things a bit of a polish before showing them to you. Remember: I’m dumb, not stupid.)
“Can I read it?” Zelda asked. I hadn’t even noticed she’d woken up.
I passed her the journal. While she read, I let my gaze float around the room. It felt different in here now, after what had happened between us. My eyes came to rest on the photograph mounted on the wall right in front of the bed. It had been taken at San Diego Comic-Con, just a month or so before my dad died. The organizers of the convention had given him a table in a lonely corner of the “Autograph Arena,” and he and I spent the whole afternoon sitting there, waiting for people to ask him to sign their books. I can still remember the desperation of that place—the desperation of second-tier actors, of comic-book guys who actually looked like the Comic-Book Guy from The Simpsons, of fan clubs and fanzines and blogs about blogs and blogs. The desperation of indoor kids seeking their first nondigital friendships—maybe even a furtive hookup in the back row of a screening of the trailer for the next Batman movie. Near my dad’s table, some actor sat behind a little doppelgänger army of cardboard cutouts of himself dressed as a hobbit; apparently, he’d had a role in one of the Lord of the Rings movies. The line stretching away from his table was long—like waiting-for-a-lifeboat-on-the-deck-of-the-Titanic long—while the line in front of my dad’s table was not. In fact, it didn’t even deserve the geometric designation “line.” Occasionally, it was a dot. Usually it was nothing. Void. The total absence of attention. This photograph was taken during one of the dot periods. Just me, my dad, and some pimply teenage advertisement for celibacy who’d loved my dad’s first book.
I saw that photo the moment I woke up every morning, and it was usually the last thing I saw before I went to bed. And why? Just to prove to myself that I hadn’t forgotten him?
“That’s a good one,” Zelda said, handing me back the notebook. “But I have to ask—what inspired it? I haven’t known many men who write short stories postcoitally.”
It’s for my applications. I want you to see I’m serious about going to college.
“I know you are, darling.”
She kissed me on the cheek.
But do you really think I’m arrested? I wrote.
“I think you’re arresting,” she said with a smile.
I’m being serious. Yesterday you told my mom you thought I was arrested. Did you mean it?
She wrapped her arms around me. “Yes. But I didn’t say it to be hurtful. And I think things are already changing. Can’t you feel it?”
I nodded. The rain was playing music on the shingles over our head. Out the attic window I saw it patter on the crooked trees and bent weathervanes and wrought-iron fences of the Sunset. I’ve always liked the rain, maybe because I grew up with it always coming around. It kept things clean. It washed things away. I’d often wondered what people did in cities where it never rained. How could they ever start fresh?
“Where are you going?” Zelda asked.
I climbed out of bed and down the attic ladder. In the kitchen, I got a garbage bag out from under the sink. The only question was where to begin.
SYMBOLIC GESTURES
I NOTICED THE ONE ABOVE the television first, because how could I miss it? How could anyone miss a foot-tall photograph in a wide silver frame, its subject staring down at you like some sort of judgmental religious icon every time you just wanted to relax with the tube? When I took it down, a rectangular shadow of white was left on the wall. It reminded me of this photograph we’d seen in history class, taken in Hiroshima after the bomb had been dropped, in which someone’s silhouette had been permanently etched into the cement by the force of the blast.
In the kitchen, a tiny photograph of the three of us at Disneyland hung from a nail above the toaster. I’d had it framed for my mom last Christmas. In the picture, I was small and chubby, smiling hugely, with a pair of black plastic mouse ears on my head. My mom wore a neon fanny pack. There was a crack of splintering glass when it landed in the garbage bag with the other photo.
Three different pictures were mounted on the wall of the stairway. One of them was a cartoon someone had drawn, in which my dad’s stubbly beard became a wide bush with a bird inside it and my mom’s tiny ears had been transformed into mere nubs on the side of her head. NYC, 2004 was written at the bottom. Crack. Next to that was a wedding photograph, taken at some epically shitty photography studio. My parents were posed against a swirly blue background, spooning standing, the way people always stood in pictures but never stood in real life. My mom’s dress made her look like a cheap cupcake, and my dad’s suit made him look like a bad waiter. Crack. The topmost picture was again of all three of us, but I was just a baby in this one. My parents were co-cradling me, staring down at me with this look in their eyes like this kid was going to be the solution to all their problems. Crack.
The upstairs hallway was a veritable museum of photographs, and it included the true centerpiece of the collection. At first glance, the image in question looked pretty ordinary—hardly deserving of the big bronze frame. My dad was sitting on the couch in front of his laptop, looking up at the camera with his usual annoyance.
It was the last photograph we had of him, taken just a week before the accident. Crack.
In my mom’s room, I did my best not to look at the photos as I picked them up and dropped them into the bag, but I accidentally caught sight of one that had been taken on our trip to Colombia, in which my dad and I were making a sand castle on the beach. The whole trip came rushing back to me in one enormous wave-crash of memories. My dad had rented a metal detector, so we could search up and down the beach for hidden treasures. All we ever found were a bunch of bottle caps and some loose change, but those were treasures enough for a five-year-old. I could remember my dad speaking Spanish with the hotel staff and the owners of local shops and the men who walked up and down the beach selling costume jewelry and bottled water. He seemed so at home there, so much happier than he ever was in California. Crack.
I left the bag at the bottom of the ladder and climbed back up into my bedroom. There was only the one photograph here. I pulled it off the wall and dropped it down to the second floor. Crash.
Zelda sat up in bed, alarmed. “Parker, what are you doing?”
I-t-s f-i-n-e, I finger spelled.
And of course I knew this was all just symbolic. Somewhere in my mom’s room, there was a whole cardboard box full of other photos. But I wasn’t trying to eradicate every trace of my father. I was trying to make a point. To my mom, and to myself, and maybe most importantly, to Zelda. Because if I could move on, then maybe she could too. Maybe we could move on together.
I picked up her clothes and brought them to her in bed.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded, then gestured that she should get dressed. I was about to head back downstairs when I remembered the box under the bed. Zelda helped me get it down the ladder, and then we dumped it out into the garbage bag.
Outside, the rain was pelting down, and I ran for the trash can.
“That’s the first place your mom will look, you know,” Zelda said.
Damn. I hadn’t thought of that. Why did big symb
“Where are we going?” Zelda asked, once we were in the car.
I shrugged, because I didn’t know yet. I just started driving, up Oak Street and across the Panhandle, the rain growing more intense every second, through Hayes Valley and then spiraling up onto the Central Freeway, heading south but exiting on Cesar Chavez when I finally figured out what I had to do, then getting back on the freeway heading in the other direction. Every few hundred feet, a long black scrape ran along the cement wall of the highway. Each one represented some kind of accident. Most of them had probably been small. Others had probably been just like mine—a gaping hole opening up in the fabric of reality, a sadness that no one else could see pouring in like water through a leak in a boat. I stopped just shy of the yellow-black stripes of the divider separating the 80 and the 101. Ground zero.
I set the bag on the hood of the car and then climbed up next to it. Cars streaked by in glow-stick lines, flashing white to red as they passed. The hood was slippery with rain. I stepped to the edge of it and, with a grunt, emptied the bag over the triangular divider, into the no-man’s-land just beyond the apex. The glass in the frames shattered on the pavement, and the papers rose upward, carried by the wind from the passing cars in fractal fluttering patterns, like enormous flakes of ash, plastering themselves to windshields, pulled under the tires of big rigs, disappearing over the walls of the highway and gone forever.