Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

Saul trailed him from the bathroom across the Dayroom to the med window. Luis ducked behind the counter and started popping pills from blister packs.

“So … what’s the outfit?” he said.

Luis was many things — co-conspirator, guardian angel, emancipator, sidekick — but genius he was not. Saul overlooked his question so as not to cudgel him with his ignorance.

“Luis, I met with Kraepevic and he suspects something.”

“Dr. Kraepevic is a great psychiatrist. I thought you liked him. He’s really worried about you right now, and I think we all are. Your behaviour has been, well, bizarre lately. Here,” he said, depositing a paper cup of pills on the counter, “this is your new dosage. And Saul, when I was cleaning the bathroom this morning, I found a pill behind the toilet, melted enough that I couldn’t identify it. I’m not saying it was you, but I’m going to need to make sure you take these meds today. Okay?”

The poor fool’s allegiances were so skewed that King Saul couldn’t rebuke him. He could even forgive this lingering fealty to Kraepevic. The doctor had him on the same leash he’d used on Saul for the last thirty years, a barbed tether that had required every gram of his strength to break.

“There is no stopping it, Luis,” Saul said, drawing the cup of meds to his lips. It held two of the same orange pills and a new capsule that was green and white, the markings of a deadly snake.

“Good,” Luis said, exhaling. “This afternoon we ‘re doing crafts. You could write some letters or put some more art on your head scarf if you wanted.”

Saul scuttled the pills onto his tongue, sipped the water, and for the first time in what seemed like years, he swallowed. He opened his mouth as wide as it would go, twisting his tongue in a circle.

“All gone. Satisfied?”

“You bet, Saul. Thanks for making my job easy,” Luis said.

As he returned to the Dayroom, Saul could feel the medication’s tingle of dissolution in his throat, preparing for its short journey upriver to the palace of his mind. He would grow duller, meeker and less capable by the minute, and King Saul knew that if it was to begin, it must begin at this moment.

He went to the TV Room, where he found Tina basking in the gangrenous glow of her train movie, burrowed into the couch for all eternity if he failed to act. A videotape was actually much more difficult to snap in half with bare hands than one would think, and King Saul resisted the urge to put it over his knee because he’d pictured doing it in the air, over his head, his thumbs pressed at its centre — much more epic, statuesque — and he did this while expounding to Tina the new life offered her, after the Electrifying Conclusion had freed them all from bondage. There was a choked screech and she came at him with all of the glory and elegant fury of a wild beast. He twisted the glossy coils of tape around his forearms like a boxer readying himself for the fight of the century. Her small, hard fists bit into his shoulders and neck and her wailings were musical and ignorant of syntax. “Let it out,” Saul sang, and he leaned into her, accepting her blows as one would a handmade gift, or Christ did his thorny crown.

King Saul then saw that she had driven him into the Dayroom. Someone was wrenching fists of hair from the back of his neck and kicking at his shins. He laughed, and tears stung his eyes, and King Saul knew instantly that these were her tears, that she’d given them to him. He called on his subjects to witness her transformation and be inspired by it. He’d managed to wind the videotape around his neck and face like a carbonized mummy and the hair-tearing ceased. Through his mask he could make out the approaching figures of nurses and a number of his subjects watching from the craft table, mouths agape. He heard Tina’s name. Nurses had her by the arms and she kicked at them and roared. More nurses came. Saul saw Luis appear from the nurses’ station, where, inside, he saw all their files up on the shelf, and he vowed silently to burn those too once it was over. Luis wrestled one of Tina’s legs and they dragged her down the hall.

The miracle is underway, thought King Saul. I am only an usher to it now. By its own engine will it be brought forth. He tore the videotape from his face and climbed up on the craft table, where he kicked aside their artwork, crude portraits of their tortured dreams, their parents and their childhood homes, even a sheet that staff had beset with horse stickers and signed Georgina’s name to. He saw that bits of glued paper and sparkles had affixed themselves to his slippers. From high he gazed down on his pitiful subjects. He saw Drew, Jacob, Kim, Tina, even some of the stunned nurses, all admiring him together, their faces pale and practically arranged like a keyboard. Words rose for them to hear, the boil of voices in his head now constituting his own true voice, the way colours together made only white, and he was unsure if they were telling him what to say or if they repeated what they read from his mouth. He informed his subjects that he was no longer just a self-taught detective, that he’d been crowned King in a ceremony of his own design. He vowed to rule kindly and justly. First, he would re-establish the farm — his subjects would cultivate tobacco, then in time other crops would be sown. Families would be forbidden any visitation. If they came they would be drowned in milk and buried at the bank of the river. There would be no more schedules. His subjects would be free to live as they pleased. Then as plainly as one peered into a bucket of water he saw into their futures. Kim would play checkers and keep her own darkness in her head. Drew would cease his meds and smoke without limitation, writing great nonsensical missives on the walls of every building and donning every manner of tinfoil helm. Jacob, free from his father, would grow into a kind and gentle man, maybe a farmer. Even Tina would come to understand what a great gift was given her with the destruction of her tape. Shortly after the Conclusion she would find a companion, not just a vision of a man long gone. King Saul then vowed to commence his reign by constructing for her a train that ran around the edges of the grounds, which she herself could pilot. And finally, Georgina. She would be venerated, an empress, and it would be thought of as a great privilege to change her linens, kiss her sores, and for her a great pool would be dug, and she would float for the rest of her life in the warm water therein and each day would be like the day before she was born, when she was still perfect.

Saul’s eyes veered back into focus. Some of his subjects were dazed, their faces churning confusion, and he feared his words weren’t as he’d intended, that they were bad models for the architecture contained in his head, or that the air itself was somehow sickening them. For a moment he felt like he had during his trial, like something important and irrecoverable was slipping from him. He could smell the fluorescent lights above and considered breaking them open and drawing their gas into his lungs and speaking the illumination contained within them. These thoughts were abruptly ended when in the crowd he saw her. King Saul knew that she’d heard what was transpiring here and had come to stand by his side. She’d come with his letters bundled in her bare arms and glass shards shimmering in her hair. A shuddering joy broke over him and he raised his arms and spread his palms like two wide eagles and called to her and she sent him a kiss tumbling into the air.

Then a booming voice was asking what he was doing. A clutching thing gripping his ankle. Things are happening wrong, he thought; there is no centre to them. King Saul called out to Luis, an entreaty, a royal plea for help, but not a soul could hear him. Saul saw only a gilded songbird flitting about the room, a rainbow in the air like gasoline splayed on water. He wondered if it was the pills. Then another voice spoke words about someone getting off a table. Luis was by his side. King Saul introduced him to his subjects as his second-in-command. This gentle bear Luis called him Buddy and gently wrapped him in his hairy arms.