Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

He avoided such men. Their despair was earned too slowly; their dreams died daily, and one day’s loss meant nothing, even to themselves. What he feared, of course, was that he might lose his own dream. It, more than the possibility that the dream was wild, irresponsible — which he recognized as more than possibility — was what tormented him, drove him to do anything, accept every job. He worked only at night, or, forced to it, in the afternoon and evening. These were the vulnerable shifts, he knew, but he had to keep the mornings open for his search, even though much of the time he was exhausted, could do nothing but strain to reach the bed in his small room, to fall upon it like a man impaling himself upon some terrible destruction.

At night, drugged with the endless labor of loading and unloading, it was not so bad. He’d sometimes stop, straining at a cigarette, and look at the boats, the light from the portholes outlining the ships. When he squinted his eyes, the lights seemed to come across the water like Japanese lanterns strung for some incredible entertainment. He would look up at the decks looming large and dark above him and see here and there members of the crew seated on chairs, a cook still in his white pants and jacket looking ghostly in the light from the dim stars, like someone dressed in silver, seeming to loll there in remarkable peace, at ease in deck chairs that he himself had paid to rest in and then known only the stare of the sun, or the air’s sudden chill, or the sickening roll of the decks beneath him until he thought that he must surely slide into the sea. But the ship was truly the sailors’ home. Perched so high above him, caught in the light from areaways left casually open, they seemed gigantic, like gods, diminished not at all by their distance from him or by a night which hid even the sea.

But once he had gone across the street from the piers into a shop for merchant seamen, a great bare wooden-floored room with open card tables on which were thrown together glass jewelry, shiny plaster-of-Paris souvenirs, bottles of cheap wine, the liquid bright purple or red as artificial cherry candy in the clear bottles. On one table were scattered bundles of back-issue magazines tied with thin white strings, the faded pictures of burlesque dancers, insane, overdeveloped girls from the country, in obscene poses on the torn covers, their flesh bright pink, like a baby’s, glittering silver stars on their nipples. Men from the docked ships crowded sullenly at the counter, turning the pages of a few loose issues torn from the bundles, one hand in the pockets of their raincoats holding down their erections, their faces set carefully without expression. He had stood in the doorway and known at once their longing and their sense of loss, intuited their overwhelming homelessness, like a great hole torn in their bodies. He had gone quickly back to his work, saddened, troubled for all who sailed at sea.

At night, under the heavy senseless strain of weights too great to be borne, he forgot the vision he’d had in the shop and thought bitterly of Khardov’s box, grinding out wealth for him, but now perpetually stilled, more fragile than anything in the cargo he helped to unload.

He no longer wore his precious clothes, realizing that if something happened to change his fortune it would not do to have them look too threadbare. At work he thought of ways to preserve them, steps he could take to restore them to their former handsomeness. Surely, he would think, moving a large crate into place on a platform, things which cost so much money must still have much of their usefulness left in them. He remembered the location of weavers’ shops he had seen on his walks through the city, and tried to estimate the cost of resurrection to his clothing.

He had come to a country where the tradition of a ruling family stretched backward to the beginning of its history. In the low hills tribes and clans had made their camps, and in each had emerged, by dint of intelligence or force of arms or God’s fiat, one who had been leader, king. It excited him to think about it. Barbarian, horn-helmeted, clothed in skin of tiger or of bear, he had yet embodied even in the placating gesture of hands that calmed the watchers of the lightning, the hearers of the thunder, some major principle of civilization.

The nation was still a provenance of empire, albeit a waning one (each year another governor was recalled). Because its long history had been neither placid nor uninterrupted, there seemed still to drift in the atmosphere claims and counter-claims, whispered conspiracy of pretender and fool. In towns near the capital each old inn had housed its would-be king. Ambition had even become a major theme in the national literature.

Here, he felt, if anywhere, something would turn up. On his free mornings he haunted the palace grounds. A custom made things easier for him. By tradition petitioners of the royal family were allowed to mill about outside the gates to await the arrival of the king’s carriage. At the king’s discretion he might extend one royal glove and the coachman would stop. Then the petitioners would come forward individually (in an order agreed upon among themselves) and standing, eyes lowered, beneath the high gilt sides of the carriage, address the king. He did not stop every day. There was no pattern. Everything was left to royal whim.

He had no desire himself to address the king and was, of course; suspicious of appeals made in this way. The hangers-on about the palace gates were almost always old people, or young hoodlums who came to tease them.

He had stood close enough to hear one old man’s strange request: “Your Highness, I should like to propose myself for a postal stamp. I’ve a remarkable good-looking face. All think so. I’ve been to the authorities but they say it’s your decision, sire, who gets on the postal stamps.”

And the king’s amused reply: “Oh, we’ve postage stamps enough, I think. And an endless supply of faces for them, what with the queen and the children and the war heroes. Wouldn’t a statue suit you better? Think about it and let us know.”

He didn’t really know why he came to these audiences, unless it was because he felt that even this easily shared proximity to royalty somehow advanced his cause. At any rate, he continued to gather with the others outside the gates despite his own awareness of the king’s disdain and scornful patronage of the mob he was a part of, and he was disappointed on those mornings when the carriage did not stop. Gradually he became familiar with the public habits of the royal family. There was the trip at the beginning of each week to open the parliament, and when it was warm the morning ride in the public park, or the shopping tour of the princess. He could even predict with some accuracy those periods in which the king’s benevolence was running at full tide and he would be sure to stop.

One day he saw a new face in the royal carriage. He was so excited that he had to ask one of the regulars next to him who it was.

“Cousin of the queen. Duke somebody or other.”

He thought he had seen a resemblance between himself and the duke. It was only a remote possibility but he had to follow it up.

“Excuse me, but would you say I look something like the duke? It seems a foolish thing, but as he rode by I thought I saw a resemblance.”

The man looked at him carefully. “Oh, he’s much older than you are.”

“Older, of course, but is there a resemblance?”

“Well, that beard he’s got. That covers him up pretty well. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I didn’t get a very good look at him. He’s not here often.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, feeling foolish.

“You’ve the same builds now,” the man said. “And maybe around the eyes, though I didn’t get a good look.”