Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“ ‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE.’ ”

“ ‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE, DARES DUKE TO DUEL!’ ”

“ ‘MAKE-BELIEVE MONARCH.’ ”

“ ‘CARGO CON MAN CLAIMS KINGDOM!’ ”

“ ‘KHARDOV CREATES KINGDOM FOR CARGO KING.’ ”

“ ‘WHO IS KHARDOV?’ ”

“What is this?” he asked again. “How do you know about me?”

“Are you going all the way with this, mister, or did you just want some quick publicity?”

“Who are your backers?”

“Any influence with the people?”

Suddenly a bulb exploded in his face. It pierced the room with a bright, blue-white light, and he thrust his hands to his eyes defensively.

“Not used to having your picture taken, right, fellow?”

“The gateman said he keeps that medallion inside his shirt.”

“Let’s have a look at it, mister.”

“No. Get out of here. Please.”

“Come on, a shot of the medallion.”

“It’ll be good for your campaign.”

“There’s no campaign,” he said. “Please. There’s no campaign.”

“Come on now, one shot and we’ll get out of here.”

“Grab his arms, someone.”

“Come on. The shirt, the shirt. I’ve got him.”

There were half a dozen pairs of hands on him. They closed about his mouth, his eyes. Someone held him by his throat. He felt hard fingers jabbing at his chest. Someone was trying to unbutton his shirt.

“Rip it off,” somebody said. “We can’t hold him all night.”

He heard the anguished ripping of material like a quick, low scream. He struggled with somebody’s hands, forcing his own hands toward his chest, trying to protect his medallion. His fingers closed around a loose button on his shirt. It came off convulsively and he felt it, something alien, in his hand. “Please,” he screamed. “ Please .” There was another sudden brightness flaring in the darkness and he struck out at the reporters. Strangely saddened, conscious of a peculiar loss, he dropped the button.

“I could use a few more shots but you’d better let him go.”

“ ‘PRESS PUMMELS PRETENDER PRINCE,’ ” a man said, giggling nervously.

“ ‘MONARCH’S MEDAL MEDDLED!’ ”

Then, suddenly, he was free. They let him go and he stumbled backward, clumsily slumping into a chair. Someone took another photograph. Dazed, he thought of heat lightning on a summer night.

The photographers gathered in front of him in a half circle. On their knees they aimed their cameras at him as he sat, stunned and dulled, in the chair. One man, stooping slightly and holding his camera balanced carefully before him, backed away from him slowly. A final explosion of light filled the room. It was as though they had been striking matches under his eyes. “That’s it,” one called. “Let’s get out of here.” He could not see them clearly. They moved, blocks of greater and lesser darknesses, like huge, dimly seen, milky chunks of ice retreating slowly in some northern ocean.

“Wait,” he called, not sure they were still in the room, “I have no claims.” There was no answer. “ I have no claims, ” he shouted. They had not heard him. They would print their story and their pictures and he would appear, tattered and brawling, in their papers, like one deranged, his claims distorted, insisted upon. He would never be able to explain that it was all a harmless hunch that he had acted upon but once. He rubbed his eyes. Gradually he was conscious of the medallion which hung exposed, obscenely visible through the torn shirt, like the phallus of a careless old man.

For three days he lay on the cot in his work clothes, sick in his shabby room. He knew he was feverish. The medallion felt cold against his skin, and once he took it off. He removed the chain from his neck and wrapped it about the medallion; it was very heavy in his hand. He would have liked to throw it away, but at the last minute he found that he could not do it. He had had it too long — all his life. Even its shape, he thought. His very heart must have taken its shape by now. He thought of his heart, shield-shaped beneath his rib cage. He put the chain back around his throat, and again the medallion lay against his skin, a dead weight, useless and cold.

He wondered if Khardov was still alive. My father, he thought. My kingmaker. What a joke he had played. What a joke!

He would have liked to write him. It would be a very long letter. It was too bad he had no strength. The founder of kingdoms would have liked it. He could tell him how he had wasted his life, how it had been dissipated…

How had it? In disappointment? It was strange, but he knew that disappointment was not among the ruins of feelings lying about him like collapsed, dropped pants. Nor was failure. Nor frustration. Nor pity for his cause. Yet he knew a sense of dreadful, terrible waste. Nothing could be reclaimed, nothing, and he gnashed his teeth and ground his fist into his palm. That was it, he thought. It had been thrown away, dissipated in anger, in outrage at imagined affronts, his energy destroyed by a dubious righteousness. It was as though his life had been sliced thin by a daily, steady outrage, as real as pain. He took the medallion in his hands and looked at it. He had often wondered which of the figures was meant to represent himself. The knight, militant astride the horse, pledged to some unknown cause, his fury, like his loyalty, merely a technique? The lion, defiant, all its weight in the vicious arching outrage of its paws? The eagle, its legs and feet in queer, attenuated taper, as nude as spikes, its talons curved about the crown shape in the act of usurpation, fantastically appearing to perch on it in mid-air, like any canary on its toy swing?

He looked more closely at the figures. The hauberked knight was protected by his armor. He would not feel the blows of enemies. His cause was borrowed anyway, something not his own. The eagle, intimidated, bewildered in his adventitious majesty, had not meant to grasp the crown. The eagle bespoke accident. It was the lion then, rampant, the claws bursting from the furred paws, its rage, like his own, concentrated on no object, irrelevant but steady, just steady, spraying the air like spit. It was the lion, then, at the edge of the shield as at the edge of the jungle — loose, lost, peripheral, partner to nothing.

But there was something more than outrage. From the very beginning there was the hope, not tarnished even now, on the cot in the shabby room, in the broken house, in the wounded neighborhood, in the strange city, in the alien country, in the unfamiliar hemisphere, in, at last, the unresponsive world — the hope, conviction even, that in a real way he had been a prince. A real one. There had been no sports cars climbing the sides of hills along the Mediterranean, nor racquets stitched crisscross on a jacket, nor education at an American university, nor hilarious incognito revels, nor grandly formal balls where stag lines of princesses waited for him to choose among them for a dance. Although he had known none of the conditions of the prince, he had felt like one. He still did; he could feel it now. Precious. His identity. He would have to tell Khardov that too.

There was the question, of course, of what he was to do with his life now. He had not anticipated failure — his dream had been too wild. Yet failure had changed everything. It was one thing for the king, biding his time, awaiting his chance, to seek anonymity, to float on the oceans of the world, to hide behind the cargoes piled high on those oceans’ docks; it was quite another thing for himself, the man of no hope, in whose heart no conviction burned steady as a painted flame. But he saw that it made no difference to him. His failure had been of gross proportions. To mitigate it, to settle for less, and so much less — to bargain, as it were, with his fate — would hardly do. He would not settle for less, but for least. He determined that when his fever went down he would return to the docks.