Jonathan Levi - Septimania

Up on the porch of the house, above the terrace abandoned by La Principessa and her court, all the countless bits of what had been Tibor’s childhood and adolescence and hopeful struggle and boundless energy, all the memories of the actresses of Tenth Avenue and the ballerinas of St. Petersburg and the demimondaines of Paris and nights sleeping rough in Rome and cracking a vertebra or two leaning over the parapet of the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, all these bits went flying through the nighttime air towards the half-roof above the terrace, towards the top branches of the three protective birches, towards the quivering underbellies of the leaves, and lit up the night with a light as sharp and ambitious as the flames of hell; all strove with a last muscled flicker of energy to become a part of the great Tevere of stars that twisted across the heavens.

The bit of Tibor that flew the highest, attached for a moment as brief as that timeless instant at the beginning of the beginning to a still-intact apple pip, was his first memory of a rising sun in the depths of a Bucharest winter; of hair dark, years away from the merest hint of gray; and the two eyes, gray, even silver, interrupting his rehearsal, looking for a bathroom, drawn to his — eyes pure and clean and full of a saving innocence in a time before knowledge, before the wisdom of Minerva overran them both. That final spark of Tibor’s compounded, complex, unimaginable love for Cristina released its forgotten energy and lit up the sky above the Red Barn and Cristina’s gray head.

And then, since these countably finite memories — each attached to a portion of swiftly cooling brain — had been forcibly exiled from any connection to heart and lung, all that remained was the echo of the pistol that Mr. Jeddah had left in the plastic bag on the bar of the Seven Veils, the bag Ottavia had so thoughtfully retrieved for Tibor. Then came a silence and then the prayers of the crickets and the mantras of the bullfrogs, as the fireflies — whose memories are the merest fraction of their brief lives — lit what was left of the world, until, giving way as it must to the law of gravity, the light circled back upon itself, licked its paws, crept into a box, let fall the lid and seal, and settled cold, extinguished, irreversible.

11 September 1692

ear Mr. Newton,

I regret to inform you that, on the night of 10 September, after consuming a light supper with a bottle of claret, Her Royal Excellency, the Queen of Septimania, retired to the Sanctum Sanctorum for the last time. Enclosed, please find a letter in her hand addressed to you. I rest

your most humble & most

obedient Servant,

Settimio

LEEPLESS, BUT NOT DREAMLESS.

Sleepless in the Good Knight’s Inn in South Hackensack.

The digital alarm blinked out the minutes of the early hours with a spastic colon. Malory reckoned he had been awake for every one of those indigestible blinks. But sometime in the darkness a vision came to him — perhaps in the way the Arabian Tales revealed themselves to restless storytellers over a thousand and one insomniac nights. Water — an ocean, or maybe just the pond at TiborTina, water lapping the grassy shingle like a lukewarm summer’s bath — pole pines, shadows, evening fog muting all sense of space. Sitting at the edge, shoes off, trousers rolled below the knees, toes deep in loamy mud, a bamboo pole and shop-bought string for a fishing rod.

“So …” Malory knew Tibor was behind him, could smell the tobacco and the vodka merging with the fog. “Do you promise to tie my legs?”

Malory tried to answer, tried to ask, but in his half-sleep couldn’t move his lips.

“Tie my legs,” Tibor continued, “tight at the ankles. Tie my wrists behind me. Tight. Toss me into the pond and count to thirty. If my hands come up first, waving, fish me out and dry me off. If my feet come up, bound and lifeless …”

Malory knew the story, knew how it would end. He knew the Tale of Judar, the tale that Haroun al Rashid had told Aldana in the stable below the shochet’s house in Narbonne. He knew the story of the three brothers from some distant Arab land — Morocco was it? Tunisia? — the three brothers who approached a young fisherman named Judar on the shore of Lake Karoon. They had made the same request as Tibor — bind my wrists behind me, bind them tight. Toss me into the water and count to thirty. Two of the brothers drowned. The third rose to the surface hands first and led Judar to unimaginable treasure.

Malory didn’t want to tie up Tibor, couldn’t imagine unimaginable treasure — certainly didn’t need it. But in his sleep, he felt bound — yes, he remembered thinking that word — to bind his poor, sick, drunken, sweat-soaked friend. He reached into his Kit Bag and pulled out a meter’s length of laundry cord. He began to wind the cord around Tibor’s arms, but Tibor’s elbows kept slipping the knots.

“Sorry,” Malory said. He reached again into the Kit Bag and pulled out a coil of grapevine, the leaves and grapes still hanging ripe and heavy. But tying knots in the mess only made the job more difficult. Malory reached into the Kit Bag a third time and found a cello string, the low C-string, a length of steel-wrapped gut thicker than the grapevine but less complex. With the C-string, Malory was finally able to tie Tibor’s arms behind his back and bind his ankles in a rough imitation of a Transylvanian martyr.

“Now what?” Malory asked in his half-sleep.

“The rules,” Tibor said, with a long sigh. “Just follow the rules, Malory.” And although Malory had no idea which rules, or who else was following the same rules, Malory lifted Tibor over his head with a strength that he hadn’t manifested since he’d carried Louiza from Santa Maria sopra Minerva to the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli twenty-three years before.

“Now!” Tibor commanded.

With the heave of a Hercules, Malory launched Tibor towards the Sun. And as Tibor descended towards Earth, as the rules mandated, and the full force of his turkey-trussed, balding frame hit the water, the explosion — unlike anything Malory had heard, even from the sixty-four-foot contra-trombone stops of the cathedral of Narbonne — shattered whatever sleep had brought on the dream.

The clock flashed 05:34, September 11. Malory found the light.

WHEN MALORY HEARD THE GUNSHOT AT TIBORTINA THE NIGHT BEFORE, he first thought that he had been hit and then feared it was Louiza. But as he was running to her and she to him, he realized that the sound must have come from elsewhere and been directed at somebody else. He was happy — he remembered that sentiment — happy that it was not them, that he was close and closer and Louiza was also running.

And then he was stopped.

“ Principe! ” The Driver grabbed Malory around the waist in a manner both respectful and determined. “I apologize, but we must go.”

“Let me go, please,” Malory said.

“I cannot,” the Driver said. “My instructions are to protect you.”

“I,” Malory began, as the Driver pulled him towards the car, “I command you …”

But clearly Settimio’s commentary of twenty-three years before, that Malory was the one who made the choices, was the Chooser-in-Chief, did not apply to this situation. There were other rules that Malory couldn’t understand, rules that overruled Malory’s rule. And as the Driver firmly, but respectfully, shoved Malory into the passenger’s seat and locked the door, Malory saw the man with the brush cut follow Louiza up the hill to the pond. He saw the brush cut lead Louiza away.