My Dying Heir

The girls bathed my son in the morning, as they do every morning.  I call him retarded but doctors don’t know what it is actually. I even brought in a specialist from a city to the west.  He said, “He’s just spoilt. Bad brain. Soft.”

That’s his favorite thing—the bathing.  And he sleeps all day like a cat in his room full of pillows—his quarters.  Sometimes there are the girls in there. And the opium smell drifts out.

I took him into the city to see suffering.  I showed him the hungry. The sick. His eyes were gauging the distance of the sun over the horizon. 

I pointed out to him a leper.  When he didn’t respond, I looked to where he sat in the carriage to find him excitedly scanning some pornographic material he had smuggled aboard.

I sit in bed that night smoking my pipe.  It is a large pipe, and I sit on a vast bed.  My wife sits at the bed’s distant shore, also smoking a pipe, a smaller one.  She is sitting facing the wall, perpendicular to me. 

Normally I find pipe smoking too masculine for women, disgraceful, especially in the mouths of those of status.  But because of an incident with my manhood in the frontlines of a war preceding my taking of this throne, I turn a blind eye to certain things out of respect to her.  Besides the pipe, for instance, I know one of her manservants not to be a eunuch.

She is small.  Helene. Her eyes set deep in her face.  She is not much younger than me. Old. I do know what’s in her pipe to be opium—not what’s in mine I can assure you!  The poor woman… The majority loss of my manhood is my one great shame. Three children: a daughter, a stillbirth and then finally a male—each act of conception a great miracle of herbal medicine and a display by God in His faith in me as his representative.

“When will this pass,” I say, referring to the boy’s apathy, hedonism and stupidity.  “I am getting older. My own father died around this time and I was at his age when I claimed my birthright.”

“It will pass.”

“I could die tomorrow, or I could live another twenty years,” I say.

“It will pass,” she says, sagely, vaguely.  The way the drug pickles her makes like she’s always talking from the dark.

I have horrible nightmares next to her, perhaps being invaded by her own warped and outsized opium dreams.  I picture my son in his acts with the concubines. I am a fly on the wall and to me these acts are violations.  He throws them around like an ape. When he is on them he is like a disgusting hound copulating as I did in my youth.

A man of my position must have concubines.  It is a symbol of my status and a necessity of social convention.  But they are not mistresses of mine. Distasteful. It is not appealing, also, because I cannot have sex due to my manhood.  Not in the traditional sense I cannot. My libido is limited, and out of shame and the preservation of my reputation, and the reputation of that of my throne and its forbearers, I take care of things by myself—and quietly.

I still call them girls but they are women now.  They preceded my first child. They were young then so I hired a schoolteacher.  One girl was still pockmarked with acne. I never thought of touching them. They would clean around the house, make meals.  They had plenty of time to read, play games or go out into the gardens—plenty of time to do as they wanted. If they weren’t locals of my people’s conquered province, their skin a shade too dark, I might have called them daughters.

The day following the dream I find one of them, Gia, the tall one, whispering in my son’s ear at the breakfast table.  The table is vast, in a vast hall, high domed ceiling.

And the sound of the whispering is like a reed blowing in the wind.  Or a rat you can hear faintly chewing food in the pantry.

My son shovels food into his mouth.  His mouth in a glazed smile and his head is leaning down a bit as if he doesn’t want to be bothered with the effort of lifting it.

The concubines are not supposed to eat here.  How would that look? Their own dining quarters are quite nice.  But here she is—I make her out pushed up next to him at the other far end of the table.

Helene is the only person sitting on the side of the table.  She is far away enough still that I cannot talk to her without risking my voice being amplified by the room and traveling over to my son and his whore.

Then my son looks alert for a moment.  He looks at me. I see Gia’s one eye looking at me too, as her head is half-obscured and turned in my son’s ear, the sound of her speech still reverberating quietly everywhere around me.  She laughs. Then he laughs. Still looking at me.

A shorter one comes to clear the plates and it takes all of my purple and blue-blooded restraint not to kick and scream like an impudent child.

The soldiers have come back from the field that afternoon, so I make my way down from my palace to the mead hall. 

The palace is in the highlands where it is hot and desert-like.  The ground is cracked. The mead hall is in the lowlands, where it is cold and wet and often a white frost lies atop the grass.  It is a brief walk down a steep hill. I drag a large woolen shawl behind me for when I make the transition.

The soldiers sit along a long vast table.  They are strong and muscular, metallic breastplates jingling.  And there is so much movement with the warriors and the beer-and-mead women that it is almost as if I have been shanghaied to one of their rocking warships.

They tell tall tales of the same few invented beasts so often and so thoroughly that the learned men of our times have begun putting them in bestiaries and reference books.  They throw up their arms. They say it was bigger than a house. My teeth glisten at them when I smile often.

When the drink has given me something I take down the hood of my woolen shawl.

One by one they know me, and one by one grow quiet.  They look at me, then look off to nowhere or desperately everywhere or just behind my head.  Soon it is all quiet with just the sound of the garish looking servers moving quietly around.

This is always my favorite part.

When I was on the killing fields I would spear three men at a time.  I took life and spirit as my own but never ate the hearts like some revolting folk. 

I took respite from one battle in a beach cave and where I found Helene sucking hermit crabs out of shells was that cave.  Even after we exorcised the demon from her—a process that took many months—there was still something strange left. But when I found her I knew her my own kin.  There was something that was stripped of us both—some important facet, I’d gathered—that made us alien to other men. So even if she never loved me, or even expressed affection, it was enough to find some like-minded type to my side.

She, too, is concerned about our son and the events at breakfast.  We are sitting smoking our pipes together that night. Me again against the headrest, set up on frilly pillows, and her lurching on the bed’s side as if with indigestion.

The woman, Gia, is to die, surely.  This much is agreed. But will that be enough of an example for the rest of them.  Should she die publicly, or quietly? Should the body be left out in some fashion to be found by the others—strung up?  It’s all very distasteful. Unpleasant and uninteresting work.

The idea of getting a new slew of concubines is very tiresome.  And I think the fate of those current would be no less grim than that of the peacocks who escape the gardens and are taken by bobcats—if they were to be let go.

I tell to Helene something the specialist told me of when he was visiting.  There is a disease in his homeland. It is known by the common name, “The Shit”, and it is debated whether or not it is real despite many from his province claiming to suffer from it.  And those who deny the existence of “The Shit” often do so angrily, like a man renouncing God. It has been deduced medically that those diseased have already died, which is evident in how they only function to gratify their basic needs and their sense pleasures.  And if these activities don’t get them killed, the last remnants of their spirits have been known to fling their bodies off of the tops of high buildings or walk their bodies into oncoming cannon fire.

The people who suffer from this, the specialist said, I told Helene, never recover.

Helene begins a guttural moaning.  Then she throws her head back and casts a shadow against the wall.  The moaning is louder with her mouth opening more and the eyes in her head rolling back.  Then her hair begins to dance around like snakes and their shadows too are projected against the wall.

I sit smoking my pipe watching this.  I squint and watch the shadows dance until they are blurry enough to be seen as other things.  Then my body relaxes.

“Can people die from this?  Is there any form of treatment at all?  Is there any hope, in any way, shape or form?” she asks after calming down.

“It wasn’t completely told to me, or I don’t remember,” I say.

Helene moans again—more, and with shaking hands seeks to numb herself by preparing more opium.

Before we sleep, Helene mentions of an island mentioned in my daughter’s letters—my daughter, married off to a man of even greater status!—where the native heathens all up and died at the near moment of their exposure to Christ—or whatever form of mysticism we follow.  The island was now naked of life, and my daughter and her husband were now considering a holiday there.

In the night I am again taken by the elasticity of my wife’s drugged mind.

I find myself on a boat being rowed by men from the mead hall.  The man at the stern looks and nods at me paternally. There is an air of great reverence for me around.  I see the island in the distance; we are going to see my son. I go to relieve myself off the portside and things are intact down there, not coming out like a barrel whose one side has been shot full of holes—like in my waking life.

We disembark.  I am led by more men to a little cabin on a hill.  Another large man guides me inside.

On the floor, on a sleeping mat, is my son.  He is writhing from his withdrawals from sex and opium, and the poison with which he has been given in increasing amounts, put into something without his knowledge at mealtime, over the past several months.

I kneel down beside him.  He recognizes me, and manages to keep his eyes on me briefly.  He is breathing hard—struggling to breathe. He is drenched in his perspiration and smells of piss.

“I have failed you,” he wheezes, “I am the end of our lineage, your name—our family line, and I have broken myself with excess.”

I find him disarmingly articulate.

I hold the hand of my sick son.  I put my palm on the top of his hand and pat it.  I look at his eyes, which are jittering on the ceiling.

“There’s a certain honor in leaving with a bit of dignity,” I say, before waking— and then knowing the tasks that would require the day’s attention.