Maybe there will be swords inside,
Tom thought.
There had better be swords inside.
6
“THIS IS IT?”
The king of the nameless kingdom was talking about Tom.
The king was old and bearded, the way Tom thought of kings as being, but he was wearing an unzipped black goose-down jacket with nothing underneath it, so his stomach protruded, bare and covered in salt-and-pepper hair, and the knobs of his knees poked out of Hawaiian-print shorts. There were green shower sandals on his feet and a baseball cap where his crown should have been. Unless the cap was his crown, in which case, his crown had white letters on it that said
BIKINI INSPECTOR
.
“This is he!” Gark said.
“Him,” the king said. “You mean to say ‘this is him.’”
Tom knew “this is he” was actually correct, because his mom corrected him about that kind of thing a ton. He hesitated to correct a king, though, even if he was a king whose throne appeared to be a blue Igloo cooler, with its open top serving as the chair back and lots of towels and blankets inside to act as a seat. Also, the king had a British accent. Tom liked British accents a lot. They made anyone who had one sound smart no matter what they said. If the king had a British accent, he probably knew what he was talking about way more than Tom or even his mom did.
“He’s awfully small,” the king said.
Tom felt like it was probably time for him to pipe up and defend himself, but he didn’t know what to say, exactly. A Chosen One wouldn’t wait to have it all figured out, though. He’d just act.
“Your Highness,” Tom said, “I won’t let you down.”
“I’m afraid you already have,” the king said.
“How?” Tom said. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do here.”
“And that’s exactly it,” said the king. “A true Chosen One would not need to be told what to do, he would just do it.”
“Come on,” Gark said. “He hasn’t even been here an hour. He hasn’t even heard the prophecy!”
“In my opinion,” the king said, “a Chosen One needing to hear the prophecy that foretells his coming before he can do the thing he’s come to do is a little like the sun needing to hear a poem about itself to be reminded how to shine. But go ahead, if you believe it will help.”
“I’ll go and grab it,” Gark said, running out of the throne room, which was a big wooden cavern cluttered with crisscrossing beams and lit by torches. Tom didn’t think it was a very good idea to keep torches in a room that was basically a big jumble of flammable wood, given the kingdom’s overall fire safety record.
“You must understand it is nothing against you personally,” the king said. “Gark is rather an abnormality here. He is perhaps our least intelligent citizen. He is also the one with the most positive attitude. Which is strange, because his father was one of our most respected citizens, and also one of our most negative.”
“Why was he respected?” Tom asked. Tom had often been accused of being negative, and in his experience, it made people like you less, not more.
“Because negativity is one of our most valued qualities. Gark’s father, Garko, was a masterfully depressing person.”
Say something smart,
Tom thought.
Something smart and Chosen One–like.
“That’s interesting,” Tom said. “On Earth we think of happiness as kind of the goal.”
“Oh, we do as well,” the king said. “But our people are happier when their expectations are lower. The past was better than today, today is bad, and tomorrow will be worse. Viewed that way, anything that happens that is remotely good is very good. But you must also realize it’s an accident. You might pursue a pattern of behavior that would cause more good things to happen, but with each triumph, you are getting your expectations out of sync with how the universe normally works. Eventually, you are going to fail, and when that failure happens, you will feel even worse than you had when you started. So why start?”
“Uhm,” Tom said, “That’s . . .”
“A quote. I was quoting Garko, rest his miserable soul. Garko, Garko, Garko,” the king said, staring into the shadows, getting nostalgic. “Ah, there’s a good example! Our names, you see. Gark’s father was Garko. Garko, son of Garkon. Garkon, son of Garkona. And so on and so on. When it is time to name your offspring, you name them after their father if it is a boy, the mother if it’s a girl, and drop a letter. One letter each generation. It reminds us that the past was better, that we are all our parents, but less.”
“What if you have two boys or two girls?”
“Most people stop at one. I did. It’s not an experience one seeks to replicate.”
Tom was an only child. He imagined his dad telling his mom that Tom was an experience he did not seek to replicate.
“What happens when you run out of letters in your names?”
“For most, that is four generations from now, and we’ll worry about it when it happens. If it happens at all. We did not expect to exist even this long.”
Tom marveled at how depressing Garko must have been if the king considered Garko even more depressing than the king was.
“When we transitioned out of a life of mere survival, it was Garko the Great Cynicist who kept our expectations low. All this Chosen One nonsense is really for his sake. I do not believe he would have wished to see his son go through life as an optimistic person, so I am letting this all play out in hopes that it will be a spectacular failure, Gark will finally realize that idealistic endeavors are simply asking for trouble and become so disillusioned he’ll choose to continue the legacy of his father. He actually found you and brought you back, which is impressive. If only he would apply his energies to some really productive brooding, he could easily be one of the greatest men in Nggghthththhh.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Nggghthththhh? The name of our kingdom.”
“Gark said the kingdom didn’t have a name.”
“It doesn’t,” the king said. “But there are times where, grammatically, it makes sense to speak the name of the kingdom aloud. And since it does not have a name, it is traditional just to mumble unintelligibly for the length of the average kingdom name.”
“Why not just name it?”
“No one would be able to agree on a name. We’d end up with something everyone hated.”
“Can’t you just make a proclamation?”
“That would be awfully arrogant. Can you imagine how mad people might get if I was just to go around proclaiming things?”
“I thought that’s what kings were supposed to do.”
“I suppose. But in our society, it is more the king’s job to set a mood, to discourage outbursts of irrational ambition or exuberance. We’ve always had an army, but I’ve found that they’re most effective just being at home, bored, chatting with their friends and neighbors, complaining about the state of things and imagining the horrible ways they might get worse. I suppose if I started doing rash things like issuing proclamations, I might have to tell them to take up arms and gather around me to protect me from an angry populace. As it stands now, no one is mad at me because they know I can’t do anything and they trust me not to do anything even if I could because it’s all futile.”
“Oh,” Tom said.
“Unless you have an idea for a brilliant kingdom name to which everyone will instantly agree?”
Tom was silent.
“No? Then we shall continue to be nameless. For if we name our kingdom,” the king said, “we might develop an identity. A culture. A sense of ourselves. And what happens if those things are taken away? If we do not develop a sense of ourselves, we will not miss each other when we’re gone. If our kingdom is destroyed—”
Tom was about to ask who would want to destroy them when Gark came clomping back in. “Here it is!” he yelled, waving a white piece of paper over his head. He paused and tried to catch his breath. “Do you want me to read it to him? You said ‘
Hear
the prophecy,’ so . . .”
“
You
said ‘hear the prophecy.’ I was just repeating what you said,” said the king. “Just give it to him and let him read it.”
If he could read it for himself, Tom thought, that meant it wouldn’t be in runes or pictographs. But when Gark handed it over, he realized it was even less impressive than that. It looked like it had been printed out on any computer and typed up using any word-processing program on Earth. It was formatted exactly like a paper Tom would turn in for school, double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman. It read:
The Chosen One must be retrieved from Earth.
He will bring down the Wall and restore the kingdom to glory.
His name is Tom Parking.
It was a cool enough prophecy, Tom thought. The problem was presentation. It was a white sheet of printer paper with three lines on it. If Tom had been told to write a prophecy on his home computer, he would have at least made sure the words were centered in the middle of the page. He didn’t dare point these things out, though. Sure, it was a prophecy any kid could have made in any computer lab. But it was also a prophecy that named him as the Chosen One.
“Gark, where did you get this?” Tom asked.
“It was slipped in through my window at night,” Gark said.
“I must confess,” the king said, “there is one very small part of me that wants this prophecy to be right about you. So, Tom—”
“Come on,” Gark said. “It’s
Tim
, it’s right here on the page.”
“It is right here on the page,” Tom said, “and it’s Tom.”
“Yes, Tom, what is it exactly will you do as Chosen One?”
“Uhm, I guess whatever the prophecy says?”
“I find the idea of a Chosen One reading his own prophecy like an instruction booklet distasteful. You’ve read the prophecy. What now?”
“Uhm, there’s a lot of things in it that I’m unclear on. . . .”
Gark perked up. “‘The Wall’ refers to—”
“Ah ah ah!” The king said. “Now we must interpret it for you as well?”
“Just help me out here!” Tom said. “Trust me, I’d love to actually
feel
like I was your Chosen One, and just come in here and know exactly what I was doing and start doing it, but I don’t, and you said there’s one part of you that wants me to succeed, so why not help me as much as you possibly can? I thought, like, maybe in your world I’d have special magical powers or something, but I clearly don’t have any, and you guys aren’t offering me any magical swords or anything like that, and I clearly need all the help I can get, so why not just tell me as much as you know and stop holding back?”
Tom was out of breath. He started trying to breathe through his mouth instead of his nose, as the throne room had the stale cantaloupe-y smell of old dog pee.
“As I said, Gark surprised me by retrieving you,” the king said. “Thus, I haven’t yet put enough thought into how we here in Ghhhhddkdffrr will deal with you. I must deliberate with Gark, as you are his project. You are free to explore the castle. I know you Earth types enjoy that sort of thing. Garko once said that, in exploring, you will either be disappointed when what you find fails to meet your expectations, or disappointed when things are exactly what you expected because they do not exceed your expectations, or thrilled when things exceed your expectations, but those exceptional things will always turn out to be evil or dangerous. I am reasonably certain our castle contains only things that fall within the first two categories.”
He waved Tom away.
Tom wanted to say something else, to not let the king have the last word, but he didn’t know what to say. He turned and walked out.
He should have corrected the king! That was it. When Gark said “this is he,” and the king told him it was actually “this is him,” Tom should have jumped in and defended Gark. The king would have been impressed by Tom’s guts. It would have set a whole different tone. Why was he only now realizing this after it was too late?
Gark’s and the king’s voices faded, and so did the dog-pee cantaloupe smell. The planks and beams jutting out from the walls made the place feel like one enormous backstage area for the weirdest show in history. Tom started to pretend that he was backstage, and that any second now he would round a corner and reach the real kingdom. This was the part no one in the audience was ever supposed to see. Any second now he’d step onstage, and he would be on a sunny hilltop with huge ivory towers in impossible geometric shapes off in the distance, and there would be dragons circling in the sky. He wanted a kingdom with just a few dragons. Even if the dragons had health problems.
Then he rounded the corner and saw the first thing he’d seen since coming here that made him feel like he hadn’t rolled bad dice in a role-playing game.
She was beautiful. She was sitting in a golden shaft of light with dust motes dancing in it. She was completely still, like she was sitting for a portrait. She was probably good at sitting still for portraits, because she would be highly in demand as a subject, because she was incredibly beautiful, and also because she was a princess. There were no two ways about it. When little girls said they wanted to be princesses, this is what they were talking about. As they grew up, their expectations could be modified by the slow realization that there was not a huge call for actual princesses in the modern world, but somewhere deep inside of them, in a place they would not admit existed to themselves or anyone else, an image lingered that looked exactly like the one in front of Tom: the princess, with the big pink cone of a princess hat, and the thin veil, and the long blonde hair and the big eyes containing wisdom and innocence and sparkling blue in equal amounts.
Likewise, any boy who’d ever clutched a wooden sword and whacked his friend with it and then argued with that friend about whether or not that friend was “dead,” the argument going on longer than the game had, so long that they were both called in to dinner, that boy had felt that he was fighting for the honor of a princess very much like this one, and for the rest of his life, somewhere inside of him, the stakes of every struggle great or small would be measured against this vividly imagined bounty of princess love. He would always sort of be rescuing her.
By now the idea of the princess as a passive totem of prettiness had been revised and revised, and yes, Tom would admit, princesses could kick ass or wear short haircuts or do whatever they wanted, but somewhere, for everybody, there was still this princess. Not that she was actually out there. You knew that. But an un-erasable part of you still thought you might get to meet her if you slayed enough dragons.