The Beggar's Garden (24 page)

King Saul then saw that she had driven him into the Dayroom. Someone was wrenching fists of hair from the back of his neck and kicking at his shins. He laughed, and tears stung his eyes, and King Saul knew instantly that these were her tears, that she'd given them to him. He called on his subjects to witness her transformation and be inspired by it. He'd managed to wind the videotape around his neck and face like a carbonized mummy and the hair-tearing ceased. Through his mask he could make out the approaching figures of nurses and a number of his subjects watching from the craft table, mouths agape. He heard Tina's name. Nurses had her by the arms and she kicked at them and roared. More nurses came. Saul saw Luis appear from the nurses' station, where, inside, he saw all their files up on the shelf, and he vowed silently to burn those too once it was over. Luis wrestled one of Tina's legs and they dragged her down the hall.

The miracle is underway, thought King Saul. I am only an usher to it now. By its own engine will it be brought forth. He tore the videotape from his face and climbed up on the craft table, where he kicked aside their artwork, crude portraits of their tortured dreams, their parents and their childhood homes, even a sheet that staff had beset with horse stickers and signed Georgina's name to. He saw that bits of glued paper and sparkles had
affixed themselves to his slippers. From high he gazed down on his pitiful subjects. He saw Drew, Jacob, Kim, Tina, even some of the stunned nurses, all admiring him together, their faces pale and practically arranged like a keyboard. Words rose for them to hear, the boil of voices in his head now constituting his own true voice, the way colours together made only white, and he was unsure if they were telling him what to say or if they repeated what they read from his mouth. He informed his subjects that he was no longer just a self-taught detective, that he'd been crowned King in a ceremony of his own design. He vowed to rule kindly and justly. First, he would re-establish the farm—his subjects would cultivate tobacco, then in time other crops would be sown. Families would be forbidden any visitation. If they came they would be drowned in milk and buried at the bank of the river. There would be no more schedules. His subjects would be free to live as they pleased. Then as plainly as one peered into a bucket of water he saw into their futures. Kim would play checkers and keep her own darkness in her head. Drew would cease his meds and smoke without limitation, writing great nonsensical missives on the walls of every building and donning every manner of tinfoil helm. Jacob, free from his father, would grow into a kind and gentle man, maybe a farmer. Even Tina would come to understand what a great gift was given her with the destruction of her tape. Shortly after the Conclusion she would find a companion, not just a vision of a man long gone. King Saul then vowed to commence his reign by constructing for her a train that ran around the edges of the grounds, which she herself could pilot. And finally, Georgina. She would be venerated, an empress, and it would be thought of as a great privilege to change her linens, kiss her sores, and for her a great
pool would be dug, and she would float for the rest of her life in the warm water therein and each day would be like the day before she was born, when she was still perfect.

Saul's eyes veered back into focus. Some of his subjects were dazed, their faces churning confusion, and he feared his words weren't as he'd intended, that they were bad models for the architecture contained in his head, or that the air itself was somehow sickening them. For a moment he felt like he had during his trial, like something important and irrecoverable was slipping from him. He could smell the fluorescent lights above and considered breaking them open and drawing their gas into his lungs and speaking the illumination contained within them. These thoughts were abruptly ended when in the crowd he saw her. King Saul knew that she'd heard what was transpiring here and had come to stand by his side. She'd come with his letters bundled in her bare arms and glass shards shimmering in her hair. A shuddering joy broke over him and he raised his arms and spread his palms like two wide eagles and called to her and she sent him a kiss tumbling into the air.

Then a booming voice was asking what he was doing. A clutching thing gripping his ankle. Things are happening wrong, he thought; there is no centre to them. King Saul called out to Luis, an entreaty, a royal plea for help, but not a soul could hear him. Saul saw only a gilded songbird flitting about the room, a rainbow in the air like gasoline splayed on water. He wondered if it was the pills. Then another voice spoke words about someone getting off a table. Luis was by his side. King Saul introduced him to his subjects as his second-in-command. This gentle bear Luis called him Buddy and gently wrapped him in his hairy arms.

Saul kissed the great scar that he'd once feared but now saw as a badge of boundless strength and perseverance. Then someone cut gravity in half. His feet were level with his head. King Saul heard someone who sounded exactly like himself ask Luis what was happening and Luis replied that everything would be all right all right all right and Saul was comforted by this exchange. He could see now that a whole group of them were carrying him aloft. Saul could hear the river licking the windows. He could hear cheering and the call of a trumpet in the close distance. They were taking him to the apartment in West Lawn to prepare for the Electrifying Conclusion and he felt himself loose a great bellow of triumph.

Saul watched the Dayroom recede from him and spoke tender words to Ada who he could see now had joined the ranks of those who bore him, her intricate hand in his own and the other pressed in the hollow of his knee. He regarded her twinkling face and told her that upon his return this kingdom would be more different than even they could ever imagine. The TV Room passed into his view and inside was Georgina slumped in her wheelchair amidst a gentle rain, dangling her small stunted head toward him, drizzling a shot-glass amount of drool into her lap. King Saul instructed his subjects to halt and grasped at the doorframe. She lifted her head, her stringy hair cast sopping across her gorgeous face, and fixed her deadened eyes to his. Georgina then uttered something so startling in its profundity, so divinely beautiful to King Saul's ears, that he feared it would light the rain on fire with its magnificence.

“Roob,” she said.

T
onight he'd plucked an emerald green Benz S600 from the spiralling garage of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. The sky hung with violet dregs of twilight, and a recent rain was held by tire ruts worn in the pavement like the prints of snakes. Finch piloted the Benz over the stately Lions Gate Bridge, up some switchbacking mountain roads to a turnout with a clear view of the city. He parked, mindful to leave the Benz running—it wouldn't start again without Stanislaw's laptop. He discovered a set of pristine golf clubs in the trunk and hit nearly thirty balls from the cliff out into the inlet. This took an hour: he held the tall clubs below the grips, took four swings at each, murmured boom with the miracle of each connection.

On his way down, he dropped the stick in neutral, retracted the sunroof, stood, and coasted with his head in the jet-engine wash of night air until his eyes went gummy and his lips recoiled like the muscled dogs Jerzy kept in their yard. Sitting down, he found the sedan's stillness and grace so deliciously amplified in the
aftermath of the roar he executed a jerky three-point turn near a curve and climbed back up to do it again.

While Jerzy and his boys preferred the growling flutes of Japanese or Italian design—sleek as swelling waves and painted in lipstick sheens—Finch liked the quiet ones. Sedans mostly, executive models, the kind that diplomats were chauffeured around in, the kind with classical music in their television ads, cars so noiseless, so painstakingly designed to hush even the meticulous whirring of their own engines, they floated with the elegance of celestial things.

Finch took his first when he was twelve and emboldened by the sort of confidence that only youth can prop up. It was his brother, Jerzy, who'd retracted the slim jim and swung the door out like a valet. “You going from BMX straight to BMW, Ostrich,” Jerzy said as Finch climbed into the leathery cockpit. Though he'd begged his brother mercilessly for the opportunity, Finch had never before operated an automobile—not counting arcade games you sat in. That first night, Finch ground the BMW's gears for ten whole minutes while the others bent at their waists laughing, until finally he hopscotched the car out from beneath the buzzing amber of the lot.

He'd driven hundreds since. Getting them was no problem. The expensive ones didn't even use keys anymore. They were too good for keys, as if keys somehow tainted a driver's hand. Stanislaw programmed laptops to open them. Twenty minutes near one was enough—digits and letters flipping on the screen with a shimmering speed.

Tonight, it was only twelve minutes before the locks of the emerald Benz thumped and the engine came alive.

“It's your brand, I'm right?” Jerzy said before Finch went for the car, a weighty hand on his shoulder. “But this time no tour.” Finch nodded.

“Where do you go with them?” Jerzy said.

“Nowhere.”

“What? Speak up.”

“Nowhere,” Finch said, not much louder.

“What's this mouse-talking? Are you unhappy, mouse? Maybe you have a girl?”

Finch sunk his hands into his track-pant pockets.

Jerzy regarded him sideways, a grin turning on his lips. “It's no problem if you do. It would explain much.”

“No girl,” Finch whispered.

“Okay, no girl. Then you tell me, Robin, where do you go?”

Finch knew that once his brother got his teeth into something like this he would not relent. Growing up, Finch had seen him take hideous beatings from bigger kids, men even, because he wouldn't let something drop, once by a giant sauntering man who'd let a door swing closed on them at a movie theatre.

“I just like driving, that all right with you?” Finch said, sloughing the hand from his shoulder.

Jerzy laughed and cupped the back of Finch's neck to force an interval of eye contact. Like Finch, he was still a boy, really, but his eyes looked pleading and perennially tired like a pair of deflated blue balloons. Jerzy turned to spit through his teeth on the concrete floor. Finch saw Stanislaw shoot a panicked look to the stairwell.

“Well this time, my feisty driver-bird, no tour,” Jerzy said. “We need to flip this one quick. There's people we need to pay.”

He released Finch's neck. “At home in one hour. Not until everything is cool and clean.”

Twelve a.m. by the dashboard clock and Finch was back in the city, giddy and ecstatic, his shoulders taut from swinging the clubs. He'd found four hundreds, crisp and brown like book-pressed leaves, folded into a golf scorecard in the console. Betting money, he figured. He'd seen greater sums piled on his kitchen table and never taken notice, but those bills had not been his own. All he could imagine buying was a ping-pong table they lacked room for, so he resolved to keep thinking.

He drove five under, captivated by the pavement's glisten and the innumerable signs—the Benz an exquisitely tailored coat he wore. He squirmed and adjusted the pillow he'd brought to boost him. Back when Jerzy took cars, his brother brought CDs—soaring orchestral samples over subsonic bass eruptions peppered by barking lyrics baroquely detailing the joys of wealth—that he let ring from opened windows with a strange pride. But it wasn't just rap. It was all music. It grated Finch, seemed to demand a response he could not give. As long as he could remember, he'd found contentment in the world's quiet places—pillow forts, closets, churches he'd visited as a boy with his father
in Łódź—but nothing compared to the sedans. And their stillness was movable: you could take it anywhere in the city you chose, especially when it was late, with the roads empty as fresh sheets of black paper.

After a couple more hours of aimless, blissful driving, Finch arrived home to see a few of Jerzy's boys on the porch, bottles of
Żywiec pendulous in their hands. The Benz insulated him from the thud of bass, but Finch could see it flexing the picture window of their house.

He should have killed the engine, but he needed to feel it. He half-yawned and removed his glasses to rub his eyes. He was beyond late. Jerzy would be more scathing with his boys looking on. It was doubtful Jerzy needed money. He'd always got paid, even in bad times. Four years previous, when Jerzy was fourteen and Finch was ten, their father, who worked security at the airport, was killed in a dispute out front of a nightclub. The hospital called and they spoke to Jerzy, who passed the cordless from one hand to the other like it'd just come out of the oven, clearing his throat mechanically. They had waited weeks for someone to come. When nobody did, they'd simply carried on. Jerzy had been a goofy, raucous boy, but this ended when he became their guardian. He built a bunk bed out of two weather-beaten doors they found in the basement and made Finch sleep above him in his room. He quit school, sold stereos, gram bags, bikes, shoes, fake pills, even umbrellas for a while—all of which he kept padlocked in Finch's old bedroom. This was before he ordered a fifty-two-piece lockout toolkit online and moved on to cars.

Then two years ago Finch was hassled on the way to school by some Hindu kids, and Jerzy and Andrzej went and beat them with leather skipping ropes. Later, people said the Hindus had gang-affiliated brothers and Jerzy got worried. He pulled Finch from school, stabled his crew at the house, and reinforced the doors with sheet metal. At home and bored, Finch pestered his brother to bring him along at nights, a privilege he finally achieved by suggesting he'd be safer with them than at home.

In the idling Benz, Finch considered inventing a story—he was followed, chased by cops—then let it go. Jerzy had a keen ear for fabrication. Yet in other ways his brother was a fool. It'd been two years, no Hindu gangsters, and his paranoia had not abated. Lately, Finch found little inclination to obey his brother, whose darkening demeanour increasingly reminded him of their father. Finch slept on the couch and locked himself in the bathroom to read encyclopedias. Now he saw Jerzy's warning for what it was: a desperate attempt to force his obedience—a bluff, really, because violence was his only remaining option, one he would never use, if only because their father had employed it with such zeal.