The Future Is Blue

Then the Ordinary Emperor wasn’t a pepper grinder anymore because he was that beautiful man in doublet and hose and a thousand hundred colors who stood in my kitchen smelling like sex and power and eleven kinds of orange and white. He put his hands over mine.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why the clarinauts are the only ones who travel between countries? Why they’re so famous and why everyone wants to hear what they say?”

“I never thought about it even one time.” That was a lie; I thought about it all the time the whole year I was eleven but that was long enough ago that it didn’t feel like much of a lie.

He wiped away my creme de menthe mustache. I didn’t know it yet, but my lips stayed green and they always would. “A clarinaut is born with a reed in her heart through which the world can pass and make a song. For everyone else, leaving home is poison. They just get so lost. Sometimes they spiral down the drain and end up Red. Most of the time they just wash away. It’s because of the war. Bombs are so unpredictable. I’m sure everyone feels very embarrassed now.”

I didn’t want to talk about the specialness of Mummery. I didn’t want to cry, either, but I was, and my tears splashed down onto the table in big, showy drops of gold. The Ordinary Emperor knuckled under my chin.

“Mon petite biche, it is natural to want to kill yourself when you have bitten off a hurt so big you can’t swallow it. I once threw myself off Split Salmon Bridge in the Orange Country. But the Marmalade Sea spit me back. The Marmalade Sea thinks suicide is for cowards and she won’t be a part of it. But you and I know better.”

“I don’t want to kill myself!”

“It doesn’t matter what death means in the Red Country, Violet. Orchid didn’t die in the Red Country. And you won’t make it halfway across the Tangerine Tundra. You’re already bleeding.” He turned over my blue palm, tracing tracks in my golden tears. “You’ll ride your sorrow into a red brick wall.”

“It does matter. It does. You don’t matter. My sorrow loves me.”

“And what kind of love would that be? The love that means killing? Or eating? Or keeping warm? Do you know what ‘I love you’ means in the Yellow Country?”

“It means ‘I cannot stand the sight of you,’” whinnied Jellyfish, flicking her apricot and daffodil tail. “Ocherous Wince said it to all her paintings every day.”

The waiter appeared to take the Ordinary Emperor’s order. He trembled slightly, his clovers quivering. “The pea soup and a glass of green apple gin with a dash of melon syrup, my good man,” his majesty said without glancing at the help. “I shall tell you a secret if you like, Violet. It’s better than a swipe of gold paint, I promise.”

“I don’t care.” My face got all hot and plum-dark even through the freezing lemony air. I didn’t want him to talk about my slat. “Why do you bother with me? Go be a government by yourself.”

“I like you. Isn’t that enough? I like how much you look like your Mummery. I like how hard you rode Stopwatch across the Past Perfect Plains. I like how you looked at me when you caught me making coffee. I like that you painted the underside of your bed and I especially like how you showed it to Orchid. I’m going to tell you anyway. Before I came to the throne, during the reign of the Extraordinary Emperor, I hunted sorrows. Professionally. In fact, it was I who hunted them to extinction.”

“What the hell did you do that for?” The waiter set down his royal meal and fled which I would also have liked to do but could not because I did not work in food service.

“Because I am from the Orange Country, and in the Orange Country, a sorrow is not a mammoth with a cabinet in its stomach, it is a kind of melancholic dread, a bitter, heartsick gloom. It feels as though you can never get free of a sorrow once you have one, as though you become allergic to happiness. It was because of a certain sorrow that I leapt from the Split Salmon Bridge. My parents died of a housefire and then my wife died of being my wife.” The Ordinary Emperor’s voice stopped working quite right and he sipped his gin. “All this having happened before the war, we could all hop freely from Orange to Yellow to Purple to Blue to Green—through Red was always a suspicious nation, their immigration policies never sensible, even then, even then when no one else knew what a lock was or a key. When I was a young man I did as young men do—I traveled, I tried to find women to travel with me, I ate foreign food and pretended to like it. And I saw that everywhere else, sorrows roamed like buffalo, and they were not distresses nor dolors nor disconsolations, but animals who could bleed. Parasites drinking from us like fountains. I did not set out for politics, but to rid the world of sorrows. I thought if I could kill them in the other countries, the Orange Country sort of sorrow would perish, too. I rode the ranges on a quagga with indigestion. I invented the Nonegun myself—I’ll tell you that secret, too, if you like, and then you will know something your Mums doesn’t, which I think is just about the best gift I could give you. To make the little engine inside a Nonegun you have to feel nothing for anyone. Your heart has to look like the vacuum of space. Not coincidentally, that is also how you make the engine inside an Emperor. I shot all the sorrows between the eyes. I murdered them. I rode them down. I was merciless.”

“Did it work?” I asked softly.

“No. When I go home I still want to die. But it made a good campaign slogan. I have told you this for two reasons. The first is that when you pass into the Orange Country you will want to cut yourself open from throat to navel. Your sorrow has gotten big and fat. It will sit on you and you will not get up again. Believe me, I know. When I saw you come home with a sorrow following you like a homeless kitten I almost shot it right there and I should have. They have no g

ood parts. Perhaps that is why I like you, really. Because I bleached sorrow from the universe and you found one anyway.”

The Ordinary Emperor took my face in his hands. He kissed me. I started to not like it but it turned into a different kind of kiss, not like the kisses I made with Orchid, but a kiss that made me wonder what it meant to kiss someone in the Orange Country, a kiss half full of apology and half full of nostalgia and a third half full of do what I say or else. So in the end I came round again to not liking it. I didn’t know what he was thinking when he kissed me. I guess that’s not a thing that always happens.

“The second reason I told you about the sorrows, Violet Wild, is so that you will know that I can do anything. I am the man who murdered sorrow. It said that on my election posters. You were too young to vote, but your Mummery wasn’t, and you won’t be too young when I come up for re-election.”

“So?”

“So if you run as my Vice-Emperor, which is another way of saying Empress, which is another way of saying wife, I will kill time for you, just like I killed sorrow. Squirrels will be no trouble after all those woolly monsters. Then everything can happen at once and you will both have Orchid and not have him at the same time because the part where you showed him the slat under your bed and the part where his body disappeared on the edge of the Blue Country will not have to happen in that order, or any order. It will be the same for my wife and my parents and only in the Red Country will time still mean passing.”

The squirrel still squatted on the table with her belly full of baby futures in her greedy hands. She glared at the Ordinary Emperor with unpasteurized hate in her milky eyes. I looked out the great ice picture window of the restaurant that wasn’t called O Tannenbaum anymore, but The Jonquil Julep, the hoppingest nightspot in the Yellow Country. Only the farthest fuzz on the horizon still looked green. Chic blonde howdy-dos started to crowd in wearing daffodil dresses and butterscotch tuxedos. Some of them looked sallow and waxy; some of them coughed.

“There is always a spot of cholera in the Yellow Country,” admitted the Ordinary Emperor with some chagrin. Through the glass I saw my sorrow hunched over, peering in at the Emperor, weeping soundlessly, wiping her eyes with her trunk. “But the light here is so good for painting.”

Everything looked like the underside of my bed. The six-legged squirrel said:

“Show me something your parents don’t know about.”

And love went pinballing through me but it was a Yellow kind of love and suddenly my creme de menthe was banana schanpps and suddenly my mugwort cake was lemon meringue and suddenly I hated Orchid Harm. I hated him for making me have an ardor for something that wasn’t a pony or a Papo or a color of paint, I hated him for being a Sunslinger all over town even though everybody knew that shit would hollow you out and fill you back up with nothing if you stuck with it. I hated him for making friends with my unicorn and I hated him for hanging around Papo and me till he got dead from it and I hated him for bleeding out under me and making everything that happened happen. I didn’t want to see his horrible handsome face ever again. I didn’t want alive-Orchid and dead-Orchid at the same time, which is a pretty colossally unpleasant idea when you think about it. My love was the sourest thing I’d ever had. If Orchid had sidled up and ordered a cantaloupe whiskey, I would have turned my face away. I had to swallow all that back to talk again.

“But killing sorrow didn’t work,” I said, but I kept looking at my sorrow on the other side of the window.

“I obviously missed one,” he said grimly. “I will be more thorough.”