Potboiler (24 page)

94.

Zhulk returned not long after. He was not alone. The surroundings would seem to preclude maid service, but sure enough, the woman following him was dressed in a black polyester dress, a limp white headband, and a white apron gone gray with numerous launderings. The dress had seen better days. Its seams were puckered. The maid herself was a stout, sallow creature, with swollen calves and a broad, flat backside. Her eyes were droopy. The backs of her hands were flaky from washing dishes. She was carrying a tray of food. She seemed unhappy to be there. Pfefferkorn could more or less see the rain cloud over her head. She unlocked the cell door, crossed to the desk, put the tray down, and started to walk out.

Zhulk clucked his tongue at her. She paused and turned to face Pfefferkorn.

Pfefferkorn had never imagined how much venom could be packed into a single curtsy.

She stepped out of the cell. Zhulk spoke harshly to her and she trudged out of sight. A moment later, a door opened and closed.

Zhulk gestured to the food. “Sir, please.”

Pfefferkorn peered at the tray. Its contents confirmed that he was back in West Zlabia. There was a charred puck of root vegetable hash, a cup of brown tea, and a small pat of goat’s-milk butter whose barnyardy aroma caused him to retch.

“I’ll pass,” he said.

“Sir, this is unacceptable. Food represents labor, and labor represents the will of the Party, and what the Party wills cannot be denied.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sir, this is incorrect. Article eleven of the principles of the glorious revolution dictates that nothing exists except for that which is necessary. Sir, I, the individual, have already eaten my lunch. Hence the need for this food cannot reasonably be ascribed to me, the individual. Therefore you, sir, must have need of this food. If you did not, then the food would exist without its being necessary, and clearly this cannot be true, for the principle just stated. Therefore, either this food is an illusion or you must need it. But this food is not an illusion. Sir, it is plainly there. Therefore you must need it. QED.”

Pfefferkorn, mindful of the phrase “scrotal electroshock,” sat down in the wooden desk chair. He picked up the puck of hash. He spread the butter across it and shoved the whole thing into his mouth. It tasted like scarcity. He got it down as fast as he could and chased it with the tea. He sat back, wishing he had something to chase the tea with. His chest hurt. It was too much food to take in at once and he could feel its mass exfoliating the interior of his gullet. He had a premonition that he would soon be tasting it in reverse.

“Sir, the Party salutes you,” Zhulk said.

A door opened and closed. The maid staggered into view, pushing a wheelbarrow full of books and papers. Zhulk held open the cell bars for her and she carted the wheelbarrow in. She set it down near the desk and began unloading it.

“Sir, you will find these items inspiring.”

The books were old and musty, with broken spines and dangling covers. There were a lot of them, and the maid was perspiring lightly by the time she finished. She took the empty tray, curtsied to Pfefferkorn, and exited the cell.

“Sir, it is the intention of the Party to provide you with all that you require, within reason. Please state any additional needs and they will be seen to.”

There was a silence.

“I could use a shower,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Very good,” Zhulk said. He spoke harshly to the maid, who trudged off again. “My wife will accommodate this request as soon as possible.”

“Your wife?”

“A proud and humble servant of the Party,” Zhulk said. “No different from any other comrade of the revolution.”

“Right,” Pfefferkorn said.

Zhulk bowed. “If there is nothing further, sir, I, the individual, shall leave you to great thoughts.”

95.

He had been given eleven reams of writing paper, an assortment of the finest West Zlabian leakproof ballpoint pens, four different linear English translations each of the West Zlabian edition of
Vassily Nabochka
, a compendium of errata, a Zlabian-English dictionary, a Zlabian rhyming dictionary, a Zlabian thesaurus, the complete
Encyclopædia Zlabica
, a bundle of maps as thick as a phone book, a copy of the Party writings, D. M. Piilyarzhkhyuiy’s seventeen-volume history of the Zlabian peoples, an anthology of Marxist literary criticism, and reprints of Zhulk’s speeches dating back to 1987. There were several photo albums filled with picture postcards of the local countryside. There was a calendar, a freebie distributed by the Ministry of Sexual Sanitation. Each month highlighted another venereal disease. Zhulk had circled three days in red. The first was that day’s date. Pfefferkorn counted twelve more days of chlamydia before the clap rolled around and the countdown to the festival began. The thirteenth was opening night, and the Friday prior was labeled
final deadline
in Zlabian.

Twenty-two days.

He tossed the calendar down and picked up a plastic-wrapped copy of the East Zlabian
Pyelikhyuin
. He couldn’t understand why Zhulk would provide him access to capitalist media. He tore open the plastic and unfolded the paper.

EXTREMELY FAMOUS AND VERY PROMINENT AUTHOR EXECUTED

According to the article, the mood at the Kasino Nabochka had been uplifting. The Cirque du Soleil theater had been filled to capacity with people eager for the first public execution in more than a year. Face value of a ticket was US$74.95, but scalpers had been asking as much as four hundred a pop. The festivities kicked off with a rousing speech by Lord High President Kliment Thithyich. He promised the same bloody fate to anyone who dared cross him. Next there had been a dance performance by his entourage. In honor of the proceedings, the ladies wore special black “Grim Reaper” miniskirts and twirled neon sickles. The president had then decreed a weeklong reprieve from interest on all gambling debts owed to him. Seeing as how most of the populace was cripplingly in hock, this announcement elicited enthusiastic cheers. A T-shirt cannon was fired, and at last, the execution got under way. Notorious American hack thriller writer and international fugitive from justice A. S. Peppers was brought out hooded and handcuffed. He was made to kneel. The president asked if he had any last words. Peppers shook his hooded head, and the president made a joke about not having such a big vocabulary after all. Laughter and jeers flew at the condemned man. Thirteen sharpshooters took up positions. They raised their rifles. At the president’s command, they fired. Peppers’s bullet-riddled body was removed, the T-shirt cannon brought out once more, and accordion music played.

Pfefferkorn supposed that, for PR purposes, it was almost as good to kill a faceless A. S. Peppers as it was to kill the real him. He also understood why Zhulk wanted him to read the article. In the eyes of the world, A. S. Peppers, Arthur Pfefferkorn, and Arthur Kowalczyk no longer existed. Nobody would come looking for him. However terrible this realization was, it was not nearly as terrible as knowing that someone had died solely because he happened to be about Pfefferkorn’s height.

A door opened and closed. Zhulk’s wife appeared shlepping a massive, sloshing bucket, a burlap sack slung over her shoulder. She put the bucket in the crook of her arm and fought to get the keys out of her apron without setting her burdens down, all the while doing an uncomfortable little dance. Pfefferkorn recognized the feeling. He remembered doing similar things on early mornings, thirty years ago: trying to bottle-feed his infant daughter with one hand, for example, and make coffee with the other. Zhulk’s wife succeeded in getting the right key into the lock. The cell door swung open. She left it ajar, brushing past him as she carried the sack and the bucket across the room. As long as he was chained up, there was no danger of his making a break for it. At the same time, he found her indifference to her own safety peculiar. He could have severed her carotid with one of his leakproof pens. He could have jammed his fingers into her eye sockets and popped out her eyeballs. Harry Shagreen and Dick Stapp had done that on more than one occasion. He could have strangled her. The chain tethering him to the desk looked long enough for him to gather the slack off the floor and get it around her neck. Yet she didn’t hesitate to bend over with her back turned. Was he that unintimidating?

She set the bucket and the sack down. She straightened up, winded, her hand pressed to the small of her back.

“Thank you,” he said.

She curtsied.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said.

She glared at the floor.

“Really,” he said. “I mean it.”

She looked up, meeting his eyes for a fraction of a moment. Then she turned and left.

Inside the burlap sack were a towel, a washcloth, and a hunk of rancid soap. The towel and the washcloth were identical to the ones at the Hôtel Metropole. He took off his clothes, leaving the left leg of the woolen pants and the left leg of his underwear strung along the chain. He stood over the floor drain and sluiced himself with water from the bucket. For a moment he allowed himself to fantasize that the soap was a high-density dubnium polymer, and that it would split open, revealing a weapon or a key. But it turned to lather in his hands.

96.

Pfefferkorn got to work.

It wasn’t easy. To begin with, he really was a lousy poet. He’d given up on the form sometime in high school. Moreover, the structure of
Vassily Nabochka
was extraordinarily demanding. Each canto was ninety-nine lines long, broken into nine stanzas of eleven lines of trochaic hendecameter apiece, adhering to a rhyme scheme of ABACADACABA, with triple internal rhymes on lines one, two, five, seven, ten, and eleven. What made the Zlabian language so tricky to master was its use of gendered, neuter, and hermaphroditic forms as well as a system of declension that had been mutating continuously since the days of Zthanizlabh of Thzazhkst. Add in several thousand textual variants, and a state of affairs resulted whereby a seemingly simple sentence—“Verily he loved him, for he was his beloved since days of yore”—could also be rendered “Verily she did love him, for she was his lover since long ago,” “Verily they did love each other, for he was his uncle since many a time,” or “Not necessarily false was her love for it, for he had not fondled it since Tuesday.” Pfefferkorn could all too easily see how this sort of muddiness would give rise to violence. It also accounted for the poem’s sustained popularity, for
Vassily Nabochka
possessed a quality essential to great literature, one that ensured it could be read by every successive generation and appreciated anew: it was meaningless.

Another major obstacle he faced was that Zhulk kept turning up to chat. Once or twice a day, as Pfefferkorn was getting ready to take another failed run at the thing, he would hear bony knuckles touching the bars. The prime minister wanted to know: was Pfefferkorn comfortable? Did he require more paper, more pens, more books? Was there something else, Zhulk asked, he or his wife could do to ease the maestro’s toil? These questions were but a prelude to the interrogation that inevitably followed, for Zhulk was unduly obsessed with Pfefferkorn’s creative process. When did the maestro like to write? Early in the morning? Late at night? After a large meal? A small meal? No meal at all? What about beverages? What role did carbonation play? Did he get his best ideas standing, sitting, or lying down? Was writing like pushing a boulder? Rowing a boat? Climbing a ladder? Netting a butterfly?

All of the above, Pfefferkorn said.

There was only so much poetry he could produce per day. The rest of the time he was profoundly bored. Other than Zhulk, he saw only Zhulk’s wife, and she resisted all his attempts at conversation. Mostly he was alone. The fluorescent tube never shut off. The lack of sunlight was disorienting. It warped his sense of time and made him drowsy. He dozed. He did push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and squats. He jogged in place, the chain rattling noisily against the floor. He projected maps of the world onto the cracks in the ceiling. He used the finest West Zlabian leakproof pens, all of them hemorrhaging ink, to play the cell bars like a xylophone. He marked off the days on his venereal disease calendar. The clap was rapidly approaching. He pressed his ears to the wall, hoping to catch a hint of the outside world. The temperature in the cell led him to conclude that he was far underground. He imagined what the rest of the prison looked like. He envisioned rows and rows of press-ganged authors, all of them laboring to complete the poem.
There have been others like you. None of them have survived.
It was like the world’s worst writers’ retreat.

On the seventh day of his captivity Pfefferkorn looked up from his desk to find Zhulk standing outside the cell, rocking back and forth on his heels. His hands were clasped behind his back. He started to speak, decided against it, and without further ado hurled a ball of paper through the bars. It bounced and landed at Pfefferkorn’s feet.

Pfefferkorn uncrumpled four handwritten pages, covered in crabbed script and marred by strike-throughs and carets. He looked at Zhulk uneasily.

Zhulk bowed. “Sir, you are the first to read it.”

Pfefferkorn read Zhulk’s own take on the final canto of
Vassily Nabochka.
In it, the king died before the antidote got to him, and a grief-stricken Prince Vassily repudiated the throne, deeding the royal lands over to the people and going to live as a commoner, tilling the fields and herding goats, finding redemption in manual labor before dying peacefully beneath a runty tree in the meadows of West Zlabia. It was the worst kind of agitprop: heavy-handed, impatient, and artless. The turns were improbable, the imagery fuzzy, and the characters reductive.

“Wonderful,” Pfefferkorn said in his writing-workshop voice.

Zhulk frowned. “It cannot be.”

“It is. Frankly, I don’t know why you need me at all.”

“It is putrid, disgusting, an offense to eye and ear alike. Please, you must say so.”

“It’s not, it’s very . . . evocative.”

Zhulk threw himself to his knees. He began to keen and pull at his hair.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Pfefferkorn said.

Zhulk moaned.

“I’m not saying it doesn’t stand to benefit from a little editing. But for a first draft—”

With a howl Zhulk sprang to his feet. He grabbed the bars and shook them like a madman.
“It is bad,”
he yelled, “and you must
say
it is bad.”

There was a silence.

“It’s . . . bad,” Pfefferkorn said.

“How bad.”

“. . . very.”

“Use adjectives.”

“. . . sickening?”

“Yes.”

“And, and—and juvenile.”

“Yes . . .”

“It’s repetitive,” Pfefferkorn said. “Pointless.”

“Yes, yes . . .”

“Trite, bland, rambling, overwritten. Poor in conception, worse in execution, just bad, bad, bad. Its only virtue,” Pfefferkorn said, finding his groove, “is that it’s short.”

Zhulk honked pleasurably.

“The person who wrote this ending,” Pfefferkorn said, “deserves to be punished.”

“How.”

“How should he be pu—eh, well—”

“Spare nothing.”

“He should, uh—beaten?”

“Oh yes.”

“And—shamed.”

“Yes.”

“He should . . . be forced to wear a bell around his neck so people can know he’s coming and run away.”

“Truly, he should,” Zhulk said. “Truly, his is a dead soul, and the ending reflects that.”

“You said it,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Yes, maestro. But tell me: if the ending seems bad now, how much worse will it seem when the maestro’s ending is revealed? And how much more glorious will the maestro’s ending be? Speak, maestro:
how glorious will the ending be?
”

There was a silence.

“Pretty darn glorious, I guess,” Pfefferkorn said.

Zhulk stood back, starry-eyed. “The suspense is killing me, the individual.”

Pfefferkorn did not share his patron’s optimism. Ninety-nine lines in twenty-two days equaled four and a half lines per day. By day eleven, the halfway point, he was still stuck on line nine. He knew exactly what was happening to him. He’d gone through it before, only this time there would be no salvation. He was at the mercy of a villain crueler than any Dick Stapp or Harry Shagreen had ever faced: crushing self-doubt. And he was beginning to understand the word “deadline” in a whole new way.