A Beggar’s Kingdom. Paullina Simons
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touch her, opens his mouth to beg her, beg her not to die. I love you, he whispers inaudibly. Please don’t die before you are redeemed.
Mallory almost smiles. Pulling a crumpled piece of parchment out of her apron, she slides it into his palm. Julian tries to stand her up, but she can’t, and he can’t. Why did you fall? Why did you let go of my hand? Why did you run into the fire, why did I hide your gold, why did I take it? Why did you kill him and her, why?
She is gasping.
Timber is being torn to pieces. Julian’s body feels as if it’s being torn to pieces. The ashes of London rise in the black ugly fumes and are carried by the wind into Mallory’s throat, into Julian’s throat, into Mallory’s soul, into Julian’s soul.
He is convulsing. His throat closes. He can’t yell, can’t speak, can’t tell her what he feels.
Reaching up, she touches his face, her eyes clearing and glazing over. Julian …
Still on his knees, he tips over her.
Go, she whispers. Or did she say gold?
Julian, go and come back for me.
EACH DAY MAN IS PERISHING. YET HE IS RENEWED DAY BY DAY.
Julian didn’t know about the renewed part.
But about perishing? Check.
Still on his knees, covered with grime and soot, he threw up in front of Sweeney. This time he didn’t get up and walk out. They had to call an ambulance and carry him down the mountain on a stretcher. He was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital and treated with hyperbaric oxygen. The hospital called the police because Julian had no ID, nothing but a coin, out of circulation for four hundred years, and a Bill of Mortality from 1665 clutched in his blackened fist. Julian gave the police Nextel’s number, and Ashton arrived at Queen Elizabeth with Julian’s ID and optimistically with a change of clothes.
But Julian wasn’t going anywhere. His body has been ravaged by prolonged inhalation of carbon monoxide, he was coughing up blood and had swelling in his lungs that was causing continued oxygen deprivation. Julian scribbled his signature on a document making Ashton his health care proxy, and Ashton talked to the doctors.
“What are you talking about, smoke inhalation?” Ashton said. “Like from cigarettes?” He was standing at Julian’s bedside.
Like from a fire, one doctor said. Also he has a number of burst blood vessels in his arms and legs, and Lichtenberg flowers down his back from his neck to his pelvis.
“Is that also from smoke inhalation?”
No, another doctor said. We see Lichtenberg burns after an electrocution.
Ashton refused to believe it. It was obvious they’d mixed up Julian’s chart with someone else’s. They brought out Julian’s chart, showed Ashton there was no mistake. They pointed out that Julian had complained of being electrocuted a year earlier. Then, they had concluded, it was psychosomatic. This year they weren’t so sure. This year, the symptoms were visible.
“What about the tattooed dots on his arm that weren’t there the day before yesterday?” Ashton said. “Is that also from smoke inhalation? Or is it from electrocution? Or are the tattoos psychosomatic?”
The doctors had no opinion about the tattoos. Tattoos weren’t a medical emergency like swollen lungs.
Julian himself was confused and on painkillers and refused to confirm or deny anything. An X-ray showed three fractured bones in each foot.
“Is that also fucking psychosomatic?” Ashton said, fuming at their ignorance, and at his own.
After a week, Julian was sent home with an oxygen tank to help him breathe until his lungs healed. Oxygen for Julian.
While Ashton was at work, Julian, his crutches against the railing, sat motionlessly on the cold rainy balcony and rocked back and forth. When you want to escape from your blinding rage, stop moving, stop speaking. All action feeds the beast. Stop feeding it.
“Dude, I beg you. Explain,” Ashton kept asking in the evenings after work.
Which part?
“Um, the swollen lungs? Electrocution burns? Breeches and tunic? The broken feet, the catatonia, the tattoos? Literally a single thing. What happened to you? Where did you go?”
Smoke inhalation is from a fire.
“What fucking fire?”
The Great Fire of London.
At first Ashton had nothing to say. Then: “Why do you refuse to be straight with me? Why can’t you reply to a serious question with a serious answer? What fucking fire?”
I just told you, the Great Fire of London.
Ahhhh!
You wanted me to be straight. I’m straight.
Julian stuffed the ends of the plastic tubing into his nostrils, inhaled deeply, and closed his eyes. I can’t explain any better than that, Ash. We’ll try again if I’m renewed.
A week went by, the lungs got better, the tank had gone. Ashton and Julian still hadn’t talked. Julian still hadn’t returned to work.
After another week, Ashton walked into Julian’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon and surveyed the abnormal disorder inside. Julian knew his room did not look rational to a man who was used to Julian being meticulous with his belongings and who was suddenly greeted with a scene as after a ransacking or an earthquake. Hundreds of books were strewn on the bed and the floor: history, how-to, biography, travel, plays, and philosophies. Everywhere newspapers, broken pencils, open notebooks, pencil shavings, a sharpener on its side, half-empty plastic cups of water, an unmade bed, and on it, a half-naked Julian with a magnifying glass and a superbright LED lamp trained on a coffee-table tome of London paintings from the 1600s. He was trying to find a glimpse of something true somewhere, anywhere, to prove to himself she had been real. He’d been sleeping poorly, attacked by bewildering nightmares, callbacks to old visions and memories once so vivid, now half-forgotten. This time, there was no Josephine shining on the street. Instead there was terror and fire followed by a dismal icy darkness.
A pallid, unshaven Julian raised his head from the book to face Ashton grimly homing in on the chaos. Julian tried to smile. He could tell his friend wanted to make a joke, lighten the mood, but comedy was beyond even him.
“What the fuck,” Ashton said. That was as funny as he could make it.
“Don’t ask.”
“I feel I must, dude. I must ask. What the fuck.”
“Everything’s okay.”
“It’s two in the afternoon,” Ashton said, as if that was the only thing that was wrong.
“Then what are you still doing home? Did you go to Valentina’s, get us food like you said?”
“Don’t answer my questions with questions,” Ashton said. “What are you doing? What are you writing, reading, looking for? Why the magnifying glass, why the mania? What’s happening? What the fuck is happening?”
Dressed in nothing but boxer briefs, Julian swung his aching feet onto the floor. He was uncontained. He was a dead leaf in the yellow river, an ailing creature, a rotting marmoset. How could he have not seen it coming? How could he have allowed it to happen. Allowed it to happen again.
“Why are you examining