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Telluride Institute
Year King Pie by John Clute
Year King Pie narrative content
1
According to the itinerary, which had been hand-delivered by a human being, they would board the zeppelin in the uttermost West and drift eastwards overnight until the great airship grounded against the roots of the mountains. Pavilions of ermine would await there the disembarking of the pioneers; and luncheon would be served by indigene bots. Only the hard part would then remain: to imagine sculling up the San Miguel River, dodging the dry gulches and the mesquite and the tumbling tumbleweed and the purple sage and the Sons, until finally, late that night, after privations galore, to gain the narrow path to the true north and come through the strait gates into Telluride.
It would be 1999 all over again.
"Welcome to the 20th century," Deirdre whispered into Patrice's pearly ear. It was to be her treat. The evening after their arrival, having braved the day of awakening--the Telluride sunblock having been grandfathered in decades ago at a level now impermissibly low in WestAmerica, though perfectly appropriate in the famous ski and culture resort at the top of the world--they would attend the opera in the ancient opera house, the very venue at which Enrico and Maria Callas premiered Gucci's still-fashionable Girl of the Goldwyn West at the beginning of the very century Patrice and Deirdre were now honoring with their presence in the open. Tomorrow night would replicate that long-ago gala first night on 11 November 1918, when the Discerning classes of the world flocked into the mountains via airship from Denver to celebrate the culture hero Gucci and the latest triumph of his Gesamtkunstwerk initiative, little recking the tragedy to which they would awaken the following day; for on rising with the late dawn--Telluride mornings being truncated by the fire curtain of mountains that sequestered the small town from the turning world beyond--they found Enrico Callas dead in the hotel lobby. A local heldentenor known as Maxwell's Silver Hammer (a stage name), had become infatuated with Maria Callas, and in a fit of jealous ire, in the hour of the Sons just before dawn, had punched Enrico in the stomach, which ruptured. The great tenor died in agony. Just before expiring, he uttered Last Words which have become a tag for the Discerning of later generations, in a voice haunted by a thousand stage deaths:
"Is this the end of Rico?" he murmured resonantly, and died.
"At this date, human nature changed for ever," said famously a proto dog bot in faraway England, her delicate paws flexing like needles as she keyed her primitive instrument. When Gucci himself perished at his own hand, in Sarajevo, almost half a century later, without writing a further note of music, a spasm of universal grief fluttered on butterfly wings through the spas of Europe. It was, for many of the Discerning, the last flutter. All this, the memories and the dread and the incorrigible sweetnesses of the departed century, was part of Deirdre's treat.
The two infamous lovers debouched at an early hour from their humble dwelling, holding bare hands as a sign of the ordeal to come, a gesture which told the world they were ready to brave the blast of the past. A Bubble rolled them downtownwards under the gaze of a thousand admiring swainbots, through the BARThole into the Underworld where Smaugs and Grendels snarled in durance vile eternal, and up into the twirly subaqueous air of the plaza, under the great central San Francisco dome. Above them dangled a sun. The plaza itself was hung with gossamer, and silken ladders hovered above, ready to winch them upwards at a moment's notice to the hovering zeppelin painted all the colors of the rainbow. There did occur, it had to be admitted, a tiny hitch at this point. It seemed nothing at the time. Only later would Patrice understand that this small ripple in reality marked the beginning of his ordeal beyond the edge of the world.
They were floating in their normal mode of embrace across the plaza to the parti-colored booth where a fascicle of Net Servers presided in all pride, when a voice from the sky within their coiffed heads told them that their tickets were not in order.
To Patrice's eyes, the world blurred.
Finally he let out a breath of air, and the colors of things began to swim once more.
The infamous lovers floated in front of the booth of entry.
The presiding fascicle bent a stunned bot face onto the pair.
Deirdre, whose treat this was, had already swollen.
"You better explain," she said to the protruding face, in a tone that brooked no denial. It was her tone that brooked no denial. She had learned it. "You really better."
Quivering with programmed trepidation, the bot face opened its mouth and ejected the offending tickets.
"I shall deal with this," said Deirdre to Patrice sotto voce." After all, it's my treat."
Patrice drifted skywards, within the limits of his fluffy tether.
"So?" said Deirdre in a high iron voice to the bot, taking the tickets from its tongue. Her swollen skirts enveloped the bot face so that Patrice could see nothing but her distended coif; but whatever transpired under this inadvertent privacy umbrella seemed to do the trick, because her head emerged smiling, and she called to Patrice to descend, to come to her, to continue their parade to their designated ladder, which wrapped itself lovingly around the infamous human lovers, and they rose.
They rose to the tiptop cupola of the San Francisco dome, where the zeppelin awaited, and the ladder--which was of course really a tongue of San Francisco Central--deposited them at the bamboo foyer of the great airship, where they clutched the brass railings which had closed protectingly behind them, and made their entry into the central chambers.
A human servitor welcomed them aboard.
They were seated by this personage at a wicker table by a window, where they could gaze out upon San Francisco, down upon the thousands of humans who packed the great city full.
"There are so many of us now," whispered Patrice.
"Denyse is pregnant," said Deirdre, in the loud vulgar carrying tone that had helped gain them the infamy which had made it possible for them to afford this gala trip to Telluride, where the modern world began. "It's a population explosion," she concluded.
"Who's the Dad?" asked Patrice, quite loudly, not to be outdone by his flamboyant concubine. "Peter Piper?"
"With his pickled pepper," trilled the famous bawd.
There was a ripple of polite applause from the other guests.
"Are we all aboard?" boomed a large rumpled human figure at the far end of the room. It was the Captain! "Raise your hand when I call your name!"
He was a domineering Captain of the first rank.
It took only a few minutes to confirm the presence of all twenty passengers.
"Well then," boomed the Captain. "All present and accounted for. Jolly jolly." He picked up a brass megaphone, which was really a partial or teardrop of the City Mind, and spoke to the circumambient golden air:
"Cast off!" he bellowed.
And the great airship rose like a Bubble through an opening in San Francisco dome into the naked air of space.
2
After several hours following the arrows of the jetstream, which had been lowered to convey them, they were floating over the great bullseyes of the central desert, where particularly somber events had occurred earlier in the century, just after the Year of the Millennium conveyed the peoples of Earth across the line, into the time of troubles. At the heart of each bullseye, the sand was the color of dried blood. Rings of yellow, blue, orange, vermilion and brown surrounded the hearts. Each ring was separated by a high wide wall, where the Discerning were able to promenade and view the Nature Preserves and themepark relics within adjacent rings of colored sand. Caravanserais dotted the long promenades, for the Discerning were wont to spend whole fortnights circling their chosen ring at leisure, soaking up knowledge.
Where the outer rings of four bullseyes met, in the quaint curvilinear emptinesses there, sealed safely away from temptation and threats of further wampum loss, flourished the Indian Nations. There were dozens upon dozens of Indians left.
Tracing an intricate course through the Indian Nations and via shapely tunnels through each Nature Preserve could be seen a thin blue line, which occasionally thickened into a lake.
"We've come a long way," murmured Patrice to Deirdre as--safely tethered by ropes of radiant baby blue--they leaned over the railing in the late afternoon, which was signaled by a general descent of small suns that sank like bubbles, giving off a russet glow as they were surrounded by the rising dusk.
"What river is that?"
"I believe it was the Colorado," said Deirdre.
In the distance, far to the east, shrouded by molecules of dusk initiating the nanodance of adherence to the format of night, could be seen the roots of the mountains. Lacing through the gravid barrier liths an opalescent line marked the San Miguel river tumbling downwards from the realm of invisible Telluride, this side the strait gate, where Time had had a stop.
"O dearly beloved," said Deirdre softly, "it's time to earn our keep." Night was indeed falling fast. Patrice and Deirdre blocked all incoming calls, blinked shut the teardrop nanoswarms within their skyblue Aryanesque eyes, so that nothing they might whisper to each other at the moment of highest passion might be overheard, and took off their clothing as well, and performed their nightly intercourse silhouetted against the railing as the last suns winked out like Christmas Past.
Quiet applause attended the intercourse of the infamous lovers. Afterwards Patrice, as usual, feigned a moue of postcoital tryst, though (as usual) he felt no tinge whatsoever of melancholy; and slid his smooth polychromatic cock out of the kiss of her vulva, and lay prone on the bench in the calm night, and closed his eyes, comfy as a cat, in sleep. Once he was deep down into the night, Deirdre stepped out of his life for a while.
A swarm of surgeon bots descended like Halloween masks, biohazard sigils glittering bright around their brows.
The terror was about to start.
3
It was a single sun and it was rising in the East. This would be a dream, thought the child-man. There is no single sun, it would strike me dead, I could not look upon a single sun, it would blind me.
A single sun would fall from the sky like lead.
But his heart was pounding terribly in his chest, which was the color and odor of porcelain; his heart kept him awake. So he was awake. Something was grating softly at his back, his smooth back, his buttocks, his useful curved white ass.
He blinked to awaken his teardrop.
Nothing awoke the blinded world.
He blinked again in the blinding light of the dream which would not fade into the harlequin dance of dawn as properly synched through the local Made Mind.
There was nothing. There was no world whispering inside his head, no messages, no morning song, no lovenote from Deirdre, no compass, no direction home, no world.
Patrice closed his eyes tight and opened his mouth and screamed.
A hand closed his mouth.
The hand tasted of smoke and grit and burn and wood and earth, or something else, or something. It tasted.
It was not a bot hand.
Patrice allowed a slit of light to touch his eyes. He saw he was lying under an overhanging something, maybe a rock thing, maybe a rock, an exudation of stone from Mother Earth; and that the rim of a solitary single sun struck upon his flesh, but that most of the sun must be hidden above the rock, so he was not dead of burn; and that there was an arm.
He turned his face from the thin grin of sun under the rock overhang, and saw a human face, so close he could touch it.
"Balloon man," said the face through its mouth, raw and literal. "Balloon man, saw you fall. You lucky your pants have good brakes, or you gone splat!"
The lips in the dark and carven face continued to pucker around the column of air which issued from the human's mouth and buffeted Patrice's naked skin.
--Fall?, mouthed Patrice into his teardrop, which was dead, which was gone.
"Speak with the breath of the good earth, sort of thing," said the human, "or I won't understand a word. Welcome to First Station."
"Fall?" whispered Patrice aloud, through his mouth.
"Yeah. Happens, don't it. You lords of the upper air, somebody says lookee lookee, you all rush to one side a your balloon to lookee lookee at poor native wigwams, tip your balloon, you slip off. Crunch. You are toast."
"Oh no," said Patrice, "I did not fall. I was in the world, I fell asleep in a safety couch. We are going to Telluride, for the Festival of the Beginning of the World. We have tickets. I did not fall."
"'We did not ask to live in a fallen world,'" said the carven mouth literal into the air, quoting an old saw. "'We were pushed.'"
"Am I in Hell then?" said Patrice.
The sun was now entirely hidden above the rock overhang, the overhang of raw rock spun from spasm depths of magma trembling right now beneath his buttocks, he was shivering, it was the sudden cold.
"Sure thing," said the Amerindian whose garb was very colorful. "Taste."
And he slipped a finger between Patrice's parted patrician lips, and Patrice gagged.
"Welcome to the Good Earth, baby," said the aborigine.
Patrice could taste sand and something clammy, dinosaur scum or caviar or batshit. His gag reflex saved him from swallowing any of the Good Earth raw, but he realized he was hungry.
"Telluride?" said the autochthone in a voice of wind.
"Of course," said Patrice, his tongue shaking with privation and hunger. "The Festival of the Beginning of the World. Do you think we'd have left home for anything less?"
"Dunno," said the redskin.
Suddenly the terrible solitude of the fallen world assaulted Patrice, even more crushing than before, and he realized again that he was deaf and blind and dumb, that he was utterly alone, that there was nothing beyond the sky but the fabled vacuum, the unreachable stars mapping the darkness that enclosed the planet.
For the first time in his life he wept. It was scalding on his cheeks. The air coating his naked skin had been ejected from inside a red man, a creature of flesh, a zoo monster. His tears, which were scalding, were already dirty from the air.
"So you want to go to Telluride?" said the savage of the wilds.
Patrice nodded, his head making waves in the laden air.
"Here," said the Wild Man of the Mountain, and handed Patrice a pair of physical glasses. They were shaded.
"Put them on or you'll go blind," said the great male, who was wearing a vast covering that looked like something like skin, perhaps a zoo skin, with a pipe bone breastplate and a gap below where big hairy human genitals hung taciturnly down. At least that was something normal.
Patrice remembered his manners.
"Thank you, my good man," he said.
"You may call me by a name," said the wild thing. "Call me . . . . " and there was a pause, as though the great creature had a choice of names to select from. "Call me Buckskin Charlie," he said finally.
"Mr Buckskin Charlie," said Patrice.
"I am 96 years old," said Buckskin Charlie, shifting towards Patrice Lumumba so that his face caught the light. It was an oval face, quite savagely seamed. He wore a small moustache the same color as his skin. The lines around his eyes were quizzical, but his eyes were oval, like two Charlie Buckskin faces laid sideways. He wore a feather and two braids. A stripe of orange paint extended from his hairline, over one eyelid, down to his chin. "I always had a taste for whites," he sighed. He had a wry face, a face ready for 96 years of very terrible news.
"Moi?" said Patrice.
"The great chieftain my chieftain my semblable who died of liver, he could read your faces, your white ghost faces, your faces filled with light like toilets flushing, shitface, but I could not. You always tricked me in the end. All whites are trickster."
"Are you a rogue?"
The oval face of Charlie Buckskin flushed like a food of the gods. Then he sighed.
"So," he sighed. "You wish to go to Telluride. There she blows!"
He pointed to the East, where the sun had risen.
"There," he said. "The Shining Mountains. It will be a bit of a climb, shitface."
"My own name--" Patrice began, but was interrupted.
"Mouth. Chameleon mouths, all of you."
"Call me Mouth," said Patrice, and a beguiling smile wreathed the lower portion of his neotenous countenance.
"Time to haul your white ass, Mouth," said Buckskin Charlie. "Close your eyes."
Mouth closed huge bilateral eyes under trembling lids.
Buckskin Charlie glared through his burial stripe at the trusting manchild, and sprayed the foetal skin of the visitor to Hell with nutrient sunblock.
Mouth opened his eyes.
"Cool," he said as the sunblock soaked into his skin, fortifying it, "cool."
"Put this over you," said the Indian Chief, pulling a woven Red Cross blanket from an alcove behind him and draping it over Mouth's exposed flesh.
"Guaranteed smallpox free," he said.
They were about to step into the full glare of the world.
"Me first," said the Indian Chief, making a V sign, and slid silently out of sight around a sunbaked rock. Only his feather could be seen, upright, utterly still. Then a hand, waving.
Patrice "Mouth" Lumumba stepped into the light.
"Oh," he said.
For he had not known it could be so huge. He looked up for an instant, where the great sun shone unblinking at the zenith of the blue-black sky. He turned and fell to his knees, for behind the tiny cave, where the infamous lover from San Francisco Dome and the Indian Chief who paced the good earth had taken shelter, rose featureless and chill up into the dark empyrean the curving wall of the easternmost reservation, as black and polished as obsidian. He quailed under the weight of it on the earth. He turned his face again to the East. Below him lay sand and gulches, rock and pallid scrub, the remnants of a road. A few yards away downhill, a decrepit sign hung awry from a weathered stake. It bore an arrow pointing right, and the numbers 666 within the outline of a badge. The visitor shivered.
"This way, Mouth," said Buckskin Charlie, pulling the thousand wrinkles of his face into a chuckling squint, and stared north, away from the signpost to even lower regions.
"Only one path leads to Telluride," he said, his face creasing into a fractal map displaying joy and woeful resignation, and other emotions not available for paraphrase through the face of a human without teardrop facilitators. "You cannot fly there, you cannot hang-glide into the valley, you cannot wander helterskelter into Telluride over raw mountains from any direction but one, you cannot drive a land vehicle through the gate. There is only one way."
He pointed north, then east.
"First we must find the Dolorosa," he said, "and follow it downstream, past the lost souls, until we come to Paradox valley, where we must beg passage from the sheep rigs. Then we continue downstream, to the place where the true road joins its waters to the Dolorosa, and they mix. We can squeeze in there."
So the two bipeds clambered from rock to rock until they reached the baked and sutured badlands, where Buckskin Charlie found an almost invisible trail leading north through labyrinths of mesas and arroyos towards Paradox Valley where the sheep rigs ruled. The sun smote Mouth, the airs of the world almost knocked him off his sore feet, the sand scoured his large face, but he did not perish.
Indeed, he found himself grinning.
"When do we eat?" he said, loudly.
"Ha," said Buckskin Charlie, halting. "Patience, little Mouth."
They slid down a sharp incline past ragged rocks.
The river lay before them.
Buckskin Charlie had a bow and arrow in his hands. He drew the arrow and the bowstring twanged, the arrow disappeared. Buckskin Charlie whooped and ran downwards, delicate as a deer, and out of sight. Mouth followed as fast as he could, around a dense squat bush, and stopped suddenly.
Before him, crouching over a small fire not ten steps from the river, Buckskin Charlie was roasting a skinned animal. To do so, he had driven a stake through its body. The eyes popped.
Mouth thought he heard the carcass say "Ouch!" He thought he heard it call out for help. "Offissa B Pupp!" cried the four-legged sacrificial beast.
With a swipe of the machete he was holding in one seamed hand, Buckskin Charlie beheaded the noisy creature.
"Sorry," whispered the open throat and that was all it said.
Soon the meat was cooked to a turn.
"Eat up!" said Buckskin Charlie, "food is the mother of us all."
So the two companions squatted around a table-sized rock and ate up. It was what Deirdre had always said about exercise: Mouth had never tasted a better meal.
Utterly refreshed, the two tossed the bones of their repast into the Dolorosa, which sighingly accepted the offering and flowed on northwards and westwards where eventually its waters would die in the simulated Colorado.
"This way, compadre," said Buckskin Charlie, pointing downriver, and off they scrambled, light and lithesome as larks, down the Dolorosa, following the slow bend northwards towards the source of the San Miguel, where the path upwards, to the east, began.
The sun was high in the heavens.
They trekked for hours through the mesquite and the occasional savage concrete jumble marking a 20th century ruin. The Dolorosa smacked and smirked beside them. The sun beat directly down upon Patrice's blanket. The mesas above them concentrated the light. Except for the suckle of the water, the silence was great.
"Phew," said Mouth.
They skipped around a vast horizontal slab of rock and the view before widened. On the far side of the Dolorosa a smaller stream, having carved its own way through mesas and mountain with its own water, debouched into the larger flow.
"The San Miguel River," cackled Buckskin Charlie. "The mouth of watershed. Everything up there"--pointing up the San Miguel to the eastwards, where the Shining Mountains stretched their mist-enshrouded flanks--"is Telluride. Been the death of many a poor man, buckeroo."
They stood on the bank and looked across the Dolorosa at the crystal stream, the garland of watershed dissolving. Fish leaped in the waters, which seemed to chime against the rocks. The waters of the San Miguel glinted in the high sun.
"How do we get across?" said Mouth.
"Whistle," said the Indian Chief, and whistled high and sharp.
The echoes bounced higher and higher off the striated sun-struck walls of rock, making chords.
A small flat barge with rails drifted into sight around the curve. The ferryman wore a large beard and a vast hat and burlap, and held an oar. He spat over a rail and steered his craft toward his two customers.
"Hiyyuh," said the ferryman, "hiyyuh, Buckskin Charlie."
"Hiyyuh, Old Simple," said Buckskin Charlie.
The ferry grounded, Old Simple doffed his hat, and the twopassengers clambered aboard and sat on a simple bench.
"Hiyyuh, young un," said Old Simple, "you look durned hot. Let me," and he helped Patrice Mouth Lumumba remove his blanket, which he folded neatly, placing it in the lap of the fallen child-man from the pearly western sky.
The ferry made staunch progress across the waters of the Dolorosa, eventually reaching the other side at a small jetty where the crystal waters met the earth-soiled brown waters and melted away.
"Get that blanket back on, Mouth, or you will surely fry," said Buckskin Charlie, his face wizened under the direct glare of the sun very high in the steely heavens.
Mouth obeyed, but immediately found himself sweating again.
"Never mind that," said Buckskin Charlie, and stepped into the shallow crystal waters of the San Miguel. He looked back. He gestured. "Come on," he said. He gestured again. "Man must endure his going hence," he said, with a grin that exposed gaps in his mouth and a tooth or two. There was a smell of sweat and leather and something else. Patrice gagged. Behind him came a cackle and a puff of smoke. Old Simple had lit a stick in his mouth and was blowing smoke from it. "Never mind that," said Buckskin Charlie, "come on. Man must endure his going hence. Yippee aiyo kiyay," and so Patrice the Mouth stepped into the shallow waters and they climbed against the current out of sight of the smoking man.
There was a plashing sound before them.
The sun was very high and it was hard to see against the glint and glare of sun-struck water. A hand extended from the spray just steps away from the laboring pilgrim from the skies.
"Poor Mouth," came a female voice from the glittering waters.
"Rest stop," said Buckskin Charlie. "Take five."
She came into view from waters. Her breasts were as pale as Deirdre's, and the nipples as dark, but Deirdre had never become a fish below the waist. She held a cloth of lace in her hand. She came to Patrice, she leaned over him, her breasts touched him, and she mopped his brow.
His lips were so swollen he thought he would not be capable of speech, but he forced the air of the lower world through them.
"Thank you," said Patrice the Mouth, "thank you."
"Once upon a time every field," said Buckskin Charlie, "gave fruit."
The mermaid had dissolved into foam which burned the eyes of the traveler, there was so much light. His arms flailed for balance, his feet slid to and fro, he fell, a foam-drenched rock caught at his ribs.
"You've pierced your side there," said Buckskin Charlie, hauling him to his feet. They stood side by side in the bubbling waters, but Mouth was bleeding under his blanket, which lay heavy on his shoulders.
There was a nibbling at his feet.
"Ah, the fish wives," said Buckskin Charlie, tolerantly.
Patrice the Mouth gazed down into the clear waters, and saw that dozens of small fish were snouting his feet and ankles and thighs. One of the largest fish leapt into the air and touched his side; and another followed. Their mouths popped daintily and came away red. Soon there was no wound.
"You'll be fine now," said Buckskin Charlie, "till you cop it."
"Am I feeling anguish?" asked Patrice the Mouth, but Buckskin Charlie only glanced wryly at him, out of the side of his face.
"I'm 96 years old," he said. "White face."
The high bright sun made his feather glow like fire.
"Come on," said Buckskin Charlie, "come on."
They plunged back into the heart of the stream and clambered upwards at a great clip. The banks of the San Miguel blurred with the speed of their passage. As they climbed up against the current into higher regions, the mesquite along the banks turned to verdant grass, and every turn of the river uncovered taller trees, aspen and pine, which vied for light. The sky--for they were approaching nearer and nearer the vacuum of space--grew black.
Fortunately the sun shone on high, giving plenty of heat.
"Stop," cried Mouth, "I beg you. I've got a cramp."
And he fell face first into the waters, which were cool, and tasted of nurture. A hand snatched at his hair and pulled him free of the embrace of the San Miguel so intoxicatingly close to its source above them.
"Look up, compadre," said Buckskin Charlie, holding Mouth in his arms safe from drowning.
Patrice the Mouth looked up and saw where granite cliffs turned to pearl and joined overhead into a great gate.
"You are not far from Telluride now, little one," said Buckskin Charlie. "Let me help you with that blanket." He divested Patrice the Mouth of his wearisome covering, so that the traveler stood naked in the waters of the San Miguel. "Here's where I leave you." The ancient redskin
was stooping slightly; it had been a long day. He spat. He mopped his brow. "Here we are," he said finally, turning his face away from his small
compadre, "at last. I must return now to the Sons." A radiant canoe slid into Patrice's sight. "You are not far from Telluride now," said the
autochthone in a voice which growled, and struck Patrice a savage blow, and laid the half-unconscious body of the traveler in the canoe, and placed the terrible seamy blanket that had accompanied Patrice throughout the livelong day back onto his prone shoulders, and the canoe turned and began to drift upstream.
"Buckskin Charlie!" whispered Patrice the Mouth, but loud enough to be heard. "I'm frightened. Don't leave me!"
But Buckskin Charlie's face had turned to stone.
"Great Chieftain!" cried Patrice the Mouth.
But the canoe carried him away from the wooden Indian. The canoe, whose gunwales were of silver craft, carried him up the San Miguel through sunlight and through shadow through the gate. The waters were vivacious, and splashed the traveler, soaking him and his noisome blanket, which shrank around his torso. The canoe leapt upwards as to spawn, silver and gold. Patrice the Mouth tried to move his thin arms, tried to free himself from the embrace of the blanket he had carried so far up the mountain, but was not nearly strong enough to accomplish this. One strand of the blanket had entangled itself around his throat, had caught in his hair, was tickling his mouth.
The canoe settled into deep calm waters, among salmon and other fish. A corona of suns settled upon the traveler from on high. A touch of something, a sly soft susurrus which could have been an aspen-soaked zephyr, or distant applause, caressed his burned ears. But the blanket continued slowly to desiccate around his neck. It was too late now. Slowly, without leisure, the man whom the earth had abandoned, Patrice the Mouth choked, choked to death.
4
"Patrice, Patrice," came the whisper of a voice, a gossamer rustle inside the teardrop that sang within his eye, tidying up after its long
sleep. "Wakey wakey! Patrice!"
Like a patter of delicate small leaves in autumn, air that did not taste of death-wind coming from a human mouth touched the eyelids of the man who had died. A long tenuous monkeyish finger touched his trembling lips, a nurse-bot caress, redolent of childhood. Nutrient-rich nanos soaked into his weary flesh, healing it. His skin burned no longer.
"Buckskin Charlie?" he whispered, not yet opening his eyes, because the afterlife might blind him.
"Silly boy," cooed the teardrop.
The sound of applause was now unmistakable.
Patrice half-opened one eye.
Deirdre gently pulled her nipple from his mouth.
He opened both eyes and saw her beloved face haloed against a sky of baby blue, and suns of many colors, and below the empyrean a cup of mountains rimmed with gold and enamel, and clinging in rococo clusters to the surrounding piedmont, like Neapolitan sundaes: Telluride itself, the golden.
"Do I wake or sleep?" murmured Patrice, sinking back.
They lay on soft cushions by the calm crystal headwaters of the San Miguel, in the heart of the cup of the surrounding hills, while Telluride unfolded itself around them like a thousand fans. Salmon frolicked dense as eyes in the plashing waters, Patrice held Deirdre close as cotton.
She lifted her slender arm and pointed in all directions.
"Behold," she purred, covering her breasts with lace of a lavender hue and raising herself to gaze.
"Welcome to the 20th century," she said. It was her treat.
Like pot-pourri in a crystal bowl, Telluride was opening its heart to the visitors. It was perfectly preserved. Not a hair of the 20th century was out of place. Perfectly weathered signposts were everywhere to be seen. On the main drag, machicolated by malls, there was a sudden movement, and Patrice gazed mouth open as several great SUVs from the last decade of the beloved century came throatily to life, their brazen motors turning over in homage to the revenant. Dozens of inhabitants of the town at the end of the world, garbed in the colors of the rainbow, each one of them human, appeared in doorways wide and narrow, and continued to applaud. Out of the saloon rolled a perfect sheriff. Bearded men in flannels and boots wrassled for lasses.
Telluride surrounded the still waters like a diorama, turning on its axis around the couch where Patrice and Deirdre lay.
"You can see this cost the earth," she murmured.
"Can we afford it?"
"Patrice, Patrice, don't you understand? They paid us."
He lay silent in the perfumed air which did not chill, though the suns danced lower by the moment. He was beginning to understand.
"Was I really there?" he asked, though he knew.
"That was half the treat, silly! Our treat and theirs. Of course you were there. You had to be, or you couldn't have done an entire death. Aren't you going to thank me?"
Patrice raised his eyes and gazed at his infamous consort.
"You did this? You did this for me?"
"Because we love you, Patrice," said Deirdre. "And to cover the membership dues."
They embraced.
A posse of bots slid into view on the turning town and nodded its dozen heads, doffing as one a dozen apparent Stetsons, which flew into the air like crows.
"Because we love you," chorused the posse, standing stock still so the Stetsons could find their homes again.
"King for a day!" chorused the posse, in buckles and bows. "King for a day!"
"Poor bots," said Deirdre, sotto voce via teardrop, "they simply aren't geared to think beyond the hour. Year king, they mean, of course, o
my dearly beloved, sweetling. I wept real tears when you fell out of the sky, when I saw you plummet into the world, dear one, all unknowing of your fate. But it would have spoiled the fun if you'd known."
Patrice nodded, smiling. He remembered how--raw in tooth and claw--he had tamed the aboriginal Friday, who from that moment followed in his footsteps faithful unto death. He remembered how he walked around the world, and crossed the river of sighs, and gave of his substance to the beasts of the earth, and clawed his burden upwards to the strait gate.
"You died for us all," pealed Deirdre, levitating briefly in her excitement from the bier which would soon become a wedding couch.
"It was nothing," smiled the infamous lover.
"It was everything, my sweet," responded his inamorata. "We have earned our way into the preserve. We're members now, you know, full members, precious. We have been saved."
Invisible hands wreathed Patrice's brow with holly.
The sheriff slid into view on silver skates, bearing costumes in his arms for the infamous lovers to select from.
"I'll do Enrico," smiled Deirdre. "You do Maria."
The opera house slid into view, gaudier than a wedding cake, under the setting suns, and opened its doors. The sound of a century of laughter and awe swelled from within, a Phantom shrieked. A thousand candles were lit. The year king and his consort were nigh. Soon they would step on stage and continue the century for which the world longed. They were now members of the Discerning of Telluride, where the 20th century had reached its pitch. They were Americans at last.
They were the next thing to gods.
Year King Pie copyright 2000,2001,2004 The Telluride Institute and John Clute
© 2010 All Rights Reserved.
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