“The Red Country is the only country with walls. It stands to reason something precious lives there. But short of all-out war, which I think we can all agree is at least inconvenient, if not irresponsible, we cannot know what those walls conceal. I would suggest espionage, if we can find a suitable candidate.”
Now, I don’t listen to chronosquirrels. They’re worse than toddlers. They babble out things that got themselves said a thousand months ago or will be said seventy years from now or were only said by a preying mantis wearing suspenders in a universe that’s already burned itself out. When I was little I used to listen, but my Papo spanked me and told me the worst thing in the world was for a Nowboy to listen to his herd. It’ll drive you madder than a plate of snakes, he said. He never spanked me for anything else and that’s how I know he meant serious business. But this dopey doe also meant serious business. I could tell by her tail. And I probably would have gotten into it with her, which may or may not have done me a lick of good, except that I’d made a mistake without even thinking about it, without even brushing off a worry or a grain of dread, and just at that moment when I was about to tilt face first into Papo’s plate of snakes, the jade pepper grinder turned into a jade Emperor with black peppercorn lips and a squat silver crown.
“Salutations, young Violet,” said the Ordinary Emperor in a voice like a hot cocktail. “What’s a nice purple girl like you doing in a bad old green place like this?”
Jellyfish shrieked. When a unicorn shrieks, it sounds like sighing. I just stared. I’d been so careful. The Emperor of Peppercorns hopped across the table on his grinder. The mauve squirrel patted his crown with one of her hands. They were about the same height. I shook my head and declined to say several swear words.
“Don’t feel bad, Miss V,” he said. “It’s not possible to live without objects. Why do you think I do things this way? Because I enjoy being hand brooms and cheese-knives?”
“Leave me alone,” I moaned.
“Now, I just heard you say you were lonely! You don’t have to be lonely. None of my subjects have to be lonely! It was one of my campaign promises, you know.”
“Go back to Mummery. Mind your own business.”
The Ordinary Emperor stroked his jade beard. “I think you liked me better when I was naked in your kitchen. I can do it again, if you like. I want you to like me. That is the cornerstone of my administration.”
“No. Be a pepper grinder. Be a broom.”
“Your Papo cannot handle the herd by himself, señorita,” clucked the Ordinary Emperor. “You’ve abandoned him. Midnight comes at 3 p.m. in Plum Pudding. Every day is Thursday. Your Mummery has had her clarinet out day and night looking for you.”
“Papo managed before I was born, he can manage now. And you could have told Mums I was fine.”
“I could have. I know what you’re doing. It’s a silly, old-fashioned thing, but it’s just so you. I’ve written a song about it, you know. I called it My Baby Done Gone to Red. It’s proved very popular on the radio, but then, most of my songs do.”
“I’ve been gone for three days!”
“Culture moves very quickly when it needs to, funny bunny. Don’t you like having a song with you in it?”
I thought about Mummery and all the people who thought she was fine as a sack of bees and drank her up like champagne. She lived for that drinking-up kind of love. Maybe I would, too, if I ever got it. The yellow half of Absinthe’s day came barreling through the cafe window like a bandit in a barfight. Gold, gorgeous, impossible gold, on my hands and my shoulders and my unicorn and my mouth, the color of the slat under my bed, the color of the secret I showed Orchid before I loved him. Sitting in that puddle of suddenly gold light felt like wearing a tiger’s fur.
“Well, I haven’t heard the song,” I allowed. Maybe I wanted a little of that champagne-love, too.
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.”