“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 good 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.”
And the Ordinary Emperor, quick as a rainbow coming on, snatched up the squirrel of time and whipped her little body against the lemonwood table so that it broke her neck right in half. She didn’t even get a chance to squeak.
Sometimes it takes me a long time to think through things, to set them up just right in my head so I can see how they’d break if I had a hammer. But sometimes I have a hammer. So I said:
“No, that sounds terrible. You are terrible. I am a Nowgirl and a Nowgirl doesn’t lead her herd to slaughter. Bring them home, bring them in, my Papo always said that and that’s what I will always say, too. Go away. Go be dried pasta. Go be sad and orange. Go jump off your bridge again. I’m going to the Red Country on my sorrow’s back.”
The Ordinary Emperor held up his hand. He stood to leave as though he were a regular person who was going to walk out the door and not just turn into a bar of Blue Country soap. He looked almost completely white in the loud yellow sunshine. The light burned my eyes.
“It’s dangerous in the Red Country, Violet. You’ll have to say what you mean. Even your Mummery never flew so far.”
He dropped the corpse of the mauve space-time squirrel next to his butter knife by way of paying his tab because in the Yellow Country, money means time.
“You are not a romantic man,” said Jellyfish through clenched pistachio-colored teeth. That’s the worst insult a watercolor unicorn knows.
“There’s a shortcut to the Orange Country in the ladies’ room. Turn the right tap three times, the left tap once, and pull the stopper out of the basin.” That was how the Ordinary Emperor said goodbye. I’m pretty sure he told Mummery I was a no-good whore who would never make good even if I lived to a hundred. That’s probably even true. But that wasn’t why I ran after him and stabbed him in the neck with the poisonous prong of the story hanging from my belt. I did that because, no matter what, a Nowgirl looks after her herd.
THIS IS WHAT happened to me in the Orange Country: I didn’t see any cities even though there are really nice cities there, or drink any alcohol even though I’ve always heard clementine schnapps is really great, or talk to any animals even though in the Orange Country a poem means a kind of tiger that can’t talk but can sing, or people, even though there were probably some decent ones making a big bright orange life somewhere.