How would the Queen react? Would she find in this lie the answer to her most profound sadness?
As the boy posed these questions to the air at dinner that night, his parents truly felt them. The story—the boy was thirteen now—was as real as anything else in their lives, and of course they wondered how it would go, this subterfuge, this manipulation of an old queen’s heart by the vanity of a king unable to love.
But when they pressed him a few nights later, the boy did not answer. He seemed withdrawn, more upset than usual about the Kingdom, and he made strange, slow gestures in the air as if defending himself from something they could not see.
When they pressed him again that weekend, he said only, “It isn’t right, what is happening now. I tried to help him, but suffered wounds in my attempt.”
“Wounds?” his father asked, not knowing what his son meant, and wanting very much to know. He stepped toward the boy, to check his body for injury, but his son moved away.
“They are minor,” the boy said to him. “They will heal on their own, Dad.”
His mother and father looked at each other and, without a word, knew the truth: The boy was referring merely to his tide pool scrapes—which in the Kingdom of the Ancient Sea would of course be “wounds.”
When they had given up hope of finding out what had happened in the story—when the story had faded enough from their own lives, from his father’s work at the base and his mother’s teaching at the local high school, that the Queen’s fate no longer held them in the morning when they woke and at night when they fell asleep—the boy did tell them. It was many months later, and at dinner, as always, that he said:
“The Queen was too cynical to fall for his lie. She had never sensed in the King Helmet’s heart the capacity for love that would have allowed him to sire a child with a conch, with a woman of another species. And in this she was right. He was too vain, too proud, to be sullied by such mixing, and the Queen knew this. But this was not all that protected her from his ruse. It was her own cynicism, her own insistence on the profound sadness (the idea of her barrenness) with which she had lived so long that she could not live without it, that protected her most from his lie.”
His parents stared, waiting. “Yes?” they both said.
“Nevertheless, the Queen agreed to marriage—though in name only, with separate quarters, their lives sharing not even breakfast—that their kingdoms might be joined for the sake of the people of the Ancient Sea.” The boy paused, as if sad, though perhaps (they told themselves) he was only feeling thoughtful. His mother had seen a mark on his face the week before, a little puncture wound, like a spider bite, one that made a hole, but it had healed. He’d had a fever then, too, but there was no reason, the boy insisted, to think the two matters were related. “She was a queen, after all,” he was saying to them now, “and did in her heart, despite the sadness that told her who she was, truly care about her people. Is this not what a queen must do, even if she despises the partner of the union that may achieve it?”
The boy’s parents nodded. Of course that is what a good queen must do; and it made them proud that their son, whose whole life was reading and seashells and had so little in common with the world other people lived in, could be so wise, could in fact understand that world perhaps even better than they, who had lived in it for so long.
“It is the story of the Queen’s Minister of Coral Reefs that matters now,” the boy said, obviously upset, “because he is the one who may actually destroy the Kingdom in the end, though that is the last thing he imagines he could ever do. He falls in love with the Queen. That is how it happens. I have tried to help him see the truth, but it is impossible. . . .”
There was indeed, his parents saw, a sadness in their son’s eyes (which were still red, as if a trace of the fever were still in him). He was fourteen now, and had been asking about girls recently—what they were like in their hearts and minds, in the way they thought and felt, how they were different from boys, if they were, and the same, if they were—and, given his words now, it was difficult for them not to imagine that the two were somehow, in a way only he understood, related.
“Love doesn’t always—” his father began, stammering, then tried again: “Love doesn’t always need to end in tragedy.” As soon as he said it, he felt embarrassed; but his son, who was looking at him now, smiled. “I know, Dad, but thanks for reminding me. I’m just speaking about the Minister, who is not experienced in love and so can be taken advantage of. Those who do not walk the corridors of power can afford to engage in the playfulness of love without tragic consequence, but I’m afraid the Minister is not one of these.”
His parents did not know how to respond. What could they say? The boy understood it better than they possibly could. But shouldn’t something be said?
“Is there no way,” his father went on, “to warn the Minister, to help him understand?”
The boy’s mother stared at her husband as if he had lost his mind; but then she too looked at the boy, nodding, wanting an answer. There were no marks on her son’s face, no marks on his arms (which were bare), so she did not have to worry and could listen.
The boy sighed. “I wish it were so, but those who live as the Minister lives are too isolated to be warned, or to listen even if they are.”
Again, his parents thought they saw in their son’s eyes something more personal than the story he was telling, but what words could they give him? His father was not going to say, though he wanted to: “Could the Minister not listen more carefully to his heart, to find wisdom there that might protect him from foolishness?” Or: “Could he not stop for a moment and see that love might not really be a trap, but a way to live—to really live—even if the corridors of power make it so difficult?” His mother was not about to say, “Whatever happens to your Minister, Brian, that is not what your life needs to be.” Certainly not that, though that was what was in her heart, both as a mother and as a woman who loved a man, and whose life was good, even if they both worried sometimes about their son.
When the boy entered high school, his body—which often did not feel like his own—changed, and with it his mind and what that mind saw in the world; and though the seashells were still with him, so were girls and other boys and teachers. Without planning it—without seeing at first the dynamic of mind and heart that might allow and ensure it—the people he came to know at school and after school, those willing to speak to him despite his manner of speech and the rash he often had, suddenly seemed real to him; and he began to write about them in the diary where he now recorded the Kingdom’s story as he knew it; the diary he had been keeping for the past year and, like the marks he brought back from the Kingdom each night, had not confessed to his parents.
One day at school, in the corridors of the main building, he spoke to a girl, one he had two classes with and noticed frequently outside of class. They spoke on the Ninth Grade patio. How it had occurred, he could not be sure when he looked back at it that evening in his bedroom. She had been standing there, talking to other girls, and had turned to look at him as he passed. She did not stare at the rash on his neck, which itched from the sea, but simply looked at him, eyes open to what she might see. He had stopped because she had looked at him this way; and when she said, “Hi, Brian,” he stood there looking back at her until he heard himself say, “Hi,” too. The other girls left, and he and she remained, sometimes finding words (she found them more easily than he) and sometimes just standing there, looking around at the other students, not saying a thing, but also not leaving, as if being together mattered to both of them somehow. What all of this meant, he could not be sure.