—
IT’S A NICE HOUSE for Ched too, in that it’s big and he got it on the cheap, and anyway he’s not really comfortable in overly normal situations. As it is he hears voices. Nobody else hears these voices but they’re not just in Ched’s head, you know? In this world there are voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end. Ched borrows their melodies: That’s the music part of the songs he writes. For words Ched uses rhymes from our village, the kind that nobody pays attention to anymore because they advocate living by a code that will surely make you one of life’s losers. A lot of stuff about living honestly and trying your best. Even if you only have one tiny job to do, do it well, do it well, do it well…
These songs of Ched’s turned out to be a hit with a lot of people outside our country. Ched got Internet famous and then magazine famous and all the other kinds of famous after that. It was fun to see. His mother still says to me: “But don’t you think people overreact to our Chedorlaomer? These girls screaming and fainting just because he looked at them or whatever. He’s just some boy from Bezin.”
That’s the power of those true voices, man.
And now that you know that Ched and I are from a small village that might make you say Oh OK, so that’s why this guy believes in voices he’s never heard. But trust, living in a small village in a country that’s not even sure it’s really a country you see a lot of shit that’s stranger than a shaman (which is what Ched is, or was, before he started making money from the voices). Every day there was news that made you say “Oh really.” Some new tax that only people with no money had to pay. Or yet another member of the county police force was found to have been an undercover gangster. If not that then a gang member was found to have been an undercover police officer. An Ottoman-style restaurant opened in a town nearby; it served no food but had a mineral water menu tens of pages long, and fashion models came to drink their way through it while we played football with their bodyguards. Speaking even more locally there was this one boy at our school who had quite a common first name and decided to fight every other boy in our postal code area for the right to be the sole bearer of that name — can you imagine? I was one of the boys on his hit list, and I was already getting picked on because I didn’t have a father. But what a ridiculous place we were born into, that fatherlessness was a reason why people would flick a boy’s forehead and say insulting things to him, then pile on four against one when he took offense… it’s not our fault we’re ridiculous people, Ched and me. How could we be anything else?
Ched was the absurd-looking boy who suddenly grew into his features and became really good-looking overnight. That didn’t seem right, so he got picked on too. But Ched had been thinking, and the result of that was his going around offering assistance to the other boys who had the same name as me, arguing that if our little problem fought us individually he would easily beat us but if we stood up to him together none of us would have to change our name. The others feared duplicity more than anything else (this was wise, since duplicity was all we knew) and decided it was better to take their chances as individuals.
—
I BELIEVED Ched though. With the solemnity of a couple exchanging vows we slipped knuckle-dusters onto each other’s fingers, four for each hand. Then I walked over to the boy who didn’t think he should have to share his name with anybody and without saying a word I smacked the pot of chocolate pudding he was eating right out of his hand. He was so astounded he just stood there pointing at me as his friends came loping over like bloodthirsty gazelles. I didn’t even check whether this Chedorlaomer boy really had my back, but I trusted that he did, and he did. What a great day, a day that a modest plan worked. That guy changed his own name in the end. And it’s been like that ever since with Ched and me. He was lucky enough to be a year older than me and when he graduated from our school it was like I was the only sane one left in an asylum. There was more and more bullshit every day. But Ched waited for me at the school gates, and he had a lot of good pep talks.
That’s why it’s pretty odd that Chedorlaomer went back for mandatory military service. Only passport holders have to do that, and I thought he’d given up his passport, like I had.
“No, I never told you that,” Ched said.
“But why would you keep it? Haven’t you seen the stuff they write about you over there? You’ve sold out, you’re scum, blah blah blah. So what, now you’re trying to change people’s minds? Why those minds in particular? I thought we—”
“Yeah, I know what you thought,” Ched said. He laughed and ruffled my hair. All of his was gone; he’d just come back from the barber’s. Baldness made him look younger than I’d ever seen him, and toothier too. Like a stray, but a dangerous stray; you could take him home if you wanted to but he’d tear the walls down. “It’s time for me to be part of something impersonal,” he said. “Duty is as big as it gets. Do these people like me? Do I like them? Am I one of them? All irrelevant. I’ll be directing all of each day’s effort toward one priority: Defend the perimeter.”
Other things my best friend said to me: That two years was but a short span. And in the meantime he hoped his house of locks would become a kind of sanctuary for me. It would’ve been a really nice speech if Boudicca hadn’t been blinking balefully at me the whole time. You there… forget to feed me once, just one time, and you’re dead. I mumbled that I had a lot on at work but I’d see what I could do.
—
I DON’T TELL Ched how often the things he says come true. That’s for his own good of course, so that he stays humble. But here’s an example: This past couple of weeks alone I’ve come to the House of Locks seven times. Four times to feed Boudicca and walk the length of her tank — the first time she raced me to the farthest corner, and all the other times she’s turned her back. The rest of my visits have been for sanctuary, I suppose. Just like Ched said. All I’ve seen or heard of him since his departure are blurry photographs of his arrival at barracks, these posted on various fan sites. He hasn’t called or replied to e-mails, so I walk through the wing of the house that he favors, passing the windows with various views of his fountain. A girl of pewter stands knee-deep in the water, her hands cupped, collecting streams and letting them pour away. Her eyes are blissfully closed. In the room I’m watching her from the curtains hang so still that breathing isn’t quite enough to make me believe there’s air in here. The front door is the only one I lock behind me, so as I go through the house all the doors behind me are ajar. It’s still hair-raising, but it’s reassuring too. The house is wonderfully, blessedly empty — nobody else will appear in the gap between the doors — that gap is a safe passage across all those thresholds I crossed without thinking.
—
ABOUT WORK: I run a clinic for my Aunt Thomasina’s company. A “Swiss-Style Weight-Loss Clinic,” to quote the promotional materials. This basically means that people come here for three days of drug-induced and — maintained deep sleep, during which they’re fed vitamins through a drip. This is a job I jumped at when it was my non-Ched-dependent ticket out of Bezin. It’s not as peaceful as I expected; most of the sleeping done here is the troubled kind. A lot of sleep talking and plaintive bleating. None of the sleepers are OK, not really. On the bright side the results are visually impressive: Most clients drop a clothing size over those seventy-two hours. Aunt Thomasina experienced this herself before she ever tried it out on anybody else. Something awful happened to her when she was young — she’s never even hinted at what that might be — and she took what she thought was a lethal dose of valerian and went to bed, only to wake up gorgeously slender three days later. “This will be popular,” she said to herself. And she was right. Most days the waiting room is full of clients happily shopping on their tablet devices; the whole new wardrobe they just ordered will be waiting for them at home after their beauty sleep. Of course weight loss that drastic is unsustainable, which makes the clinic a great business model. We send our monthly customers Christmas and birthday cards; they’re part of the family.