The Royal Diadem of Maggot Hall

And I pretended to him that I was the last one, J., the one with the most frigid of hearts, I tried to convince Kim that I was J. with heart melted and humanity put inside him, who would rush to him one fine day out in the golden sunshine, and put his arms around him, around Kim and hold him and tell Kim he would never ever go away again. Kim, who, when the sun comes out these fall and winter months, has to have the curtains drawn against it. I think of all, that is the saddest parts. It was no good pretending. Kim knew it was me who held him that night, and tried to forgive me, but could not. Nor could I forgive myself.

And I held Kim that rainy cold stormy night out in the middle of God's terror and he whimpered to me and shuddered against me and I knew at that exact moment that I had lost him forever and would never get him back again.

I go to him now. There is only darkness and staleness around us for the rest of our days. I am next to him on the dusty dreary besieged with holes couch, with such tears in the fabrics. He lies like a fetus there. . He does not move. He might have died in the night. The monsters he and the other mad people communed with, of whom the mad were but the messengers of what is true, who bore reality that the normal people could not stand to look at for half a second, who bore it till they could do so no more, the monsters are with him but are not of him. He is destined to chase after them, begging them to take him along, and is to be unsuccessful in that as he was with the persons he tried to hold onto.

I lie my hand with my signet red ring, the only unessential item I could not bring myself to sell, for Kim had given it to me on my 17th birthday, I lay my hand on his chest delicately and feel the sad soft unwilling bones of his breathing softly rising and falling. I am relieved. I am saddened. A mixture of both. I wish the monsters he sees and hears could be the one that I see and hear. I envy his monsters. For like his untrue lovers they have also taken him from me. And I envy them that. I kneel next to him. I hold his right hand gingerly.

I do not want him to wake up. When he does open his eyes, I will be there, each morning, for as long as I can, for I've much to make for, my Kim, my brother, my life, and he will open those dark eyed doorways on me and he will see me as he flinches his body his terror, and sees, through the eyes of his scarred and hideously mutilated soul, all of them, all of us, who have betrayed him, our parents, his friends, all the doktors, all the bullies, all the hate mongers, all the self righteous, all the hypocrites, and he will see me as he sees them, changed hideously, cruelly deformed as we are in soul, if not in body, and we are the true outcasts, we who make our way in the world so self-assuredly, so proudly, and do things to such delicate breakable brave people like we did to Kim because we knew what is the damned best for him, and we are not for the consumption of the cowardly and timid. Who know so well how to live another's life for them, and then when the other person breaks, we can't get away from them fast enough.

I especially, for perhaps I betrayed him the worst of all. He will see, we evil beings, that he and the other mad people of the world must eliminate, are indeed done away with, which is his only purpose now. His hopeless eyes, with the mad pale fire so far away in them, tell the story. His mouth will always be mute. He has no need of it. Words hurt him too much. Words say "good-bye" whatever else the words supposedly are saying.

He does not speak even about the slugs of his mind, that he thinks are real, that he craves and he wants to learn from and that he thinks are so otherworldly, and he and the others will trick deceive brow beat the evil things into instructing the holier than thou, the "true saviors of humanity--you can trust me, I will not betray you," on secret things, on covert and mysterious things, magical incantations, and use vastly superior knowledge on the sane and the mundane, which will make a reason for all of his and all of his compatriots' pain. These creatures from a different plane of time are just waiting for the right moment to attack, but the mad are mad as hatters and there is no arcane. But it will not happen. There is only losing. And then losing more.

There is no magick. There is only the world. As it is and has always been. And people as they are and have always been.

But, for Kim, the revenge must be onward: after he and his fellow victims have bled the tricksters of words and their self justification dry, after they have taken every bit of the lies and shams from them, then, these former giants of the world, now become the deformed jokes themselves, being of no further use, were they ever?, can watch through their no longer proud evil eyes, as every square of flooring that they stood on or crawled or slithered on is taken away from them, one square at a time, can watch their dying heartlessness and the burgeoning of their molecules will be written on by him and his avengers, and the authorities of keys and locks of body and mind will be screaming helplessly in the vastly far back distance. We all dream still and always.

Wait for me, I can hear Kim say in my mind, wait for us for an eternity or two. Then, see.

I hold his pale under sea hand, and have not the heart to tell him he is wrong. I sleep with him at night. Or I lie with him in our musty bed sleepless, as is he. I am never without him a moment of the day or night.

I cannot tell him what he does not know. At least I hope he does not and never knows that his needs will never be met. His revenge will never be exacted. Without his private, pallid, crippled monsters to believe in, he has literally nothing at all. In leaving this country behind, in sailing next week to another land, we shall hold each other on deck, in our chairs. We shall travel steerage, for we are poor as church mice now

The two of us in our formerly rich rags, on the ship. The former big brother with the strong back and the hearty laugh and the heart that yearned for whoever was at hand. Back and heart and dandyish destroyed. And my broken brother with the cracked heart and brain, who will be in my arms on that boat, as we face the sea breeze and the coming century and a different world right there in the water as it sprays on us from the winter world we go to. Kim will be right there with me, held tightly in my arms, as I cover him with blankets and myself, from the cold of our frigid journey. But he might as well be a million miles from me then and now. He is as far from me as his loves are from him.

I kiss his brow. Flaky papery wan ivory with a small pale vein beating like the wing of a butterfly which is dying. I kiss his lips, wan, slack, and in doing so, I kiss not a man, but only a memory.