PEACOCKS
PEACOCKS AND PIGEONS
His father’s death was his great misfortune. He had anticipated dying before him. He had only a sleepy hold on life. An early escape is what served as hope for him.
He was summoned from a hunting trip with his falcons. He felt the birds observed him with contempt if they noticed him at all. Towards other things they turned a lancing gaze, while their brilliant eyes seemed to acquire introversion when he intruded, and brushed over him indifferently. Their talons gripping his forearm through the leather sheath infused him with a feeling of sexual violation. When he removed their hood to admit the searing horizons into their fierce eyes his breast became transparent, fully vacant to their angelic desire. He longed for their abuse.
He hunted with hounds and even cheetahs; he was besotted with the androgyny of the hunt. The lyre on the antelopes head was a more completed rendering of the fatality in immortal innocence than the unicorn, and their grace seemed Eurydice-like to him, returned reluctantly and briefly to life. With relief they relinquished themselves to the cheetah. When the falcon’s pursuit climaxed in the dorsal bolt, or the cheetah seized the gazelle mid-leap into a smoky whirl where acute life expended now drowsed panting, he experienced an ecstasy of grief. His own eyes seemed too weary to wear coarser threads than dreams. He longed for rapture.
He entered his father’s chambers accompanied by ministers from the government, men in dark Western suits with turquoise ties. The generals were already in the room, men with brush mustaches and thick eyebrows dressed in full regalia, constellations of medals and gold ribbons with tassels. He looked away from their faces. He recognized none of these men, but their panic alarmed him. They were in free-fall. Thunder and iron had been welcome interventions between them and the empty reaches in the desert sky.
His father had died suddenly; perhaps his heart had exploded during a rage. He was rarely angry, it seemed to exceed his imagination, but was seized without warning by rage. When this happened he stampeded. Woe to those in his path. He was a giant, and servant or general he would snap the neck of whoever came to hand or smash their skull against a wall. He never regretted it later, but because the tempest was thoroughly purgative and always pure of reason and motive, the general’s widow would receive her husband’s full pension and the servant’s children would remain in the palace and rise at maturity to serve where their parent had.
He was outfitted in his full shah’s resplendence. Saber, sash, and burnoose, gleaming boots, military pants with gold lateral stripes. A cavalryman’s parade hat with plume and his turquoise coat. He smelled from fragrant oils, and the prince thought about his posthumous bath. Who had they summoned? The delegations that marched at those parades held to commemorate historical events, where the shah had stood on the reviewing platform unmoved by the spectacle? Bands and dancing students, tradesmen and soldiers, and their shah bored even on the anniversaries of his ascension to a throne left vacant for centuries-the unattainable lover impossible to appease or stir. The maidens with flushed cheeks and brilliant eyes, the soldiers a refulgent stoicism that seemed mere flirtation against his impervious disregard, all of them failing to meet their blank destiny; now, they remove his clothes to find him undiminished, the idol blocking his own tomb. Not one scream or wail, flower or song ever reached him, and no sacrifice was ever noticed. He gave as the stony desert ground gives, foundation for skittering and shadows, and from him they can take nothing. Nothing will be returned to them, their adoration never animated him and so it continues and his body is bathed tenderly and the land closes to them, its one declaration final: You know this.
His father had many wives, but the prince was his first child from his first wife whom he had married while still a soldier. He was destined to father a score more after his elevation with as many wives. Had he lived another few years he might have had the prince killed as several of his younger brothers were better fitted to rule and had ruder carriages and coarseness to endear them to a withering monarch, but the shah died before age could temper him with plot or contemplation.
By all accounts the prince had been a beautiful child, a common event in the Middle East where spiritual destinies pour into the eyes of infants from orphaned prophesies, and, of course, if the heirs to royalty are not deformed they are hailed as beautiful, but photos from his first decade confirm it. Neglect allowed this affliction to fester. He was cursed to remain beautiful even to his coronation, a grief and accusation for his subjects. Subjects and new shah viewed each other as if from the opposite sides in a reflection, flensed to the core, the gold coin he saw from fathoms down in their retina, reflecting back at them.
The monarchy had lived by adoring the shah’s physicality; laws and actions coalesced around this projection. A people dredged from river sludge and impressed with spirit-the story goes-straining to remember what about mud could have pleased or angered the sky. The prince would once have longed to be picked up by his father, but he could be offered nothing but his own disappearance, and it was the same for his subjects whose existence was an offense to his simplicity. Politics became the hierophantic art of tip-toeing to forestall his rages. His death left the kingdom bereft of interpretation. Conceivably, you could move, but in answer to what necessity? What would insure your orbit?
As long as possible jewels and flowers and tears were thrown into the hole where he’d passed, but nothing could entice his rage to descend again, and the prince’s coronation was prosecuted to general ennui and panic. A madman fornicated in the street with a whore that rumor later reported as a donkey. The spring was unusually gentle; rains curried the desert and delicate flowers bloomed in the wadis. No retribution came. Dropped heedlessly from the sky back into earthly paradise, girls’ kisses were refused and young men gambled without thrill.
Within a year after his ascension, throughout his kingdom, the people seemed to be pining for lost loves. Vagueness and daydreams clouded their eyes and paled their cheeks. He sensed the contagion’s source to be his own dewy melancholy, and that they would have replaced this inhibited peace, this civilization, for the savage ecstasy they had lost and which under the immediate heel of dread had made ardor possible.
Many palaces had been built for the old shah, but the new shah mostly dwelt in the palace where he had lived as a child. He walked for hours in its extensive, geometric garden, stopping at the fairy tale fountains, imagining again as he had when young, of living beneath their watery arches. He would choose between flower petals for the eyelids to couch slumber, the lounges readied by radiant hummingbirds. Echoing in the garden, the shrieks of peacocks, vertiginous, evocative, and at the same time mindless or hysterical, and the peacock shah during those moments would think he might spread into sheerness and disappear into the garden, and there meet again the little girl with blond hair and turquoise eyes he either remembered or dreamed, and had always loved, only her.
On the squares and traffic circles in the city, in windows in high apartments or in doorways in cardboard shacks, such a girl was glimpsed time and again and finally remembered and finally replaced the strident children who insistent on their selves, had shouldered out all grief for the past. During these sweet visitations the frontier between private self-loathing and revelations was left unguarded, murders were committed, and worlds no more substantial than soap bubbles reflecting constellations filled the city.
He opened the prisons to those who had offended the old shah and the inmates crept suspiciously out, some to behold with alarm their waiting families and cringe at their touch, others to pace the streets of their own necropolis, the byways bleached and empty, the cords of the instruments they had strung through the streets dangling slack. Where might they look now for the stone that whet their purpose? They gathered randomly in coffee houses scoured even of visions from the underworld they had been wrenched from, the vacuum’s clarity passing insensibly through them.
Outside the palace walls motor scooters churned through the crowded streets, venders pushed decrepit carts, donkeys drowsed under heavy, long-lashed lids, and only the lepers sitting motionless behind their begging cups, cowls hiding their devoured faces, without recourse to heaven, maybe longed with innocent patience for a beautiful kingdom.
