The following is a chapter from a work-in-progress novel that will likely never be finished, presented in the spirit of wild editorial self-indulgence for our November “regime change” theme.

Cadaver

The young king’s corpse is badly decayed. Decomposition happens rapidly in the capital, where the summers are suffocating and the winters are sterile—neither warm nor cold, not humid or dry—and windless. This is what I’ve been told. I haven’t seen the remains myself, nor have I lived in this city long enough to have a working internal almanac. Though what I have experienced—two weeks of late summer, a month of fall—has indeed been oppressive. All of the vassals who have lived their entire lives here tell me how lucky I am to have arrived during the gentlest months of the year. 

“It’s gorgeous,” one noble lady told me. (Her face and name elude me now, either because of her makeup or my failing memory.) “There must be so much more color here than on the frontier, where I’ve heard you have only a single week of green, followed by six weeks of brown, and an eternity of white.” I didn’t bother to correct her. She was close enough to the truth. And who knows if it would have been appropriate to tell her how uncomfortable I was at that moment, in a fabricated garden that looked so much like so many others, harassed by the glare from a sun that was as low as you’d expect from autumn but yet somehow was as hot as summer. Is it a breach of courtly manners to say that the king is sweating? Or maybe it’s one of those things you can say if you’re the king. Either way, why put her in an awkward position? The lord suffers in his people’s place. My anguish is the relief of many. Maybe it would be to the benefit of mankind if I perspired blood. 

Why am I complaining about the weather? It’s age. We grow more and more uncomfortable with this world the closer we get to leaving it, so that death can be a blessing, a relief. I tell myself this. Who knows if it’s true.

They—the court, the apprehensive “they” that constrains the royal “we”—do not want me to go to the house where the corpse is being prepared for trial. They’re afraid that our—both the royal “our,” meaning only me and all the abstract virtues that I’m supposed to signify, and the literal “our,” referring to the throng of necessary nonentities that now follow me everywhere for ceremonial and practical reasons that I mostly do not understand—presence would be functionally identical to a public declaration of the body’s location. They (we) fear insurrection. 

What if someone still loyal to him sneaks in at night and spirits the body away? What if they counterfeit a resurrection? What if they put his skeleton in a cage and mount the cage to a pole and march through the streets with it held high, advocating revolution? What if they rub his femur against some old peasant’s club foot or crush his fingers into dust and mix it with spit and make a paste to spread on a child’s scabby eyes, and what if, after doing this or that, they get the miracle that they were hoping for? (No one mentioned this last possibility, not to me, but I’ve considered it for them, and it scares me more than any of the others.) So I do not go.

Instead I’ve been presented with a written report on the body’s condition. I try to read it clinically, reminding myself that I have a duty to separate the germane from the morbid. The friar who prepared the report has done me no favors in this regard, and seems perversely interested in describing the little that is left of the man as meticulously and artfully as possible. (I’ve been told that on the southwestern frontier there’s an enormous purple flower that smells like a cadaver. Something about his prose reminds me of this.)  I skim.

He is mostly bone, adorned in scattered spots with shreds of colorless, desiccated skin. His hair is entirely gone. [A relief to my imagination.] All of his organs have rotted away or been consumed by larval beetles, aside from his spleen, which is withered and dry, but otherwise intact. 

I’m sure this last detail is significant—Why would one piece of a man petrify while the rest putrefies? I’m most confident that God is not dead or asleep when I’m faced with an event that’s simultaneously arbitrary and improbable. My prejudices are transcended. I’m humbled. I close my eyes to visualize that withered organ and instead glimpse the immortality of the soul—but all the advisors I’ve asked have given me answers that transparently pander to what they think I want to hear. 

One religious scholar told me that the spleen was the seat of demonic possession. “Demons,” he said, “obviously cannot reside in the human heart. That’s out of the question. And they must feed. They have bodily needs, just as we do. The spleen is right next to the stomach, you know. And it’s darker—purple, almost black really—and more vile than the other organs. So it’s the perfect location. It, the evil spirit I mean, can squat there, in the organic gloom, and steal its host’s food right from their belly. This is why demoniacs almost always suffer from indigestion.”

“And, of course, the demon … or, more probable in a case like this, demons … survive their host, trapped, starving, and desperate, with no available exit, so … You can understand why even the maggots want nothing to do with his spleen.”

I could hear the improvisation in the cadence of his speech. There’s a difference between the pauses and intonation of an educated man who is straining to remember truths that he read in a book once, years ago, and those of a practiced liar, fabricating a convincing anti-reality on the spot. He was bullshitting me.

A physician I consulted was more concise. “The spleen is where the body stores excess vice,” he offered. “Which, as I’m sure you know, the dead man [They are always careful not to say “dead king.“] had in abundance. Of course it’s inedible.”

I don’t understand medicine. I’m not sure that I believe in medicine. But this felt false and contrived, even by the standards of doctors.

“Hell, spleens just taste like shit,” one of my cooks interjected. He had overheard my conversation with the physician while awaiting an opportunity to read me a dinner menu that consisted almost entirely of foreign delicacies that he had no idea how to pronounce and which I wouldn’t have recognized regardless. “Don’t know if bugs can taste, but I’d bet they can. You can make a meal with almost any piece of meat. Not the god damned spleen though.”

The paltriness of their explanations strengthens my faith. God is quiet, but close. I’ve been praying again at night—when I’m alone and there is no incentive to put on a public display of piety—for the first time in years. Sometimes I pray to God. Sometimes to my wife or my son. Sometimes to any dead thing that can still hear.

There has been a debate within the court about the optics of the mock execution of a man who is already so visibly dead. I’ve been advised that a beheading is out of the question, or, at least, that someone would have to contrive a clever means of reattaching his skull to his spine without visible ropes or lines, so that it won’t simply fall off when they lay his neck on the block. There has to be something for the axe to sever. Hanging presents even more apparent obstacles. I’m told there isn’t enough glue in all the lands under my dominion to reattach all of his bones to their mates in a way that would allow him to convincingly dangle from a noose.

“It’s not as impractical as you might think.” A palace philosopher, respected for his unflinching empiricism, who’s become monomaniacally obsessed with the “glue problem,” delivered a lecture (to me, exclusively and inescapably) outlining his proposed solution. “The war has left us with so many dead horses. Their corpses are rotting in pits and ditches throughout the kingdom. And there are remote villages where they have simply been left to molder wherever they fell, despoiling wells and stinking up common pastures. Some farmers are so fatigued and demoralized that they are simply plowing around them, because they don’t have the energy to drag them from their fields or because they’ve seen so much death that it doesn’t even occur to them that the bloated carcass does not belong. We could send envoys with drays to collect as many of these corpses as they can and bring them to some designated barren place near the capital and boil their bones and hooves in a massive trench there. You would have more glue than you could ever use, and a more sanitary nation less haunted by the wight of animal death to boot.” (I momentarily considered rescinding his patronage, but thanked and dismissed him instead.) 

Other traditional methods of dispatchment had their own short-comings. Drawing and quartering was out of the question for much the same reason as hanging. Additionally, it would require live horses, which are harder to come by than dead ones. Defenestration, one advisor gleefully noted, is not dramatically effective if the condemned cannot scream. Stoning is archaic, but has the added perk of crowd participation (and thus crowd complicity). “Yes, but stoning evokes martyrdom,” an (admittedly astute) counselor rebuffed.

I remained mute as I listened to their suggestions, reminding myself that sometimes silence is the same as gravitas, or, at least, that it’s more dignified than equivocation. I limited my interjections to brief, practical questions, seeking clarity on issues of pomp and procedure. Confidants and theorists came and went, innominate and blurred, consumed by speculative moaning; poltergeists rearranging my perspective in disquieting but worthless ways. One evening two of them, whoever they were, had an endless dialogue on costuming and stage decoration.

“Should we give him a crown? Or does that denote too much authority? Would we be retroactively legitimizing his rule?”

“How would anyone recognize him otherwise? He doesn’t have a face.”

“We could have an artist craft a mask and put it over his skull. Base it on one of his portraits, but exaggerated, grotesque; true to his soul, if not his body. The way he should be remembered … before he’s forgotten.”

“All of his portraits have already been burned.”

“Eh. Then how about coins? Thousands were minted during his reign. Some must survive.”

“Coins? Sure, there are coins. Coins could work perfectly. They’re already caricatures. Already propaganda. There’s nothing there that might inadvertently inspire compassion in the audience. Nothing human. Just tell the mask maker to take everything regal and make it profane.”

This sounded nonsensical to me. Completely abstract and rootless. Impossible to implement.  Each word was tethered to nothing but the word before it and tethered with nothing but autoerotic zeal. I felt my throat tighten. I didn’t speak, but I did close my eyes slowly and pressed the edge of my folded hands to my forehead, touching my thumbs to my lower lip. I hoped that they would see me—I was watched constantly, my facial tics and tremors interpreted remorselessly—and understand my aggravation and stop without me having to exercise (and by extension abuse) my power. They continued.

“And are we going to dress him up? We can’t just prop him up in his burial shroud.”

“We have to think carefully about how we clothe him. Every sartorial decision is significant. Different colors, in particular, bear different connotations. White is straight out, obviously. Red and purple convey too much majesty—”

“Black?”

“You would think that would be a good choice, but, no. Black is too intimidating, and, worse, it signifies mourning. We don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea and think it’s appropriate to grieve for him. Grief is only a half step short of worship. You have the genesis of a cult right there.”

“Alright, how about green? You know, a putrid, moldy green. Something really rotten looking.”

“Do you think your average pissant peasant can discriminate between mildew green and the color of the woods in late spring? In trying to get them to picture death, they’ll imagine a rebirth instead.”

“Yellow. Piss Yellow.”

“Oh.”

“Right?”

Energized by this moment of mutual epiphany, they escalated. The conversation turned to materials. Silk was quickly eliminated, but there was a protracted debate about whether to opt for a fabric that was simple and communicated nothing about the body’s status (cotton, wool) or if he should be outfitted with hemp rags or a hairshirt to emphasize his humiliation. It struck me as a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of a hairshirt to put one on a mostly skinless skeleton, but I didn’t say so, allowing the tension at the edges of my eyes to speak for me. I let my mind drift. Heard only pieces of their discourse on different stitches and hems and how the wrong sorts of loops or embroidery could falsely foreshadow the method of execution (not yet decided at this point). A quick consensus was reached on whether his finger bones should be adorned with rings. (Absolutely not.) Any displays of his coat of arms or seal were likewise nixed. I was almost entirely oblivious to a lengthy exchange about the martial implications of leather boots. By the time I was cognizant again, they were deliberating about seats.

“There’s a monastery a short distance from here—two days, possibly three with inclimate weather—that has a chair made entirely from human bones.” 

“What. Why?”

“It’s a meditative aid. The monks sit in it and reflect on the brevity of life.”

“But isn’t that a desecration? To rest your dirty ass on the sanctified remains of dead men? Do they shit in the chair as well? Wipe themselves with the dried tongues of martyrs?”

“The bones are from condemned criminals. Murderers. Rapists. Deserters. Their souls are damned. What do their bodies mean to them?”

“It still seems obscene to me. And do we want to risk drawing attention away from the bones that matter? How many bones can one gawking tanner see and truly comprehend? It muddies the damnation of the one being tried, invites too many comparisons between his crimes and those of the men he’d be seated upon.”

“But don’t we want to encourage those comparisons? Don’t we want to debase him? Let them see his remains besides those of degenerates of lower social status. See if they can tell the difference.”

“The difference is he won’t be a fucking stool.”

I made the choices that I could. There would be no crown, and absolutely no chair made of bones, but he would wear the mask. It must cover his entire face. (His entire skull.) Sure, he could wear a yellow cotton robe. Symbolism aside, it was practical. No rings. Barefoot. String would suffice to hold him together enough and upright enough to mock the appearance that he was seated. The method of execution didn’t need to be decided until the whole ordeal was over. We still had time to choose.

At night after prayer, I try to visualize the full trial chronologically and then holistically, to parse through the necessary steps sequentially, anticipating screw-ups and scandals, and then to draw my imagined vision upwards and backwards, straining to sense the feel of the thing in its entirety, to anticipate the immediate, intestinal reaction of the spectator who would become the mob. Instead, I see the skull, half-wrapped in half-painted papier-mâché, the skeletal hand resting nude on the skeletal chair, the spleen.