Heart's Desire

It was getting early, almost dawn, and me and the boys had killed a case of Jack and Pepe shooting the shit about the old days. Kay's Texaco was always good for that, and we had a semi‑permanent campfire set up on the roof where we'd sit and sing and drink and chat. We were quieter than usual tonight, more serious. Normally, we’d be telling stories about the old days, about how the great knights quested out for grails and telling dirty jokes about how a grail was like a woman. But tonight we were serious. Merlin lay in a deep sleep in King’s Daughters Hospital up the road, tubes and plastic tape embracing him like some ancient monster from the lake. Didn’t look good for the old boy.

Lance finished off the last bottle of Jack with a sigh and a belch. He'd changed since the old days, like all of us; his belly drooped over his Elvis belt buckle, and he had graying dreadlocks down to his waist, lacing into his beard so that you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. He reminded me of the Green Man that way, of the way the leaves and greenery blended over his body, and I wondered if it was for a reason. For the first time tonight, he looked up and spoke.

“I know where the enchantress is.”

The gas station rooftop fell silent besides Kay's hiccups and sobs.

We had been discussing the enchantress all evening. Vivaine, lady of legend, mistress of secrets, bitch royale. Using her other name Circe, she'd worked as a police recruiter and undercover agent for a while, which is how she got the rep for turning men into pigs. But she was mostly known for talking to ghosts, which is an old magic and forbidden by Merlin. Vivaine never listened to Merlin much.

“Where is she?”  Modred’s voice was raspy. He was my stepson, the product of an indiscretion of my husband’s, and I tried to love him; but he was too much like his father, really, and it was painful. Besides, you might as well love a black hole as love Modred; he always needed more, absorbing it and feeding on it and draining you of every drop. Probably due to the way his mother ignored him. She’d only wanted him as a tool, poor bastard child.

Lance shrugged. His considerable bulk shifted as he slammed down the freshly-killed bottle of Jack in the morgue of bottles, almost shattering the glass. “Trailer park. She dumped me for this guy on a black longneck Kawasaki. Trash. Lives in a trailer with him now.”

Modred leaned forward eagerly. “How good is she?”

“Don't know. You sure you want to?”

“I'd like to speak to my mother, just for old time's sake.”

Lance nodded sadly. “Yeah, I know. It ain’t right.”

“Just tell me. I’ll worry about what’s right.”

So Lance told us, and me, Gawaine, Modred, and Kay headed out to the Happy Valley Trailer Park. It was a dump, with trailers on bare mossy cinderblocks, rusted old trucks, most of the grass dead from lack of sunlight and leaky cars, the rattle of dragging mufflers and old air conditioners lending a strangely lively air. Didn’t compare to the wide halls and echoing stone corridors that I’d once been used to, or to Vivaine’s old island palace, the one built by the king of Crete and painted with vivid bull dancers long before Camelot was a dream. The art here was primarily chipped concrete figures and crookedly-set flagstones.

The trailer park was tight, everything packed into tiny lots threaded by broken-paved streets softened with gravel. The trailers were painted to look neat, but I could tell easy that some were a good fifty years old. Gawaine shook his head.

“Guess she didn’t know Lance would be a corporate attorney now. She picked the wrong man.” He got off his hog, making a show of it like always. He wore a lot of  black and hard leather these days, and he wore a hard vest like a clamshell under his duster; he said it felt like old days when he put it on. His heavy boots were straight out of KISS. When he stood up, you wondered that the hog could survive him, he was so tall. Percy and Kay wore clichéd biker gear: greasy headband, leather jacket, jeans, boots. Kay braided his beard like an old Teutonic warrior. You looked for horns on the helmet.

Me, on the other hand, I dress with class. Always. The dress was a bitch until I cut the long black leather skirt into strips, making it easier to straddle the bike but adding the danger of tangling in the spokes, and then Merlin fitted my bike with hubcaps, eradicating that problem. A low girdle held the strips to a decent level, and a royal‑blue cape topped the effect. I got sick of blonde several years ago and tried the Goth look, liked it. Some people say I look like Morticia on a bike. I like that.

Gawaine hastened to help me off the bike, shoving down the kickstand for me. Standing by him, I remember dancing the courtly dances with him, and the quadrille, and the swing, and the shag, and all the others. He has been kind to me since Bear vanished, and I’ve slept with him a couple times. Nothing serious. Lance won't touch me anymore anyway.

I turned and faced the others, strips of skirt skimming my legs, giving the illusion of seamlessness. “Well, boys, let's go see the enchantress.”

We picked our way through mud and ruts up to the trailer. Yard gnomes danced around a concrete mushroom, and at least twenty sets of chimes dangled from the sagging roof of the built‑on porch. As we passed, they tinkled loudly. Cheap alarm system. Gawaine, ducking his head, stepped up to the door and knocked. It jerked open on the second knock, leaving him with his hand hovering in the air.

The girl standing there didn’t look more than twenty, her blonde hair in twin braided pigtails down to her waist like Ellie Mae, petite butt clad in ripped daisy dukes. No shirt. In fact, no top at all. “What. We ain’t buyin nothing.”

I glanced at Modred. He was staring, and not at her eyes. I smacked him on the shoulder. “Your cue, I believe.” He blinked, shot me a dirty look, and stepped forward. “You the enchantress?”

She smiled sarcastically. “Do I look like an enchantress?”

In unison, the men said, “Yes.” I rolled my eyes.

“Surely all you gentlemen aren't mistaken.” She gazed at each man in turn, her smile growing larger. “Come in. Sit on the couch, but move the cats first.”

She meant it about the cats. There must have been twenty, Persian and Siamese and Hemingway, plain domestic shorthair and even a Mexican hairless, the poor ugly thing. I hate cats. They won't do what you say, unlike dogs or men. Glancing at her, I shove two tabbies out of the papasan and sink into it, crossing my legs into a lotus for comfort and also to show my legs to advantage. If I didn’t think she was an enchantress before, now I was certain of it, for her pigtails stayed put over her breasts, and the boys' eyes stayed fixed on the pigtails.

The boys - idiots - competed to clear a space for the enchantress on the cheap pinewood couch,  shoving remote controls and ashtrays to the side. She sat with more grace than one would expect of trailer trash, then clapped twice. The cats all ran yowling from the room.

“That’s better. What can I do for you gentlemen?” She smiled around at them, pointedly ignoring my presence.

Modred spoke up first. “My mother. Can you speak to her?”

The enchantress looked at him, then laughed. “I can. Are you sure you want me to? I mean, she beat you and she drank all the time, and, like, she tried to sleep with you.”

Poor Modred. He had a coughing fit while the other guys tried their hardest to forget what they’d just heard. Though there had been rumors. Modred's mother had been an enchantress too, but the magic had warped her somehow.

The enchantress cocked her head to the side like a perky cheerleader. “I thought not. Anyway, Modred, you can make your own choices.” She leaned forward. “You know what you want. Just go get it.”

Modred glanced toward me, then stood and left the trailer. Wayne stood to follow him, but I waved him back down. “Don’t. He’ll be okay. Remember what we’re really here for.”

The enchantress looked at me as if I were a cockroach. “And what is that?”

I leaned forward, dropping my voice into its throatiest range. “We seek the Holy Grail.”

This isn’t the Old Times. Today, you can get anything you want, if you have money. You can fly. You can travel at incredible speeds, which me and the boys do as often as possible. You can heal wounds that would have killed you in a few minutes back then. Why, the Fisher King could have been healed here.

You’d think that they’d make Holy Grails by the cartload, out of extruded plastics and petroleum products. But they don’t.

The Grail is a thing, they say, that will bring joy to the joyless, life to the lifeless. It will find things that are lost. It allows you to speak with God without the judicious application of chemical assistants. The Grail is an item of magic for a time that is not.

Perhaps, though, that’s not accurate. This world contains so much magic that what was once amazing is now mundane. Miraculous mechanical steeds that go hundreds of miles without stopping, and chilled bottled beer in the summer, and fast food. Devices for talking to people on the other side of the earth, or drill mile‑deep holes, or repair tears in leather like new. Viagra (what the Fisher King would’ve given!) and duct tape. Miracles. In a time of such magic, it would seem that the Grail must be its opposite, the most mundane object. But none of us were sure.

None of us had ever seen the Grail, even back then. How could we recognize it now?

Vivaine bounced up off the couch. “The Grail! You’re serious?”

“It may be the only thing that can awaken Merlin.”

Her lips curled into a smirk. “That old man is still alive? I don’t believe it!”

Gawaine spoke up. “Barely. He’s in a coma, and a machine is breathing for him. They say he’s lucky to be alive. Me, I think he needs to be either alive or dead. Surely the Grail will do one or the other for him.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. Probably.”

Clumsily, slowly because of his arthritis, Kay got down on one knee. I managed not to snort. “Vivaine, I beg you. Help us to find it.”

“Oh, just get back up, you big dumb guy. I’ll help. I just don’t think you’ll like what you find.”

Looking at her sly smile, I suspected she was right.

She shook out her hair, bare bosom exposed clearly now. And she hummed, clapping her hands together. Fog crept into the small living room to obscure the moss-green carpet, swirling around our feet, chilling us to the bone. Percy jumped up with a yelp. The enchantress laughed, eyes growing deep and green, thick hair swirling around her head very much like the mist that swirled around her feet. The fog, I realized, wasn’t fog at all, but spicy, heady smoke, like expensive incense or the best weed ever grown. Her voice came from a distance, like thunder.

“Take these.”

There was a ringing sound, as of giant coins being flipped into the air, and it echoed through my head, sending shock waves through the smoke. Reflexively, I grabbed at the air, feeling the weight of a large disk settle in my palm. I looked at it. Shiny and golden, it was a token, stamped on one side ‘Diamond Treasures Casino,’ and on the other side with a large and forbidding castle.

“Castle Perilous.” Kay looked at the enchantress with awe as she faded into smoke, gleaming eyes and teeth the last things to vanish.

We stood there, spellbound or maybe momentarily stoned, until we realized we heard cars and the honking of horns. I jumped back at the blaaatt of a particularly loud semi horn, and the mist cleared with the truck’s passing, melting and fading into his diesel-fuel-scented exhaust. Across the highway in front of us was the Castle Perilous, shining with a thousand neon lights, the sounds of coins and excitement and Neil Diamond drawing us toward it. Gawaine cleared his throat, sounding suddenly teary.

“‘But from without he heard wondrous voices singing, and saw a light shining brighter than any that he had seen before, and visions such as he scarcely dared to look upon.’” He wiped at his eyes. “That’s it. Bear was right. It’s beautiful.”

We linked arms and crossed the road.

I didn’t feel out of place at all, not here. Maidens wearing flowers and interesting little golden kirtles swept past on all sides, smiling and passing out drinks to the guests. I blended in well. On all sides were chattering people and clattering machines, voices swept away in the chaos of bells and lights and the jingle of change. One old man in Bermuda shorts caught my eye and winked. I winked back.

“Where do you suppose the Grail is?”

Gawaine looked at me as if I were insane. “It’s all around you. Can’t you feel it, the throb of life, the excitement, the desire and passion and fear and hope and dreams? They’re almost physical here, almost touchable.”

“Gawaine, that’s what happens in a casino.”

“No, Gwen. This is ‑ this is amazing.” He surveyed the room in awe, then gasped. “There.” I looked. Modred was B

“Modred, stop!”

Kay grabbed my hand before I went after him. “Gwen, people come in here to find dreams. Let him have his.”

I nodded, tight‑lipped. Modred walked -- sleepwalked --  to the largest slot machine, the one labeled Excalibur. It was a glittering evil‑looking thing, squatting between its brothers like a gilded toad, its arm resembling Bear's sword shoved in a glittering diamond stone. The five windows at the front showed cards from the deck of Tarot: Death, Knight of Cups, Three of Swords, Seven of Staves, and most appropriately Wheel of Fortune. Modred pulled a coin from his pocket and slid it in, pulling the arm of the machine down. The five windows blurred, then came up all Seven of Cups – illusion, confusion, self-delusion. Sirens went off, lights flashed.

“Leave him, Gwen. You can’t help him. His fate was set long ago.”

I turned around and buried my face in Kay’s burly chest. He was the closest thing I had to family, my brother in law, and he understood how I felt about Modred, how even though he was not mine by blood,  Modred was the closest thing I’d ever had to a son and I loved him. After a minute, the pain eased, and I backed off, nodding. “Okay. So let’s find the Grail.”

We moved together deeper into the heart of the castle together, toward the secrets hidden beyond the slots. The mosaic on the floor shifted from a random, checkered design into intricate images of flowers and grasses, fallen leaves, mushrooms. Sprouting from the floor were the most amazing trees, slender and straight with identical trunks, tiny glowing lights wrapped around each branch in an electrical web. Little songbirds with clipped wings chirped and sang, hopping from limb to limb. And brilliant globes of fruit, lime and apple and pear, dangled heavy from the ends of limbs in regular patterns, lighting our path. I shivered.

“Don’t care for it?” asked Kay.

“It’s beautiful and hideous at the same time. What are those, plastic?”

Kay nodded. “Better than the real thing. You don’t have to water them, and they never catch diseases.”

The roof here was a high atrium, and I could hear singing beyond the trees, a man’s voice backed up by young women. “Who is that?”

Kay grinned. “Someone we’ve been looking for.” Beside him, Gawaine looked shocked, then grinned, eagerly moving forward.

We came out of the forest of plastic trees behind an audience splashed randomly between tables and folding white plastic chairs. The people were of all different types and sizes and colors, both sexes, and mostly old. They sat at round tables with oxygen tanks, canes, wheelchairs, drinking whatever the pretty young maidens were passing around on trays. Everywhere I heard the clinking of tokens. Beyond them on stage –

I gasped. “That’s not Bear!”

Kay grinned again, watching Gawaine sink to his knees. “Yup. I’ve known for a while. He said this was the one way he could be acknowledged King by the masses these days.”

On the stage, Bear glittered, bright rhinestones on white polyester. His collar was turned up, his hair was dyed black and swept back in a wave, he wore dark glasses and postured. He had put on some weight over the years. The song ended, and the audience clapped, a great wave of sound punctuated by coughs and wheezes, and the pumping of oxygen into feeble lungs. Bear bent over the microphone.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” He nodded at them all. “If y’all will excuse me, I see I have some friends in the back.”

He handed off the microphone to another man dressed in bright rhinestones on white polyester, topped with a short cape. As the next song began, Bear strode through the audience toward them. “Kay! Where’s everyone else?” He glanced at me sideways. “Gwen. Long time.”

“Yeah. Very.” I tried to keep the longing out of my voice and failed miserably. Lance had been a hell of a lover, but I loved Bear and always would. He didn’t seem to care.

“Modred’s here, ensorcelled by one of those machines up there.”

“Excalibur?”

“That would be it.”

“He’ll find out soon enough that the sword doesn’t come out, not for anyone but me. What of Lance?”

I bit my lip. He’d speak of my lover, but not of me, the pig.

“Lance had court this morning, but he said he’d help us if we don’t complete our quest today.”

“Which is – ?”

“We seek the Grail.”

Bear laughed, a young and happy sound that startled me. He hadn’t laughed like that since our marriage day, when everything was young and fresh and filled with promise. “Oh, that. I found it.” He held his arm out to a young girl who resembled the enchantress; she giggled and smiled up at him, sliding her hand possessively over his. “True love, my friends. The only thing you cannot buy, that science cannot make.”

Science probably made those breasts of hers. I looked daggers at her. She didn’t seem to notice. It hurt, seeing Bear like this, with another woman, happy. I guess it was the happy part that bothered me the most. He should be twisted and miserable and guilty like me. And the thought made me feel guiltier, of course. It was Lance and me who deserved, and bore, the guilt.

The boys settled down at a table, pretty maidens bringing them mugs of ale. Where, I wondered, were the pretty lads? On stage, they were starting another set. Bear put his little floozy in his lap, introducing her as Layne, and immediately started a running commentary on the new singers. This one's a cocktail waitress who does one heck of a Cher, and that one's a corporate executive who desperately wants to hide his secret life behind Elton John's glasses. “They live their dreams, boys. Dreams. That's all they have.”

“Bullshit.” I looked as surprised as everyone else. Had I said that?

Bear stared at me. “Dreams, Gwen. You remember those. I guess you found out yours wasn't what you thought it was.”

“Action was what I needed. I was tired of sitting there in limbo, caught between you and Lance, the eternal tragic love triangle. Lot of women dream about that, too.”

“So you grabbed your dream, and found out it was a nightmare, is that it? Is that my fault?” He swept back the lock of black hair that fell down over his forehead. Layne got out of the way, muttering something about a powder room. Not as dumb as she looked.

“It's damn well someone's fault.” I modulated my tone – no point screeching. “If I’d had something to do besides waiting for you to come home from questing, if I’d been treated as something beyond a symbol of a throne or women or purity – ”

Bear snorted at that, and I flushed. I’d certainly not been a symbol of purity, any more than Lance had. “Right, Gwen. It's my fault you had your little fling with my best friend.” He took a deep breath. “You know what you really wanted, what you always wanted? You wanted to be the king. Well, now you have your little club of thralled followers, the ones I abandoned to follow my dream. Does it make you happy? Does it?”

I looked away. “No.” That was true; all I really wanted was the Old Days, when the world was bright and filled with possibility, the time before the decisions that changed everything were made.

He nodded, satisfied, and leaned back in his chair. ”The achievement of the dream doesn’t always make you happy, Gwen. Sometimes it's just having something pretty to look at that you need. Sometimes it's the chase that we want.”

“Merlin needs more than that.”

He was suddenly interested. “What's up with Merlin?”

“You hadn’t heard, I guess. Coma. Took a header off his bike, the old fool. I told him to wear the helmet, but no, he wanted to feel the wind in his hair, and his beard. Wasn't for me, he'd probably ride the damn bike naked.”

“So.” He was quiet. “So you look for the Grail.”

“We do.”

“That enchantress sent you here. Circe, Nimue, Vivaine, Morgan, whoever she is today.”

I nodded.

“She's a fool.” He got up and tightened the red sash around his waist. “Gotta go. It's my set. One thing, though, Gwen.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Sometimes it's best to let things be. Sometimes when you think people are in pain, it's really where they want to be. You try to control everything.” He nodded and strode toward the stage. Halfway there the spotlight caught him, glittering off the rhinestones that studded his white jumpsuit, and applause lifted him like a wave. I could see him getting younger, more vital, ready to spread his majesty among the audience, his subjects.

I got up. “Let's go, boys.”  They looked at me, Gawaine and Percy and Kay, and all three of them deliberately turned toward Bear. Fine. So he won this round. I turned around to watch the show, too. And gasped.

Modred, at the foot of the stage. He stared at me, all the longing I had never seen in his eyes, desire so strong and pulsing I shivered. In his hand, the glittering shard that was the arm of Excalibur, the slot machine. And with it he pierced the side of Bear, and the light flared and went out. There was a scream, a long wailing despairing scream, and I wasn't sure whose it was, Bear’s, Gawaine’s, Modred’s, mine. And then silence and stillness. But tears ran from my eyes; I could never fix things between me and Bear now. “Modred? Gawaine?”

Nothing but silence. I couldn’t even hear the aspiration of the oxygen machines now. No air moved. I couldn’t even feel anything under my feet.  “Damn you, enchantress, what did you do now?”

I heard her laugh, and there was tile beneath my feet, and the lights came up again, white, harsh, cold. I was not in the Castle, at least not the same castle. I saw the corridor of the hospital where Merlin lay, a machine doing his breathing for him more effectively than machines breathed for Bear’s audience. I stood outside Merlin’s room, where I could see bellows pumping oxygen into his slack lungs, tubes up his nose and in his arms and his bony chest, monitors beeping busily as they kept him alive. There was a young man there with a clipboard; on his white coat, the name P. Goode. He blinked at me, shoving his round-lensed glasses up with his middle finger.

“Are you a friend of Mr. -- Merlin's?” he read the name from the clipboard.

“I -- well, in a manner of speaking. He's sort of a guiding force in my life.”

“Pity about this. He sounds like he was a good man.”

“You think, then, there's no hope?”

“Hope. Now, there's an odd word. There may indeed be hope. A new treatment, yes, something I'm working on, taking stem cells from human placenta and injecting them into damaged parts of the brain. They can sometimes rebuild, you see. I just need a release signed, someone taking responsibility for Mr. Merlin, but I can't seem to find a close relative.”

“They're all dead.”

“You're certain?”

“Except me.”  I stepped forward. What was one more lie? “I'm his daughter, I'll sign it. You really can do this?”

“I believe so. Here, sign here, and here -- yes, Ms. Pendragon.” He grinned, hanging the clipboard up at the foot of the bed. “I'll go get the treatment now, I've been ready for days, just needed the right permissions. Fancy you, his daughter, showing up just now when they were getting ready to pull the plug. Marvelous. I’ll be right back.” He hurried off. Innocent. Not questioning my lie, in his excitement.

I sat down on a stool, wondering what I had just done. Before me, Merlin slept, as dead to the world as he had been at Nimue's hands. I had lost everyone else. And somewhere, Dr. Goode stirred something in a petri dish, the cauldron of science, financed by the blood and sweat of everyone in the world, the mold and muck out of which wonders emerge. So mundane.

I flipped on the television, not turning it up but rather listening to the sound of Merlin's breath as a machine made him live. Rhythmic breaths, same at the end as at the start, ragged in the middle as air forced a way into unwilling lungs. I listened. With each cycle, each new beginning, I listened.

On television was a show about Elvis. Leaning back in the blue naugahyde chair, I waited, I wandered, I dreamed.

About Me | What I Write |  My Blog | Subscribe to Newsletter
 Writers Resources | Contact Me

Other sites

© 2005-12 Jamie K. Wilson