The Tent

So if it was a revenge story it was a strange revenge. The only person to benefit from it was someone who hadn’t been directly involved. That often happens too, I’ve noticed. Maybe instead of being a revenger’s tragedy the Hamlet saga was a story about subconscious guilt—Hamlet realizes the Hamlet family has done dirt to the Fortinbras clan, and obliterates his own kinfolk and scuppers his inheritance in a spectacular act of self-sabotage.

While I was chewing on my quill, dozens of years went by. Then some jumped-up English playwright chose to dramatize this whole fracas. I was annoyed—he hadn’t even been alive at the time, and he put in a bunch of stuff he couldn’t possibly have known anything about. If he’d come to me I might have set him straight; but he didn’t, and he published first. He filched my material and appropriated my voice and exploited a human tragedy that was really none of his business.

Anyway his play was too long.

My own writer’s block got worse than ever. Hamlet’s well-known procrastination had rubbed off on me. I began asking difficult questions. Why me? Why should I have to write Hamlet’s_ story? Why not my own?_ But there’s nothing much to mine, really. Come to think of it, is there anything much to Hamlet’s? By this time we were well into the seventeenth century, and Oliver Cromwell had gone on the rampage, and Charles the First had had his head cut off, and thousands of soldiers and civilians had died cruel and ghastly deaths, with their intestines wound out of their bodies and their heads stuck up on stakes. I’d seen a lot of that up close, so a few slashed and drowned and poisoned bodies littering the Danish court were no longer very horrifying to me by comparison.

Somehow I no longer wanted to tell Hamlet’s story. I wanted to tell something a little more—what’s the term? Human, inhuman? Something bigger. But statistics pall after a time. We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.

So I went back to the stories of individuals. I’ve covered the ground, I can tell you. The French Revolution, the Terror, the slave trade, the Spanish wars, Australia, Cuba, North America, Africa, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, the Middle East, Cambodia—you name it, I was there. Sometimes I was a peddler of supplies, sometimes a dispatch runner, sometimes a neutral observer, sometimes a provider of aid; more recently I’ve been working for the newspapers. I’ve talked to famine victims, war orphans, survivors of massacres and rapes, perpetrators of them—all sorts of people, with clean hands and dirty.

You’ve heard of injustice collecting? That’s what I’ve become—an injustice collector. It’s like a tax collector, only there’s nothing to be done with the injustices once you’ve collected them except to pass them on, as best you can; though there’s always the possibility that merely telling such stories will make people angry and thus give rise to other injustices. Still, after four centuries, I think I’m prepared to speak. To tell how things are, now, on this earth. Finally, I’m ready to begin.

So shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; and, in the upshot, purposes mistook, fall’n on the inventors’ heads.

All this can I truly deliver.

KING LOG IN EXILE

After he had been deposed by the frogs, King Log lay disconsolately among the ferns and dead leaves a short distance from the pond. He’d had only enough energy to roll that far: he’d been King of the Pond for so long that he was heavily waterlogged. In the distance he could hear the jubilant croaking and the joyful trilling that signalled the coronation of his celebrated replacement, the experienced and efficient King Stork; and then—it seemed but a mini-second later—the shrieks of terror and the splashes of panic as King Stork set about spearing and gobbling up his new subjects.

King Log—ex—King Log—sighed. It was a squelchy sigh, the sigh of a damp hunk of wood that has been stepped on. What had he done wrong? Nothing. He himself had not murdered his citizens, as the Stork King was now doing. It was true he had done nothing right, either. He had done—in a word—nothing.