3: The Collector

Zelgadis stayed away from Seyruun, and it was not because he was still looking to "cure" his transformation. It hadn't been about that for a long time. If he could, by some miracle, revert back to his former self, he was afraid he'd be someone else completely, and he was too old to live the life of a stranger. He had spent the better part of his life defining himself by the nature of his tragedy, which didn't seem so terribly important anymore. Now his past existed only as a frame encompassing everything else his life had become.

He'd made his ties to others despite his efforts to avoid them---but wasn't that what he really wanted all along? Would these people who'd become so important in his life still recognize him if he changed? He harbored a perverse fantasy about becoming human again only to be rejected by everyone---as if he were a stranger who killed the original to take his place. In the end, they would rally together and kill the "doppelganger": revenge for the death of their friend. But it all falls apart there, Zelgadis found it difficult to determine which of his selves was the original. He did know that if he did change, his daughter would be alone and he couldn't live with that. No, he'd correct himself; she had always been alone, born neither human nor the other (he could not look at his daughter and still think of their shared form ugly; he could not consider her a mistake nor the result of a mistake), but something else entirely. Mostly, he was afraid that his image of himself as a man would be shattered, everything he knew, or thought he knew, invalidated, and the sum of his life's experience farcically rendered insignificant and hollow.

So he lived in a small estate, spoils of Amelia's position and influence---he never did feel comfortable amidst the palatial milieu---and lived there under the pretense of a habit that no longer existed. And in place of that habit, he collected things:

Obscure engineering tools, entomological specimens, physiognomic indexes of side-show freaks, books about magic, books that critically broke down the history of the world, books of philosophy, books of poetry, books about the various things he collected. . .

He had archival boxes filled with his daughter's drawings: first the naive crayon schemas of home and family, later methodical renderings of imaginary machines. These boxes hadn't been filled for some time. His daughter, it seemed, in her adolescence had taken to wandering the world. She never wrote him anymore. Instead, he'd receive packages of rocks with no letters to explain what they were, what or how she was doing, why she sent them, no less what she'd intended them to mean to him. She frightened him sometimes. Even as her face molded itself into shapes as intimately familiar as his own, she was becoming more of a stranger. She had reached the point of womanhood that made fathers uncomfortable, only knowing them as little girls and ill-equipped to understand them as women.

. . .he raised orchids and roses (he named them after his friends as each plant reflected the version of them that existed in his memory). . .

Other boxes were filled with the letters he wrote but never sent to Zelina and Amelia, both. Stacks of notebooks, some filled with notes and magical equations, some filled with his drawings, the nudes torn out then carefully folded back in. . . .

The house where he now lived was situated in a peaceful wooded landscape, interrupted, at times, by agrarian fields and pasturelands belonging to the small farms and hamlets that populated this area of unofficially incorporated Seyruun. He could have chosen other places to live, places further away from the city (the royal family owned many lands and estates, many of which were empty; the royal bloodlines had thinned from its history of betrayals, exile, death, and the occasional prodigal heir). It had all been arranged. He had his pick of it all, and he chose where he was. It was just as well. His nearest neighbors were at least a league away in any direction.

He would often walk alone through his "lands"---although it made him uncomfortable to think of the house and the surrounding thicket as his, though he liked it there, because he didn't feel as if he earned any such entitlement. It was the same way he felt about the word "consort"; on the one hand, it was the sort of title that carried satisfying connotations of subversion; an ambiguity of character and motivation. But on the other hand it was the sort of qualifier which tends to be accompanied by nasty looks and suspicious murmurs, and Zelgadis was a man who loathed making a spectacle of himself. Heavy thoughts, indeed, to entertain as one wandered about in nature. But here, too, he'd collect things, picking up anything that caught his eye, sometime drawing or taking notes, until these things began to fill their own boxes and form stacks on shelves, next to boxes of stones from unknowable corners of the world.

. . .he watched birds and kept journals about them, sometimes making up stories about their lives. . . .

He hid the things he collected in every room of his house, although it had been a long time and he was beginning to forget why he hid them since he was the only person who saw these rooms. He always kept these rooms open and ready, even as his collections spilled out from their closets and shelves and into the living space. It wasn't a large house, not by aristocratic standards, but it had several rooms. He really only lived in one of them. He did not store any of his collections in this room, save for a small compartment of his writing desk. Here, almost ritualistically placed, he kept the things he had taken from Amelia.

They were small things---things she wouldn't miss, and if she did, he'd lie about them: a broken nib from her desk still stained with pitchy splatters of ink, a pearl earring she thought she had lost, an embroidered handkerchief, a brittle page that had come unbound from a volume of illustrated children's fairy tales, a sad, wilted camellia she had pinned to her collar for some court function years ago, a hairbrush, a white game piece from a Go board. . . .

For each of these, he left a reciprocal token of his in exchange: a button, a guitar pick, a drafting tool, a page of magic runes with his notes scribbled in the margins, a chipped teacup, a miniature watercolor portrait he'd once painted of her. . .

He didn't tell her about these things, either. But he was convinced that she kept them and recognized the grand gesture and profound meaning behind each of these objects.

He did not tell these things to Amelia, but he did tell them to another small object he had carried with him for some time. He never did return Amelia's cuff (and she never asked for it). If he thought about it, he would have realized that by not returning it he was hedging (he also would have asked himself why he wasn't talking to Amelia but to one of her personal effects instead). He never had to commit himself one way or the other, and didn't have to feel bad about it. In his mind this was the only way he could care for Amelia: free from having to explain it to himself or anyone else. During those rare instances when he was completely honest with himself, he would realize that he was not happy having both his freedom and his family as he had them now.

In the end it wasn't his feelings that made their relationship impossible, but the realities of Amelia's very public life and the hegemony involved with it (this began to make incredible sense to him when he first realized that he did, indeed, care for her; perhaps it was the reason why he cared for her---men were defined by their patterns: his seemed to be to want things he could not have, and reject the things that came too easy---but isn't that everyone?). And what did he really want? Well, it wasn't in any of his collections, but it was silently omnipresent and heavy, permeating every room of his; rooms he'd left ready for company that didn't know it was invited.

"You're so selfish," said a small voice in his head. It was a girl's voice. Emphatic and young, just the way he remembered it. Sometimes, to make himself feel better, he'd remember things. Things, like the small scar at the base of Amelia's throat she never bothered to heal properly. He used to catch her touching it unconsciously, even when she hid it behind coils of her dead mother's pearls. He didn't know what it meant or why she'd suddenly smile as her fingers hovered over it. He knew he'd been the one that gave her the scar. He would ponder this, and filing through a history of moments as he attempted to find meaning in the chain of random occurrences that made up his past, the events, whether big or small, grew more numerous and complicated the longer he tried to simplify and decode them, until they formed a beaded rope strung across the irrational expanse of infinity. It seemed, over the long years, he collected memories as well.

Those memories, even the good ones, were suspended in a place far away from him, or rather, he was suspended somewhere between a horizon of remembered things he could perceive, but not touch and the present, chained by an immense gravity of regrettable decisions and unnamable insecurities.

And it was regret that stole its voice and likeness from those memories---its form trespassing over the thick walls of solitude protecting his ego, and had become his only company for quite some time. A capricious mistress, regret; it often chose to appraise him from the highest possible vantage point. But then again, she'd been a girl of lofty ideals and always did prefer heights.

"That's not right. That would just make me an idea you thought up in place of the real me so you don't get hurt," it said. It was a very reasonable argument, one with which he had no desire to argue.

"I thought you had an agenda here. Look at all this clutter---what has it accomplished?" At least this way he could pretend he wasn't talking to himself.

"You had a good thing going for a while. You know that right?"

"Yes," he conceded, because it was and he did, "it was what it was."

"And this?"

"It is what it is," which, however lame it sounded, was also very true.

"There is something. . ." and he imagined this thing he'd conjured looked about the room while saying this, "there is something very sad about all of this. Something beautiful, too."

"I suppose you must be very disappointed in me."

"Yes, perhaps. But I knew from the beginning how foolish it would be to have expectations, so I stopped having any. You are who you are, after all."

"But you did have some."

"Which you also knew. From the beginning. Knowing everything you knew of yourself, and I, knowing everything I know of you, accepted those terms."

"Please don't be cross with me---"

"I thought I just explained---well, never mind all that. I don't have to be angry with you just because you want me to."

"I don't want you to be angry with me."

"Yes. You do---but that would be too easy."

"It wouldn't do to make anything easier for me, would it?"

"You're the one who left."

"You're the one who didn't stop me."

"Would it have made any difference if I did? You already know the answer---you should know better than anyone else. Simple and easy are two very different things."

There was a horrible sameness to this argument. It was the most awful kind of disagreement because neither side really disagreed, they just repeated what the other said using different combinations of words.

"It's hard, isn't it? It's hard not to be hurtful. Not to be hurt. It's hard to find happiness."

"Do you want me to be happy?"

"Yes. And I am not all together unhappy, if that is what you're asking. Is that so hard to believe?"

"It's unexpected."

"Is it really? I mean, don't you want to be? Happy?"

"Happiness is something you have to take with your own hands."

"And did you?"

He closed his eyes. "Sometimes," he thought.

"What are you thinking?"

"You already know what."

"But you're going to tell me anyway." He sighed.

"Raspberries," he began, the image already began to take form in the real as he spoke; the words became the colors and shapes they described instead of abstract emotional aggregates, the scene itself lending a sensory verisimilitude to the chain of other memories inexorably linked to it.

"Yesterday, I saw that the bramble overtaking the north wall is really raspberries. I guess they grow wild around here, even though I'd never noticed before. Maybe it's because I always cut them down before they came into season. They should be ripe, soon. Don't you remember? You always liked them. You used to put one on each fingertip before eating them."

"Yes, I remember. And you always complained about the mess I'd make. You can be very patronizing, you know."

"I suppose it can't be helped. I'm a serious man. I take everything seriously."

"Is that why you're talking to a figment of your imagination?"

"You're cruel."

"I am what you've made me," he could almost see it point an imaginary finger at him.

"There you go, feeling sorry for yourself again. Didn't you say you'd never give up your dreams?" He couldn't remember if he did or didn't. It was a long time ago.

"It isn't too late, you know. It isn't too late to change the way things are." Just as suddenly as it had become confrontational, the voice in his head softened its tone. It startled him for a moment, and then he laughed, because it was so typical and more than a little bit silly. But it could also very well be true.

"You always believed that, didn't you?"

"You see, I have to believe that---because if I didn't---no, I do. I believe. . ."

It must have been a draft, or some psychic trick played by an errant mote of light, or the dust, or maybe he was, as he feared, slipping into madness, but for the briefest moment, he thought he felt himself kissed on the forehead.

"I miss you," he murmured. But it was like confessing to the bottom of a very deep well, and he was answered only by the distorted echo of his own voice.

Next Chapter: A Supposedly Fun Thing She Will Never Do Again

------

Notes:

This was originally intended to be the fourth chapter, but its content was so immediately apparent when I began writing this part of the project that the vignette nearly wrote itself. And because it takes longer than I anticipate to post new chapters ( I can't seem to get my effing life together), I thought I'd drop some pages on you---you know, give you a little bit more and let it marinate for a while, at least until I get better at getting it together. I am so sorry, Zelgadis fans, that my writing is morbidly obsessed with his misery. But I find most of it self-imposed (what, you didn't think it would all end perfectly with those two, did you?). I've always thought that this somehow made his character more romantic and is largely what has gotten him such devoted fandom. Oh, how we love our tragic heroes.

The story about the princess and the shadow was only half cribbed from Choke, by Chuck P. (Fight Club).

What I've laid out in this and the previous chapter leads to something---and this something will have to wait till the entire story is nearly finished. Anyway, it makes sense, in a way, that I get this and the last chapter out of the way so that I can get this weird Zelgadis/Amelia fascination out of my head so I can devote my pages to more challenging subjects (writing about those two, it seems, has become too easy). Rejoice, Lina Fans! In a few chapters she'll play a more central role. Or that's the plan, anyhow. We'll see if it plays out.

I like how the title of chapter two can describe either Amelia or Zelina, but it's really a play on an Elvis Costello song title.

On a tangential academic note, I kind of like writing about Zel and his daughter because it present two opposing interpretations of Foucault's theory of the body as a site of power. The older Zelina gets, the more she'll take that philosophy literally. I really like all of the characters I've made up. They have such formed personalities and they are fun because I can play around with your expectations of who these characters are. Valgaav also counts, since he was re-born and is essentially a blank slate. I'm sorry there's not much in the way of physical descriptions. Perhaps in another set of notes, I will describe what they all look like.

Anyway, the next chapter is told entirely from Tatiana's perspective, but the events recounted take place over a shorter interval of time, and the action is recounted in a very peripheral way. I am no good at writing (or perhaps it is more correct to say that I am disinclined to write) straight-forward action narratives. This is sad, because after re-reading the last fic I wrote, which was sort-of a hot-mess-but-people-seem-to-like-it-and-I-sort-of-still-like-it-because-it-has-its-moments kind of thing (I'm sure you all know what this feels like), I wanted to write something more in line with the Slayers! universe---more of a funny-action-save-the-world kind of story at the same time it's only-a-fan-fic-which-means-I-really-just-want-to-write-about-two-characters-#$#$ing-each-other-for-mere-personal-gratification. Can one realistically do all of that? I love tangents, run-on sentences, and hyphenated-statements-as-single-concepts.

Oh, and it will be some time before I get around to posting anything more. See I just joined the Navy, because they wear cool hats and I need health insurance. But more is coming---I've planned the whole story out, and I think most of it is pretty cool---some parts I'm 90% certain are very cool and, uh, I feel quite urgently that they must be posted to be shared and receive angry fan-fiction reviews for having the audacity to exist. If that makes any sense. So until then, enjoy what is here, and write reviews and make suggestions, etc. Wish me luck!

Sincerely,

The Management