Pride of the Library

a bonus post on Wayward Wednesday

Last night I finished a 5-session workshop with Wayward, a local art collective here in the Triad with (like the Cheshire Cat in the story below) anarchist leanings. Their “No Ma$sters Self-Publishing” series showed me a great deal of technical stuff about how to get work out into the world, but also emphasized the path of creative joy, following the Muses without tripping over perfection and other psychospiritual obstacles. That’s something I’d already been working on by posting my own less-than-perfect cartoons here.

In honor of them and the little community that formed around them over the 10 weeks of the workshop (1 session every other Tuesday), I’m reposting this short story, which

Winston Malone

was kind enough to publish last August at Storyletter XPress. After 6 months, the rights have now reverted to me, and in the spirit of the workshop, I want to make it freely available.

So without further a-do . . .

Pride of the Library

Patience, south of the main steps. New York Public Library.

Patience yawned, stretching his mouth wide enough to fit one of the nearby sidewalk cafe tables into it. He turned his massive maned head to the left, where his brother was already up, stretching backwards into what the yoga teachers in Central Park called a dog pose.

“This is the night; I can feel it,” said Patience, his marble eyes glowing cat green. “The moon is new, which will give us the advantage. Tonight, we kill the Bull.”

“So you’ve said before,” growled Fortitude, sounding like one of Scorcese’s old-time mobsters. He still identified with the old mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, who had given them their more lasting names during the Great Depression. Before that he had spoken with a more Southern accent, as a nod to their quarrying place in Tennessee. Fortitude could be a bit sentimental. “It’s been fourteen years since the mortgage bubble popped and we brought down the Bear. It didn’t matter. The jackals at Lehman Brothers carved up the carcass, and business continued as usual.”

“Not entirely,” said Patience. “You’ve seen the same journals I have. Orthodox economics has a lot more heretics nipping at its heels these days.  Look at the recent Nobels: Kahneman & Tversky, Elinor Ostrom --”

“Mixed metaphor,” said Fortitude. “And stockbrokers don’t read academic journals. The Dow Jones hit a new record high today, for no reason at all.” He was down off his pedestal and on the move.

“The paradigm is shifting,” called Patience, trailing after his brother.

“Whatever.”

They did a quick clockwise circuit of Bryant Park, paying their respects to the statues of Gertrude Stein and Goethe and Benito Juarez, sniffing around them to make sure nothing was amiss, as good neighbors do, and then set off down 5th Avenue, their marble paws ticking on the pavement, their shoulders rolling in that dangerous large-cat way.

The two stone lions spent many a night roaming the city aimlessly, together or alone, partaking of its sights and sounds and smells, or picking fights with the numerous and colorful statues in Chinatown – lions and dragons, mostly. At twelve feet long, and weighing probably eight tons apiece, they had little to fear from anything in this urban jungle. Only the Bull, pumped up on consumer confidence and bailout money, could dominate them.

On this night they took a direct line, cutting across Washington Square Park and heading down Thompson Street, past Zuccotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street encampment had been.

“Hunting, are we?” said a voice out of nowhere, in its typically condescending tone.

“Go back to your toadstool, you quantum-entangled bag o’—“ started Fortitude.

“Lady Astor!” gasped the voice, sounding feminine and scandalized, before settling into its more normal imitation of Roddy McDowall. “Is that any way to address a fellow feline? Especially one who has access to all of time and space?”

“Show yourself,” sighed Patience, rolling his marble eyes.

“As my Lord Lenox commands,” grinned the Cheshire Cat, fading into existence draped over a parked BMW. It always used their former names, chosen to flatter the rich founders of the Library, just to annoy them. The bothers assumed it was jealous of the way the city had adopted them as symbols of civic pride. Nobody put a Yankees cap on the Cheshire Cat, up in Central Park. Or a top hat when it turned a hundred, like they had for the lions.

“Whaddaya want, dementoid?” asked Fortitude. “A cure for toxoplasmosis?”

“Why to help you, of course,” said the Cat, widening its fuschia eyes in a faux-show of earnestness. “I’ve always had anarchist leanings.” As it said this, it stood out from the corner of the car’s roof at a forty-five degree angle, and stayed there, stretching its front paws out and twiddling its clawed toes.

“Fine,” said Patience. “Where’s the Bull, right now? Grazing the Bowling Green, as usual?”

“Shitting on widows and orphans?” added Fortitude.

“I’m not entirely sure the god of finance was sculpted with an anal opening. Artistic oversights and gross domestic products aside, I believe our bronze bovine is currently sharpening His exalted horns on a tree in the Battery’s urban farm, some few hundred yards south-southwest of our current position. Do you require GPS coordinates?”

“Fade off,” said Fortitude, and surprisingly the Cat did, though that was no guarantee it wasn’t still around somewhere, watching and grinning to itself.

---

They found the Bull raiding the organic garden at the Battery farm, pawing the ground and hurling dust up over his back, as though any insect on Earth had a chance of biting through his gleaming metal hide. Beets and radishes lay scattered about his massive hooves, which had only one toe, rather than two like a real bull. Those were just as dangerous as the upswept horns. The lions separated to stalk from different directions and maximize their chances of catching the great beast by surprise.

Charging Bull, Arturo Di Modica. Public Domain.

In his normal crouching posture during the day, the Bull stood over eleven feet tall at the shoulder, and he was sixteen feet long. Now, at night, he seemed even larger. As Patience crept closer, however, the lion could smell that something was deeply wrong inside the Bull. Speculative bubbles were growing in his gut like tumors: in gold, crypto-currencies, even farmland. Perfectly legal, but dangerous nonetheless.

Then there were the drugs and the guns and the slaves and the stolen credit card numbers, circulating through the Bull’s system and poisoning his heart — if he had a heart. Dropped on the street as a message of hope and perseverance thirty-some years ago by a Sicilian guerilla artist after the Black Monday stock market crash in ‘87, the Bull had grown fat and strong on globalization, just as the parallel growth of the Internet had empowered the Library.

“Why not wait?” whispered the Cheshire Cat’s disembodied voice into Patience’s left ear. Its eyes and wide smile faded into partial existence on the right, in a version of the old playground prank. “Positive feedback loops are inherently unstable. The more unequal the capitalists become, the more the pressure builds. Give it time, and the whole system will eventually come apart.” Its face exploded silently, the teeth spiraling off in thirty different directions while the eyes rolled around to interpose themselves between Patience and the Bull. “Think of it! Revolution on a worldwide scale!”  The eyes glowed blood red.

Patience snapped at the eyes, but his mouth closed on nothing, as it always did. The distraction was infuriating, as the Cheshire Cat had probably intended. It put on this mad act, but its words, and its timing, always seemed simultaneously calculated.

At that moment, Fortitude burst out of a compost pile he must have burrowed into from the other side and clamped his teeth onto the Bull’s metal snout. Bronze and marble are of roughly equal hardness, so the lion’s claws were of little use; they raked over the Bull’s eyes without damaging them. Instead Fortitude placed his paws wide on the Bull’s horns for leverage and tried to twist his head and throw him to the ground.

This would have been the perfect moment for Patience to hit the Bull from the side and bear the bronze monster over, if he hadn’t been distracted by the Cheshire Cat’s murderous antics. As it was, the Bull spun his back end around to keep stable and pushed forward, trying to flip Fortitude onto his back and drive those pointed horns through the lion into the earth. Or shatter his chest with those pile-driver hooves.

Patience charged in a semicircle, rounding on the Bull to build up speed and leaping onto his shoulder. A real bull would have had vertebrae in his neck, and spaces between them, weak spots where a lion’s long fangs could reach the spinal cord. This Bull was made of bronze, cast in a mold, and Patience’s fangs just dented the surface without penetrating. But when he struck the Bull’s side, it rang like a gong. The Bull was hollow. Whether this was a quirk of construction or an effect of the economy’s corruption didn’t matter. Patience had a plan. “Crush it!” he called to his brother.

The Bull had other ideas. He flung Fortitude off his head, a good ten yards, smashing the lion into the SeaGlass Carousel. Iridescent fish shattered into shards that still rolled their lidless eyes and gaped their toothless mouths. Covered in colorful fiberglass, Fortitude shook himself and roared in frustration. The sound shook loose more pieces that fell from the windows.

The Bull ran up towards Battery Park, perhaps looking for more open space. It clattered into the Naval veterans’ memorial, where its guardian, a black granite eagle, screeched, “Have some respect!” in a feminine Irish brogue. The Bull bellowed and charged the eagle’s pedestal, knocking it over and breaking off one of his horns in the process. The eagle’s stubby wings didn’t allow her to fly, but she expertly flap-hopped into the air and dodged the attack before coming down on the pebbly concrete court. She saw the lions dodging behind the first of the eight gray granite slabs that stood like giant dominoes in two rows on either side of the memorial.

ERECTED BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA / IN PROUD AND GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE / OF HER SONS / WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN HER SERVICE/ AND WHO SLEEP IN THE AMERICAN COASTAL WATER / OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN / INTO THY HANDS, OH LORD. Link.

Screaming obscenities that would have made a destroyer’s gunner blush, the veterans’ eagle flung herself at the Bull’s dented head. Her ebon stone talons were much harder than bronze, and they scored the Bull’s face deeply before the bird leaped away again, calling, “Come get me, ya yella bastard!”

The end happened very quickly. The Bull came at the eagle, blinded by a green fluid leaking from its cuts, and the two lions leaped in unison towards the top of the granite slab, tipping it over and riding it down. It burst the Bull like a pinata, throwing money into the air, where it spiraled down like a ticker-tape parade. The lions watched the fluttering bills with interest for a moment, wondering how long it would take the City’s scavenging gargoyles to show up, and then turned to the eagle.

“Sorry about the mess,” they said in unison.

“Sailors make sacrifices.” said the eagle. “It’s right there on m’plinth. He’s not gonna stay dead permanently, is he?”

“Nah,” said Fortitude. “Bulls have been linked to fertility all the way back to Babylon at least. Agriculture, invention, all that jazz. The concepts are inextricably linked. That’s why Thomas Nast’s cartoons resonated so much. That’s why all those people took selfies with Di Modica’s statue, there.” He nodded towards the spreading threads of green ichor trickling out from under the granite slab. “Polishing his balls, or painting them blue.” The lion pulled his lips back from his fangs in disgust. “Humans are animals.”

“But,” said Patience, grimacing briefly himself, “if we play it right, and reach him early, while the memes are still crystallizing, his next incarnation will have a much broader view. Policies will include data beyond simple prices. The economy will be a subset of ecology, with none of that nonsense about externalities.”

“Total bullshit,” quipped Fortitude. “Adam Smith would have been majorly pissed that his Theory of Moral Sentiments was so completely ignored.”

“I don’t know about none o’ that,” said the eagle, squinting a bit, and then pointing out towards Liberty Island with her beak. “But the Lady over there seems to approve, and that’s good enough for me.” She was right. The Statue was clashing her torch and book together, and stamping her sandaled feet. The sound rang out for miles, echoing around the harbor, off the skyscrapers, and into the noosphere.

All across the city that night, New Yorkers dreamed of copper bells. Some, the readers, heard lions roaring in triumph.

The next morning, the Dow opened a fraction lower, and for once nobody cared.

PS. What did you all think of the links embedded in the story? Were they an enhancement? A distraction?

I’ve felt for a long time that online fiction has in general been much too conservative with design. Interactive Fiction is another level, and Alternate Reality Games another still, and I’m not talking about going there so much as recognizing that stories exist in a larger context. Why is there no Genius for fiction?

Anyway, as always (and especially for indulging my experimental instincts),

Thanks for reading!