THE PRINCE

By Cameron Darc

In a moment of anxiety, in the middle of the night or the early morning, I don’t like the way my spine curves forward and my nose hangs, dripping off my face. I fantasize about jumping off the balcony. The balcony belongs to a young prince’s grandmother’s apartment. He’s not a prince, only treated like one. He wears the kind of slip-on loafers and tight pastel salmon pants that only princes can wear without inciting violence—because they reside in circles where everyone dresses this way. I saw on the prince’s cell phone the picture of his fresh-faced fiancé in his arms. She must be on vacation with her family in Rome or Nice or Monaco. You have bad posture, he didn’t say. Instead, he mimicked the way I stood, like an old woman leaning on a cane.

I have come here together with the prince and two others from a nightclub under a bridge that I don’t remember leaving or entering. I’m standing, drinking a glass of Côtes du Rhone, trying to light a cigarette, and watching the scene illuminated inside.

In the old apartment the furniture is Louis XVI chenille chairs with Fleur de Lis brocade and gold-painted wood. There is a gargantuan Swedish blonde and a tall, bearded gargoyle with black-framed glasses who snorts lines from a rolled bill, hunched over the table. The Swede is dancing. Her breasts bounce. The bearded man stands. He parts the blonde’s straight hair to unzip her bodysuit from the back. She turns around and looks out the French doors, but doesn’t see me, since I’ve shut them. She stands still for an instant and then her nipples trace circles in the air because she starts dancing hard and shouting in a language none of us understand. Maybe she is a model because she is so tall and unreal. The man starts to dance in a robotic, angular fashion, like a Mondrian painting, his glasses fill the room with straight black lines.

I have to go to the bathroom. In order to do so, I must reenter the internal space for a moment. When I push the doors open, the heat hits my face, which had been freezing, and the prince stands to embrace me. I push him down on the couch. He buckles backward like a person made of straw. His head hits the table instead of the couch, but the table doesn’t shatter, because his head hits a bronze artichoke-like protrusion.

My stomach roils. I keep walking down the endless carpeted corridor until I reach a bronze handle and swing it open.

I clench my thighs, hover over the toilet, gripping the porcelain lip of sink. A pure liquid avalanche pours out of me like I have eaten bad pork. But it must be the club coke mixed with speed or laxative or some other white poison by teenage boys who linger in empty lots or beside urinal stalls. The ancient plumbing struggles and I flush again. Again. Then I run the water in the sink very hot and rub my hands with a lavender bar of soap. I wipe under my eyes with toilet paper to remove the tears of mascara. I use the old toothbrush to scrape my tongue.

When I return, the prince looks at me like he does not remember that I’ve hurt him. He opens his arms to swallow me. He is too inebriated to feel pain now, but a goose egg swells from his temple. The only time I’ve ever had a black eye was an accident. I never saw the baseball coming. I’m sure he’s never had one.

—I understand why there was a revolution, I tell him.

He pours me another glass from a 1987 bottle worth a small fortune. The strangers from the club smash their cigarettes into the carpet. The gargoyle ignores both of us, on a death mission. He will seduce the bouncing giant at all costs, even if it happens on the floor, in front of us. The prince is lucky he hasn’t invited worse inside his castle.

When I look down from the balcony and imagine jumping it’s the same as when I walk along a cliff or the train quay. The temptation to veer into death is what makes me afraid. The voice that says jump. Not a voice but a pull. Undeniable, like instinct, like God, like my own body not asking but demanding an end. A final point to this meandering collision. Whatever roles I’ve stepped into coagulating at the bottom of the bowl, cold cereal in milk. Fantasy, what else to call the movie I see now, my spine cracking the pavement ….

Were those my thoughts or did they belong to the devil whose face lived on the back of my tongue, a little green head in the remote recesses of my mind where it hid until I was left vulnerable, unguarded in half-sleep? The demon hand, as large as the night, as large as the room, tapping my forehead with one finger, made of ash or soot but also matter, heavier matter than the real world, more real than the ‘real’ world could ever be, who taps me awake on a sofa, sending a shock into my blood. This touch feels real. The rest feels fake. How to explain a dream more real than being awake?

Physical symptoms of possession:

Hair falling out, hair becoming unmanageable, the rope around my neck that chokes me and makes me unable to swallow anything but alcohol and soft, raw hamburger, white spotted tongue, painful swelling in the throat glands, bloated belly, palms that never stop sweating, prolonged mental absences, coming to someplace I don’t remember….

When did the demon enter my body? Did the demon come from Maman? Or was he attached to me before I entered Maman? Was he there to protect me or kill me? Did he come off the back of that man who attacked me, was it his demon?

❖

The Swede and the gargoyle are chasing each other now, knocking objects from their places, preparing their nest. Soon they will be writhing on the floor, laying dragon eggs beneath them. The prince drifts, despondent on the sofa, denied a copulation partner. I turn away from the scene to watch the empty street shiver in the cold. So many people will walk on this street in the morning. There is no reason to look at diabolic picture windows with so many souls about to fill the streets.

Are demons a contagion? Do you catch them when you dissociate? Like each time your soul leaves your body does it leave a hole in your aura, and does your aura grow evermore porous each time you leave, and does this make you susceptible to possession? Was he here to warn me or was he the danger?

In the early hours I will step over the sleeping bodies draped over Louis XVI chairs and tasseled carpets. The prince and the gargoyle and his concubine honking out snores and desperate coughs, wet cigars half burnt in porcelain dishes, the bottles of wine half empty. I will take a swig from a bottle of deep brown liquor to loosen the rope around my throat, which has become tighter this morning—so tight it’s difficult to swallow. I will take another swig and the demon’s grip will loosen, enough for me to continue the task ahead of me: to get home and sleep for a few hours. Without sleep the demon becomes ungovernable and my own mind untrustworthy. I will throw my glass off the balcony and watch it shatter in the street. I will feel my way out the front door and down the narrow stairs and unlock the heavy double doors into the courtyard, where the concierge wearing a flowered apron and a white mustache sweeps stray leaves into a corner. I will tell her “Bonjour” and she will not hear me because she’s hard of hearing or perhaps she will only pretend not to hear me because I am wearing high heels and a minidress and silver mittens and a small black cape and my hair is long and tangled. Or perhaps she ignores me because I smell like Maman, like the kind of sweat that fear is made of.

Cameron Darc is a French to English translator and writer. Her fiction has been published by Fence, Post Road Magazine, Hobart, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. Read more @ camerondarc.com