Here Be Dragons (35 page)

The link between the King and his realm in
Last Call
is understandable through his mythical identity with the Fisher King figure and, through this figure, with the gods of resurrection and vegetation.
³⁵
This identity is visible in many symbols found in the various rituals required to remain or become King. Weston observes how “the personality of the King, the nature of the disability under which he is suffering, and the reflex effect exercised upon his folk and his land, correspond […] to the intimate relation at one time held to exist between the ruler and his land.”
³⁶
This “reflex effect” may not be relevant to the Fisher King figure in the medieval romances,
³⁷
but it certainly describes the “curious relationship” (to recall Jones's expression) between King and realm in
Last Call
. The well-being of the ruler affects the well-being of the realm; his death, injury, or sterility affects the land adversely.

Pogue, another contender for the Las Vegas throne, focuses on the importance of perfection. His belief that “[t]he man who takes the throne can have no flaws” (199) echoes the old Celtic idea that “a blemished king [is] unsuitable to reign.”
³⁸
These flaws need not be of a physical nature (as in the case of Nuadu of the Silver Hand, who relinquished his king-ship temporarily after having lost his right arm in battle
³⁹
); kings who were “deficient in character or conduct” would also bring misfortune, and usurpers would bring famine and drought.
⁴⁰
These “reflex effects” parallel those in
Last Call
but, in his focus on perfection, Pogue errs on one count: the rightful ruler is
made
flawless by becoming king, as Crane eventually discovers (521–22). Powers's novel takes the “reflex effect” further: even the physical features of the King and Queen are imprinted on the landscape, allowing characters to gain insight into the mythical rulership by studying maps where seemingly random roads and terrain features sketch a portrait of the sovereign (see 357, but also 21).

In
Last Call
, the realm not only reflects the King; the King also reflects the realm, as illustrated by the complex of mythical symbols surrounding his stronghold. The Flamingo Hotel, built by Siegel in Las Vegas,
is the defensive focus of the King's realm, and the various myth fragments associated with it are part of the relation between ruler and realm. Its construction is guided by numerous symbols intended to exploit the powers of various myths. By strategically opening, closing, and reopening the Flamingo at Christmas, New Year's, and Easter, Siegel symbolically identifies the hotel with himself as “the modern avatar of Dionysus and Tammuz and Attis and Osiris and the Fisher King and every other god and king who died in the winter and was reborn in the spring” (22). At the base of the hotel, Siegel places an upside-down Tower card, a symbol of “foolishly prideful ambition” which “[r]eversed […] could permit a King to build an intimidating castle, and keep it” (22). Situated in the Nevada desert, the Flamingo also becomes a symbol of the Grail castle in the wasteland, linking the King's stronghold, and thus the King identified with it, to the sterility of the surroundings. This sterility, the non-healing wound of the maimed king, and the groin injury suggested by the Emperor card (5) all reflect back on Leon when he usurps the throne, eventually leading to the gunshot that emasculates him (9–12), and his sterility is then—again—reflected back on the realm.

With a sterile King on the throne, the realm remains a wasteland. Crane muses on how the land has changed during Leon's reign: “It was an Orange County with no orange trees anymore, a region conquered by developers, who had made it sterile even as they had made it fabulously valuable” (105). Fertility has given way to sterility, making the land dead but financially attractive. Death and wealth are linked through Pluto, a force closely associated with both Leon and Siegel (21). Las Vegas, too, is kept in dusty, dry sterility because of Leon. “Wild,” uncontrolled water is associated with the Goddess, a force Leon fears (which is why he has its avatar, Diana's mother, killed). The result is dried-out water tables under the city, a conflict over water rights, and the use of “tame water” from the artificial Lake Mead.

A sterile realm is against the nature of things, however. Leon's king-ship is not that of a fertility king. Even his henchman, Trumbill, cannot help thinking that in the past, “Fisher Kings would just
have
children, not kill their children's minds and steal their bodies—and […] such a King would reign over a fertile green land and not a sterile desert—and […] he would share his power with a Queen” (258–59). Trumbill's sentiments foreshadow the rule of Crane and Diana. As fertility King and Goddess Queen, they plan not only marriage but also children (the mythically important incest being neatly sidestepped by their status as
siblings in symbolical terms only—both are adopted). Restoration of both land and King commences, healing Crane's wounds (apart from the one in his side that symbolizes his kingship) as well as giving him a new eye. As the couple drives through the Mojave Desert, the land is no longer described through images of death and emptiness but in terms that indicate healing. The sterile wasteland is no longer dry and dead:

And the old truck sped on up the highway in the morning sun. And in the desert all around, the Joshua trees were heavy with cream-colored blossoms, and the glowing cholla branches shaded the flowering lupine and sundrops, and in the mountains the desert bighorn sheep leaped agilely down to the fresh streams to drink. (535)

With the new rulers, the desert has become a place of life, verdant and flourishing, recalling Trumbill's “fertile green land.” Instead of sterility, fertility; instead of arid wastes, fresh streams. The departure from the wasteland into life promised by this final paragraph also suggests a departure from mundanity into the domain of myth; Crane and Diana drive off into the sun
rise
, leaving their mundane lives behind and taking up their mantles as mythical rulers.

Crane's departure is, in fact, an inversion of King Arthur's departure for Avalon. As if in confirmation of his right to the throne, Crane manages to pull a knife from the cement under the Flamingo Hotel. His last action, after having defeated his father and before departing from Lake Mead, is to throw the knife into the lake where he sees it caught, Excalibur-like, by a hand (417–18, 534). Where Arthur defeats his son but is mortally wounded, Crane wins the throne from his father, his wounds healed. Significantly, he rids himself of the weapon of war before the start of his reign rather than making it his mark, entering a reign of peace, not war. His relationship to the realm promises to differ from Leon's, suggesting that the King figure need not be a Fisher King trapped in a wasteland, but could instead be a healer offering fertility and rebirth.

SHAPING THE REALM: PALIMPSESTS IN
TOURISTS
⁴¹

Lisa Goldstein's
Tourists
is set in the city of Amaz, which, Wolfe observes, “is vaguely reminiscent of Borges's Tlön, with its odd language, nameless streets, mysterious ruins, and ubiquitous decks of cards which serve as newspapers.”
⁴²
In this bizarre place, the American anthropologist Mitchell Parmenter, his wife, Claire, and his teenage daughters, Angie
and Casey, find themselves involved in a centuries-old feud between the supporters of two ancient kings. Rather than the interdependency displayed by king and land in the Fisher King legend, as shown clearly in Powers's
Last Call
, Goldstein's novel illustrates how topography can be used to express a conflict between two rulers and their supporters, and how the shape of the land can change in relation to which side is in control. The most prevalent and explicit symbol for the conflict in
Tourists
is the letters of one king written over those of his enemy. Two related concepts are embodied in this overwriting: the palimpsest and the Roman process called
damnatio memoriae
.

According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, a palimpsest is a “parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another” or, in extended use, “a thing likened to such a writing surface […]; a multilayered record.”
⁴³
All kinds of inscriptions, from Egyptian cartouches to engraved brass plates, may constitute palimpsests if they are in some way erased and reinscribed. Sometimes the palimpsest simply represents a case of economic expediency: expensive material (such as parchment or vellum) was washed clean and reused for a more relevant text. Accordingly, the topmost (thus most recent) inscription in a palimpsest is considered in some way more deserving of the writing surface. Ultimately, the reinscription is an expression of power—a case of the winner writing the history book. This expression of power becomes most obvious when the palimpsest is a result not of economic but of political expediency. The written traces of one's enemy are obliterated, whether that enemy is a previous pharaoh with the wrong ideas, the persona non grata of a totalitarian regime, or the holy text of another religion.
⁴⁴
Palimpsests have been used not only to purge someone from history but also to preserve the memory of the purge. Historian Charles W. Hedrick, Jr., argues that this was the purpose of the Roman repertoire of penalties known, in a modern coinage, as
damnatio memoriae
. “Despite pretensions to the contrary,” Hedrick explains, “Roman political attacks on memory were not intended to
destroy
recollection of an individual […] but created gestures that served to
dishonor
the record of the person and so, in an oblique way, to confirm memory.”
⁴⁵

The most conspicuous palimpsests in
Tourists
are writing on top of writing, expressing a power struggle in which the enemy is supplanted by being overwritten. As with the
damnatio memoriae
, traces of the previous script are left to ensure that the memory of the deposition remains.
Each member of the Parmenter family notices the ubiquitous graffiti that expresses the feud between supporters of the Jewel King and his predecessor, Sozran, although they do not grasp its relevance at first—and Claire, blinkered by alcoholism and culture shock, fails to grasp its palimpsestic nature (15, 42, 49, 78, respectively). The phrase
The King lives
is written twice: first, in the jagged letters of Sozran; then, almost covering them, in the rounded letters of the Jewel King (203). In fact, the graffiti is only a recent expression of a
damnatio memoriae
that goes back twelve centuries to the Jewel King's ascension to the throne. When Mitchell and his Amaz colleague Jara stumble over the Jewel King's old palace in their search for the King's sword, Mitchell finds the remnants of a mosaic along the base of a wall, a mosaic that palimpsestically affirms the Jewel King's superiority over Sozran. The tiles form writing in jagged letters, but “[f]arther on along the wall the letters looked as though they had been pried up, and another mosaic, of newer, more rounded letters, had been put in their place” (89). The Sozranis have employed the same tactic in the mosaic that covers a floor in their house, except that here the jagged writing covers the round one. More observant than her father, Casey makes the connection to the graffiti she has seen, reflecting that it was almost as if “whoever had done the second mosaic had wanted people to know they had desecrated the original” (168).

The
damnatio memoriae
palimpsests are only the most obvious aspects of the feud between the two ancient kings' supporters, however, and once their meaning is made clear to Casey, she realizes that the puzzling Amaz proverb “Jagged and curved things can never marry” (77) is a summary description of how the conflict has affected the city's society as well as its topography:

The store ahead of her had sharp gables over the windows and a door shaped like a triangle. The store next to that one was rounder, a scallop design on the roof, circular windows and a large arch over the front door. Did the feud extend even to their architecture? […] In twelve hundred years the entire city could have been made over into angles and curves. You'd want to know whom you were dealing with when you went into a store, whether the proprietor was a follower of Sozran or of the Jewel King. (175)

Angles and curves are found everywhere, in cars, driveways, even the shape of the streets. Casey realizes that depending on allegiance, a person would move through the city along curved or jagged streets. Even the
map appears vaguely palimpsestic, the very layout of the streets forming a palimpsest with one set of streets superimposed on another.

The influence of the feud on the physical environment of Amaz not only results in bus routes that “snake through every part of the city” (130) and streets that “[loop] like string back and forth and finally [seem] to turn in on [themselves]” (132); the feud also shifts the shape and location of the streets. That the streets move about is suggested already in the directions to the university that Mitchell is given by his Amaz colleague. Although brought up repeatedly, the notion is generally rejected by the rational protagonists. Mitchell and Jara are forced to accept the moving streets for a fact only when they follow a route that spells out the word
sword
on the map. As they have written the word with the Jewel King's rounded script on jagged streets declaring for Sozran, they witness how the city changes shape before their eyes as they walk: “[Mitchell] thought he saw houses jumbled together in front of them, a chimney here, a front door there, a car sticking out of a second-story window. And as they passed the houses re-formed themselves, moved over politely to create new streets” (205).

In this palimpsestic city, moving through the streets is a form of writing. A taxi ride has the car “writing [its] own calligraphy on the streets of the city” (44). Mitchell sees how the streets on the map write
sword
with the jagged letters of Sozran, and Jara changes the word into the Jewel King's script (202–3). The new writing is an expression of power that changes the streets' allegiance, reforges their shape. Writing is necessary to navigate the streets of Amaz. The city's streets are (for the most part) nameless, and there are almost no addresses (14, 21). Mitchell has to rely on written directions to find his way to the university, as well as back home after an excursion through unknown parts of the city. To send a letter, “he'd had to write a whole series of complex instructions on the front of the envelope, instructions that seemed to be directions from the post office to the house” (21). A street map is itself likened to the written manuscript that Mitchell and Jara use as they try to find their way to the Jewel King's legendary sword. The city is truly topo
graphy
—a written place constantly expressed in terms of writing.