The Next-to-the-Last Emperor

China. The Emperor lays dying in his palace. He is the last of his line. The Fwang Dynasty dies with him tonight. It is on the Royal Schedule, right under "Bingo Nite."

The Emperor is hungry. A counselor offers to bring him food. The massive Emperor waves him off, saying that the food of his country is good food, but it always leaves him hungry two hours later.

The counselor says that it has always been that way. Generation to generation the recipes have passed, without fail or error.

The Emperor weeps. He feels himself a failure. He failed at building the Great Ceiling of China. He failed at teaching cats and dogs to bow to their masters. And he failed in his revolution to make Chinese cooking both delicious and filling at the same time.

And here begins the dialogue, because I'm sick of speaking for these idiots. I'll be in the kitchen if you need me.

---

"I am a failure," wept the Emperor. "I have failed at everything."

The counselor patted his Emperor on the shoulder. "Fear not, Emperor. Your name shall be remembered for great things. Do you not remember your grand legal reforms? No longer is it possible for a man to throw fish to another man without warning him first."

"With a sonnet," said The Emperor. "An original sonnet, if possible, that does not demean the fish."

"Yes," said the counselor. "You have outlawed the leaping of great distances by Royal Postal Workers for gambling purposes."

"I still remember the demonstrations," said The Emperor. "I see you still have that stamp-scar on your elbow from when you sacrificed your life for mine."

The counselor shrugged. "And banning the use of yogi to avoid meeting one's in-laws has brought a new appreciation to the value of family. Punishable by death."

"Of the in-laws," said The Emperor, chewing his lip. He put his dentures back in his mouth, and he found them much easier to manipulate. "I distinctly said 'Of the in-laws' that morning. Blood ran in the streets that week. Uphill."

"You shall be remembered."

"Oh," said the Emperor. "That's nice. Bring me a burger, then."

"Your health!" hisses the counselor.

"You're right," says the Emperor. "Bring me a hot-fudge sundae. And some cheesecake. I might as well die with food on my face."

Just like his father, thought the counselor.

---

Night time. The Emperor barely clings to life, using Stick-um on his hands and forearms to help in the clinging. He requires assistance in breathing. He also requires a bath, but no doctor is bold enough to suggest it to him and no man is strong enough to move the massive, dying Emperor nearer to the firehose.

The counselor bites his nails. When he has exhausted his own nails, he calls for his assistants and he bites their nails.

The counselor does not want The Emperor to die. More specifically, he does not want to die himself. He is obligated to be buried with The Emperor in his Eternal Underground Palace in the Valley of the Ancestors. He didn't notice the fine print in his labor contract way back when he signed it. Fat lot of good his lawyer did for him, he figures. Death or no death, the counselor wants to be buried with his own family in Brooklyn.

When asked how he wanted to be buried with his master, the counselor suggested "Alive, with a shovel." The Burial Committee shook their heads and went back to playing backgammon. The counselor shuddered and winced. Buffoons! Criminals! They're only robbing themselves when they insist that the gold and silver of their daily wage be covered with only pure maple syrup.

He has asked for The Emperor to release his obligation to die alongside his master, but The Emperor has refused him completely unlike like many a meal he hasn't refused, and with the same gusto, too. He tried planning a vacation in the Outer Provinces, but The Emperor merely smiled and told him to wait for the off season. The counselor even tried turning in his resignation. But for each of the four times he had tried in the past week, each of them was refused with a form letter.

The counselor is confused. Form letter? Where did the form letter come from? It is signed with The Emperor's Seal, but personnel decisions were traditionally left to the counselor. He thought he had found his loophole to freedom, but this form letter came back to dash his hopes. To die young! A tragedy! Perhaps this form letter was a prank by one of his associates. He reminded himself not to fire any more associates for tomfoolery - they were succeeding in arousing his anger and escaping where he himself couldn't, which served only to fan the fires of his anger even higher. Well, if he was going to swing, the counselor wasn't about to swing alone.

---

The Emperor calls for his counselor. The Burial Committee attendant is confused, having only recently learned the Official Palace Hand Signals and passing the test only with the help of a contortionist tutor.

The attendant brings a potted plant. The Emperor slaps him with it. The attendant acknowledges the "Slap With a Plant" signal with a wink, and removes his shoes while crying about his missing sister. The Emperor shakes his head and moans.

This time the attendant gets the signal correct. "Shake Head And Moan" is usually interpreted as a Declaration of War against Poland, but this is a Thursday. He remembered the admonishment of his tutor: "Don't learn any instrument that you cannot carry comfortably in a parade."

The attendant blushes with pride. He rolls the Royal Piano out from a niche. The Emperor shouts out his request, blue in the face. "Guards, Kill This Man" rolls from his fingertips better than he has ever played it before. His tutor would be proud of him if he were here today. But alas, it is not to be. The attendant wipes a tear from his eye during the first chorus.

Not every man can tie himself into a knot and volunteer into the Chinese Navy as an anchor. He remembered the tutor snacking on rocks between lessons, desperately reducing his buoyancy before his final days of The Battle of Monkey's Stomach. The Emperor himself pinned three medals on his corpse before collapsing from the heat.

The attendant remembered crying on that occasion, too. And other occasions. Constantly, to the point of pain and blindness. Perhaps I should see an ophthalmologist, he thinks.

To his general amazement, The Emperor sings along. With unbridled enthusiasm, never seen before on any Imperial occasion. And for a dying man, such timbre! The attendant says "Thank you" as the guards storm into the room.

Why aren't they signing along? thinks the attendant. Oh, wait.

Shit.

---

They have found him!

The ministers nod to themselves. They compare him to a picture. They nod again, and one of the ministers complains of neck pain.

They have found the missing heir!

They have traveled long and hard to this place, only stopping to ask directions. The augurs and sages had foretold of their difficult journey with riddle and rhyme, but the ministers had held out for a map.

"The path you must take is fraught with mystery and danger," had said a sage, casting chicken bones before putting them in the soup.

"Right, right," responded a minister, "Is that Highway 50 or the Great Wall Parkway?" They bickered over verses and directions, and eventually the sages gave up and handed them an address.

"Just try to make the journey interesting, okay?" said the sages. "We've got a reputation to keep."

So the ministers wandered for a few hours in the red-light district before hailing a cab heading straight to the address. To make the journey interesting, they paid tolls in Canadian currency.

"But we're in Canada," said a minister to the cab driver. "What's so interesting about using Canadian currency here?"

As the cab pulled up to the curb, they immediately felt a wave of strange energy surrounding them. They followed it into the house, where they were accosted by a rather short farming couple preparing breakfast. The woman was waving a stoppered jar at her husband, who was defending himself with a large wedge of cheese.

"How many times have I told you, 'au gratin' does not mean 'laced with poison!'" shouted the man at his wife. He looked at the ministers. "You're probably here for the heir." The ministers nodded. "He's in the bathroom."

The ministers kicked open the bathroom door to discover a beautiful six-year-old boy sitting on a dirty toilet. "The heir!" they shout. They quickly wrap him with burlap and drag him to a rickshaw double-parked in the alley. "To the palace!" one of them shouts, and the others raise their beer mugs.

---

The counselor is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. What if they discover that he has been skimming funds from the Treasury? He thought that he had sold the wooden skim he had used to a fisherman, but his memory could be tricking him. He had grown tired of tricking it back, and wandered off through his secret panel in the racquetball court to the storerooms.

The accounts were in shambles. The expenditures were outstripped by the revenues. Even the Royal Warehouses were filled with junk, worthless and difficult to pawn off as Christmas gifts to relatives. The counselor walked from storeroom to storeroom. This one contained the remains of animals that had only their heads stuffed and mounted. That one contained couches comfortable enough to sit on, but too uncomfortable to sleep on. And that one, with the locks on the door, was filled from floor to ceiling with parts from roller coasters dismantled in the early days of the Fwang Dynasty, removed to make room for the fields in which schoolchildren could practice their waddling.

"But after every storm," his father said to him as a boy, "there is a rainbow. See?" He pointed to the sky above, and sure enough, there was a rainbow there, spanning the heavens above their devastated farm.

"It's missing the blue and yellow stripes," the counselor-as-boy said.

"Go to your room," said his father, "And don't come out until you're Counselor to the Emperor of China."

The counselor crawled into a corner among the aluminum pipes and wooden struts and lit up another joint.

---

They scrub his skin with sponges and rough brushes until it is sparkling white. They cover scratches with paint, for there is not time for last-minute ministrations and repairs. They quickly dress him in silken garments, and move him to a platform borne by six half-naked blindfolded strongmen.

One of the strongmen breaks out into a sweat. He crosses his legs and moans. One of the ministers notices his discomfort, and the strongman whispers in his ear.

The minister is cross. "We're in a hurry," says the Head Minister to the strongman. "Should be ten, fifteen minutes at tops. Besides, they've got scented soap in the bathrooms there."

"I knew we should have brought a spare," said another minister.

They head for the palace, and pray that the White Smoke of Being Too Late doesn't come from the Imperial Chimney before they arrive with The Heir. One of the ministers shrieks with horror, but the Head Minister reassures him that it is only the Treasury burning to the ground.

The strongmen pick up the pace.

---

The ministers gather around The Emperor. They motion for the strongmen to lower the platform in front of him and to turn their backs. The strongmen turn around aimlessly, and they lift their blindfolds just long enough to get it right.

The ministers then turn their backs on The Emperor and his Heir. The counselor covers his face with one hand while lifting the cover with another.

"You're all fired," says the frowning Emperor, and he breathes his last. Two attendants check his pulse and stuff a giant fish-stick in his mouth. To complete the ceremony, they close the Emperor's eyes and staple them shut.

There is great commotion amongst the servants. The counselor jumps with unbridled joy "I'm going to live!" he shouts. He kisses the rapidly cooling corpse of his Emperor and runs out the door, whooping and laughing.

The other servants gather around their new Emperor, awaiting his orders. The first is traditionally "Get this damned cover off of me!" but there is no sound from under the cover. Some of the servants tremble. Some chatter their teeth. Others, who still have fingernails left to bite, bite their fingernails.

One of their number grows impatient. "Aw, the hell with it." He removes the cover, and the crowd of servants gasp with a single, common breath.

The American Standard Dynasty has begun. The strongman on the corner of the platform, who has been holding it since lunch time, screams, "I can't hold it any longer!" and becomes the first man to urinate on a Chinese Emperor in two thousand years without asking for permission first.

---

The celebrations last for weeks, and somewhere in Canada the real boy-Emperor of China watches his father shout curse after curse as he tightens the pipes on a newly-installed toilet.

Author's notes... stroke that ego!

Material stolen from all four corners of the globe. The "Alive with a shovel" was inspired by that Simpsons episode where Burns wants to bury Smithers in his tomb.

To die with food on your face was a common response to die with your boots on in my family. Heaven will be catered has been the last words of many a Simon and Kushner.

Clinging to life with Stickum... removed a bit about rubbing baloons on him to help with static-clinging to life.

To get fired so you can be freed from obligations... Robocop, directive 4.

Au gratin does not mean laced with poison... okay, so I had a bad night in the kitchen in college and wiped out half of the hallway. they shouldn't have begged for food, anyway!

To the palace & raising beer mugs... one of the best lines of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is where the mice say "to business" and ford & zaphod mistake it for a toast.

Do not learn any instrument you cannot carry comfortably in a parade... the unspoken motto of the Rice MOB. Still, somebody always managed to play electric guitar or bass.

There's a reference to Big Trouble in Little China there... see if you can find it.

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Next up to bat should be Pulp Free Fiction... something that never made sense and hopefully never will. I consider it a classic example of an entrance essay for applying to mental institutions.

[tipu]

Well your Holeyness... if Terry Pratchett should ever require an assistant one of these days...

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