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"You are not real," Rudolf said to the empty room. When there was no answer, he felt encouraged. "See? You can't talk. Not if I don't imagine you talk. You're not real."
He had asked the queen mother about imaginary friends that were real.
"They're not, Rudolf," she said. "That's why they're called imaginary friends. It says something about you, that you can't tell the difference. Eight years old and not a single friend. I worry about him, Ester, I tell you. The boy's not right. How we're ever going to get him ready to assume the throne I . . ."
Baroness Leichtenstein nodded sympathetically, and slipped Rudolf a candy under her sleeve. That was her way of telling him when she didn't agree with what the Empress was saying.
But the queen mother was right about this. Real people could not be imaginary friends: it was one or the other. And as he had reflected, he remembered that his friend had no face. His friend had no body, no feeling, no weight; his voice carried words but Rudolf could not remember tone or how it sounded. His friend was invisible, intangible, and silent. He was imaginary.
Rudolf felt freed by the knowledge. Free and unlimited, he felt he was living in a world more solid, more free of fog and mists and whispering voices, more capable of being shaped by his choices. He felt simultaneously that he was untethered, that this world had the ethereal solidity of a ball floating in space, never falling back down.
*
Rudolf was thirteen and he wondered why he still felt relieved when his arm started to gush.
In a moment he would have to staunch it, or it might scar too noticeably.
In a moment, he would.
In his mind it almost gurgled, a fountainhead. He knew he shouldn't do it so regularly, that it was problematic, symptomatic of something wrong, but at these moments that thought was pushed back. Whatever was wrong with him here, it was secondary, it was nothing compared to what was wrong with him in the first place, the part that made this necessary. If a lesser wrong fixes a greater, isn't it just a side effect?
He wasn't being watched as much anymore, now that he was old enough. It was just as well; he didn't think he could last as long in between anymore. The world slipped into hazes too often, it seemed slick and decontextualized, free-floating. He couldn't seem to grasp at any of it. This was like a tether. For a moment he felt he had context. He was in reality. He was real. The sticky residue if he didn't wash off properly made him real. He was real.
He was reeling.
His vision was spotting by then, so he couldn't ever be sure whether he could see someone pushing him down or whether he was imagining it.
He did hear a voice that whispered "we stop whenever you say. Remember that, and don't blame me" before lips and teeth moved down to nip at his throat.
Rudolf was thirteen, and certain urges happened. He had pawed once at Effie the maid, who had laughed and dared him to kiss her, but he had not been pushed down like this, weight upon his chest, his legs, hands like iron keeping his arms down, fingers splaying into the gash in his arm, rubbing under the open skin. He wondered if it might do more and as if obeying, it began to undulate the rest of its body against him. Rudolf felt his hips buck; he let out the faintest of whimpers, low on breath; a tongue darted out to run along his lips, and his mouth parted. The tongue slipped under his lip, running along his teeth, the backside of his teeth, and as another pair of lips were closing over his, he felt a sudden rush of cold, as if all the heat of his body and his blood and the moment were all thundering away to that other tongue, into that other mouth, and even his teeth hurt now from the cold.
Suddenly, abruptly, it occurred to Rudolf to wonder who it was that he was doing this with. What he was doing. Where he was.
God, this wasn't real either. When had he slipped from it—
"Oh, this is the same thing," the mouth whispered into his, not moving closer or further away, each brush of its lips with his making his heart shudder as if to freeze. "This is your reality."
Stop, Rudolf worded feebly, stop, and the lips stopped moving, the man didn't press any closer, but Rudolf's head was spinning, he was reeling, he was fading away, as if he could feel his body dissipating and melting into the chair, and the other man's into his and dissipating with him. It was as the blackness rounded out and his sight left that he fancied he saw a face at last, leaning in the final millimeter with curled lips.
*
"Little Rudolf was always getting into scrapes, wasn't he?"
"And you were the one who patched up the scrapes, Madam, I'm sure, so please, go on. You have the right to. Let's reminisce, shall we?"
This may be the first time that I agree with that old hag, Rudolf thought. He noted the crease between his mother's brows despite the fact that her frown was no doubt deliberately faint. He took a vicious joy, almost pride, in it.
If she had been there, it might be deeper by now. Still, a wrinkle was a wrinkle. Better she have some; better that it might be from knowing why he had been in white beds so often, watched over by nurses and a harried doctor who had grown gray trying to keep the Emperor's son alive.
Sophie had been there too. At his bedside and looking down, expressionless, cold, but there every single time the fevers broke and he was sure he could see anything right.
It had not been a nice face to wake up to. But at least he could not accuse her of apathy: at least she had thought it important that the heir keep breathing.
The worst time had been when he was thirteen. He had apparently been on the verge of actually dying: someone had walked in and seen him, apparently covered in blood. He suspected she had been exaggerating, but he didn't think he could blame her for the impression. That, or Sophie had made the detail up to scare him.
At any rate, that had seemed to get it out of his system to an extent. With the lucidity of epiphany he felt death to be a reality, a possibility that could strike, and would strike if he let it. Instead of terrifying him, it had somehow calmed his young soul. He had felt this was something tangible against which to struggle. Rudolf hated abstractions and shadows. Death removed from abstraction worked well for him.
He was twenty years old. He was no longer a child living in his head, no longer a youth fighting for footing so that he could tread along life. He was self-sufficient. He was seeing someone.
He did still keep one dagger—a slender dirk, concealed in his cloak—regardless of whatever other complement of rapiers he might be wearing for a day. He knew by now what sorts of whispers along the skin, what spots and what angles, could count toward making sure he was careful. He never let himself faint; he never resisted the urge to staunch as soon as his vision got spotty. Certain memories stayed in the very muscles; he felt a visceral alarm, made strong by the years of being quashed and muffled, from memories too blurry for his mind to know what they were.
Sometimes he felt this wasn't so different after all from the old way. The nights he took out the dirk were the nights when he felt alone like a child again: nights when the ethereal took over, thoughts and feelings without words, voices in his head crying and sobbing in children's tones, and when he tried to reassert reality, the phantoms and voices still seemed stronger, the corporeal world seemed paper. The dirk provided the balance: it provided the necessary dimension and depth to fact, and Rudolf felt sure again.
Sure, that is, until death started to have a whisper of its own.
Sometimes if Rudolf waited, he could feel ghost touches on his skin, air stirring as if from breath at his ear. He suddenly remembered that this had been the other thing to happen whenever he reached the blackout point as a child: this. A person.
A man.
If he stood long enough in one place. If he leaned over railings on the high balconies. If he clenched his neck hard enough to bruise.
Stéphanie asked questions all the time. Why hadn't he noticed that, back in the beginning? It had been charming then; it was stifling now.
"Why is she named Elisabeth?" Stéphanie still asked. "Why after that horrible woman, that mother of yours?"
And, later: "You don't hate her at all, do you? Not the way you look when she writes you. What's really going on with you two?"
That was the first time he had ever struck a woman.
He had run up and locked a door behind him. This time he didn't have to do anything before he felt an arm strike him down.
Invisible hands were holding him down for a moment, he thought, but they must have let go or he had imagined it; at any rate there was no getting up now. He hadn't felt anyone this vividly for half a lifetime ago — he still remembered.
"Same rules," said a voice both real and disembodied.
Rudolf struggled at the hands pinning him down.
"I feel I've been waiting without knowing it," he said, trying to raise his head high enough.
"The one you should be waiting for is downstairs," it said, "but it's not in my interests that you realize that."
"What do you mean?" Rudolf managed, though his breath came in wheezes now.
"You have several badly-healed wounds in your chest, possibly self inflicted, reaching through the muscle. They can be life-threatening, especially left untended."
Rudolf could not tell who was speaking; death and his own old doctor seemed to be blurring faces. He couldn't tell if he was on floor or sheets. His vision was hazy. It was like his childhood again.
This time he combed the shadows in his vision, searching for a figure.
*
When Mary gave out a sort of sigh, opening her mouth against his, Rudolf stopped feeling sick, though he didn't stop trembling.
Her hands moved up to his shoulders, then slipping around to his sides. She quickly started to fiddle with his buttons; her own case was just a matter of petticoats.
"I've never," she breathed out.
"I wasn't asking," said Rudolf.
"My alacrity," she said, pulling back her mouth. "I just want you to know. It's not—you know what it's like. But I'm frightened. And I've. You should know, I've never before."
"I haven't either," he whispered, and she laughed, a hard deep laugh with eyes flashing.
It was a joke; he'd meant in his case other than his wife. He wondered if that were true. As if to answer him, he felt a ghost touch on his back, making him shiver.
"Rudolf, has it—" Mary's voice was breathless but not distracted, "has it gone cold?"
Soon the whisper along his spine would become a touch, an unbearably perfect touch he could not arch away from.
"It seems so," he answered, and this talking really put too much distance between them. He reached down and closed his mouth over hers again, his back still exposed and cold, and he wished vaguely that they might switch places. He moved to kiss her jaw, her cheek, her forehead; she reached up and drew his face back down to her mouth.
Pressing together, they staved away the cold.
"I love you," he whispered. She smiled, eyes open and unapologetic and lighted, and moved his hand down. He wasn't quite sure what to do, but in short time she gasped and arched up, holding him tighter. He leaned into her arms, moving in closer and wishing he could melt into them entirely.
Mary's head flew back and she moaned; as she pulled up again, both of them tangling their legs and arms now, he could for a moment pay no attention to anything else. "I love you," he said, and in an almost defiant movement, she darted her hand up to his legs.
He wished he could pull away; instead he fought the urge to flinch, and closed his eyes. He tried to remember exactly how Mary had looked a moment before, how she had seemed to feel; he tried to keep that in his mind and let himself feel the same way. He tried not to remember anything, and keep her face in front of him.
It sort of worked, until he felt a cold hand settle beside Mary's. He gasped, and hated himself for bucking forward.
There weren't any words in his ear, none that he could decipher, but there was a voice.
*
"I believe in facts," said Rudolf.
"It's why you need me, to give you some balance," grinned Ferdinand. "Realist and idealist. We make a good pair, don't we?"
"There may be a chance for them to distribute the papers among the populace then," said Rudolf, pointing to the sixteenth on the calendar. "There will be a procession."
Ferdinand turned to look at Rudolf, as if searching for something in his gaze. Not as if: in fact. Rudolf knew that Ferdinand was the kind of person who was driven by his emotions. He was searching in Rudolf's gaze for some sort of connection.
"You would do well to give some to him," whispered into his ear as Rudolf's back tore grinding into the wall.
"He asks stupid questions."
"He asked you why you're so sympathetic to the cause."
"It's obvious."
"Is it? To you, I mean."
"I can't talk in ideas and abstractions. I'm the realist."
"You're the one gasping into shadows."
Rudolf's eyes widened.
"He goes home to a lover, that idealist of yours. A human lover, mind, of flesh and blood who cooks meals and manages the bills, and has ideas and ideals of her own."
Rudolf opened his mouth to rebut and inhaled sharply at a twitch of its hips.
"I'll tell you what your trouble is. Your trouble is that you don't let yourself accept abstractions. You're so busy denying us." A gentle push, a roll down and alongside the wall. "You're so good at it." A hand and Rudolf arched up. "You're in so, so much control."
*
Rudolf saw a face, for the first time and not, staring back from his mother's mirror. For the very first time, though, it looked impatient.
"How much longer do you feel like keeping this up?" it said. "How much longer do you plan to deny and detest the idea you've never abandoned?
"Never tried to abandon," it added, in his ear now. "Never dared to face or combat. Detest and deny, deny and detest. Hate all ideas entirely, on the basis of one: a good map of the country, that, at the moment. But above all, don't dare face and combat it." Lips against his ear curled upwards. "It'll be me, Rudolf. Maybe you can guess why she'll want *me*."
Amazing that the strength he remembered melted away in an instant as he broke away in revulsion now. It was with a dead walk that he made his way he wasn't sure where.
When he saw Mary, he realized he must have remembered they were supposed to meet at the cottage today. When the door was bashed down a moment later, he knew they must have been followed. He wasn't surprised by the insignia the soldiers bore. His mother had probably known, and hadn't decided to warn him.
As he raised his pistol in the only protest he could make now, he saw people flash before him and reach for it. His sister, Effie the maid, Doctor Sieberger, all grabbing at it as if to play hot potato with it together; Stéphanie, Ferdinand. Mary. None could, and Rudolf wished Death would stop pushing that point home. It was neither here nor there, and neither was his mother.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mary, emptying a pistol he didn't know she carried, ducking behind a table she'd upturned, eyes flashing with hate and glee and desperation the way they did whenever she laughed. When the pistol was empty and the officers grabbed her, landing their first blows, her laughter threw her head back.
Rudolf turned back. "You think what you like," he whispered, aware that the remaining officers were standing looking at him, and poised to act if he didn't. "I know better than you do."
He wondered what it was he knew, as his head ricocheted to the side, angling up to kiss the face he knew better than any other.