King of Infinite Space

You might’ve seen my domain from an airplane window. Miles and miles of rocky, empty, firework-colored desert, and somewhere at the center of it all, the little white glint of a lone building. That’s where we live. My older brother, my grandad, and me – King of Infinite Space.

You probably wouldn’t think anything about it. I’ve been on a plane once too, for my parents’ funeral. My brother let me have the window seat on the way back, so I know there are all sorts of strange shapes and patterns you can see down below that you wouldn’t waste a thought on. But as king, I’m going to grant you a royal pardon because distance cuts both ways. From my bedroom window, you wouldn’t even be a plane. Just some split-second sparkle in the blue Mojave sky. And probably not even that.

Besides, I don’t spend all day sitting by my bedroom window, all moody and brooding. That’s my older brother’s job. At least, it used to be, before he decided to abdicate his throne so he could go to trucking school. I spend my day playing video games on his old computer. Only RuralNet is abysmally awful. My character ragdolls across the map from explosions that don’t happen until after I’m already dead. My teammates hate me. I don’t lower myself to explaining that I’m the King of Infinite Space, I tell them farm internet sucks a ten-gallon bag of dicks. Someone tells me to fuck my cows. I respond we don’t have cows, we contract with the government to raise endangered fish. Someone else types: that’s really cool, go fuck your fish.

It's not always like that. Most days, I can’t get online at all. I host a game that’s just me, driving around empty maps for hours until the fact that I’m being deserted gets drowned by the sound of my Humvee’s tires.

Save your pity. Give it to my grandad, who’s missing his foot. Not his leg – his foot, which is somehow worse. Give it to my older brother, who Frankensteined a military uniform together from things he found at the Salvation Army. Before getting ready to escape swallowed up all his time, he used to sit on my bed and show me the dating profile he’d made. Pictures of him in mismatched camo, using the scrubland as background. With the radius cranked to a hundred miles he can sometimes pick up pictures of girls on their way back from long weekends in Vegas. If you want to be sad about something, be sad about that. He’s going to be in North Carolina while I inherit his old room and weight set and fantasy books and smelly, stained carpet. I am the King of Infinite Space.

Every couple of weeks, biologists from some state or federal department drive up here. Not to see us, to see our fish, which are really their fish, they’re just kept on our property, in artificial ponds that look like nothing but blotches if you glance out an airplane window. The fish are called Amargosa Pupfish. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about them because nobody has. They’re raincloud blue. They’re smaller than my thumb and ugly as hell and totally blind. The biologists count them, one by one, explaining that once upon a time, my whole domain used to be a prehistoric ocean. It shrank, little by little, until the fish that weren’t strong enough to escape got trapped in shower stall-sized holes in the desert, adapting to survive those exact conditions. They’ve been there for millions of years. With the help of fisheries like ours, they’ll be there a million more. Every biologist that comes up explains it like they’re the first one, mixing me and my brother’s names. They don’t tell the story anywhere as good as me. I listen because there’s absolutely nothing else to do. Even kings get bored and lonely.

My grandad gets checks in the mail because he doesn’t like computers for anything other than solitaire. His missing foot haunts him with phantom itches that can only be exorcized by six hours of video poker at the bar. Sometimes around midnight, Mariluz will call us to go pick him up. Last year, he puked up his Cajun fries all over us. My older brother freaked out because he had our grandad slung over his shoulder and wet chunks got down the back of his camo jacket. He took it out on us later by getting that trucking school loan. My granddad didn’t beg him to stay or even ask. I didn’t either because it wasn’t even my fault. I am the King of Infinite Space, kings don’t beg to be stayed with, no matter how much they might want to.

I know how to rule by myself. I’m teaching myself to, anyway. I’m adapting. Whenever my games are too laggy, whenever my grandad has the History Channel’s volume set to 76, whenever my brother’s reading about airbrakes or hogging the bathroom to jack off to girls on his phone, I go down to the artificial ponds. My older brother used to play army men with me on the concrete banks. I don’t mind the godawful smell or the way the blind fish still manage to stare at me. I have the power of life and death in my sticky, barf-covered hands.

One day, supposedly, the biologists will fix the chemical runoff leaking into the groundwater and global warming and everything threatening to erase those fish from the universe. Until then, all I’d need is just a little bit of bleach from the rack over the washing machine. Just a tiny shift on the dial in the shed that controls the water temperature. There’d be nobody around to stop me. I’m not saying I’d ever do it. That’s not befitting of a king. But when you live in a place like this, in times like these, it’s nice to know that you could.

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About the Author

Gordon Brown grew up in the deserts of Syria and now lives in the deserts of Nevada. Since arriving in the New World his work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Weird Horror Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere.