"Free Society" by Brittany K. Allen
This story from our inaugural Fresh Voices Fellow originally appeared in Epiphany’s Summer 2022 issue. The 2024 Fresh Voices Fellowship is currently open for applications.
The Magic Keep in Petrin Park is just off the main pedi path, chilling in the shadow of the funicular. From the outside, she—it—looks like the shoe the fairy tale woman built her house in. Wildflowers strangle the facade. A little chalkboard sign tells passersby 'Welcome' in English, Czech, French, German, and Japanese. The day I found the place, a stringbean boy with cystic acne and the pale blue eyes I was just beginning to associate with King Wenceslas, dead knights, Eastern twilight, looked me square in the soul and said, "Come inside young sir! OR DON’T YOU CARE TO TREAD WHERE GREAT WONDERS AWAIT?" I remember the sun was high in the sky and the clearing held a holy quiet, like no human feet had ever marred its face. So, of course I followed. Forty minutes later, I had my first job.
See, I came to it all too late, too catastrophically late—shea butter for ashy knees, "ish," and "sheeyit," and "triflin," how and when to dap, to say nothing of Digable Planets, No Name in the Street. Angela, Malcolm, A Different World. A respectable fade, a barbershop to get that fade in, brothers to meet there. But it wasn't my fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, precisely. My father was an ambassador of the Talented Tenth. They said my mother was like ODB—a lil bit country—but she died before she could preach the gospel of the hip, voluptuous sister who would take me in her arms at an East Coast HBC and teach me all the other things I needed to know.
My stepmother, Gloria, is Filipino. They raised us in Hyde Park. In high school I hit a kind of stride, reviewing video games for the online branch of the student newspaper. I wore Vans sneakers and loved two Claires: one a tiny blonde, the other a maypole half-Japanese girl whose friends said we'd have beautiful babies. But the summer before I started at Northwestern, we broke up.
Giri, my freshman year roommate, was from Singapore. He was light-a-Franklin-on-fire rich, though his favorite thing to do was to go skulking around Chicagoland for the most "authentic" Asian street food. He was the one who introduced me to all the Wu-Tang songs they wouldn't play on the radio. One night we got high, and he sucked my dick on his narrow twin bed. This became a pattern, though one we never let into daylight. Rather, most evenings—in the somnolent stretch before dawn—we’d creep back to our respective corners like guilty children.
When it was time to think about next year's dorm assignments, Giri took me out for a feast of dan dan noodles and asked if I'd visit him in Singapore over break. You can use my miles, he said—and sleep in my brother’s old room. I paused just a second before telling him no, I could not, because I'd be at the Global Exchange Studies Institute in Ghana doing a summer semester. He gave me a funny smile, then we went off to two different parties.
The next day at the student center I learned in the brochure that Ghana was "the first colonized country in the sub-Sahara to gain independence," and was impressed. Pictures showed rapt students sitting in the back of what I learned was their daily Twi lesson, granola types hiking through Kakum National Park. But what I liked best was the bright audacity in the west African clothes—the reds, the blues, the natty greens. It occurred to me that my mother could’ve loved this place. Un-dimmable, despite the best efforts of armies.
“Ghana, huh?” said my advisor—Miguel. “Alright, holmes. Though the academic plan we sketched out didn't include any study abroad.” Miguel was one of those young teachers still itchy on the authoritative side of the fence. He scrunched up his chin and started clicking around. “Yeaaaah, looks like we slept on it. Ghana's a popular program this year. I can get you on the waitlist, but the problem there is timing. What's the rush, if I can ask?"
"Just excited to see the world past Winnetka," I said. From his office window I could see the frolf team laughing through their nonsensical drills, three floors below. I remembered their square-jawed captain, Alec Gilman-Roy. A friend of Giri’s.
“Um, so. What else is there?”
"Not much in your major, I'm afraid…" Miguel went back into his computer, and in the silence I tried to step into his life via the photos on his desk.
There was a sloppy-mouthed golden retriever in one. In another, he canoodled with a fly hapa girl who looked like her name should be Vanessa. I thought about asking my advisor where he'd met his lady, where he'd found his dog, how he got this job, even. How did one know where to go for such things?
“Hold on a minute. You could knock out two history classes and a poli-sci seminar with this one.”
“Nice!”
“But, it’s not Africa. This one’s in Prague.”
I heard Alec’s voice shouting instructions from the field, considered his clarity of purpose. I thought of my father, who was often saying: when you set your chin to something, it becomes true. As a child, I’d balked at this dictum because it just seemed so fucking depressing. But the evidence was mounting, I had to admit. Effective people made loud commitments to kith, kin, or government. Effective people made their claims with every tooth.
“Make it happen, cap’n,” I said.
Miguel pursed his lips, then smiled the kind of smile you smile when pretending to get a joke.
"Okay, my dude,” he said, expelling a little puff of air. “Arriverderci, or whatever they say over there. Hope you like puppets."
The way winging east had this in common with the number 6 bus—beginning at the museum, skirting the South Side, and landing in the Loop, you'd see black folks get on, get off, and stay off, while white people in trendier parkas would do the same thing in reverse. At the airport, I thought I glimpsed the group en route to Twi class in Winneba. The girls—they were mostly girls—wore matching periwinkle shirts with cartoon globes on them, and looked like they were having tremendous PG fun just sitting on the floor at Midway.
Audre Lorde had gone to Moscow. I’d read about this in an Intro to Black Feminism seminar last fall, taken off Giri’s suggestion. I remembered that Audre'd had a dream on the plane about making love to a woman in the stacks of a Soviet grocery store, or something—she'd also taken the wrong coat and arrived in the Republic cold. Yet I struggled to recall the main point of her essay from where I sat sandwiched between two old women with cracked, outrageous faces; this seemed a bad omen. Certainly, it would behoove me to remember what an OG mother warrior had learned in eastern Europe. But my memory turned up nothing but the unusable. Giri’s studying face. Giri’s stacks of books.
My poli-sci lectures were populated by a fleet of girls from Mount Holyoke, serious types with angular bobs and catwoman glasses. Our instructor was always late, but when I made a joke musing that it seemed the trains didn't run on time in Praha anymore, it went over like the Hindenburg.
“You should really be more thoughtful,” said a one Cherie, of Westport. “The war isn’t Hollywood. It’s close for these people.”
This remark—and Cherie’s tone—niggled me all night long. But I couldn’t reason out the right response. So, my second Monday in the Republic, I boarded a tram heading away from our classroom. Petrin Park was at the end of the line.
“It’s really just your typical art gallery,” said Evzen, the blue-eyed boy who’d sirened me in across the grass. He was about my age, a local. Up close his acne wasn’t so bad. “Admission is fifty koruna, cash. We take traveler’s checks and Visa. But no American Express. Tell your friends.”
I’d lumbered across an overgrown thatch of lawn to the flower-strangled cabin, and now stood in a small, shadowy foyer, on a warped wooden floor that sloped sharply downward the further in you walked. The stucco walls had been painted to evoke—well—a keep, though the decor was of fourth grade art project quality. Spraypainted hunks of styrofoam, presumably stalagmites, stood sentinel in all four corners. Above our heads an electric chandelier spasmed out some yellow light. A rickety spiral staircase pointed to an attic and a cellar, respectively. It smelled like mildew and lacquer and nothing else familiar.
“So, what brings you to Europe?” Evzen said.
“World tour,” I said. My eyes were adjusting to the light. As I lurched further in, the floorboards creaked beneath me.
That’s when I saw her—or, she saw me.
“I’m jealous,” Evzen said. “I want to tour. I’d tour anywhere they’d let me in. I’m just that kind of guy. You must like Jack Kerouac?” He’d sidled up beside me and I felt him follow my gaze. “Ah, yes. You’ve found the moneymaker. Owen, meet The Queen of Moldokovika.”
In the wall-sized mural before us, a blue-skinned woman hurled a speer at a hapless steed who reared back in fear. The perspective was all over the place. Her limbs were too long, and the sun was too close; the conifers along the horizon were all oddly uniform. Her prey was neon green, with angry red spirals where his nostrils should be. It wasn’t a “good piece of art,” is what I’m saying, but the Queen’s face thrilled me. Something about how calm she seemed, perched above all that violent strife.
I stood there, in Moldokovika, for a long time. At some point Evzen left my shoulder, but I couldn’t say when. A slow-spreading peace had begun to fill me, like an IV drip. It felt like, at last, I’d been chosen. Like I’d finally been given a task.
To celebrate what turned out to be my first day as a “gallery assistant,” Evzen bought me a lemonade at the little cafe at the top of the park. After filling out the appropriate paperwork, I spent the morning appraising inventory, where I confirmed that Moldokovika was the setting and its blue, fiery Queen the subject of every single painting in the Magic Keep. But whether she was turning into a tree, or being torn apart by wild dogs, or simply addressing her handmaidens, her expression—implacable, poised—remained the same.
“The artist,” Evzen said, “is quite eccentric. I mean, obviously. Calls himself Henrí Paluba. Though I suspect this is a pseudonym.” As the sun dipped behind the green hills, Evzen told me how our boss had worked his way up from the street fair circuit after “receiving a mysterious windfall” from a “minor Eurasian royal.” The Moldokovika series was his magnum opus. To explain his bevy of fantastical paintings, Henrí had self-published a two thousand page book of the imagined kingdom’s mythology. Much of this, Evzen suspected, was cannibalized from existing sources—specifically The Mabinogion and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Henrí claimed to be close friends with Sting and Aleister Crowley, who were both collectors of his work. Rumor had it he had bought the decommissioned park ranger stand that would become the keep the week Vaclav Havel was elected. “People made a lot of big decisions here in that time,” Evzen said, before adding, “should we switch to pivo? Let’s switch to pivo, yes?”
“But why?” I asked, once Evzen had returned to our picnic table with two pale beers. “I mean—why put a gallery in the middle of a park and call it a castle?”
Evzen removed his cap and wiped at the sweaty red imprint it’d left behind. He looked at me like I was a little dumb, which I didn’t love.
“For the same reason your Dennis Rodman went to North Korea, eh?” he said. “Because he could afford to.”
Our uniform was humbling. A court jester concoction, made of billowing nylon—it reminded me of testicles, texture-wise. Where Evzen’s was green, mine was red as the devil. I felt like Tweedle Dumm in its idiot embrace. But I took it in stride. One humiliation seemed a suitable tax for my nascent life.
This became a pattern: every weekday, I’d rise early, tiptoe past the closed doors of my classmates, and hop the #24 tram to Lesser Town. There I’d sit in congregation with the workers of Prague, the hassled morning masses, and feel capable and grown. Once I’d reached the Keep, I’d change into my costume, and begin batching the powdered lemonade we gave to visitors. The empty time before Evzen’s arrival was my favorite. Alone, I could sip coffee and behold the blue-faced mother warrior, killing and loving and ruling a world with such unperturbable eyes. I was in thrall to the Queen’s murderous poise, and—I admit—I loved that she was silent. There seemed to be a lesson in the quiet way she carried power.
One day, my instructor left a message for me at the front desk of the student housing complex. On another, Miguel sent an email that started, “Heeeeeeeey, O…” I left the student housing complex, used my under-the-table earnings to pay for a week-to-week bed at a youth hostel in Zizkov. The hostel looked out on the Old Jewish Cemetery. An old Soviet radio tower loomed above it, to the East. Sometimes looking at that brutalist spire made me think of Cherie’s admonishment—the pain of other’s . But then it also brewed in me a wild envy toward these pained citizens of the Czech Republic, who seemed to live inside their history, instead of in spite of or on top of it.
One Thursday I was on lawn siren duty when—the second Claire! Sacre Bleu! I almost didn’t recognize her until I saw that the new things about her served to reinforce, not obscure, an essential Claireness. In a word? Gauges.
She rounded the corner with her family just as I was croaking, “Come one, come all!” at a bewildered German tour group.
“This looks like the bathroom,” I heard her mother say. “Kids, anyone have to go?”
Before making a play for the bushes, I clocked that her brother was taller. The baby sister’s cheeks no longer fat and dear. But Claire spotted me halfway into a thicket of creeping bellflower. She came right up to me, so close I could smell the recent sandwich on her breath.
“Owen? Dude seriously, what the fuck?”
Silently, I cursed my garish garb.
Claire’s father tented his eyes against the mean July sun. “My goodness. It’s you!” I remembered his scary laugh.
“I’m on study abroad,” I informed her family, doffing my cap. “Well, for the most part.”
At this, the Matsuke-Richards frowned, and commenced tapping at the Keep walls like inspectors. Claire raised her eyebrows and gave my bloomers a pointed look.
“This is extremely weird,” she said. “So weird I’m thinking it must be fate. Hey, what are you doing later, O? Any chance you want to get a drink?”
Before we’d left for our respective colleges, I'd written this Claire an anxious love note positing rules about our then-plan to “try long-distance.” I’d outlined a schedule for our calls and visits. I’d listed, in detail, what I loved about her, and all but demanded she respond in kind. I needed to be convinced that she wanted me particularly, in spite of adverse conditions and tricky terrain. Graduation day she handed the letter back, but folded up like a cootie catcher. Then she had a friend come up behind her with a boombox, and blasted George Michael's "Freedom" right into my face. We made eye contact until she knew I knew it was over, like the opposite of a Quaker wedding. “Another eccentric,” Evzen said, when I told him this story. “You must attract them.”) On my off day, I met Claire at a chain cafe in Old Town, feeling vulnerable and saucy in a Public Enemy t-shirt. We ordered two pilsners and frites to split. For a while, there was just chewing, as I tried to think of a way to answer the inevitable questions. But Claire didn’t mind silence. This had always been true.
“Do you like North Carolina?” I said, when a minute had lapsed.
“I mean, it’s a lot of white people. But you know how that is.”
She sipped her pivo daintily. Behind her, a girl with ice blue eyes was strutting a marionette across the cobblestones. Mistaking my smile for encouragement, Claire launched into a monologue. She spoke quickly, like a valve had been released. Gave me updates on her family. All the old mutual friends. And, also—”
“I should maybe tell you that I’m queer now,” she blurted. “Not that I wasn’t before. And not to, like, assume you’d care. But…” I stared at the lacquered eyes of the puppet, who’s pupils were dizzily huge. I could feel her studying my face.
“I know I don’t have to say this,” she said. “But I wanted you to know. I think you’re an awesome human being, Owen. But I guess I’m realizing, that I had a certain idea of myself? That was entirely dishonest. And it’s fucking terrifying to let go of the expected me, but I think if I didn’t do that, I’d explode. Or…worse. Does that make any sense?” She had rearranged her features into a meaningful, searching look.
Claire took my blush for something else and placed a hand, palm-up, on the table between us. Into the space that followed, I projected the smug, smiling faces of Miguel, my father, Giri. This magnanimous Claire. All the people—effective, happy people—that were determined to fix me. Or fix me in space. Yet not a one of them had made me feel chosen. They’d all glanced at my surface and bounced off it momentarily, having sized me up and found me wanting. Well, I was wanting. I had want enough to fill a cathedral. I had magical powers and unruly whims and an army of blue-faced handmaidens at my beck and call.
Only, I couldn’t figure out how to prove it. Not yet. Not here.
“Have you been to the ossuary?” Claire was saying. The relief in her face had resulted in beauty. Beatifically, she licked salt from her fingers, having polished off our frites. “I want to go, but the ‘rents are superstitious. All those bones.” I said I hadn’t.
As we rose to part, Claire suggested a time and said to WhatsApp her. She said I’d have to show her “the cool part of town.” The next day, true to her word, she sent me a SUP BUDDY??—but I left it to linger. I went back to work.
The Queen had become my lodestar. The Keep, my planet. Evzen, by default, became my bro. As we swept floors and dusted frames, two more weeks went by. Miguel sent another email, said my father’d been alerted. “We know that you’re still in the city, from classmates. Holmes, please be considerate. Let us know what’s going on.”
I’d begun to pick up Czech phrases, knocking around Nad Viktorkou and the Akropolis. I lived on lemonade, pivo, and smazeny syr. I’d not quite let a plan take shape, but had made mental gestures toward a future. One night as I was leaving Evzen’s, I saw a ‘For Rent’ sign affixed to the front of his rabbit hutch apartment, and promptly pictured my life in a Czech flat. With my own little bed, my own bookcase. I’d saved enough money to buy a print from work—maybe “The Battle for Loth Lommlien.” This image of my own, invented kingdom made me so dizzy, I had to whistle on the walk home.
The second Tuesday in August, I was mixing a batch of complimentary sangria when a man walked into the Keep. I recognized his shock of grey hair from the bio on the back of the price catalogue. He peered at me a moment before extending his hand. “Kde je Evzen?”
I responded in broken Czech, then began to sing praises. I told Henrí that I adored “The Wellrudian Pringo,” the triptych of history paintings portraying the Moldokovikan victory over the devilish Kimmitze ghouls. I confessed that I’d dreamt about his portraits of the Queen in repose, and thought the boudoir series beautifully teased her vulnerable side. I told him that, on the formal front, I admired his consistency of style—how the sense of place was just as clear in both tempura and pastel.
Henrí nodded as I spoke, looking baffled but pleased. Then Evzen appeared on the spiral staircase. Together they went into the back and began to speak in quick, excited tones. I heard intermittent bursts of laughter, and felt my face grow hot.
A short while later Henrí emerged, shot me a vague smile, then darted out the way he’d arrived. Evzen appeared at my shoulder, beaming. I tried to determine an elegant way to ask if the artist had found me impressive. But before I could sound out a question, there was a monologue in my ear.
“There’s been a big sale,” said Evzen. “Huge. A Danish celebrity. This week, we’ll wrap all the paintings for shipment.” He rubbed his fingers together. “There will be a fat commission. We’ll have to find some way to thank the boss, for taking care of us.”
“Commission?”
“I’m as surprised as you. But we’ll get to close early!”
I sat on a stalagmite. “Early?”
“Yes, we usually close in September. When the park gets slow and the tourists go home.” He squinted at me. “But you didn’t think this was a year-round job?”
There was a Queen behind his head. She was bright blue, unsubtle, so sure of herself. I felt my throat tighten. “Of course not,” I said. Evzen gave me a long look, then grabbed my wrists and pulled me up into a dance. “Let us first get a drink,” he said. “No—let us first get the fuck out of these bloomers. This is good news, my friend. You can tour your next world.”
Not very long after the Keep was shuttered, I returned to Chicago on my knees. My father and Gloria weren’t angry. It was worse than that. They tiptoed around me, and performed close attention. I saw I had frightened them, and though I thought this would make me feel powerful, instead it just made me feel small. Chastised, I tried to set my chin to becoming different, as my father’d suggested was possible. I took all the Audre Lorde out of the public library and tried to fix myself in lessons from the real and relevant world.
Fall of my sophomore year, I found out Giri was dating a guy who'd arrived at Northwestern with a girlfriend. A guy I knew on a nickname basis because we both went out for newspaper and came from Hyde Park.
Galen LaChappelle was shiny, dark, and serious, in the ways of the wide-eyed puppets they sold tourists outside St. Vitus cathedral. He had soulful eyes, a high, geeky laugh, and made earnest, frequent contributions in the Existentialism & Phenomenology class we were both enrolled in. He was an avid frolfer, too, and wherever I saw him play, he made that silly game look elegant; he had the conspicuous air of someone who knew where he came from and where he was going.
When Giri and Galen walked together around campus, every kind of person I could think of felt the need to comment on their symbolic perfection: girls, boys, the genderqueer; black people, brown people, white people, blue people. The empowered and the hapless. The well-traveled and the happily still.
Sometimes a body’d just sigh and clasp their chest theatrically as they passed, saying something like “there goes the hope of America.”
I could never figure out the right response to that.
It’s years later, and I still can’t imagine what some kinds of power must feel like. What if your satisfaction could make a stranger breathless? If your stupid little truth could bear that freight?
Brittany K. Allen is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Catapult, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Longreads, and Kenyon Review Online, among other places, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A MacDowell fellow, her stage plays have been produced and developed in New York, Portland, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. She is currently working on her first novel.
