The King in Yellow Arrives

They opened the first Suicide Chamber in Seattle nearly a year ago, and since then they?ve exploded in popularity. Nearly every state has one, and the United States Government holds the official position that any citizen now has the state-sponsored right to opt out of the rest of their life, no questions asked. I hear that the lines get long in February.
When called upon to give a reason for this sudden shift in moral sensibility the response went something like: ?In this modern age, natural selection has given way to artificial selection, and this trend must be embraced if we are to remain competitive on the world stage. Man has the power to shape his own destiny like never before, especially in the United States of America. In order to accept that any man, woman, or child has the right to take everything for their own, we must accept that living through the process of having everything taken from you is now a legitimate social position. With the introduction of ?The Last Resort? we now offer a liberty to the least among us which is unparalleled in all the world. With the installation of this final human right, the American Dream is finally realized.?
It is almost the very first anniversary of the ?Death Box?, but it is nearly the third for the legalization of a very different social consideration. Three years ago, a certain Play was finally allowed to be shown publicly. In a world that makes a firm point to accept all walks of life, it came to someone?s attention that there exists a market for the path of ritualized despair. The performance of The King in Yellow has been recognized not only as a religious observance, but also as a valid perspective to argue from in our modern society.
I could not have been more pleased when I heard the news. I quit my job that afternoon, and I became one of the very first ?Yellow Priests?. That just means I and my troupe perform the Play anywhere anyone will let us. It is a good life.
The King in Yellow is an orphaned play (an author-less amusement) that I have long been fascinated with.
I was introduced to the work in my childhood, and almost from the time I could read I have owned a small handwritten copy of that fated piece of deterministic prose.
I used hide it, of course. Wherever and whenever people knew anything about what The King in Yellow actually was it became fabulously illegal, and it remained that way for thousands of years from what I?m told.
I have never been ashamed of what that strange little story taught me, but I have never known differently either. The message I have built my existence, and now my livelihood, around is incomprehensible to me even now. As I hold it in my mind it is perfectly perceptible, but never communicable. This has always been a difficulty with me.
There was some shame in not being able to speak about the larger part of my own soul. My parents taught me to never speak of what we did at home and I learned to separate my true self from the self I cultivated for the public. It was crippling and isolating. Despite the true and sincere leanings of my heart I could never allow myself to be known, and so I truly knew no one. I could never speak the truth. It was not allowed.
For many years, that was nearly as large a part of my identity as the words I protected within.
Now all I do is tell the truth. My whole life is about spreading the honesty within me, and I have found such power in it.
Unless you see the thing for yourself you won?t really understand it, and unfortunately reading it just doesn?t have the same effect. It can still grab something about you in that way, but the truth is in the experience.
You become intrigued, at first, by the simplicity of the thing. The story itself is silly, and profound. Easily worth a second and third look.
There is a hero and a villain having one hell of an argument about nothing from the get go. They scream and talk over each other and repeat themselves. It?s fun.
There are two beautiful, entirely contrary, girls who disagree with everything except each other and they sing a truly haunting song at the climax of the first act.
Then there is The King in Tatters who shows up at uncertain intervals and doesn?t speak at all in the first half.
On top of that, the clever reader and the canny observer may notice that the characters are unnecessary to the advancing argument of the play itself. In fact, the play may be performed by only two people. One playing the whole cast, and one playing the King in Tatters who has the majority of the lines in the second half. When my family used to do it at home My dad played the King, I read all the other lines, and my mom would sing.
The King arrives in the very first line of the second half, and?
?I can?t tell you how what happens next happens, but once it does all hell breaks loose.
Everyone reacts differently to the coming of the King, but in the main I have noticed three basic reactions: Denial, Acceptance (followed by some truly admirable, if inadvisable zealotry), and the third kind usually ask to participate in the Play. I call them Converts. Everyone who plays in my company started out in the audience. These select few become members of the Yellow Priesthood.
I think a lot of people are disgusted by what happens in the second act. I have to argue that this is only because they are ashamed of how closely the Play comes to changing what they understand about the world around them. They are ashamed of themselves. Their very identity is threatened by the message. With those who choose Denial, there is a certain physical reaction.
I?ve seen them so many times before. They have a rotten time at the show, and then afterwards they deny they were affected at all and they retreat inward. It can be a terrible and traumatic thing to see yourself contrasted against the truth of the Play. They never remember what they saw. They throw up mental blocks against it, lock it away, and then they move on. Happy as clams. They say so anyway. I hear they have nightmares. I hear they often make use of the ?Societal-Restructuring Booths?. I do not follow up on such unhappy rumors.
I believe shame is only good if you intend to do something about it. Otherwise it becomes the thing that steps on your neck and makes you vulnerable to the worst in yourself. Those poor souls can?t do anything with what they?ve worked for now, but rather than embrace that understanding and grow, they bury themselves deep and wait for the end. Not that it will do them any good.
Its all in the Play.
The two other kinds of reactions I have observed in the audience, Acceptance and Conversion, are more interesting and they are the primary reason I continue my work.
The ones who accept the message, are perhaps the wildest souls humanity has to offer. ?Wild? I say, because they more easily give in to their own survival instinct, which allows them to be propelled into action by the Play. They are the ones that you hear about. They usually figure out where the play is going about halfway through the second act the very first time they see it. They begin shouting the words along with the King whenever he speaks. They?re always so proud that they figured it all out, and they never forget the experience. They come back to repeat performances, and they bring as many people as they can get to come with them every time.
We usually see more and more of this particular reaction with repeat performances. The message fills them to the brim and soon nothing else matters. In a way I envy them. The simplicity with which they receive the message makes me feel like they really get it, even if they can?t do anything with it.
They can get dangerous if you handle them poorly. I stopped offering more than three performances in a row at any single venue because after the fourth night you don?t tend to draw any new participants and the actors can?t hear themselves delivering the lines because everyone is just screaming along.
We walked out on a performance once. They begged us and paid us well to do a fourth and fifth show, and we did, but on the fifth night everybody in attendance had screamed themselves so hoarse from the night before that during the performance they started to spit up blood.
Not much blood but still, we didn?t want to be party to people injuring themselves, and so we walked out after the first act. The audience stayed and finished without us.
They knew the Play as well as I did by that point.
They calm down after a week if they don't get worse. Acceptance becomes a quiet understanding after a while, and life still has to be lived even if hope for the outcome is lost. The ones that don?t calm down usually opt out of existence after a year or so. You can only scream so long before you start to wail.
The ones that do calm down tend to develop a taste for private readings.
I knew a man who would pay young women to read with him and sing the song. As far as I have heard, nearly no one who reacts this way sings the song themselves. It is not in them to do.
I know many more who read with their families, and so the legacy continues I suppose.
I know also that even after finding each other and reading with each other they will still refrain, mostly, from actually putting on the rags and performing. They fear to become the King himself. They fear what that would mean.
I hear some of these also make use of the ?Corporate Bailout?, but only after they can no longer find someone to sing for them, so mainly I imagine they turn out alright.
The third reaction, Conversion, is especially rare these days. I suspect this is because before they see me, they are prime candidates for self-murder. They seldom come to performances on their own initiative and you mostly find them when you perform unannounced in public areas.
You?ll have deniers running for it, and you?ll have accepters screaming, and then there will be one or two who just sit there like they?ve been struck by a revolutionary thought. It is always the look of one who has, at last, come home. They always knew, and they had never before had it laid out so clearly.
I live to find those people.
They are sometimes homeless, often self-medicated, usually diagnosed with a host of disorders, nearly always isolated in some painful way, and they never leave a performance without asking me an important question.
My answer does not matter, and they know it. If I turn them away they either start up a competing troupe or run straight to the nearest ?Self-Destruction Station?. That is a choice I have not seen in some time however. My answer is always ?Yes, of course you may.?
My troupe is just as gracious, for we have all received the salvation offered by performing the part of the Tattered King. We did not run, and we did not dare try to scream for any human reason. We can sing the song. We knew already that the Pallid Mask was not meant to stay on, and so allow us to live in ignorance. We therefore accepted easily that the Pallid Mask would never come off, for the King in Tatters wears no mask as he will tell you himself.
I have said enough, and look now, the curtain is rising once more.
It is my belief that despite our freedom to practice our sacred art in the sunlight, the ?Culling Compartments? were meant for us and those like us in particular. The Yellow Priests are not fearful children, and we do not come into our quiet strength through any particular effort. We just know that there is no hope, and we do not laugh or cry about it. We perform.
A man named Albert Camus once said: ?One must imagine Sisyphus happy.?
I can tell you plainly that when the curtain rises on my stage he is ecstatic.


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