Kellie Wells
When the Dictator was a child, before he was a dictator, he was a boy who stuffed his pockets with feathers and the odd pebble and bones pried from animal scat, which he reassembled at home into the vanquished vole they had once animated. He sometimes walked on his hands and spoke words under his breath he was forbidden from uttering aloud. He pronounced the profanity like a benediction, with the solemn intonation he thought the priest would use. He pitched acorns at the heads of chickens that bobbled by, pulled scabs from his limbs at night, and ate mud experimentally. He was a boy like any other.
Walking home with his mother one day, the boy stopped and tilted his face toward the sky, which hung overhead stale and gray as a rancid chop being used to lure a feral mutt, and his eyes, which suddenly looked to the mother like tea leaves, like something only the toothless crone sitting swaddled in moth-eaten shawls could make sense of, his eyes flashed. At this moment, the slate sky broke and light trickled onto the boy's face, and this caused his mother to kneel upon her skirts and seize him by the ears. She tipped his face farther back, and his eyes glimmered with blinding dazzle, as if auditioning for the role of the sun itself, and so she did what any mother would do under such circumstances: she sent him to the Academy for Totalitarian Despots, two towns over.
The school had provoked controversy in the town when it was first proposed, the people of the snoozy hamlet reluctant to allow their children to wander near the grounds where dictators were to be taught how to torture the innocent and reward the corrupt, but the town constable spoke with ardent conviction about how the Academy would bring to the community not only prosperity but also the renown that had thus far eluded them. Their former claim to notoriety, the world record for the most sightings of the ghosts of Genghis Khan and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who frequently hovered over wedding processions or appeared on pancakes together, did not bring them the fame they'd hoped for. And so the citizens agreed to the Academy and wept at the prospect of the village finally thumbing a pushpin into the map of the world.
Most boys who attended the Academy for Totalitarian Despots were all preternatural loners. They were encouraged by instructors to wile away the friendless hours by pulling the wings off insects and abducting baby bunnies from warrens, but many of the boys did so with, at most, perfunctory enthusiasm, at least in the beginning. The Dictator, before he was a dictator, tried to sneak the rabbits back to the nest before they were slaughtered, but he was eventually ratted out by a future autocrat of a small landlocked country with two blood-soaked borders that would one day experience an epidemic of dancing. This outbreak would lead to a shortage of shoes in the country and the eventual ouster of the autocrat, the revolution known as The Dark Night of the Worn Sole.
The everyday ghosts that were rumored to haunt the village began to appear to the Dictator his second week at the Academy. They sat in a circle around him as he ate figs beneath a tree. The older ghosts looked to him like pieces of burnt paper, crumbling around the edges, and when they walked they made a sound like a pile of leaves skittering. Occasionally one ghost would lift in the air and the others would grab it by the ankles and pull it to the ground. The ghosts mimicked the Dictator's movements, pretending to put figs in their wavering mouths. They offered him pebbles, which he put in his pockets, and then they lay on the ground and began soundlessly to sing. This all made the Dictator vaguely uncomfortable, for he sensed the ghosts were exhausting their limited store of ectoplasm in order to communicate to him something he feared he was unable to comprehend. There was one ghost in particular that caught the Dictator's notice, a boy, a few years younger than him, who had a pronounced cowlick, trembled constantly, and leaned forward as he walked, as if into a gusting storm. This ghost smiled wanly at the Dictator, who suddenly felt heavy with bones.
The next week the Dictator, before he was a dictator, was standing in line with the other would-be dictators, waiting to sign up for classes. Another boy, who was already in possession of a jacket with epaulettes and whose fingers were long and thin and looked like they might melt at the slightest provocation, was urging the Dictator to sign up for a very popular class in Malignant Psychopathic Megalomania, the foundation, really, of the whole course of study and therefore a class best taken early on. The Dictator had not yet decided on the track he wished to pursue. There was the freedom fighter turned ruthless mass murderer, the genocidal xenophobic amphetamine addict, the born-into-wealth confidence man posing as a bootstrap joe, the art school reject, the failed priest turned intellectual, the anarchist-authoritarian-nationalist farmer raised by monks, the totalitarian monarchist with a sense of urgency bred by a war-wounded liver, the shy goat herder turned charismatic anti-imperialist, and the vainglorious drug lord installed by a foreign power as a pawn in a geopolitical game of chicken. As the Dictator mused about the possible dictatorial paths, the boy with the epaulettes briefly caressed the Dictator's cheek with his taper-fingers. The Dictator paused to look at the boy, who said, "Meet me later by the hanging tree." The Dictator considered telling the boy he had a previous engagement, but this was untrue, and so he nodded.
The thing the Dictator was worst at was lying. He was a chronic truth teller, itself a truth he tried to conceal and about which he felt great shame. The truth always came tumbling out of his mouth before he could think to stop it. Shortly before leaving to come to the Academy for Totalitarian Despots, he broke his mother's most prized possession, a porcelain bowl that had been passed down to her through several generations. He gathered the pieces in his hands and, mournfully, confessed his clumsiness to his mother, whose face grew dark. "Is this how you expect to become a dictator, by claiming responsibility for your misdeeds?" she asked. The disappointment that tightened her face caused the Dictator's eyes to brim with regret. The sorrow he felt was complicated, parasitic and insatiable, and he thought he could feel it gnawing at his liver, for he knew he would never be a natural liar. His mother pulled him into her apron tightly, and said, "We shall never speak of this again."
After signing up for classes, all the new students were invited to sit in on an oral examination. An older boy with a sparse inkling of a Vandyke and unnaturally erect posture sat at the head of a table of six examiners.
"What is your favorite color?" asked the first examiner.
The boy paused, fidgeted with the buttons of his suit coat, then responded, "Hitler."
"What is your favorite breakfast food?"
"Mussolini," answered the boy.
"Your favorite car?"
"Stalin."
"Favorite season?"
After a pause, "Pol Pot?" The examiners smiled approvingly.
"Your favorite . . ." They paused, folded their hands on the table, glanced at one another, nodded, then chorused, "constellation?"
The boy's brow furrowed in concentration and he chewed on his lip, and finally he stammered, "Or- Orion?"
The boy immediately scowled at himself, while the examiners stroked their elaborate moustaches, narrowed their eyes made beady from hours of practice, and scribbled on clipboards. The students had three tries to pass the exam, but if they failed to pass it, they became civil servants, circus equestrians, or haberdashers.
That evening, while the Dictator was waiting for the boy with the epaulettes, he thought about what he'd told him earlier. He'd said that while the Academy for Totalitarian Despots was the only well-regarded institute of advanced learning in the village, it was not the only one in the region. There was the International Finishing School for Awkward Spies, the School of Borscht Belt Comedy for Salty Broads, and the Institute for Covertly Coercive Parasites.
As the Dictator sat down beneath the tree, he saw the knobbed knees of a girl standing behind a young poplar too thin to conceal her. The barrel of her spyglass extended past the trunk and made it appear as though the tree were performing surveillance. The girl took a tentative step forward and he saw that she had freckles and hair the color of autumn, and her feet, which were surprisingly large, appeared to get entangled in one another and she stumbled to the ground. Her face reddened and she quickly leapt to her large feet, and with every fleeing step she took, the Dictator heard the click of tiny camera shutters emanating from the heels of her shoes.
The Dictator leaned against the tree and began to pitch sweetgum pods through the loop of the noose. He was six for ten when the trembling ghost with the cowlicked hair appeared beside him. The boy pulsed into place next to him beneath the tree, and the Dictator saw that inside that granulated aura that enveloped the boy, his ghost body was perilously thin. His bony sternum heaved beneath the skin of his chest, which quivered rhythmically like the body of an inching caterpillar. The Dictator didn't know if this was because the boy had been poorly nourished in life or because ghosts are naturally spare, and it seemed to him an impertinent thing to ask a ghost he'd known only a short while. He wasn't entirely sure ghosts would suffer any conversation with the living, and so he gathered some sweetgum balls and showed the ghost boy how to aim them at the noose, but they fell through the boy's fingers whenever he attempted to throw them. The Dictator thought he saw the cowlicked boy's face fall, though it was hard to tell because all parts of the boy seemed to throb insistently. The Dictator felt bad for inadvertently urging the boy to confront the losing battle that is solidity.
They sat together silently and watched as the sun surrendered to evening. The Dictator fell asleep with his head resting on the insubstantial shoulder of the cowlicked ghost, and he awoke when he felt a waxen caress against his cheek. It was the boy with the epaulettes, who asked the Dictator, before he was a dictator, if he wanted to wear his jacket. The Dictator put on the waistcoat, which was blue with a white breast and red cuffs, and it made him think of a preening jay. Once, a few years ago, the Dictator had been attacked by a blue jay as he climbed a tree, and he was so startled by the bird's pugnacious swooping that he fell to the ground. Since then, he had been respectful of birds and their nests and had attached bells to the necks of all the cats in his home village. The Dictator slipped his hand between the gold buttons of the waistcoat and rested it there, as they'd been instructed to do. The boy seemed to grow vague in the absence of his epaulettes, so the Dictator returned the boy's jacket to him, and they walked back to the barracks as the moonlight spangled their path.
The following week, in his Chemical Warfare class, the Dictator sat next to a boy with a pair of pince-nez spectacles balanced on the bridge of his thin nose. The boy took meticulous notes as the teacher lectured. He paused occasionally to adjust his glasses or straighten his cravat, but the Dictator couldn't see that they were ever askew. The boy's fingernails and cuticles were beautifully maintained, reminding the Dictator a little of the headmaster's topiary garden, and he smelled faintly of pine needles, and the Dictator felt if he stared at the boy too long, his own gaze might leave behind a smudge.
What they learned that day in class was that the man who developed the fertilizing method half the world's population depends on to produce food is also the man they call the "father of chemical warfare." It was his pioneering work that led to the weaponization of chlorine and other poisonous gasses. This produced in the Dictator's stomach a feeling like that time he ate two raw potatoes with spiteful haste because they were out of biscuits. So far, the only chemical weapons the students had been able to produce were a spray that made everything smell like pineapple and a gas that caused those who were exposed to it to sigh heavily and emit a sarcastic snort. The Dictator had heard there had been a class long ago that had concocted a gas that caused people to take early retirement, compulsively wear cardigans, and sometimes trip the elderly as they toddled past, but this was an unsubstantiated rumor.
Later that semester the Academy for Totalitarian Despots agreed to host a dance with the other three schools in the area. The boy with the epaulettes told the Dictator that he should be very careful at the dance, for awkward spies, opportunistic parasites, and salty comedians could easily undermine a burgeoning autocrat, but the Dictator was nevertheless cheered by the prospect of meeting other students on a decisive career path.
Since the Academy for Totalitarian Despots was hosting the dance, they got to choose the theme, and they originally picked Come as Your Favorite Kleptocrat, a theme they thought everyone could rally behind, but feedback suggested otherwise, so they settled instead on a pajama party.
The Dictator's pajamas were dark blue with gray stripes, while the other budding despots sported smoking jackets and silk ensembles. All the awkward spies came dressed in black and stumbled into the gymnasium. They spilled the frothy green punch on themselves, which caused the listening devices they carried with them and were planning to bug the Academy with to sizzle into silence. The comedians wore loud prints and gaudily feathered peignoirs, and the parasites, the toxoplasma gondii, came dressed in their hosts, mice and cats. The cats wove themselves in and out of the legs of the partygoers, while the mice darted brashly about. The teachers at the Academy for Totalitarian Despots were aware of the fact that an infection with toxoplasmosis caused their host organisms not only to take unusual risks but also to be less conscientious, and they had long been trying to collaborate with the Institute for Covertly Coercive Parasites, believing, as they did, that they could be useful in subduing the citizens of a fallen democracy. But parasites are stubborn and single-minded, difficult to reason with, and not nearly as vulnerable to manipulation as the brains of rats and humans.
The Dictator stood next to the boy whose dressing gown also boasted epaulettes, and they clapped as the evening's entertainment took the stage, a graduating member of the School of Borscht Belt Comedy for Salty Broads. She delivered a series of husband and father-in-law jokes that fell like lead to the ground and produced nary a chortle. She looked around, assessed her audience, then said, "The doctor gave a parasite six months to live. The parasite couldn't pay its bill so the doctor gave it another six months." The cats began to yowl approvingly and there was a high-pitched tittering from the mice.
"A man whose vision was once infected with amoeba keratitis meets up with it again years later at a bar," said the salty comedian, "and when he sees it sitting on a stool, he exclaims, 'Aren't you a parasite for sore eyes!'" At this the cats groaned.
The comedian spit in her hands, rubbed them together, smoothed back her hair, straightened her boa, and said, "How many awkward spies does it take to change a lightbulb?" And the awkward spies stopped daubing the punch from their pajamas long enough to look up. The comedian shrugged her shoulders and barked, "It's classified!" and several awkward spies laughed so hard their x-ray specs fell into the French onion dip.
"A man walks into a bar and pulls Fidel Castro out of his pocket," said the comedian, "and the barkeep replies, 'Well, hello, sailor! Is that a dictator or are you just happy to see me?'"
The boy in the epaulettes turned to the Dictator, before he was a dictator, and whispered, "Dictator jokes, the last refuge of the unimaginative."
One of the things the Dictator had learned in his Totalitarian Survival Skills class was that a dictator must be humorless at all times and that more than a few had been done in by subversive wiseacres, but the Dictator secretly liked comedians. Comedians, he would one day discover, were, like dictators, frequently woebegone and starved for attention and might well have become dictators themselves had their timing been off, their boots shinier, and their punchlines a little more murderous.
Later in the evening, the Dictator wandered over to the bleachers, where the girl who had clumsily spied on him sat alone. Her expression was one of startled sorrow, as though she'd just awakened from a dream of having been eulogized by a clown. The Dictator had once dreamt of his future funeral, years hence, and he awoke with a start when he passed through the crowd of sobbing mourners and saw only the faces of people he'd never known. The girl leaned on her arm in such a way as to make the Dictator think she might be capable of stumbling even in repose. The Dictator's heart thumped palpably beneath his pajamas, and he sat down next to her.
"I suffer from labyrinthitis," said the girl, in answer to a question it hadn't occurred to the Dictator to ask, "a vestibular disturbance." The Dictator imagined the girl as a wobbly minotaur crashing dizzily about the center of a maze. "I have failed Furtive Surveillance three times," said the girl quietly, and she looked down at her large feet.
The Dictator regretted that his presence had provoked the girl to confess her vocational ineptitude. "I am unable to lie," he offered, and this caused the girl to brighten slightly.
"How will you sow disinformation and turn the public against the media?" asked the girl.
The Dictator was impressed that this up-and-coming spy knew so much about the ins and outs of tyrannical rule. His problematic candor had in fact landed him in a Remedial Propaganda course, whose slogan was What's good for the news is bad for the propaganda, and he'd even been tutored by a body linguist. "They're trying to teach me to speak the truth in a way that at least sounds deceptive and therefore seeds skepticism," said the Dictator, before he was a dictator. "In this way will my enemies and rebel forces be forever kept off-kilter." He cleared his throat, looked into the girl's elliptical eyes, bit his lower lip, then said, in the stammering manner he'd been taught, "You . . . you are . . . captivating?" He cast his eyes to the ceiling—he couldn't recall which direction indicated mendacity and so he looked left then right then left again—put his hand to his mouth, swallowed hard, looked back at the girl.
The girl searched his face and then clapped her hands and grinned. "That's very good!" she exclaimed. "I wouldn't believe you for a minute! You'll make a fine oppressor one day!" The Dictator felt heat crawl up his throat and settle in his cheeks.
Across the gymnasium, the boy with the epaulettes stared at the Dictator and the girl, blinking in a slow and deliberate manner, and his white-lashed eyelids called to the Dictator's mind the milky nictitating membrane that removes debris from the eyes of falcons as they rocket through the air toward prey. "He's a cruel one," whispered the girl, and then she stood up and stole toward the gym door, stumbling over the cinder block that propped it open.
The fledgling dictators returned to their classes, and one of the Dictator's instructors, a former despot himself, asked the Dictator to stay after class one day. The subject of the course was Homicidal Charisma, and the instructor informed the Dictator that he was at the top of the class, that he exuded the sort of charm that could easily persuade people to act and vote against their own interests. "You're a natural," said the teacher. "You possess the velvety élan of one who can harness his megalomania and turn it to great advantage."
"I'm not a good liar," confided the Dictator, and he dropped his head.
The instructor gave out a delighted yip and exclaimed, "You are one of the very few who can get away with telling the truth without it tarnishing your appeal! Indeed it seems only to strengthen your magnetism." Magnetism. The Dictator imagined himself on a stage, at a lectern, with an eager herd of iron filings in the audience, leaning in his direction. He shuddered.
"But here is something even you must bear in mind," said the teacher. "Despots do not get to be despots by promoting their own beliefs, especially those misguided beliefs that are founded on notions of humanity. Pishposh! Despots will not maintain their power for long if they let their minds become polluted with empathy. Fellow feeling leads a dictator down an ever-darkening tunnel." The teacher pursed his mouth and narrowed his eyes as if he'd been made to eat something bitter, wagging a finger metronomically in the air. "You do not wish to become merely an authoritarian populist quasi-crony-capitalist flash in the pan, do you? No, despots become and remain despots by identifying and exploiting the prevailing bigotries of the day, of which there is generally a bounty. Human beings, after all, are willingly poised for atrocity and look for any excuse to activate their endless animus. That is the mission to which you must pledge your considerable charm, my dear boy. See that you do."
The Dictator bowed, clicked his heels, swiveled himself around, as he'd been taught to do in his Authoritarian Comportment class, and marched out the door.
The Dictator, before he was a dictator, had the afternoon off, and he passed the time beneath the hanging tree. The air was beginning to grow crisp, and the Dictator thought he could see the leaves of the trees reddening in response.
The Dictator fell asleep nestled in the tree's weathered roots, and when he awoke, he saw that the ghost boy with the cowlicked hair was asleep with his head resting in the Dictator's lap. What does sleep mean to a ghost? wondered the Dictator. He imagined it must somehow fuel a ghost's vaporous manifestations in the world, which he supposed took a great deal of effort. The Dictator tried to touch the ghost boy's head and felt a vague electricity stirring in his fingers as they swam through the space the ghost boy did and did not occupy. At this the ghost boy's eyes fluttered open and he sat up.
"You look familiar to me," said the Dictator, before he was a dictator. The boy's mouth wobbled uncertainly into a smile. The Dictator had always imagined ghosts would be more disagreeable by nature, having to work so hard to conjure even the gauziest materiality. The boy rose to his feet, like smoke wisping above a snuffed candle, and when he gathered together the tendrils of his inscrutably provisional being, he then began to walk back and forth in front of the tree. The Dictator thought he was trying to pantomime a communiqué, and he observed the boy closely. Even though the ghost's body made the Dictator think of rain rolling erratically down a pane of glass, he could see he was walking with stiff efficiency, and the boy placed his hands flatly on his shoulders and marched in what the Dictator could discern was a goosestep manner.
"The boy with the epaulettes!" cried the Dictator.
The gathering mist of the boy's head moved in such a way as to suggest he was nodding with what passed for vigor in the ghost realm. Strands of his cowlicked hair flopped over the endlessly receding tunnel of the boy's eyes. The ghost boy held his arm out and made what the Dictator surmised was a finger gun. The boy oozed to the other side of the weapon while a diaphanous outline of the gun remained hanging in the air. The gun emitted a fizzy report and the boy, now standing with his hands in the air in front of it, dispersed like a school of silvery fish into which a pebble has been dropped.
"I don't understand," said the Dictator. "The boy with the epaulettes shot you? But he's not even a ruthless despot yet. And I've heard he's doing poorly in his Summary Execution class."
The boy drew on the air a cloud of ghostly particles that shaped themselves into a calendar. The boy tapped the calendar and the pages flew off until a date ten years in the future was arrived at. The Dictator marveled at the fact that ghosts can make theatre of the very ectoplasmic putty of themselves. "You're saying he will execute you in the future?"
At that moment, the ambivalent border of the cowlicked ghost's body grew faint like a picture drawn in disappearing ink and inside his shifting outline appeared the boy with the epaulettes.
"With whom are you speaking?" asked the boy, and he dusted the remaining intimation of ghost from his ornamental shoulders, the golden bullion fringe trembling.
The Dictator looked around, but the ghost boy had evaporated. "No one," said the Dictator, and the boy with the epaulettes tightened his eyes and clucked his tongue appraisingly.
"It's a little early," said the boy with the epaulettes, "to be developing . . . eccentricities."
The Dictator, before he was a dictator, awoke the next morning feeling uneasy. He had been dreaming of the boy with the epaulettes and the cowlicked ghost. They stood in front of one another beneath the hanging tree, the head of the boy with the epaulettes tilted at an adversarial angle. He wore a baldric slung low around his waist, and suddenly he pulled from his scabbard the sword of his index finger, which he plunged into the chest of the cowlicked ghost. The Dictator stood behind the cowlicked boy, and he could see the ghost's body offered little resistance, so the finger continued on through the Dictator's chest, pinning him to the tree and scattering shards of shattered ghost into the air.
In their Malignant Psychopathic Megalomania class that afternoon, they were tasked with performing field work. They were instructed to go outside and locate victims on whom they could practice pinning invented crimes. The teacher told them that any living thing would do and that they should keep their megalomaniacal ambitions modest for the time being. Some students returned with ants, some with garter snakes, and the more ambitious came back with angry cats. The Dictator, who was only just beginning to realize that not being able to lie might be the least of his worries, returned with a ladle of pond water bearing several water striders zipping frantically across its surface. He hoped their messianic ability to trip lightly across the water might save them from a fatal outcome. The boy with the epaulettes came back with a townsperson in tow, a young boy whose tufted hair reminded the Dictator of a sweetgum pod. The boy with the epaulettes had found this boy digging in the dirt by the hanging tree and had snatched him by the collar and dragged him into the classroom. The teacher frowned at the boy with the epaulettes, but the Dictator could see beneath the reproachful arch of his eyebrows he was secretly pleased at the boy's despotic initiative and his willful flouting of the instructions.
When the Dictator looked at the boy more closely, he had the nagging feeling that they'd met before, and then it struck him: this boy trembled like a sickly sparrow and had a pronounced and distinctive cowlick. He was several years younger, but the Dictator could see this was the boy whose acquaintance he had made in the form of his future ghost. This was the boy the boy with the epaulettes would one day shoot, that execution launching the boy with the epaulette's career as a tyrant.
For the rest of the class, the students performed a clumsy interrogation of the ants and the snakes and the feral cats, the aphids, rabbits and lichen, skinks, caddis flies, voles, spider mites, green lacewings, tree frogs, river rocks (a controversial choice of quarry, impervious to torment), the water striders and the boy with the cowlick. As the boy with the epaulettes prodded and badgered his victim, he stared not at the tremulous boy but at the Dictator, and the boy with the cowlick also gazed up at the Dictator, imploringly, and then eventually he broke, quietly weeping, confessing to any crime the boy with the epaulettes accused him of committing. The teacher restrained his prideful beaming, and the Dictator, before he was a dictator, could see this was the beginning of the kind of random enmity that would persist and could only result in a fatal resolution.
So it was the Dictator who this time invited the boy with the epaulettes to meet him that evening at the hanging tree. As the sun slid behind the distant hills, he leaned against the tree and was startled to discover that the clumsy spy had sidled up stealthily beside him. "How did you do that?!" asked the Dictator.
The girl blushed and whispered, "My vertigo has remitted." She looked around her and behind the tree. "Don't tell," she said.
The Dictator smiled at her and she exhaled with relief. "Look," said the girl and she pointed to the branch of the hanging tree from which the noose dangled. The ghost boy sat there swinging his blowy legs. "You see him?" asked the Dictator, and the no-longer-awkward spy nodded her head. "I have keen eyesight," she said and smiled. "And my grandmother is a magical crone. She taught me to see what other people convince themselves isn't there." The girl leaned toward him and said, in a confidential timber, "There are many kinds of spies in the world."
The ghost boy leapt from the branch and lilted to the ground, causing the noose to shiver. His hair was all the more disheveled, his cowlick more pronounced, as though he'd just awakened from a fitful nap. The ghost boy tried to gather sweetgum pods from the ground, but he still could not summon the necessary solidity with which to hold them, and they fell through his fingers. The boy's body lapped at the farthest shores of himself and he slumped. The girl licked her finger and smoothed the boy's hair. This tenderness seemed to cause him to take on weight and assume a decisive contour, just for a second.
The boy with the epaulettes was strolling toward them, his hands clasped behind his back, black boots glinting in the evening light. The Dictator turned to the girl and the ghost, but the boy seemed to ebb and the girl withdrew with a noiseless grace the Dictator hoped would not jeopardize her place at the International Finishing School for Awkward Spies.
A tiny embryo of apprehension began to pulse in the Dictator's abdomen. The boy with the epaulettes stood in front of him with posture so taut he arched in a way that seemed gymnastic. The Dictator saw on the boy's upper lip the mere suggestion of a thin moustache.
"I want you to leave the boy with the cowlick alone," said the Dictator. "And his family. I want you to take your tyranny elsewhere, when the time comes."
A faint smile crept onto the face of the boy with the epaulettes. He stroked his chin, practice for that time in the not so distant future when it would sport a scrupulously sculpted beard, the last thing upon which his victims would cast their eyes. "Or what?"
"Please," said the Dictator, before he was a dictator, taking a tact frowned upon by the Academy for Totalitarian Despots. "Please."
The boy with the epaulettes snorted disdainfully, and he tapped a long, thin finger against the Dictator's chest. "I do not think you are cut out to be a career despot," said the boy with the epaulettes in a low growl that reminded the Dictator of a thunderhead rolling in overhead. "I do not think you have it in you to . . . neutralize the many threats to your authority that you will encounter. The corruption in you is weak," and he looked up at the noose that hung above them.
Behind the boy with the epaulettes appeared the cowlicked ghost, who hung in the air in a way the Dictator could only describe as sorrowful, and the Dictator reached out to the face of the boy with the epaulettes and held his cheeks in his hands, and he marveled at how oddly warm they felt, feverish, and then he snapped his neck.
The boy with the epaulettes fell tidily to the ground, and the Dictator peered into the face of the cowlicked ghost, growing faint in the waning light. He saw in its place his own face, his own dimming eyes, and something else, an expression of . . . reluctant satisfaction? A look that would haunt him in those moments of secret dejection to come.
The Dictator, having finally become a dictator, would still never be able to lie compellingly and would, for the rest of his days, be of two minds about every life he took. Some days he would sit in silent colloquy amidst the ever increasing herd of the slain, their billowing remnants. And then there were those impending ghosts, seeking to save their still beating hearts, filling the atmosphere with their winsome futility, and whose futurity he regretted he would one day bring to an end. But it was himself the Dictator would spend every day of his life trying, and failing, to save.