triumphing over the more sexual, “animal” challenger, it seemed uncertain to all present that the head resident could defeat the “Prince” using the tools at his disposal — a stethoscope, some pens, and a pager. It’s difficult to determine, though, what kind of damage the resident may have been capable of inflicting with these devices, since, according to his own account, when confronted with the fierce and gruesome “Prince,” who “smelled like burning rubber and had white stuff hanging off his beard,” he froze, then mutely raised a traitorous arm to point to the supply closet where the Princess and the rest of the staff were hiding.
The Prince wrenched open the door with a huge paw, and out popped the Princess.
According to the staff, the Princess screamed with a high-pitched yelp when the Prince grabbed her, smearing her lovely Renaissance-style dress with grease. The records note that the Prince and the Princess together presented quite an odd picture, one that brought to mind “a nightmare creature clawing a plate of petit fours” (Petix, 2002). The Princess is reported to have said, “It’s okay,” and, “No, but I want to go with him, really,” and, “He’s my old man!” in a tone of tense brightness, but the staff plainly did not believe her and theorized that she was simply trying to “appease her oppressor” in order to minimize the likelihood of domestic violence. Before the staff was able to contact the authorities, the “Prince” settled himself astride his hog and pulled the Princess up behind him.
The Prince and Princess roared out of the building and vanished into the night in a cloud of exhaust.
After the Prince and Princess had departed, the staff grumbled that the head resident had behaved “most cowardly,” and complained that the Princess had been “sacrificed,” to be “whisked off to a prefabricated house where everything is always fast and tinged with madness, or else dark and sad and falling asleep.” Much of the staff argued that something should have been done to help the girl, though some felt it was the curse of the phylum Princess to be always at the mercy of one prince-type or another, and that her best chance was to save herself, which seemed unlikely. The resident, for his part, quickly aligned himself with the phlebotomist, agreeing that the Princess was “just an addict” who had come in “exhibiting drug-seeking behavior anyway,” and implying, in word and action, that drug addicts were by nature less than human and so deserved whatever nasty fate they got. Then he skulked off down a fluorescent-lit hallway with his hands shoved into his pockets.
Though he wore the silver bell around his neck to the end of his days.
At the same time that I wrote this story for my friend, the poet Richard Siken, I was doing a lot of research into the production of crystal meth (I wish I could say I was setting up a clandestine lab, but it was a writing project). This was back when the Internet was not the rich vein of drug information it is today, so I was forced to actually go to the library and browse the stacks. Deep within the university’s compact shelving units, I found a pile of sociology journals that dealt with the subject of methamphetamine abusers. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant sociologists doing trenchant work on the mores of drug use, but what I found was a deposit of dry, heavily footnoted prose about tweakers. These papers were so good. I was so happy. It’s probably always inadvertently funny when sex, drugs, and rock and roll are subjected to rigorous academic study, but the articles I found were so funny, and so credulous, that it was sort of moving. Beneath the footnotes and citations, the naivete of the researchers shone through with touching clarity.
Though this wasn’t the information I needed, I was so fascinated that I took notes in the library all afternoon. I could see the researchers sitting at plastic tables, interviewing a series of addled, strung-out dirtbags who bounced their knees and fiddled their pencils while they answered questions. And as I read, I began to notice that some of the facts didn’t ring true. It began to dawn on me that a lot of this information wasn’t very accurate. And really, why would it be? I’d guess that meth heads are not a particularly truthful bunch. I was especially taken by the unlikely drug slang they’d concocted, presented in heartbreaking italics, probably verbatim — so stupid, so obvious and colorful. I wondered if the researchers were really so easily fleeced, or just so desperate to publish that they didn’t care? (I was hoping fleeced.) I used some of these terms in the story and made up a few more of my own. Now I’m not sure which is which, an indication of how absurd the slang was.
I hadn’t planned to write a story based on these academic articles, but when I began to write a fairy tale for Richard Siken, I found myself considering the natural intersection between fairy tales, drug-induced psychosis, and gullible scientists. After all, we may think we know the world as it is, but most of our human experiences suffer from a lack of empirical data. The truth is useful, but half-truths have the allure of the shadows on the edge of sleep, or the swirl of a chemical high. This is the only place where most of us get to meet mythical beings such as witches, fairies, monsters, princesses, and trustworthy drug addicts. Maybe we all only believe what we want to believe in the end.
NEIL GAIMAN. Orange
(Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire)
1. Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.
2. 17 on June the 9th.
3. The last 5 years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).
4. I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.
5. An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin(TM), and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Colored Bubbles (not actually™ yet).
6. Two. My sister Nerys, who was just 15, and my brother Pryderi, 12.
7. Several times a day.
8. No.
9. Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.
10. She’s been buying colors and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly colored Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.
11. It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins(™) money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.
12. I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned 13 she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.
13. Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-colored, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.
14. Tangerine Girl. The Oompaloompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.
15. Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little quick- time films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.
16. German measles, mumps and I think Pryderi had chicken pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the
