Oliver Benjamin
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I deliver coffee.”
She hesitated and then in the same way that she did with Roy,
Sprout took Niles’ head in her hands and kissed him with an
unqualified affection. A staggering amount of fresh chemicals
flooded his bloodstream, hurling him over topographies of desire and
emotion, no different than as if he had injected a powerful drug
directly into his vein. Only that drug felt exactly like life itself and he
burned with it.
He tried to kiss her again, but she had already pushed him into
the center of the room. The others looked up to hear what he had to
say. They had not seen the buss and so mistook his new luminosity
for inspiration.
This was unfamiliar to Niles; he had always the outsider. But now
he looked at the faces of his melancholy fellows, arguably farther on
the outside than he himself, and wondered if perhaps he had not
been blessed in a way. He had grown up in a country where
absolutely nothing was taken for granted. Here it was the opposite:
what was not already granted was promised. And when everything
was a forgone conclusion, it might as well already be gone. The
perceived world was disappearing under their feet.
“Look,” Niles began, “I know this all might seem hopeless. We’re
small and Biddenbrooks is huge. We’re weak and he’s strong. Our
leader is a marked man. And we’re not the best warriors in the world.
But neither were the Maroons, the Jamaican Wild Men. Freedom
fighters. They were a dirty, hungry and natty bunch that hung out in
the Blue Mountains and picked off the English oppressors with the
world’s first organized guerilla warfare. What made them strong was
their appetite. They beat their enemies not because they wanted to,
but because they had to. If you want to save this place, you’re going
to have to stop drowning your sorrows and start raining them down
on Bidden.”
“Empires fall, Niles,” Partment assured him, “but it takes a long
time.”
“What if we got on the inside,” Niles suggested. “Does anyone
know anybody who works at Biddenbrooks?”
“A secretary at Biddenbrooks was a regular at the Crystal Ship,”
Leona admitted, “I used to read her palm.”
“Great,” Niles said, “See if you can locate her, Leona.”
“How did Rome fall anyway?” Colin asked. “Too many orgies?”
“The Germans,” Leona answered.
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