Work Text:
The thing about being a prodigal son is, everyone expects this of you.
This: the leaving, the returning. The tipping over of chairs, the lighting of the barn on fire, the collapsing later in daddy’s arms with a sob. The accidental killing of a drugged-up waiter—a dramatization, perhaps, but a filling of the expected narrative nonetheless. What did Hal do, while his father was preoccupied with matters of state? Drank, laughed, ran wild through the countryside. And then: the death of a father. Throw off the old nickname and demeanor like an old cloak, like a snake molting for spring, skin shining and fangs newly-sharp. Henry V returns and rises, sprawls on the throne like it was made for him because of course it always was, calls his troops into battle on the back of a white horse. Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George.
Or something like that, anyway. It’s been years since Kendall read Shakespeare.
Kendall kisses his father on the cheek.
This is easy, he way the weight falls. Chapped lips to wrinkled skin. Rava always used to carry lip balm in her purse, a little yellow column with the cap halfway to slipping off. She’d offer it to Kendall in the car on the way to important dinners, their hands meeting with something like a smile. He wonders if she still has it. I should call her, he thinks. But, of course, he won’t.
It’s stupid to think of Rava here, now. Kissing his father on the cheek, bending like a knight taking a knee, paying homage to a king. Lear made his children bow like this, didn’t he? Say how much you love me, say you know what my kingdom is worth, and I’ll give it to you. Two sisters spin pretty palaces out of their false affection, and Honest Cordelia is left in the cold. Kent loses his stature, Gloucester loses his eyes. The only one Lear trusts is the Fool.
Their mother, Kendall’s and Roman’s and Shiv’s, she used to make them study Shakespeare. Those American schools don’t teach you to really understand his poetry, she said. They can make you repeat lines and mark iambic pentameter on the chalkboard, but to truly dig into the emotion you must step inside it, and so they played out scenes whenever they visited her. Logan even joined sometimes, his rough voice stumbling over the corners of the stanzas. Kendall remembers—the brush of lips against a cheek, thirteen years old with his tiny hand in Logan’s big one, calloused from decades of gripping too tight and throwing too far. Playing at Old Gloucester and his son Edgar at the Cliffs of Dover. Only after Edgar has let Gloucester believe he killed himself does he say, it’s me, Father. You can touch me. I am here.
Logan refused to fall properly, when they played it out in Caroline’s tiny living room. Said he didn’t want to lie on the rug. So they had him sink into an armchair instead, one of the old leather ones, and he delivered the rest of his lines with a scotch in hand.
Kendall cried when he read Lear’s ending. It’s stupid, but he did. Snot bubbling up and everything. His mother patted his back and explained that another poet later adapted the play with a second ending, one in which Cordelia lives and rebuilds the country with Edgar. Anything is possible in fiction, she said. The greedy old man can be redeemed, if his children help.
Kendall looked up that second ending, years later. He likes the original better. It’s more realistic.
I am not what I am, Iago says.
Othello: now there’s a play about power and paranoia. It takes the evil advisor all of ten minutes to convince his General that the new wife is adulterous and deserves to die. It’s a twisting of language, mesmerizing as it is despicable: take each of Desdemona’s loving glances and flip them like teacups of delicate porcelain stacked in a pyramid, one tiny push and the whole palace shatters. Logan never had porcelain as a kid but Kendall and his siblings stained or cracked buckets of it and he remembers sitting in a darkened theater, seventeen years old, so close to college or some kind of escape and still watching his father’s profile instead of the actors, watching Logan’s eyes widen and his throat work to stifle a laugh.
Desdemona deserved it, Logan said in the car going home. For failing to fight back. Othello deserved his deception, for being noble. Iago deserved the kingdom.
He didn’t say this, really, not in so many words, but Kendall saw it in the hard lines of his reflection in the car window, felt it it in the tightening of Logan’s hand on his shoulder as they walked back to the house, Kendall unsteady on his feet after hours in the darkness or maybe the joint he smoked in the bathroom at intermission.
Goodnight, son, Logan said, and Kendall wondered what he wasn’t hearing, there in the spaces between the sounds.
Hamlet did it all for his father.
That’s what he says, anyway. Professes it all in pretty speeches. This, too, is a twisting of language: turning words on their heads, pivoting and pivoting like a ballerina on a slick wood floor until the sounds are only that, sounds, vague collections of lips and tongues. Nothing with meaning. Did you know that Hamlet has the most speeches of any character in a single Shakespeare play? Words, words, words, or some such bullshit. Three hundred fifty-eight speeches, that’s what it takes to make a single decision when your uncle has poisoned your father and you’re a fucking pansy who has never really put on a suit of armor in his life.
Yeah, Hamlet had it easy enough. His father was noble enough. Imagine it like this: your uncle has poisoned your father, only your uncle and your father are shades of the same tyrant, throne painted red one day and black the next. You could stab him, you could kiss him. It’s all shades of the same violence.
To be or not to be, huh. To shit your pants or to stand and scream—that’s more like it.
I'm not gonna jump out the window, Kendall tells Greg in the airplane.
Where would he go, anyway? He’s no use to anyone forty thousand feet in the air. If he were to kill himself—and he’s not, but if he were—he would do it with something clean, like a bullet, or a good old-fashioned sword. Maybe jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, if he were high enough. But he’s not, he’s not, he still has work to do.
When Greg gets back from the bathroom, Kendall is staring at his hands. What’s Lady Macbeth’s line? Out, damned spot?
Has Logan Roy ever faced a goddamn spot of blood? Ever, in his life? Or is it all cleaned up before he gets there, paved over with fake grass and chilled champagne. No real person involved.
Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. It’s simple. Throw the knife without looking to see where it will land, follow the prophecy without any shred of interpretive thought, and all your skeletons will come back to bite you in the ass. Everyone knows that fucking tomorrow speech, but nobody remembers that Macbeth delivers it because his wife has killed herself.
She should have died hereafter. What a fucking maniac.
Kendall Roy has two scripts.
One: typeset on thick paper, fourteen point font for ease of reading, Waystar Royco letterhead at the top. Two: stack of index cards covered in slanted pen. Words are crossed out, letters bleed into each other. That could be a B or a K or even an R, yeah, he’d be fucked if it weren’t for context clues. Two scripts. Count ‘em. Two scripts, ten mics, fifteen copies of classified documents in the folder clutched to Greg’s chest. Millions—he does the calculation real quick to calm down, say six hundred thousand on ATN, four hundred on MSNBC, three hundred on CNN, five hundred on Twitter and other assorted livestreams, and that’s, yeah, one point eight million people watching, give or take a few hundred thousand. Right. No problem. His hands aren’t even shaking.
You have to be a killer, Logan said.
Kendall estimates it will take an hour for the first articles to go up. Some rapid-fire blog without oversight—the New York Post, maybe, or wherever those Vaulter hippies have skulked off to—will slap a catchy headline on it and report his words verbatim. Give or take a gif of his face when he switches to script number two. New York Times, Washington Post, AP, those fuckers take longer. They like to bleed the story like Middle Ages plague doctors for its marrow, fact-check and add context and analysis and as many backlinks as their servers can handle. Still, a couple of hours, and his face will be plastered on every major news outlet. His voice will play over the nightly talk shows. He’ll trend on Twitter. A few more days, and he’ll be the star of analysis segments, podcasts, weekly briefings. Maybe, fuck it, maybe he’ll trend on Twitter again.
It’s been years since Kendall read Shakespeare. But that shit sticks with you, gets under your skin and emerges when you least expect it, like eczema or Keynesian economics. He knows how the media will spin this. Kendall Roy Attacks CEO Logan for Years of Corruption. Prodigal Son Disrupts Family Legacy to Restore Credibility. That’s how Hamlet ends, right? And Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, even Titus fucking Andronicus. The spilled blood sinks into the ground, the seedlings sprout forth from the soil, and a new castle is built on the bones. Order out of chaos, or at least close enough an approximation that the tabloids will buy it.
Cassius said it, when he was washing his hands from Caesar’s blood. How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over, in states unborn and accents yet unknown. We will be remembered, we will be lionized. We will be turned to ink and brought to life and turned to ink again.
Kendall knows how history will spin this. Golden boy, noble son. Rises like a motherfucking phoenix, wings taped over with scars, to pull his family from the ashes.
I think you might be under a misapprehension, Senator, Kendall said. In this country, all news, from the Times to the supermarket tabloid, is for profit.
And this is his profit. This, now. This silence, between his last words echoing in the mics and the clamor of the reporters.
This is how he will be remembered.