INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

By

Angela Woodward

Three years ago, my husband gave me two-thirds of an exceptionally beautiful and sacred mountain. I disputed whether he owned it in the first place, but I accepted through treaty his offer of the majority portion.

The mountain lay on the northern border of a country I had intricately imagined a year earlier. I visualized it at first as a topographical map, hillocks and indentations mostly shrouded in mist. But gradually it became clearer to me, and I filled it with barley fields and tin mines, forests, a few largish towns, and many pleasant hamlets. I gave it a capital city, a system of decaying highways, a library, a river port. I considered placing a benign queen in charge, but then named it the Free Republic of Marmoral, and put it under the auspices of a hereditary oligarchy of thieves.

I peopled the towns with several tribes of conflicting religions and a useful urban poor. The countryside remained quiet and green, more of a mystery. I used to tell my husband about it, back when we leaned against each other in the evenings, and sometimes he would ask if he could add a little bit—a touristy waterfall, a rare species of hummingbird. "I don't think that's quite right," I said.

At first I thought all of Marmoral might be high in the mountains, the air thin and piercing, almost unbreathable to outsiders. But that began to seem trite to me, too toylike. I wanted something more graspable. Unfortunately, by the time I had imagined the holy mountain on the northern border, my husband had laid claim to his own land.

His country straddled the mountain and then sprawled off into a chain of foothills beyond. But because his country's rulers were a long-standing warlike people, he told me they had seized the mountain in its entirety some three thousand years before I came on the scene. My people, he said, could gaze at the heights on clear days. Every August 11 we could climb to the temple in the grotto and drink a special holiday herbal tea. But for the rest of the year, we were not to set foot on it. His government policed the border fence vigilantly, and practiced target shooting on Marmolian goats that strayed over.

For weeks I cried and begged, and then I began to pay attention to a budding aeronautics industry in the central district. After work, after supper, I lay back in my chair, eyes fixed on the cobwebs on the wall, and imagined a few Marmolians educated abroad, who returned to start a commercial jet factory in a town known before only for apples and dark beer. My husband spent his time at the kitchen table, perhaps looking for inspiration for his country from the swirls in the formica. He finally made a peace offering. Not half but two-thirds of the holy mountain would belong to Marmoral. All he asked was the loan of some of my engineers, and that I would help him maintain good relations with the vast country to our south.

I knew nothing about this other place. It cropped up overnight. Everything was new there, torn down every couple years and built again, the door handles on the squalid highrises polished, the street lights a hideous burning blue, the trains eerily silent and fast. These southerners bought a fleet of Marmoral airplanes, but then reverse engineered them and made their own. They poured acids down the rivers and dumped infected sheep carcasses over the border. They began making demands—their cigarettes should be stocked in our corner markets, our corner markets should be bought up by their grocery chain, we should watch their movies and educational newscasts, our government of thieves should resign. They didn't bother my husband's country in the same way, maybe because he sent them a steady flow of young women to be nannies, maids, and prostitutes.

"It's not fair," I said, as he walked with me to the video store. "What do they want?"

He professed he couldn't tell me. My Marmoral was a buffer between his country and the Southern Empire, so it didn't seem to matter to him.

One night he handed me a document claiming mineral rights to the sacred mountain. He had granted me the surface, but not what lay under the ground. He wanted as well a percentage of the proceeds from the restaurants and lodges near the summit, which were always filled to bursting near the August 11 holiday. He also demanded rights to the holiday itself, which his people had inaugurated in their urbanity and wisdom when my people were nothing more than a few families of ignorant herders. The monks in the monastery were to pledge allegiance to his country, which had been their ancestral home before the civil war in the last century. Signs were to be printed in two languages. This was already the case, but he wanted it strictly enforced, with inspections and monetary penalties.

"My love," I said. "It was a gift."

But I could see by the hard set of his eyes that the circumstances had changed.