As I said before, it was not that Michelle spoke up in public. Her very presence beside the obscure J.B. was enough to make anyone reevaluate the man at her side. To J.B.’s embarrassment, he was suddenly on the cover of Business Week and Forbes, billed as the man behind GGG, with an exclusive article following him around the Matacão, through the corridors of GGG and onto his private plane. The tabloids leaked the news that J.B. had proposed to Michelle Mabelle. Their marriage was touted with great fanfare. Soon they appeared cheek-to-cheek on the cover of People, were featured in an interview in Cosmopolitan in which he and Michelle were asked pointblank whether sex with three arms was indeed everything it was rumored to be, and followed unremittingly by Robin Leach and his camera for a spot on Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.
Robin Leach was forced to dump most of the footage because J.B. actually led a rather dull life, aside from his physical escapades with Michelle, which were, of course, untapeable. Footage of Michelle’s exotic and extravagant bird collection and Napoleon eating slices of Camembert in J.B.’s penthouse condo was kept, but the newfangled Matacão plastic projects, the abandoned 9.99 stuff, and J.B.’s clip collection really had very little stylish appeal, especially as everything was arranged in the haphazard fashion of a tropical forest.
There was a particularly romantic scene where the cameras caught J.B. giving Michelle a tiny jewel box. “Oh, Jonathan,” Michelle cooed. “You shouldn’t have.”
J.B. glowed lovingly as Michelle removed its velveteen cover and discovered the solid-gold diamond-studded paper clip within. Leach kept the footage of the sunrise over the Matacão, aerial views of the Amazon forest from J.B.’s personal helicopter, and Michelle’s habitual early-morning trek through the forest as she sighted riverside cormorants, egrets, and spoonbills. Leach also shot a lot of footage of Michelle Mabelle as she worked with Paris designers on custom clothing to promote her special attributes, but it was too much trouble to go to Hong Kong to interview Huang, who had been J.B.’s tailor ever since J.B. could remember requiring a suit to go job hunting.
J.B. and Michelle were soon the target of an enormous amount of gossip, mostly regarding their sexual lives. Both were approached on numerous occasions to pose in the nude. Despite a certain perversity that their extra extensions aroused, there were some positive results. The growing curiosity about extra arms and breasts brought hundreds of closet cases with extra fingers, toes, tails, etc. into the public light. These people, suddenly liberated by J.B. and Michelle’s obvious success and fame, congregated in large and small groups to proclaim their rights before a society that had relegated them to freak shows. The trialectics movement, known colloquially as the “freak movement,” with its call for freak rights and so forth, turned out to be an enormous and heretofore unknown contingency for politicians to respond to. (The term trialectics, first coined by J.B., was immediately given a larger meaning to encompass the physical as well as philosophical basis for J.B.’s original ideas.) While Michelle Mabelle supported the freak movement with generous donations and public appearances, J.B. felt no empathy with the painful self-consciousness most of these people spoke of. He had always felt that he was one of the more privileged human beings, a more advanced specimen. It was only a matter of time, to him, before other human beings with only two arms or two breasts would begin to feel inadequate.
Public rapture over the love affair of J.B. and Michelle Mabelle seemed for the moment to raise a transparent but impenetrable barrier of Matacão plastic between the couple and what environmentalists were generally calling the rape of Mother Nature. As with all such charismatic people, the media surrounded J.B. and Michelle like adoring handmaidens and makeup artists, transforming warmongers into peacemakers, criminals into saints, the inept into the apt, the empty into the full. How, for example, could an ornithologist, a French ornithologist at that, who kept an aviary of tropical and rare birds inside her apartment, who trekked daily into the forest to look for new species, be anything but a lover of birds? When Michelle Mabelle tearfully told reporters of her anger over the illegal sale of rare feathers, everyone agreed that she was concerned. “Buyers must take the care and time,” Michelle emphasized in her melodic voice, “to discover the origin of their feathers. They should use a respected brand like GGG, which only deals in the legal farming of feathers and supports serious scientific research and the preservation and study of all birds. Since GGG committed itself to generous grants to ornithologists all over the world, hundreds of new species have been identified! To other such illegal feathers, you must just say, ‘Non!’”
Then, there was the growing concern over the mining process of Matacão plastic. The chemical runoff from GGG’s secret technique had been collected and analyzed and found to cause genetic mutations in rats after five generations. The mutations were most bizarre and grotesque. Rats were found to develop fangs and tiny horns and an eager appetite for blood. The idea of vampire rats caused a shudder of horror and speculation about a tropical Transylvania. However, some later generations were found to sport extra appendages—research that J.B. followed with particular interest. Such aberrations of the general mutation process caused by Matacão mining runoff gave J.B. reason to justify the pollutant. The GGG official write-ups stated, “GGG Enterprises has a firm policy of environmental concern. All runoff from Matacão mining is collected, encapsulated in stainless-steel containers, and sealed at strategic disposal locations. GGG’s disposal locations will not impact the social or environmental structure as they are usually spaces made vacant by the mining itself. Sophisticated collection procedures guarantee a 98.2 percent collection of runoff material. Additionally, research and development is proceeding to find methods to extract and employ the currently known benefits from runoff.”
While Michelle Mabelle bathed warmly in the public limelight, J.B. twitched uncomfortably. He was typically terse and uncommunicative, which somehow got translated as subtle and mysterious. He would not have accepted all this attention except for Michelle. He and his third arm owed everything to her, but he was now in constant fear of finding himself deposed from the top, lopped off the twenty-third floor of GGG. It had happened to Geoffrey and Georgia; it could happen to him. Having exposed his hand, as it were, there was no department, no obscure clerical or unnecessary managerial position in which to hide. He constantly dialogued with the American magpie Butch and even attempted for a time to “jus’ chill out,” as was the magpie’s usual suggestion. “I’m trying, Butch,” J.B. insisted. “I’m really trying.”
To which the magpie replied, “Love is a many-splendored thing.”
“Yeah, Butch, yeah.”
“Splendid. Splendid.”
“Yeah.”
“Love love love.”
“Yeah,” J.B. agreed. “Love love love.” What else could he do but ride those currents from obscurity to fame? As with Michelle Mabelle, everything was obscured for the moment by love. So after those initial and passionate serenades, poses, flaps, and thrusts, J.B. and Michelle Mabelle nestled comfortably in their plexiglass high-rise overlooking the Matacão, cooing contentedly among the birds, rearranging plastic objects, clips, and old 9.99 oddities. J.B. wrapped all three arms around her. She was pregnant, and it looked like triplets. Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité.