By the time GGG researchers and scientists discovered the true nature of the Matacão and developed a reasonable hypothesis for its existence, Kazumasa had disappeared. The Matacão, scientists asserted, had been formed for the most part within the last century, paralleling the development of the more common forms of plastic, polyurethane, and styrofoam. Enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth had undergone tremendous pressure, pushed ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle. The liquid deposits of the molten mass had been squeezed through underground veins to virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon forest, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty.
Kazumasa did not care how the Matacão or the plastic had gotten on Earth. None of these explanations seemed to have any connection to him or to me. The fact that the Matacão was made of nonbiodegradable garbage seemed to have very little bearing on me or my ability to detect large masses of the plastic stuff. Kazumasa felt he had had enough of Matacão plastic, intrigue, and danger. He stared cross-eyed at me with a certain sinister irritation but eventually relented. It was not my fault. One did not simply separate oneself from a lifetime of close proximity. Kazumasa felt ashamed of his desire to be released from me; I was actually looking rather haggard and even, Kazumasa detected, sad these past few days. We had certainly been through some trying times.
Ironically, Kazumasa and I were rescued from all those agents and counter agents by J.B. Tweep himself. From his helicopter, J.B. had spotted Kazumasa and me running from the tragic scene of Chico Paco’s murder. J.B. hid us in the confines of his penthouse apartment with the clip collection and all the 9.99 artifacts.
Michelle’s exotic collection of birds and their cages and the bird caretaker were all conspicuously absent, as was Michelle and the Tweep triplets. Michelle Mabelle had remained through the typhus epidemic despite the danger to her newborns. She had remained like foreigners often remain in war zones and military dictatorships, writing home to their friends and families to tell how the situation isn’t as bad as the press makes it out to be, strangely immune to the turbulence surrounding them. But allowing the birds to die had been the end, the unforgivable end, she told her husband. She did not wait to see the slaughter of the tropical birds, their thick, stinking blanket of corpses covering the Matacao. She swept up her three chubby babes and all the birds and their cages and had everything transported via private jet back to her birthplace in southern France.
J.B. had run to the airport, gesticulating with all three hands in a helpless penitent manner as the airplane lifted off and carried them away from the Matacão forever. Long after the plane had gone, J.B. wept on the tarmac, wringing two hands and wiping his tears and blowing his nose with the third. He emptied all his pockets, scattering clips everywhere. “Liberté!” he cried. “Égalité! Fraternité!”
But Michelle was gone, and there was nothing J.B. could do about it. They had had a last irreparable argument about nature VS. technology. He had said unforgivable things about French breasts and culture and she about uncouth American arms. J.B. could not convince Michelle that birds reproduced on a production line were ultimately more valuable to mankind. “Just think of the jobs we would create!” he had exclaimed. J.B. remembered the horror in Michelle’s face. She would not even let him touch his own three babies. She threatened to get plastic surgery and donate her third breast to an organ bank. “You are a monster!” she had screamed. “I am not a monster. No. No!” she cried, hurling a rash of French expletives at J.B.
“At least she could have left Butch,” J.B. confessed to Kazumasa and me, even though we did not understand any of J.B.’s personal traumas. We were simply relieved to be hidden at the quiet center of the mad tornado surrounding us. We cowered in this center helplessly, frightened by the horrible death of Chico Paco in Kazumasa’s stead and despondent about the attempt to get Kazumasa’s ball by snatching it from his dead body. “If I could remove you myself,” Kazumasa grabbed me in demonstration, “there would be at least some chance of hiding you somewhere.”
After several days of wandering around J.B. Tweep’s apartment, among those 9.99 artifacts, Kazumasa and I were removed to a new hiding place attached to Hiro’s Karaoke. Kazumasa resisted mightily his desire to rush into Hiro’s and burst into song. His resistance to this urge was greatly reduced by the arrival of Lourdes. In a moment saturated with all the romance that any soap opera could possibly muster, Lourdes and Kazumasa fell passionately into one another’s arms, actually forgetting that I even existed.
When Lourdes emerged from that embrace, she remembered the horror of the past few days, the terrible moment when Kazumasa and I exchanged ourselves for the lives of her children and the death of Chico Paco and of Gilberto. She shuddered at the thought of her own dreams, the vision of the murderers dragging Kazumasa’s dead body around with the ball which would never detach itself. She would be the same, she thought, like the ball. She would attach herself forever to Kazumasa; those murderers would have to drag her dead body around, too.
But it was Lourdes who first noticed something physically different about me. Kazumasa had felt a slight light-headedness, and certainly, my attraction to the Matacão was more than noticeably weak. That Kazumasa had not been thrown by my attraction onto the hard surface of the Matacão that fateful Saturday night was a definite indication of my diminished abilities. Kazumasa imagined that I was suffering from the stress of our travels or the psychological trauma of our isolation and the obvious danger involved. There was, too, the fact that so many things were now made of Matacão plastic; anything built or devised within the last several years might no doubt have been created out of Matacão plastic. My energies were conceivably dispersed. But perhaps my powers of magnetism to the Matacão were actually waning, thought Kazumasa with relief. J.B. could arrange some sort of press conference, a public statement to impress upon everyone, those agents and counter-agents, those greedy and power-hungry murderers, that I was now only a worthless object of curiosity. But this was not necessary.
“Look, Kazumasa,” Lourdes pointed at me one morning. “It looks lopsided today.” Kazumasa could not quite see the difference, but he did notice I was spinning with a sort of awkward limp, if balls could be described as having limps. I no longer spun with my old snappy precision but with a sort of dizzy unpredictable turning, like a planet losing its star. On closer inspection, Lourdes and Kazumasa discovered that I was no longer quite spherical and that I seemed fraught with tiny holes. At night, Kazumasa was tormented by what he thought must be his dreaming impressions of the sound of something chewing.
“Lourdes!” he screamed. “It’s eating my ball!”
It was true. Something was eating me, carving out delicate pinhole passages, which wound intricately throughout my sphere. Of this, I confess, I felt nothing but my own disappearance, bit by bit, particle by particle, my world falling away. Kazumasa alone felt pain, and it was sad to see this. Every day, Kazumasa watched more and more of me disappear, my spin grow slower and more erratic. He was helpless to stop the strange decay of his beloved ball. Kazumasa was disconsolate. Lourdes would find Kazumasa alone, speaking sadly but comfortingly in Japanese to his poor dying ball, as if I would feel more comfortable with the language of our childhood. Kazumasa continued his monologue for many days, sitting with an incurably sick and dying patient, apologizing, reminiscing, and always thanking me. One day, he touched me tenderly and was shocked to find his finger pierce the now very thin veneer of my surface. Within, I had been completely hollowed out by something, by some invisible, voracious and now-gorged thing.
The next day, Kazumasa awoke and wept uncontrollably at the unobstructed view of the room before him.