18

Ved—I return to the museum archives (I now have a key to the attic!) again and again in my attempt to reconstruct my island’s history. This effort consistently rewards me, sometimes in tantalizing scraps: a badly foxed letter, a fractured ocularscopic plate, an iron glove bearing the Fantasma crest, a codpiece of red silk—or with a major discovery such as the previous portrait of Nuño Alfa y Omega the poet. But the past two days I have been drawn irresistibly to the natural history wing and that tantalizing view of Birdland as Lilliput and yet another wonder in an adjoining room I overlooked last week: a Brobdingnagian medusa, a full fifteen feet tall! Made of resins, I suppose; fiberglass, perhaps? And cellophane! Reduced to the size of a smelt, one stands beside it paralyzed by the artist’s audacity. In a froth of excitement I ran back down to town and raised our old friend Boris from the lethargy retirement has imposed upon him, to prod him up the hill; he claims the medusa is scientifically perfect down to the smallest detail—and you know how scrupulous he can be. What, I wonder, will this mysterious Polly, this protean Polly, come up with next? (It occurs to me that we are both reconstructing something in a time so eager to deconstruct! If I were not so damnably shy (ah yes, that incapacity of mine has not lessened over the years) I would introduce myself. But as you know, the only time I ever dared entertain thoughts of courtship was when I dreamed of Lise who at this very moment is in the kitchen with her mistress preparing sfogliatine saporite for the Edible Ark’s Saturday night menu!)

Clay’s mood, like his master’s, appeared to worsen. Once the party had taken leave of the bereft barber, who did nothing to detain them, Clay trudged behind the rest, muttering to himself and holding his mule by the tail. He looked so dark, so umbrageous, that the others feared him and wished the battle on the beach had come out differently. But then, the lôplôps had been known as much for their incapacity to protect themselves from harm as for their beautiful voices. One blow of that great beak could have shattered Clay’s skull; instead, the creature had continued to sing, as if a voice could still ferocity! Phosphor wondered: Could a voice inspirit the world? Embellish it and change it for the better? Privately he feared that all poets would one day go the way of the lôplôp. We are all birdmen, he shuddered, doomed. As he and his mule passed beneath a tree so weighted down with parrots it creaked, he longed for exquisiteness, for beauty and peace.

The poet’s nostrils quivered; the air was swimming with the fragrance of flowers, of wild honey and ripening fruit. Breathing deeply he thought it did not matter if his own voice was never heard, as long as Beauty continued to inspirit the world. Unjustly, it was at this precise instant of sweetness that Phosphor was cruelly struck upon the head and with such violence he tumbled from his saddle to the ground and rolled into a ditch. The missile—a spiny breadfruit—had been fired by Yahoo Clay from the treetop. Fantasma’s mule gobbled and rearing, groaned; it nearly threw Fantasma. It too had been struck. For what seemed like an eternity, the entire party was bombarded.

“A stinkpot!” Fogginius could be heard hollering throughout that deadly weather. “A fumigation! A holy war!” And Clay was bellowing—that his brain was boiling, boiling so fast his head could not contain it … this brain was a pig roasting in the pit of his skull—

“Roasting in its own juices!”

“Silence!” Fantasma stood in his stirrups. “Not another word! Else I blow apart your mouth!”

“My brain’s a soup of shit!” Clay pleaded from his perch. “Master! Climb up here and put your nose to my ear! You’ll smell dung!”

Sometimes, the saint pondered to himself, the cure is the malady. “Thinking stinks!” Clay wagged his head this way and that as though attempting to unscrew it from the rest. “A call for stilts, master, to carry me across the sewer of my mind!”

“A call for quarantine!” Fogginius offered, attempting to get off the hook. “A quarantine and a curfew! The citizen has been bewitched! Bewitched by female sorcery!”

Pale as a ghost, Fantasma reached for his musket. It’s all over, little Pulco thought. I am dead and gone to hell.

“My brain’s ejaculating!” Clay was sobbing, “into God’s fist!” Phosphor held his hands over his ears and in a fetal crouch groaned in his ditch for the mother he never had.

“I dream of fires!” Clay ranted, “and unlawful things! My way—ask Fogginius!—is marked by a turd. The way is marked by shit and leads to a pit of bones! So say ancient ge-, ancient ge-, geographer students of sharp edges, Fogginius told me their names: Christopher breaking like glass carbuncles, Christopher Carbuncle, Karfunkel, ‘fenkelh’ means, means—what in the name of Christ does it mean? ‘To sparkle’! Ask Fogginius! Ask Fogginius! Ah! If I could count I could tell you how many seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks I spent crushed beneath the weight of his tutelage and how long each one was and how long each one lasted and how long—”

“Come down from there now!” Fantasma cried, pointing his gun, the red crest of his hair igniting the wood like a bonfire, “else I halve you in two!”

Halve him in two? pondered Phosphor. Halve him in two? But Clay was captive of his addled wits and could not stop. In an altered voice, and in a manner they recognized as belonging to Fogginius, he continued:

“Ah! Agony. Ah! Affliction. Ah! Alas. Ah—”

“ARCHITECTURE!” Fogginius approved. He could not stop himself.

“What is architecture?” Clay droned, “if it is not the brainchild of alphabet? the burial ground of animality? the alpha of exile from Eden? A tangible mathematics encrusted with the … the lime of, the lime of human pretension?”

It was then that a detonation pierced their ears—a sound so fierce the reverberating wilderness stilled to silence and they saw the thug’s body caroming through branches and leaves, branches and leaves … and Clay lay dead at Phosphor’s feet, the top of his skull torn off. Already the wound was black with flies.

Phosphor closed his eyes, knowing that hideous and disgusting details have a way of sticking in the mind. When he opened them, Pulco was pressing against him for comfort. A turtle had joined them in the ditch and although its head remained hidden, it clearly grieved and kicked with its four leathery feet. Fantasma, his musket smoking, stood over his strongman’s corpse:

“If I hear the sound of another human voice,” he said, “if anyone dares speak, I will blow out his brains too.”

They traveled towards evening in silence. Camp was made beside Galatea Bay’s molluscan monument—that heap of dead shell we once mapped together, dearest Ved, proving the aborigines were shell-gatherers and that prior to the colonial invasion had inhabited the island for many thousands of years.

Clay gone, the party was forced to forage for itself, setting to work in the shallow coastal waters much as sea lions, knocking limpets from rocks with stones and digging for clams in the wet sand. The turtle, although simmered over a slow fire for six hours, proved too tough to eat. Had he dared speak, Fogginius would have informed them that terror had rendered it inedible.

That night, as Phosphor lay in his hammock unable to sleep, the sky appeared to part like a vast velvet curtain, revealing a sudden moon: a mask of gold and a pulsing heart, an inscrutable face, or a fist holding something very tightly; yes, the moon throbbed and trembled in the air, trembled with rage or desire, he could not say; it hung there in its ink like a lantern or a golden pear fallen from the table of the gods; it pulsed like those sexual shellfish—Modiolus vagina—the poet had (the blood rushing to his ears) devoured for his supper.

In haste, Phosphor inked a “moonish list” to be used later, although he feared the moon’s capacity to fill his brain with images might subvert his own intention in the end. Giddy, he scribbled: I cover these pages with ink yet have no inkling why. And then, before he could stop himself, before he realized what he was doing, he found himself writing a letter to Professor Tardanza:

Honored Professor:

Animated by the moon in a forest so thick with parrots the ground is incandescent with feathers, 1 balance in my hammock, the near sea thundering, wide awake despite the ardors of the day, for my heart is not mine but another’s, its seizures aggravated by distance. And yet I am contented, too, because the air I breathe is the air she breathes; we breathe the same particles of air, and we sleep, or do not sleep, beneath the same luminous eye that tonight is an adoring eye, weeping. Even now, you see, I dream, I dream of her. I dream—he repeated—of her.

Then, in a fever and firm in his resolve, Phosphor leapt to the ground and prodding Pulco in the ribs, woke him.

“You must,” said the poet, “you will take this missive to Pope Publius, take your mule and go now, beneath the moon, and once you are there, give this to Professor Tardanza himself, no other. For I have had a revelation and it is this: Life is but a rent in the wing of a moth and love an unquenchable fire, and I must marry her else die.”

“Nuño Alfa y Omega!” little Pulco cried out in childish terror, hopping about like a wounded bird—for Clay’s murder had rattled him irretrievably—“Don’t die! Don’t die!” He threw his arms around the poet, his guardian and master—and the only member of the party who treated him with disinterest. The sight of Clay’s swarming wound had deeply distressed him; he saw Death’s gaping maw everywhere, even in the charred shells scattered about their cold fire.

“My life is in your hands,” the poet said. “You must leave at once. Take this letter; do not lose it or soil it.”

At first sight of the morning star and in the heavy dew of the early hours, little Pulco set off.

“Her hair is as heavy, as fragrant, as pollen,” Phosphor called out after him. “Tell her I said that.”