When morning came, Fantasma was enraged: Pulco was useful to them all. Henceforth, Phosphor had to perform all menial tasks—such as preparing the breakfast gruel and helping his hated stepfather off and on and on and off his mule, in and out his hammock, and out and in his boots, as well as with the least gratifying details of his toilet.
Fogginius, having forgotten Fantasma’s threat of the previous day and even Clay’s violent end—and, for that matter, everything that had happened recently—and believing himself to be on an important papal mission, unsure, even, of his own identity, was, with a growing certitude cemented by disparate signs visible only to himself, tottering at the edge of Ultimate Illumination: that he, Fogginius, was pope. He began to yammer, as if all life and muscle were contained in his jaws.
The rest of him was visibly waning; he could not reach for his own elbow without decrepitating—a brittle pop like the sound of distant musket fire, a fusillade of crackles and reports so loud that, had the saint not been already deaf, these could have deafened him, surely.
“The boy’s been seized by cannibals!” Fogginius cried out, spitting porridge unintentionally into the poet’s face—for he was suddenly aware that the little buttocks he so liked to pinch were nowhere near. “Who will wipe a pontiff’s arse and pass him his plate?”
Phosphor audibly groaned, knowing all too well the answer. But he suffered for love; he humbled himself for love!
“Pulco is on an urgent errand,” the poet explained, “and we will wait here for his return.”
“I have decided,” said Fantasma, “that I shall explore the coast alone—that stretch of sand we see from here, and the rocky ridge. I hope to catch a glimpse of a mermaid. I would so like to fuck a mermaid.” He scratched his balls and continued dreamily: “It must all be contained within the ocularscopic box: the sea, the waves, those grottoes yonder, like wounds in the underbelly of the world. I want it all—can it be done? The very quality of the air.” He was feeling powerful again, and greedy. He pointed to the places he would have Phosphor capture on glass once Fogginius’ needs had been met with for the day.
“Well and good!” (click!) Fogginius cried. “Wander where you will! I have much to share with my friend the bishop” (clack! clock! tock!). The saint stabbed the poet’s heart affectionately.
Phosphor scowled. He was exhausted, tired of the open air, of carting camera and chemicals across the roots and rubble of the world. His thoughts had not been his own for days—had it been weeks? He was Fantasma’s thing, an appendage to his hallucination.
“Snakes!” Fantasma cried out. “I should like to have them coupling in the grass. All manner of copulations—the entire animal kingdom. An historic collection. The private lives of pythons, parrots, primates, porcupines, and pigs. And then, once we are home again, the fornications of the citizenry in its entirety. Peasants on couches of mud, brides deflowered in rooms smelling of lavender.” He moaned. “You must seize the private parts of every living creature on the island.”
“Meringues!” Fogginius was speaking to himself. “One half-pound.…” A string of drool dropped from his lips and webbed its way down his grizzled chin.
“Corpses, Nuño …” Fantasma mused. “We’ll take your black box to the morgue. Last night I dreamed a head was growing from the center of my face,” he recalled, turning pale. “It has just come back to me. A hideous head—hairy and hungry. A famished head, gnashing its teeth. I begged it to leave me in peace. But it was voracity itself and devoured everything in its path—boulders, anthills, cows, windmills … and I was forced to follow helplessly behind. Ruled by it! Utterly ruled! And ruined. Ruined and ruled!”
“The nightmare,” Fogginius whispered, his voice fractured and thin, “is a cold wind raging within the mind. The nightmare is an amalgam. It contains:
The sulphur of ingested rage
The feces of fear
The resin of unrequited love
The urine of ingested falsehoods
The owls of unresolved quarrels
The jackals of jealousy
The knots and snot of perplexity.…”
But Fantasma did not hear this list, for he had wandered off, clutching his face and cursing.
Looking infinitely dejected, Nuño Alfa y Omega attempted to feed Fogginius his gruel. My life, he thought, has come full circle. I am not my own master. So dark were Phosphor’s thoughts that a small cloud appeared to orbit his head—although it might have been a silent swarm of flies. (The three men sorely needed to bathe.)
I am a mere thing of Fantasma’s fantasy, Phosphor thought. To hell with the ocularscope! At home in my impoverished rooms, who knows what I might have dreamed up by now. For such a thing as moving pictures glimmers deep in my brain, flickers, dies, flames anew.… A thing, I think, not impossible.
Just then Fantasma’s mule kicked and brayed, possessed, or so it seemed. Burdened with the graceless task of bringing it to its senses, Fantasma hollered for Phosphor. The dream of images in a continuum vanished from the poet’s mind.
“I shall mend my mind with exercise and pleasure,” Fantasma told Phosphor. “Wait for me. I won’t be gone but a day or two.”
After breakfast, the poet settled Fogginius, visibly waning, in the cool shade of a fern as furred as a spider, and gave himself over to thoughts of Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Once when Fogginius, waking, began pontificating—DO STARS CAUSE EVIL?—the poet, his ears insufficiently plugged with beeswax, audibly sighed.
“You are in love!” the saint wagged a finger. “Better I remain silent.”
The days passed; Fantasma did not return. Phosphor succumbed to revery. If Fogginius had not raked him from his fantasies by calling out from time to time gooseberry fool! and milk candy!, Phosphor would have forgotten to eat. Suddenly ravenous, on uncertain feet, he would totter off to gather irregularia and oysters; once, he managed to capture a crab. But Fogginius, now so thin as to appear made of parchment, refused all nourishment—although he continued to carry on like a child in a bakery.
One afternoon he called Phosphor to his side.
“You do not know this,” he said, “no one does. But once I had a son.…” He attempted to rise; the forest responded with the retorts of his shattering bones and snapping tendons. Startled, Phosphor looked on as the saint disarticulated before his eyes and collapsed with a sigh into a heap of knucklebones and pale ashes. Even his skull imploded, like the thin shell of an egg on the fire. Fogginius’ jaws, which for several instants appeared to work the air, also turned to dust. It was then that the poet realized the extent of the old man’s sorcery: evidently an act of superlative necromantic will had held those enfeebled parts together long after their time had run out.
My God! Phosphor wondered, I have been harboring, humoring a cadaver. Perhaps, he considered later, enjoying his solitude deeply, perhaps his listeners were the glue that kept him fused. Perhaps … he mused further, language is the glue that held my stepfather together.
He began another scrap of verse, this time to no one in particular, but to:
My fellow man who must needs find
Meaning and Purpose, else lose Hope and Mind.
And then, in response to Fogginius’ definition of nightmare, he proposed this portrait of the dream: She is an airy tincture of a fragrant rain, the brightest flowers, all the colors of China and Persia combined, the mystery of weather and shells breathing beneath the sea.