XXII

Enigma

He was always going off somewhere, hell-bent on his own destruction, only to end up in the freshwaters of sociability, trumpeting like an elephant, playing the alpha animal in all things, throwing his weight around, stirring up entire neighborhoods for matters of no consequence.

He never managed to travel incognito because of this loud crane-noise that he carried within himself, clatter of chains coiling, slackening.

Looking rather like a logging truck.

Or rather, always propelled forward by the huge flicks of his whale tail.

He also had a great loathing for anything bottle-shaped, or recalling the voices of sopranos.

He was, three-quarters of him, most accommodating, accommodating to a fault, but his other quarter just paddled onward, pushing people around, rubbing their noses in the facts.

He was possessed of an enormous heel which propelled him forward, a huge locomotor plate of which he was but the small stem, a large plate that jolted along, shaking him like a plum tree. Always knocking things about, always on the run, and hardly did he care if his bones got broken against stone walls so long as this plate passed above or below them.

He was weak and frail, everything discomfitted him, the sun and the rain.

The locomotor plate never slept. It just kept on and on, its every step so eventful it would drive anyone nuts.