Olivia has died. Oh, Olivia. I supposed she must, of course. She was so small and slight. I was always gentle with her. Even as I tsunami-rolled over in my sleep, I took care not to crush her. But delicate life, the clockwork is faulty. It is dangerous, Olivia, I kept telling her, to be so small. Do grow up, you! But she did not heed me. It is not her fault; I speak no crab. But I found her today, in a beard corner, still and blue. I tried to push her along a very little, but she scurried not. She had lost the knack.
She’ll nip no more.
How I will miss the nipping of Olivia Crabb.
I keep her on the shelf, by the captain’s pictures, by my drawing of my son. Dear, dead little friend.
I don’t believe in you.
The ill-face has been back.
Sometimes he is here, right beside me, the wooden thing, and when I reach out to touch him, he changes—there and then—into a door or bench or mast pillar, to some knob of wood. And yet, I swear it, the ill-face was just here.
Find your balance, Joseph. You are a man, a man inside a shark. Facts.
If you want better things than facts to ponder, make them up yourself.
I will tell a story, for I have no books to give me theirs. I will improvise a tale; it will go where it will go. To keep my mind from idling. To get me out of myself.
I will change the cast. A new child, not my son; not that wooden knot but someone else’s. This new puzzle-fellow is most highly pleasing to me. He is pale, so pale; he is smooth and cool but chipped; he is a bit of something larger, but that bit has come to me.
He is part of a teacup.
Each time my monster host swallows some porcelain, I leap with joy. Why? Because it means we must be close to land—at least here is evidence of land! And what is in the ocean: water of course, fish, weed, some wood, but also something else: old bits of pottery. Broken pieces of china, shards that float, human daily life in fragments. This creature must have disturbed the bottom of some port, ingested what humans have thrown away. Like the great river Po that rushes through Turin and Piacenza and Ferrara, all the way from the Alps to the Adriatic, it carries with it small shards of human history, and when it floods it throws these pieces out on the burst banks: a little history of man in broken objects. So is it here with me.
Perhaps the world has ended, and these small pieces of shattered pottery are all that is left of Homo sapiens. Perhaps I am the last human, though I think myself dead sometimes. Yet even my dubious eyes spot the broken pieces that are thrown about by the busy ocean, until they float into the beast’s mouth like seaweed. I clink two of them together, and it is a beauty noise!
What could be built from all this, the broken crockery of the seven seas? I have pieces from Ceylon, pieces from Haas & Cžjžek, pieces named Spode or marked Doccia or Porzellanmanufaktur Gotha or yet Verbilki—what mixing of the world. Not yet, however, one shard of my father’s porcelain. Perhaps it shuns me. But these broken bits and pieces are, to me, great communications. I have plenty of glue, and so I have put the shards together—to make someone new. Will he live, I wonder?
I shall call you Otto, I tell him. Otto, because you are the same taken forward or backward; you are, like me, in a constant place.
Welcome, Otto. It seems to me that you were always meant to look this way—that you are not being constructed for the first time, but rather that I have put you back together properly at last. You have been decimated, poor Otto, but now, piece by piece, you are more and more yourself again. Slowly, you come to me. And I sit beside you of an afternoon, if indeed it is an afternoon, and do enjoy our time together.
What kind of a cousin are you, Otto? You always were, it seems to me, very fragile. You were born, much to your parents’ distress, with very hard skin—so hard that you could knock upon it and it would give a clink. There was always something of the dinner service about you. Your nose, please do not be offended, always suggested a teacup. Your forehead, is it not strange, recalls to me the saucer. Your parents found it wise to keep you away from other children. You had a brother, do you recall? His name was Massimo, yes? And Massimo, as I have no need to remind you, was . . . oversize. Big-boned was he. Mimo, as he was affectionately called. Most heavy baby, enormous thing, mother heaving and cut, local doctor very proud. What a big clot it was! Biggest infant the town had ever seen, though it was a small town, of no historical importance. Even so, local celebrity. He was born, oh, loud Mimo, with all his milk teeth fully present. Oh, hungry Mimo! Oh, provincial monster! No herbivore this, no lettuce cruncher, no cucumber botherer. From the earliest age, it was ever meat with Mimo. How this fleshy flesh-eater ate! I do not think he could ever be fully satisfied but needed more—not just meat, but love, too. He was hungry for everything. Your parents gave him everything they could. Who can blame them for feeding Mimo with so much love? And there he always was, with open arms, hugging and kissing and smothering, always wanting more . . . until the parents grew tired of it. They loved their Mimo, but so much affection, so much need, can become a tiresome thing. They needed some other little pot in which to keep a part of their love.
So then, after a troublesome confinement, one weeping day, you, my dear, delicate Otto, were born.
Otto did not cry when he came into this world of cups and saucers; indeed he clinked. He was shiny and white, with blue words on his ears that read ROYAL DALTON, STAFFORDSHIRE ENGLAND, BY APPOINTMENT. That was his birthmark. How proud his parents were! They saw instantly that he belonged on the mantelpiece and put him there. How smart he looked. The neighbors came in their Sunday clothes to look upon Otto of the mantelshelf. Some were jealous, but they tried to hide it.
“What a lovely piece,” they said. “How well it shows off the room.”
“Ah, yes,” said a shiny neighbor who was certainly better than anyone else she had ever met. “I have a great aunt who produced a spectacular child with Meissen. A wonderful child that was, always destined for great things. She was sent to palaces, and was even used by Catherine the Great. She had the most beautiful skin I have ever seen. All went well with her until, alas, she was dropped by a servant. She leaked in old age and no one could stop the leaking. Poor Ingrid. Such skin.”
Otto kept still upon the mantelpiece. He never cried, good child that he was. When he was old enough, Otto asked about going to school, but his parents considered him too precious. His laugh was a most satisfying sound that never went on too long, like the noise of a lid being put on a teapot—it fitted him exactly. His mother dusted him often, and he shined up beautifully.
After Otto was put on the mantelpiece, Mimo was denied the front room. You are too clumsy, they told him; we fear he will break. Mimo would pound about outside, until Otto jogged a little on his shelf. “Otto! Here I am!” his brother cried. “Come and play with me, or at least just let me in! Why do you not talk to me. Otto! Otto!” His parents hugged their big hungry child less and less, and they left him on his own a great deal. Over time he wandered from the house and found friends among the unemployed souls who gathered near the town’s workhouse; those washed-up people took a pleasure in Mimo, who spent his afternoons doing odd jobs in the workhouse, showing off his strength. When a worker there would scream and bellow and break things—which was not uncommon, for the place was unrelenting and wore the workers down—Mimo was directed to take hold of the unhappy person and clamp them within his arms until at last their weeping or screaming ceased. Mimo was so good at hugging people into silence that once or twice some ribs were broken, but nobody minded very much because a riot had been averted.
Most of all, though, Mimo longed to hug his brother. Sometimes he stood outside the front room looking through the windows, until they kept the curtains drawn. Once, tapping on the window to attract his brother’s attention, he smashed the glass altogether; this caused Otto to give out a loud, high wail, something like that of a kettle—and how his parents fretted over their endangered child! Picking up the shards of glass, they imagined themselves picking up pieces of Otto and they wept. Mimo, it was decided, should stay in the workhouse, where he was so useful and the work suited him so well. They visited sometimes, but not often, and less so with time.
From the window in the front room, Otto could see the bell tower of the town church. It gave him great ideas of height, the tower did, and might perhaps be to blame for the strange growing upward that occurred in him around his thirteenth year. Soon he was too big for the mantelpiece, until his parents were obliged to move him to a cast-iron end table. He started growing small handles here and there about him, no matter how much his mother discouraged it. A new spout was found on him. He began to smell faintly of the sea.
“If I were you,” said the neighbor with the Meissen antecedent, “I would put him in the attic.”
It was the nicest room in the house, the front room, with its carriage clock (Otto’s favorite companion when he was small) and its empire sofa (which, though uncomfortable, improved everyone’s posture). But Otto no longer fitted; he had outgrown such elegant things. The mother and father, exhausted, agreed that it was time—for the empire sofa and the carriage clock were likewise most fatigued—and Otto was taken up to the attic.
But Mimo was around so seldom that no one remembered to warn him away from his brother’s new home.
. . .
Ha! What nonsense! Enough, at least, for now.