He offered Zajic some food. The Czech smiled, his hard, slabbed, clay-like face splitting in unused directions. Malcolm offered him a job, and was suddenly swallowed by the slop man’s unwelcome embrace.
In the same gloomy chamber Malcolm lay on a low bed made up of straw and planks and the thinnest of blankets. Zajic lay on a similar arrangement beside him, nearly unconscious from heavy drink. Malcolm had drunk a small amount of wine but wanted to be relatively clear-headed for this procedure, this extraction.
But he was being constantly distracted by a commotion behind the door in a generally left direction, behind his line of sight. He hadn’t noticed a door there before, but he could hear it creaking, opening now and then, shutting with a soft bang, and the people behind it, murmuring drunkenly, possibly weeping.
“Pay no attention to them.” Meyer, the professeur, was suddenly above him, and unless Malcolm misapprehended, gazing down at them as if they were babies in their cribs. “They will come in later during the process. We start with one, we expand to two, as many vessels as are needed. The mathematics are inexact—I will know only after we have begun.”
“But they seem distressed.”
“Distressed? Oh, non, I assure you. They are simply anxious to be a part of this great expérimentent. We are surrounded by a surfeit of life force—surely you can feel it? Yours, our volunteers’, the spirits of all the soldiers who died in the war? So much to channel, to redirect, to sort! I must ask you to simply relax. I have something more for you to drink. It will go well with your wine.”
The taste was strong and bitter, but the bitterness went away immediately, replaced by an overpowering sweetness. The professor smiled broadly and danced around the room, his arms above his head, loose and waving, rubbery. But then he was back close again, a moldering book in his hands, whispering, but Malcolm could not hear him. The anxious people behind the door were too loud.
The professor caressed Malcolm’s side, and his fingertip came away bloody, and there was a knife in his hand, dripping. Malcolm watched as the professor used the knife to carve shreds out of the book, then stuffed those shreds into the wound in Zajic’s side. He had a moment’s anticipation of a different, simpler life to come, fewer complications and conflicts, an avoidance of misunderstandings. And then the professor strolled over to him, grinning widely, his hands full of those shreds, those fragments of ancient narratives, and then the professor’s hands went inside Malcolm, where they stayed, and became busy as insects.
He had been in Paris for decades, it seemed. He could not recall the year he had arrived from Prague, or the look of Prague in even the most general of detail. He could not recall why he had ever left, but he was sure it could not be desperation. It could not be desperation.
There would be no point. Worlds were coming to an end and there was no point. The cities were all failing at the same time. Had no one else noticed this? Could he be the only one?
Some days he would wander the lanes, searching the short streets, the forgotten streets, for nothing. The Rue Abattue D’enfant, the Rue des Veuves Aveugles, the Rue D’âmes Vidées. Some days he would walk to the river, and watch there. He could not remember the river’s name, but thought it might be the Seine, the Thames, the Vltava.
Some nights he climbed the shaking steps to his attic room. But Degaré now lived there. He said he had always lived there. “Monstre!” the burly Frenchmen shouted. “Meurtrier! Can you not leave me alone? You do not live here!”
Some nights he slept where he could. Some nights he wandered without sleeping.
Was he starving? Did it matter?
Everywhere he went people stared. They did not stare just at him—they stared at everything.
He himself stared, he was always staring. He did not want to miss any vanishing detail. In this at least they were brothers and sisters.
There was much he had forgotten, and yet there was much he still knew. Every idea in him had its own voice, every stray thought its own head. In him there were multitudes. He thought perhaps that particular idea might be from the Bible, but he did not know for sure.
He might be sad, he thought. He very well might be. But he could not be sure. He waited for all these other voices to tell him.
FISH
He calls himself Fish because he swims at the bottom of the pond. Most everybody he knows glides so easy above, like life wasn’t even a second thought, even the ones who live hard, who fill their insides with sewage, they’re still high in the sky as far as Fish is concerned.
He don’t mind. Sometimes it’s safer swimming at the bottom. He can look up at their faces and see they’re looking at each other, hating on each other, but not seeing him at all.
“Get outta there, Fish!” That’s his brother Paul. But Fish just found somebody’s ring in the Trench, and he has hopes for more. Paul keeps his distance from the Trench, he has no belly for it, the Trench where they dump the bodies before they burn them. Bodies lay there two, three days so they smell like nothing ever smelled before, mommies and daddies and kiddies waiting to be burned by the burning crews, always short-handed, it being such a foul job. Fish has seen the burning, and he thinks it’s pretty, the way the flames go blue in places, like they caught a soul—souls burn blue. Houses of people, blocks of people, cities of people are dying every day—pretty soon, Fish thinks, the whole world will burn blue.
But Fish finally gives it up, crawls out and rolls around in the dirt to get the stink off, then crabs after Paul, low to the ground where Fish feels safe, the ring hid in his pants pocket. Paul says it’s time to eat, and Fish was born hungry.
Along the way they stay out of trouble even though trouble passes the time. Trouble always means you eat late.
Some slime-head has his tongue down the mouth of a little girl, but they pass him by like he was scenery, even though it makes Fish’s teeth ache.
Some bald woman sits in water and screams, pinching skin until she’s black-spotted, scratching herself until the skin runs.
A clean-up crew chatters about nothing while they beat an old man with electric fans and toasters, slinging any machine with a cord into the wrinkled face, snapping ribs, pounding dead arms and legs. Paul pushes Fish’s head away so he don’t see.
A so pretty lady lies on a sofa in the middle of the street. She’s been harvested, her parts replaced with rotten potatoes and corn. Fish gets away from Paul and swims right up to her. He don’t get upset—he just looks a long while trying to figure out what he sees.
Most of the houses are burning, those dead families a cloud of smell that creeps across the sky. But the sunset is still something beautiful, like Paul says it’s been since the beginning of time.
When they get home Mama has the food hot and waiting. But Fish swims in slow, careful of a kick and a stomp, a belt across the ear.
“Paul, get your brother up off the floor,” Mama says, and it’s like the daylight finally come, and Fish sees himself in the bright new kitchen, and there’s a great green tree out the window, and the voices of little kids playing outside.
“He was talking crazy again, Ma,” Paul sings like a crow, “and jumping out of his wheelchair, rolling around on the ground. It was embarrassing! I wish you’d let me tie him in if I have to take him out!”