That night Gerardo did not dream of rivers.
Author’s Note: Thanks to entomologist Dr. Aristeo Cuauhtémoc Deloya Lopez and his information about the maquech, which was invaluable in the writing of this story.
The Glory of the World
Sergey Gerasimov
They went upstairs, to the second floor that was actually much higher than the first. An unknown contractor had sandwiched it between the dimly lit twenty-second and the exceptionally roomy fifty-fifth, either for fun or as a publicity stunt. As they walked up they saw through the big windows an embarrassed town changed very much by the linear perspective, refracted here and there as if seen through a huge quivering prism, scared, shiny, dark-cornered. One of the corners folded up and the rain flickering along the horizon trembled there like piano strings.
The starry heaven gaped over the clouds. The constellations and shiny dabs of galaxies wheeled there, shivering with their own beauty. Seeing this, a lady with a tame cobra around her neck frowned and strained herself to unlock the door. She was long-legged and purebred like a Great Dane.
“Saviour, hold it, please,” she said.
She handed him the pensive cobra, freeing her hands for a two-handed key. Saviour took the snake. The cobra shook its head as if rousing itself, then squashed his hand, smiling quite cheekily and glistening as if it were smeared with stale grease. Saviour put the snake into a pot with a cocoa palm and it immediately, with rumbling stomach, muzzled into the soil rich in fluoric limestone.
“Shouldn’t have done that,” said the lady. “Now she’ll gnaw the roots. She’s a snake, a predator. Understand?”
Saviour presented her with a bunch of red folios, and she gave him a condescending nod. They entered.
The boss sat at a round table elongated enough to receive lots of victuals, which formed a slanted turret in the middle of it. Steamed crabs’ legs made of wild sardine scales crowned the turret. A few nonentities with indiscernible faces sat nearby, but the table was empty both to the right and to the left.
A security guard with such a muscular neck that the muscles dangled below his shoulders slept at some distance. A dog, extremely lean and long, romped on a leash, staying aloof. The pet was so attenuated by hunger that you had to have a really trained eye to distinguish it from the leash. It licked off its sweat, reducing the environmental pollution. Very far away, three moneychangers, small end evil like avian flu viruses, played cards for curtseys with a coal-miner. A buffoon played the pipe and sold doves.
Saviour froze, stunned. He had expected to see something unbelievable here, but this impossible world was anti-believable, and it had a hypnotising music of its own, at that, a shrieking sort of music that can sound inside a happy lunatic’s mind; it jammed the low, quiet voice of conscience Saviour had always listened to. This world looked him over with button eyes, grinned, let him in.
“I don’t believe in it,” Saviour whispered.
“What about getting paid?” the world asked.
“Oh. It would be nice.”
“Got dyspepsia?” the lady asked, and Saviour started.
“No, I was just thinking.”
“Yeah, thinking gives me gas, too,” the lady said in a brain-shrinking voice.
“Hi,” the boss said, “Saviour? The one? Welcome.”
He held out his hand with five nails, and the Saviour shook it, feeling prone to cringe.
“Well, well, I know,” the boss said. “Heard much about you, you’re that tough guy who cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and even overthrew the tables of the moneychangers. It’s my house! Ye have made it a den of thieves! Piss off everybody! I can appreciate such things. But, you know, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. I mean, times change. Just in case, if you forgot Latin. Today wine maketh us merry: and money answereth all things. By the way, want to drink? No? Pity. I know everything about you because my people never lie, though I don’t believe them of course. So want to hear it from you. From the horse’s mouth, ha-ha. Don’t be modest. Position yourself. Can fly? Or walk on water?”
The boss took from the table a forty-three-barrelled cigarette lighter.
“Yes,” Saviour said.
“Cool. Will you fly if I throw you out of the window, right now?”
The boss brushed Saviour’s cheek with his fingers, quick and spidery, incompatible with his plump face.
“No, I’d be killed. The ability to fly, uh…comes to me from time to time. I can try, though. Maybe, if not very high…”
He flew up and hovered, for a minute, above the table. The lady was busy putting a layer of absolutely transparent powder on her nose. The coal-sweep had already lost the game and given out all the curtseys. Being sick and tired of everything, he pressed his stained face to the wall and charcoaled a self-portrait there. Saviour was hovering. His face wore the dreamy look necessary for flights.
“That wasn’t bad,” the boss said. “Be my friend. Meet this girl. She’s Denise. A female variant of Denis. And don’t meet the others. They are morons.”
The lady with the key slowly winked; she was aristocratic, like an oyster in spinach. Then she unscrewed a stiletto heel and picked her teeth with it.
They spoke of this and that, then the conversation turned to food and stopped at this comprehensive point. The buffoon got tired of selling the lewd doves and, being hungry, sucked at his saliva ejector. The nonentities kept doing nothing. Their gazes moved up and down Denise’s legs, polishing them to a mirrored lustre. The words stirred in Saviour’s mouth, losing taste like a wad of chewing gum.
“They say you can live on spirit,” said the boss in the voice of a business executive opening a staff conference. “I hope that’s true.”
Saviour was about to say something non-commercial but changed his mind and answered artlessly. “Sometimes. But I eat, as a rule. Something low-Calorie. Austere repast, you know.”
“Cook yourself?”
“Yes.”
“By a fiat of will?”
“No. Prefer a microwave.”
The boss raised his brow as if surprised at such an extravagance. “Now, you listen to me, bud,” he said. “I want, here and now, by a fiat of will. Make me something really delicious and special to eat.”
“I can cook cobra’s flesh for you. Is it okay?”
“Go on, man, go on.”
Saviour took a porno magazine decorating the table and flipped through. One of the women fitted perfectly: snake-eyed and resembling a piece of meat. He decided to make the dish from this picture. Tore it out, crumpled, and placed on the plate. Intertwined his fingers over it.
The boss went out of the room, not wanting to wait for at least fifteen minutes. The buffoon was licking the paints off the pictures and shoving them into the proper tubes; the dog watched him with a melancholic rapacity in its heart. Denise played with a gold watch chain and moved her wonderful eyelashes rhythmically, so long and dense that they could shovel humus.
“What else can you do?” she asked and made the moment flinch.
“Everything,” Saviour said.
“The most difficult, I mean.”
“With a single word I can make a man happy.”
“It’s easy,” Denise said, “I can do it, too. Hey, guard, I order you to be happy.”
The guard woke up and burst out laughing, junked up with official delight. He was prompt to carry out the orders to sob, to fall in love, to go mad and senile, to get prodigious acne and, at last, to go to sleep again. The nonentities echoed, though not at all concerned. Saviour was talking, keeping his mind intent. He developed some arguments for Denise. She was listening to him with unflagging indifference. He was so carried away that he didn’t even notice the sudden appearance of a black car smelling of expensive lubricant.