“Long passes,” ordered Drop. They began. The crushing weight of the seal’s head bent them double. Catching it, they staggered backward; their veins swelled and they grimaced in pain. Drop shouted himself hoarse, demanding more speed, more precision. And to Gravity, who was beside him, looking on worriedly, he said, “A few drops of height are no match for savagery.” The players’ falling sweat echoed throughout Mongolia.
With the movement and the handling, the seal’s head warmed up. The gold began to shine; the fat in the seal’s brain melted, running between the players' fingers, making the large projectile slippery, all the more difficult to catch and throw.
In the end, the group rose up, forming a kind of cone whose apex was the seal’s head, exuding fat, shinier than the moon, with the five basketball players underneath, stretched like phylacteries. They took off, into the black, starless sky. Gravity was irresistibly drawn up in their wake, and the motorcycle followed him. Drop watched them shrink as they climbed, until they disappeared. The only thought that occurred to him was that the wedding would have to be put off again.
Later he was criticized for his extravagant and inappropriate training methods. He even wondered himself, for a moment, if he hadn’t gone too far.
But for him it was a point of honor to maintain a superior indifference. The game of realism, by its very nature, neutralized everything. Even invention, to which the scattered drops had devoted themselves with a passion, had a retroactive effect on realism. It might have been said that in each of its avatars, invention was writing itself with a drop of ink and an obsessive attention to plausibility. Each drop was self-contained, thanks to the delicate balance of its surface tension. There was no context, just pure irradiation.
The drop had neither doors nor windows. History had countless generative tips. A certain drop, virginal and vaginal in equal parts, had, by a miracle of naptime surgery, undergone gender reassignment and adopted the name Aureole. Initially his name had been Dr. Aureole. Due to a suspension, Aureole was left hanging in the air. .
The suspension gave rise to a sublime romanticism: Aureole, in a nightgown, on the balcony of her little castle, overlooking a dark garden alive with the sounds of insects and fountains, lost in her reverie, her spidery weaving. The castle was in flames, but the fire was suspended too. The drop was in another dimension. It could only have happened to her: another display of indifference, made plausible by the devices of realism.
Suddenly, on a third level of the story, three cloaked figures dropped from the eaves and the drainpipes, landing all at once on the balcony. Torn from her reverie, Aureole began to spin, squealing in distress. She tried various falling movements to escape from the gloved hands of her attackers, but it was as if she were floating on mercury. All she succeeded in doing was to make them tear her nightgown and mess up her hair. Working as a team, the three figures thrust her, terrified and tearful, into a box, which closed with a resonant clack. The crowd that had gathered around the castle to watch the fire saw nothing of this maneuver, and the firemen busy extending their ladders like pirates boarding a ship saw even less. The kidnappers took advantage of the confusion to escape with their captive; a car was waiting for them on the other side of the moat. They traveled through the hills for a long time, and before the moon rose they came to the gardens of an abandoned country house. They entered the house through the back door and shut the prisoner in the cellar.
Only then did they relax and take off their hoods. They were a trio of dangerous criminals: Shower, Hose, and Faucet. For many years they had been plotting to kidnap a drop. Chubby, hoarse, chrome-plated, they danced about on the table like Maenads, making metallic noises, drank a bottle of cognac, and called Gravity on the telephone to demand a ransom.
Ring. . ring. . ring. .
The sound of the little bell reverberated throughout the mountains. The echo carried it from peak to peak, creating a kind of succession.
The documents relating to the case were published by Drop Press. Pocket museums had become a possibility, thanks to technical progress in photography and printing. Here a flashback to an earlier part of the story is needed to complete the “picture.” The Mona Lisa is, as it happens, the emblem of the mechanical reproduction of the work of art (whether by photography, printing, or digital media). The merits of this splendid portrait are not to be denied, but it’s important to recall some of the historical events that propelled it to the position of supremacy it occupies today. There are other portraits of women by Leonardo that could perfectly well have stolen the limelight. There’s the portrait of Cecilia Galleriani, the Lady with an Ermine, which more than a few critics have praised as the most beautiful ever painted, the most perfect. Or the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, that childlike woman with her severe, round face. Neither is lacking in the mystery that stimulates the imagination. . What, then, explains the incomparable popularity of the Mona Lisa? It so happened that throughout the nineteenth century, as tourism began to develop and the books that would establish the canon of Western art were being written, the Mona Lisa was on display in the Louvre for everyone to see, while Cecilia and Ginevra were languishing in obscure collections in Krakow and Lichtenstein.
The theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 put the picture on the front pages of the newspapers, just when photography and printing were making it possible to reproduce works of art on a massive scale. The news story had natural flow-on effects, and the Mona Lisa, reproduced ad infinitum, became an indestructible icon.
But there was something more, another new development in civilization, which contributed to the process: the invention of the global news story. Just when journalism had reached its industrial maturity, two events occurred within a few months of each other that justified that maturity and brought it to fruition: the theft of the Mona Lisa and the wreck of the Titanic. Both events instituted a myth. Because these stories were the first of their kind, they were the biggest and the most productive. All the rest were condemned to operate within a system of substitutions. It was pure poetic justice that one of the Mona Lisa’s runaway drops should set up a news agency, and precisely in China, humanity’s great neural puzzle.
The DropToday agency specialized in the hunt for the new Grail, the greasy golden seal’s head that had begun to think for humans. There was a lead to follow: the spectacular melodrama of Gravity, who was wandering through the deserts of the world after leaving the Pope at the altar, dressed as a bride, holding a suppository. Gravity himself was impossible to follow, but his movements could be calculated using geographical logarithms. He also left a trail of slime. Laboratory tests revealed that this slime was principally composed of an organic substance, newtonia, whose cells could expand in response to sexual desire. The expansion was practically unlimited and the discovery of the cell membrane’s flexibility and strength revolutionized the textile industry. From then on, the substance was used to make shirts for basketball players, who kept getting bigger and taller.