Fossiloctopus Read online

  Take pulse.

  “But the blue helmets have pulled out. There is no one left to protect us. We must strike before we are stricken. We are ready – let us fight.”

  Left arm blue.

  “Such fighting is exactly what got us here. We might not have lost our lands, our jobs, if we had restrained the extreme elements among us.”

  Remove constricting robes.

  “No person is an element. You are old enough to remember how the colonials favored the Tutsi, treated us like dirt – like an element.”

  Pulse dropping.

  “Yes, we are old. And we remember a time of peace.”

  Breathing shallow.

  “A time of oppression.”

  Eyes unresponsive. No reaction to light.

  “Wages or life? Which do you want? I prefer life, peace.”

  No pulse.

  “To live without liberty is death! Better that we die trying .”

  Breathing stopped.

  “You may say so, but you do not speak for the community. We, the elders, speak for the community. If you choose to fight and die when you lead, so be it. We will not allow it. We declare for peace.”

  The shouting continues, a cloud of killer bees inside my numb head.

  The old one is dead.

  One less voice fuels the debate.

  The fervor of argument bounces off the church walls, vibrating through my bones.

  But I hear nothing.

  A young man’s mouth opens, closes, spits in slow motion, yelling at the remaining elders. I see it as a disembodied instrument, floating free of the face to which I know it must be attached, a machine. There are not words. No words. Words. No.

  Video:

  Black to static to white, bleeding slowly to full color.

  A view down a muddy village street, makeshift huts to either side.

  A horde of men brandishing machetes and firing rifles into the air cross the bridge leading into the village.

  A low roar of shouts, vehicles in the distance, then silence as the camera’s sound shuts off.

  Inhabitant’s scatter for the woods, a large group of women and children – some elderly men – head for the small cement-block church.

  From left a group of young men – about ten strong – rushes toward the oncoming group waving machetes.

  Uniformed soldiers ooze out from the crowd, take aim at the charging youth, shoot low, for the legs. Bodies fall.

  The onrushing horde threads out, filters the village’s creases, greases the walls with blood.

  A black hand reaches toward the camera lens.

  Whirlwind blur, the world in vertigo.

  A European man, on his knees, in the middle of the street, camera attachments on his back and belt.

  Two men stretch his arms out, two his legs, as a fifth machete hacks off his hands and feet.

  Pan up to a jeep driving past at high speed, one of the brave young machete-wielding defenders of the village chained by his ankle to the back bumper, his head and shoulders repeatedly bouncing on the road. Sound comes back as the engine dopplers into the distance.

  Follow the jeep, pan left to the church where soldiers throw hand-grenades through the open windows. Sound lost again in multiple explosions. Doors blown off.

  Pan right: a man holds a bloodied machete in one hand, a human head in the other, high above his head, smiling.

  Ghosts crawl over my bones, beneath my skin. My pelvis aches from childbirth. My mandible is sore from debate. My hand is permanently curled in the shape of a camera handle. My cheek is shattered from a Zairean rifle-butt blow.

  I am to be introduced to the court as a witness. “What did you see?” they will ask. I will remain silent. “Where were you at the time of the attack?” And I will not answer. “Why do you not answer the question?” I will tell them: “When do you eat? When you are hungry. Sleep? When you are tired. Respond to questions? When you have answers. I have no answers.”

  Time ends when all your friends are gone. It is a new era. The time of silence.

  Fossiloctopus

  It is as big as two fists and glows like gold in the sunlight. Embedded in the amber is a tiny dark brown octopus, its tentacles mummified and sharp-edged, like a poorly-crafted wood carving. How an octopus became stuck in ancient tree sap is beyond me – some freakish cosmic accident, I guess – but there it was on Rhiannon's desk, just like she said it would be. Purple bands encircled the chocolate tentacles up and down the length, like some psychedelic harlequin. One tentacle twirled around another – eternally – as if the thing were wringing its hands and laughing over some diabolical plot. The insinuations – about us – were ominous.

  Four Canopus

  Fatimah watched the organs fly from their body cavity as his automobile disintegrated in a spray of fiberglass and through-bolts. Accidents in Cairo are seldom tidy. As his eyes faded dead, he saw one last glimpse: Osiris, God of the Underworld, catching the organs in canopic jars to be weighed against Fatimah’s soul, thus determining the dictates of eternal justice. Allah would not be pleased that a mere idol had intercepted one of the faithful – well, parts of the faithful – before he had reached paradise.

  These were the contents of the jars:

  IMSETY: A liver – pickled in cheap wine and thin beer. Soft and cracked through with rivulets of burning alchohol. A deep brown topographical map, complete with ragged peaks and clear flowing wadis. An overtaxed sack shot full of holes.

  QUEBEHSENUF: A heart (Professional Egyptologists will note here a contradiction – Fatimah’s intestines were unavailable at the moment of Osiris’ catch, thus, in His eagerness, He grabbed the nearest available organ) – Incarnadine from toughness, not blood flow. More ruby mineral than muscle, yet ruby flawed. A tough, brittle thing. Pock-marked and bruised from self-abuse. Blood coursed through it like cold water through a cavern – the housing stiff and unmoving, cored out by a bitter liquid until the structure collapses in on itself.

  HAPY: Lungs – Scarred with black furrows carved by opium smoke. Wheezy pouches frayed from yelling at wife and child. Depositories of toxic odors gathered through unethical business practice. Bellows of grime. Cilia stilled by tar and nicotine.

  DUAMUTIF: A stomach – Stretched to excess. Flacid with gluttonous over-stuffing. An acid-churning well of worry and guilt, deception made manifest in indigestion. A treasure chest of lipids, sugar and vinegar. Clearing house of burning bile vomit – much to the joy of the liver, which quivered in fear beneath whenever the stomach was filled. A bucket of filth, unclean contents hiding from Koranic law.

  Perhaps Allah wouldn’t mind Osiris’ interference after all.

  Jamalerdapala’s Refractor: A History

  Of the hundreds of objects-de-artifice commissioned by Jamalerdapala, crown prince of Tamil, none enjoys as storied a history as the delightful creation known at the royal court as The Mirror of Scintillating Wings. Surely more magnificent devices were invented by the prince’s artisans, such as the automaton diorama of Lord Rama handing the idol-god Sri Ranganatham to a young boy (Rama had to relieve himself and had been instructed not to place the god on the ground – you can imagine the result of trusting one’s charge to a mere boy, and a stranger at that). There were more practical devices, such as the cinnamon-peeling tree bark harvester used by the prince’s gardener before tea-time, or the now infamous dew-recycling morning water pitcher. But few of these admittedly magnificent oddities have garnered such an international interest as that object known informally as The Butterfly Mirror.

  The artifact is intricate, and one could easily imagine the royal artists fidgeting upon their nail beds at night, unable to meditate their way through the problems of design and execution, for months on end. Luckily for them, Jamalerdapala was a ruler of great patience – a trait uncommon among those of his caste – as well as one of great wealth. His liberal use of resources, combined with his ability to bring out the best in his subjects (after all, they thought, despite his kindness, he could a
t any moment revert to royal “sanity” and order the decapitation of the lot of them. It was always safest to be over cautious in preventing one’s own decollation), created an atmosphere in which it was almost preordained that some measure of lasting beauty must emerge from the court. An almost perfect something. An artificial Nirvana, of sorts.

  Twenty craftsmen and scientists were involved in its construction. They worked only at night, in absolute darkness under the influence of powerful stimulants, lest intrusions from the outside world mar their work. The frame was built first: a filigreed pewter rectangle molded with arcane symbols and pictures of flax and cattle – images that, stylistically, most resemble those found centuries later by Sir John Marshall at the ruins of Mohenjo-daro. Next, a plate of flawless of amber-tinted glass was fitted to the frame. Behind the frame was affixed a case, which was subdivided into a hundred tiny compartments, the insides painted matte black so that the ambered glass acted as a golden mirror. Through the mirrored glass, however, the reflected viewer could see, like fluttering ghosts, ethereal in their near-insubstantiality, the true wonder of the artists and scientists long hours of labor: one hundred finely-tuned and exquisitely-painted mechanical butterflies in 65 different species, from the common white on milky brown papilio polytes rumulus through the angelic papilio polymnester parinda and danaus aglea aglea to the iridescent blue Banded Peacock (papilio crino). Even a trio of that rarest of island butterflies, the Sri Lanka Five-Bar Swordtail (graphium autiphates ceylonicus) was represented – more swordtails in one spot than the keenest lepidopterist might see in a lifetime.

  One stood before the mirror and beheld their glass doppelganger surrounded by an astral haze of slowly pulsing wings. It is reported that when Jamalerdapala stood before the mirror on its completion, he exclaimed “My soul takes flight. I will ascend to my new mistress, the moon!”

  Perhaps the fear of buoyancy and ascension beyond the physical plane, combined with the prince’s well-known fear of heights, presaged the passage of the mirror from the hands of Jamalerdapala to Sultan Muliyat Khum of Zanzibar. The Sultan’s envoy, Gilead Mbano – one must suppose that the envoy was of Jewish descent, perhaps through Ethiopia – on Khum’s hearing of the munificence and glory of the crown prince, was sent to visit the Tamil palace of the generous noble in an effort to establish contracts relating to the exchange of spice for gold and ivory. While touring the royal forest, the prince noted Mbano’s fascination with and keen knowledge of the local invertebrate fauna. At the conclusion of the visit, the mirror was sent southbound with Mbano on the Sultan’s dhow, a gift to Khum, but more a gift for the envoy than for the Sultan, whom Jamalerdapala had never met.

  Nevertheless, though Mbano sat spellbound in its presence the entire journey back to Africa, the butterfly mirror spent little time in his company. Upon its arrival at the stone ramparts of the Sultan’s fortress, it was whisked away to the Zanzibari royal harem, where only emasculated males might see its wonder. It became a favored plaything of the Sultan’s wives and concubines, who stood nude before the mirror, preening themselves, in turn, before the oft-jealous eyes of those whose reflected form was not caught in its golden gaze. For while silky-veiled rumors of pleasure and delight cast a shadowy erotic mist about the harem, the dwellers therein know only an unending jaded boredom. The eunuchs, stripped of their libido, viewed the women’s vain displays with a detached sense of spiritual fulfillment – the mirror, to them, was an object of sublime transcendence.

  Seven generations of Sultan passed, while the harem remained bathed in an eternal sea of youth, white-hot sexuality and utter ennui. The Butterfly Mirror was all but forgotten by those outside its carved ivory walls. An occasional amber glow at night, combined with high-pitched giggles, sighs, and the scent of patchouli hinted at its presence, but only an obscure catalog, inscribed at the time of Mbano’s contract, recorded the actuality of the device.

  Were it not for the influx of outsiders seeking to establish a colonial foothold in the area, the mirror might still be in the inventory of the sultanate (decrepit and corrupt as it has become in this age of corporate ascendance). We should thank the great cosmopolitan, Doctor Phineous Pilander for temporarily rescuing the wonder from dusty obscurity. Doctor Pilander (who, history has revealed, was actually an irascible merchant of shallow moral character), was sent as Queen Victoria’s emissary in a last, desperate attempt to establish a consul at Zanzibar where previous attempts by the always-stodgy and sometimes-belligerent Royal Navy had failed. The good Queen Mother had sent with her ambassador a pair of London pigeons as an example of “exotic English aviary fauna” – or so it was printed on the certificate of authenticity tied to each of the bird’s legs. So impressed was the Sultan – now Umbayar Uthman Fada (the Khums since displaced by another dynasty on the murder of Khum III by bandits) – that he ordered the firing of all the fortress’s cannonade at once (much to the surprise of local fishermen, who received no warning of the coming salute) and the gifting of some token to the British emissary. The Sultan’s vizier combed the records for a suitable something – anything, for the Fadas were in desperate financial straits . . . relatively speaking. After an exhaustive search of the libraries, the vizier’s assistants found the catalog entry of the Butterfly Mirror, which was seized at once and removed from the harem. Suicide spread like wildfire through the concubinage.

  It was after Pilander’s return to Britain that the mirror suffered its first mishap. The queen, though fascinated by the Sultan’s gift, felt it unseemly for a woman of her station to portray a modicum of vanity. Thus the much-coveted artifact was awarded to Pilander, who had, with much effort, secured the use of a small dock facing the East African coast, for the Royal Navy. Dr. Pilander, not knowing quite what to do with the mirror, donated it to Tearsham Group, the exclusive men’s club to which he belonged, where it stood under the mounted heads of various specimens of African wildlife entirely inappropriate in their proximity to an object of such beauty.

  As was mentioned earlier, this Dr. Phineas Pilander proved to be quite a scoundrel. His company might be to blame. At least one of this companions proved the undoing of three-hundred-odd years of attention and upkeep to what can only be described as a marvel of invention and art: Sir Robert Yurr.

  Sir Robert had been knighted for an act of bravery that he did not commit. While masses of poverty stricken family men languished in British prisons under false charges, Sir Robert found himself, despite his best efforts, in a rich and upright social standing that he clearly did not deserve. Yurr was a thug by trade. A strapping brute of a man who delighted in the squirmings and whimperings of a victim up against a wet, dirty wall. It was on one of his nightly forays into the alleyway shadows of Brixton that he happened on a mugging in process. The muggee was a young, effeminate Prince Edward. But more interesting to Yurr, the muggers were a pair of gypsies who had swindled him out of a box of cigars some months earlier. The constabulary arrived in time to see Yurr triumphant, standing atop the unconscious forms of the gypsy twins, the young prince bruised and faint, but alive and well. The timely arrival of the police might well have saved the prince’s life. The gypsies were jailed, Yurr knighted, and Prince Edward never found the pouch of coin that somehow ended up in Yurr’s noble pockets.

  After receiving his knighthood, Sir Robert became an object of adoration to the semi-male androgynes of the lower-upper class, who lauded his toughness and rough charisma. He was invited to hunt in Africa (hence the trophy heads at the Tearsham Group), India, Australia, and the American west, where he proved a cunning and ruthless hunter. Yurr tolerated the daintiness of his benefactors for the sake of the hunt, but despised the chalky paleness of those philanthropists who toadied to his favor. In ways, one might say he was like a coy mistress . . . but not.

  In time this inner contradiction reached a boiling point. One day, torn between lone-wolf manliness, on one hand, and financial dependence on those he despised, on the other, Yurr went to an obscure corner of the Tearsham Group for a se
lf-assessment. There he proposed to sort out his feelings and rediscover his true self, money be damned.

  He did not like what he saw in the mirror.

  The glass suffered its first breakage, while Sir Robert suffered severe cuts to his ulotrichous knuckles. Both Yurr and the butterfly mirror were removed from position and deposited on the street outside the Tearsham Group. Here the two parted ways: Yurr returning to a life of thuggery, the mirror being picked up by William John Morrison, a doyen of the arts and crafts movement.

  William John Morrison (never merely “Mr. Morrison” or “William” or even – God forbid – “Bill”) was an artist who specialized in stained glass and miniatures paintings. His quite-capable reconstruction of The Butterfly Mirror was only marred by two facts: 1) the soldering with which he bound the amber shards back together divided the mirror’s face into some twenty-off irregularly-shaped and sized puzzle pieces, and 2) William John Morrison, being true to the principles of the arts and crafts movement, had decided that the butterflies so cleverly compartmentalized in the mirror’s ghostly cloud looked far too modern in their execution. Thus, in true pre-Raphaelite fashion, he repainted the insects’ wings with scenes from the Arthurian legends (Mallory being all the rage at the time). Here was the birth of Mordred, there the arrival of the Green Knight in Arthur’s court, here Merlin speaking with his familiar, there Guineverre deceived. The entire panoply of Welsh-cum-English mythos whirred, clicked, and fluttered in a pewter-veined montage around the viewer’s form.

  Most often the Questing Beast and the Grail were seen jumping from shoulder to shoulder of one Anne Skarsinkopolis, an underage Greek maiden who had fallen under the spell of William John Morrison, but whose romantic advances on the artist went un-noticed by the man himself, though another, a young calligrapher by the name of Blake Carmenson, was enviously aware of Miss Skarsinkopolis’s attentions to the oblivious William John Morrison. A strangely-disconnected love triangle developed with William John Morrison blissfully unaware of Skarsinkopolis’s infatuation, while the dark Greek vixen, in turn, spurned Carmenson’s love. Unknown to both of the younger members of the trio, William John Morrison had fallen in love with Carmenson, whose fine features and somber manner had set the miniaturist’s heart afire. Over the course of months, sexual tensions rose to flood stage, with Carmen finally challenging William John Morrison to a duel. So stunned was the elder artist by the attention, and so enamored had he become of the untouchable young Carmenson, that he agreed to the duel, seeing in its conclusion the fitting tragic end to an unrequited love. Among the Yorkshire hills (both having travelled several days by coach for the occasion), William John Morrison happily slid his now-broken heart over the rapier blade of his platonic love, crimson blood falling nearly as quickly as the tears that fell from Anne Skarsinkopolis’s cheek at the demise of her own platonic love. Ironically, William John Morrison’s will ceded all of his artistic accoutrements, including The Butterfly Mirror, to Carmenson.