Fossiloctopus Read online

I looked for the key, but it had seemingly disappeared. I checked behind me on the sofa – perhaps I had just laid it to the side and forgotten about it. I looked at the floor, but it was not to be found. I was most embarrassed and was thinking up an apology for the lost key when my host walked through the doorway, a tumbler of rum in each hand.

  The key slipped through the binding of the book – through, not around – and fell to the table, clattering loudly. I looked up at my host, jaw gaping, and slammed the book’s cover shut far more loudly than I had intended. I set the book down clumsily, sandwiching the key between the tome and the table.

  The reporter walked over to me and smiled, handing me one of the tumblers. I was glad for the rum’s sharpness, each sip bringing reality burning back into my throat.

  He smiled at me. Then, picking up the book, he turned to the exact page I had been admiring earlier. I looked down at the table where the key should have been, but it was not there. Instead it was, as before, wedged between the book’s pages.

  The reporter read, translating from the Arabic: “The key is crafted of iron, shaped in the form of the arabic letter meem, signifying mortal existence and its end, according to Abd’ al Ansab.” I quaffed my drink, thanked my host, then left in utter astonishment. He smiled, as if pleased with the oddity of the situation.

  It was only a short time ago that I learned that Ibn Arabi’s al-Futahat al-Maghrib is still unfound, having been lost to Berber raiders over 900 years ago, though its existence is irrefutably confirmed in several catalogs of Ibn Arabi’s personal libraries.

  Bentham’s Eye

  Since its inception in the mind’s eye of Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon has been the focal center of a contentious philosophical debate on the nature of power and control in the modern state. Despite the varied, sometimes chaotic reactions to the proposed structure, the building itself has never been built. It is, in its very essence, the greatest prison/laboratory/asylum/quarantine that never was.

  The key to the Panopticon, however, is a very real object, now in the possession of Professor Emeritus Hans Vansanno, resident of Bern, Switzerland. It is carved from a single piece of crystal, a smooth, rounded key of elliptical shape, unlike the jagged-edged keys to which most of us are accustomed.

  The central motif of the key is, as one would expect, an eye. Not just any eye, though. Bentham’s key is modeled after the reformer’s own eye – his left, to be exact; the droopy one that caused him such grief and made him the subject of much mockery as a young student. The very eye that taught him about the emotionally painful relationship between being seen and powerlessness, and the converse relationship between authority and over-sight.

  All biographical inferences aside, the object itself is an opus of inventiveness, surpassing the clever design even of the building that it has never unlocked. Its curvatures were cut and ground in such a way that the holder of the key sees on its surface only his reflection, no matter at what angle or distance it is held. He who holds the key to the Panopticon has the image of himself always before him.

  But Bentham’s audacity, craftsmanship, and genius is most powerfully made manifest when one catches the reflection of his own pupil within the key’s crystalline lens. If you are so fortunate, or unfortunate, to see into Bentham’s eye seeing your eye seeing Bentham’s eye seeing your eye . . .. If you are caught in that visual gravity well, you will understand that the entire world and all its inhabitants can be, and indeed is a Panopticon, with all its inhabitants completely visible at all angles, at all times, simultaneously.

  And you will hold that curiosity in your hand, though your sense has left you, and be left, forever, with the question: “Am I a warden, or a prisoner?”

  Tshibumba’s Skeleton

  Tshibumba Kanda Matulu painted what he dare not speak. His depictions of Belgian colonial brutality gave voice to the un-utter-able. The brilliance of his palette cut through and broke the jungle-shrouded silence of tortured screams and the thick layer of background weeping that pervaded central Africa for a lifetime or more.

  The hierarchy of power was clear. European officers in starched white uniform held the kiboko, or rhinoceros-hide whip. Below them, dark-skinned askari in dark-green uniforms shouldered rifles and clubs. The askari were truly the fist of colonial law. Beneath the fist were the citizens, if that term may be used for those who lived under such forms of oppression.

  Thsibumba’s Skeleton shone like an African kaleidoscope. It was a mélange of cast off paint chips and unused canvas drippings in the form of a three-dimensional skull and spine. The bones were not cleanly separated by color. You would not, for instance, have found paint-by-number lumbar bones neatly stacked in barbershop stripes. Rather, each bone was mottled in a sort of candy-store camouflage, a hypnotic, if macabre, osteological tie-dye. That is, if you ever saw it.

  Most who saw it claimed not to. Those who wished to see it dare not let their desires be known. The authorities hated the thing because, for all its concreteness, the ideas that it gave voice to – freedom, equanimity, hope, and possibly even joy – these ideas were anathema to the authorities. When the key was seen, by those who admitted it or not, it was inevitably in a position that strengthened its iconographic standing as a representation of those ideas: in the lock of a recently-opened stockade, protruding from a freely swinging prison cell door, stuck in the barrel of a gun that had been leveled at fleeing prisoners. For all the denial, Tshibumba’s Skeleton seemed to be everywhere.

  These repeated appearances of the key gave rise to several possibly un-answerable questions. What is the magic of art that leads man out of captivity? Is this escape literal or merely metaphysical? Exactly who was being freed, and to what end?

  One final question must be asked: Why must we speak here of Tshibumba and his key in the past tense, as if he were already dead? Perhaps it is because the past has not yet given way to the present. The uniforms are different; the key remains unchanged.

  Chung Ho-hsiang’s Visitor

  No one can accuse the Chia-yu empire of ingratitude towards its subjects. In 1054, one Chung Ho-hsiang discovered the famous “Guest Star” (a massive supernova explosion that has since expanded into what we now know as the crab nebula) in the constellation Taurus. A scant two years later, the star faded from naked-eye visibility. Chung Ho-hsiang, who had since been promoted to the office of Director of the Astronomical Bureau of the Chia-yu empire, was rewarded with a token of remembrance by the emperor himself: a glass-blown key infused with a gold replica of the supernova as it appeared on the first night of its discovery. The locks on the royal observatory were switched out for new ones that matched the key. And there was only one key.

  Astronomers and empires come and go, and China, despite its storied history and ancient heritage, holds no exemption to these changes. The key passed from director to director through a series of mentoring, regime changes, and public beheadings until 1449. Not long before that time, during the Qing dynasty, a bronze telescope had been built and mounted at the ancient Beijing Observatory. In that year, Emperor Zhengtong, known for his collection of one-thousand peacocks and his penchant for fried goat fat, died in his sleep – a rare royal victim of death by natural causes.

  One must assume that security in the astronomy bureau had grown lax in the few centuries between Chung Ho-hsiang’s discovery and the death of Emperor Zhengtong. For an unknown assistant at the observatory was so moved, upon hearing of the emperor’s death, that he saw fit to adhere the key – colloquially known by that time as “Chung Ho-hsiang’s Visitor” – to the object mirror of the recently-forged telescope, thus reminding all who looked through the lens that Zhengtong had ascended, like a bright star, into the heavens. Of course, this rendered the telescope useless, but this was soon rectified when a second, more powerful telescope was built alongside the first.

  For over 500 years – a span of time almost incomprehensible to the western mind, let’s be honest – the Visitor loomed before the eyes of astronomers, curiosity-seek
ers, and historians. Then, in 1967, cultural revolutionaries dismantled the telescope, painted the bust of Chairman Mao over the top of the key, then re-assembled the scope.

  Given the state of Chinese art in that decade, one who has not seen the portrait can only imagine the comical affectations given to the ruler’s visage. Chairman Mao can now be seen gracing the heavens at any point in the sky, day or night, a 24/7 twinkle in his left eye. Even the introduction of Capitalism has not sullied his starry gaze. He just keeps on smiling. If you’re lucky, you might catch him winking, a sparkle of acknowledgement just for you.

  Unlocking Vollmer

  Everyone wants to talk about it, but no one wants to touch it. It is hip, chic, and utterly forbidden by good taste. All the coolest writers write about it, singers croon anthems to its praise, academics publish erudite articles about its place on the literary keychain, but its allure is that no one with any degree of mental stability would be willing to handle it and those whose damaged sense of reason would not render it taboo to use the thing would have no clue how to find it.

  This is a good thing.

  The object is rather simple, even puerile in its representation. The handle is cast in the shape of a revolver, the tip a .38 caliber bullet, and the stem between them a stylized gunpowder flash like that in a comic book. Inscribed on the key in tiny, almost inscrutable letter, is the following:

  My molten-steel bullet will unerringly reach my target. MY target, not that of the trigger-puller, who naively views himself as a self-stimulating enticer of fate. This firearm follows its own rules. My projectile defies the laws of physics, obeying the trajectories of misfortune, the gravity well of sorrow. He, the so-called wielder, sees, in his drunken bravado, an epic retelling of the William Tell myth. But I see to it that the idyllic landscape of never-was collapses into the soul-stealing black hole of never-will-be. You would like to use my manifesto for your own purposes, to cure the world of its ills by abolishing its tools. But I reject your anti-parochialism. I tear your agenda to shreds. I glory in the small. For this manifesto was written for one man only, and you are not that man. My entry wound is small, a mere centimeter in the woman’s head, but the exit wound pulls the man’s being through it, turning him and his life inside out. You cannot use me. I am the user, he the used. I the trigger puller, he the trigger. She, the target, he, the victim. Now who is the key and who the turner as we unlock Vollmer?

  Nancy Davis' Bridal Veil

  A lifetime blink of lucidity came to Ronald Reagan as he lay on the bottom of an immense walk-in closet in a house that he did not know he owned. Nor did he know how he got there, legs akimbo and covered in rayon dresses. Rayon, all except for one, a brilliant white wedding dress whose tail wrapped around his waist, an, an albino boa constrictor of sequined mirrors. The silk veil caught him full in the face, dazzling his eyes and jarring loose a tenuously-connected string of facts and mnemons.

  Silk,

  rumored to be discovered in China by lady His-Ling-Shih, wife of the Yellow Emperor and, later, Goddess of Silk.

  Ann Francis Robbins,

  screen name Nancy Davis, a bit actress of no great fame. She had come to "Ron" in his capacity as President of the Screen Actors’ Guild. He helped her clear her name from the communist blacklist in 1951, and the couple was married soon thereafter.

  Hellcats of the Navy,

  English with Japanese and English subtitles, 1957, starring Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis.

  Japan,

  the world's second leading producer of silk.

  China,

  the world's leading producer of silk. Also the first communist country that Ronald Reagan ever visited. Before the Iran-Contra scandal. Before the fall of the Soviet Union.

  Before the fall of a shoebox, gifted to Nancy by Imelda Marcos, onto his head.

  The veil slipped from his face.

  A strange old woman with a familiar voice called out "Ron? Where have you gotten to now? Are you alright?"

  Down the hall, someone turned on a light.

  The Seven Tattoos of Inisto Cantaglia

  You won’t find his name. Your search is over before it has begun despite long hours at a microfiche table, stamp-licking yourself nauseous, and a hundred paper cuts caught writing out checks to the world’s most respected genealogists and private investigators. Your dreams corrode in the witching hour with distant whispered echoes from unseen mouths, his name muffled and cowled in inky cerements. “Inisto Cantaglia, Inisto Cantaglia, Inisto Cantaglia . . .” until the words explode like flame into morning and you are left grasping for the fast fading dream that is being eclipsed by the darkness of your waking consciousness.

  Though perhaps lonely, you are not alone. Alongside you, the crowd watches, hypnotized.

  The manta-ray night is his canvas. Nyx’s indigo cloak is punctured only feebly by stars and sparklers, like lighthouse flashes from the neutron universe, briefly flashing with relativistic lensing, only to be engulfed in strands of nebulae and cloudbanks. His audience are everymen, the drabness of their clothes throbbing with sameness and mediocrity. Their eyes occasionally light up as the celebration passes them, but it is only a reflection of someone else’s festivity. They are incapable of self-illumination. They are there to be entertained. And Inisto Cantaglia is happy to bring light and entertainment to these beer-soaked streets where the buildings loom, leaning over the everyman mob like MacBeth’s witches peering down into their soot-charred cauldrons, seeking the essence of prophetic apparitions.

  He moves like a dynamo through the molasses masses, a man alive, animated, sharply aware of the mind-numbed insensates that surround him. His bare skin glistens, as if the black cowls and misshapen shawls of the onlookers serve to insulate his naked torso from the frosted night air. But the heat that causes his perspiration comes from within – from within turned without in magma and white fireballs flared past the pair of burning sticks that he wields in a frenzied dance, trying to keep his spectators at bay. His is the only true illumination. Bright clouds, fiery jets, burning ovoids burst beyond his lips. He is the Cassanova of Vulcan. Prometheus’ Lover. The Tongue of Flame.

  And in the light of the performance they see – you see – the seven tattoos of Inisto Cantaglia:

  THE SALAMANDER - Over his left breast – over the region of the heart – writhes the salamander. The demonic serpentine bottom half undulates in the glow of the flames, reaching out to escape its epidermic prison and return home to the plane of fire. Atop the fire-adder’s hocks are a trunk, a head, and two arms of human appearance, but devilish provenance. The mustachio face might be that of Saint Pol-Roux or Comte de Montesquiou – black whiskers sharp as a scalpel, pointed as a syringe needle, every hair of the head waxed into its proper place. In his immaculately-manicured hands he holds a flamethrower, pointing the dragon’s mouth toward the viewer. The pilot-flame that peeks out of the weapon’s muzzle in anxious anticipation serves to darken, rather than illuminate, the salamander’s ebony eyes. The malice-filled orbs glitter with emptiness, sparked by something more searing than flame, yet darker than the abyss.

  THE JONGLEUR – Opposite the salamander, on the right breast, the Jongleur. He is a plump wag, his wide blue eyes and jaw-gaped smile full of élan. He is a Disney Bacchus in renaissance garb. A black and white checkered cap replete with two belled horns balances atop his foppish Ringo mop, and beneath the goateed double chin a frilly, laced jabot attached, in turn, to a once –piece harlequin suit in black and white stripes. Below the Goliath Beetle (Goliathus regius Klug) corpulence, a pair of bell-tipped genie shoes in red. The Jongleurs face might be the salamander’s, sans sinistry, and fattened on the paychecks of his audience. He laughs aloud, surrounded by generic stick people, empty heads with drawn-on smiles and inexpressive eyes. He juggles five fuse-lit cannonballs. The crackling of their sparkling wicks stops the sound of laughter from reaching the un-ears of the stick people crowd. Had they heard through the fizzle, they might have realized the danger they were in, f
or his laughter was less mellisonant than maleficent. The crowd laughs ignorantly. The joke is on them.

  KNUCKLEBONES – Two pairs of knucklebones in three chronological stages on the inner left forearm.

  Stage I: Four knucklebones reading 2:2:6:4 or 4:10 by the pairs. This is the oldest and purest of the three stages, the cubes clean, white, dots clear and distinct. Read the pairs – Song of Solomon 4:10: “How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all spices!”

  Stage II: A touch-up job in reverse. The crispness of the initial tattoo has faded and wear has appeared – hand oils and nicotine stains smudge the skin inks, and two dots have appeared on the first die. Let him who hath eyes read. Psalms 6:10: “Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly.”

  Stage III: More dots, 7:11, and things have become unclear. The knucklebones are gnarled, cracked, grooved, dirty, used, worn smooth on the vertices from obsessive rubbing, smudged with soot, and burnt. Interpretations diverge. One – Genesis 7:11: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Or, two –the old books are decontextualized and, thus, defunct. A new book has superseded the old, and a one-letter deviation in its prologue can lead to drastic results in the denouement. Events are nudged by even the slightest punctuation error, the resulting plot line careening out of control. Chance has taken over in the fractal interstices. Cracks infinitely deteriorate, and chaos spreads like a cancer through the history of the man who wears the dice. The empty shell of the knucklebones barely hides the rot within its crumbling ivory veneer.