Category: milliFiction

21.

 

Fingers flailing wildly for effect, I say, And so, and so, and so Churchill tells them, “Now that is precisely the sort of thing up with which I will not put.”

Raat! Hahahahahahahahahaha!

Chimpy’s nostrils spray a clumsy spritz of Moscow mule. Five sequential spouts ejaculate from the geoduck shelter. Naomi booms loudly enough to vibraslide Chimpy’s chalice off the coffee table, which he dives for to no avail. A lightbulb pops and crumbles in another room.

But of the mess I couldn’t care less. Today I turned 21 and I am having the time of my life. For breakfast, Chimpy prepared me a Yoshoku omurice made with silkie chicken and Electra performed a flawless rendition of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mister President.” We have indulged in Dionysian pleasures since.

Mittgrabbing my tankard, I step over Gambino and Lucchese, stumble on a pile of pointed words and phrases that haven’t yet fully evaporated, and make my way to the loo. There are four trash bags crammed taut with crumpled paper lined up against the wall. The dolphins cost me half a closet of mail.

Before the porcelain god, I relieve myself. Hence my mind returns to Antonia, my leitmotif. There are certain facts about her. She has an aura that stimulates all five senses. If intuition is a sixth sense, then all six senses; if emotion a seventh, seven. I am confident it’s probably there on all the undetectable wavelengths, too. She is desirable and charming and I am charmed by and desire her. Calm is the key of her register, which is so constant it gives me doubtspook. While I admit that Antonia’s stigmata have become an unhealthy obsession—we are watching The Passion of the Christ tonight and I have moved the flat screen so that even Beethoven can join us—I am sure she is guilty of something. I always pick up that whiff of fear hormone whenever the animals engage her. My faith is in the universe, and I suspect she might be a protected witness, if not a repeat offender, if not a notorious felon, in the court of natural law.

Last night in the dark as I stared at the ceiling waiting to turn 21, I contemplated all of the things Antonia might really be. The Frenchman’s minions had delivered my new pod of dolphins and crates of Greenland herring stuffed to the gills with roe; this excitement fresh on the mind, for some reason my thoughts hopscotched all the way to the topic of the lost kingdom of Atlantis. Plato wrote in the Critias that ‘Poseidon, receiving for his lot the island of Atlantis, begat children by a mortal woman.’ What is going on here and now with Antonia feels like the opposite—it is I who is the mortal, she the deity, this menagerie our adopted children. Maybe she is a resurrection from a dead religion of a bygone world like Atlantis, for they, too, had their gods, no doubt. But perhaps she is something else. Perhaps she is the embodiment of a natural miracle: neither the incarnation nor the product of a knowing god but an issuance of matter (not spirit) that is perfect, or in some other obscure or oblique sense divine. That is to say, a holy thing. A wordless scripture. A solid æther.

 

Chimpy has lined up six yabbies on the coffee table, all six balancing perfectly still on their heads, his newest parlor trick. (Toast, out like a light, he signs.) I refill my tankard from the pony keg in the kitchen. Electra is lying on her back on the floor, playing dead for laughs, tongue dangling from her beak, one rigid talon twitching like a cartoon. Eve sniffs Electra with fearful concern.

She’s just kidding, I tell Eve.

Eve looks up into my eyes. Her tail comes to life.

Let’s take a walk, girl. I let her lick my hand.

 

The hallway outside my flat noisechurns with the sweet stink of petrol. Eve is by my side as we enter the unhinged doorway of no. 9.

The grindblast is coming from the heavy rotating saw that Antonia is guiding along a straight path in the floor. She is spraying the blade with a water hose. Scores of floorboards lean vertically up against a wall in tidy lines. Beside them is an equally measured stack of concrete slabs.

She stops the saw, pulls up another plank, adds it to the rest. She turns to me and Eve and smiles. She takes off her protective goggles.

Dozen it look hood?

It looks fantastic, I reply.

She gestures behind her.

Half the room’s floor is gone. About a meter down into the flat below I see a liquid surface tremble and ripple. The entire second floor of the building is nearly full with water, to contain the pod of dolphins. Vents such as this one will allow them to surface, breathe, and talk.

Do you think it’s full downstairs yet? I ask.

Antonia removes her gloves. Maybe buy tonight.

Eve dips her snout down into the floor, sniffs at the waves. Her ears stiffen.

¡Ya vienen!

I’m sorry, what?

A sharp, throaty mist erupts from the water, followed by another and another. Waves clap on the surface.

One dolphin raises its head completely in the air, bares teeth and tongue, and sings, Tktktktk ckckckckck ananananana ayuayuayu!

Others follow suit, with varying degrees of interest and intent. Tktktktktktk. Ckckckckckckckck! Kekekekekekekekeaaaaahhnaaapei.

I respond, I’m glad you find everything comfortable. Help yourself to some herring if you haven’t already. They’re spawning. Tkatkatkatkatka.

Antonia gasps. ¡Vaya, Raymundo! That so good!

I hadn’t realized I responded in clicks. It just came out of me.

Eve spinshakes from neck to tail to dry herself. She is grinning with open mouth.

I suddenly remember our other task, what I really intended for us to do.

No. 21, “H. Blindeth” (or so it says on his mail).

My tankard is empty again. I need a refill.

 

20.

 

I light another cigarette, toss the match into the ashtray, and resume pacing around the room.

I ask, Is this what you meant when you said what you said to me that day in the pet shop?

“Don’t be so specific, man.”

Please. That time when Antonia and I were walking together.

Raat! Two peas in a pod.

Exactly. Is this what you meant? The superstitions, the followings? Beethoven said she is a goddess.

“…I knowww all there is to knowww about the crying gaaame…”

What do you mean?

Raat! Cut it off.

Cut what off?

“It’s not my fault.” “God made me this way.”

Electra, please. You’re mixed up. That’s not what I mean. I could plainly see under the black light that her hands bear the signs of stigmata.

Raat! “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”

Well, that’s more in the right direction. But will you tell me: is that what you meant?

She’s no more a goddess than I am.

So that is not what you meant?

“Welllll, I do an’ I don’t.”

I ash my cigarette. I plead, Electra, I need to know.

Everything goes red.

Sheis th eMessi ah.

From behind a cloud of silt and ink, Beethoven unfurls a single tentacle, a limb as thick and twice as long as my own arm. Its suckers smush against the transparent boundary, warp and flatten, silent. They look just like the eyeless faces of burning, screaming souls.

The red ends.

 

I can hear my father now: Sinjoro devas marŝi, ne kuri. ‘A gentleman should walk, not run.’ But I wouldn’t expect him to understand my urgency.

I am out of breath when I top the stairs and enter the doors of the Kant-Gump Lane Branch of the Public Library. Behind me, amongst the tourists in the street surrounding the statue of our city’s founder, two women—one shouting, the other sobbing—are pointing and gesturing at me while being restrained by police officers in black uniforms.

Under the light of stained glass and chandeliers, amidst the smells of paper and stone, I get to the books I need: leatherbound, brittle pages. In 1224, two years before his death, St. Francis of Assisi manifested stigmata of the Christ, the first known instance of such a thing ever reported. Without cause, he bled from hands and feet as well as from his rib, where Jesus was speared on the cross. St. Bonaventure’s Major Legend (1266) records an anecdote about a portrait of St. Francis that temporarily displayed stigmata right before the eyes of the painting’s matron and a fellow witness, the marks becoming visible only when the two contemplated the miracle and vanishing from view just as swiftly. Nothing I read convinces me that the resultant stigmata tradition is anything more than a few hundred hoaxes exploiting superstition, but I cannot deny what I saw on Antonia’s hands under the black light in the bug suite.

A true stigmatic manifests all five wounds: both hands, both feet, and the flank of the torso. Outside the library, I stop to light a cigarette. A man with a shaven head wearing an orange toga and sandals kneels a few feet from me, his lips moving in prayer.

 

Everything turns red.

Imea nsh eis theM essiah.

I light another cigarette. I ask, Yes but what does that actually mean? Why does she have Christian stigmata on her? Of all things?

S he is the thirdr evela tion.

Fine, but why not the Sixth Sun or Shiva or Shangó?

Shebea rs thewounds ofcruxi ficti on. Ripp edf rom thec ross, handsa ndf eetsplit, and shehas heal ed andi srebo rn.

I think, I have no god. Or, at best, if I do, it’s the invisible hand. But not a thing worthy of worship. By no means.

An tonia is theo pposite ofyou.

The red ends.

 

In a brass Art Nouveau birdcage at the top of an eye-high pedestal, my new pride and joy snares and swallows yet another weevil.

She is magnificent, I say.

Antonia hugs my arm, leans her temple on my shoulder. On cheese prom México! Electra wheel loaf her.

I’m sure she will.

Antonia sighs, squeezes me tighter. A welcome gesture of sincere affection.

And yet my skin crawls. Ripped from the cross as Beethoven said. I think, For what crime was she punished? What heresy?

Antonia is the opposite of you. If so, I wonder: What is it she lacks?

I hear boots; the Frenchman appears. Stetson hat, bolo tie, velvet brocade on a gunfighter blazer.

Howdy patron, he says. Il dit que le camion livrera les dauphins demain soir.

I ask, Will the shipment include the herring?

He claps me on the back. Oui, bien sûr. Ils auront besoin d’accéder à l’ascenseur de service.

I’ll be sure to meet them when they arrive.

D’accord.

We shake hands.

Avoiding him, Antonia walks down an aisle, each animal in a cage or tank clamoring as she passes.

 

I unlock the door to my flat to find Rascal eating the remains of a pillow cushion. Goose down floats in the air like snowflakes, drifts of it piled against the walls. The cedar ribs of the sofa’s carcass horrorsplay from under torn fabric. What’s worse, Eve is balled in a corner where she never sits. She is licking in her groin what is an obvious wound. Neither Eve nor Rascal pay me any mind when I enter with the birdcage.

Raat! Who’s the fox?

She is your new companion, Electra. A Socorro mockingbird. From the Revillagigedo Islands.

Raat! Can we name her Elvis?

Of course we can.

The good news is the Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaeles in no. 20 moved out. They leave a letter they drop through the mail slot. I don’t have to open it and see that it is in fact from them to know so. Chimpy tosses it in with the rest in the now second mail closet (which is already near knee high).

Now all I need is no. 21.

 

19.

 

There has been, shall we say, a revelation, one that has occurred to me with the issuance of this chapter, since by its very nature, its coming into being is simultaneous with my self-awareness. And upon my self-awareness, the narrative is affected. As a result, the climactic moment of the aforementioned revelation is become the present, and all other action leading up to this moment, the past. That is, until the moment and the narrative converge into one and the same once again.

Prelude to the present: Days (weeks? a moon?) had passed since the last time I’d encountered Beethoven. Antonia and I have fully installed all of the MTEs, which results in a single transparent plastic tubular maze running throughout my home, from room to hallway to room to walkway, snaking around the entire flat. Dozens of meters of interconnected MTEs have come to surround me in my apartment, maybe hundreds of meters, maybe even thousands the vaguer I keep it. Some portions are attached to walls, others the ceiling, a couple of bends rest on the floor. At a meter in width, the MTE setup allows Beethoven to move freely, even expressively. A morning some time ago I dried the final coat of epoxy on the interior of the guest room, loaded it with sand and brackish tabs, set out pails of new breeds (Rex sole, Dolly Varden trout, grunt sculpins), and unveiled the coral baskets. Then I sealed the doorway, filled the room with water, and linked it to the MTE corridor. This gave Beethoven the space it demanded. Beethoven named it Todeshöhle, which Electra heard as ‘toad-in-the-hole’ but really means The Death Lair. Chimpy estimated that Beethoven’s body by now must be longer than his.

In the lead-up to the chillfate moment happening right now involving me and Antonia upstairs having some fun with the new moths (vestals, crimson-speckled flunkeys, and rosy underwings), I had become utterly consumed by thoughts and feelings for her. I would not say that Antonia has moved in, but she spends as much time here as she likes and I want her here all the time. My houndstooth-clad schoolboyish neighbor in no. 9 has moved out, finally, and by now lives with either his boyfriend uptown or his great-uncle’s widow Griselda down in windmill country.

The revelatory moment that we’re considering at present only lasts a few seconds.

Let’s say the whole moment lasts seven seconds.

The first second. In the first second, I feel a rush of curiosity and joy like I did yesterday when I powwowed my menagerie to ceremoniously welcome in the new cultures of tardigrades. (Also referred to as moss piglets or water bears in common parlance.) I have twenty-six of them of various classes and orders, names pending. And they are astonishing. These tardigrades can withstand 1,000 times more radiation than any other animal in the known world. They can survive 6,000 times the pressure of our planet’s atmosphere, at either the top of a mountain or the bottom of an ocean trench, as well as endure prolonged exposure to a vacuum, or to unfiltered ultraviolet light. They can suspend their metabolism for decades if needed, can live within a temperature range spanning hundreds of degrees. They are microscopic and indestructible. The Frenchman now wears Boss and drives a Jaguar.

In the second second, I tell Antonia, Let me see your hands. She wasn’t here when the emu egg had hatched, and I wished she had been. Naomi has gotten to roam loose throughout the building and she’s become big and beautiful. The last tenant holdouts are nos. 20 and 21 on the seventh floor.

In the third second, I wave a black light wand before my hand, wiggle all six fingers, check front and back. I hadn’t realized how much invisible bee pollen was stuck to my hands when we had begun the new moth setups. The drapes are drawn, there is only black light present. My hand looks splattered with neon flecks and streaks as if I were guilty of a heinous crime.

Mother had called again, and we had had a good talk.

She’d said, O nilo lati tọrọ gafara fun u.

I will, I’d told her.

O nilo lati ṣèlérí.

I promise.

O nilo lati sọ gbogbo awọn ọrọ.

I sighed like a tired boy and said, I promise I will apologize to Chimpy and the others for how rudely I spoke to them.

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth seconds of this most revelatory moment, I feel the weight of new things. A lot feels new. Antonia acts shy, mutters, Butt-eye-dough-one-two, and hides away her hands. Her vulnerability nowadays affects me deeply and always, it seems. She had told me that her mother has been deceased for years and that she never knew who her father was. That no one believed her young mother was expecting given how virtuous and unassuming she was. There never appeared to be a father. An immaculate conception was the general opinion. And it would not be long after her birth for her to experience the sort of odd celebrity I had experienced my entire childhood, my entire life. By now we have wept together at least three times. I say, But you must, and pursue her in the fluttering, breathing darkness. I reach for her elbow, and when I get closer, even though she turns away, I take a hold of her wrist.

In the seventh second, I put the black light down to her hands. Under the black light, for just an instant, I can see, clear as day, that on each hand, Antonia has a prominent scar: a straight line running down from between two knuckles to a hole in the middle of her palm.

A pair of stigmata.

At this very moment, everything goes red, and from my third-floor flat to where we are now on the eighth, Beethoven sends a message that buzzes in my head: I tol dyou so.

 

18.

 

Chimpy clicks on the aquarium light.

The flat has been growing. Spreading, developing as of late. Opening up. Areas have been coming into focus the more they’re needed. Before a need there is nothing but vagueness around what space of my home has been put to use. Like the Bonsai and the window alcove before: how that came into being (although I’m unsure of what need was fulfilled). Closets, rooms, mirrors all come into being only at their mention.

We settle into the Eames chairs. Chimpy places down ashtrays.

I tell him, So, you’re a native New Yorker.

He flicks his cigarette and nods.

I ask, Is there a good story behind that?

He signs, It’s got the birds ‘n’ the bees in it so maybe, but you’re eighteen now, Ray, so, no more earmuffs on the grownup shit for you.

Thanks.

Baby’s all grows up.

Get on with it.

Raat! ‘You can’t handle the truth!!’

Electra, please.

The room flashes red.

I rub my eyebrows and ask, Why must you all go on like this?

Beethoven buzzes in my head, Jailbait isdead.

The red ends.

Chimpy signs, Everyone pipe down.

Thank you, I say. I point my finger and add, I swear I was going to lose my shit.

Chimpy holds up both hands and frowns.

I’m sorry but you know I’m, I mean, I—

I know, Chimpy signs.

No you don’t, I say. I am getting sick of this. I drew every single one of you damn things into existence and this is the fucking respect I get?

Chimpy drops his hands, takes the nakedest posture possible. You do not need to be talking to us like that.

Like what?

Like that. You know what I’m talking about. I know you hear yourself if you’d take a minute and listen to yourself and the words you’re saying. That is not right. You know it.

What do I know?

Take that shit back.

Take what shit back.

That brought you into existence shit back.

Raat! Send him back to oblivion.

Don’t be acting like you’re the boss here, Chimpy signs. Don’t make me bring up the invisible hand here. You don’t even know why you love her. So settle down.

That’s not—, I start, then tell him, I don’t know what to say.

Chimpy pulls on his cigarette, waves away a wisp of smoke that touched his eye. You asked me a question.

Oh yes, right.

I was born in captivity.

He sets down his cigarette, to free his hands to speak. Have you read anything about circus chimpanzees?

You mean like the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey?

Fuck, man. I mean about the workers. The animals. Not the tweeds. He slaps his eyes, then signs, Sure. Barnum.

Yes I have, I say. I have in the past. I have in my past. I have a past.

Fucking terrific, Ray. That makes two of us. Which is what I’m going to tell you now.

Please do.

Chimpy frogstares at me the entire time he takes to reach and pick up his cigarette, drag it, set it back down, and blow the smoke up into the swirl of the ceiling fan.

My parents were from Africa. They came from the Congo. When they were babies they both lost their families because oil companies cleared away their forests. So they were taken in by sanctuaries run by the state and eventually sold to traders who sold them to New York to work in the circus. They were both still infants, still drinking out of bottles. They were taken to Coney Island in Brooklyn, put up in a carnival that travelled back and forth between Coney Island and Atlantic City. That’s how they met. They grew up together. Even though my mother was Eastern chimpanzee, so she was in the chimp act, and my father was bonobo, so he was in another act. She did the tea party, he did the knife throwing.

You don’t say. You are actually half-chimpanzee, half-bonobo.

That’s right. I’m mixed. I’m biracial.

I had no idea.

When I was born they knew I was his because they already knew they had a thing for each other going on. Plus my face was dark so they figured I was his.

What do you mean your face was dark? Your face isn’t dark now.

I know. That’s because my mother used to bleach me.

Bleach you?

Yes. She used to bleach my face. She would get hair bleach bottles with the sponge applicator and she would sit me in front of her with her legs wrapped around me so I couldn’t get away and have me face her and she would wipe the black off.

Why in the world would she do that?

So I could look more like her and less like my father. She was light. Their plan all along was to get me to look more chimp and then maybe if I was healthy enough they would sell me to the zoo. To get me out of the circus. To get me out of the game and into a healthier environment.

To give you away?

Yes to give me away. Coney Island was no joke. So, they did that and it worked. When I was old enough I started performing in a magic act. Then my father told me I shouldn’t be so good at it in order that the show wouldn’t want to keep up with me and then sell me.

And it worked.

Yup. They sold me to the Bronx Zoo. I was there for like ten years, with the chimp set. Then one day there was a huge field trip full of kids with the Make A Wish Foundation, so, bored, I got out in front of them, started performing, doing flips, whatnot. News reporters came back next day, I did it again, and the rest is history.

What happened?

A network bought me. The Legendary Mr. Chimpy McPickles Variety Show.