"What time is it now?" I asked.
"I'll tell you that when you tell me what the last book was about."
"The last book?"
"The last."
I rummaged around with my limbless body in the nest of books. They were splattered and rumpled round with banana peels, apricot skins, and rat's tails. I tried to dig in the books with my nose and teeth, find a shred of paper I could read that wasn't covered in garbage, but I couldn't. My nose wouldn't dig, and my chin was useless.
"You didn't read any, did you?" he called down.
"I did."
"No you didn't."
"Alright then, I didn't!" I shouted. "I don't have time to read books while I lose my limbs all around. Look, there's my thumb. It's sitting there black and frozen just staring at me."
"You don't need a thumb to read!"
"No, but I do need a forefinger. Without that I'm worse than a mosquito. And I don't even have any forearms!"
He shook his head. I knew this because the stars coruscated at the hole entrance, and a single white hair drifted down from his head, glinting in the moonlight.
"That's no excuse whatsoever. You've squandered this chance. You've wasted all my books. You know they cost me half my days to make? Half my days, working in that pit digging up words for you to read, hammering the pages together with rivets and bone, and what do you do? You sleep on them, and you slough off limbs like a lizard. Well, I've had enough!"
"Wait!" I called. But he was already gone.
* * *
No books came the next day. Or the day after that.
The days and nights grew long. The apricot tasted like filth. My own blackened fingers and knuckles stared at me grotesquely. I began to feel the cold again, creeping in between the spines of the books, rubbing its clammy hands across my pale and hairless skin.
My nose fell off the next day. My arms dropped off at the shoulder the day after, and my thighs the day after that. It was like I was an ember thrown from her fire, dying on an arctic tundra, dying on a bed of ideas.
The next day my eyes began to freeze.
After that I couldn't see a thing. For a time I still heard. Then that too was gone, and I was truly a worm, with no eyes, no ears, not even any lips. I was a tube that rummaged in the paper trying to bite down on apricots. There was not even any taste anymore, as my taste buds froze and fell out. There was just the chewy endless sog of papery fruit in my mouth. I couldn't peel the bananas so I ate them with the skin. I couldn't peel the rats so I ate them head, tails, feet, and fur.
I felt a lot like the headless mouse in the milk. I churned the milk and I churned the milk and I made cheese, except I didn't make cheese, because paper is not milk.
Rather I lived as a worm in the bottom of that pit for another year and a day.
* * *
I would have lived forever in that state had it not been for the unique chew of one apricot. It sogged like paper, as they all did, but there was also a hint of something else, something I'd long forgotten.
It chewed of blue.
I ate more, and chewed more things that were not tastes but chews. I chewed the word- friend. I chewed the word- family.
Had I adapted? Had I evolved? Was I ready to spring forth a butterfly?
I realized then, I was eating the books. All the apricots, bananas and rats were gone, and only books remained. So I chewed on them, like a cow at cud, like a caterpillar nibbling at its leaves, chewing tastes of all the books scattered around and covered in my detritus and droppings. I chewed Jane Eyre, and tasted fusty, polite, buttoned-down, but free. I chewed the Collected Works of Shakespeare, and tasted the rhythm, like banjos in perfect unison, strumming movements in my heart I didn't know were there.
I chewed a mouthful out of all the books I could reach, and felt all the feelings as if I'd read them with my long-gone eyes, as if I'd lived them for myself, filling up my caterpillar-heart with sensation.
Then one day my eyes grew back.
My eyes grew back and I saw the disgusting state I was living in. It was a filthy pit, splattered with filth. Pigs would not live in that gross morass of turpitude.
Shortly after that my nose grew back, and the smell made me sick. Compared to the fine chews, the varied chews, the clean, aired out, living chews of the books, the pit was a foul and stinking lair.
I wormed my way up to the wall. I wormed my way to the other wall. I heaved for the sky. I stretched up, and up, but still I couldn't reach any higher than my chin or my forehead.
I was still trapped. In this lair, in this well-pit of stink.
But I had the books. I remembered what the boy had said about books, about getting out of a rut, and began to believe.
So I began to read. Book after book I read, and after I chewed them with my eyes, I chewed them with my mouth. I ate one book a day at first, filling me up from the bottom up, enjoying the meanings as my taste buds grew back, filling me with hope and joy and ideas of things I hadn't seen for the longest time, things I'd thought long-impossible, the possibility of change.
Soon I was eating two a day, then three, then four a day, more and more until I lost count of how many found their way to my head and gut in sharp succession. Gradually the stench of the pit began to dim, and the stars above began to fade and glimmer with the faint edges of blue in the blue sky.
I realized, I was getting longer.
Taller is for humans. I was still far from taller, I was longer. I was a human tube of a caterpillar, standing on its end, blooming out of the filthy earth in which I'd lain like a seedling for so long, reaching up for the sky.
I was several meters tall now. I still couldn't climb out of the pit, because I had no arms. I couldn't dig my way out, or bounce my way out, or get pulled out.
But I could grow out.
I upped my eating ration until all I did was eat, distending my belly, and still the hunger rose within. I ate all day and through the night, voracious for the tastes, for the chews, for an end to the rut. I ate so hard I couldn't sleep, chewing by the light of the moon, chewing by the bright of day, looking up as yellow crept in to the star-scape and I grew longer and longer and nearer and nearer. I began to hear the sounds of the people up there, moving around, walking past my hole, the sounds of life. I smelt croissants! Coffee! Double lattes!
I ate and ate and ate, and when I was done, I ate some more. The book pile beneath me dwindled, until I had to bend hairpin double to get my mouth to the floor, rooting around in the papery shuffles like a truffling pig, snaffling up the last written dregs, until at last all the books were gone.
I stretched out to my full length, stretched to the sky, but still I was several feet short of the top of the well.
I tried jumping, but it didn't work, because I had no legs to jump with. I tried to stretch out my already long and spindly body further, but it didn't work because I had no muscles to stretch with. I was already over ten meters long, towering up in that pit-hole, and it still wasn't good enough.
There was only one thing for it.
I burrowed down inside myself. I pored through my long stomach filed with ideas and thoughts and the writings of history, and I dug out the memory of a book on science I had chawed down. It was a treatise on plant-growth, that taught how to graft plants on to other plants.
I reached down and plucked up a cold-blackened, withered remnant of my left arm, the shoulder and bicep, in my mouth, and following the instructions from the book, began to graft it to my left side.
I watered it with my own saliva. I bound it with the single white hair that had fallen down so long ago.
I watered it and waited, and waited and watered, until soon, I felt the first glimmerings of movement within.
I had a stump!
I reached down for the elbow and forearm, and attached it in the same way. I reached down for the pieces of my right arm. I reached down for my legs, and I grafted them all on.
When I was done, I stood like a human for the first time in yea
rs. The hole's mouth came within reach of my re-grown arms. I reached them up, stick thin, and took hold of the edge. I tried to lift myself up, but my ten-meter body was far too heavy. I couldn't budge the weight of it.
So I began to shed the books. I let them go. They passed from me and every one felt like a loss and a friend saying goodbye, but a friend helping me along at the same time. I held on to the lip of the hole as my body shrank, taking the enormous weight on my shoulders, on my fingers, as my body slowly shrank up the walls.
The bottom of the pit was falling far behind. Every book lost eased the load on my hands, and as I dispelled more, it eased and eased, and soon, my massive worm's body was gone, and I was a man again.
I pulled myself up out of the hole.
The first thing I saw was the boy with the white hair. He was sitting on a boulder with a hammer in his hand, an anvil and a smith's fire before him. He was hammering the pages into a new book of words exhumed from the word-pit.
He looked at me and dropped the hammer. I looked at him and almost fell back into the hole.
It's you," I said, unable to believe it.
"It's me," he said. "I was waiting for you. I was hammering another book on how to get out of a hole."
I walked up to him, this child that I knew, and looked at the book he was hammering on.
"It's finished now, isn't it?" I asked.
"Yes."
I took the book from him. There was a picture of a caterpillar on the front, and a hole bitten through the pages. I felt like crying.
"Then lets feed it where it's needed."
I walked back to the edge of the pit. I looked down. It seemed like an awfully long way. But at the same time, it seemed very small. Like a dint in the ground. Like a divot hole. Like a hole a golf-ball might get stuck in.
I tossed the book in. The hole ate the book. And the hole closed.
I turned back to the boy, but he was already gone, back wherever the memory had come from, the child I once was.
I was the butterfly, now.
The smell of croissants carried on the air. Life was all around me, full of new chews to be had, and old chews I hadn't tasted in so long. Croissants! Coffee! Double lattes!
I spread my wings and flew towards them.
3. THE TONSOR'S SON
I knew from the moment I saw him that his beard was full of evil.
He walked into my shop carrying a copper-hilted cane, clopping its burnished tip smartly on the hair strewn tonsory floor with his every step. He wore camel-hide gloves with the hair turned inwards, so his hands seemed a milky mother-of-pearl white, as though agapornic. His eyes were a sharp hazel-brown, intelligent, intent upon the tonsory around him, absorbing the details, finally settling on me.
He walked flush up to me, busy as I was sweeping lopped brown locks into a scuttle, and smiled tightly, extending one of those sickeningly pale hands towards me. His thinly sliced moustache bristled as his upper lip curled back, and I knew the evil was in there too, peering out at me from each follicle end. I could feel the waft of his past deeds emanating from the light down of his cheeks.
He had sliced into men's bellies and woven clothes from their bloody organs. He had flayed living skin to fold origami cranes. The burr of all those screaming souls called up at me from his black and white flecked beard. The reek of it was sweet as sassafras, but punctured by the underlying tinct of the midden. I could feel little lumps of misery clinging to each of those stubbly hairs like red dew on a battlefield corpse, invisible, indistinct, but vibrating with the echo of loss.
He was smiling. He laid one hand on the back of my tonsuring chair, his long pale fingers like blind earthy roots against the dyed leather, and spoke.
"I hear you give a very close shave," he said.
His voice was not evil. His voice was sonorant, full-throated like a warbling lark, as though he had thick curds of whey lodged comfortably deep in his windpipe. His eyes were neither evil, rather they gleamed with amusement, with distinction, and I felt I saw in them the reflections of an endless counting house, rooms full of scriveners back-bent over mounds of crumply paper, digging as though to find diamonds.
In his dress I saw no evil; a double-breasted grey flannel Abledair suit, the upper pocket aligned as smartly as a sextant with a triangle of pure white kerchief. About his wrist was a heavy brass-cased chronograph, the same sported in the cities of the continent. His shoes were perfect black, polished to reflect my face glancing down, and there was no evil in them.
But in his beard there was, and he smiled at me through it.
"Have you completed your assessment, tonsor?" he asked, his upper lip wrinkled in amusement.
"Forgive me, Lord," I said, knuckling my brow, as the first beads of sweat sallied down my back. "I meant no offense, only curiosity. The likes of yourself, sir, a fine gentleman as you are, do not often grace my little shop."
The gentleman smiled warmly, generously, as though he were the host and I the supplicant, come begging with my scalp in my hands. "They spoke highly of you at Verdini's opera," he said. "I heard the viceroy of Samarkand himself has his enlisted men visit you before they depart for the war."
I nodded. "It is so, sir, we are fortunate the viceroy has graced us with his patronage."
"Come come, you must be less modest," warbled the man. "I hear you strop the knives of the Rillingham palace Barbicans themselves, such is your fame with a tonsuring blade. I see your hollow grind athwart of the corner there. Is it corundum?"
I nodded. "His lordship knows blades."
His taut smile became a broad grin, and he swung the end-tip of his cane up, caught it in his left hand, and held the length of it out for a moment as though proffering a gift. Then in one smooth movement he desquamated the copper cane scabbard, and drew out a rapier of wick-thin silver.
The ringing sound of the steel swelled the air majestically. He proffered the blade for my inspection.
"Bought it in Thrace, you know," he said, and winked. "It's seen its share of tonsury, if you know what I mean."
I did. In his beard I saw it shingling little children in the streets of Amopotame, peeling back the dark skin of Abindian men like potato jackets in a scullery-maid's practiced hand.
I held out my hands meekly. "Would his lordship have it ground here?"
He laughed then, scabbarded the blade in its cane, and slapped a pale-gloved hand on my shoulder. "My good fellow, no, such steel as this needs the hand of the queen's regent. Rather I have come for that shave, as I heard it in the opera and all about town. Would you oblige?"
I nodded. Of course I would. His beard demanded it.
* * *
There are six angles to grind a blade, and I have studied and learned them all.
I have ground with Vesuvic pumice, with corundum, with limey marble, with Ablate Tun. I have polished with tinctures of Jeweler's rouge and steam baths of green chromium oxide. I have worked on copper and steel, on iron and tungsten, on cobalt and shimmering manganese. I have stropped and honed and planed at every one of the six angles that exist.
Until at last, I found the seventh.
* * *
The gentleman settled into the soft leather chair with an ungulent sigh. I was sure I felt the curds in his throat flapping with the sound.
"A shave then," he beamed at me from the mirror. "As close as you can, for I've dinings with society men tonight."
I took his meaning clearly, as I leaned in over that scalp of glistening pomade. I read it in the weave of his throat hairs. Tonight was revelry, the only sort he could enjoy.
I held up my switchback razor, ran my thickened thumbnail across the tip. The metal had rolled in two places on my last customer's neck.
"Jakelby!" I called.
My son was squatted beyond the corundum grindstone, roughing the leather strops. He came at once to my call, and I held the blade out to him.
"But what's this?" gurgled the gentleman in the chair, his eyes lighting upon Jakelby in the mirror. "A
n apprentice, tonsor?"
"My son strops the razors, my lord," I replied. "His keen eyes see imperfections mine cannot."
The gentleman smiled, his lips like slugs crawling across an over-furred peach.
"I too have a keen eye," said the man, "and I see your son is undoubtedly an asset to you. Come closer boy, sharpish now."
Jakelby looked to me. By no means was he a boy, having surely as many years as the gentleman himself, but with the sweat creasing down my chest I scarcely dared argue.
"It will but delay-" I began, but the gentleman abruptly lashed out with his cane, rapping me firmly on the left kneecap. The bone made a solid thunk, like the thud of a mailed fist on a wooden door. I let out a gasp, but he only smiled.
"It is only reasonable that I inspect the hands that sharpened your blades, is it not, tonsor?" He peered up at me as though he had never struck me at all. "They will after all lie upon my throat. Is that not reasonable?"
I bit back the gasp of pain. "Very good, sir."
I motioned to Jakelby, who stepped around to face the gentleman in the chair. The gentleman smiled up at him, and I felt my heart sink in my chest. I had seen that smile before, written in his beard, and knew where it led.
He reached out to Jakelby, and took hold of his hand in those pale-gloved fingers. He studied first the palm, then the obverse, examining the cuticles closely, the lines, a small patch of lye-dust across the knuckle of Jakelby's ring finger.
His inspection continued up onto my son's face, and before he could move, the gentleman laid a pale-gloved hand on his chest. Jakelby jerked back, but the gentleman held him firmly in place.
"I can read your heart, boy, through my hand," he warbled. "I see you have a sweetheart, is that quite right?"
Jakelby looked to me, his eyes wide.
"Sir, this is most irregular," I protested.
"Be quiet tonsor," said the gentleman without turning his head. "This is between me and your son. Boy, I asked you a question."
Jakelby turned to him, stammering.
"S-sir, what question please?"
The gentleman tutted peremptorily, then yanked my son from his feet into an embrace. There he nuzzled Jakelby's smooth chin with the bristly hairs at his jaw, grinding as though upon corundum, until they drew tiny beads of blood. My son cried out and struggled to escape, but the gentleman braced him tight as a lover, grinding at his chin, speaking as though no untoward deed were done.
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