by Toby Barlow
From the time she had spent in the country hospital, Noelle was used to disrobing and bathing in front of strangers. And so, resigned, she pulled her nightgown over her head and stepped naked toward the steaming bath. Elga had promised her shopping later in the day, so while the dark waters did not seem inviting, Noelle did not want to cause any trouble. Slipping her toe into the water, she quickly pulled it out.
“Oh, it’s much too hot!”
“No, it is not.” Elga spanked at her bare bottom. “Get in there.”
There was a firmness to the old woman’s words and a sting to her slap that made Noelle slightly nervous, so, despite the almost scalding temperature, she slowly squatted, wincing, down into the swampy bath. Her skin was scorched pink from the heat, but she got all the way in without complaint and rested her head gently against the rim of the tub.
“Good. Okay,” Elga said soothingly. “Now if you close your eyes and count to three, you will get a big surprise.”
Noelle, uncertain but excited that perhaps this meant more treats, shut her eyes tightly and began, “One, two—”
Suddenly, she felt the firm hands of the old woman pushing down on her skull, shoving her head forcefully under the water. Noelle squirmed hard to break free, thrashing to get out from underneath Elga’s grasp, but the woman moved quickly, pressing one palm against the side of Noelle’s face while her fist pushed the girl’s bare torso down to the base of the tub. Noelle kicked and opened her mouth to scream. Gagging, she sucked in a lungful of the green water. It burned against the inside of her throat. She twisted and pushed with all her strength, thrashing like a caught fish, but she was no match for Elga. Terrified, the girl tried screaming again. Looking up out through the murky water, she saw the stern shadow of the old woman’s face staring down at her. Noelle reached out to pull at Elga’s arms. She was so confused, the water entered her lungs again; the dark green was growing black. It felt as though acid was being dragged through her veins. Then she saw nothing.
In her dream there was a russet red chicken. The two of them stood in a large circular clearing in a birch forest. Noelle was wearing her nightgown. The pine needles tickled her bare feet. The chicken stepped around her toes, pecking randomly at the soft ground. Then it looked up at her and spoke: “You are a dancer?”
“No. I was a dancer,” corrected Noelle.
“Yes, I heard about that. The ballet, the audition, tut-tut,” said the chicken before returning to its pecking.
Noelle looked around the forest; it seemed to be quite early in the morning, though perhaps it was twilight, she was unsure.
“Excuse me,” said Noelle.
“Yes?” said the chicken.
A strong breeze came blowing through the trees, making their branches creak. Noelle started shivering. She looked down at the bird, who was waiting patiently for her to speak. “Do you perhaps have something to tell me?” Noelle asked. “Is that why we are here? I would like to know, for I am getting quite cold.”
“Yes. I have something very important to say,” said the chicken, pausing between pecks to look up at the girl.
“What?”
The chicken cocked its head as if trying to recall. “Well, I believe I am supposed to tell you to—” At that moment there was a blurring flash of red as a fox suddenly darted out from the trees. The chicken squawked and jumped, thrusting its feathers out wide in a panicked attempt to escape but the fox pounced upon the bird and, with a quick hard bite, snapped its neck. Then the fox dashed off into the woods again, carrying the bird’s limp body in its mouth. The wind stopped. Noelle looked around at the vast solitude surrounding her and called out a tentative “Hello?” The lonely sound of her small, worried voice echoed in the woods.
Frightened, she woke up. She was in the hotel bed again; Elga was sitting at her bedside. Noelle immediately jolted up, desperate for escape, but the old woman grasped her tightly in a warm embrace. “There, there, do not worry, it is over, you are fine. You are good now. Look at you, you are fine.” Elga stroked her hair as a terrified Noelle beat the old woman’s sides with her tiny fists. Finally, Noelle stopped struggling and burst into tears, wrapping her arms around Elga and letting her whole body shake with grief and relief. “Why did you do that?” pleaded the girl through her tears. “Why?”
“It had to be done. Relax. You are safe now, you are safe forever,” said the old woman.
The girl cried hard until it seemed as though she had drained her body of all its tears. Then, finally, she relaxed and lay back down again. Elga leaned over with a dingy handkerchief and roughly wiped Noelle’s cheeks dry. Sitting beside her for the next hour, she massaged Noelle’s back as the girl rested. Looking out the window, Noelle noticed the sun had set. There would be no shopping, she had slept through the whole day. “We missed going to the stores.”
“Do not worry, there will be plenty of time for stores. You rest,” said Elga, playfully tugging at the girl’s earlobe. “But first tell me, what did you dream about?”
“A chicken.”
Elga stopped rubbing her back. “Mmn. You are sure it was a chicken? Not a duck or a rooster or—”
“I know it was a chicken.”
“Fine. So what did this chicken say?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No. But it wanted to. It tried to tell me a very important thing, but then it was eaten by a fox.”
“A fox? Hmmm.” Elga gave Noelle a final pat on the back and stood up. “Okay. Well, a fox is not so good.” The old woman shuffled out of the bedroom and shut the door, turning out the light behind her and leaving the girl in the dark.
XVIII
It was a simple trick that saved Vidot. For two consecutive days he watched as Dottie took the slender vials of fleas down, one by one, and handed them to Billy, who then disappeared with each into his hooded workbench. Billy wore his unusual pair of thick magnifying spectacles as he labored, making him resemble some sort of massive and diabolical insect god each time he emerged to take hold of a new subject. Billy would then vanish again beneath the white cloth, working for less than a minute, before reappearing with a carefully harnessed flea. A good number would be attached to carriages while the rest were hooked up to small silver balls. After observing to check that the flea was relatively undamaged by the operation, Billy would carefully hand the flea to Dottie, who would box the creature and place it in a traveling case.
The process was simple in theory but its actual exercise was, like any effort involving the collision of creatures with conflicting desires, fraught with violence. A good portion of the fleas taken beneath the hood were often simply brushed out, landing on the floor, mortally injured or dead, many torn to pieces. Occasionally, Vidot watched the silhouette of Billy’s hooded fist come down with a force that shook the whole table, after which the debris of what must have been an unruly and uncooperative flea would be swept out onto the floor. Vidot surmised that Billy had an uncanny ability to predict a flea’s motions, gathered over a lifetime of wrangling these simple creatures. Of course there was no remorse or even pause amid the constant carnage; these were merely bugs, common vermin, nothing more. The couple and their dog blithely ignored each death, stepping all over the fragments of flea debris as they worked, until they eventually crushed the corpses into dark smudges resembling no more than ink stains on the floorboards.
The entire exercise took about an hour. After they were done, Billy applied wax to his mustache and fastidiously put on his threadbare suit and tied his red-and-black-striped bow tie while Dottie rolled up her net stockings and zipped up the black petticoat with the pink trim. Watching her, Vidot could still remember the budding sexual thrill that had struck him as an adolescent watching the much younger version of Dottie assist a then much handsomer Billy in front of that small carnival crowd. To the enthralled and childish Vidot, she had been as captivating as a blossoming flower, teasing the bees crowded round with the succulent honey lurking there beneath the edges of her p
ink skirt. She must have been barely twenty then, if that, at the time of her life when every expression she adopted could not help but be coquettish and tempting. Now, though, she was of an age where it was almost too bittersweet to watch her dab on her eyeliner, brush on her rouge, and paint on the black vanity mole above her lip. The two gathered their carnival cases up in their arms and left, turning out the one bare lightbulb as they went, leaving all their captured bugs in the pale shadows nervously tapping against the walls of their slender glass prisons. Vidot did not hop about. Instead, he laid his head against the vial’s cold surface and waited, feeling the hard pressure of time closing in.
A little after the church clock chimed ten, the two would come home. Each night it was clear that they had been worked to the edges of their endurance. Dottie would immediately lie down on the bed, tired and silent, and proceed to undress while remaining horizontal. Across the room, a slouched Billy emptied his pockets of small bills and coins onto the kitchen table. Then he unpacked his black boxes. As they were dumped on the table, Vidot could see that in each case all the fleas lay still, without the slightest twitch or sign of life. They all had perished, worked to death in the course of a single day’s performance. With a quick, efficient bang, Billy would knock each box’s contents into the dustbin. Then he would strip off his suit and perform his evening toilet before finally coming to bed, where his wife, still in her makeup but now naked, already lay fast asleep. Billy would pull the blanket up over her body and whistle for their little dog, who would leap up onto the foot of the bedspread. Then Billy would curl up beside his wife, kiss her cheek gently, and switch off the light.
The Paris skyline sparkled through the window, its twinkling illumination bathing the room in a dark cerulean blue. The city’s glow seemed to be taunting him, thought Vidot, like the visions of silver crystal kingdoms that arise in the deliriums of fever-crazed soldiers. Vidot stayed awake, hypersensitive to everything around him, the rhythm of the nervous hopping fleas reminding him of deep African drums beating before a savage blood sacrifice, a percussive prelude to the certain doom that awaited him when the circus master rose again to don his terrible magnifying glasses. For tomorrow was the day; there were only three bottles sitting to Vidot’s right, and Billy used more than a dozen to prepare for every show. Vidot knew that he would have to come up with some sort of a plan if he wanted to survive.
Regrettably, Vidot’s flea-sized brain was at that point utterly devoid of any ideas. He knew that once Billy set his tweezers on him beneath that white cloth, his life was over. He thought of all the things he would miss: listening to football matches with the chef at Chez Barbe, playing dominoes with Claude Attal, walking through the market in the April spring when the cherry and the pear blossoms colorfully bloomed overhead. He thought of the comfort of a glass of Brouilly and the grace of Satie’s Gymnopédies and, finally, the warmth of Adèle’s kiss, a memory laced with bitterness now, but one that still defined his greatest ideal of happiness.
The tap-tap-tapping of the fleas on the glass kept distracting him from his thoughts. He wanted this to be a moment of contemplation, his last night on earth, and yet these persistent pests kept breaking his concentration as they leapt about in their little vials. As he gazed down the row, his neighbors’ ceaseless jumping reminded him of Camus’s Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder up the hill and eternally happy in the futility of his effort. Then he noticed that a few of the fleas next to him, instead of frantically attempting to leap to freedom, merely were crawling about at the bottom of the glass. He watched to see if they would hop at all, but they did not. These fleas simply paced around, circling endlessly, as the condemned often do. Vidot thought at first they were merely depressed or discouraged, but then, looking closely, he observed that, in fact, the rear legs of the creature were shaped slightly differently. Vidot found this very interesting.
The next day began as the days had before: Dottie put the water on, Billy and the dog went out and returned soon with a single loaf of bread. They ate silently. Then Billy chose a pair of small oil paintings from a stack in the corner. Perhaps he was going to a dealer, Vidot thought. Whatever the errand, it was an unsuccessful one, as Billy returned an hour later with the same canvases tucked under his arm. As he placed them back in the stack, Dottie said nothing—it had clearly been too long since any paintings had sold for any comment to matter now—instead she kissed him on the cheek and heated up some carrot soup. A little later Dottie boiled a large pot of water and filled the bath, a narrow steel tub that sat in the corner of the loft. Billy combed her hair while she soaked. When she was done, Billy took their dog out again for a long walk, and when he returned, the mutt’s fleas were meticulously harvested, bottled, and placed up on the shelf. In the afternoon Dottie sat and modeled again while Billy painted. Debussy’s La Mer played on the radio.
When Billy rose from the easel and put away the paints, Vidot knew it was time. He sucked in his breath and waited, watching as, one by one, Dottie reached for the bottles on the shelf. The first bottled flea caused Billy no problems. Within seconds the flea emerged attached to a harness and was swiftly put away. The fate of the second one, however, was exactly what Vidot most feared. After disappearing beneath the white hood, his neighbor’s mauled carcass was quickly swept out, falling to the floor before it had even finished its final convulsions. Vidot had no time for sympathy, for at that moment Dottie reached for his vial.
The moment Billy shook him down onto the hard white paper Vidot began his charade. You’re going to have to force yourself to march, he told himself, march, march, march, though it is against your instinct, though every microgram in your exoskeleton is begging you to leap, to soar, to break free and escape the doom that awaits, this is the time you must march. He tried to remember what it was like to march in unison with his fellow cadets in his youth brigade. But that brought other memories that were even darker than his current condition, so he blanked them from his mind and kept marching beneath Billy’s careful gaze.
Observing his neighbors the night before, Vidot had come to the conclusion that while most fleas jumped, there were some fleas that could not jump at all, and these, he assumed, were the ones that Billy put into the chariot harnesses. Vidot knew his only hope at outwitting a man who had been outthinking fleas for more than thirty years was to convince the man that he was the wrong kind of flea. As he marched across the table, he prayed it would be enough. Vidot saw the gleam of the tweezers coming down. Then he jumped.
The fist came smashing down hard on the table behind him as he leapt. He had spotted a fold in the tenting where he knew he could hide for a moment. When Billy lifted the fabric to find him, Vidot leapt again, right over his captor’s head, through the small opening and out into the rich, warm kaleidoscopic light of freedom. He did not pause to look back, he did not know if he had enraged the circus ringleader or if his escape was being shrugged off as a minor irritation. He thought he heard Billy curse, and the little mutt barked, but Vidot did not pause to worry as he leapt, jumped, and practically flew up to the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, the great wide open window.
Only after he passed across the threshold and began tumbling and spinning down toward the cobblestone street below did it occur to Vidot that leaping out from a fifth-floor apartment’s window might not be the most prudent path to liberty.
XIX
Witches’ Song Five
Oh no, oh no, tut-tut, look and scream,
your pretty pest has gone,
flailing and flying over the abyss
heading to be flattened,
most certainly flat, on the solid surface below.
So, tell me, do, who will you pray to now, pious ones?
What divine hand swoops in for the rescue?
Ah, let me guess, some manly shade, yes?
Some broad-shouldered musky balled spirit?
A pretty boy Jesus? An undaunted Allah?
Or some wizened circumcised Jew with neat sea-parting tricks?
Boys, boys, so many boys you have placed
in control of your dreams, destiny, fortune, and fate, why?
Tell me this too: where was your own father
when you stumbled and fell?
Who scooped you up and set you right on your path,
swatting your bum for luck as you ran off, weeping “waaa-waaa”
through your lush ivy gardens?
See there, it was a woman’s hand that set you right. Yes.
Your mother or matron or nana who watched and nurtured.
So why this faith in the swollen and awesome
all-present phallic-bearing force?
Why do you pray for what you’ve never known?
It’s not that we’re envious or spiteful, no,
frankly we don’t much care,
Lyda spits out her distaste for Poseidon
in fish scales on the floorboards.
But I am curious, why so many gods come
bullish, hirsute, and bearded?
What bullies and brutes elbowed them there?
Yes, women are tucked in amid your marginalia,
Mary, Sarah, Hagar, Hera, Hestia, I can name each,
sulking there in the testaments’ shadows, outshone
like Diana by Apollo’s ever-bright aura,
or shunted to the side like Jacob’s two patient wives,
waiting there past the river’s ford as he wrestled his angel
the way boys will do, the same way this stupid flea
now wrestles against gravity.
Oh, watch him descend.
Book Three
I’ve come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can’t get rid of it.
—JAMES JONES, The Paris Review
I
Superintendent Maroc had an important errand to run. But he was a procrastinator by nature; in his experience if you put off most things you found in the end you didn’t truly need to do them. But this errand was most likely not going to go away. Yet still, he stalled. He sat behind his desk, watching the big yellow clock tick its way around and listening to the little old detective rattle on: “This was, I don’t know, thirty years ago now, between the wars. I was then working for my father, who was prosperous then.”
