The trumpeters had started in on a piece so lively that it made you want to sway, with, on your lips and inside your head, a big smile of happiness. I began undulating with a mad pleasure, and I came closer to the platigromphe. I don’t know if you know what a platigromphe is. It is a little bit the same as a nanoctiluphe, but smaller: you can take it on trips. It possesses musical sacks that breathe strongly when you push on the black keys, a little like if the instrument was sleeping, and, when you push on the white keys it inflates its incantatory bladders and begins to sing. You get the impression, suddenly, of being free like a seagull in midair, and, at the same time, of being surrounded exclusively by kind men and women. Yes, often you have this impression when you hear the song of a platigromphe.
After a moment, the platigromphist took his place at the keyboard. He played almost as well as my dog Djinn did when he walked his paws over his nanoctiluphe. The trumpeters, on their end, cut loose. I knew them, Pamelia Obieglu and Iponiama Oshawnee, two arctic she-wolves, two she-wolves with magnificent white fur. They obtained, with their brass instruments, dizzying sounds. We all started wobbling from right to left as if inside a dream of fraternal happiness. The mini-bellules surrounded me. We all swayed our hips without thinking about the ridiculousness of our squirming. It was night in the street and the wind blew, but, because of this dream, the cold no longer managed to cut into us.
I had closed my eyes, to better become drunk on the music, and perhaps also because the cups of herbal tea that I had drunk at Mimi Okanagane’s continued to produce their hypnotic effect on me. When I thought about it, I felt incapable of saying if I was awake or in the middle of dreaming.
“Hey, have you seen who’s squirming all over the place? It’s Bobby!” cried a voice above my head.
“Bobby Potemkine! Not possible!” cried another voice.
“My Bobby, but you haven’t changed, hey!” joked a third. “We recognize you even when you close your eyes!”
I opened my eyes and caught sight of several bats who were fluttering at third floor level. It had been a long time since I had seen one, a bat. I believed that they had left the area and that they had all left to settle on the moon, like nearly everyone. And this caused me pain, for among the bats was one I had known since we had been in school. Lili Niagara.
I know that I have already spoken to you about her, about Lili Niagara, but, for those who are starting this story partway through, I am a little obliged to repeat myself: Lili Niagara was a little bat with a roguish demeanor and extremely cute even then, striking and stunning. And even though, in class or during recess, she felt free to make fun of me, I had a weakness for her. Every night, I repeated her name until I collapsed from fatigue on my pillow, and, during class, I watched her out of the corner of my eye instead of listening to the teachers. Let’s say that my weakness for her was immense.
“What are you doing here, my Bobby?” asked Lili Niagara. “Why are you contorting yourself? Are you learning to dance? What dance is this?”
“I’m leading an investigation into a bizarre event,” I answered.
All the bats who clippetted their wings nearby immediately howled with laughter. I started blushing, but not so much at the idea that they found me ridiculous and that they were joking at my expense. I blushed because Lili Niagara had spoken to me. It was enough for her to have said three sentences to me for my heart to go mad. In an instant, I perceived that my weakness for her, instead of being dulled with time, had only grown and been embellished. My cheeks were on fire. They must have been the color of raspberries. And then, I also wanted to cry a little, at once from humiliation and from amorous emotion.
What’s good about nighttime is that colors aren’t as recognizable as in broad daylight. I counted on that, on the nocturnal darkness, to not lose all my confidence. I drove back my tears and behaved as if I weren’t bright red.
“The fish want to bring back the police,” I explained. “They want to construct a Great Mimille out of bubbles.”
The bats burst out laughing most beautifully.
“Bubbles!” you heard in the midst of their laughter. “No, it’s too much!…Bobby, you’re too much!…Hee! Hee! Hee!…Bubbles!…”
“It must be stopped before it’s too late,” I said. “Its name is Emilio Popielko, this Great Mimille. And, once built, it will start laying sheriffs.”
The bats screeched with laughter between the third and fourth floors. The name of Emilio Popielko filled them with joy.
“Popielko! Popielko!” they cried, pursuing each other at top speed through the shadows, as if it were an exclamation of triumph.
Then they began rushing at me, at the platigromphe, at the musicians, braking in the last half-meter without clippeting. The trumpeters hadn’t ceased playing and the mini-bellules continued to dance. I realized that I was the only one paying attention to the bats.
“All the same, you could help me,” I complained. “Instead of clipping me dangeriliously with the tips of your wings, you could…”
Dangeriliously! Look how I was deforming my words. I am sure this happens to you, to you also. The situation is tense and you would like to say something intelligent, but grotesque nonsense comes out of your mouth. And the more you try to salvage things, the more the phrases you pronounce become strange.
“Emilio Popielko,” I stammered, “yes, with the Mimille he is the same as the same even. Um…They are going to lay everywhere that egg-laying is possible…and even otherwhere, moreover…And if this makes a thousand Mimilles, eh?…or millions of Emilios…Eh?…”
My cheeks burned.
I was not proud of my discourse. I suddenly decided not to say another word.
The bats whirled in every direction without attaching any importance to my stammerings. The orchestra played frenzied melodies; the arctic she-wolves that I knew, Pamelia Obieglu and Iponiama Oshawnee, blew their trumpets brilliantly; the mini-bellules wriggled around, the rings that they had in their ears danced with them, from time to time they grabbed hold of their own instruments and, without stopping their dancing, they joined in the musical torrent; the platigromphist improvised, his nose shining, jazzing up all his barking; the platigromphe started singing. It was sweeping, it was endless, it was intoxicating, and, even if the bats had made me understand that I was a completely laughable Bobby Potemkine, I no longer had tears in my eyes, I felt rather good and I continued to prance about to the beat. The music was splendidly comforting, and I had again the impression of being surrounded by exclusively kind men and women.
After their aerial acrobatics, the bats calmed down. They put a damper on their irony, they stopped emitting strident cries, stopped shouting raucous and mocking sentences, and suddenly in the street there was only the music with its infinite refuge, inside of which we felt like brothers and sisters. I believe that the bats had also begun to be deeply affected by this, by this fraternity within the music.
Lili Niagara approached me, she tousled my hair with the tips of her wings and said to me:
“Don’t worry, Bobby, we will help you wrap it up, your investigation.”
Another bat came to a standstill nearby. She was a pretty brunette, wearing a red scarf around her neck and nothing else. I immediately recognized Lili Soutchane, the inventor of fire, who, after having renounced her invention, had ended up transforming into a bat. She had tied her braids into a crown above her head, which gave her an even more piratical air than before.
“My Bobby,” said Lili Soutchane in an affectionate voice, “we don’t want any either, any of these sheriffs for wall fish.”
“We are going to tell you where they are creating their Great Mimille,” suddenly added a third bat.
She flitted above the platigromphist. I had met her also from time to time at school, that one. I recalled her name, Lili Cataouba. She had black braids and, already by that time, she was very cute, but I had never had a w
eakness for her.
“And where is it?” I asked.
“In the anthill factory,” said Lili Cataouba. “They’re taking advantage of the old facilities.”
“What facilities?” I quibbled. “There is only an egg out there giving moon lessons to a wooly crab who is learning to float so as to light the countryside.”
“He is completely obsessed with the idea of transforming into a moon, this crab,” commented Lili Soutchane.
“He’s my friend,” I warned. “He is called Big Katz.”
“He may be your friend,” objected Lili Niagara, “but, as a result of being interested in nothing but the moon, he hasn’t even noticed that the fish are constructing a Great Mimille in the factory where he lives.”
The orchestra continued to play. She had to shout to drown out the blaring blasts of the trumpets and the song of the platigromphe. All the bats had to speak very loudly to make themselves heard.
“The construction of this Great Mimille is already far along,” said Lili Cataouba. “If you want to stop this, you must go there without further delay.”
“Yes,” said Lili Soutchane. “Bobby must go try to find what’s needed at Mimi Okanagane’s.”
“What’s needed?” I worried.
“My poor Bobby,” sighed Lili Niagara. “Sometimes you are hard of understanding. Everything has to be explained to you. Did you not ask yourself questions, just now, while you were dozing at Mimi Okanagane’s? Didn’t you move your investigation forward?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
I felt abashed. My cheeks, once again, took on a raspberry color.
Lili Niagara reentered the fray.
“About the subject of blue bubbles in Mimi Okanagane’s shop, nothing seemed strange to you?” she asked.
“There aren’t bubbles at Mimi Okanagane’s,” I said. “The fish heads come out of the walls to tell their dreams, but they don’t spit bubbles.”
“And that didn’t trouble you, Bobby?” questioned Lili Cataouba, as if she was speaking to someone truly very, very hard of understanding.
“Yeah, uh…I was troublilled…a little,” I stammered.
“There is something at Mimi Okanagane’s that is stopping the fish from making their cubic bubbles,” said Lili Niagara.
“Something that keeps them from dreaming too strongly about sheriffs,” added Lili Cataouba.
“Something…” said Lili Soutchane, in a thoughtful tone.
“The red flags?” I suggested. “The rags? The steam from the herbal teas?”
The bats burst out laughing, then nearly at once became serious again. They talked among themselves in their secret language. They didn’t come to an agreement. That reassured me, in a way. That was the proof that they didn’t know much more than me.
“It’s perhaps all those things at the same time,” Lili Soutchane ended up saying.
“So, Bobby has to carry all of it to the factory: the rags and the herbal teas,” said Lili Cataouba.
“And the red flags,” I reminded.
Already we had begun to move away from the orchestra. The bats flew above me, between the roofs. The arctic she-wolves, the platigromphist, and the mini-bellules gave me a tiny gesture of good-bye, but, in reality, they were completely immersed in the magnificent universe of music, and they weren’t worried about what I had stammered out about the Great Mimille. I believe that they thought I was talking to myself in the night, and that I was telling myself stories.
While I approached Mimi Okanagane’s shop, the music continued to resonate from street to street, and, when the bats couldn’t see me, I half-danced and wriggled again a little in time with the music.
* * *
—
In the shop, Lili Nebraska and Mimi Okanagane were huddled together against one another to keep warm. They were both sleeping like babies under a mountain of rags, tatters, and torn fabrics. Three or four fish heads stuck through the walls, rather massive and very warty, but they weren’t saying anything, and they too seemed to be profoundly asleep. It was very dark in the street, and between walls the light was even weaker. Since the door hadn’t been opened in a long time, the shop smelled strongly of byeberry, sweet gale, Algonquin myrica, bog myrtle, and snow currants.
I gathered an old curtain to make myself a sack out of it and inside I put all the rags, old fabric and tea herbs I could find, then I knotted the four corners together. This made a gigantic bindle, bigger than an eiderdown. I hooked the bindle to the pole of a red flag and I picked up two others, red flags, just in case. When I went out into the street, I was weighed down by my misshapen burden.
The bats who were waiting for me outside descended several stories to examine me, and, when they saw that I was disappearing under my load, with wooden handles and bits of fabric sticking out in every direction, they immediately screeched with laughter.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said. “These are supplies for stopping the Great Mimille. You could help me instead of throwing jibes at me.”
“Us, we flutter, we can’t encumber our winglets, my Bobby,” said Lili Soutchane.
And the jibes burst out with greater intensity.
You know what they are, jibes? They’re when you go to a lot of trouble to save the town from the danger that the police represent, and flying creatures, invisible in the night, heap cascades of laughter on you, all the while treating you as a Bobby-blockhead, an eiderdown with paws or a rag-carrier.
“Watch out!” guffawed Lili Cataouba. “Clear the way, Potemkine Moving Company coming through!”
I traced the streets back to the old port. The orchestra was still there. The trumpeters played a jazz oratorio composed in Lili Gesualdo’s memory. I rocked a little in time to the music, but I had too large a heap on my shoulders and I stumbled. I lost my balance, my bundle burst. Everything I was hauling somehow scattered over the musicians and the dancers. Out of surprise, the platigromphe started singing an octave too high, then its musical sacks deflated and fell silent. There was bog myrtle, rags and red flags everywhere on the sidewalk, and even on the instruments. The platigromphist barked. The mini-bellules let out little cries. Pamelia Obieglu and Iponiama Oshawnee, the arctic she-wolves, no longer blew into their trumpets. They looked at me in a stupor, as if I had emerged suddenly from another world. Above my head, the bats whinnied with laughter. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly certain that I was the only one hearing them.
“What’s happening, Bobby?” asked Pamelia Obieglu.
Taking shortcuts to go as quickly as possible, I told the story of the wall fish, of the sheriff eggs that the fish wanted to make Emilio Popielko, the Great Mimille, lay; I spoke of blue bubbles in the form of cubes; I explained why I was carrying all this material, and where I was going.
“The bats can’t help me,” I said. “They flutter about and clippet the tips of their wings, and they make fun of everyone, but, as far as carrying parcels go, they are rather useless.”
“What bats?” asked the platigromphist, raising his snout toward the dark sky.
“You see bats, do you?” asked Iponiama Oshawnee.
“They left for the moon a long time ago,” said Pamelia Obieglu.
I gazed toward the sky in turn. Above, neither the clippetings of wings nor cascades of laughter could be heard. Perhaps the bats had risen a lot higher than the roofs of the houses, or they had gone away, offended to see their existence denied by the musicians in the orchestra. Or perhaps I had only dreamed their presence near me. Perhaps I had invented them, in the night, during the music, to solve the investigation.
We all stayed silent a moment.
It was dark. You could hear the sacks of the platigromphe breathing, not knowing if the music was going to be taken up again or if the musicians were going to put an end to the concert.
“Here’s what we’ll do,”
said Iponiama Oshawnee.
I looked at her. She was an arctic she-wolf with a coat of silvered snow. She had yellow eyes, with flashes of light green that sparkled in the darkness. Not only was she an excellent trumpeter, but what’s more, she was a breathtaking beauty.
“No need for everyone to go to the anthill factory. With Pamelia Obieglu, I am going to help Bobby Potemkine transport his bric-a-brac. And you, you can continue playing and dancing. The threat of police mustn’t stop us from playing. We mustn’t abandon playing under any pretext.”
We talked a little further, then each returned to his role in the story. The platigromphist pressed out some chords in G major, one of the mini-bellules immediately took up the theme on the flute, and the others again started to wriggle and to horse around near the platigromphe, near its sacks, its incantatory bladders and its player.
And we, the arctic she-wolves and I, gathered the red flags, the rags, the scraps, the clusters of snow currants, the leaves of Algonquin myrica. We divided the burden into three equal parts, and we got under way.
We walked quickly. Now that I no longer had anything but a flag in hand, I heard it deploy in the wind behind me. The fabric flapped. The she-wolves trotted while singing. They flanked me. Iponiama Oshawnee was a breathtaking beauty, but Pamelia Obieglu was, she as well, more than superb, with her off-white coat, her gray-red forehead and her fine muzzle, and her golden eyes with brown flecks. We followed the quay, the edge of the water, the low roads. The sky was very cold and very dark, from time to time it opened up to let fly a meteorite that afterward boomed somewhere against a building or on the already burned ruins of the town. We were a little afraid, moving through the roads during these showers of burning rock, in the midst of the darkness, the gusts of wind and the sprays of snow.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 157
