by John Klima
VIII.
The next morning Dr. Black awoke early, according to habit, splashed water on his face, dressed and stepped into the kitchen. Wilhelm was there, just completing the process of making espresso over the wood stove. He greeted the doctor and handed him a cup, and the latter, after admixing two spoonfuls of sugar in the black sap, stepped outside, the petite porcelain vessel poised between his right thumb and index finger. He took a sip, smacked his lips and blinked his grave eyes. Presently Wilhelm joined him.
Künz. (Hypothesis) A whirlwind takes up cows and pigs from some near distant farm, decimates them and disperses their remains.
Black. An interesting proposal, or starting point of reasoning, but utterly fallacious. Examine: A whirlwind picks up objects of the weight of cows and pigs, but refrains from picking up objects of equal or lesser weight, such as plant life, timber, small stones and fence posts. Thus, for your hypotheses to work, a whirlwind would need to segregate the cows and pigs from other matter. And the laws of nature, the laws of science, state that a whirlwind can do no such thing. And what of the flesh?
Künz. The flesh, Doctor?
Black. Yes, the flesh Wilhelm. —The flesh, unlike the vascular fluid, was not dispersed evenly, but primarily in the vicinity of Frau Riemenschneider’s.
Künz. But when it rains, it often rains more in one spot than another.
Black. But when it rains, it generally does not rain both flesh and blood.
IX.
peeping
demons flourish forshortened
in pouches carrying tongues
which taste wet fur marlaceous some creatures who live on
juice of lichens
muttering effigies marble pushed the day
the skin of a bison
is called a robe
immortal calf ate the moon leaping
titubating before
footsteps on the air and water of singing splendid worms in skeins
sun never old such things such things
choreographed planets learned from the lesser bear
amber fruits hooking leg such things things
X.
When the next rain commenced, Wilhelm was having a rendezvous with Piera in the chestnut grove; the emerald, primary light, echoing off luxuriant black hair, the pink crease on her oval face; and then a blast of wind made the branches quiver. Crowding together; osculation.
“The sky is growing dark,” Wilhelm murmured.
“I hope it is not another one of those awful storms.”
“They must be terrible for you.”
“Oh, I don’t mind the storms themselves. It is just that people seem to blame Mamma.”
“It is the priest. He stirs up trouble.”
Her, blushing: “I . . . I know.”
As conciliation, there was further contact of curved surfaces; caressing of the fleshy edges of the mouth. The dark cloud moved through the valley, a crimson tail dipping behind it.
Wilhelm pulled himself away from the young woman. “I must go,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “The Doctor will be expecting me.”
They touched hands and he departed, the shower, a deep and vivid purplish red, dashing at his heels. Past the fleisch shop he went, Frau Riemenschneider at her doorstep, giving him the evil eye, the cloud beating overhead. The doctor was standing in the lane, legs apart, arms akimbo, his beard bristling fiercely from his face.
“Where have you been?” he growled.
“I am here, Doctor.”
“Come; inside; under cover; the cloud is emptying itself!”
An incarnate mist began to fall, succeeded by the bloody drops. The blast swept over the village; rivulets formed, red as if fire ran along the ground. The substance seemed to almost cry out as it shed from the sky; and it stank and the pigs in their pens wallowed in it; and the children stood dazed staring at their doorsteps and then hid within.
“It is too awful!” Wilhelm said.
Then there was a flicker of sunlight and the black cloud was past.
“Come,” the doctor demanded.
“Where to?”
“Into the car. We have things to learn; we must chase that cloud.”
Minutes later the two men were pulling onto the road, the gravel bursting from beneath the tires with the car’s impulsive movement. The motor revving; gears switching; and away.
“Drive, Wilhelm; drive!”
“I feel like a tornado hunter!”
“The accelerator pedal; use the accelerator pedal!”
The car flew through the narrow valley, trailing after the dark, airborne mass. The doctor aggressively stroked his beard, peering through the windscreen with furrowed brow and intent eyes. Wilhelm bent over the steering wheel. The ball of his foot applied the maximum pressure to the gas pedal and the needle of the speedometer crawled into high numerals.
“It looks like it is heading over the mountain, Doctor,” he cried in exasperation.
“No, it is settling up against the saddle. It is alighting, Wilhelm!”
“A strange cloud . . .”
“We will get it yet.”
“But it is so high up.”
“No, drive further on. I see lines descending from the mountain. There is a funicular leading up by yonder arête.”
Ten minutes later they were gliding up the side of the mountain on a seldom-used funicular line, the pines spiring up beneath them and the road shrinking behind. The vehicle pulled into its station on the saddle of the mountain and the two men leapt out and began pursuing their way along the descending foot path. The doctor’s svelte legs worked well, guiding his torso and crown of cranium down the steep trail with rapid ease. Wilhelm followed in his wake, every now and again adjusting the glasses which sat unsteadily upon the bridge of his nose. Presently the doctor veered off the trail, to his right, through the alpine woods, and on through shelves of blueberry bushes.
“You hear them,” he said in an undertone.
“I hear something, Sir.”
“Ahh!”
“Yes?”
“We are coming into their vicinity.”
“What is it Doctor?”
“Lepidopterans, Wilhelm. Lepidopterans.”
“Doctor . . .”
“Come, let us advance.”
The two men entered their midst, the delicate wings brushing against their faces, clinging to the doctor’s beard and adhering themselves to the frames of Wilhelm’s glasses.
“Note their ommatidia, Wilhelm; they are watching us!”
“Doctor, they are strangely beautiful! What variety are they?”
“I cannot be certain. They have obviously been pulpating on the opposite ridge and, while migrating across the valley, ejecting their meconial fluid!”
“The blood, Doctor!”
“Exactly!”
“So this explains it,” the young man said, gazing at a butterfly that had mounted his forefinger.
“Almost.”
“Almost?”
“There is still the little matter of the flesh, Wilhelm. We can certainly not regard that as meconial fluid.”
There was a moment’s silence. The small, murky-winged insects filled the surrounding woods and began to slowly clothe the two men, alighting on their faces, heads and vestments. Thousands of wagging and knobbed antennae, slender bodies, curling proboscises; as the daylight waned the insects descended, perched mellowly, and observed.
“Then what is the answer to the mystery?” Wilhelm asked, almost in a whisper.
Dr. Black grinned. “Come,” he said, “it is getting dark. Let us see.”
The doctor and his assistant stood, backs against the outer wall of a stone dwelling, feet resting in a few centimetres of relatively fresh gore. He, Black, felt sorely like igniting a D’Orsay, but refrained;—it was, in any case, his last.
“Piera and her mother are asleep,” Wilhelm murmured. “Why do we watch their house?”
“Shhh!”
They waited; the moon swung over the pe
aks, its dim light slashing across the valley, filtering through the village. Wilhelm yawned and leaned his head against the wall. The doctor stood alert, eyes scanning the zone before him. Presently there was a sound, footsteps trodding through butterfly slurry. A hulking silhouette appeared at the end of the lane. It stepped cautiously, one arm occasionally flying off to the side: as Millet’s Sower; prowled the vicinity, with lumbering care, and was soon around the corner of the fleisch house.
“Who is it?” Wilhelm whispered.
“Come,” growled the doctor. “We will see. . . . Around this way. . . . Here. We will wait at this corner.”
A few moments later the lurking figure rounded the way. Dr. Black, producing his all powerful cigar-shaped Varta 645 pen light from his pocket, flashed the blinding ray in the creature’s face.
“Halt!” he cried. “We have you!”
“Damn you; put that light out of my face!”
“It is Waldmüller!” exclaimed Wilhelm.
The stocky man stood before them; a satchel over one shoulder; a hand raised, shielding the light from his eyes; a robust claw before his face gripping dripping guts.
“Look what he holds, Wilhelm.”
“Flesh!”
“Check his bag.”
“I was on my way home,” the goatherd protested. “It is my supper.”
Wilhelm had the satchel on the ground and was examining it. “It is full of raw meat,” he said coolly.
Dr. Black extinguished his light and the three men stood silent in the dark. “It is long past supper time,” he said presently. “Waldmüller will come and join us for a glass of wine at headquarters. This is not the place for explanations.”
Waldmüller hung his head and let out a consenting grunt.
XI.
What peace,
so long as the whoredoms of thy mother and her
witchcrafts are so many, scrivening through
hours of night due to the multitude of the whoredoms, at
fingertips’ end a glass of pale wine of the well-favoured harlot: and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth villages through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts (his mind quivering in the vocabulary of the sacred writings, snorkelling in that of the latrine) whom thou hatedst for doing most odious works of witchcrafts, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies there shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or an enchantress, or a witch and they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils
after whom they have gone a whoring.
Ears stuffed with cotton, he hung from the ropes and the bells tolled, vigorously, impetuously, echoing over the village. Then, unplugging his organs of hearing; he climbed down the precarious tower ladder and made his way around to the front of the old church; stopping his progression, he stood and waited for the flock. It was however not a lamb or sheep that first appeared to his sight, but a top-heavy black being walking easily towards him in the morning light.
“Good morning,” Father Tito said in his thin, nasally voice. “I am glad to see that you have come for our Sunday gathering. I flatter myself that my sermon will be of interest to you—Though unquestionably it will not be much to the liking of our local sorceresses.”
“It is not to enter your building of public worship that I have come, but to see you about these . . . sorceresses—I intercepted one of them last night.”
“Oh . . . indeed!”
“Yes, I caught one red-handed. He was of but small intelligence, with a rather large moustache and a satchel of meat stuffs.”
The priest paled slightly. “How—How very odd.”
“Come now. Not so odd. From the décor of your home, it is apparent that you are an amateur lepidopterist, of a high order. Your interest obviously led you to the discovery of the migratory habits of this butterfly—these butterflies which have been pulpating on the shoulder of the mountain; attracting hungry birds and then, in a cloud, crossing the valley. . . . Producing rains of meconial fluid. . . . The other night, in the darkness, at Frau Riemenschneider’s, it was you I heard making importunities to young Piera. For neither lust nor money could you ascertain her lips, so you stooped to drumming up hatred against her mother—hiring Waldmüller to dump gristly bits of flesh around the shop’s vicinity and then denouncing her publicly as a witch.”
The priest was agitated, silent. He bit his bottom lip and turned away.
“So then, you will indict me,” he said.
“Nothing of the sort. . . . If you obey my directives. . . . First, you must say publicly, today on the pulpit, that the cause of the blood shower has been determined, and it is au naturel. Secondly, you will remark that the flesh was not actually part of the showers, but was strewn about by some village boys, as a prank. As the latter piece of information was told to you in priestly confidence, you are unable to name the culprits, but are assured that they will refrain from further tricks. . . . Thirdly, you yourself must give up all hostile behaviour towards Frau Riemenschneider, and all designs on her daughter. —If you obey these commands, then you will be fine, but if you hesitate, if you prove a recidivist, then you will be exposed.”
The priest shrugged his shoulders, as if to say “What choice do I have?” It was apparent that the man opposite him, the man regarding him with the eyes of a judge, was a higher order of being. He was a man whose friendship it was wise to tender, but Father Tito had acted the churl.
The doctor retraced his steps, wagging a freshly lit cigar in his lips as he went. Approaching headquarters, he saw Wilhelm, seated on the doorstep, a coffee balanced in his fingertips.
“It is all settled?” the latter asked.
“I believe so,” answered Dr. Black, exhaling a jet of smoke. “If not, you have the evidence and know what to do.”
“So what next?”
“What next! Why, you load up the car and away we go. I have a train to catch.”
“Ah, of course, your chess match.”
“Not to mention the fact that I am currently in the process of smoking my last D’Orsay.”
XII.
“So you will spend long in Italy?”
“Only a few days as things currently stand, and then back to the United States.”
There was a moment’s silence. Wilhelm stared at the ground. Passengers bustled onto the train.
“The girl?” Black asked.
“We get on well together,” Wilhelm replied, lifting his head.
“Good. But I hope you did not pay too much for the pleasure. Or am I to understand that you have been granted a scholarship to the University of Love?”
The young man blushed.
The doctor offered him his hand. “I must go; the train will soon depart.”
“It has been wonderful working with you.”
“It has been my pleasure.”
Dr. Black took up his valise and climbed onto the train. Wilhelm stood, looking after him with sad eyes. The leaving bell rang.
“Wilhelm,” the doctor said turning. “Apply yourself, and you will go beyond the limits of the average.”
The door closed and a moment later the train slid easily, almost silently out of the station. It moved out, wrapped itself around a curvature in the mountain and, reappearing just beyond, entered and then disappeared in a tunnel cut through the rock; aboard it the man thought of sixteen pieces, sixty-four squares, the firmament, and its division into twelve sectors and three celestial planes.
The Dogrog Phenomenom
Richard Howard
Perhaps the most interesting development in Popular Music in the past ten years has been the rise of Dogrog. For those of you who have been living in a monastery for the last decade, I’m referring to loud, fast, abrasive rock music played by domestic dogs. The continuing credibility of a form that has its roots in novelty records aimed at children is shocking to say the least.
Animal music probably starte
d in earnest in 2009 with the forming of a group called the Menagerie. The cutesy cartoon cover of their self-titled CD shows a monkey on keyboards, an elephant on drums, a wolf on bass and a crocodile on guitar. On the inside of the CD cover we see the animals in the studio although it’s not certain how much playing was done by the Menagerie themselves. Industry insiders assure me that the actual animal input was minimal and that the recording was chiefly made with session musicians and samplers.
Having said that there’s no doubting the innovation on display. Covering the guitar with raw meat and having the crocodile attack it created the guitar solo on “The Grumpy Song.” The result sounds like Pete Townshend at his raucous best. “The Stomping Song” contains the sound of the elephant stomping on the studio floor and is truly terrifying. Stewart Angle’s performance as the monkey singer is also amazing throughout. But despite some interesting ideas it’s plain to see why this project sank without trace and is of little interest to anyone over nine who isn’t a pot smoker. Indeed the forefather of Dogrog claims to have never heard the Menagerie, let alone plagiarized their idea.
Nigel Thomas, head of Research and Development at Gibson USA first had the idea of dogs playing music when he bought his son a Labrador for his birthday. His son was a devoted punk rock fan and had been playing the guitar about six months.
“I was daydreaming at work and I thought to myself that it would be cute to teach the dog how to play a tune on the guitar to give Kenny an extra surprise on his birthday. Nothing too complex but you know, a recognizable song. So I went down to the workshop and started messing around and what I came up with was the Paw Pick, which is basically a kind of leather mitten with a guitar pick stitched into it, and the barre chord block which became known as the Dog Biscuit. This was a block of wood which, when you attached it to the guitar, could slide up and down the neck. The inside of the block was carved so that when pushed onto the strings it made a barre chord.”
