“Forty-four … sixty-six …”
“But they were home. In the backyard. Angenot and two women … naked! In a blue bubble!”
“What is this, some kind of kids’ cartoon?”
(It should be noted that Antoinette was merely voicing a thought that, but a few hours earlier, had crossed Cecile’s mind.)
“No, I swear! Naked, in a blue balloon! Look, here’s the letter. Pascal Angenot, Turtledove Lane.”
She started at him, a wicked gleam in her eye, a mocking grin. “And you claim you saw them?”
“With my own eyes!”
“And they were having sex?”
“I didn’t say that! They were lying down, not moving.”
“It’s their business, isn’t it?”
“Well … of course,” Firmin could only concede. He seemed to hesitate, then, having walked right up to the window, he leaned toward the clerk and whispered, “Sure. Their business. You’re right, Antoinette. It’s just … I think they’re dead.”
“Indeed,” remarked Inspector Jacques as he stepped from the van, “quite a peculiar aroma.”
“Carnations,” said the taller of the two patrolmen.
“Verbena,” said the other.
They walked into the backyard, passed before Balthazar, who harassed the boys in blue; then, with the mailman in the lead, all four of them headed for the red cedar, whose shadow was invading the lawn.
“The culprit!” Firmin declared.
Before them: the heap of bluish Jell-O, still brilliant and firm, it tenants intact.
“The naked guy,” Firmin specified, “is the addressee, Mr. Angenot.”
“And the others?”
“His wife … their maid, Irene … those two over there are neighbors, and the smaller young man is Martial, the butcher’s boy. As for the priest and the cyclist, I have no idea. Probably people passing through.”
“At any rate,” said the inspector, “contrary to your allegations, they don’t seem to be dead.”
That much was obvious. Irene and the butcher’s delivery boy, in unison, were humming something like:
Come, my darling little fly
Dally in my lullaby
We’ll flitter-flutter fly to fly
Darling little fly!
“They don’t even seem to be in pain! Should’ve called narcotics!”
There was something like a sigh, an easeful cooing, an ample swoon: one of the patrolmen, the one who’d said it smelled like carnations, had just lain down, arms spread wide, hugging the maternal substance.
“He slipped,” said his fellow patrolman, a glazed look in his eye. “But he didn’t hurt himself.”
“If you ask me,” Firmin piped up, “I don’t think you’re going about this the right way.”
“Oh, really? Is Mr. Know-It-All the Postman going to teach us how to do our job?”
“Look, don’t fly off the handle—”
“Ahhh!” bellowed the other patrolman, the one who’d smelled verbena, tumbling into the elastic bliss.
Come, my darling little fly
Dally in my lullaby
Flitter-flutter fly to fly
“You shouldn’t criticize them,” said the inspector. “They’re just civil servants, like you … employees of the state … They’re doing their job … just like me … Professionally, I am … forced to give this closer … examination …”
Firmin grabbed his arm. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me all alone!”
“You can come with.”
“Detective, I don’t think you’re going about it the right way.”
“Well, don’t you just think you’re the bee’s knees! So what is the right way?”
“Hold your nose!”
“Hold my nose? If that doesn’t fly in the face of all—” He burst out laughing, reeling like a wino, legs akimbo. Firmin, still holding him by the arm, delicately pinched his nostrils shut. For a moment, they stayed like that, anxiously awaiting whatever was to come.
“You’re right,” said Inspector Jacques. “My mind’s clearing up.”
He couldn’t get over it.
“How very right you were! That aroma is a drug! May I?” Relieving Firmin, he took charge of pinching his own nose, and straightened up with assurance. “But my dear fellow, however did you resist?”
“I suffer from anosmia, Mr. Inspector. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes. Not exactly.”
“I can’t smell a thing. No olfactory sense. Especially in spring, when the almond trees are in bloom.”
Come, my darling little fly
Dally in my lullaby
Flitter-flutter fly to fly
They made a slow circuit of the bubble, stopping several times, nodding like experts.
“Curious, isn’t it? Ten victims, but who’s behind it? Or what? Not to be too on the nose—heh—but no violence or indecency …”
“Except the naked guy, Mr. Inspector.”
“He’s at home, on his own property. Careful, don’t step on the cyclist! Have you noticed that the grass all around is burnt? Maybe some kind of chemical fertilizer in blue plastic packaging that somehow mutated? Just a theory. And right in the middle of the lawn! What a bunch of nincompoops!”
Dithering nasally, in utter agreement, coldly eyeing the mysterious orgy, they experienced an intense feeling of superiority. Men, men they were, and upright! All they had to do was hold their noses.
At their feet, from the mush sparkling in the sunlight, came a higgledy-piggledy humming. And in the air was a strange tension, more than vernal, a new pigment, as if life hung suspended a bit above itself, suddenly glistening with a surfeit of obviousness.
In his pen, the dog was gazing at the sky.
There’s nothing left to tell that isn’t utterly ordinary. Really, we should stop here, on the image of Balthazar gazing at the sky. The rest, alas, is but denouement.
The bubble was removed by men from the Department of Public Works equipped with mentholated breathing masks. In the hour that followed, each of the ten victims recovered his or her verticality and dignity. It might be observed, on this occasion, the degree to which the average Westerner, no matter how conceited, refuses to be a celebrity of the inexplicable. As we have said, Mrs. Angenot was the only one who gave in to the temptation for wild confession, and for just a few weeks—up until the day when the mayor, who was almost a friend, summoned her to his office. The meeting lasted more than two hours.
“I wonder,” Cecile admitted the next day, “I do wonder if I didn’t dream it all. At least a little bit. I didn’t have my glasses on, so … They say it’s pollution.”
And why not? Who is to say she didn’t dream it, that we didn’t all dream this little episode? The grass has grown back on the lawn, the man of the house is back in charge, Irene is busy sweeping and Firmin pedaling. As for the bluish Jell-O, it’s long since been sealed in lead-lined drums and sent off to high places for study. Places so high we’ve quite lost it from sight. Just like the biker in his white leathers. No one’s ever seen him again. Has he too—who knows?—gone to a higher place?
“Just like my childhood,” Mrs. Angenot reflects dreamily, gazing at the sky. Those stars, by the thousand, unattainable as little green peas.
Two Poems
Jonathan Thirkield
SUPER FRAGILE CATALYST
our child was the size of a hummingbird
neatly glued to the stomach lining
blur of liquid metal sunshine
purring through apse and radial cells
a gently rising submarine
in the unsettling before sleep
a hologram of your next self
will break into a new body
building a raceme hierarchy
from which the hummingbird sips
*
a race disappears around the corner
I hear their voices another two blocks
colors at sunset go from the schoolyard
skin duste
d shades of cobalt
river sounds flow out of eyeshot
a heart-based curvature of time (language)
a contraction of time (systole) in the heart
hearing the kids fly from imaginary beings
the filling of time or blood (diastole)
in a name you dream walks by you
*
new love flutters at seventy wingbeats
a new movie flickers at twenty-four flames
a thousand fine gradations of happiness
performing a lice check on my daughter
testing all twenty-six teeth
in the Latin alphabet
the tongue like a Ouija planchette
points to the letter it licks
a silverleaf-faced angel pricks
her finger with a sterile need
*
missing rivers of bodies flow
through channels of the blood
are you so different having seen the second
beating of a wing across the shoulder
a woman once came to our apartment
all the bones in China wouldn’t bend
a vivid pink against the cheek that way
a swan rustles in the neoprene
our minds better at absorbing
fictions than new realities
*
shivering snare drum
phantom living lung
flawless sun-like figurines
sea-level dreaming azimuths
synthetic hyacinth junk derivatives
finite winter maize red party
black famine roulette station pilgrims
live hierarchical prunings in the brain
diving bells locked in palatine eardrums
a serpentine train set carries us off
*
decidual trans-cysteine life machines
cosmetic metalinguistic surgery prongs
sword forged consanguine molecular
carbon substitutions on a benzene ring
polyphonic fucking data strata erotics
sugar tongs orange gin red sangria
funny how gallium melts in the palm
how a human head melts in the mind
anything can be anything else after burning
the key to metamorphosis is turning
*
drawn without learning the lettering
the alternate editing the director’s cut
written in heaven among the bodies
of the 24 episodes to come
and bead upon be cloned among
other things a turnip plant an explosive device
the impulse to cloak the exposed girl
super fragile catalysts
to rout to expel the red cross
wear whiteface be cow-eyed to desert to echo
*
a corpse looks nothing like a robot
the sight of corpses is commoner
in less industrialized nations
the presence of the illusion
of distance deepens the assimilation
of the angel’s silver leafed plane
the wind’s a substitution for the sonic gulf
where water ran above us
but then again upon waking I lose
the conviction
*
where the wind farm is now
not far from the radiowaste tanks
a man once returned to the edge
of a battlefield made silver
by meadows filled with bodies
whose noses or ears were severed
as tokens by victors and carried
in sacks to later match to the kill
the man filled with hunger
held a yuzu rind against his teeth
*
the unimaginable being
the reality I choose
not to process the eyes’
aversion to the thing I
cordon off whole sections of
the body rendered herded
speechless unheard of zoned
imagining reality as it cones
in the quarter-second brain delay
by the phenotype’s deficiency
*
where does the mapping end
all the thoughtless forms formed from foam
glaring indifferently like 1000 toys
glaring happily like 100000 toys
unimagined casualties
rolling through watery air
freshly minted tongues for kissing
behind the schoolyard
fuck and dream of continuities
between impassable mirrors
*
I worry when you lift your eyes to this you
won’t find a satisfying mirror
I was reading about kindness last night
the currency in the early minds of kids
I thought the animals outside
were dressed in human conditions
I thought of writing a treatment
for an animated sitcom
in which everything is normal as hell
but everyone’s all dressed up as animals
THE ATLAS OF VIRTUAL
Constantly recorded, listening through loops
Of string of blue with fraying fibers webbing
The walls of the kitchen, climbing like ivy
Into the ears of our loved ones, channels
Playing whales and spinning light-up
Jellyfish, lipstick headed tubers by the ocean’s
Vents, music making modulated intimations
Of the lives of minor species, brown and golden red
Across the white-paged sky, a tablet
Of numbers spiraling out from one like trapdoors
Beneath a stage where a table stands with settings in Dutch blue
Of Japanese castles, cypresses, blue brick walls
Dividing the pastures, cows, sheep, a stray deer
Nibbling at an apple, and a huntsman in sandals
Drawing his bow, the feet of children showing
Beneath a fence by the stable playing
Harpsichords, samisens, and sitars on the service
Platter, tiny sketches of robotic spy insects
Twitching in the marsh, and I grew hungry, I ripped
The greenest lowest branch and loosest chips,
The skin of moss at its foot, forgetting that trees
Are others, forgetting people are always close
And listening, the mountains drilled through for
Fiber-optic trains, hidden suns speeding a desire for
Water, speeding the sleepless heart with particulate
Matter, the regions of dust in the visual apnea where
Mother and starlet and cow blend within the segmented
Caterpillar rushes, all seeping into the deepest troughs
Of the river systems of Mars, beneath the Olympus
Mons, the pyramidal tracts, a system of green men
With leaflike pinnate ears harvesting root crops
In the sub-rosa villages. During my abduction, the one
I’d prayed for all those years under the painted girl
Whispering, you are special, you really are,
Not an apparition in my night window, the six lights
From the hydroelectric plant making a crown
Above her many eyes. I toured the catacombs
Under the sandy planetary face, nothing was
Illusion, they called my guide Virtual, their towers
Modeled on a neurotransit system, trains
Passed from axon to dendrite, the supple liquid
Walls teeming with krill-like ground creatures,
They said, snack as you please. The taste bordered
On pork rinds and blueberries, the redder ones were
Sweeter, almost cotton candy, for a minute every
Word rhymed with every other one, the poison ones
Are irresistible and equally unstable
, they said,
Approaching the planet’s nuclear heart or amygdala,
Its marzipan scent covering field upon field of dark
Tentacular flowers or ideas, I couldn’t tell, the smell
So enveloped my senses like a boat crashing through
The snowy skullcap of a Western child, I thought
Briefly the Martians wore Japanese teddy bear
Suits, even heard the zippers close up their spines and felt
Myself being enclosed in one as well, it was difficult
To see through the pinhole eye, my head became
A camera obscura, I watched the film of a mariner
Eating bodies he carved with an LCD glass machete
That played video collages culled by a spider
Algorithm: a roulette of babies, cats, mirror
Soliloquies, violinists in short dresses, cooking
Instructions, nuptials, snake v. mongoose, poverty
Trials, cucumbers on the eyes, centers getting
Posterized, and a very long song about May. I may
Have been in the bear head for seconds or years being fed
By the mariner. The many men, so beautiful,
I feared, but I ate and ate, because they reassured
Me it was a dream, all of it, the scented watermelon
On the shoulders of the women, the scent of quinine
On their feathers, the myriad reductions—wine, cherry,
Anise—bubbling up from the skin, the fading purgatory
Impulse as my hunger and joy took hold. I felt perfect
Complicity with the mariner, he was the reason
I thought, the reason words gave way to pictures again,
He was the manager of the bodies. I came to
An oasis, Virtual let me surf the liquid plasma,
The buttons on her face went purple-pink, the doctor lost
His horse in the snow, and a trainer applied oleoresin
To his client’s thighs. The answer to every office pool,
The runoff from every dye job, the diminishing, ever
Diminishing trees and catalysts and rare earth
Materials seemed to extend their private wilds
Into an infinite number of vanishing points. It
Other Aliens Page 32
