Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  ✴✴✴

  Caitlin—if that was in fact her name and not Calypso—and I remained outside with Myron while the others went inside for the “viewing” of Figgy’s sibling.

  “Pork’s in the eatin’ room,” Mrs. Fontana had said leading the disinclined pack to the radically inclined Pork, “and he’s awaitin’.” That answered the prevailing question: not what was being served for dinner, but the identity of the man who was presumably lying tableside in state.

  With the three of us on the porch, Caitlin, or whatever her name really was, pressed to Myron’s clammy forehead a cold cloth of unknown origins but whose past purposes might have included engine-block clean-up for all I feared.

  “Venice. San Francisco,” Myron started and couldn’t finish.

  “Hang with me, Myron, the best is yet to come.”

  “Whoever the fuck you are.” It was beginning to occur to me that if I myself did have a mild case of Tourette’s, as Myron always asserted, it was for him possibly as catchy as my uptalk.

  “You sure get around, Caitlin.”

  “You too, Myron. Thanks for lunch, which was marvelous, wish we could have talked some more. Got the contract ready?”

  “You and Cable Fontana? Really?”

  “You publish books and rub shoulders with writers and gypsies all the time. After Venice, haven’t you gotten used to surprises yet?”

  “I never unexpect the unexpected.”

  “Good, I can tell you’re feeling your oats, which is good because you have to live long enough to publish my great book.”

  “Feeling a lot better than Pork Fontana, that’s for sure, poor son of a bitch, cut down in the abattoir at the prime of his brother’s career. Did you know him?”

  I realize Myron wasn’t making completely rational sense, but it was hotter than you would imagine and there were too many developments for him to keep track of in his condition. Twin siblings Pork and Fig: could be a kind of culinary breakthrough, I begrudgingly contemplated. Wonder what inspired their parents, and if their names were Cucumber and Nag, or Zucchini and Beef, or Plum and Catfish.

  “Never met him,” she swore. But according to her, it seems that Pork was the educated one, a legendary high school drama and English teacher who retired early a few years ago, purportedly to compose plays. This career turn possessed a sort of logic because he was always starring in some community theater production of Surrey with the Fringe on Topahoma or South Pacification. On the other hand, Figgy was homeschooled and formally uneducated. Pork was the good boy, the A student, the one following along the straight and narrow path. In his younger days, Fig was the shit-kicker, the booze hound, the one always on the prowl for trouble and women on the side, which he couldn’t help but find. That’s where he found his inspiration for those distinctive books, in his hard-scrabble life, not in literature.

  “Where good books come from,” said Myron, “is anybody’s guess. It’s always a miracle, that’s one reason I’m in the business.”

  “That gypsy might have had some influence, too.”

  Come on now, you would have rolled your eyes along with me.

  She ahemmed and filled us in. Cable had explained for her benefit that anybody who knew Fig from the old days never could account for him writing as much as a grocery list, and that may have contributed to his decision to become essentially a hermit. The brothers spent a lot of time together up till the very end. They had a bond that Cable or Fig’s wife never understood, but you will, in time. The brothers did fight a lot, true, but their conflicts seemed to keep them connected. And their odd names?

  There was one conceivable explanation. Pork and Fig were the nicknames they gave themselves, I was forced to presume, while under the influence of psychotropic drugs that cognitively incapacitated them. I was correct they were nicknames. On the basis of their hospital birth certificates, Cable had informed Caitlin and so she informed us, long deceased James and Mary Fontana legally named the twin brothers Porphyry and Newton.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” said Myron, surprisingly agile of mind. “Not Figgy Newton, no way. I may have lost consciousness for a minute, and I may have run into a tricky gypsy in Venice one time and almost you, but I am not buying this story.”

  Would that he would say the same thing about her book.

  “Cable never said much about his dad or his uncle or the rest of the family when we got to know each other at Brown. I did later on get the picture that his dad had evolved into a dedicated writer. Not conventionally schooled and obviously unpolished, but then I read those amazing books of his and they made my head spin. The man wrote like a house on fire.”

  “When your house is on fire,” I took my opening to Murmechkally mention, “that is not the time to stock the refrigerator. That’s what a wise senior editor once told me.”

  Caitlin pretended not to hear, for which I could not really blame her, and went on: “And to hear Cable tell, nobody took a shot on his dad till he found you, and you went out on a limb and published him when nobody else would risk it. You’re a ‘big-time’ publisher.” Again with the air quotes? “A first class dickwad, too, says my fiancé, but a hell of a publisher, which is obviously why you called dibs on Adventures of Calypso O’Kelly.”

  “That’s ‘dickwad’ to you,” Myron corrected her, employing his own air quotes to dramatic effect.

  At the same time, I could not contest the sum and substance of her assertions. My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk.

  How many in our increasingly large circle, excluding Ashlay Commingle and wouldn’t that be nice, attended a sepia-toned university? My college team lost every league game except against Brown, a point of humility that didn’t need to be underscored at this tender button juncture. She had no view on my dumb, should-have-remained-internalized question, but she had one on another issue.

  “Ashlay Commingle is a better porn name than Suzi Generous,” she said, “which I object to unconditionally on the grounds of selfie-indulgence. But if she doesn’t stop acting generously around Cable she will be commingling with the fishes.”

  Changing the subject, I mentioned to her that YGB was himself a distinguished Brownish alum.

  “Remember I told you he did look a little bit familiar?”

  To which I said, “And remember, Caitlinypso O’Gypsy, when I should have told you to keep your Venetian blind mitts off of him?”

  Then Myron said, “But in the meantime I need to meet with Double F. Figgy’s good, and I need his next three books, which I paid for, but between us and the slumped barn where the witches’ coven is probably meeting, he’s no Calypso O’Kelly. Wait, are you also no Calypso O’Kelly?”

  Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude and with forced fingers rude.

  “Take it easy, Myron. You’ve been through a lot.”

  Something told me we were in for a fuckovalot more.

  A Clockwork Sibella

  Myron mustered the strength to get to his feet, with Caitlin and my grunting assistance, and we endeavored to enter the house improper through the extrasuperventilated screen door. As she told me the day before, I was his protectah—if not his luvah—and damn it, I should keep an eye out. As for the alleged screen portal, what could have been its functional purpose, considering its advanced state of disrepair? The mesh was shredded to the extent that it would Open Sesame for the winged depredations of blood-engorged mosquito swarms if not mated-for-life mourning doves.

  Once inside, the temperature hovered I estimate at a comparatively refreshing ninety-nine degrees. You’d think Fig would have installed air conditioning. But no such luck. Myron turtled along, and the unscreened door had slammed behind us as Caitlin held his arm and guided him toward the muddled masses give me your tired and poor voices presumably emanating from P
ork’s next-to-final resting place. At least I hoped it was penultimate.

  We ventured down the long hallway entrance tastefully appointed with a lynched sixty-watt bulb that swung from a codependent chain in the nonexistent cooling cross-breezes. The warped floorboards cartoonishly croaked. We passed an opened door and, giving over to his curiosity, Myron stopped to see what was inside the room. There was a bare wood desk and chair, and numerous boxes on the floor. It smelled dank as a cigar-humidor (a receptacle for my dad’s only vice), and the smoke-stained gossamer curtains drooped arthritically against the unopened window. On the shelves were indeed a few books, but they were all multiple copies of Figgy’s publications. This must have been where the Figgian magic once happened, because didn’t Mrs. Fig say that he worked in a cabin on the property? Nonetheless, people are typicanooly and nosy too about the work habits and surroundings of famous writers. They want to know what time of the day they show up for business, they want to know if they write longhand or on a computer, they want to know if they listen to music while decomposing. I get that, I do. But you know what was most peculiar about Figgy’s office—if indeed it was or had been in the past his office? Maybe Figgy had gone minimalist, or maybe there was no Ikea within hailing distance to spruce up the joint.

  “That’s curious,” I said to Caitlin. A writer with no books and no computer, not a typewriter or pads or pens or pencils. Figgy Fontana was legendarily eccentric, but who was this Spartan?

  Caitlin was ready with the answer to my unasked question: “Cable said his dad got rid of all the other books besides his own, said they distracted him. And he was giving up his computer, too. It was too noisy, and the porn that kept popping up all the time was distracting him. He moved into the cabin he and his late brother built by hand out back.”

  We passed along the corridor and soon came upon what the unfailingly veracious real estate agents in my posh neighborhood would have described as a “spacious and welcoming gourmet dining room with classic, timeless touches that will bring back memories of childhood,” but which I, being an unreal estate agent, would advertise as a place “where luxury and hygiene go to give up the ghost.” It was all-too-easy to imagine Mrs. Fontana serving up healthy organic, locally rustled up fare such as BBQ roadkill.

  In any case, there he was—evidently a man by the name of Pork Fontana. But I would have thought it was Figgy if I hadn’t been encouraged to think otherwise. Admittedly, I knew the eminent author solely by that silly book straitjacket photo where he was rubbing his chin like it was an Aladdin’s lamp. Here Pork was stretched out on the butcher block table. And talk about the flesh he was in. He was enormous. He resembled a beached sea lion. A sea lion wearing a John Deere cap and a flannel shirt and suspendered jeans and work boots. His leathery sunbaked skin was beginning to postmortemly sag. He had the look of somebody who had fallen eternally asleep on the shore, and the M-Bomber should have thought to clean the dead man’s fingernails. As he lay—watch out, Kelly, ’cause here comes a single-car collusion—dying, but mainly really dead.

  I was looking at Pork, but I was thinking: Fig. I know writers come in all shapes and sizes, as well as all ages up to and including dead, but in advance I wouldn’t have picked Figgy (or his twin) out of a lineup of bestselling authors. Literary types don’t have to look like James Joyce or Joyce Carol Oates or a Joyce such as Joyce Kilmer, but it helps. I think I shall never see a poem lovely as Figgy. Let’s hope that Jennifer Lawrence or Penelope Cruz writes a novel and one day is nominated for a National Book Award, because if they’re irresponsible enough to put me on the jury I will do my best to make that happen. I lead an active fantasy life.

  At this point my fantasy life and I were washed over by an odoriferous tsunami. A thunderstorm pelting me with offal. A C-4 detonation in the abattoir. The smell, the smell. The house itself reeked as if it itself had been M-bombed. Hello, nausea, my old friend, I sang in my bones like the sea.

  ✴✴✴

  Then it happened. This was the moment Myron had been hoping for: Double F’s grand entrance. It was disturbing but also fascinating to eyeball the identical twin of the deceased, dressed exactly as his brother and every bit as immense.

  Myron must have summoned up all the strength in his beleaguered body and he ambled up to his wealthy and disturbed and unstable and unreliable author.

  “Figgy, I’m Myron, your publisher, sorry for your loss.”

  “En I’m sorry fer yours, too, but we talked ’bout that on the telly oh phone.” That unforgettable voice of his, half frog, half crow. A frow, a crog.

  It was bad form for Myron to dive into that complicated business matter, but he would prove to have no corner on badness of bidness form. There was no risk of talking turkey, and besides, FF wasn’t listening to or looking at his publisher. He was gawking at Ashlay, which, to be fair, sounds worse than it was.

  “Suzi Generous? Dammit, as I liv’n breathe,” he said King Leeringly to Myron’s new author. “Know’d you anywheres, clothe or nekked.”

  It goes without saying, and that’s a dumb expression because here I am saying it, he had zero interest in a colloquy with Myron.

  “All happy families,” said Caitlin, “something something.”

  The illustrious Russian author had once made a good point on that subject, which Caitlin couldn’t collusively quote. But here was my point. I had not been wrong about lunch yesterday. She was no witch. This Caitlin was nothing but a grifter, albeit a talented and well-dressed one, but one whose game I had not yet figured out, and I wondered where she was hiding that Birkin.

  What universe of insanity had we insinuated ourselves into? I couldn’t wait to undiscover. But that’s not true. I could. But Myron? Not quite. Because look what happed next: darkness filled his eyes and he dropped again, deadweight, to the floor.

  ✴✴✴

  Not so fast, Morty the mortician man. Myron didn’t permanently lose consciousness. His knees buckled! like that line in the great Hopkins poem, which Junior supposedly knew by heart, and which I doubted. YGB and Caitlin and Ashlay combined forces (Mayday, Mayday!) and carried him into the front room, and they deposited him on the mouse-castle of a couch. Myron had told me before that he needed to see his doc about his rocketing then plummeting blood pressure as soon as he got home, and that sounded to me like a fucking sensible idea. These unsafe skittery jags in BP, if that’s what they were, might betoken a worrisome condition. Shoot me before I Google Search again.

  On that couch was where he would stay for I couldn’t say how long, but when his eyes opened, he told me later, it was dark outside and his whole body ached, head to toe, a random plunking on the xylophone of his skeletonic form. One thing he could detect with confidence was the resonance of advocate Cable’s accusatorial voice as the author’s son was speaking, Myron was dimly speculating, to Caitlin in the hall not too far away.

  “Flu?” he said to her.

  “Don’t think so,” she said.

  “Being he’s greedy and likes to roll in the mud, I’m diagnosing swine flu, doctor. Speaking of which, can we play doctor soon?”

  Consulting my notes from Myron’s account that he ultimately related to me, I understand the two of them laughed. Does anybody find remotely amusing this exchange relative to an elderly AARP-eligible man who is feeling like he is dying in a should-have-been-condemned house, one that might have served aesthetically as an inner-city shooting gallery, while another man is on his impromptu bier of a dining room table a few feet away? If you qualify, please send Hard Rain Publishing the first forty pages of your new work via the transom.

  “I gotta get home,” Myron managed to say. “Where are my people?”

  My people? He said it, and examining the Myron arch archives I would say it was a first for such an expression on his part. He never thought of them, or I should say us, as people, much less his. My conclusion: he was in progressively shaky shape. I should have been by h
is side, but I was, comme on dit, surprisingly if seriously occupied upstairs, and you know what happens when a nation occupies another and they plant a flag, well, don’t complain later that I didn’t foreshadow.

  “Myron,” Caitlin said as she hustled toward Myron, barefoot and reportedly wearing nothing more than a checkered cotton nightshirt that was admittedly delightful to observe, whose buttons were not being called upon for decorous application. “You feeling any better? You had me almost worried. I thought about calling for help, though from up in these hills you’d have to be Medevacked.”

  “Did Sibella and Young Goodman Brown abandon me?”

  “They went to bed hours ago,” she told him. “Everybody’s upstairs sleeping.”

  Or something.

  Except with respect to Pork, who was more than asleep and downstairs. Alas, Poor Porkick, at that juncture I knew him not well.

  “What time’s it?” Myron couldn’t raise his arm to look at his watch. He didn’t think he had ever been that sick before. I knew I was right to suspect that pseudo-lemonade.

  “Two a.m., Myron. Go back to sleep.”

  “Got anything for the pain in my head?”

  She said it wasn’t a good idea in his condition. What did she know? Myron wasn’t a book upon which to perform her doctorly ministrations.

  “Then get me a gun and let me end it.” For the record, ungentle reader, you’re not the first to call him or me a drama queen.

  Myron couldn’t tell where the author’s progeny was, except for the fact that he was hidden deep in the shadows. As usual, Figgy’s son piped up a mite too eagerly: “Gun? You want a gun? We got plenty of firearms in the house, Myron, but I doubt you have the strength to pull a trigger. Cait baby, beddy-bye-time.”