Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “His soul has gone now to a better place,” the minister said, and, in a way, I do agree; the silent darkness where a life once was and, like a guttering candle, has been snuffed out leaving only a thin trail of smoke—the grief of others—rising like incense to the heavens, that can only have seemed a mercy in comparison as he felt their blows rain down on him, the blood run down his face, the blame ring in his head. I wonder how many of us can imagine the pain and terror subsiding slowly as the body shut down, shut off from the world as the shock kicked in—as their boots kicked in his ribs—that curling up of consciousness being his only defense. And then a slow slide into senselessness, and, eventually, into nothing.

  In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?

  THE TEMPORAL WORLD

  We lay upon our backs, his head nooked in my shoulder, turned to gaze across my chest, above us open sky, the golden crescent of the sun, the silver-cratered moon. His wings furled around him as a peacock cloak, mine extended wide and flat across the thick-bladed grass heavy with moisture, we lay like something fallen from the stars, indolent with the noon heat, and oblivious to the tuts and tsks of other students crossing the campus grounds around us on their way from this lecture to that tutorial.

  “Fucking fairies,” I heard one mutter, and Puck raised a hand to circle it, slack and lazy, a regal wave in the air that, on the third revolution, came up as a fist, one finger extended to flip the bird, as casual as could be.

  “Fuck you kindly, fine sir,” he called after the white-knuckle asshole, never one to let an opportunity for brattishness slip by. “Fuck you very much indeed.”

  I put a hand over his mouth, laughing, and he nipped at it with nimble teeth.

  “Hey.”

  The world, the temporal world—at least that little piece of grass in it outside the campus cafeteria—belonged to us for that lunch hour. The temporal world belonged to us even as we neglected it, because we neglected it, my rucksack as my pillow, his abandoned to one side, and a solitary ring binder of polypocketed past papers and handwritten notes that flipped and flitted this way and that under the fingers of a warm August breeze, fingers far more studious than our own. I extracted one of my own shamelessly idle fingers from between his teeth and flicked at the acute of his earpoint.

  “Ouch. Bastard.”

  “Well, don’t friggin bite me, then, scrag.”

  He cocked his head diagonally across my chest, half angled to fix me with most innocent doe-eyes, half angled so his smirk, seen from above, curled up with mischief at the edges as he batted the black lashes of those eyes across my skin, and clicked a nip of teeth into my nipple. I bellowed curses loud enough to make a nearby mutt, browsing the remains of student lunches, raise its head and look at me with curious cocked gaze and raised ears.

  THE GRACILE AND THE ROBUST

  “When compared to the gracile—or dolichocephalic—elven skull, or, indeed even the robust—which is to say, brachycephalic—skull of one of the gnomitic races, the brutish and apelike features of the swarthy ochroid clearly mark him out as a racial type to be categorized as distinct and inferior to the more civilized races. The ochroid is, it must be concluded, to be considered as standing at the median point between these modern races of Man and their troglodyte progenitors, those such as Astralopithecus or Pithecanthropus Titanus, so-called Peijing Man.”

  Old bluff bombastic Samuel Hobbsbaum, with his copious white beard and sheer solidity of short stature, closed the book and laid it on the lectern, one finger resting lightly on the yellow Post-it note that marked his place.

  “When we read the words of the archaeologists of the nineteenth century,” he said, “in a modern context, we can hardly help but be shocked by the racism that is not merely implicit but is, in fact, quite unashamedly explicit. To us, slavery is an abhorrent notion, and yet…”

  He opened the book again.

  “It is for this reason that the ochre Afritan must be nurtured by his Elyssean cousin, as one would nurture a child, for surely the Afritan is but an infant in comparison to his Elven superiors, his savagery but the wild impulsiveness of youth, lacking in reason and self-control, his superstitions but the untamed fancy of a childish imagination. Without science or mathematics, without history or philosophy—without even a concept of progress beyond the natural cycle of seasons, indeed—he is, like all children, trapped in an Eternal Present, bound to follow his most immediate fears and desires and thus as ignorant in matters of ethics as in all others. He is a slave to his passions, and can only remain so unless the cultivated man take him under his wings and, with firm hand, as guide and master, lead him to his place within society. And it is the clear and present duty of the enlightened Elyssean to deliver that discipline of reason to the passions of the savage.

  “This series of lectures is going to be about passion,” said Hobbsbaum, after a pause. “About passion and reason, and about the politics of those two fundamental aspects of human existence, as the artists, philosophers, idealists and ideologists of nineteenth-century Elysse perceived them to be. Passion and Reason. Romanticism and Rationalism. At what point, we’re going to consider, in the collision and collusion of these two ideas do the aesthetics of the nineteenth century become the politics of the twentieth? Where does Romanticism become Fascism? Where does Rationalism become Communism? And can we even speak in such simplistic terms?”

  STUDENTS OF METAPHYSIQUE

  We met, Puck and I, as students of political science in our first class on the first day of our first year at North Manitu State University and, in the course of that first week, we became also students of each other, unsure at first if any of that niggling fancy in our tongues—that tingling appetence that makes you lick your lips and touch the tips of upper teeth in thought—if that, or any of the twiddling fingers or snatched glimpses of furtive glances, if any of that were more than just the wishful thinking of our own fey desires. We scrutinized each other for certainties that we ourselves were not quite ready to articulate in anything more explicit than the same sort of nod or smile given to any other fellow student and familiar stranger.

  It was in our second week that we found each other in the same tutorial and found ourselves locked in a debate as fierce as it was foolish, pouring scorn upon each other’s patently absurd ideas; and locked in each other’s gaze, we gaped incredulously and shook our heads and let fly insults at each other till it seemed we were about to fight, and while the postgrad student tutor tried in vain to steer us back onto the actual topic, the full flow of ridicule flung back and forth between us was unbreachable and in all the vitriol of an argument more derision than discussion, all I kept thinking as I stared in his infuriating face was just how much I wanted to fuck him and how I could see, in his ferocious eyes, how he was thinking the same thing.

  And later, after we walked out of the class still fighting, still flirting, after we sat for hour after hour in the campus cafeteria, drinking coffee, black and bitter in my case and frothed with milk, and sugary, for him (I watched, still talking, as he poured one, two, three, four sachets of sugar in), after discussing nothing of significance as if it was the most important matter in the world, and after we somehow walked together back to his room, not even noticing that we’d done so, we locked together physically and became students of each other’s form and flux.

  We studied the articulation of each other’s jointed intricacies, the slant of a kiss, the turn of a neck, the roll of its nape down to the first corrugations of the vertebrae where fuzz of hair gives way to skin, the roll of that spine in contrapposto pose, r
aising a hip at one side to curve a torso so another’s arm slips comfortably around the waist as if there’s nowhere else that it was meant to be. I studied the nicking points of his horns and ears. I studied the impish emerald of his eyes, the oriental jade tones of his skin. He arched an eyebrow at the limber of my wings, and we stopped studying.

  THE SUPPLIANTS

  A woodprint caricature of a Gnome, dating from the Middle Ages, presented the perfect picture of a child-murderer and a plague carrier, the vestigial wings under his tunic making him look hunchbacked, a sackful of dead babies slung over his shoulder, a purse grasped in his hand. This was the image of the Gnome as graceless and crooked that inspired pogroms and persecution, and that the Nazis were to play upon so heavily during the early twentieth century. It was the image that gave the Crusaders an excuse to hone their skills while on their way to the Holy Land, purging cities of their local Gnomish populations. It was the Gnome as usurer, and as murderer and, of course, at its roots, it was the Gnome as killer of Christ.

  Not that it mattered that Adonais was himself a Gnome. Medieval frescoes and altarpieces, icons and crucifixes had portrayed the Son of Jove as light-skinned and slender, the perfect Angelo-Satyr messiah, his wings spread wide upon the cross, his long horns lowered in his suffering. From its first advances toward the gentiles, through the Emperor Instantine’s adoption of the faith, and the growth of the Church during the period of the Holy Rhyman Empire, Christianity had progressively distanced itself from its Gnomish roots, painting the disciples white instead of cobalt, and sliding blame away from the Rhymans and on to the Gnomes. The dead babies and the purse of the medieval Gnome were a reminder of the Slaughter of the Innocents ordered by an evil Gnomish King and of the thirty pieces of silver taken by the Gnome who betrayed Christ.

  Tailors of fine clothes or moneylenders, jewelers or pawnbrokers—there were only a few professions open to the Gnomes of Elysse, and many of those were crafts or trades of peering eyes and pinching hands, of a back hunched over the intricate details of clockwork or bookkeeping, of fine manipulations and complex designs, almost as if the gentile cultures could accept the refugees only as absolute suppliants, submitting to symbolic roles of intrigue and avarice.

  In the darkened lecture hall, there was a click-whirr-clack and the projected slide slid to the side, replaced on-screen by a more modern image, a black-and-white photograph of a Gnomish shopfront in Berlin in the 1930s, the window shattered, the words Hobben raus daubed on the door. I heard Puck, in the seat beside me, mutter a quiet and unfinished “fucking…” and all around the room the almost-silence of shifted positions and folded arms—of our retreat into uncomfortable indignance—was clear and solid.

  OF DISTRACTION, OF ATTENTION, OF ATTRACTION

  He looked over his shoulder, and I took the cigarette from his mouth between two fingers held up like a sixties peace sign, and turned my hand to place it against my own lips, take a deep slow draw of the tobacco smoke right down into my lungs to hold it there, and held my breath with eyes half-closed, with the aching bliss of a nicotine fiend on his first hit in all too many days. I placed the cigarette back between his lips and felt the slightest hint of a pout, just the suggestion of a kiss on my fingers, as I exhaled.

  “Benedictions,” I said.

  “Salutation,” he said. “I thought you’d quit.”

  “I have. Those things’ll kill you. Terrible habit.”

  “Live fast, die young,” he said. “And leave a beautiful corpse.”

  “Fuck that shit. I’m looking forward to being one of those crazy old farts who shouts at kids and whacks them on the heads with his walking stick. Great fun. So what are you drinking?” I asked as I slid up onto the leather cushion of the stool beside him at the bar. I slid a beermat toward me till it was half off the wooden counter and flipped it with a flick of the thumb, missed catching it between thumb and forefinger by the narrowest of margins and had to make a grab to snatch it before it fell to the floor.

  “J.D. and Coke,” he said.

  “You know, J.D. doesn’t stand for James Dean. You…?”

  His head cocked to one side, he peered over my shoulder to the door, with a look I recognized immediately, one of distraction, of attention, of attraction, and I shook my head with a wry smile because I knew him well enough. I looked behind me, following the arrow of his lust and clocked the two of them, forescruffs of blond hair stuck out from under matching Abercrombie & Fitch baseball caps; as WASP—as White, as Angelo-Satyr and as Protestant—as they come, and with their gold aquiline wings stuck out from gray Gap sweatshirts redolent of college boy more than white trash, they looked so clean-cut, square and straight, I didn’t wonder that my Puck, always his own Puck, couldn’t keep his eyes off them.

  “Ah, no way. They’re fucking jocks,” I said. “I mean, Christ Adonais, they look like fucking quarterbacks.”

  “I like fucking quarterbacks,” said Puck.

  He tracked them with a slow and certain swivel of the head, an open cruising, as they walked up to the bar and ordered their beers. Puck had no shame in his rapacity; if anything, he reveled in the hunt, whether as predator or prey, and I noted the set of certainty in jaw and brow, although his eyes instead of being narrowed were widened in a more vulnerable challenge. It was part lion, part gazelle, the slight parting of his lips, the almost-flare of nostrils as if he could draw them to him with his breath, gather them in a chemical line of scent of shower gel and sweat.

  “Man, smell that testosterone,” he said, with relish.

  CURTIUS, E., GRIECHISCHE GESCHICHTE (1857–67), VOL. 1, P. 4 1

  “From Aeschylus, onward, we see the Prosian Empire portrayed as decadent, effeminate, soft with luxury in comparison to the young and dynamic Versid City-States, and this xenophobia was, it seems, the dominant view throughout Classical Verse. All the more remarkable, then, that the Versid writers of the Classical period continued to accept what for them was simply common knowledge, handed down from their forefathers, that the eldest of their cities—Augos, Thetes, Coronnus—were founded from Eglyph or Phonaesthia. It was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that this view was challenged by historians and archaeologists because, as Ernst Curtius tells us…

  It is inconceivable that Cunninites proper, who everywhere shyly retreated at the advance of the Hellions, especially when they came into contact with them, when far from their own homes; and who as a nation were despised by the Hellions to such a degree as to make the latter regard intermarriage with them in localities of mixed population, such as Solemnis or Cyphrus, as disgraceful; it is inconceivable, we repeat, that such Phonaesthians ever founded principalities among Hellionic populations.

  A procession of thousands of soldiers in shining armor trooped, to a fanfare of glory, through stone columns rising to the skies as city-gates, carved with titanic Art Nouveau sphinxes that towered over the spectacle as, in the foreground, an emperor lounged on a balcony, ensconced among luxurious cushions and intricately patterned rugs while female slaves, bedecked in little more than jewelry and slender draperies of silk, fanned him with palm leaves and fed his corpulent majesty with fruits whose thick juices drooled over his double chin.

  We sat in the darkness of the back row of the Film and Media Studies Lecture Hall as Griffiths’s grand historical spectacular Intolerance flickered on the screen in front of us while Hobbsbaum talked, his lecture, as always, a chimera of media, of text and illustration, annotation and quotation—a miscegenation, he called it, this intertextual exegesis of history. Last week it had been Birth of a Nation and, as the white-robed Klansmen galloped on their steeds into a town overrun by rebel slaves intent on rape and murder, my mind had wandered and I’d noticed, for some strange reason, the elegant musculature of the horses in motion, the choreography of their wheeling in close formation round the corner of a wooden farmhouse, kicking up dust under their pounding hooves to mingle with the smoke of gunfire in the air. The ripple of ribbed muscle, sinew and tendon buff beneath
their hides, the primal magnificence of the shiftings of their flesh.

  And the ochres ran before the noble knights riding in billows of white.

  SHARING ROOM AND SHARING SPACE

  “Mine,” he called, launching himself past me with a bat of iridescent wings right in my face, and leaping for the bed beside the window, where he landed and rolled over with the spring of the mattress, flinging his limbs out star-shape partly to steady himself, partly to stretch his claim—and lay there on the duvet in smug challenge, a brat daring my opposition. I tossed my bag across the room onto the other bed and cocked a snoot at him, snorting in mock contempt.

  “Fine, then. Women and children first. Shortarse.”

  He threw a pillow at me and I sidestepped, caught it, spun and—

  “Hey I’m nearly three foot tall ya fey—oomf!”

  “Yeah. And you still throw like a girl,” I said.

  He flicked the finger at me with a sneerish grin of spite—yeah yeah, big tough guy, suck my cock—and sneezed.

  Later we sat in this new room, settling in to our new home and our new year of college just around the corner. We watched a sun-drenched Californian cop show where the hero kicked open a graffitied door and swung his gun round to a room of startled gang members in red leather jackets and bandannas, all Espritic but for the solitary, sharp-suited ochre man among them with his gold-capped teeth and gold rings, and the clear bags of white powder—smuggled in by migrant Pixian farmworkers whose families were, of course, held hostage back home by evil drug lords—and the suitcase full of money lying open on the table in front of him. The camera cut to a close shot as the ochre guy reached for his flick-knife, then snapped back to a close-up on the hero’s face, his gun arm high and pointing out and past the frame.