“Oh my—”
“Goodness.”
“The Pop Rock Explosion.”
“The Big Bang.”
“I never knew the Big Bang could be reduced to a woman chomping off a man’s—”
“Privately, I’d rather not discuss the details.”
“How about publicly?”
“That, I can do.”
“Anyway.”
“The man would start bleeding the color of lobsters and so you’d faint because you’re one of us. The other woman would just scream and do nothing and so the man would bleed to death.”
“Then?”
“Then, the woman would cry for three minutes, have a cigarette, call 911, and blame the whole thing on you.”
“People today.”
“I tell you.”
“You just did.”
“Anyway, I told you all of this for only one reason: to offer you the option of picking up where that life left off or to stay here in the deep blue until you die, which you will. Don’t think you’re getting out of that one.”
“I choose to stay here, of course.” She sighed heavily and the DNA dance was moved lightly. “But I also feel obliged, being a hybrid—both lobster and human—to give each life a fair chance. I’d sometimes like to deny my human qualities and be all lobster, but humans have their pros as well.”
“And their cons. You’d be one of them. However, you’d get spun around the globe and eaten up by the lovely earth.”
“Earth is going to eat me like a kid who catches cheese snacks in his mouth?”
“Exactly.”
“Perfect.”
“So that’s your choice?”
“Tell me about the other.”
“The other option is to dance the DNA with me underwater until we decompose.”
“And then?”
“Well, I guess to the earth go the spoils.”
“Sounds like both options have the same end.”
“But does the end justify both means equally?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll order up a hybrid life for my lobster lady who I met at Red Lobster.”
“Yum.”
*
And so the girl lived happily ever after—partly as a convict and partly as a strand of DNA in the ocean. She was always 100% lobster lady at heart. And she did have a whale of a heart. Her land life and her sea life both met their ends in the earth.
When the girl thought of all this, she felt content. Like a lobster in the stomach of a man, she had no chance of leaving the belly of the earth. However, unlike a lobster in the stomach of a man, she was just fine nestling in a belly so full, a mouth couldn’t ask for more.
The Eaten Boy
Nick Jackson
When Jan’s younger sister died they laid out the tiny corpse in a shawl of embroidered linen for people to have a last look. He watched the body as it lay on the polished mahogany table in the front room, in the green dappling light reflecting off the canal. Jan examined her hands, which were like the shrivelled roots of a plant torn from the earth. He stared at the silver coins that covered her eyes.
“You mustn’t watch her for too long or you’ll die too and rot and insects will grow out of your body,” his sister told him.
Jan thought hard about it as they walked to the church. Could he, a boy, be turned into an insect? He tried to imagine the kind of insect he’d become: a fat grub or a glossy beetle or something shrivelled and stick-like.
“Do we become insects when we die?” He watched an expression of panic cross the face of the minister, who didn’t enjoy questions, or at least not those delivered with a high-pitched clarity from precocious children.
“The flesh of man does not endure after death, it rots and putrefies; if the corruption of the soul is great, the body may grow insects.”
“And what’s that, corruption?”
But the minister had had enough and turned away his gaze, his mind was busy with thoughts of the service.
The boy’s tutor told him: “I’ve heard that flesh kept away from the open air in a glass jar cannot generate insects, but I haven’t observed this for myself, therefore I cannot say for certain.”
In the garden there were herbs in clay pots. Each leaf, he reminded himself, was made by the mind of God. He watched a caterpillar as it fed on the leaves. He saw that it never paused in its eating of the leaves. It lived to eat. When he touched it, the creature twitched mechanically and slowly; the body swelled and thrashed from side to side. He wondered whether it was God who moved it. And if he, Jan, lifted his finger, was it really God who made him do it? Was he no more than a puppet at the mercy of God?
The minister had said: “Let God in.” He’d opened his mouth by accident at that point and breathed God in. For a while he was afraid to spit, in case he spat God out. But if God’s will was everything, and He was present in everything, then God must be immense, so huge that, if He were to open His mouth...
“If God is greater than everything,” he said to the maid who was sweeping the yard, “then why can’t we see him?”
The maid stopped sweeping and poked out her tongue-tip so that she could think better. “Because he’s very quick and has so much to do.” She was pleased with her answer and picked up her broom again with a fresh determination to rid the yard of dust and dirt.
Jan was silent for a moment. “God must be very big if he made everything. If he opened his mouth he could swallow cows and horses and pigs. He could swallow trees and houses. He could even swallow a whale,” he added, remembering the beached whale he’d seen last autumn with his father.
“But God is in Heaven. He doesn’t go around swallowing things,” said the maid, feeling faintly alarmed.
Jan began to shout. He tore off his jacket and hurled it on the ground. “If God made the world, he must be a giant. If he made the earth in seven days, he could rip it to pieces too, can’t you understand?”
The maid, who was only a year or two older than Jan, wasn’t used to so much talk and thinking made her head ache. “You’re all in a lather. Are you ill?” She put her cool hand on his forehead. “Sit down and rest.” And she tried to get him to sit down but Jan pushed her away and ran into the house, slamming the door.
That night Jan was consumed by a fever. In the slippery pathways of his delirium, the boy dreamt he was swallowed up and knew that he was inside God. He begged his mother to bring the minister. He felt so weak, so brittle.
The minister was flattered to be called to the big house on Herrengracht, even if it was the middle of the night. He felt he could rely on the generosity of the boy’s father, the merchant Knip. His eyes glittered as he trotted through the tiled lobby. He noticed the walnut sideboard and the mirror in its ornate silver frame and the ruby glass of the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling.
The maid led him along a dark, wood-panelled corridor to a thickly curtained room where a fire glowed in the grate. Left alone in the oppressive warmth, the minister let his eyes become accustomed to the gloom. A lingering odour of vomit brought him to a sense of his duty and he folded his hands over the gentle swell of his paunch and stood by the bed, lowering his eyes, pursing his lips.
“Father,” the thin cracked voice was surprisingly piercing.
“My child.” The exhausted face that the minister looked into was more that of an old man: wizened and wrinkled across the brows. The eyes were feverishly brilliant and the dark centre of the pupils threatened to suck the minister down; such eyes looked too deeply, as if they could see the thoughts revolving in his mind. He pulled his coat close about him.
“I wanted you to tell me about God,” said the voice, which was no longer the voice of a child but seemed more like the suffering bleat of an animal.
The minister breathed a small sigh of relief and settled himself in a chair. “Ah, I will tell you about the Lord’s goodness. He is infinitely kind and loving. Through him, all things come to fruition. It is by his will that men come into being and fa
de away. And he takes those who have worshipped him to live with him in Heaven.”
“And what’s it like, Heaven?”
“It’s a place of warmth and light and music. The angels live in Heaven.”
“And are there animals in Heaven?”
“Animals don’t have souls and can’t go to Heaven.”
“But God made them. He made everything.”
The minister wiped his cheeks, which had begun to perspire, and looked with slight desperation around the room.
“Ah,” he said, “you’ve been busy drawing.” He smiled uncertainly at the boy but there was no flicker of interest in the child’s crumpled face.
“What clever drawings.” He flicked through a pile of papers that lay curling on a table by the bed, thinking to himself what a wealthy house it must be where a child was allowed to doodle on expensive scraps of paper. The drawings were finely done in red crayon. One looked like a vaulted ceiling; another appeared to be a tangled mass of thorns.
“How curious,” he murmured, turning the drawings this way and that, “How very odd.” He felt vaguely unsettled by the images though he couldn’t have said why.
Then his stomach contracted and his heart thumped in his chest. What had seemed like a sketch of a bunch of strange flowers, he now saw was a frog, cut open so that the insides were exposed. What he’d taken to be tendrils were the creature’s entrails. The minister was so surprised that he dropped the pile of drawings and they scattered across the floor. The head of a bird stared up, its skin peeled back to reveal the globe of the eye. The beak hung open, sliced in half, perfectly depicted with minuscule hatching in the same red crayon.
“I had a dream.” Jan’s voice had become a feeble rasping from between the fluttering lips.
“A dream?” The minister fought an impulse to run from the room and sat down again in the chair. The child was obviously overwrought. He’d listen for a little while to the delirious ramblings then he would offer his blessing and let nature take its course, as it always did.
“I was flying out into the heavens, towards the Sun. I was alone up in the sky, flying, not with wings but of my own will.”
Jan struggled to focus on the minister’s face. All he could see was a pale blur against the darkness, which was obliterated as the image of the Sun came back into his mind.
“It was as if I was going to fly straight into the Sun and the Sun was God, as if God and the Sun were the same thing. Could that be right?”
The minister shifted his rump on the polished seat, his piles prickled.
“God is omnipotent. He is much greater than the Sun.”
“But the face of the Sun was like the face of God, but with terrible sores and pustules.”
The minister gave a dry cough and shuffled about. He became aware that the room was very warm and stuffy. The fire in the grate glowed and crackled sending out flurries of tiny sparks that fell, glowing momentarily, on the tiles then quivered and died.
“Dreams can seem very real when you’re ill and strange images can become mixed together.”
“But I have a strong feeling that this dream… that this dream was true.” Jan was fighting for breath. He made a grab for the minister’s arm, but the man drew away so that the boy’s hand fell back clutching the bed linen.
“Well, I can’t say what your dream may mean. But dreams and truth, especially the truth of God, are quite different things.”
“The God Sun was very angry with me for flying so close up to him.” Jan finally got hold of one of the minister’s hands. “He opened his mouth and swallowed me down.”
The minister tried to reclaim his hand. He couldn’t submit to the child’s ridicule, not a moment longer. He was suddenly hot in his robes. The black material clung to his stomach and thighs. “I can’t imagine where you’ve picked up these ideas.” And he tried to prise up the clasping fingers.
The boy’s eyes with their bluish lids were like the bulging eyes of a bird—like those in the severed head of a goose the minister had seen decapitated one Christmas morning. The eyes burned in the dead-white pan of the child’s face and the minister sweated and tried again to wrench his hand away from the claw that grasped it.
“And when I looked in the God Sun’s face, I saw…”
“What did you see?” Despite himself, the minister leaned down towards the bed to catch the words.
“I saw the inside of God: a gigantic windpipe.”
“It’s impossible to see such things. You mustn’t believe them.” The minister wished that the boy would weep and tremble as sick children were supposed to. He would have liked to fear for the boy’s soul: if the child would only beg for forgiveness.
“I don’t think you tell us what God is like,” the boy accused him, in a whisper.
The minister couldn’t rid himself of the image of the goose’s head flopping around. He heard the sound of someone’s wheezing and realised he was listening to his own breath: the aged wheezing of a Calvinist minister, kept from his warm bed by a delirious child. If the boy died it would be a blessing; he spoke in riddles that could be a danger for him.
“Bless you and forgive you your sins,” he muttered, struggling up out of his chair. He’d done his duty, more than his duty. He’d advise the boy’s mother to take away his crayons, if it was not already too late to curtail the boy’s perverse interests. If the child were his, he would beat the evil out of him... He checked himself, what an absurd thought, when the child was nothing to him.
There was a dull thud. The chain of the minister’s bible had snapped and the book had fallen to the floor. He went down on his knees, searching for the scattered pages.
He found himself reading the words at the top of a page: “The locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank.” There was a sound of infinitesimal scratching as though something was trying to claw its way into his head.
“What is it?” asked the boy, trying to lift his head.
“Nothing. Do not concern yourself.” The minister heaved himself up, using the bedpost as a support.
“I must go.”
“But our talk about God?”
“I can’t discuss these things. It’s too difficult for your young mind.”
“So it’s true. God has breathed us all in, so that we can spend an eternity in his belly.”
The minister drew his robes around him and looked along his bony nose at the child. From a distance, the boy seemed less of a threat.
“I must go!” The minister fled from the room pulling the door closed behind him as if he could shut in whatever it was he’d found there.
“He needs a physician, not a minister.” He grumbled to the maid who was bustling along the corridor with a pile of fresh linen.
When the door had clicked shut behind the old man’s sombre form, Jan pushed himself up on his elbows. He reached for his crayons and some folded pieces of paper he kept by the bed but he could only grab the crayons; the papers slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. He sank into a fitful sleep.
The girl entered, moving silently around the room, her feet wrapped in cloths to deaden the sound. She touched his hands and gently prised the crayon from between his fingers. She picked up the scattered drawings and placed them in a pile on the bedside table. Then she sat to watch and wait. The candle guttered in its holder sending up a ribbon of smoke.
He woke and was aware of someone sitting by the bed but couldn’t turn his head to see. He opened his lips to receive a sip of water. On the wall at the foot of the bed the plaster had begun to crack. The cracks were filled with light as if they ran with liquid gold. The light throbbed in time with the boy’s laboured breath.
The wall, he now saw, was no more than a flapping door through which the wind rushed. Jan had no strength to resist the force that lifted him and pulled him through the doorway. He tried to shout but his cries were stopped by the force of the burning air. The pillared walls of the tunnel flushed with pale pink and orange. And now there were people, but t
hey had blank expressionless eyes, as though he was invisible to them. He sensed that they were aware of him; they reached out blindly searching for him. Yet he could not flee. He pulled himself up but his legs and feet were mired in soft mud. He began to flounder across the uneven floor. Other creatures turned to gaze at him, shifting their immense bulk to follow him with eyes of polished jet. Deep among a tangled mass like the roots of a tree he stumbled upon a cave.
A man sat hunched over some smoking apparatus and Jan, approaching from behind, saw that it was his tutor, who looked up: “I’ve discovered here, Jan, how the excrement of a lion can be turned to gold.” In a smouldering dish lay a glistening turd. The man lifted it and offered it to the boy. But, in the next moment, the cave dissolved and the tutor’s stocky form withered like a paper balloon taken by flames. The blackened creature that remained gave a tiny cry and scuttled away.
Above Jan there now rose a towering mountain. He began to climb, his feet slipping on the screes of cooling ash. Others climbed with him, their breathing a hollow rasp much like his own.
A hand came from nowhere and lay for a moment on his forehead. The hand was cool to his burning flesh, water trickled somewhere distantly.
Jan pulled himself up onto a rise of ground and looked back over a shimmering plain. Finally, he turned away from the blinding light. Those about him were gathering, swarming at the mouth of a cavern. They were digging with their hands in the viscous stuff that was as cold as the ashen screes had been hot.
The maid who had been sitting quietly by the bed, watching the pallid face and listening to the harsh rasping breath, took it into her head that she would sing, as much to keep her spirits up as for any comfort she thought it would bring to the boy. She hummed snatches of a folk song in a low voice.
The boy turned his head from side to side as if he were looking at a gallery of faces that were familiar to him. Sometimes he smiled or whimpered softly.
In caves of soft putrefaction he was delving, gathering the cold rottenness in his hands. He heard the first husky notes of the simple melody that arrested him as he tried to climb from the hole that was sucking him down. The little tune bound itself about him. The song was something about an oak tree and a little bird that sat in its twisted crown. “Come,” she said, “come hither,” and slowly he turned, letting the frozen lumps fall from his fingers. “Come, come hither,” the voice was stronger now and vibrated from the woman’s breast. The smoking candle spurted and grew strong.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 40