“Once this lady comes with me,” he says.
“Well, I have to sit down,” Professor Borores says loudly, panting, and begins to maneuver herself into the chair, which is one of the few empty seats remaining. This entails bumping the man aside.
“Excuse me!” she says, even more loudly.
The man is not really prepared to deal with this and Professor Borores claims her seat, sitting down heavily. Now he is nearly forced to lean on top of the professors further toward the center of the audience, and they are adjusting themselves. One of them reaches up and begins pushing him with both hands back toward the end of the row, pushing at him with both hands as if she were clearing some room in a closet. The man in the bomber jacket is forced to retire reluctantly down the row. He tries to take up a position directly behind her, but that seat is taken as well. Then he goes to the front of the room and stands directly in front of the middle panelist.
“Excuse me! Excuse me, sir! You can’t stand there!” the panelist says.
He turns to her and says, “I have a lady in here, a Professor Min-Yin Long—”
“Get out of the way!” a man in the audience cries.
“Just a minute,” the man in the bomber jacket turns his head and says.
“Sit down!”
“This hearing is not open to the general public,” another panelist says. “Are you an economist?”
“No, ma’am,” he says, “but—”
“Then leave.”
After a few minutes, a doorman—the same one who had accosted the man in the bomber jacket outside—comes into the room and takes him by the arm. The man in the bomber jacket compresses his mouth in disappointment, but he leaves without resisting. The remaining Professor Long is unable to concentrate, being too aware that the man in the bomber jacket is somewhere outside the room, watching her. She came all this way, and to be tampered with like this, to be prevented now from being able to participate, infuriates her. She simply can’t manage to banish him from her mind, even if he has been put out of the room, and this is all the more aggravating because this panel has convened to review a number of cases that are apparently either similar to or perhaps even connected with her own, and she really should be paying close attention to know what to expect and to be prepared, but instead she reverts obsessively to a fantasy of poisoning the man in the bomber jacket, watching the expression of surprise melting already into alarm on his face, the hand flying to his throat, buckling at the knees ...
“Professor Long, Min-Yin.”
Instantly she is on her feet, making her way to the end of the row.
“Stay there, please,” one of the panelists says. “It’s easier for us if you do.”
A bit nonplussed, she resumes her seat.
“Now, in your own words—”
“And in your own time—”
“Yes, in your own time, explain the concept—”
“Basics only, please—”
“Yes, basics only, please, of the concept of animal money—”
“As you understand it—”
“Yes, as you understand it.”
She isn’t sure whether to feel more or less self-conscious sitting in the audience like this, but Professor Borores is engrossed in needlepoint directly in front of her, and the everydayness of that calms her.
“The concept is both a radical and a simple one,” she says. “Animal money is ...”
She searches the room from her seat.
“... is like ...”
She points to Professor Borores’ needlepoint.
“... and ...”
She points to that bizarre object on the wooden something dividing the little panes of glass around the door.
“Could you be more specific?”
“How?” she asks. “What could be more specific than ...?”
She points to the bizarre object again.
“Do you mean ...?”
The person sitting in the middle of the panel points up. There are a number of candidates for indication in that direction: the ceiling, the recessed light, the water sprinkler, a small black shape that could be a fly or some other insect.
“I’m not sure. If you mean that ...”
She points upwards herself.
“Which?”
“See?”
“But is it ...?”
The door opens and a man enters ringing a hand bell.
“Recess!”
Owing to a delay that is attributed entirely to her, the remaining Professor Long is now told that she must spend the night in this hotel and complete her hearing first thing in the morning. She doesn’t see the man in the bomber jacket in the corridor. Shutting herself up in her hotel room with the keep out sign on the doornknob, she wonders if she should undress? Her test book is not here—she will have to improvise a test before going to bed. Searching for stationery, she opens the nightstand drawer and finds that what she at first glance took for a Bible is a leatherbound copy of The Wealth of Nations. Was this put here for her benefit? Or is it their way of winking at her, letting her know they’ve been in her room?She tries to sleep with the light on, but in the end she puts it out.
The visitor crouches, not close, not too far. Not quite within a normal arm’s reach, not more than two steps away. Its voice mutters in the air conditioner and its face isn’t in the dark it is the dark. She is just sinking into sleep when she feels it lean one of its hands on the bed, a dip in the mattress near one corner, and she springs upright glaring into the dark, startled and angry. Did she ask it what it wants, or did she only think of asking it? The room stands there as before, having retracted its arm back behind the dark and the muffled quiet. The remaining Professor Long peers into the dark as if she were trying to intimidate it, then turns and dashes herself angrily down onto the pillow.
The next day is blindingly bright. As she walks to the campus the glare bounds from every parked car windshield and window, leaping in great arcs from the glass and crossing the air in prismatic fans. The water in the small fountain at the little intersection captures light and tosses it like a bauble in shapeless hands. The cries of the brilliantly-colored birds of all different kinds, who have gathered in the dense vine canopy that engulfs the trellises over the pathways are sharp and distinct, not blending in her ear but forming a kind of articulated orchestration using countless unique instruments. Glancing up, she notices something in the sky, or rather in the air, in the act of disappearing behind a building. She is able to prolong her view of it for a few seconds further by stepping back and observing its funhouse mirror reflection in the windows across the street. What she sees is like a coagulated mass of pale, virtually colorless balloons, resembling a somewhat less than medium sized inflatable creature from a Thanksgiving parade, its various parts bobbing like a slow-motion film of a buffalo fording a river or a huge puffy white cartoon glove practicing piano fingering. It moved laterally, without rising or descending, with a smooth momentum that seemed to belong to it, and not, for example, the wind, or someone who might have pushed it or pulled it. The reflection showed an undulating, cream-colored smear whose outlines zig-zagged as the image travelled over the glass. Hyacinth perfume. The thought and smell of it hit her at once, communicated across that distance of about a hundred feet from that balloon animal.
The remaining Professor Long takes in the modern, artistically-designed courtyard and lobby, the architecture of the front of the building, the slightly acerbic landscaping, and a sleeve of dark paranoia envelops her. The luminous day and its faces are starting to take on the aspect of gaudy ornaments on a prison cell or execution machine. She tells herself this is perhaps an intended effect of the harassment she’s been dealing with lately; maybe she’ll get too emotional and make an ass of herself when it comes time to make her presentation. Seeking a change, without any clear idea whether for the better or worse, she hurries inside and tries to distract herself with the business of the day, the assembling people waiting for a conference room to be assigned
. She uses a search for tea, then, when that fails, for hot water and tea bags, as a smokescreen.
“Tea?” the woman behind one of the conference tables asks. She gets up then, without another word, but gesturing to the remaining Professor Long to wait, and goes into one of the offices. She returns a moment later with a paper cup of tea and hands it to the remaining Professor Long.
“Thank you very much,” she says.
She drifts back to the lobby, sipping the tea, which is slightly too strong, and half attending to a conversation between a pair of economists from Burma, both wearing the same grey, standard economist uniform suits. After a quarter of an hour, she has whittled her tea down by half and decides to thin it. A dog barks at her as she fills a plastic cup with hot water from an office fountain, causing her to jerk. She splashes water on the front of her trousers and onto the floor. There’s no dog in sight. A seeing-eye dog, maybe, but they don’t bark do they? Had it been a dog’s bark? A single outcry that started like a cough and ended in a hoarse yelp. It sounded like a little dog.
The Burmese economists are talking about the Great Sejm in late eighteenth century Polish tax policy. She is watching the doors for any sign of the man in the bomber jacket and gradually becoming aware of a din of barking dogs coming from the other side of the rear wall, like there’s a kennel back there. The noise of the dogs is starting to drown out the other voices. She closes the iris of her concentration around the Great Sejm, not needing to follow but only to stay with it and not let the other world—which is not real—carry her away. For nearly twenty minutes, she clings to the edge of the precipice, and then she hastens to take sanctuary in the ladies’ room again, triumphant barking roiling at her back lightly pelting her with tingling incursions and she’s relieved to meet no one in the hall.
With terrifying speed the noise races up behind her and she dashes the last few steps into the empty ladies’ room, slamming the door behind her and drawing the heavy bolt of rough wood just in time as heavy bodies collide with the door, making it leap violently under her hands, with an insane explosion of barking and snarling, slavering madness raving and scratching at the door with the swift, light sound of dog claws, and even gnawing at the hinges so that they work up and down—the ponderous iron ring swivels in its housing slightly, so she shoves a massive wooden table in front of the door and piles chairs on top of it, weighting it further with a cauldron and some logs she drags from the cold hearth, taking care to shut the flue since she can already see the scrabbling shadows down the chimney and hear the dog claws, the snuffling breath hollow in that confined space. The claws rattle harmlessly on the metal flue as she slides the hasp, locking it in place. Not that way, not get in that way, she thinks.
Turning back to the door she sees the teeth of the dogs through the wood and working away at it. Seizing a lump of iron from the floor, she smashes the teeth with it, but as one isosceles jaw recoils in pain another clamps into its place, so she covers the vulnerable parts of the door with more chairs and with a landscape painting from the wall before flying to the toilet stalls, where sure enough a grotesque, elongated snout lined with snarling teeth is already forcing its way through the ceramic funnel, shoving the hinge of its jaw up through the hole first so it can compress and send through its head and then the rest of its body and followed by a black geyser of satiny vicious doberman pinschers. She flushes the toilet and the snout drops and jams against the bottom of the bowl, the jaw being too wide; the remaining Professor Long grabs the plumber’s helper standing nearby and pounds the snout down, flushing and flushing, then pulls out a fistfull of toilet paper and, without tearing it from the spool, chucks it in the bowl and flushes until the bowl is jammed and brimming. Repeat for the other stalls. They can’t smell her through the water. It acts as a barrier to all odors.
No more barking now, just vigilance on all sides. The ladies’ room has no window, and is only half lit. It’s a good thing she didn’t sit down on one of the toilets! She checks the sink, and sure enough, a small, trembling pink nose surrounded by long white hairs, like the snout of a Scotch terrier, probes silently at back of the center drain. She drives it down with a sudden thrust of paper towels, and there’s a hollow yelp from the pipes. Turning on all the taps may not drown them, but it should prevent the non-amphibious dogs from trying that again.
Sitting in the corridor, on a bench, she realizes, with a pang of alarm she dares not show, that the hairline crevices dividing the hall floor tiles are teeming with microscopic doberman pinschers. The tile grid pivots, rises up all around her, a jungle gym, and she watches the dobermans trail in the angles whose lines are invisible, only implicitly present in the movement of the dogs nose to tail, an unbroken chain like black sausages. Looking up, she sees Professor Budshah a few feet away from her, talking to some other attendees, and hounds are baying in the distance. The baying grows louder every second, and there’s a helicopter noise too, starting with a sub-bass rumble it’s coming right into the building. What is he doing here? The helicopter is following their car, and the dogs must be running directly beneath it, the dogs they pass in the street turn, their eyes find her immediately as she goes by, and they too begin running, after the car.
“Don’t stop for lights!” she cries.
Professor Budshah looks worried. Lights flash by overhead.
“They’ve found us!” she thinks, terrified.
The helicopter’s blades drum on the roof of the car with fists of air and the sky blackens. She’s in a room, with a bed, a dresser, a dim lamp. She lies down. There’s tea, rice, a sort of incense smell she associates with Indian homes.
Her gaze drifts over to the window and she leaps from the bed tangled in the bedclothes and spreadeagles onto the floor. With absolute assurance she knows that all the graves stand open and their inhabitants have come out to announce the end of the world.
The sky is a horrifying indigo color that deepens and deepens like water someone is steadily pouring dye into and as she watches an unbelievably vast arch of indigo flames tipped with silver all alike sweeps the sky. An incredible rumble swells beneath her—the floor, the ground, rumble with the heavy vibration of a ship’s deck as a succession of flaming arches, color-inverted so the hotter the darker, engulfs the entire earth. That rumbling is the earth roaring through space under some external guidance combined with the crack and rend of billions of graves, billions of ghosts tearing loose from belching clay. Things are sweeping the earth out of the sky, out of space. The remaining Professor Long scrambles free of the bedclothes and escapes in blind panic, now toward the window, now out in the hall, heading for the street, the basement, the roof—flashes keep interrupting her vision, not flashes of light but a sudden reset of the field of vision with a disorienting slap—street mayhem, flames, destruction, coming around the corner what is it? An alien man, made of living or mechanical cloth; his head is a glistening white smooth human dummy head with silver-blue features projected on its surface from the inside, hovering over an empty neck hole. A human head flies along the rooftops on filthy wings of long dirty white hair, palpitating entrails dangling obscenely from its throat, dripping vilely, eyes of phosphorescent pus and a gnashing, toothless mouth that puffs out and implodes.
Running in terror she collides with people. The streets are choked with debris, impassible. For hours she has been crawling beneath the furniture, through the open windows of overturned cars, slithering along the contaminated street like a snake, while heavy things whoosh by in the air only a few feet overhead and if any one of them caught her that would be it—there’s a catlike thing, a cat-man, screaming into the insane sky from the roof of the Rite-Aid and that was the sound she had been thinking was a siren, just this misbegotten screaming thing. The sky is a starless dark blue bulb but sometimes with opaque red flames that look like drawings of flames, complete with pointed ellipses separating from the peaks and fixed there next to them, and with black curving lines meant to indicate the undulating contour of the fire. Screeching. The
flames screech, and the screeches become cindery black flying creatures that rake the intervening space plunging into the ground. She keeps her eyes lowered. If she sees anything else inhuman she will die, the sight itself would kill her. Distress calls. Sobbing ghosts. Bat wings. The rumbling earth is rattling her teeth. She has to get up and tear away her chest and abdomen from rumble. Hiding, because there’s another alien man coming, with a regular human body more or less, a sweatshirt—his head is attached but his features move so fast they blur, his dark skin is already losing its color, she can see the dust of his vibrating ears as they disintegrate, and a grey sloppy film is spreading under the blurs and across the tops of the hands. The cries of people being mutilated, being raped, being tortured, are focussed in the vicinity of this man and the worst thing she knows is that nobody is being killed because death is being prevented, so there is torment with no end! An overwhelming pity for mankind paralyzes her. She bursts into tears and shoves her face into the ground as if she thinks she can melt into it. The street subsides and a subway train wallows into the upper air, rolling over like a dying whale and she can see the faces of the terrified passengers in its windows. The upturned belly of the train car begins to sputter yellow fire, smoke gushes from the cabin, a tangle of skinny legs in the air above the dying pillbug subway train. Her fear goes on and on. It mounts in outrageous leaps. She pleads incoherently with the universe. She thinks she cannot possibly feel it any more strongly, and then it intensifies again again again.
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