“The child,” the monks informed the Grand Inquisitor, “implies that the Son of God is an ape.”
What the assessors, councillors, and judges of the Inquisition reviled as a crime of lese-majeste divine, is today, except within the most reactionary enclaves of the Middle East, North Africa, and North America, common knowledge. The exemplary science of genetics has corroborated the marvel: the ape’s number -give or take a chromosome or two—is the mirror of man’s.
Once vigorous, a boy who delighted in pictures of the rope-dancing elephants of Rome and Pompeian acrobats, Gustavo was now but bone and nerve, subject to visions of subterranean demons. His ravaged face refused to mend and a mortal fever gnawed at his mind. He did not notice the crusted iron cross which hung suspended from a nail, threatening, at any instant, to shatter his skull. As a moon the ape had risen, and it orbited his thoughts. I who have shadowed gorillas with the hope that the quintessential nature of my ancestry be revealed to me, understand that infant’s idée fixe: it is my own. You see, I have inherited my purpose from a child dead over two hundred years. Some spontaneous influence, perhaps electric, has caused all the Munodis to share Gustavo’s obsession: my great-grandfather spent a lifetime investigating the footprints of the Yeti; my father’s father lived among the Macaca speciosa of Thailand; my great-aunt Dolorosa, when she was not tracking baboons, wrote an excellent book on Rosalie-Zaccharie Ferriol—the ravishing French albino (and according to a precious engraving, my doppelganger), whose celebrated eyes burned so brightly they pierced the hearts of everyone who saw her; and an essay on Moby-Dick in which she notes that unlike white apes, white whales are common (or, rather, were common; whales of any color are no longer common).
It is now time to return to Gustavo who is dying, and who dreams he is once again in the Baron’s workshops. In the light of resinous torches, apprentices run up and down the mazed avenues of the painters’ tables, seeding the puissant images with gold. The air is so charged with gold that when Gustavo opens his eyes for the last time he sees that his dream’s luminescence has flooded his cell, that he is held in the tender embrace of the beloved ape. An angel exiled from Heaven, it has fallen onto his verminous pallet of straw.
When the monks find Gustavo’s body, they burn it. It is written in their erroneous books that a toad hopped from the flames and that a viper circled the pyre. These are fables. The truth is that a morbid agitation disrupted the questionable peace of that wicked place thereafter and led to its decline.
My own researches into albinism and, inevitably, melanism, have taken me to the far reaches of this our shrinking planet and evolved into a study of the coded alphabets which are visible on the backs and faces of all the beasts of the animal kingdom. Above the fortieth north parallel I have, in months of incessant night, tracked white wolves and blue foxes. In the smoky depths of forests on fire I have seen hermaphrodite snakes of ink and milk, their eyes the color of the caviar of seal-ops and so rare they can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Recovering from malarial fever in France I have recorded the white spots on the backs of piebald crows (turdus merula), which, having beaked the tainted waters, plummet from the pollarded trees. I have spent an entire decade mapping the markings of capricorn beetles and even the ears of tigers; their seed is crippled irretrievably. Just as the whales, the apes, and Baron Munodi’s miraculous ceiling, they too shall vanish.
Recently, as I lay besides my mistress, I dreamed a disturbing dream: I had bought several pounds of fresh squid to prepare for many illustrious friends, all who had, miraculously, survived the gas chambers. The squid were slippery and wet, and like any inspired intuition, hard to hold. They were also perfectly white. I took each up one by one and with a very sharp knife slit them open, revealing a perfect little figure of a man, white as ivory and dressed like the princes of ancient Persia— studded turbans on their heads and scimitars in their belts. They wore neatly buttoned vests, and one had caviar—tiny white pearls of it—clinging to his loins and inner thighs.
With care I slipped each perfect man from his casing of flesh and severed the head. Then I cut the arms from the torso, and after that the legs. I feared they would waken and scream, but all slept and if one bled, his blood was pale, hardly blood at all: the blood of a fish. When I had finished I realized with a shudder that there had been 111 manikins, and that I had sliced each one into six.
I have described this dream to a psychoanalyst, a philosopher, and to my mistress.
The psychoanalyst insists that the squid is the symbol of the penis, the sleeping man I would kill rather than arouse. The philosopher suggests that these mermen are the metaphor for the soul’s longing for gnosis which the mind assassinates from fear —grace more terrible to the uninformed heart than eternal darkness. I believe that my mistress’s answer is by far the most satisfactory, although I know that all answers are fragments in the puzzle of the True:
“The dismembering of the body symbolizes its dissolution, the first step towards regeneration, and without which resurrection is impossible. The water that spills from the squid’s body, like the blood from the heart of the wounded ape, symbolizes the amniotic fluid, and above all the primal waters from which all things descend: green algae, blue foxes, men and women both white and black.”
The years pass too swiftly. Like a fantastic doctrine become ashes before it can be read, my lover and I will be reduced to dust. In one brief lifetime, I cannot undo the tragic loss of a child’s life, nor begin to reconstruct an alchemical lexicon; nor can I, with exactitude, chart a family tree. Even the finite combinations on the backs of common beetles elude me. Yet I am certain that should the world survive, others will be haunted in much the same way and dream similar dreams. This is my greatest hope, if Eden is to be one day reconstituted.
THE NIGHT OF THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION CURVE
Leena Krohn
Translated by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela
Leena Krohn is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, artificial intelligence, and issues of morality and conscience. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. The following story was written for this anthology and has never before been published in any language.
“Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,” Rosa said.
The wind had flung wide a half-open window, and a frigid gust had carried a dried-up maple leaf onto the kitchen table.
“Would you mind closing the window since you’re sitting right next to it? And turn off the radio,” I said in an unpleasant voice.
A sharp easterly wind had the porch roof rattling, the espresso machine spat and gurgled, and Rosa had the morning news blaring. Another coup had taken place somewhere. By-standers were screaming, and sirens were howling. A migraine was beginning to take shape, adding an abrasive edge to every sound.
“Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, pestilence-stricken multitudes. . . guess who?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Shelley,” Rosa said.
Rosa has a marvel of a memory. She knows dozens of poems by heart and has a habit of reciting them. It can be exasperating sometimes. That morning she was behaving somewhat unusually. When she finally closed the window, switched off the radio, and picked the dead leaf off the table, she froze and stared at something on the tablecloth.
I stared at her.
“What are you looking at?”
“This thing that the wind blew in through the window,” Rosa said. “It looks like a piece of string.”
Indeed, a pale and thin curl, a string or ribbon some four inches long, lay on the table.
“Or could it be some kind of worm?” Rosa said.
“I should get going, the sampling theory seminar starts at qu
arter past ten,” I said, swallowing a pain killer and washing it down with coffee. I focused my attention both on the ache and on and a feeling of disorder somewhere deeper, one that had been growing in the past years. It bothered me like a digestive problem, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe I had been infected by the restlessness that had spread everywhere in the city. Maybe it was simply my age catching up with me and couldn’t be helped. Pestilence-stricken multitudes, indeed.
Rosa picked up the piece of string and turned it back and forth on her palm. She bent it, lifted it to her nostrils and sniffed it, licked it, and finally even bit it. She offered her open palm for me to see.
“Take a look,” Rosa said.
I obligingly put on my glasses and examined the object on my wife’s soft palm, took my glasses off again, and announced, “Garbage.”
Rosa clicked her tongue and said, “Garbage! Now there’s an analysis.”
“Yes, garbage,” I said. “Of course, it’s all a matter of definition. A bit like art. When you put something on display at the museum of modern art, it becomes art, no matter what it was before. You of all people should know.”
I said that because Rosa had only recently gotten a part-time assistant’s position at the museum of modern art.
“What do you know?” she said.
“Leaves are leaves so long as they’re on the tree, but once they wind up on the kitchen table, they become garbage,” I continued unbothered. “Garbage is something that is in the wrong place and that has no use.”
“Save your lectures for your seminar,” Rosa said impolitely.
“That thing the wind blew onto the table is clearly a piece of garbage. It doesn’t belong here and we have no use for it. Throw it away,” I said.
“You didn’t look at it properly,” Rosa said. “I know how to look, my profession has taught me that. It looks like a piece of string, but it isn’t string. It’s extremely light, as if weightless, and extremely thin, but when you bend it, it springs back to its original shape. It’s something very special. I’m not going to throw it away.
“As you wish,” I said and threw on my overcoat. “I need to catch the next train. Put it into your jewelry box or take it to the museum. Maybe it’s not garbage after all. Maybe it’s art.”
In the middle of the night I woke to a vague disturbance. First I thought I’d woken from a restless dream. In the dream, I had been sick and guilty of something, but I couldn’t recall how or of what. Perhaps the dream had been a product of the migraine that the medication hadn’t fully been able to tame, as the left side of my forehead still throbbed. Or maybe it had been caused by the wind, which over the course of the evening had increased and was beating an uneven rhythm on the window with the branch of a maple tree. Or maybe it was provoked by my sampling theory seminar, where one post-graduate student had pointed out an embarrassing calculation error I’d made, loud enough for everyone to hear.
A faint gleam of light flickered in the room. I raised myself to a half-sitting position and saw a light coming from the direction of the window, but not through the window. The sky was still pitch-black and there were no streetlamps outside the bedroom window. The glimmer came from a glass ashtray, which sat on the windowsill. It was slightly odd, as the ashtray was a design piece that Rosa had brought home from our honeymoon in Murano, and I don’t think anything had ever been stubbed out in it. Neither one of us smoked, and if any of our guests practiced that vice, they were ushered onto the patio to light up. Even though there couldn’t possibly be smoldering cigarettes in the ashtray, something there was nevertheless giving off a soft glow.
The room was cold and drafty and I didn’t want to get out of the bed warmed by our dreaming. I lay down again next to Rosa, who was lying almost without a sound with her hand under her cheek, exuding nocturnal peace far away from me and from other distractions. Closing my eyes was of no help; the light flickered through my eyelids and sleep eluded me. The disturbances continued both inside and outside of me. Before long I was fully awake. I pushed the blanket aside and got up to investigate the strange light.
The ashtray held the string-like object that the wind had cast onto the breakfast table along with the leaves. Rosa hadn’t taken it to the museum. It was still as thin and the same size and shape as it had been in the morning, yet it looked different. Now it stood upright and flickered blue-tinted light, a bit like a firefly or a glow worm. It throbbed and moved about, twisting into the shape of a bell as symmetrical as an omega. It wasn’t just any old thing, and it especially wasn’t garbage. It looked like something living. Maybe in the morning it had only been dazed by the cold wind.
I put out my hand with the intention of picking it up. I didn’t need to. The creature climbed onto my hand by itself. It moved the way an inchworm does, with its hind end—if it can be called that, as both of its ends were identical—moving right up to its front end, so that for a moment it resembled a loop. Then its front end would stretch forward—always the same distance—over and over again. In this steady, almost mechanical manner, it climbed up my left pajama sleeve until it reached the crook of my elbow. There it stopped.
I now looked at it up close. My head no longer hurt and my vision was keen and clear, like it often is after a migraine. I was amazed, and that amazement had led me to a state of alertness and joy the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I didn’t have my glasses, and obviously the creature didn’t have eyes, yet I still felt that it, too, was observing me. Besides, the shape of its curve, very distinct and simple, began to remind me of something. Of course! To me, an assistant professor of statistics, it was as familiar as could be.
“How did I not realize it right away? A normal distribution curve, that’s what it is!” I said out loud, overcome by joy. “The Gaussian function! The bell curve! The law of error! Alive, in my own home, in my own hand!”
Rosa awoke and asked, “What are you on about? It’s the middle of the night!”
“Come see,” I said. “Come look at the thing that the storm blew onto the kitchen table this morning. Or maybe it wasn’t the storm that blew it in, maybe it flew in by itself.”
I lit the lamp on the night stand. Rosa got up and came to look. The creature was now motionless. It stood on my pajama sleeve in an upright position and glowed to itself.
“It’s not garbage,” I said. “You were right.”
“What do you think it is then?” Rosa asked.
“It’s an admirable universal truth,” I said. “It’s simultaneously a mystery, an abstract idea, and the most normal of normal, the most natural of natural realities. It has taken this physical form and revealed itself to us. Of all the people in the world, I don’t know why it chose us. What an honor!
“Are you out of your mind?” Rosa said. “Is this because of the migraine or are you just trying to annoy me? Is that even the same thing as the one in the morning? That looks to me like some sort of insect, a type of glow worm.”
“Don’t you remember what you said about it yourself this morning? That it’s something extraordinary? And it truly is! It isn’t just any biological entity. Neither is it an artifact. No human made it, no human could have made it. Do you know what Sir Francis Galton wrote about it?”
“How on earth could I know? How could he have written anything about it?” Rosa suspected.
“Perfectly well. I’ll show you!” I said.
I don’t have a photographic memory, and I couldn’t recite Galton as fluently as Rosa did Shelley. I had to search the bookshelf for the right book.
“Here it is.”
I held the book carefully and flipped the pages with my left arm held stiff, to keep my new friend from falling.
“Listen to this! Sir Francis Galton wrote, ‘I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the “Law of Frequency of Error.” The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in
complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion.’”
“Oh boy! I should have thrown it in the garbage after all,” Rosa said.
“Don’t you understand, Rosa? This is something indestructible. It’s part of the foundation of the universe, of the unchanging order of eternity. It describes something essential about everything, absolutely everything: astronomical units of measure, heredity, physics, intelligence, health, stock prices, populations . . . It bears witness to the connections between and oneness of everything in the world. It proves how wondrously normal the universe is, how stable and durable despite all the horror and chaos that surrounds us.”
“Come back to bed,” my wife said, already tucked back in.
But I wasn’t sleepy. As I watched that natural and mathematical creature, a living curve, I recalled once more why I had started to study mathematics and statistics. I remembered how in my early youth, in the darkness of the night, I had contemplated infinity, the laws of nature, the fractal nature of snowflakes, Fibonacci numbers, the world of Ideas and Plato. How I had imagined that one day I would be able to solve Hilbert’s sixteenth problem.
I said to the creature, “So what if storms toss you and the rest of us about? What does it matter if chaos and disorder seem to spread? It’s nothing but a surface delusion. You know, and I know, that even disorder has its order and errors their own law.”
I had hardly said that when I felt a painful pinch and instinctively shook my arm. The curve fell silently from my sleeve onto the floor and dashed out of the lamp’s sphere of light. I tried to search for it, and searched for a long time. But its glow had faded, and I could no longer distinguish it from the pattern of the rug and the shadows of the room.
UNMAKING
Amanda le Bas de Plumetôt
Amanda le Bas de Plumetôt is a Melbourne-based fiction writer and poet whose work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, among others. “Unmaking” is previously unpublished.
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