“Why, are you angry at each other?”
“No, but now he is very busy with his studies. He is taking moon lessons. He wants to float in the sky, he wants to be an ivory color, he wants to train himself to glow quietly in the dark of the night. He dreams about replacing the moon.”
“And?…Has he gotten there?”
“Not really,” I said. “He succeeds in floating, sometimes, but he doesn’t shine well. He’s not the right color.”
“The moon’s difficult,” said Lili.
We didn’t really know how to get the investigation going, and since not a single fish was pointing its snout through the walls, we had no suspects to question. We looked out the window. After the rain of stars, it had snowed a little. In the distance, the parking lot of the minimart was all white. There was no one in the streets. Farther still, on the banks of the estuary, the ruins of the commissary were emitting a black smoke. The meteorite that had crashed there had not yet cooled, and the last police bits were still in the process of caramelizing.
“I’ll phone him all the same,” I said. “It’s early. At this hour, there is a chance that Big Katz might not yet be entirely focused on his moon exercises.”
I dialed the number of my friend the wooly crab. Since having begun taking moon lessons from Alfons Tchop, Big Katz had moved. He now lived with his teacher, in the factory that used to fabricate anthills with human faces, at a time when anthills with human faces didn’t yet know how to fabricate themselves without outside assistance. A few months ago, when you called this number, it was Mimi Yourakane who answered, an old lady who stayed in the abandoned factory. But Mimi Yourakane had disappeared, and Big Katz took advantage of this to take her place, near the door, in the breeze. When he stands before the entry, he sees the gray waters of the estuary. Every morning, after sweeping the earth and pulling up the mushrooms that have grown during the night, he checks that deep within the workshop Alfons Tchop, his moon teacher, doesn’t need anything, and, once his broom is put away, goes to do his first exercises of the day. For those who have forgotten, or those who are picking up the story partway through, I remind you: Alfons Tchop is a very good moon teacher, but, for the moment, he is only an egg. A kwak egg, laid by a kwak during the last kwak race. And if Big Katz’s progress is slow, it is in large part because his teacher has not yet hatched. The dialogue between them lacks pep, and, when Big Katz makes mistakes, Alfons Tchop is too enclosed in his shell to correct them.
“Is that you, Bobby?” I heard on the end of the line. “It’s a pleasure to hear your voice. Sometimes it’s a little too quiet here. Nobody speaks.”
“Alfons Tchop still hasn’t hatched?”
“No,” lamented my friend the wooly crab. “He stays tight-lipped and immobile twenty-four hours a day.”
“That often happens, with eggs,” I philosophized.
We discussed the good old days, Big Katz and I. Then I told him the story of the fish, the bubbles, the heads, the mystery of the construction of the Great Mimille.
“The other day,” said Big Katz, “I was in the middle of nibbling some algae on the wharf, when I happened upon a conversation between two trout. They were saying that the wall fish had a problem. They never know inside which wall they are swimming. They pass from one house to another without realizing it. They permanently have the impression of being lost in a shadowy labyrinth and, when they poke their heads out, the least light dazzles them and they see nothing. This distresses them and puts them in a bad mood. They would like the world to be different, for someone to act as the police, bring order to their labyrinths, and extinguish all the exterior lights. And so that’s why they’re trying to fabricate a sheriff.”
“At my house, in any case, they don’t seem to be succeeding in their fabrication,” I said. “Cubes accumulate on the ceiling, but it doesn’t resemble a sheriff.”
“They are constructing him elsewhere,” concluded Big Katz.
We reflected for a minute, both of us, each one musing at his end of the line. I imagined my friend the wooly crab holding the telephone in one of his pincers. I do not know if you have ever seen a wooly crab making a phone call, but you have to remember that a pincer is extremely practical for holding a telephone.
“And at your place, do you have any fish heads?” I asked.
“Excuse me,” said Big Katz. “I have to end the call. My moon lesson is going to start.”
* * *
—
We went down into the street, Lili and I. There was almost no one on the sidewalks. The wind no longer blew like it had during the night, but it continued to circulate the cold, the smell of snow and smoke. On the ground, the debris of the stars had formed a sort of crunchy layer, a bit dirty.
“That needs to be swept up,” said Lili.
We went to get a shovel and brooms from the entryway of the building and we began to shovel and sweep the remains of the stars. We were not the only ones cleaning the street: we saw also Mimi Okanagane who was busying herself with a rake. Mimi Okanagane had been, at one time, a sleeping rag-picker. All the sleeping rag-pickers of the town had left, in general with the hope of finding someone who would help them travel to the moon. We didn’t know what had become of them, these rag-pickers. In any case, she, Mimi Okanagane, had stayed. She kept a shop of rags, mops and red flags, and she said that she didn’t have the heart to abandon her customers. But her customers, too, had disappeared, and, anyhow, Mimi Okanagane didn’t have much to sell, only five mops and three flags that hadn’t found a buyer. Before closing her business, Mimi Okanagane offered me one of them, of the flags. She’s nice. She lives at present in her former shop, among the unsold tatters and swaying fabric. She often has bits of fabric in her hair, on her shoulders, ribbons. I think that it looks good on her.
There is something else you need to know about Mimi Okanagane: she comes from a clan that knows wild plants. Not so long ago, when the moon hadn’t broken its habits and regularly shone in the sky and brightened the countryside, Mimi Okanagane went walking on the banks of the estuary, at night, in places that resembled fragments of the end of the world; for example, old snow-covered construction sites, abandoned hydroplane stations. And there, under that silvery light, she harvested the bitter red currants that help with dreaming, and she stocked up on herbs that help you remember your dreams or walk inside your dreams as if in broad daylight. You dry them, these red currants and these herbs, and, when you have a bit of boiling water at your disposal, you use them to prepare nocturnal soups or herbal teas. I say a bit of boiling water, but melted snow does the trick just as well. Mimi Okanagane drinks them in great quantities, these brews. She offers them willingly to her visitors, but, lately, since the inhabitants of the town have nearly all disappeared, her visitors are rare, and she must drink them all herself. This makes her sleep even more.
Shoveling and sweeping, we approached Mimi Okanagane. She kissed us, Lili Nebraska and me. There was the taste of herbal tea on her lips. She kept her eyes closed, and she had the voice and mannerisms of someone who is experiencing a dream. We did not speak very loudly, Lili Nebraska and I, so as not to disturb her sleeping rag-picker’s drowsiness. The three of us continued to scrub the dirty crust of stars and put into heaps the needles and the small, still-smoking embers, the bits of grit, the hissing coals, the crackling coals, the dust. Together, we gathered several cones of debris. They still gave off heat, and, every so often, we bent down to rub our hands together over them.
During one of these breaks, we chatted. Mimi Okanagane whispered, so as not to wake herself completely, and as for us, Lili Nebraska and I, we arranged to speak without sound, as if through a felt baffle.
“And fish heads, do you have any at your house?” asked Lili Nebraska.
“I don’t eat those,” said Mimi Okanagane.
“I meant to say, fish heads that come out of the walls,” Lili Nebraska clarified.
“Yes, I happen to have had some,” murmured Mimi Okanagane. “They smell the smells of the shop and they recount their dreams.”
Mimi Okanagane repeated a few of the fish dreams to us. When you are not used to fleeing or digging through the mud, you don’t truly understand what happens in this sort of adventure. Mimi Okanagane described for us a few scenes of swimming in troubled waters, under a crepuscular light, of pursuit, of naps near the sewer drains for the estuary, then she fell silent. I think you would have been like us, like Lili Nebraska and me: you would not have really enjoyed hearing these excerpts from nightmares.
“And on the subject of sheriffs, what are they saying?” asked Lili.
“They dream of making one, a sheriff,” said Mimi Okanagane. “They have given him a name, which I no longer remember, and a nickname—the Great Mimille. They want the Great Mimille to reestablish order in the town and lay sheriff eggs in every corner.”
“And at your house too, they are trying to construct him with bubbles, this Great Mimille?” I said.
“What bubbles?” asked Mimi Okanagane.
“Blue bubbles,” I said, “The heads spit out blue bubbles. Of a very intense blue, a uniform color, that shines in the dark.”
Mimi Okanagane breathed heavily. She snored a little. She was having trouble keeping up with the conversation.
“Never seen these bubbles,” she said, finally.
“Cubic bubbles,” intervened Lili Nebraska.
Mimi Okanagane mumbled something. She lay down on the sidewalk to take advantage of the warmth of the bits of stars. Sleep was overwhelming her. We leaned down to grasp her arms and we supported her until we reached the interior of the shop. There was a large bowl of herbal tea infusing near the door. Mimi Okanagane came slightly back to life, she went to fill up two cups for us, then she rolled herself into a ball in the middle of the red flags, the mop rags, the boxes filled with herbs, and the dried red currants. You couldn’t even see her eyes, they were closed so tightly.
The shop was a little gloomy. It smelled like cloth and the plants that helped with the remembering of dreams: byeberry, sweet gale, Algonquin myrica, bog myrtle, and red currant. We looked at the ceiling while drinking Mimi Okanagane’s herbal tea. There was a red banner hanging, all torn up, and a few stalactites of ice, but not a single blue bubble.
“Never seen,” murmured Mimi Okanagane. “Here the heads don’t do that. They speak, but they don’t spit.”
* * *
—
We had some more tea, washed the cups, then we went out again to finish clearing the road. Once the work was finished, we looked at each other, Lili Nebraska and I. We were tired and we had stardust all over the place on our bodies. Lili was even more beautiful than usual, with these glitterings and these silver sparkles that highlighted the black designs drawn on her skin, her stomach, and her face. On her left wrist, her bracelet had the oily shade of anthracite.
The street was deserted, a white light reflected off the windows, on the panes that were not broken. The star debris glowed and smoked next to us, giving off a gentle heat. We felt good, despite a few sharp gusts of wind that rushed, howling, between the buildings, then fell silent.
I wanted to kiss Lili on her designs.
At that moment, the gusts of wind carried some music, in addition to their sharpness. You heard the reverberations of a small orchestra, trumpet harmonies and cadences. You had the impression, suddenly, of having entered a film and having become characters. The cinema had not yet been invented, we are still waiting for someone to create film and a projector to project images onto a wall or onto a sheet, but many people have spoken at length about it, about the cinema, and everyone knows, without having seen them in darkened theaters, what love scenes are like; there is always music in the background, to move you and make you want to kiss the principal actress. I came close to Lili and I held her against me. She did not resemble a cinema actress, but she was irresistible. Shreds of red fabric clung to her hair, which must have happened when we found ourselves in Mimi Okanagane’s shop. Ribbons were strewn at random through her curls, and the aroma of the herbs from the shop had stuck to her skin. All this made her even more irresistible than usual.
I do not know if it was due to the herbal tea drunk at Mimi Okanagane’s, but we both wanted to shelter ourselves from the wind, to hold ourselves very tightly against one other and sleep. Like two sleepwalkers, we entered Mimi Okanagane’s shop again. Without emerging from her sleep, Mimi made room for us next to her. Like her, we stretched out on the ground and were enveloped in red flags and rags.
The investigation of the Great Mimille did not make much progress that day. We were lying down, daydreaming or inventing stories that we related in hushed tones, so as not to wake anyone. Then the night came, and in the darkness of the shop, I saw several fish heads come out of the wall.
“What are you dreaming about?” asked an icefield moray.
It had around its gills a sort of completely frosted-over scarf.
“Bah,” I said. “I was dreaming that I was getting nowhere with the case of the Great Mimille.”
“I wasn’t addressing you,” protested the moray in an ungracious tone. “I was talking to someone else.”
“Who are you chatting with?” asked a tuna’s head.
“With you, not with him,” said the moray. “I was asking you what you saw while dreaming your last dream.”
“What dream?” asked the tuna.
“The one right now,” said the moray.
The tuna’s head and the moray began to swap their nightmares. Other heads joined in, heads of barracudas, of hammerhead sharks, of cod. The heads sniffed, they looked at Mimi Okanagane’s shop with empty eyes that saw nothing, and they spoke loudly. Between two descriptions of mudflats, they came back to the story of the Great Mimille. They wanted the world, outside of the walls, to obey the rules that applied mainly to aquariums. And they wanted their much-vaunted Emilio Popielko, once he was created, to apply himself to laying the eggs of thousands of sheriffs to make everyone respect these rules.
“We don’t want them here, your police,” I intervened. “They were done away with once and for all, and nobody complained.”
“Who’s this troublemaker grouching in the darkness?” asked the cod.
“I’m not grouching,” I remarked.
“Whether you’re grouching or not, we don’t care,” sniffed the hammerhead shark. “We need a Great Mimille to bring all this mess to an end.”
“What mess?” I protested.
“Your opinion doesn’t interest us,” said the icefield moray.
The heads continued to sniff and to say horrible and troubling things. Their flabby mouths twisted wickedly, but, contrary to what they did at my house or Lili’s, they didn’t release a single bubble.
Little by little, night fell.
The heads continued their unpleasant conversation.
Mimi Okanagane and Lili Nebraska had their eyes closed and weren’t saying anything.
At the end of an hour of darkness, I thought that the case of the Great Mimille was advancing less and less, and that we had to act. I came close to Lili Nebraska and shook her shoulder. She almost didn’t wake up. She had absorbed too much of the infusion of Algonquin myrica.
“Let me sleep, Bobby,” she said in a dull voice. “Continue to lead the investigation on your end. I prefer to stay here, at Mimi’s, and think.”
I swallowed a new cup of herbal tea and I left the shop. Behind me, Lili Nebraska and Mimi Okanagane slept like babies, in the midst of red flags, rags, and the smells of herbal teas. I no longer heard the chattering of fish heads, and besides I believe that they too had nodded off from the exertion of recounting their dreams.
The night was dark and very cold.
I told myself that I had a choice: either go back to the seventh floor, settl
e down with a book under the light of the bluish ceiling cubes and wait for dawn, or go nose around the town to tackle head-on the mystery of the Great Mimille.
I hesitated a little, and then I made the decision to go to the factory that used to make anthills with human faces, and where today one of my friends, a wooly crab, was training himself to float above things to replace the moon. Between two exercises, I would manage to talk about it with him, with Big Katz. He seemed to know more than me about the subject of sheriffs.
Two or three intersections away, you heard the echoes of a street orchestra again, like earlier, when I had believed myself to be in a love scene, in a film. I began to walk toward the spot where the music originated from. You truly could see nothing, I had to hold my arms out in front of me to not collide with an obstacle. I don’t exactly know what my route was. I heard the music, and, further off, the sound of the waves stirring pieces of ice along the riverbanks. I must have been approaching the estuary.
There was no one outside.
The wind blew.
* * *
—
At the intersection of the old port, and when all is said and done not very far from Mimi Okanagane’s shop, there were several trumpeters on the sidewalk. They were gathered around a platigromphe, but the performer who was supposed to bring the instrument to life wasn’t doing much, at the moment. He preferred to hammer out a chord on the keyboard every once in a while and horse around with the audience: a few mini-bellules who were grouped behind him and constantly tousled his hair. This platigromphist looked a little like my dog Djinn, but he was not a dog, or in any case he was not my dog Djinn. He had a light brown nose and the eyes of a prankster. When he turned again to horse around with the mini-bellules, he opened his mouth very wide while barking, as if he wanted to eat them.
I immediately recalled an unfortunate episode in the history of music. You, also, have it in mind perhaps, this episode. One day, my dog Djinn, who played the nanoctiluphe in a fly orchestra, swallowed one, a fly, in the excitement of a game. By accident, of course. A fly named Lili Gesualdo. Let’s hope that this accident doesn’t happen again! I thought. They were pretty, these mini-bellules, with very black eyes and with rings in their ears as their only clothing. There were five of them, all alike. Although part of the audience, they had brought their instruments, piccolos and flageolets, but they used them mostly to tease the platigromphist.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 156