by Curtis White
“Nope. I don’t remember anyone of that description. N-nice little name, though, I like it, especially for something n-not-quite-human. Percy, percept, persiflage, percid…”
“What is percid?”
“Oh, the f-family of sp-spiny freshwater fish in which one finds the p-perch.”
Frown.
“No? Not heard of them?”
“Please. Also, he might have had a plastic sword.”
Laughs. “Must be a cute little guy.”
“So you never received him?”
“No, not that I recall.” He was gaining confidence, and some of the nauseating twitches on his face and the stuttering were starting to calm and smooth out.
“Well, don’t you keep a record of visitors?”
“Madame Queen of Spells, as you can see, my estate has fallen on h-hard times. Now, you might look around town and say, ‘It’s a prosperous little d-district, he should be doing okay with the tithes, et cetera,’ but we had a little setback last year with a grand-stepdaughter, the blackened thing, and I am forced to pay down a painful second mortgage. Until I can do that, well, it’s complicated. In any event, I have only one aide, Rory, and he is unhelpful. He can make a computer hum, but in all other ways he is, frankly, pretty stupid. Most Americans are like that now, although that’s no excuse for Rory. But I might as well ask that stool to keep records.”
This was all disappointing to the Queen, but she persevered.
“One other thing: he should have been traveling with a large number of little men with little horses. They were keeping his spirits up. Perhaps you saw them.”
Of course, the Marquis remembered quite clearly his happy evening of indiscriminate slaughter. Frankly, he was sorry there weren’t more such little men and many more such evenings. He knew too well that when Rory and the others had turned the masked man out, there was not a horsebacked companion left.
He blushed, grew rigid, started to sweat. He looked down, illogically fearing that the little bodies might be piled at his feet like wounded birds. Pulling himself together, he offered this: “N-now that you mention these little men, I do recall R-rory saying something about a strange man who knocked at the door one night. As I recall, the man said that he had committed an atrocity. Perhaps the atrocity he referred to had s-something to do with the little men.”
“Your man R-rory says this?”
“No, R-rory.”
“R-rory.”
“Never m-mind.”
Well, that was all she was going to listen to. The Marquis was a self-serving liar. For God’s sake, she knew her own creature and he was no ruffian, and he certainly wouldn’t slaughter the Queen’s cheerful leprechauns (for that’s what they were for all intents and purposes). Percy knew better than that. It was the Marquis himself who seemed uncomfortable, guilty-like, about her little men. She was getting a clearer idea of what had happened.
As she walked out onto the Marquis’s driveway, she saw something glinting under a shrub. It was one of the little plastic swords. She picked it up and held it up for the Marquis to look at. He chuckled and put his hand to his mouth as if to say “whoops.” She understood now that she would have to find Percy on her own, without the help of the Marquis. But she made a note: when she did find him, she would return to the Marquis, and then he would learn what her great powers were all about. She looked forward to it.
She knew something now, or thought she did, about the fate of her little men on horseback. Her brow came fiercely together between her eyes, as if it were a spearhead. It wasn’t enough evidence to hang him on just yet, but as a token of the vengeance she would one day take, she conjured a deluge of black slugs and other slimy critters, including newts and the small aquatic or semiaquatic urodele amphibians of the family Salamandridae, ankle deep in the Marquis’s chamber.
She stood in his circular drive (with its pompous aqueous-green glazed tiles imported from Dresden, and the equally flamboyant weeds that swaggered in the cracks), and listened for his scream. She smiled when it came, because it was even more miserable than she’d hoped for.
13.
“We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality.”
—MARCUSE
—after Jonathan Swift
When the Queen of Spells left the Marquis, it was clear to her that she would not get any help from him or anyone else in this strange place. She was on her own. She would have to provide her own resources, and fortunately, as we have seen, she was not lacking in them. The first thing she did, in order to make her task manageable, was to reduce the town to the size of a shoebox. In this fashion she was able to lift it, turn it this way and that, get the lay of the land, so to speak, peek in a few windows, and generally satisfy herself that she knew the place.
It should not surprise you to learn, knowing what you already know of this odd middle-western town, N—, that most of the townsfolk found their new tiny reality excessively “liberal.” Organizations were formed, protests planned, and the “Bigger Party” was formed, offering a list of candidates for city council and mayor. But many business and civic leaders found the new tiny reality interesting, as they themselves expressed it. A banner was strung across Main Street encouraging people to “Celebrate the New Interesting.” Inevitably, the local college students seized on this as an encouragement to party, and in short order the celebration became one of their infamous beer riots.
It could have been a lot worse. The students generated leaders (as a swamp will spawn frogs) and a Facebook page for the party was created. Students from all over the state were invited for the “biggest, baddest” keg-fest ever. One can only imagine the disappointment when the out-of-town revelers, having driven all the way from Carbondale and Charleston and Macomb, discovered that N— was only a lively shoebox. After some consideration, the out-of-town revelers concluded, “Whatever, man!” and drank their beer by the side of the road, amusing themselves—and it was funny!—by flattening the little town and using it as a Frisbee.
Fortunately, by the second day the students had emptied all the kegs, returned home, and collapsed back into their sodden apartments after which the more balanced opinion of the adults came to the fore. At a memorable meeting of the town council, residents complained that the new town felt “cramped.” The mayor said that he understood their complaint, but they should acknowledge that there were very positive payoffs for the new downsized municipality, and folks needed to take them into consideration. For example, he offered, property taxes would essentially disappear since the largest estate in town now could be covered by a postage stamp. And most city services could be eliminated since they could now cut the grass at the park with Granny Osage’s pinking shears, and the thimbleful of garbage they’d generate each week could simply be dumped outside of their town-box, into the old big world, where it would be no larger than an average sparrow poop. I don’t need to tell you how persuasive these ideas were for these simple people. They were all for it.
Sadly, all of these arguments became moot when the city’s liability lawyer observed that many people had been taken to the emergency ward at local hospitals because of various bumps and bruises suffered as the Queen turned her toy town this way and that (not to mention the calamities they all suffered while being thrown around like a Frisbee). He said that if the town in any way recognized the New Interesting as settled law, the town would face multiple liability suits for damages to person and property that would drive it into bankruptcy.
A disappointed “Oh!” filled the room, and one thin gray-beard angrily complained that, “Federal regulators should keep their hands off our freedom to be as tiny as we want!”
This mooting was made even mootier because the Queen of Spells decided that she’d learned what she needed to know about the place, and, having no intention of shrinking herself, she returned N— to its accustomed scale, and to its time-honored grievances with reality.
1
4.
“[To read a bad novel] is to yield your imagination for hours to people with whom, face to face, you would be ashamed to exchange even a few words.”
—SCHLEGEL
Once N— had been returned to its just proportions, our Queen of Spells set one foot before the other and began her quest. And to every person she met she asked the same strangled question, “Have you seen a young masked man yclept ‘Percy’?”
Sadly, each of her interrogators had the same reply: “What’s ‘yclept’?”
After a few days of fruitless searching, she found herself walking through a campus of WPA-style brick buildings. Seeing more raccoons than people, she concluded that this place was abandoned, and began to walk toward the next neighborhood over. But then she saw a man sitting on a long, covered porch painting a portrait of a young woman. He was dressed all in worn white linen, and he wore a blond hat woven from fine fibers. She went to him, dogged in her purpose.
I won’t say he was happy to be disturbed, but he was cordial about it, and asked if she would like to sit with him in the shade of the porch. She happily accepted his offer. After all, walking in a built-to-scale N— was tiring. It was clear to our always pellucid Queen that this was a charming man, very Old World in an iconoclastic way.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“I would be so grateful if you could.”
When he entered his studio, she had time to look at the painting he was working on. It was of a beautiful young woman in a loose, airy blouse. He had a small photograph of her clipped to the easel. Her hair was cut very short, and she affected a certain haughty harshness: a tiny silver dagger pierced the upper part of her ear. The Queen noticed that the figure was seen through a sepia wash that suggested certain familiar, if unnamed, earthy difficulties. The painting itself seemed to be as much about this tension—a lovely harshness—as it was about the figure as such. All of this the artist captured intuitively, dreamily, yet articulately, in the painting.
He returned with the coffee and asked her Spellness who she was and why she was here. When she told him that she was a fairy Queen from the Isle of Islay, he said, “No lie?”
She told him that she was on a search, and then she asked her forlorn question.
He responded, “What’s ‘yclept’?”
She sighed. Damn it, she was a fairy queen after all! How else was she to put it! She was loath to dumb down her diction, which was, she well knew, nothing less than proper, appropriate, and in every way correct. Americans!
“Listen, a little piece of advice,” the artist said, “don’t say ‘yclept’ anymore. People around here won’t like it. I’m sorry if that disappoints you. Just say that you’re looking for Percy. You’ll get better results.”
She stared at him. She was wondering if this conversation and everything she had experienced in this strange place, this N—, weren’t also something shrouded in a sepia wash, just like his painting.
“Well, however you want to put it, your Percy shouldn’t be too hard to find. Everyone knows him or knows of him, although it’s not surprising that our townsfolk aren’t eager to admit it. But let me be sure: it’s the Zorro-lookin’ guy that you’re searching for, right?”
She nearly jumped from her chair. At last! “Yes, yes he is! He wears a little mask.”
“That’s him, although he lost the mask some time back.”
“Please tell me more!”
He frowned. “I’m not sure you’re going to like this story, given what I know about it. But I’m not the one to tell it. It’s not my place and not my business. Keep asking around, just as you’re doing now. You’ll find him. He sure isn’t trying not to be found.” Laughter. “Why, almost everyone in town has found him at one time or another.”
15.
Fellini: My work can’t be anything other than a testimony of what I am looking for in life. It is a mirror of my searching.
Playboy: Searching for what?
Fellini: For myself freed.
THE BORSALINO: A ROMANCE
After Felicité had ended her conversation with the artist and gone on her troubled way, I walked over from my catbird seat behind a garden wall and asked him a few questions, just for background.
“Background? What kind of background?” he asked. He seemed just a little annoyed at all the interruptions that morning.
“In my experience, it always helps to be able to provide convincing detail. This painting you’re working on, for example, and the photograph of this vivid woman that is clipped to it. That sort of thing can make all the difference in delivering a scene. For instance, one thing that I’m thinking now, looking forward in my narrative, is that the hat you are wearing might make a compelling detail.”
“My hat?”
“I’m sure you understand this. Say you’re painting this woman and you decide to put a vase of flowers near her.”
“I don’t paint flowers.”
“That’s not the point.”
It occurred to me just then that he had not offered me coffee.
“Look. I’d just like to know what you call that hat. Does it have a name? Could you perhaps call it a boater? It would be thrilling to me if I could call it a boater.”
“It’s a Borsalino.”
“A Borsalino. Not bad. I can use that.”
“Look here,” he said, “do you see this tag? It says ‘11.’ That means grade 11 in their line of hats. A grade-11 Borsalino retails for six hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Do tell.”
“Would you like to know how much I paid for it? One twenty-five.”
“Hell of a deal.”
“The grades go up into the forties. Do you know how much a Borsalino in the forties costs? As much as six thousand dollars.”
“Wow.”
“I have always wondered what kind of person would pay that much for a hat.”
“Frankly, I don’t know anyone who would pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars for a hat. Or twenty-five. But I run with a cheap crowd.”
He looked dumbfounded, if you like that sort of Germanized word mongrel. He eyed me skeptically, wondering if I was “putting him on,” as people once said.
He continued. “You might also like to know that this particular Borsalino has a name.”
“Nice. The name has a name. This is getting better.”
“It is a Monte Cristo.”
He gave the name an Italian lilt of the kind you might imagine coming from someone who was born just up the interstate in Kankakee: MON-te CREE-sto. Frankly, he sounded more like Bela Lugosi than any Italian I’d ever meet.
“You can tell it’s a Monte Cristo by the fold in the top of the hat.”
“That’s more than I need to know. This is not a novel about a hat.”
“Look, if you’re going to include a hat in your story, especially my hat, you should know what you’re talking about. This is a Borsalino. A Monte Cristo Borsalino. Now, as you can see from the fine, soft weave of the material, if you wanted you could fold it, and, in fact, Europeans do fold it.”
He said “Europeans” as if they were a very special species of human.
“They fold it and put it in this little bag”—he took a velvety cloth bag from his pocket—“so that it can be carried just as you would carry an umbrella. The little cloth bag with the cotton drawstring is so precious in itself that…I mean, it’s beautiful.”
“I understand.”
“Isn’t it cool?”
“Very cool.”
16.
“We have built a world of outside objects that doesn’t exist for animals.”
—JACOB BRONOWSKI
THE BORSALINO: A ROMANCE, PARTE DUE
Then he turned his back to me. He reached up, slowly, as if he reached for a small child who had been riding on his shoulders, and he took the Borsalino in his hands, carefully holding it by the brim. Then he placed it before us in the middle of the table, as if it were a vase containing a bouquet of bright fal
l marigolds.
Looking at it, perfect, with no responsibility other than being the hat that it was, tears came to my eyes, speculative tears. It seemed as though I’d known this man, and his hat, since the beginning of time.
“This hat of yours,” I said, “I think it is an invitation to secret knowledge. It sits there like a portal to universal harmony.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “even though you understand, you are not quite right. The beauty of the hat is in its imbalance.”
I looked back at him in surprise and perfect sincerity. “Please, what is your understanding of the happiness of the hat?”
He sat then, as if descending into a poignant daydream, and passed me a delicate china coffee cup. It was bone white, with raised flowers of purplish blue. (English, not Wedgwood but Adderley.) The blue seeped just beyond the flower as if it were a watercolor on paper. Holding it, I found that the cup was as fragile as the skull of some infant saint. The hat was sacred, but the cups, too, were now sacred. Everything had the bluish-green glow of the Other Side. I thought with wonder, “Is everything he touches sacred?”
He smiled with understanding at the sincerity of my thought and said, “That’s enough discussion. Let’s have some coffee.”
Finally!
17.
“Do all humans have to be human beings?”
—NOVALIS
But Percy, dear Percy.
You know, he was not really as you think of him now, a mere grotesque that has stumbled out of the night and into our lives. He was more than a perverse mannequin with a crotch like smooth plaster. He had his own subjectivity, his own inmost reality, and it is high time that we begin to discover it.
Putting aside for the moment our uncertainty about what exactly Percy is—a machine like Hoffmann’s Coppelia? A stone ignited into obtuse life like Pygmalion? A pure conjuration like something Manfred could summon? Or, applying Occam’s razor, just another suffering human like you?—all that aside, when he was shown the door by Rory and his pals, and he stood before the empty cobblestones in the Marquis’s courtyard, and he heard the clattering echoes of things past racketing like falling rocks, meaninglessly, and he lifted his head up toward the vacuum of space, he was actually a very simple thing: he was lonely.