by Jeffrey Ford
All the time I was strutting and posing, Arla had continued putting away the chrome tools. I wanted to wait until she was finished and had left the “stage” so that all attention could be focused on the revelation I was about to proclaim. She was almost done but for the calipers. When she went to lift them, they slipped out of her grasp and hit the floor with a sound that ricocheted off the cavernlike walls of the chamber. As she bent over to pick them up, her gray work dress hiked up an inch or two, and my eyes automatically traced the shapely lines of her legs from ankle to thigh. That is when I saw it.
There, on her left leg on the back of her thigh was a prominent mole with what appeared to be an inordinately long black hair growing from it. I blinked my eyes and took a step closer, forgetting that there was a crowd of people awaiting my determination. She must have heard me move, or perhaps she felt my eyes upon her—I was staring so intently—for she turned before straightening and looked up at me. In that very instant, with an audible popping sound in my mind like a cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne, the knowledge of the Physiognomy returned to me completely. My eyes again teeming with their old intelligence, I saw immediately that she was no Star Five, as I had been somehow duped into believing by her youthful, feminine beauty, but that those features seen anew brought back Professor Flock’s original profile of the criminal: a tendency toward larceny and a religiopsychotic reliance on the miraculous. I remembered why the child the woman had begged me to read in the street that day had later on seemed so familiar. He had many of the same facial features as I now perceived Arla to have. The woman had, in fact, been her.
I turned to the crowd and said, “Ladies and gentlemen of Anamasobia. We have in our midst a thief.” I stepped back and pointed at Arla, who was now closing the clasp on my bag. “It is Arla Beaton who has stolen the miraculous fruit of paradise.”
She turned and stared at me dumbfounded. Garland sprang from his seat and made a move toward the altar with his claws out. With all my regained confidence, I stepped gracefully forward and kicked him in the head before he could jump me. As he landed on the bottom step leading to the altar, I took the derringer out of my pocket and fired a warning shot into the ceiling. Splinters of wood fell on those in the first row of pews, and the near riot subsided back to near silence.
Arla sat down slowly in the chair I had used for the past two days and stared, as if in shock, out over the heaving sea of physiognomies.
The mayor stood up and begged everyone to be quiet. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a serious offense, your honor. Can you please explain for those of us who do not comprehend the intricacies of your science? If I may say so, this comes as a great shock to us all.” For once, he wasn’t smiling.
I wanted nothing better than to explain. “It is accepted among the learned,” I began, “as certainly as the sun comes up in the morning or that Drachton Below is our munificent Master, that the visible structure of our physical features, when analyzed by the well-trained eye, reveals one’s moral aptitude in general and specifically exhibits the details of one’s personal foibles and virtues. If you take a look at the subject …”
Here I approached Arla, who did not move a muscle but continued to stare as if dead. I ran my finger the length of her nose and then pointed to the small hollow just beneath her bottom lip. “In these features, I have just pointed to,” I said, “we find a combination of intrinsic signs that disclose a personality prone to reckless action.”
I moved around her to the other side and pointed to the arch of her eyebrow. “Here we see an effect known to my colleagues and me as the ‘Scheffler conclusion,’ named, of course, for one of the fathers of the Physiognomy, Kurst Scheffler. What this effect denotes is, amazingly, both a tendency toward thievery and a desire to participate in miraculous events. There is also a mole on the left thigh, with a long hair growing from it, that nails shut this case once and for all.” I stepped forward and brushed my hands together as if wiping the taint of crime from them.
By the number of open, expressionless mouths in the audience, I could tell that I had made my point. I bowed and applause broke out in the pews and along the walls. Father Garland had just then come to and was crawling back to his seat when the first cries of “death to the thief” were heard to echo through the hollow heart of the wooden Gronus.
11
“And what now?” asked the mayor.
We stood outside the church as evening fell. The stars and moon were beginning to appear, and the snow had stopped falling sometime in the day. The crowd had gone home, many of whom had thanked me personally for having apprehended the criminal. From the words of appreciation, I got the feeling that these simple people had, for their own reasons, always harbored a certain fear of this girl. As for Arla, she had been taken away to the one cell in Anamasobia—a small, windowless, locked room in the town hall.
“I suppose justice must be served,” I said.
“If you’ll beg my pardon, your honor, you may have found the criminal, but the white fruit is still missing. How are we going to retrieve that if I have the girl executed?” he asked.
“Interrogate the prisoner,” I said. “You must be aware that there are methods for making people talk. Search that hovel she lives in. My belief is that she probably fed part of it to her bastard child in order to offset its obvious physiognomical deficiencies.”
He nodded sadly, which took me by surprise.
“Nothing to laugh at, Mayor?” I asked.
“Torture is not my strong suit,” he said. “For that matter, neither is execution. Is there no other way to go about this? Couldn’t she, perhaps, just apologize?”
“Really, now,” I said, “the Master would not perceive such leniency with a kind eye. With that course of action, you might jeopardize the entire town’s very existence.”
“I see,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve known this girl from when she was a child. I knew her grandfather. I know her parents. I saw her grow up, and she was such a sweet, inquisitive little thing.” He looked into my eyes, and I could tell he was on the verge of tears.
Although I met his gaze with complete silence, his words about Arla forced me to remember those things about her that had, for the past days, kept her constantly on my mind. I was now certain that it had not, after all, been the Traveler who had blinded my perception, but instead it was Arla’s own special beauty and intelligence that had bewitched me.
The mayor, getting no reply from me, began walking away, and, with this, I experienced an unfathomable emotion, almost like sadness. I wasn’t sure if it was because I also could not bear the thought of Arla’s execution, or if it was that, although I had my thief, little had truly been resolved.
“Wait,” I told him.
He stopped but remained with his back to me.
“There is something I might try.”
He turned and came slowly back to stand before me.
“It is an experimental procedure that I am not sure will work,” I told him. “I wrote a paper on it a few years ago, but it was not favorably acknowledged by my colleagues, and the idea died out after a few weeks of heated debate.”
“Well?” he said as I searched my mind for the particulars of the theory. When I hit upon it, it seemed rather daring if not reckless, but in light of my newly regained powers, and the feeling of great inner strength their rediscovery gave rise to, I began to think that this case might be the perfect opportunity to test this untried method.
“Listen closely,” I said to him. “If the physical features of the girl’s face are an indication of the character traits she harbors deep within, then does it not make sense that if I were to rearrange those features with my scalpel, creating a structure that would indicate a more morally perfect inner state, would she not then be reformed from the congenital criminal malaise, resulting in the willingness to reveal the location of the fruit and rendering her no longer in need of execution?”
Bataldo rolled his eyes and took a step back. “If
I am understanding you,” he said, “you are saying you can make her good by performing surgery on her?”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Then do it,” he said, and like the lion lying down with the lamb, we each smiled for different reasons.
I made arrangements with the mayor to have her brought to my study at the hotel the next morning promptly at nine. He then asked me if I would join him for dinner at the tavern, but I declined, knowing that there was much preparation to be done if I was going to rescue her from herself.
For the first time since I arrived at Anamasobia, I truly felt at ease. On the way back to my quarters people greeted me with the deference befitting my station. Even Mrs. Mantakis, seeing me enter the lobby of the hotel, addressed me with a certain air of subservience that had obviously been lacking heretofore. I told her to send away all visitors and to bring me some of that blue wine and a light dinner. She told me she had prepared something special for me that evening that had nothing to do with cremat, and I couldn’t believe myself that I actually thanked her. She purred like a cat at my grateful response.
Had I still been in the thick of the mystery, I would have been alarmed to see how little of the beauty I still had in my valise—only enough for three or four real doses, but with my new self-assurance that the case would be completely resolved by sometime the next evening, I took a full vial without a second thought.
Then I undressed, put on my robe and slippers, and had a cigarette. True to my old form, I was able, with the enhanced power of the drug, to readily envision Arla’s face and the changes that would have to be made to it in order to save her life. I quickly got pen and paper and began sketching my vision of the new Arla.
It must have been hours after Mrs. Mantakis had delivered my dinner and wine that I finally finished making my plans. By now the town was perfectly quiet, a condition, after having come from the city, that I could never really get used to. The sheer beauty was still active in my system, bringing me intermittent visions of splendor. Not one paranoiac image found its way into my head as I worked, but occasionally I would daydream vividly about my idyllic childhood on the banks of the Chottle River.
Finally I sat down on the bed to consider the fame this next day’s procedure would bring me if it was successful, and that is when Professor Flock made his appearance.
“You again,” I said.
“Who else?” he asked, now dressed in his teaching uniform and toting the dress cane with an ivory monkey-head handle it had been his practice to carry at official events.
“You’re a traitor,” I said to him.
“Did I not suggest the appropriate method with which to apprehend the criminal?” he asked, smiling.
“That you did, but I’m done with you. I’m going to banish you from my mind,” I told him.
“That may be a little difficult since I am really you talking to yourself in a drug-induced haze,” he said. “I can only say and do, can only be, what you desire.”
“Well, what do you think of my plans for tomorrow?” I asked.
“Be certain that you cut some of the intelligence out of the poor girl; she’s too smart for her own good. And, by all means, let’s have a cut in the center of the chin to ward off those delusions that there is anything in store for her but the meanest existence here in this shit village at the end of the world. The rest of it seems quite good. I don’t think I could have done better myself,” he said, tapping the cane on the floor.
“Very well,” I said, “I can’t argue with that.”
“My real reason for coming tonight is to bid you farewell. I don’t think I will be seeing you again,” he said. Then he held the cane up and out toward me, and the ivory monkey-head came magically to life, screaming in its small voice, “I am not a monkey. I am not a monkey.” As always, Flock left his laughter behind, and I bid him good riddance.
That night I fell into a deep sleep from which I struggled to escape. I revisited again my childhood, but this time what came to me were only the scenes of my father’s unbridled anger and the resultant early death of my mother. I woke at sunrise, crying into my pillow as I had done, so many nights of my early life. What a relief I felt when I finally opened my eyes and realized I was free of it.
After I bathed, ate a light breakfast, and dressed, the mayor and two of his miner thugs escorted Arla to my study. I greeted her cordially, but she said nothing and would not make eye contact with me. I had prepared the lab table with straps in order to hold her down in case she became unruly.
“I pray you are successful, Cley,” said the mayor, a note of skepticism in his voice.
I stepped up to Arla and looked directly in her face. “I will do for you what I can, my dear,” I said.
She looked now directly at me and spit in my eyes. I took a step backward and at this instant she brought her knee up into the crotch of one of her detainers. With the suddenness of it all, she was able to break free, and she bolted from the room, across the hall, into my living quarters with the other miner in hot pursuit. She almost got the door closed, but the man was, of course, stronger and was able to pry it open before she could lock it. We all followed immediately.
When I came into the room, she was wielding the knife that had come with the breakfast service and swinging my valise at the fellow who had managed to corner her. “Murderers,” she was yelling. The mayor made a move for her, and she heaved the valise at him, hitting him square in the head. It was finally the miner whom she had kneed in the groin who was able to jump in after one of her lunges with the knife and subdue her. They dragged her next door, kicking and yelling for help. Quickly I prepared a rag with a strong general anesthetic and buried her screaming face with it.
The miners were helping me strap her to the table when the mayor appeared, rubbing his head. “Feisty,” he said with a laugh, but I could see the ordeal had shaken him.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll cut that out of her, along with quite a bit more. By the time she awakens, she will be a new woman.”
“Anamasobia was never so strange,” said the mayor, staring at the floor.
Then I told them to leave and come back the next afternoon.
I put pads beneath her head in order to catch the blood that would result from my cuts, and then fitted her with a headband that had a long piece of cotton attached to it that could be flipped back over her skull while I worked and then brought down over the face in order to mop up the gore that might obscure the area of flesh I intended for incision. With this completed, I methodically laid out my scalpels and picks and clamps, and then brought out the drawing of the new Arla. Through the night, as I had worked on it under the gaze of the beauty, that picture had spoken words of love to me. I was determined for it to become more than an illusion.
The scalpel ploughed smoothly through the skin of her left cheek, and with this first pass, I could feel nothing but the ultimate success of the experiment. I whistled a tune that was popular in the Well-Built City just prior to my departure, a sweet ditty about endless devotion, as I leveled her willful lower lip. “There goes that vain intelligence,” I whispered to her sleeping form while scoring the upper lids of her eyes. I relieved her nose of a weight of cartilage that I knew was at the root of her troublesome curiosity. There was no other choice with those haughty cheekbones but to employ the chrome mallet. My concentration became so intense that all I could see was her face, and it became like the topography of some untamed country that I manipulated from above with artistic finesse and a transcendent vision of perfection. It was all a matter of subtraction, and for a time I wished that the sublime mathematics would never end.
I had worked diligently through the morning and well into the afternoon, taking no break for lunch, when I began to lose my way. The map I carried in my head of where I wanted to end up began to lose its clarity. My self-assurance flickered in and out like a flame in the wind. It was the telltale itching of my skull that let me know I was in need of the beauty. I reasoned that with t
he drug to bolster my innate genius, I could easily finish the job successfully by dinnertime. Besides, I could not go on without it, because the chills were beginning to run through me, making my sight wobble and my hands shake. I set down the scalpel and went next door for a fix.
I found my valise on the floor where it had landed after making contact with the mayor’s head. The thought of that actually brought a smile to my lips as I opened it. I pulled out an unused vial, and to my horror found that it was cracked and empty. Frantically, I pulled out another and found it in the same condition. Then I noticed that there was a violet puddle on the floor. All of the vials were broken. I was without sheer beauty, and the pains of withdrawal were breaking out all over my body like the blows of an invisible enemy. I groaned, but my mind screamed and then dove straight down into a turbulent ocean of confusion and fear. The only thing that kept me from passing out was the thought that I could not leave Arla in the state she was. If I were to fail to retrieve the fruit, it would surely mean my life.
I staggered across the hall, determined to finish the job before I lost all my senses. My mind was already reeling so terribly I could barely stay on my feet. I held myself up with one hand resting on the lab table and with the other I lifted the scalpel and tried to concentrate amid the quaking of my internal organs. The first shivering cut I made I knew was wrong, but there was no erasing here. I pushed on in an attempt to make another cut that would offset the one I had just made. This became a trap, and I pictured myself running headlong, deeper and deeper into a labyrinth from which there was no possible escape. My earlier precise incisions now became a desperate slashing, and the blood flowed freely, sometimes spurting across my shirt. Droplets of it momentarily blinded me. They landed on my lips, and the taste of it brought me to my knees. I struggled back to my feet, fighting off the flashes of blankness that turned my mind into a ball of night.