by Jeffrey Ford
“Don’t let it out yet,” ordered Shebeb. “I have one more thing to tell you. When you release the smoke, you will pass out. But, while you are under its influence, your spirit will have the ability to roam around outside your body for the next two hours. You can do whatever you like. Don’t worry, nothing can harm you. When the drug wears off, you will be instantly called back to yourself. Do you understand?”
Belius shook his head ‘no’, but it was too late. He felt the hot mist surging up from his lungs. Only as it escaped did he taste its sweetness. There was no tingling or rapid increase in drowsiness; the change came all at once. The last thing he was able to focus on was the voluminous folds of skin beneath Shebeb’s sagging chest.
The ape worked quickly now, setting down the coconut and taking up his scalpel. On the underside of Belius’ forearm, two inches above the hoof, he made a quarter inch incision. He knew that because the cut was clean, it would not begin to bleed for a few seconds. In this time, he fitted the eagle cornea into his own eye and carefully lifted the delicate tweezers.
Through the magnification of the powerful monocle, he could see that Thip was ready and waiting. The flea stood on his raft, The Sanguinaire. The sail of the vessel was sewn from a scrap of moth wing. There was a rudder at the back and a small cabin bolted to mid-deck. The explorer was dressed in a long shaggy coat woven from a single dog hair, and, on his head, he wore a helmet tooled from the armor plating of a beetle’s back. To either side of his stout middle thorax hung one of a pair of infant bee stingers that he could easily reach with any one of his four hands. A master at the art of dueling, he used these weapons on more than one voyage when surrounded by marauding phagocytes.
He was handsome as fleas go, with an aquiline frontal notch and unexaggerated antenna grooves. The males of his species respected him for his unusual extra set of maxillae: the broad sword mouth-parts that puncture flesh. The females grew light headed in his presence for that swaggering gleam that shone from every one of a thousand optical facets on either side of his robust head.
When not journeying for his benefactor through the organs of some alien body, he lived a quiet life with his family in the castle he had paid handsomely for some artisan termites to chew to specifications from a block of mahogany. His wife and three daughters thought the world of him and were always saddened and frightened when he was summoned by the big voice to set sail again. In the peace of his study, he’d spent many hours composing sonnets on the subject of his secret desire to be as gigantic in stature as the patients he explored. This daydream filled most of his time when he was landlocked. While taking the pet tapeworms for a stroll around the grounds, he would let his mind wander, picturing himself an equal in height and girth to Shebeb, straddling his hairy legs across an insect empire. Only a good long voyage could ease these notions and allow him to think clearly for a time. There was nothing he loved more than to be making twenty knots up a wide aorta, heading for the echoing caverns of the heart.
“Thip, pay attention now, we haven’t much time,” said Shebeb. “You’ll proceed north through the vein of the left arm of the minotaur, around the cape of his shoulder and then in a southerly direction as far as the scrotum, making stops at all the major organs along the way to investigate for signs of possible infection, disease, or spiritual distress. After circumnavigating the inner-globes of both right and left testicles, you will sail again in a northerly direction through the duodenum, each of the three stomachs and solar plexus, directly to his heart, where, it is my supposition, the problem lies. After thoroughly investigating the condition of each of the chambers of this muscle, the last leg of the journey will take you to the extreme northern pole, to the brain, to check for the healthy lightning of synapse gaps and to roam through as much of the vast sea of memory as possible, keeping a sharp eye out for aberrations. Finally, when this course has been completed, you are to exit the system through the snout by causing a sneeze. Do you understand?” The flea nodded emphatically, although only having half listened to the instructions. Instead, he had been visualizing himself carving his name in the smooth, white calcium of a rib as he was wont to do on all voyages through creatures that possessed them. It was his calling card. He liked to think that perhaps some day a young flea, rooting around in the sand on some distant shore, might happen upon the decaying corpse of a creature, and while dipping stupidly into a remaining bit of bloodless grizzle, the youngster would see his name, ‘Thip’, scratched into the curving bone and marvel at the sight of it.
Shebeb had the greatest confidence in his microscopic assistant, knowing he did not have to repeat the procedure. Using the fine tweezer, he lifted Thip and his craft. There was a quick trip through space in which the flea held on tight, his legs and arms wrapped around the rudder. Then the craft set down in the widening pool of blood on Belius’ forearm. The flea took the tiller and set a course for the open wound that lay dead ahead, like a tunnel through the heart of a mountain. The light from the torches of Shebeb’s cave receded in the distance as The Sanguinaire sailed out of sight into the hidden universe.
Belius yawned, opened his eyes and sat up. “Is it over?” he asked Shebeb, who was once again sitting at his granite table hunched over the palm leaf full of brains. The ape didn’t turn around but continued poking playfully at the medulla with his pinky.
“Shebeb, can I get up?”
Again there was no response.
Belius lifted himself off the table and walked over to where the healer was sitting.
“Excuse me, Shebeb, I …” Belius could not finish his sentence. The hoof he had meant to tap the hairy shoulder with, instead, passed right through it. He jumped backward. He spun around quickly and gave a tight scream. Lying on the marble slab a few feet away, he saw himself. He rushed over to his sleeping form, wanting to crawl back inside. “Your spirit will leave your body and wander,” Shebeb had warned him. Although he found the experience more than a little disturbing, he also now recalled the fact that ‘no harm could come to him’, and his anxiety slowly subsided. He stood quietly for a few minutes, studying himself in detail. The silence of the cave and only the barest burbling of the blabbering trees sifting in from outside gave the whole event a strange aura.
“You poor thing,” he said, thinking back on his last few days of torment.
Dragging himself along, weighed down by an unusually strong fatigue, he passed by Pezimote, who was slumped over in the chair, sleeping off his dalliance of the night before.
“A more concerned friend, no minotaur could ask for,” he whispered, still as yet not fully aware that he could scream like a peacock and go unheard.
The sunlight, swooping birds, dandelion fuzz on the breeze and the invective of the thicket shot through his transparent being as he trod heavily down the path toward home. “Actually, being nothing is not much different for me than being something these days,” he thought to himself. “The world passes through me and I clutch at it with all my might, but I can’t retain the merest particle.”
Though there were a million places he could have gone and seen anew from an invisible perspective, he had decided the second he left the cave to go home and catch up on his work. For two days he had been unable to write a word. The Cosmology, as if it were a child that could do nothing for itself, cried out to him.
Belius sat at his desk in the corner of the tower study. Before him lay the weight of The Cosmology of the Wider World, a stack of parchment that rose up like a paper mountain. The high plateau of the forbidding manuscript rested a little below eye level. He leaned forward and looked down on the title page. From the day he had begun work on the project, he had never gone back to read over what he had written.
With the patience of a glacier, the fortitude of a bubble rising in honey, he had added sheet after sheet to the edifice. Usually at night, when the louder creatures had gone to sleep, he would sit at the desk and, through his pen, drain the reservoir behind his eyes. Daily, that cranial basin would fill with observations an
d studies, and, by the hour when the blue sun would descend below the eastern horizon, the backup of ideas would threaten to overflow. So he had gone on and on with the book, like Time, with nowhere to go but forward. Only now, in his incorporeal state, with nothing about him for gravity to draw on, did he consider looking over what he had done. For once, memory could not frighten him. He was on equal, invisible terms with it.
Without thinking, he lifted his left hoof and made to turn over the title page. For all the effect he had on the top sheet of parchment, he might just as well have tried to budge the Wider World itself. After numerous attempts to get to page one, each motion of the hoof yielding another goad to his frustration, he tried to blow the page off the stack. He huffed and blew, inhaling and exhaling in a rage of spittle and silent groans, but the manuscript remained intact, fast as a tombstone in frozen earth.
“Locked out of my own damn book,” he finally screamed and that spark of annoyance ignited his ability to manifest his emotions in physical force. The page flew straight up off the stack and brushed against the ceiling. Before it had floated down to land on the arm of the divan across the room, he had begun reading. He went through it slowly, mulling over each word he could not remember his original intent for having used, aware that when he reached the last line on the page, he would again have to work himself into a rage to continue. Halfway through the second paragraph of the preface, he lifted his phantom snout and muttered, “What a pile of shit.”
Preface
I am not of this world I call my home. I am a refugee from a place where I was no more than a refugee. The future blows cold against me from my own North Sea. My memory pursues me with the persistence with which tomorrow will chase today into the past. My years are all blizzard gale and blindness, all shouting in a deaf ear. Buried to the neck in sand, I can not keep from drifting, wandering, searching for the millionth part of a moment’s rest. Half man, half bull. Where the one begins and the other ends is still a mystery after hours of tracing the dividing lines between flesh and hide. The man sneers at the bull and the bull has no respect for the man. I wear the finest clothes and when wearing them gore tree trunks with my horns. I sip tea from china cups and exchange discourse with tortoises and owls and moles.
I have read the wisdom of the wisest men and found it to be so much foolishness. There is more sense in a dog eating its own vomit. Although I scorn these other writers, I realize that they project such confidence only because they are trying to convince themselves that they too are not refugees. With words and ideas they build around themselves a place to call home. Lighting torches on the lightning of certainty, they warm themselves. Chairs and beds of sturdy self-assurance give comfort. They grow fat on feasts of delusions and drink heavily of dreams. “Who are you?” they are often asked, as I often ask myself. The difference is that they can I hand you a book that is the place they have built and say, “This is me.” The asker reads, and if the writer has known in the building the full power of his original uncertainty then the reader will be drawn into orbit and become another point to fix a position on.
I see no other way to find a place. You can not know who you are if you don’t know where you are. I want to know, so I begin this work. Go ahead, tell me it’s false, it’s not reality, while you are whirled and blown ragged in your own unknowing. Out of pity for you, I will include a moral that agrees with your position, and then I will laugh as I sit in the warmth of my study, sipping tea from china cups, watching out the window as you circle in the storm, whimpering.
Creation
In the beginning there was everything and just a small bit of nothing. The everything was full of itself; a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking entities composed of all the possible forms that matter ever could or would take. The everything was almost everywhere, spreading out and out to and filling the very limits of the universe, filling even the dreams of the dreaming minds trapped in the tight jumble.
The nothing, being of itself, singular, was considered by the everything to be the center of existence. It was no bigger than an eyeball; almost round and almost transparent. The everything wrapped around it like the fruit around its seed. Although the everything had great potential to exist, it could not because it had nowhere to go. It had been frozen fast for that inconceivable duration that was before time.
There would not have been a problem if the everything was not aware of the nothing, but it was, and that which was closest to the pearl of what it was not felt great envy. The current of this emotion traveled fast through the connected pieces of the puzzle, eventually reaching the limits and awakening the outer things with a spark of jealousy that brought with it consciousness. Each of the individual components of the everything agreed that the barrier that separated them from the nothing should be smashed so that what was not would seep out and there would be room for them to become what they were, apart from each other.
The barrier that came between the everything and the nothing was something though, and, try as they might to exert their unified weight, they could not crack it. All they could do was stare through the misty glass and hope that the things inside the jewel might eventually make a mistake, crack the barrier, and let the universe begin.
Inside the jewel there lived a male and a female. They lived contentedly together, sharing everything they had. They had freedom to roam through the forests and deserts and think and feel whatever they wanted. Each had experienced eons of life and neither of them was bored after having seen and done all that they did. What kept them always interested was the discussions they had. In these dialogues they would each tell what they thought or felt about a particular thing or subject. They hardly ever agreed or saw things in the same exact way, but instead of this causing a problem it fired their respective interests. The next time they saw or did something they had discussed, it would always be colored anew by the opinion of the other. Their lives were perfection; ever changing and vital. It was the strength of their need for each other that made the boundary between the nothing and the everything impenetrable. Every time the everything would look in and see them conversing, it would feel like shouting, but it could not because there was no room for the shout to be born.
Whereas the everything could not penetrate the jewel of nothing with the pressure of its ultimate mass, its jealousy was another matter. After the voltage of that frustrated emotion had traveled out to the limits of the universe, it slammed against the steel walls of the boundary and made its way back toward the center. It did not deflect off the shell of the nothing but passed through at all points as easily as sunlight slips through clear water. The unknown emotion now had free rein where it had never been before and eventually infected both the male and the female.
The effects of the disease made a radical change in both their dispositions. It started slowly with each of them hoarding little items that they admired. Soon it grew to the point where each wanted every object the other was using. Eventually what they wanted more than anything was the other’s thoughts and feelings. “Give me yourself,” they each screamed and then ran together to take what they wanted. A great battle ensued that lasted longer than the blue sun will burn or the sky will fizz. After clawing and battering, they put their arms around each other and squeezed with all their strength. They strangled each other’s bodies with such force that life had to leave them. Together, at the same instant, they fell dead, each having become, from the pressure, part of the other. Time’s wind blew dirt over them. The forests dropped their leaves and the waters froze. Snow fell heavily.
Eventually, spring came and a plant grew up from the spot where the two had fallen dead. The plant, having had their bodies to feed on all winter and spring and summer, grew strong and straight. At the end of the summer, an enormous bud formed at the top of the stem. The bud swelled from within with a living weight and finally it broke from the stem and fell to the earth. When it hit the ground it cracked open and a bird flew out. It was an ugly little bird without eyes or feathers. There was no color t
o it and it made no sound. It flew up into the air and kept flying night and day until it reached the shell. With one tiny tap of its beak it pecked a hole through into the everything and the universe was begun.
Siftus rolled over on his stone bed and opened his eyes as wide as possible.
“Who’s there?” he called, straining to make out some presence in the weak light that seeped in at the opening to his burrow. He sniffed once and the matrix of aromas precipitated out into afternoon, clear weather, low tide, the death of a sparrow, the sprouting of foxglove, and the last few remaining atoms of a song sung by the Raccoon brothers the previous night. All of this took but an instant to discern, after which he clawed that stale air away from him, pushing it aside with his long curving nails as if it were a pile of dirt blocking his passage through the underground. He drew in a fresh breath to see who had come to visit. Of course, many of the same ingredients were inherent in this new conglomeration, but this time there was an element that, when analyzed out, totally astounded him.
“It isn’t you, is it?” he asked. “How absurd, a bird below ground.”
“I’m afraid it’s me,” said Vashti.
Whereas most other creatures would have moved out into the light to hold their conversation, the owl and the mole stayed right where they were. Vashti had the ability to see field mice move through tall grass from the top of a tree on a moonless night. The lighting conditions underground did not disturb her. What bothered her was the closeness of the place. For one accustomed to flight, an overwhelming aroma of dirt can be paralyzing.
“Come, let’s move into the expanse,” said Siftus, hastily dressing in his snake skin vest for decency’s sake. He reached for his walking stick and then led the way from the side of his bed, past his kitchen and living rooms, down a long passageway. Vashti followed close behind the mole, jumping every now and then, trying to spread her wings for flight each time a pebble or clod of earth would dislodge itself from the ceiling of the tunnel and fall on her.