by Jeffrey Ford
“Cave in,” she screamed once without thinking and Siftus, usually the most understanding of individuals, laughed sardonically at her. Birds usually did not have a kind word for those of the burrowing persuasion: the badger, the possum, the mole. They were both literally and figuratively looked down upon by the feathered race. ‘Dirt eaters’ was the term applied.
The ‘expanse’, as he called it, was the huge underground studio where he sculpted his smaller works—busts, statues and figurines. It had taken him a solid year of working every night to clear enough dirt out of the area to create the underground cavern.
Once inside the large vault, Vashti’s rapid breathing decreased to a normal rate. There was enough room there, even with the crowd of stone animals that crouched and perched in all phases of completion. She surmised that the expanse had another entrance, one large enough to accommodate the considerable blocks of granite and limestone that Siftus cut from the cliffs and dragged beneath the earth to work on.
“What can I do for you, Vashti?” asked the mole, taking a tobacco leaf from his vest pocket. With one quick motion of his left paw, he somehow rolled the tawny leaf into a cigarette.
She looked around her at the silent, staring forms and thought it better to whisper. “Belius is sick.”
Siftus reached into his pocket for a flint. Striking the end of the jagged rock against the side of one of his creations, a spark jumped to life. With the agility of a frog’s tongue seizing a circling fly, he sniffed out the trajectory of the spark and lunged forward, catching it neatly on the tip of the cigarette. He drew in, deeply inhaling the smoke. As he exhaled, all of his playful antagonism toward the owl left him and he was filled with concern for his friend and patron. “Is it bad?” he asked.
“Pezimote has gone with him to Shebeb’s cave today.”
“Is there hope?”
“There is if you are willing to help me.”
“What then?”
She flapped her wings to clear the smoke from around her and blinked her wide eyes to punctuate the importance of what she was to say. “Shebeb, granted, is a great healer. I’d go to him if I had a broken wing or a dislocated talon, but for what is wrong with Belius, the ape has no potion or remedy that can cure it. When Shebeb has thoroughly examined Belius, he will tell him he’s perfectly healthy, perhaps a little depressed from working too hard on The Cosmology without getting the proper exercise. He will blame much of our friend’s problem on the digitalis and after giving him an herb to take that will turn his stools to pudding for a week, that will be it. Shebeb is too practical to see the problem. Belius is lonely.”
“Well then, let’s plan a party for him,” said Siftus, finishing his cigarette and throwing it to the floor. With the tip of his cane he buried it beneath the soft earth.
“When I say lonely, I’m not talking about the loneliness of sitting by yourself on a rainy day when friends can’t get out to visit. This is a profound loneliness that he suffers from. He needs someone to love; a mate. We other creatures don’t have this problem. There are no other minotaurs in the Wider World, and from what I gather, they are even rare in the lesser world, one being born only as a freak, every thousand years or so. Do you see the problem?”
“I never considered this when thinking of Belius,” Siftus said. “Since I’ve known him, he’s always seemed content to live by himself in the tower and work on his book.”
“Yes, but all that studying and writing is only an excuse to pass the time. The book doesn’t share secrets with him. He may be able to take it to bed, but it can not love him. It will not bear him children. He needs a wife; another minotaur to understand his halfling nature. If there were another, he would not see himself as such an outcast.”
The mole was nodding in agreement now. He leaned back against the base of the sculpture he had struck his flint against, a scaled down representation of Nosthemus, breaking the ocean surface. “You say that there are no other minotaurs, so what is there for us to do?”
“That’s why I came to you. You’re a remarkable artist, and I am said to have a certain wisdom when it comes to affairs of the heart. Yes, there are no other minotaurs, but what I’ve come to suggest to you is that we create one.”
The focused frustration that had lifted the first pages of The Cosmology still performed that task, but the further he delved into the manuscript the accumulated idiocy of what he had spent so many nights penning made this once useful anger now rage out of control and the discarded pages flew wildly about the study like a blizzard in a paperweight. They flew through his ghostly form as he continued reading, cutting him again and again with their inadequacy as his sight passed over fresh embarrassments on each newly revealed page.
“How could it be so bad?” he asked, without the power to stop himself from devouring yet more of it. “One would think that in this many words, by the law of averages, with no conscious mind behind the moving pen, there should still be, at least, one moderately successful line. It’s a work of negative genius—drivel purer than a flawless diamond.”
He read from the work aloud now, his phantom ear listening to the sounds of his silent voice. “The planet that is the Wider World, suspended in space, is a sentient being, an organism with a mind that contemplates the stars but sees them wrongly because of the interfering void of the yellow atmosphere. In that it knows more than we creatures who live like parasites on its generous crust, because it is larger and can imagine greater things, its seeing wrongly as a result of the distortion of the atmosphere is in direct ratio to our own wrong seeing caused by the veiling atmosphere of each individual creature’s desire for immortality. Hence, though it sees more, it is more greatly mistaken in what it sees, and is, therefore, in all its grandeur, no more wise than the most insignificant ladybug, living on the leaf of a giant spruce—one of its nose hairs.”
With the suggestion of nose hairs, Belius’ own transparent snout began to itch from within. For the first time since sitting down to read, his thoughts were now distracted. His eyes began to water spiritually as the unseen irritation of his nasal passage drew his full attention. Although he left off his reading, the confusion of discarded pages still swirled and flapped in the room. The itch built to an unbearable crescendo, and just as he was frantically trying to lift his corporeal quill off the desk to insert the feathered end up his incorporeal snout, he let go a sneeze so full of manifest disgust that it lifted the remainder of the manuscript to the ceiling and dumped it on his head. He screamed with the fear of being buried alive and then awoke on the operating table in Shebeb’s cave.
The roar unleashed by Belius as he rejoined his body, yanked Pezimote from a lascivious daydream and sent him sprawling off the edge of his seat in the waiting area. Shebeb put his arm around Belius’ shoulders and, like a mother trying to calm a frightened child, said into his ear, “Shhh, it’s over. You’re fine. You’re fine. It’s over.”
“Is he cured?” asked Pezimote, who had drawn closer, forgetting that he wasn’t on speaking terms with the ape.
“This was to be merely a diagnosis,” said Shebeb.
“How long until we know what’s wrong with me?” asked Belius, now breathing more easily, sitting with his legs dangling off the side of the table.
“No time,” said Shebeb. “As soon as Thip jumps up into my ear and begins telling me what he encountered, I’ll relate to you the condition of your inner being. Only then can I prescribe a treatment. You see him there?” he asked and pointed to what looked like a speck of dust on the marble surface next to Belius. “When you sneezed, he landed on your leg.”
The tiny black dot moved in one great leap to the edge of the table. From there, it jumped down onto the top of Pezimote’s head and then vaulted up to rest on the facial hair beneath Shebeb’s left eye. The tortoise and the minotaur both leaned a little in the direction of the ape to watch the flea blaze a trail toward the left ear. They lost the progress of his path for a moment and then found him on the ear lobe a split second before
he crawled over the hill of cartilage at the entrance to the auditory canal and disappeared inside.
“We are ready now,” said Shebeb. “Thip will speak a sentence to me and pause as I relate the same information to you.” The ape closed his droopy lids. His lips parted to show yellow teeth fiercely clenched. His left ear wiggled slightly with concentration. Shebeb took a deep breath and then began. The words, when they came, rushed quickly from his mouth, screeching as they passed through his clamped teeth. The silences in between seemed measured and, in conjunction with the sounds, gave the recounting of the flea’s journey the eerie aspect of a lone, thin-throated toad chanting for rain.
“Greetings to you, minotaur. I commend and envy you for the greatness of your frame, the dazzling rush of blood through your arteries and veins, the enormous weight of brain matter resting between your ears, the ball lightning of impulse traveling your spine. In The Sanguinaire, I journeyed the length and breadth of you, finding much to marvel at and very little to call to the good physician’s attention. It’s a shame now that I must concentrate on speaking to you only of the problems I encountered, because the delights far outweighed them.
“The circulatory system is rapid moving and rife with protecting, although vicious to me, white corpuscles to ward off invaders. Your major organs, with the exclusion of your heart, seem to be performing each like a virtuoso. Your small and large intestines are clear of blockage and debris and offer the traveler a unique enchantment with their million twists and turns like some elastic network of catacombs. Your ribs, one of which holds my signature, are hard as rock and sharp as bird beaks. For that matter, your entire skeletal system, including your backbone, is a wonderment of architecture. To have one’s structure inside the body is a grace I will never know. Your stomachs are intact. Your colon, clean as a whistle.
“Now, I’m afraid, we come to the problems. I encountered a minor problem in your lungs. A few of the small alveoli on the outskirts of those windy chambers are mucked up quite beyond hope by some sticky blue substance. When I passed these diseased sacs, I experienced light-headedness and a sensation of euphoria.
“Next, we must travel south to your testicles, wherein, while circumnavigating them, I noticed a dangerous overcrowding by the indigenous race. It seems that to keep order there among such a runaway population, the more powerful of the society have turned both globes into prisons, enforcing a penal system that offers no escape and has its inmates constantly swimming in circles in order for them to have something to do. I’m not a physician, but I suggest that this problem be taken in hand as soon as possible.
“The third, and last of your problems, the greatest problem you have, is centered in your heart. I have never seen anything like the queer conditions existing in each of the chambers of this vital organ. When I began traversing these quadrants, I was full of vigor, but as I passed from one to the other, a general atmosphere of despair wore me down to the point that, when I exited to head for your brain, I wept for the length of your neck.
“One chamber held within it a desert: hot sand and no drop of water. Another was racked by a great storm: typhoons within tornados within hurricanes. I barely escaped with my life, so buffeted was I by the ill winds. The next was a polar region of snow and ice. Even the air in this winterscape was so cold, I had to push it aside with my arms to make any progress. I remember that as I stood in the center of it, listening to the overall booming of the great muscle, the chill brought premonitions of death, and, for a second, I believed I had actually died. Gladly leaving this frozen chamber behind, I entered the last, which was as empty of warmth and spirit as the previous three. A cavern of black, so dark that not the tiniest particle of the light of your life shone there. I only walked in a few paces, tying myself by a rope to the mast of The Sanguinaire, for fear that I would lose myself in the wicked pitch and never find the entrance again.
“That’s all I have to report. By the way, I lost one of my swords in a skirmish with a dormant virus hiding in the osseous labyrinth of your right ear as I exited that side of your brain, so my payment will be increased to eleven drops of blood. Forgive the extra cost, but this type of work has its hazards. Now I’m quite done. May the Wider World preserve us both.”
“What did you encounter in the regions of the memory?” Shebeb asked, inhaling the words as he spoke them so that they would hit against the back of his throat and be heard by the flea.
There was a considerable pause, and then the answer came, the ape speaking it to his patient, “Nothing unusual.”
With the eagle cornea inserted in his eye, Shebeb found The Sanguinaire in the breast pocket of Belius’ shirt and returned the raft, along with its owner, to the mahogany castle and the welcoming party of Thip’s wife, daughters, and faithful tapeworms. Belius pricked himself with a splinter of wood and made his offering for the services rendered, adding a twelfth drop for his admiration of the insect’s courage. With these particulars out of the way, Shebeb made his diagnosis and suggested a treatment.
“There is an emptiness in your heart, Belius. You must get out of your study more and get daily exercise. All of that reading is turning you upon yourself. I would also suggest, for the third time this year, that you quit the digitalis. To fight off your feelings of sluggishness, I will give you a mixture of herbs to be liberally sprinkled on your dinner every night. In conjunction with all of these things, you must get plenty of sleep and try very hard to see that life is a beautiful thing.”
Belius nodded to everything said and accepted the mixture of herbs with a promise that he would use them, but when he and Pezimote left the healer’s cave and were passing through the thicket of blabbering trees, he confided to the tortoise that he felt, if anything, somewhat worse.
Pezimote took the bag of herbs from Belius’ hand and threw them in the stream. The minotaur made a weak protest, but he couldn’t argue with his friend’s reasoning. “All this stuff will do is make you crap your pants. I say you have to figure your own way out of this funk.”
“Do you think I should quit the digitalis?” asked Belius.
“Don’t be a fool. If you do, you’ll be as dull as one of these inane trees. Shebeb means well, but he’s missing the point of the whole thing. Just stop taking yourself so damn seriously. You could drop over tomorrow, but this universe you consider to be yours will keep right on doing the same nothing it has always done.”
Belius and Pezimote walked in silence the rest of the way to the tower. They didn’t even speak when they parted but simply waved. As soon as the minotaur was inside and climbing the spiral staircase to his study, Pezimote gave up his erect posture and returned to the normal all fours of his kind. He moved tortuously to the edge of the green ocean and, as he slipped into the cool waters, thought about his friend’s problems and muttered, “Such pretensions,” shook his head and swam down the coast toward home.
The study was just as Belius’ spirit had left it—The Cosmology scattered everywhere, covering everything like the fallout of ash from some volcanic book. Still out of breath from climbing the stairs, he moved lethargically around the room, gathering the sheets of manuscript, paying no attention to the page numbers. When he had every sheet of it again piled on his desk, he picked it up whole and walked to the fireplace. Leaning over, he placed the pages down on the charred remains of the last fire from early spring. Then he plodded to the small end table next to the divan and, lifting his pipe, filled it from his stash of digitalis which lay heaped in a hollowed out chunk of pumice. With the primitive stone and flint lighter of his own invention, he lit a piece of kindling and set to puffing the petals into smoke. He did not, as usual, flick his hoof back and forth to put out the kindling, but walked over to the fireplace with it upright to keep the twig burning.
The top page of The Cosmology, in its disorder, was the title page of the chapter dealing with the inherent attraction of all physical objects, “Satellites of Love.” He bent over and set the edge of this page on fire. The manuscript went up as
if its original purpose was to someday burn. He moved back away from the heat and positioned his chair so he could sit and watch the flames devour the work of all his nights in the Wider World.
The black smoke of the fire climbed up the chimney and out into the sky above the facade of the tower. It did not disperse in the late afternoon breeze blowing in off the ocean, but hovered there, turning in a great ball until every page in the fireplace was consumed. Then it gathered itself up into a two legged creature of considerable size. When its form had completely cohered, it floated down to the ground and, with a smooth but frightened stride, made its way through the garden toward the woods.
That night the rain drove in hard from off the ocean, turning the ground to mud and swamping the byways. Lightning sizzled down the sky with long fingers of instantaneous day, striking without conscience at trees and the peaks of high rocky places. The thunder did not roll in the distance, but ripped everywhere, as if the Wider World itself had gone mad and were tearing out great clumps of its own hair. Much to the delight of the younger ants and to the annoyance of the older ones, the armies moved everyone, for their own safety, into the farthest nesting areas of the tunnels that ran throughout the masonry of the tower. The downpour washed away scent, and the moonless sky threw a second cloak of darkness over the landscape, making it a perfect night for predators.
Deep below ground, in the protective quiet of the expanse, Siftus was lost to his work. As unaware of the storm as of the hour, he drew, with one of his long claws, sketches for Belius’ mate in the dirt of the cavern floor. As soon as he was finished with one, he would sniff at it, and, upon finding a disproportion, would brush the whole image away and begin again. Out in the ocean, Nosthemus, the whale, dove to the very depths of the sea, where phosphorescent creatures ignorant of sunlight presented a scene of bright stars in a clear black sky. He swam lazily through this cosmos, making believe that he was flying to the moon. He hummed as he went, the songs of his super brain. From beneath wind-bent saplings, scaly things slithered out of hiding to play in the newly formed pools. Up the coast, in the familiar stand of palms, Chelonia snored and Pezimote opened his beak to the fresh rainwater dripping down from the broad leaves that were his roof. He wondered to himself where butterflies slept on stormy nights.