Ta da dum, ta da dum, Sadie hums the first few bars of Swan Lake and is tempted to get up and dance. She regrets it now. She should have persevered. After ballet, she decided to become a vet but she hated the college biology courses and gave that up too. Next she took up photography—she was told she had a good eye—and she managed to buy a secondhand Rollei 3.5f, her prize possession, which had cost her plenty; she also managed to get one of her black-and-white photographs—a flock of starlings perched on a power line—in a group show, which was where she met Mason. They were going to start a bed-and-breakfast; instead, they went into debt renovating the house and Mason started to deal in illegal substances and she got a job substitute teaching.
Maybe, Sadie thinks, if she kisses the swan, the swan will turn into a handsome prince. Or, if not a real prince, into a handsome young man with whom she will live happily ever after.
Inside the house the phone rings. Sadie does not move; she lets the voice mail pick up.
“Hey, Sadie,” she hears Mason say. “Good news. They’re letting me out on probation next Wednesday. Can you come pick me up and bring me some clothes? A pair of khakis and my jacket—the jacket is at the cleaner’s. I love you, baby.”
The cleaner’s is next door to the pound and Sadie wonders if the little brindle terrier mix she liked so much is still available for adoption—probably not.
Time to go in, Sadie tells herself, feeling cold all of a sudden. Tomorrow she will take the swan back to the beach. And, if it’s a nice day, she also tells herself, she may bring along her camera—it’s been ages since she has taken any photographs. She gives the swan a little pat and stands up, then hesitates, not wanting to leave him out on the porch alone. In the fading evening light, his shape becomes more and more indistinct. Soon all Sadie can see is the silvery gleam of his feathers. In the night’s approaching lonely darkness she wonders about the swan’s forlorn mate.
Upstairs in the bedroom, Sadie looks on the top shelf of her closet, behind the boxes of old sweaters, scarves, and hats, where she hides the camera, but the Rolleiflex is not there.
The fucking bastard!
Right away, Sadie suspects Mason of taking it and selling it. Still, she can hardly believe that he could have done that and, to make sure, she sweeps all the contents off the shelf—the boxes of sweaters, hats, and scarves—onto the floor.
Afterward, Sadie rummages through the bedside-table drawers looking for where Mason keeps pills—Ambien, Percodan, oxycodone—anything that will let her sleep. She takes two of the pink pills and goes to bed.
When Sadie wakes up the next morning it is already noon. Quickly, she puts on her sweatpants and a T-shirt—she has no memory of getting undressed and, briefly, she wonders if she ate supper. In the kitchen, she starts up the coffee machine before going out to the screened-in porch. The porch door is wide open and the canvas swing chair is creaking slightly. The swan, of course, is gone.
The Confession of Philippe Delambre
Greg Hrbek
MY FATHER
My father turned into a common housefly. This is the simple explanation. Though it is hardly a complete or accurate one. What happened to him was far more complicated. I knew that. Just as I knew the basement of our home—to all outward appearances a very average home on the outskirts of Québec City—to be a place of dark secrets. Just as I would later know that my mother, having been found not guilty of murder (by reason of insanity: committed for the rest of her life to a provincial asylum at the fog-shrouded outer limits of Nova Scotia), had done nothing wrong. Falsely accused. She would never hurt a fly, ma mère pauvre, much less a husband who had turned into one.
His name was André Delambre.
He taught at the Université Laval, where he chaired the department of physics. Do not look for his name in the archives of that hallowed center of education. You won’t find it there. His name has been struck out. As well it should have been. But take me at my word: He was a member of the faculty beginning in 1947. Soon thereafter, he published “The Disintegration and Reintegration of Matter as an Objective in the Physical Sciences” (The Journal of Modern Physics, December 1949, Volume 18, Issue 9, p. 592), a paper that brought him professional renown, a fortune in research funds, and finally, in the academic year of 1953–1954, a sabbatical from the university, during which time his experiments with teleportation began in earnest, resulting in several failures, a success, and then the final disaster. He died first in June of 1954. Then again in August.
AFTER THE ACCIDENT
I had seen a strange fly in the house. A fly with a white head. Actually, I had heard it first. The drone of its wings. But also another sound. Which seemed at first to be a trick played by my ears. As the fly flew past my head, I heard a voice, a squeaky, high-pitched voice, cry my name. I turned my head, and though I could still hear the buzz, I couldn’t see the insect, which had disappeared somewhere in the colors of the room. And then it came again, from very far off. A tiny voice:
Philippe!
I often had bad dreams as a boy. The feeling in me then, after hearing that voice for the second time, was of a terror I knew very well, for that cry was like my own nocturnal pleas for help—as if whatever-it-was was trapped in a nightmare and wanted me to wake it up.
I ran away.
In the kitchen, our maid, Emma—a gray and sour woman, a vicious woman, whose husband had been drowned in the Battle of the Atlantic—was in the process of stuffing Cornish game hens. From the look on her face, you might’ve thought I’d barged in on the queen in her royal water closet. She spat a curse at me and so I knew my mother was not at home and my father was in the basement.
“Where’s Mother?”
“How should I know? In bed with your uncle perhaps.” She took one of the dead birds by its legs and forced open the posterior.
I went to the door that led to the basement. This door at the top of the stairs was often unlocked. But the door at the bottom, made of steel—the one that led to my father’s laboratory—that door: never. Descending the staircase always gave me a strange feeling of disconnection. Above, where we lived, were immaculate white rooms, windows dressed with chintz curtains, paintings in golden frames, vases of flowers. But below, where my father worked, was a rock-walled pool of shadow far too deep to be dispelled by electricity. I didn’t feel I was moving from one place to the next—from upstairs to downstairs—so much as disappearing from one reality and reappearing suddenly in another. Now, at the steel door of the laboratory, I tried to stop my panicked breathing with a hand against my open mouth. The fly, I was quite certain, had followed me here, and was veering through the darkness, and would, at any moment, come close and call my name again. I closed my hand into a trembling fist. Never, ever, did I interrupt Father. I could hear him in there. Not speaking. Moving—or, rather, pacing. But not pacing. More agitated than that. The first time I knocked, he didn’t seem to hear. Then I knocked again. Movement ceased.
“Father? Father, there’s a …”
As the heels of his shoes clacked on the concrete floor, I believed he was rushing to let me in. But there was only a sudden impact. As if he hadn’t understood that the door was a solid object. He didn’t open the door; he didn’t speak to me through it. He beat upon it. Over and over again he beat upon the door and kicked it, but he didn’t utter a single word.
THE FLY (1958): A CINEMASCOPE PICTURE
Not until much later (fourteen years, to be exact, by which time I was studying for a doctorate of philosophy at the Université de Montréal) would I discover the American film based on my father’s tragedy.
I saw it one night in 1968.
I had been out in the Quartier Latin, drinking and smoking with an American draft evader who had adopted the fake name of Caspian. Around midnight, returning alone to my garret apartment in the Ville-Marie, I switched on the little black-and-white television, which received analog signals via a pair of metallic antenna
e, and chanced upon “Nightmare Theater.” A program I had watched before. Hosted by Madblood the Magnificent, a Toronto disc jockey wardrobed and made-up to be a cross between Svengali and the Phantom of the Opera. The movie was just recommencing after a commercial break, and the first thing I saw was a boy of eight or nine with an aerial insect net, just like the one I’d possessed at the same age. Like me, he had a scientist father with a lab in the basement, a beautiful mother, a maid named Emma. Strange coincidences that only got stranger by the minute. The mother addressing the boy as “Philippe.” The boy announcing that he had just caught such a funny-looking fly … All my life I’d been refusing to fit together the puzzle pieces of that summer. Now here they were, interlocked on a television screen. Accident. My father hadn’t known it was in there. In the booth. When he entered the booth and disintegrated himself, it too had disintegrated. In the ether, human and insect atoms had mixed. When he and the fly reintegrated, each was half the other. A cold draft blew across my brain. A commercial came on. For Ca-Fo Insecticide. The cleansing liquid that kills.
HOW I CAUGHT THE FLY
Later that afternoon, in the garden, I saw the fly again. By then, I had—in the inexplicable way of a child—put behind me (or, rather: hidden from my own sight) the weird incidents of the morning.
I was playing croquet, a game I’d become precociously good at. In those boyhood summers, with Father always working and Mother usually somewhere else, I was very much alone. I hunted insects and practiced croquet. When I grew up, I wanted to be a professional croquet player, or an entomologist.
I had run the blue ball through all twelve hoops and was about to peg it out—mallet in hand, staring down at that blue globe—when upon its northern pole landed the fly. Unmistakably the same one. Only this time, the creature was still. So I could see that my original impression hadn’t been accurate. Yes, the head was strange, but not because of its whiteness. It was white. But not exactly, not merely … Had the creature spoken, I would’ve run off again. But it didn’t speak. Perhaps it never had. On a nearby chaise longue lay my aerial insect net. Slowly, I moved away from the ball and set down the mallet. I took up the net. The fly—moving about on the wooden ball, probing the smooth blue surface with its forelegs, as if trying to fathom the concept of a sphere—sensed my motion a split second too late and flew straight up, directly into the mesh.
Caught.
The rim of the implement was flush with the ground, and from within the folded and furrowed grid of netting (which bore an uncanny resemblance to my father’s schematic drawings of space-time) came short shocks of buzzing.
From a tin box on the chaise longue, I took my magnifying glass. Then lay on the lawn before the net. Enlarged, the web of lines appeared as a diaphanous haze—and through the blur, very clearly, in unerringly perfect focus, I saw a creature with the body of a housefly (wings, thorax, abdomen) and the head of a person: a living thing with five jointed insect legs and, in the place of the sixth, a human arm.
HOW I IMPRISONED THE FLY
And I an old man now, and still can hear it saying (the voice as clear as on that distant day, perhaps more so): Philippe. Don’t be afraid. It’s me … I had no idea to what self the creature might be referring. The face did not look familiar. Or did it? I had been haunted, for about a year, by photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau I’d chanced upon in a library book at my school—and I shivered inside as the eyes in the head, wide and alert in the desiccate flesh of the face, looked up through the magnifying glass and into mine. It’s me, Philippe. And no sooner had the voice spoken than the creature clumsily flew into another dead-end hollow of the net. The human parts seemed to be at odds (or at the very least not in coordination) with those of the insect. Once again, I framed it in the glass. Every time the human arm tried to wipe tears from the human face, the other anterior appendage, the black insect leg, pushed it down. It was at this time that I took from my tin-box collection kit an empty matchbox and a packet of sugar. I tore open the sugar packet, poured its contents into the matchbox, and slipped the trap under the net. Within a few seconds, the creature had taken the bait and I had it safely locked up.
The film adaptation shows none of this.
In the film, the boy—a version of me played by a child actor named Charles Herbert (who appeared regularly on American television during the 1950s and ’60s)—simply appears at the house, calling for his mother in order to tell her that he has found such a funny-looking fly. This is not what I did. In the film, the mother reminds the boy that the father does not approve of the entrapment of living things. She then instructs me (paying no attention at all to what I’m saying) to release the fly. Which I do. A thing I, of course, would never have done, even had I been so foolish as to tell my mother about the fly in the first place, which I did not. What I actually did was: I took him to my menagerie.
In those years after the war, the cities of Québec were pushing outward, extinguishing the weak flames of family farms. Barns and stables supplanted by modern homes with stone patios; loamy cropland by green lawns that smelled in summer of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Our house, for a time, was at the limits of the expansion, so when I crossed through a small woods, I emerged at a sea-like meadow of high grass, in the offing of which stood one of the abandoned farmsteads.
From inside the matchbox, the fly kept saying:
Philippe?
Philippe?
A few yards from the barn, in the shade of a giant willow tree, is where I kept it: a glass fish tank (transported the summer before in the bed of a Radio Flyer wagon) filled with soil, dead wood, moss, and leaves, and covered with a section of wire screen taken from a window of the farmhouse.
I set to work emptying the tank of everything I’d so carefully collected during that North American springtime of 1954. The ladybugs on the stemmed sticks, the rotting wood secreted with pill bugs, the grasshopper hiding in a pile of old changed leaves. One specimen was hard to part with: the mantis. But even she—that most unreal of creatures—couldn’t compare with what I had now. I let her go with the rest.
Philippe?
Can you hear me?
Nor had I overlooked the need for food. Emma’s Cornish game hens. They had not yet gone into the oven. I had filched one from the refrigerator. Now I tore a wing from the decapitated body of the hen and placed it in the tank. Then I lowered the matchbox in, slid it open, and quickly set the screen on top, securing it with rocks at all four corners. The fly exited the box and buzzed back and forth, bumping into the walls. Finally landing on the floor, human nose bleeding from an impact with the glass, it walked onto the raw meat. From the mouth came an eruption of white vomit, and as the acid did its work, the creature looked up at me, lips trembling. I wasn’t sure why, but all at once the terror of the morning was in me again. I picked up the tin box and the net, and I ran, as one runs from a haunted place.
HELP ME
Back to that night in 1968. And the film ending like this: I am walking down the staircase of our home with my uncle. Asking, with the pathetic naïveté of child characters of the era, when my father (whom everyone but me knows is dead, murdered with a hydraulic press: murdered, according to the writer and director, Messrs. Clavell and Neumann, by my mother) will be coming home.
Soon, Philippe.
Then, offhandedly, I mention: I saw that funny-looking fly again.
Not then, nor at any other time, did I utter those idiotic words. But when my uncle and the police inspector ran out to the garden in that climactic scene, what they found trapped in the web of a spider was exactly what I had captured and put inside the fish tank under the willow tree … Down to the street I went, not wondering if I was dreaming (I knew I was awake), but imagining that the television, somehow tuned to the frequency of my subconscious, had been broadcasting the darkest of my dreams.
At a pay telephone, I made a collect call to my uncle in Québec Cit
y. The ring sounded twelve, thirteen, fourteen times. The operator stated the obvious. I demanded she allow the phone to keep ringing. Until finally:
“Philippe? What the devil—”
“‘Help me.’”
“Help you. Are you in trouble again?”
“It’s a lie,” I said.
“What is, my boy?”
“The scene in the garden. That’s not how it happened.”
“How what—”
“You never saw him, Uncle. But I did. I’m the one …”
He feigned complete ignorance, saying: Middle of the night, surely this can wait until morning, Philippe, when you’ll be half-dead but at least sober. I hung up on the fils de pute. Stood there in the glass-walled booth, which bore an unnerving resemblance to the chambers built by my father in the film, in which inanimate objects and living things had been caused to disappear and reappear—and I wept. Help me, help me, the creature had begged. Trapped. Wound in strings of proteinaceous silk. A spider three times its size advancing along the radials of the web. Help me. And the police inspector had lifted a rock the size of a cantaloupe and crushed the whole tableau of horror.
MY MOTHER, SCREAMING
It is now so perfectly and painfully obvious to me that the face was my father’s: sunken, moldy, gray in pallor, muscles twisted into an unprecedented mask of disbelief. But his face. I can see that now. Back then, a boy of nine, I couldn’t: I did not recognize him, so changed was he, or my mind would not allow me to recognize, or it would, but I felt the sense of recognition must be faulty, because a fly with a human head was one thing, but a fly with my father’s head was something else entirely … What I do know is: I ran from that place, away from the farmstead and the willow tree and across the meadow and finally through the woods into the familiar realm of our manicured lawn and pruned shrubs, panting with the same combination of fear and relief I felt when waking from a nightmare.
I crept into the kitchen.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 23