Not to steal another hen but to see if I’d truly stolen the first one. If three hens were in the refrigerator, I’d know it had all been a daydream. But one was missing. As I stood there, staring at the pale yellow bodies, Emma came out of nowhere to grasp the collar of my shirt. Then she took me by the ear and marched me into the sitting room, where my mother was displayed upon a settee holding a fashion magazine.
“Here he is, madame.”
My mother did not remove her reading glasses, the thick black frames of which obscured her face as an ecliptic moon obscures the sun: All around the edges burned a dangerous corona of beauty.
“Did you take one of the hens, Philippe?”
I didn’t answer. And when she next asked why I would do such a thing, Emma began to say I did it, along with so many other nasty things, merely to spite her—at which point my mother ordered her to shut her mouth and sent me to bed without supper. That was five o’clock. About four hours passed. My stomach an empty hole. It seemed I couldn’t possibly fall asleep, but the song of the crickets, like a round with an infinite number of parts, must have lulled me, and I was dreaming that a man the size of an insect was mating with a mantis, the insect turning its head and biting into the head of the man and beginning to consume the skull and brains, when someone screamed.
I started awake and again she screamed. I had never heard my mother scream, but I knew it was she—and I knew where she was.
Underground.
In the basement. Behind the metal door of the laboratory.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAW
It was evidently the contention of Clavell and Neumann that a boy of nine will sleep through a barrage of cries so loud and shrill as to shatter glass and curdle blood. Or perhaps the creative team did not wish to bother with the dramatic implications caused by my cognizance of the fact that something had frightened my mother that night and frightened her terribly. In either case, any picture of me at the time of the screaming was omitted. I was not shown lying in my bed, eyes open but body unable to move, hearing Emma saying, “Madame? Madame?” And my mother, racked with sobs, choking out commands, “Leave me alone, go to bed, mind your own affairs.” “I’ll phone the police,” Emma said. (Less an offer of assistance than a threat.) Something made of glass (the vase in the hallway, I guessed) smashing. (Had my mother thrown it?) “How dare you,” she was shouting. “You old bitch. If you touch that telephone …” While I lay paralyzed. Staring out the window of my room, the lower sash of which was raised to let in the cool night air.
In the distance, a moon nearly full. Close by, clinging to the crosshatch of the screen, a luna moth larger than the moon.
I did not sleep again that night. Or if I did, I dreamed I was awake and watching that white circle of moon advance like the ticking of time from one quadrant of the window to another and finally out of view.
What had happened in the basement?
The actress playing my mother—Patricia Owens, the nadir of whose film career would soon come in the form of a low-budget wartime melodrama titled Seven Women from Hell—descended into the underworld of our home with a tray of dinner. Knocked on the laboratory door. It was opened. And there was my father. Wearing the usual attire (beige lab coat, dark trousers, shoes) and something odd too: a black shroud over his head. He took a sheet of paper from a typewriter. My mother read the message silently. Yet through the miracle of non-diegetic sound it is possible to hear the words echoing in her mind: There are things man should never experiment with … Now I must destroy myself. She won’t hear of it. Well, one thing leads to another, which leads finally to the pulling of the shroud from his head—and what is to be seen there on my father’s shoulders but a monstrous version of the very head that belonged on the fly I had captured: two bulbous compound eyes, and, in place of a human mouth and tongue, a proboscis and a pair of maxillary palpi, twitching. She screams. Once, twice, three times—while I lay in bed, as if paralyzed, staring at the moon and the moth.
HOW I ATTEMPTED TO SAVE THE SPECIES
I have no doubt that my mother saw him that night. She saw what her husband had become. Screamed and quite possibly lost consciousness from the shock. But according to Messrs. Clavell and Neumann, the next day was one of frantic searching. Searching for flies. In particular, one with a white head. My “mother,” they contend, was practically histrionic in her urgency, rushing about the house every time she heard an insect wingbeat or saw a tiny dark dot move in her field of vision, throwing herself finally in despair upon a bench in the garden, saying, “Oh, God. Please don’t.”
Inaccurate.
In fact, ma mère (this should come as no surprise) was one of the myriad upper-middle-class housewives of the era who blurred the lines of her daily sorrows with a tranquilizer called Mebaral. That morning, as I sat in the kitchen waiting for breakfast, she was lying on her still-made bed, fully clothed, dead to the world.
“You heard last night,” Emma said to me.
I shrugged.
“What a family you have. Father a madman and mother a junkie. To think that my dear Jean-Luc gave his life for this country, froze and drowned in the Atlantic …” And so on, as she set before me a plate containing two purposely undercooked eggs and a deliberately burned piece of toast.
“I hate you,” I said.
“The feeling is mutual, you little son of a whore.”
I turned the plate over on the table and walked out the door with my insect net. Through the garden I went, through the copse of trees and into the meadow, half laughing, half crying, knowing I could never understand them, my mother and father: the things they did alone in secret, all that happened privately between them.
In the distance, the farmhouse, the barn, the willow tree were like an old painting in a frame.
At first, unable to descry it, I thought it had escaped or disappeared like the hallucination it had always been. But no. The creature was there: in the shadow under the bent wing of the hen.
Sick.
The flesh of the face gray and wrinkled. Nearly all the hair fallen out of the head. The human part had aged a lifetime overnight. In the bloated, tearful eyes, I could read the fear of death. The mouth was trying to express something, but the power of speech had been lost. No sound emerging, only a trickle of drool. For a long time, I sat under the tree, trying to think. Ants filed in and out of a volcano-shaped hill of sand. Blue mud wasps sparked in the air around a nest grown tumorous from an eave of the barn. Finally, a pair of damselflies (not dragonflies; I knew the difference) drifted along the edge of the meadow. Joined in the air. In a configuration known as a mating wheel.
For the very first time, my mind posed the question: How could this thing have come to be?
Part human, part insect.
Not that way. At the age of nine, I could not imagine the means by which normal human beings were made, much less … No, there was only one explanation. A mystery species. Creature of myth, like the centaurs and the mermaids. A feeling—clear despite the limits of my experience—overcame me: responsibility. A few steps into the meadow, I found the game hen, more or less where I had thrown it the night before: the meat stripped off by some carnivore, the bones heaped and twisted, over which flies unnumbered had gathered in a dark cloud. With a single drop of my net, I caught nearly a dozen, and through a careful conjunction of net and tank was able to create the conditions necessary for sexual reproduction.
HOW MY FATHER DIED THE FIRST TIME
My father had made his own world in the basement. Rarely did he join us in ours. He used a toilet off a corridor accessible only from the lab, and he kept a cot in the lab too, near the floor-to-ceiling core memory and control panels of the supercomputer. At mealtimes, Emma would descend with a tray of food and leave it outside the metal door. But that night, I was the one who brought Father dinner, because Emma had abandoned us (having left a note on the kitchen table that read: You can all go
to hell—especially the boy) and Maman was half-unconscious on her bed, her head flopping to and fro in lazy defiance, murmuring, “I won’t live like this, I won’t.” I wasn’t sure what to do. He was accustomed to meat, potatoes, and a vegetable. In the refrigerator, I found ham from two nights prior and a bunch of raw carrots; in the cupboard, white bread and a bag of potato chips. I arranged it all on the silver platter and covered it with the matching cloche and poured a glass of milk and carried down the tray. At the metal door, I summoned all the bravery in me and said: “Father.”
And waited. And hearing no response, somehow closed one hand in a fist and struck the knuckles twice against the door, saying: “There’s no maid anymore, Father. But I brought some dinner. It isn’t much, but … I’ll leave it—”
The room was kept secure with hardware that might have come from a medieval dungeon. I heard the crossbar sliding through the brace. Yet, for a few long segments of time, the dark iron door remained closed—as if he were giving me a chance to escape. But I didn’t move. I stood in place until the door cracked open, then swung inward to reveal him standing there, head and neck covered with a black shroud, one arm thrust into the deep pocket of his lab coat—and, behind him, the room in ruins. The consoles and index-register displays of the computers had been smashed, one of the mainframes fallen like a toppled monolith, and papers, thousands of pages of typewritten reports, handwritten notes, and diagrams, teleprints of numbers—the encyclopedic chronicles of a man’s dreams and his plans for their realization—disarrayed.
Years later, I would watch on the screen of a cathode-ray television my mother, in a kind of trance, assist him in the destruction of himself. But it was not she whom my father asked for help.
Trembling, his right hand (a human one) reached out for the tray of food, and as it did so, the other arm—the left one, the extremity of which had been heretofore concealed—reacted with a violent spasm, and the hand, which was no hand, emerged … I found myself on the cot. A feeling of waking up only to realize one is still dreaming. I glimpsed him. Across the room. Head covered by the shroud. The appendage hidden again. Upon my chest, a sheet of vellum stationery:
SON IF YO LOV ME HELP ME
I must have looked up at him then. Must have said: I love you, Father. And followed him. Though I cannot recall walking across the street to the factory. The next thing I remember is the switchboard: standing before it, staring at it: the pressure gauge (set at fifty tons), the safety switch (in the off position), the counter (set for one stroke), and the red button. The downstroke button. At which my father had motioned after adjusting the controls. To which he had pointed with emphasis before going to the machine and laying himself out upon the metal base. The button I was to push.
Which I pushed.
What then commenced I did not believe. A part of the machine, a second slab of metal, equal in size to the base but positioned several feet above it, started to move: downward. If my eyes were seeing anything real, my father was about to die before them. But none of it could be real. A hand could not be not a hand, any more than the head on my father’s body could be not his head. Which it wasn’t. An impossibility I perceived when the shroud slipped away as he thrashed about on the bed of the press as the slide plate gradually came down and the space between plate and base diminished, until soon the plate was touching the body and finally compacting it, breaking the bones, rupturing the organs, and causing that head (which was not his) to burst open like the bud of a fantastical flower.
ENTREZ, MON ONCLE
In Neumann’s film, my uncle is portrayed by the iconic actor Vincent Price, famous for macabre roles in midcentury cinematic adaptations of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. It is, I suppose, purely coincidental that Price played Thomas De Quincey in the 1962 production of Confessions of an Opium Eater. Still, my late uncle’s later dependence upon a synthetic version of that drug has always seemed to me an effect caused by the earlier filmic actions of a man with whom I can’t help but conflate him in my mind’s eye. It is only with some effort that I recall my true uncle. Not a fiendishly debonair bachelor with arched eyebrows and a tapered pencil mustache, but a man with the pure face and white-streaked Van Dyke beard of a cabinet minister from the olden days. Which is not to say I had any trust in (or affection for) him. I didn’t. I dreaded his visits, marked as they were by secretive conferences with Maman behind the closed doors of the library and stiff, wordless dinners for which my father refused to interrupt his work …
In the middle of the night, he arrived. Not alone. In a black sedan that I understood instantly to be in the service of the Sûreté du Québec. Once it had parked in the drive, and the three men who had exited it had started toward the front door, I climbed into my bed and pulled the blanket to my chin. And that is where I stayed, with my eyes wide open—thinking of absolutely nothing—until the time I ordinarily arose: between seven o’clock and a quarter thereafter.
“Philippe!”
He was the first to see me—and when he did, he rushed toward the staircase as if to block my passage. Then he did something quite out of character. Went to one knee and took me into an embrace.
“Where’s Maman?” I asked.
“In the library.”
“Why are you here, Uncle?” As he failed to answer, another man, dressed in a gray tweed suit, exited the library. “Who is that?”
“It’s no one, my boy.”
“Where’s Father?”
“Your father. Alors, you see, Philippe—“
I broke away from him and started for the door that led to the basement, shouting, “Father! Father!”
It took two grown men, my uncle and the man in the tweed suit, to stop me at the top of the stairs and hold me down, back to the floor. Another man, whom I recognized, knelt beside me. The family physician, Dr. Ejouté. Whose attempts to reason with me were hopeless. I wouldn’t stop screaming and trying to wrest myself free. Finally, he removed from his black bag the instruments of sedation—a syringe, a hypodermic, and a vial filled with clear liquid—and when the shot was delivered, it was like being stung by a bee or a hornet producing in its glands a venom of forgetfulness.
THE HOLOCAUST
I spent the next month—while the wildflowers bloomed all across the subalpine zones of the land—in a weird daze, with an amnesia for almost everything that had transpired that summer. A nanny was hired, a distant relative from Cape Spear. Little more than a girl. Surely ignorant (as I was) of the fact that my mother was not lying in a sickbed in a sanitorium, but standing trial in a courtroom of the provincial capital, accused of using an industrial hydraulic press to murder her husband … M. Neumann’s film is a case study in factual error. However, in the final minutes, I ask a question that I did ask numerous times in the course of that month: When is Father coming home? For a time, I believed the answers. That he had been very suddenly summoned to a scientific conference in Sweden. That he was still at the conference. Soon, Philippe. Until one day, I surprised myself by saying to the girl who had become the world to me (parent, sibling, friend, even a love insofar as a boy of nine can be in love): “He’s never coming back, Amélie. And neither is Maman.” A few days thereafter, my uncle came to see me, and explained that I was correct. Soon I would go to live with him in Montréal.
July turned into August.
The cicadas grew ever louder: the rasp of their flexing tymbals a sound like that of time and space tearing at the seams.
Suddenly, I found myself in the meadow. In the morning light, the buildings of the old farmstead seemed to have been painted with a fresh coat of blood. I was still a long ways from the willow tree when I heard the sounds, distinct from one another but weirdly intermingled: the buzz of countless wings and a crying of little voices, unnaturally high in pitch, as when a song was played on the hi-fi at too many revolutions per minute … Fifteen years later, I would hear such a voice again—though only one. In the assumption
of Messrs. Clavell and Neumann, there was only ever one, crying for help from a spiderweb in the garden. What they did not know, what no one knew, is what I had done out there on the edge of suburban expansion. I am not sure that I myself knew until I came close enough to see the glass tank … Once, my father had told me of a theory: that a star might collapse at the end of its life cycle and form a region of space from which nothing, not even light, could escape. At first, that was all I could think of. Dark void from which voices were crying for help. Yet wasn’t the blackness in the tank more cloud than hole? I stood in the morning heat, listening. Voices, yes. But not words. Not language. Just meaningless phonations. Closer now. To see that the blackness was not a cloud but an aggregation. Of insects. Hundreds, maybe thousands of flies swarming in the open space of the tank, crawling on its glass walls and upside down on the ceiling of screen, and just as many piled on the floor, dying or long dead. Closer still. To see—you might expect—a humanoid head on every insect body. But the situation was more complicated than that: There were flies with two human heads, headless human torsos with the wings of flies, human heads with one compound insect eye, conjoined twins with two faces, one human and the other insect, on opposite sides of a single head …
For the first time that strange summer, I cried. With my eyes closed and my hands covering my ears.
In the end, I made my way to the barn, where I had seen a red can with a handle and a nozzle. When I picked it up, liquid sloshed around inside. I poured all of it into the tank and threw the can into the weeds. Then got the magnifying glass from my tin box and focused a tiny dot of sunlight on the stew of kerosene and corpses until the fuel reached ignition temperature and combusted. The fire burst in every direction. Against the four walls of glass and up through the screen. Hot enough to singe my hands and to set all the children of the thing I’d caught and all of its children’s children instantaneously aflame. I thought of my father then. Though I still did not see. That these were his progeny and therefore my own brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews: He was the father of everything I was destroying, and I was brother and uncle to each and every victim.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 24