by Tim Davys
“You may believe what you want to,” said Sam bitterly.
“I believe you,” said Eric. “But it still sounds unbelievable.”
“It’s just that…oh, what the hell, you have seen things before…” said Tom-Tom, swallowing his third biscuit. “The kinds of things you’ve told us about. Hell’s dragons and colors and…you know…those sort of frigging…roller-coaster rides.”
Sam put on a wounded expression. The white and black rings that made his eyes seem bigger than they were reinforced his innocence, and the corners of his eyes glistened as though from tears. He put his head to one side and stroked his broken horn.
“I hadn’t taken anything for several hours. At least,” he whined. “That is really narrow-minded. Believe me, after all the years that I’ve used a little…extra stimulation…you learn to see the difference between reality and fantasy. It’s only in reality that my little energizers run out.”
“No, damn it,” Tom-Tom now tried to take back what he’d said, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s clear as hell that I believe you. It’s just…no…damn it, then, I believe you.”
The crow’s words subsided in a silence that might be called reflective. Snake broke the silence.
“It’s not implausible,” he said, wriggling up onto the kitchen table.
They all looked at him with a certain surprise. Up till then Snake had sat silently, weighing arguments for and against. Finally he’d made his decision, and this despite his contempt for the gazelle, which he no longer concealed.
“Apart from the fact that there only remains a sliver of credibility in our little gazelle, who seems to do whatever it takes to get a little attention from our straight-backed lead bear,” Snake began with venomous irony, whereupon protests were heard around the table, “it’s not at all implausible. One might say that it’s actually just the opposite: rather obvious. Chauffeurs and Deliverymen are only different sides of the same coin. It’s so foolishly predictable that it’s amazing no one has uncovered them before. In addition, from the perspective of the authorities, it’s rational. One contract, one garage, one rent…”
“…and one transfer!” said Eric.
The thought struck him when he had his guard down. He got up from the chair with such force that it fell to the floor.
“The lists,” he said, without even noticing Snake’s irritation at being yet again interrupted in the midst of a lengthy statement. “I know how they handle the Cub List at the ministry. How the transfer itself takes place. Are you imagining that there really is a Death List, and that it’s delivered at the same time?”
Sam nodded enthusiastically.
“Darling, that doesn’t sound improbable at all,” he said.
“I don’t really flipping get it,” said Tom-Tom.
He was still hungry, but didn’t want to take more biscuits as there were only three left.
“But it’s…”
“What?” asked Snake.
“It’s today.”
Eric nodded without anyone understanding what he meant. Since the four of them had shut themselves up in the apartment at Yiala’s Arch, none of them had been concerned about what day it was. The nights had come, the days had passed, at a more and more ominous pace.
“It’s the sixteenth today,” said Eric. “And it’s on the sixteenth that the transfer takes place.”
He was so agitated he was shaking.
“That’s this evening!” he repeated.
“Is he talking about that frigging Cub List now?”
Tom-Tom put the question right out into the room.
“It’s about both lists,” said Sam. “I think.”
“But we don’t know that,” said Tom-Tom Crow, mostly to make the matter clear to himself. “Eric knows what they do with the Cub List, but if it’s the same frigging way with the Death List? We don’t know that, do we?”
“It’s this evening,” Eric repeated to himself.
“Finally we’re getting out of here,” said Snake.
TWILIGHT, 3
When the sun sank behind the horizon and the last breath of daylight colored the sky dark pink and dull red, when the Evening Storm was at hand and could be sensed in the bushes and the crowns of the trees, sometimes he felt ill at ease, reminded of forces that were beyond his control. Then he fled deep down under the ground, to the catacombs that had been constructed by long-forgotten generations, to which the light of day would never reach. There he might wander around and marvel at these endless passageways and crypts where secret societies had held their meetings, where business deals were struck, and where secrets were buried for all time. Deeper and deeper down under the earth he went along a route that wound through the very bedrock, lit up only by the torch he brought with him. The air became damper and damper, full of earth and stone dust; the chill caused him to shake and feel at home. When he’d walked for over a half hour he reduced his pace. It was getting hard to breathe, and he rationed his oxygen. The system of tunnels was several miles long; neither he nor anyone else knew its full extent; it had been built, extended, and added onto for hundreds of years; there wasn’t just one but many architects, and a map would never be drawn. Everyone in the city knew about the tunnels, but there weren’t many who knew how to find an entrance. He himself knew of two, but it was maintained that there were ten of them. He’d investigated a few kilometers in each direction from his starting points, but he didn’t want to go farther than that. It wasn’t necessary, either.
A few meters after the tunnel had become so narrow that he was forced to crouch, it divided in three directions. He took the middle route, a broad but low passage which after ten or so meters came to an end in a small crypt. He extended the torch in front of him and lit up the wall. From out of the ground a cat’s head was sticking up.
“Boo,” he said.
The cat didn’t react. He extended the torch closer to the cat’s eyes, and the cat’s left eyelid seemed to jerk weakly.
Fascinating, he thought.
He’d buried the cat thirteen days earlier, and there was still life in it. He could of course have buried the cat’s head as well, but he was interested to see what would happen. Presumably the loose-tongued cat that had tattled to Dove would never die, but instead live down here in an eternity of eternities. He was not alone in wondering what really happened after the Chauffeurs fetched you.
Soon enough he would see, he thought drily.
He turned around and went back the same way he’d come. He still walked slowly. The chill caused him to move slowly, but it contributed to his thinking swiftly. It didn’t worry him that Eric Bear had succeeded in tracking the Chauffeurs to the hotel down in Yok. Without bothering in the least about the matter, he’d known for a long time that the Chauffeurs camped out at the Esplanade. On the other hand, it made him wary that Nicholas Dove had paid a visit to Sam Gazelle’s apartment the other day. The harder Dove pressed, the greater the risk that the bear would be forced to become truly creative. And Dove was an opponent who couldn’t be defeated without the type of repeated, much-discussed confrontations that he especially disliked.
He stopped. Had he heard a neighing behind him? Was it the cat who had managed to pull itself together for a small sound? He stood dead quiet, listening. Then it was heard again, the growling from his own belly. He smiled. He was hungry.
When he came back up out of the catacombs, the sun had gone down and darkness had overtaken the sky. This was a relief. He felt starved, and decided to visit one of the cafés open in the evening which had spread across the city like weeds the last few years. He didn’t like to move about openly on the streets, he avoided that as often as possible. Before it hadn’t felt like that at all, but now he’d become furtive. There were occasions, however, like this evening, when he made exceptions to the rule.
He regretted it the moment he stepped into the café. He thought everyone was looking at him, and he quickly sank down into a booth far inside the place. He ordered pancakes, syrup, and coffe
e, knowing it was unhealthy, but hunger conquered good sense.
Thank heavens for Snake Marek, he thought. Services and counterservices. Manipulations and promises. With Marek on the scene as a mole quite near the bear, he in any case didn’t need to worry that something would happen that he wouldn’t find out about.
They would never get anywhere.
Then the pancakes came to the table and he lost interest in Eric Bear and the Death List.
HYENA BATAILLE
Worse than pain, worse than treachery and beatings. Worse than the most intense anxiety or the most dreadful humiliation; worse than all of this is cursed memory. Days on end can go by, then the clouds draw in over the city, the sky darkens, and rain dampens the wrecked cars around the place where I live: large raindrops that indolently settle onto mangled metal car bodies. Then the past forces its way through the membrane of time, in the empty hole in my chest a heart is pulsing anew. And when I awaken and everything around me is refuse and putrefaction, the collision between then and now is violent. It causes me to lose my breath. This cursed Garbage Dump was my destiny long before I came here.
I met Nicole Fox through an editor at the publishing house—I don’t recall his name. I still hadn’t published my first book; my collection of poems, to which I’d given the title approach…honeysuckle, would be coming out the following week and I was already scared to death about its reception. I don’t know if what frightened me most was the thought of being publicly criticized, or if it would be worse to be passed over in silence. It seemed to me that the looks I encountered everywhere were insidious and scornful and I was on my way to the exit at high speed when I stumbled over Nicole Fox.
She was sitting in an armchair, and her long legs became my deliverance. I fell like a tree, but thank goodness she was the only one who noticed. Together we fled from the place. Nicole became my savior and my deliverance. Life before I met her had been a single long denial, and the poetry collection was the climax of wretchedness. The poems had been written over a period of ten years, and when I locked myself into the cellar of a condemned building in Yok with cigarettes and moonshine alcohol, I didn’t give a thought to tomorrow. I’d pissed on my friends, betrayed my family, and done my best to strip myself of all pride and dignity. It was a wreck who stumbled into that cellar in Yok. I drank to fall asleep. I relieved myself on the floor in a corner of the room, but after a few days I didn’t shit anymore because I didn’t have anything to excrete. It was the pains in my stomach that finally forced me out of that cellar. The poems were finished, I don’t know if they’d been finished for weeks or only for a day or two, but with the manuscript under my arm I made my way up to the street. I cringed in the sunlight, I thought that the wind was ripping and tearing my fur, and I thought everyone I encountered was staring at me. I walked hour after hour with my gaze on the colorful asphalt until I suddenly recognized where I was. I was in Angela’s neighborhood. Because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I knew where she hid the key, I let myself into her empty apartment and managed to eat my way through the major part of the contents of her refrigerator before she came home. When she saw me she screamed like the guenon that she was, and she didn’t stop screaming before I left. I forgot the manuscript on her kitchen table, but didn’t have the energy to go back and fuss about it. The poems weren’t worth it. Out of pure sadism Angela turned the manuscript in to Doomsbury Verlag. The result was that an editor from Doomsbury found me at the Century Bar just over a week later. He paid my tab—that was the condition for me being able to leave the place—and with that, half of my advance for the poems was used up. Out on the street I sobered up enough that I could sign the contract. But I was nonetheless pleased; I would make my debut as a poet.
When my first book of poems was reviewed I’d been living at home with Nicole Fox for the past several days. She smelled of meadow flowers, she knew what I would say before I said it, and she had perfect pitch for when I wanted to be close and when I needed space. I was still a miserable animal without anything to risk, without spine or value, but with every day that I spent with Nicole something was growing inside me. It was self-worth. approach…honeysuckle received an effusively warm reception. Without my understanding it—because I was a fool in heart and soul—it was my living together with Nicole Fox that gave me strength, and not the cane-wielding critics at the daily papers. But I believed that my newly awakened power had to do with the book, and, with Nicole’s enthusiastic approval, I set out into the city to fill my arms with application forms. My life as a paralyzed hyena was over; I was intoxicated by a sense of my own will. Together with my beautiful fox, I sat the entire day and half the night, filling in small squares and writing my name on dotted lines. I applied for grants and jobs, for the first time in my life.
Everything went so fast. After many tough years of life without content, it seemed as though everything happened overnight. A marvelous everyday life emerged together with Nicole Fox. She was living in a roomy two-room apartment in Tourquai, and her neighborhood was a universe that unexpectedly opened itself to me. There was the bakery that sold bread over counters out toward the sidewalk, which is why there was always the aroma of fresh-baked rolls on the street. There was the café at the corner by the park where the milk foam was always shaped into a heart. Nicole and I lived in this idyllic state. The months passed, and finally we were on our way to being caught by grim reality that sent us insistent reminders of telephone, water, and electrical bills. It was then that I got my grant. One day in August, an anonymous, brown envelope from the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Grants was lying on the hallway floor in all modesty. We celebrated that evening with a bottle of champagne, but we had a bad conscience from having been extravagant and skipped breakfast the next morning.
It was a lovely time.
Hindsight’s common sense fills us with the knowledge of that which was, and that which is to come. But you have to be loyal to your younger self. What I did then, I could not have done better.
It took time to gather together the sequel to my first collection of poems. I was filled with life: I had begun not just one but two degree programs, one whose purpose was to complement the sorts of things I had gone without, and a second in order to go further in life. The poems I wrote became short and empty, light as air and just as transient. Nicole read them, and, without taking the enjoyment from me, she was definite in her criticism. Between the first collection and the happy verses I was squeezing out of me there was now a chasm. This chasm, said my wise fox, was considerably more interesting than the verses at hand.
We got married. I had no expectations about the ceremony itself. I was neither a believer nor an atheist, I didn’t have time to invite either relatives or friends, and yet I felt so proud that I was about to burst. In a little pavilion in Parc Clemeaux where the Afternoon Weather struck drumrolls against the roof, such that the deacon was forced to raise his voice: there I wed Nicole Fox. It felt like I made her my property, and I was ashamed of that feeling. We had dinner at a nice restaurant on Rue Dalida, and then Nicole fell asleep, worn out, at midnight. I sat up writing without interruption. It became a long suite of poems about hes and shes. The words dripped with self-loathing and shame over my sex, but I had no idea where all these feelings came from. Later, attentive readers would understand that there was something affected about this collection, whereupon I became very upset. But the poems were good. Nicole read them when I was finished the following evening, and she congratulated me for having found the way out that I had unconsciously sought. Here I had a worthy successor to approach…honeysuckle.
Book number two received respectful treatment as well. By this time I had finished my basic courses and had just begun doctoral studies in comparative literature. The book became the starting point for a debate about genre which I lost interest in after the first article. I applied for a new grant with the Ministry of Culture, and when I got the money, Nicole and I began to think in earnest about having cubs.
We
decided to be just as wise and organized in becoming parents as we had been impulsive and passionate in our two-someness. I immediately began to plan for my next book, and at the same time applied for yet another grant. Along with the miserable compensation I got from the Comparative Literature Department, we could get by on the money. We applied to the Cub List.
The third collection didn’t offer the same birth pangs at all as the second had, and my stern, wise fox confirmed what I felt myself. Something new was in the process of being born in my writing career, something grander and more original than I had accomplished before. With every day our application for a cub climbed up the long waiting list, and poem was added to poem without the quality going down. Nicole observed the connection as obvious.
Then my life was crushed. The annihilation was meticulous and definitive. During the years to come I would curse the day I forgot the manuscript on Angela’s kitchen table, the evening I stumbled over Nicole Fox’s legs; if I hadn’t learned what happiness was, it could never have been taken away from me. And it all depended on a single animal. Snake Marek.
I didn’t even know he existed. During the entire humiliating and drawn-out process that was my case, I didn’t know that Snake Marek existed. I found that out much later, by chance; it’s not interesting and doesn’t add anything to the story. The important thing is what he did. The decisive thing is the way in which he sat deep inside the dark culvert of the Ministry of Culture, letting bitterness ooze out of every stitch of his insignificant body. With my first two poetry collections I had passed his Argus eyes, but the third time my application forms were on his desk he caught sight of me. And for some reason that spiteful reptile decided to crush me. One day I received a letter saying that my grant money would not be coming. A new decision had been made, it read, and it had been decided to freeze my grant “for the time being.”