by Dyrk Ashton
Fi slings her backpack on, stomps to the door, but when she turns back she can’t help but smile at the sight of Mrs. Mirskaya singing, playing and swaying away behind the counter. Fi waves. “Spasibo! (Thank you)! See you in a few days!”
The woman who played nurse-maid, mentor and practically mother to Fi over the not-so-many years nods and does a theatrical little turn.
Halfway up the block, Fi can still hear her sonorous voice and the piping chords of the bayan.
* * *
The sun continues to hold its own, pressing a gap of flawless blue sky between cottony clouds. Fi steps along the sidewalk, enjoying its warmth and light. The lovely weather does little to smarten the stark city streets in this area of town, with their cracked concrete, heaving asphalt, abandoned brick buildings and chain link fences embedded with soiled white litter. The passing of an occasional car, a few ratty-looking sparrows flitting by, and stalks of sickly weeds are the only signs of life on this quiet Sunday morning.
A few blocks ahead is St. Augustine’s, the hospital where Fi works. The six-story building of caramel-colored brick was once a YMCA, shuttered in the 1980s. A few years ago it was renovated by a corporation that operates several hospitals in the area with a considerable grant from an enigmatic philanthropic group called The October Foundation. The grant, which amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, came with the stipulation that it be used to create a long term care facility for elderly patients who are both indigent and suffering mental illness. Peter, the old man Fi spends most of her time with, meets both criteria.
She began working at the hospital three months ago, thanks to an internship program between St. Augustine’s and the university’s medical campus. Peter was discovered on the front steps her very first day, his only identification a torn slip of paper that read Peter, pinned to his shabby baby-blue bathrobe. Fi had gone outside to help bring him in, and though he was practically catatonic, lying there in his old-fashioned night-cap and matted pink slippers, for one brief moment he looked right at her. A smile crept across his gaunt wrinkled face and he inexplicably said, “There you are!” He hasn’t spoken anything quite so coherent since.
The doctors chalked Peter’s condition up to “severely impaired global cognitive faculty.” Dementia, in other words. He was relegated to the north hall of the fifth floor where untreatable patients are sent to wait out the end of their days.
Fi hadn’t given up on him, though. Zeke has been a great help too, and Big Billy, an orderly at the hospital. It was Zeke who found out that Peter had an affinity for the song “Greensleeves,” and Billy discovered his infatuation with the stars. But it’s Fi whom Peter relates to the most, if you could call it that, and she who brings him flowers and figs.
In her first week, she was making rounds with one of the doctors and they checked on Peter in his room. Amidst his usual incoherent mumblings she thought she heard him say “flowers and figs,” over and over. She figured, what the hell, I’ll give it a shot, and brought him daisies and the sweet little fruit from Mrs. Mirskaya’s market the next time she came to work. The response was extraordinary. Even the doctors took notice. Peter actually clapped his withered hands--quite an accomplishment for him--and held the daisies under his nose all day. Which is kind of funny, since daisies smell like ass. Since then, Fi’s been assigned to Peter every time she works. Every once in awhile he smiles when she arrives. Those are the best days.
Most of the time she just walks him through his various therapy sessions, makes sure he eats something and sits with him while he watches TV (though what’s happening on the screen doesn’t seem to register). She reads to him too. Anything will do, even medical journals, which she borrows from the doctor’s lounge. Sometimes she’ll sit next to him and just flip through the pages while he stares at them. The faster she turns them the more he seems to like it. Something about the repetitious movement appeals to him, she guesses, because he certainly can’t be getting anything else out of it. The patients have no computer access, but she occasionally sneaks him into an empty office and clicks through screens for him, surfing the web. If he perks up, she’ll follow certain threads. Some of it’s important stuff, news, world events, science, but mostly they watch music videos and stupid human tricks on YouTube. A lot of the time, when they’re alone, she just talks to him, telling him random stuff about her day, school, even boys, and Uncle Edgar. She senses he might be most interested then, as much as he is capable.
Fi waits for a TARTA bus to pass and crosses the street. Her thoughts return to Zeke, like restless fingers to a fresh bruise. She’s been attracted to him since she first laid eyes on him, playing his guitar in the hospital rec room. She’d catch him watching her sometimes, too, but for a long time she was unable to form words when he was near. She’s convinced all the women want him. Of course they do. He’s hot!
But he’s more than that. The kind of guy who listens to you. Really listens. And with him, she gets the feeling that what you see is what you get. No bullshit. There’s still a mysterious air about him, though. And a sadness, she thinks, though he handles it well. Unlike I do mine.
Only in the last couple of weeks have the two of them had any semblance of a real conversation--about music, his six months overseas as a volunteer relief worker, the paper he’s working on for the conference, sometimes Peter, but mostly about a whole lot of nothing important--which is nice, actually. Last week she finally bit the bullet and hinted they ought to go to dinner. Zeke looked stunned, then smiled and she felt like her feet would leave the ground. Last night after dinner it was she who suggested they get some wine and go to his place. He’s old enough to buy it, even if she isn’t. Third date, right?
I was too pushy! she suddenly blames herself--It’s all my fault!--then she counters--Stop torturing yourself! This is for the best, really!--Really?--Really!!!
There is something special about Zeke, though. She just can’t put her finger on it. It’s like an invisible string connects them, tied to something inside her--but that something is numb. She feels the tug, but what it’s tugging at she doesn’t know. She’s convinced, as cliché as it sounds, that when her mother died, something died in her as well. Her heart just doesn’t work like it should. It would make her sad if she allowed herself to dwell on it. Hell, she might be perfectly normal. Everybody might feel the way she does, all the time. But somehow she doubts it.
A voice comes to her, a pleasing lyrical tenor singing on the warm breeze. She looks up from the sidewalk and slows. The hospital is just ahead on her right, but a homeless man she’s never seen before sits hunched against the building between the corner and the entrance, the unlikely source of the sweet melody. If she crosses the street to avoid him she’ll just have to come right back, swipe her card at the door and make sure security sees her through the camera before they buzz her in. All the while he’ll glare at her, beg, say rude things or try to break her heart with some sad story. If he’s a decent guy, she’d make him feel ashamed. She resolves to continue on her present course and hand him some change.
As she comes closer, she hears the words of the song:
“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,
I dunno why, she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she’ll die!”
This guy looks bad even for a vagrant, and weird, in striking contrast to his beautiful singing voice. He’s small and stout, sitting with his back against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, in gray trousers and black boots. He wears a tattered vest under a gray woolen jacket but he has two more coats, one black, the other gray like the first, with the arms tied around his waist. His clothes are sullied with ground-in dirt and God knows what else. The strangest thing, though, are his sunglasses--not just one pair, but four--each placed above the other from the bridge of his flat snotty nose on up over the brim of his grimy stocking cap. Each pair is a different size and style but all have reflective yellow lenses. He holds a torn cardboard sign with the nonsense Will Eat For Food scratched in what l
ooks like dried blood.
The little hobo grins at her. His face is crusted in filth. Slaver froths on his lips, drips from his moldy teeth, runs down the forked and twisted beard that juts from his chin.
“There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
It wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her...”
Then the smell hits her. Working with the elderly and indigent in the hospital, she knows the sour odor people can have when they’re really bad off. Rot and infection, shit and death. But this guy is rank in a different way, like a corpse or rotting fish, or a corpse in a pile of rotting fish. Fighting the urge to retch, she tries not to breathe as she digs in her pocket for change.
“Here ya go,” she says hurriedly as she holds out the money, trying not to open her mouth any more than she has to in a futile effort to keep out the stench.
Still grinning, the homeless man completes the verse.
“She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
But I dunno why, she swallowed that fly...”
He reaches with his wretched right hand. It’s caked in black crud, and the last two fingers are missing.
“Perhaps she’ll die!”
At that moment a chill wind buffets Fi, and it occurs to her that the sun is gone. That fast. Just gone. She glances skyward to see black storm clouds tumbling in. She drops the coins into the man’s palm.
“Thankee, missy, thankee,” his voice creaks. “What be your name?”
Fi feels fixed by his gaze, even though she can’t see his eyes through his sunglasses. Disturbing, profane, violating her, body and soul. She doesn’t answer.
“Some folks,” he says with a leer, “they call me Max.”
And the rain hits, icy cold, which comes as a shock in itself, but then thunder cracks, startling the hell out of her. She turns to run to the hospital door and the portico that promises cover--but the man’s three-fingered hand clamps onto her wrist.
The coins he’s dropped bounce, tinkle and spin on the freshly wetted concrete.
CHAPTER NINE
Order of the Bull 3
The gate to the secret elevator rises. A slab of stone slides aside, revealing a wide lamplit hallway running to the right and left. The three young monks remove their shoes while Tanuki exits, but stay timidly where they are until Tanuki bows and invites them in. “Welcome to our humble abode.”
Down the hall to the right are Tanuki’s, The Rhino’s, and The Bull’s personal chambers, as well as The Bull’s private library, and a vault--their personal armory--but Tanuki leads the monks to the left. They hear low voices ahead. Tanuki motions for them to wait. He sets his backpack down, pads quietly to the end of the hall and listens.
The voices coming from the next room are the calm clear baritone of Asterion, and the agitated, rough bass of Arges. This is a conversation Tanuki has heard before. Arges can be quite single-minded and the subject is close to his heart, one that has made him prone to periods of depression of late.
They aren’t speaking in Turkish, but Minoan, the language of ancient Crete. They tend to use it when in private conversation, even when they’re entirely alone. Tanuki understands the words with ease.
“Only two hundred and seventy-five remain,” Arges grumbles. “Just two hundred and seventy-five, of an entire species.”
“It is unfortunate, of course,” Asterion replies, “but we’ve seen it countless times. Species come and go.”
“But these are Sumatran Rhinoceros,” Arges retorts, “direct descendants of my mother’s kind. They are my brothers and sisters.”
“Tanuki and I are your brothers as well, and this is a journey from which you could possibly never return. What will you do, wait in the woods for poachers, then jump out with a roar and scare them away?”
“I will smash them! Pop their skulls like grapes!”
“Then what? Do you believe for a moment you would fool anyone by cloaking yourself in human form? An enormous hulk of a man with one eye, wearing a horned helmet? Would you hide behind a tree? Cloak as a boulder in the tall grass? Run away? The watoto have eyes in orbit, surveillance equipment of types we have not encountered in all our lives. They would acquire your image on digital cameras and share them with the world. They would hunt you down, and they would capture you.”
“Let them try!” Arges snaps back. “At least I would cause a ruckus, bring much needed attention to this travesty!”
Asterion tries a different approach. “If your existence were to become publicly known, the last thing any mtoto would be thinking about are a few wild rhinoceros.”
Arges harrumphs.
“They may not be able to kill you,” Asterion asserts, “but it’s possible, with the technology they have today. Worse, perhaps, they might not kill you. They have cages, bunkers, that perhaps even you cannot escape. What then? Experiments? Maybe you would be put on display. I can see the headlines now, ‘The Cyclops Lives.’ Only not in the Enquirer this time, but on the covers of Time Magazine, National Geographic, scientific journals. You would undoubtedly be questioned by some diabolical method that may be impossible to resist. Have you considered what trouble this could cause for the rest of us remaining Firstborn?”
Arges’s voice loses its emphatic tone. “It’s our fault, you know.”
“Yes. In a way, it is.”
Tanuki wonders, what would the watoto think of Arges if they caught him? What would they really do to him? Tanuki isn’t overly concerned, however. Asterion’s level-headed logic will prevail, as always. It never stops Arges from arguing, though. He likes it, and Asterion humors him. These two have been friends for a very long time and lived through much together. They know exactly how to deal with each other, to placate--and how to push each other’s buttons.
Tanuki also has something in his purse he hopes will help, paperwork formalizing the creation of a non-profit organization for the preservation of wild rhinoceros, funded by Tanuki and Asterion to the tune of three hundred million U.S. dollars. A contact from Istanbul surreptitiously passed it to him at the bazaar this morning. Tanuki will present it to Arges today. He can hardly wait.
From around the corner comes the defeated voice of Arges. “What have rhinos ever done to anyone?”
“Nothing, brother, nothing,” is Asterion’s simple but sympathetic reply.
Tanuki hears Arges shuffle across the floor. He takes his cue and waves the monks to him.
Tanuki enters the main chamber, the young monks in tow. This is the area of the Lair of the Bull where Tanuki, Asterion and Arges spend most of their time during the day. “Chamber” is hardly the right word for it, though. It’s a cavernous hall, 60 feet wide and 300 feet long, with a forty foot high barrel vault ceiling, carved into the living limestone of the mountain, polished smooth. Doric columns line the walls. Between each is mounted a lit gas lantern.
Tanuki steers the monks to the right, where a stone counter partially separates the hall from the kitchen where Tanuki prepares their one meal each day. He bids them to place their parcels in front of the counter and enters the kitchen.
Arges has been cooking, he notices, setting down his backpack. Fumbling my fine cookware with his big fat finger-stumps. Asterion also prepares meals on occasion, but he never leaves paprika spilled on the counter, a tipped salt shaker, containers askew on the shelves and open on the counter, or burnt rice stuck to the bottom of a pan on the gas stove. Asterion would never burn rice in the first place. At least Arges turned off the stove this time.
The monks have everything neatly piled and stacked when Tanuki steps back around the counter and are anxiously adjusting their robes and straightening their sashes. Tanuki looks them over. They gaze back expectantly, show visible relief when he smiles and nods. Tanuki retrieves a rolled carpet from a stack and they follow him into the main hall, straight and proper, bare feet padding on the polished floor.
The hall is sparsely decorated, the scant furniture made of the same stone as the hall itself, including the sets of free-standi
ng shelves of books and pottery arranged in a sensible manner to “break up” the vast expanse of floor. There are only a few chairs, but here and there are low stone tables of various sizes with cushions lining each side, and Turkish carpets piled with pillows.
Asterion sculpted all of the furniture, as well as the hall itself, which he cut from a mere crack of a cave when he first came to this place so long ago. It isn’t austere, but there aren’t a lot of frills, either. It’s clean, organized, practical, solid, strong, and balanced, just like Asterion himself. The open layout was chosen for more than aesthetic reasons. Having to move around indoors with horns on one’s head was also taken into consideration.
A third of the way to the end of the hall, on the right-hand side, is a large hearth with an arched mantle. Another third of the way down, on the opposite side, is an identical hearth. Natural gas fires blaze in both. Heat and cold have little effect on Firstborn, but Asterion likes the ambience.
Opposite the furthest hearth, a hulking black figure crouches over something on the floor near the right hand wall. Tanuki makes straight for it. He can sense the nervous excitement of the monks behind him. Even the High Priests and Abbottess see Asterion very rarely, and the rest only once a year, in early May, when he comes down and addresses all of them for about fifteen minutes, then disappears back into his Lair. Very few are ever admitted into the Lair itself. A week ago a lottery had been drawn so that those who would accompany Tanuki to The Bull’s chambers after the bazaar would be chosen fairly. The high priests and house staff didn’t enter the drawing, leaving it open only to those who might otherwise never see Asterion’s quarters. The monks trailing Tanuki are the three who won. They can barely contain themselves. It wouldn’t surprise Tanuki if they peed their robes.