The Isle of Minimus

by MKL Murphy

  The Isle of Minimus

  The Isle

  of Minimus

  MKL Murphy

  “I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.”

  — Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”

  “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

  — James Joyce, Ulysses

  THE MODERNIST CONCRETE PAVILION of the Isle of Minimus was the largest and most imposing of any pavilion at Expo 67, shocking many with the absurd size of the structure and its enormous flag continuously snapping in the wind above a sunken circular area at the pavilion’s outer entrance, where, during the Exposition, the dwarfs would burn unrecognizable effigies of various celebrities who had supposedly offended dwarf culture, then follow this with a grand book-burning on a scale not seen in a quarter-century, throwing armfuls of antinanoidic literature, such as The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist, The Little People by John Christopher, The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, a university press annotated student’s edition of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien into the flames as they danced around them counter-clockwise, chanting ancient ritual dwarf maledictions, flagellating themselves (as part of their complex system of ceremonial magic), and calling on the wrath of a legendary figure known as the Nain Rouge, who, in dwarf folklore, founded the Isle of Minimus long before the Roman invasion of England (which left behind the Channel Islands’ famous community of elephants, supposedly tamed by the Nain Rouge himself), a story obviously contradicted by the more reliable accounts of the Portuguese, who banished nearly all the dwarfs in the late sixteenth century from what scientists believe to be the original dwarf homeland of Flores in modern-day Indonesia, and of the Dutch, who (in the early seventeenth century) drove the dwarfs from their new colony in the nearby city of Bantam and into diaspora out of (an admittedly well-founded) fear that the dwarfs would steal their daughters at night, establishing the hatred many dwarfs felt, even centuries later, for the European colonial powers, especially the Portuguese, whom the dwarfs later named, in English, “long pygmies”, one of the gravest insults in dwarf culture (as dwarfs and pygmies have shared an enmity for thousands of years, recorded as far back as 1000 BC), which was eventually shortened to “long pig”, a term which gained its present denotation of a cannibal’s victim through the French, who recorded one of their priests visiting a Portuguese leper colony on Flores, where the unfortunates, ashamed of this curse their God had apparently cast on them, attributed their condition to the attacks of ravenous man-eating dwarfs hiding in the jungle, much to the amusement of their visitor, who, upon returning to France, found great humor in mocking this transparent lie whenever he spoke of his travels, embellishing the story more and more with each telling, so that parents all over France soon began to threaten disobedient children with a visit from the lepre cannibale, a hideous rotting dwarf who would reach in through the windows at night and spirit them away to be devoured if they would not behave, though this legend of the lepre cannibale did not confine itself to its home country, but eventually made its way to Ireland, where it was corrupted to leprechaun, a slur often screamed by drunken hecklers at Hercule Percepied in lamenting the “distrustworthy” face, the beady eyes, and the sneering muzzle of this famous dwarf tightrope walker, who, in 1989, was chosen to walk a line strung between the Arc de Triomphe and the Arche de la Défense to celebrate the completion of the latter structure, since he was, aside from the much taller but deceptively-named Philippe Petit, France’s only funambule with experience in what the Syndicat de Funambules calls extended-distance travel, his tiny body capable of remaining balanced on the line with such ease that, when he became fatigued from the long walk and a degree of indigestion brought about by the poisson au vin he had cooked up there on a small stove he had carried out in his rucksack, he simply stretched out on his back (while the onlookers in the street below gaped with astonishment) and took a nap, then, awaking half an hour later, continued on his way, stopping here and there to paint a self-portrait, photograph Paris and develop the prints on a Kodak “Portable Darkroom”, compose and perform a one-man comic opera (which, despite its pacing issues and obvious debt to Gilbert and Sullivan, was generally well-received), establish a short-lived sky-worshiping cult made up of fellow Walkers and several mimes on stilts, successfully duel with a Walker known for infiltrating such acts and attempting to usurp the attentions of the crowd with his death-defying antics, and dangle over certain cafes to toast the outdoor diners and ask for more bottles of wine to be passed up in order to satisfy his unchecked alcoholism, which, in 1966, had first begun to take hold, owing to the pressure of the preparations for his first great Walk, planned to extend from the top of a great inverted pyramid called the Katimavik to Habitat 67 (across the river from the main Expo grounds) during the visit of Charles de Gaulle in July, an act that would prove to be the highlight of an illustrious career that spanned over four decades and ended on the day of his promotion to Sergent- Acrobat with a catastrophic chainsaw-juggling routine, which he, having been chosen for this role after winning over much of the crowd during his walk to the Arche de la Défense weeks earlier, performed while crossing drunk between the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse as part of the centennial commemorations of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, culminating in Hercule dropping the chainsaws and killing several of Jean-Michel Jarre’s band members performing below, sending the famous Walker into a spiral of depression, drugs, and gambling, all three of which he found in limitless supply in Las Vegas, where he hid in early 1990, seeking to escape his past (and bizarre allegations that he had deliberately dropped the chainsaws), and spent much of the next decade throwing away his fortune in the most expensive penthouse of the Mirage, which he left only rarely, and only to wander down the early morning streets alone, hoping a mugger would show up and pull a gun on him, then, angered by his refusal to give up his wallet, shoot him dead, fleeing as Hercule’s blood poured out on the pavement, reflecting neon, forming a wildly shimmering halo around his head, like that of a saint in a Byzantine icon, his soul floating up and shimmering too in a million colors that oscillated and ricocheted in the starless sky over groggy tourists staring disbelieving up at him (just as they had before, in his former life) as his light caused an early sunrise over the Strip, flames dripping from his radiant palms and setting fire to the world with his brilliance, a million people cringing in awe and fear, a million luminous faces reflecting his light, though no one ever pointed a gun at him, ever noticed him, aside from the Russian expatriate artist Sakharin, who met him while visiting Las Vegas, having been commissioned to make a painting of the city in his inimitable style, and who first suggested to him, in early September of 1999, when Hercule’s money was running out, that he should take a job at the newly opened Mini-Paris outside the Paris Las Vegas hotel and casino, where they were seeking someone (with circus or other live entertainment experience) small enough to match the reduced scale of the new “city”, which was simulated with half-sized outdoor models of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and several other Parisian landmarks, around which he, alongside a small community of dwarfs who already lived within the miniature Paris, would mime a number of “authentic” scenarios while dressed in stereotypical French clothes to increase the sense of realism for passersby, for those fanny-packed drawlers heading for the casino and throwing coins at the dwarfs for luck (as a placard suggested) before plunging into the air-conditioned, windowless, timeless null zone, into the flashing lights, the jangle of coins pouring from slot machines, and the spangled décolletage of swirling showgirls, who, later on, after their shift ended each night, stumbled out into the hot dry neon air in t
heir jeans and T-shirts to lean against the railing, where they watched the dwarfs (author’s note: in real life there were seven of them, but to avoid an unfortunate parallel with the “Snow White” fable the reader should consider their number to be indeterminate) still cavorting with their baguettes and their bicycles and called out to them as they lit their cigarettes, teasing the dwarfs coquettishly, well aware of the infamous act known as the “sooterkin” but half-convinced it was a myth, then closing their eyes and listening to the weird roar of early morning Las Vegas, to the weird, exhausted roar, to the distant traffic and a million air conditioners, to the streets made for crowded-up tourists that reverberated each night with psychic feedback in their absence, to the half-hearted howls of the drunken partiers trying to keep the night going as they cruised along, to the whir of the street-sweeper vehicles and their spinning brushes clearing away the debris as the first glow of sunrise spilled over the desert and the dwarfs were finally allowed to rest, at which point, after Hercule’s first shift at Mini-Paris, the others showed him to his room within the miniature Louvre, commending him on doing so well for his first night on the job and, as they sat around smoking and drinking under the nicotine-encrusted lightbulb and the cracked and cobwebbed rafters, regaling him with tales of Mini-Europe, the Belgian tourist attraction with hundreds of scale models of famous European buildings and monuments, the pinnacle for their line of work, the place they all “dreamed of”, where the one hundred dwarf employees found their every whim satisfied, since the proprietors of Mini-Europe were said to procure any drug, every prostitute, endless quantities of hard liquor, forms of pornography catering to fetishes impossible to satisfy under normal laws of physics, and the meat of the black rhinoceros and of the white tiger through their connections in the Brussels underworld for them, though Hercule, skeptical, shrugged in his corner and lit another cigarette, finding, in this talk of a dwarf Cockaigne, echoes of the tedious manifestos and the inflated hopes of the absurd Utopia for Walkers the Syndicat de Funambules sponsored in the mid-1980s, a thousand wires strung between the hills over the Côte d’Azur, criss-crossing in the sky, tense under the weight of Walkers from all over France, some on holiday, some seeking the companionship of like-minded people who could understand the lonely pressures of this career, and a number of elderly Walkers who had spent so much time on la ligne that they could no longer bear to walk on the ground and who traveled from place to place on telephone wires instead, most of whom were killed when sound waves from a nearby Jean-Michel Jarre concert caused a disastrous vibration in the lines that snapped them all at once, leaving hundreds dead and a memory that caused Hercule to shudder as he brooded with his wine in the corner and watched the other dwarfs becoming more and more inebriated (they did this after every shift, he was soon to discover), more and more wild, pacing like tigers in a cage, plotting feral rampages across the city that would rival those of the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz and the Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, two films that were nearly ruined by the drunken chaos stirred up each night by their dwarf cast members, all heavy drinkers and all given to frenzy, safe in the knowledge that they could always retreat to the Mini-mus embassy should they finally go too far, should their trail of destruction be too egregious for the authorities to ignore, for their film’s producers to bail them out of jail, to pay off the judges, the police, the enraged property owners, though, by this time, September 1999, appeal to the embassy was no longer an option, as the United States had cut off diplomatic relations with the Isle of Minimus in July to protest the infamous antics of the Minimus ambassador and of the subordinates among his delegation at Woodstock 99, meaning that these dwarfs would face a real danger of legal repercussions should their talk become act, talk which became increasingly slurred as the dwarfs quickly drank themselves toward unconsciousness, dropping off one by one in the halls as they staggered unsuccessfully in the direction of their own beds, mumbling unrecognizable dwarf ballads and, before falling over wherever their feet had taken them, bellowing traditional dwarf battle cries that floated up to Hercule, who found himself sprawled on the top observation deck of the miniature Eiffel Tower, having apparently climbed up there at some point, now gazing up at the bright blue sky of late morning, at the pinpoint airplanes drawing long scarlet vapor trails over the world, some coming in to land, gliding down into the skyline, into his uneasy dreams of flight and confused desperation, of airports and shopping malls, of telephone wires and vapor trails, of runways and freeways, dreams from which he awoke in a strange daze, convinced that he was floating in the air over the desert sands, that the city was gone, the raw morning light burning across the immense and empty plain, a hallucination which ended as soon as he sat up but lingered on as an ominous sensation rising from the depths of his mind all day, much as when he had, in his career on the high-wire, seen from time to time the line beneath him disappear, a surprisingly common experience for Walkers, one a number of highly skilled psychologists had spent years studying, including Sigmund Freud, who called this phenomenon Blondin’s Fugue, after the Walker Charles Blondin, famous for crossing Niagara Falls, amazing spectators all over the world, then establishing le Syndicat de Funambules, maintaining a spectacular career that spanned decades, experiencing only on occasion this sudden, terrifying vision, looking down to see that his trusted wire, the same he always used, a regulation three-inch-thick rope fashioned from the whiskers of a female sooterkin, had vanished from beneath his feet, a case which was used, oddly, as the plot of the first episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Baywatch 2015, a short-lived television program based on notes for an unwritten script by the late television producer Gene Roddenberry about a team of lifeguards who patrol the canals of a newly-colonized Mars in the year 2015 and rescue swimmers and beach-goers from drowning, alien tentacles, supercomputers, asteroids, mysterious Italians in black robes, time-travelers, space mummies, drunken Martian natives intent on piloting their motorboats into “swimmers only” waters, and other dangers, beginning with main character Clarisso Maxwell (Stephen Baldwin), a veteran Space Detective (Space Beach Division), recruiting a trio of beautiful rookie lifeguards to save a drug-addled tight-rope walker attempting to cross over the Olympus Mons Falls as part of a scheme to pay off his debt to a Venusian cocaine dealer in the overwrought pilot script, commissioned by producer Aaron Spelling for the 1997-1998 television season, filming of which commenced in October 1996 in Vancouver, British Columbia, a setting which somehow failed to impart a convincing sense of Martian verisimilitude and which was harshly mocked by every critic but one, a university professor named Marcel X, who, in his weekly column (“written only to pay the bills and with a certain sense of what I must confess to be a certain disdain for my middlebrow audience”, he insisted) for a fairly obscure politics and culture website, declared that Gene Roddenberry’s Baywatch 2015 exemplified what he called the “umbilicist delimitation of asymmetric phallogical memberment within a superstructure of hermeneutic disruption that one must certainly acknowledge has self-evidently dichotomized the transformational-peripheral syntactism of semiotic metonymy and intertemporal deconsumption in the modern world”, and particularly commended the pilot episode’s climactic scene, in which, by using the example of the tightrope walker to prove that “anything is possible if you put your mind to it”, Baldwin talks a “troubled teen” out of suicide, a scene reflective of the existential dilemma that had grown more and more pressing in what Marcel called the “post-modern” era, when more and more people seemed to have come to the conclusion that life wasn’t worth living, that the suffering inherent to all life could no longer be justified, could no longer be tolerated, especially since religion, in the West, no longer provided the illusion of meaning, which was itself a positive development, Marcel felt, but was one that had, perhaps, complicated life beyond a level most people could grasp, and had, certainly, posed a dilemma he sought (during those long nights in the flickering candlelight of his oak-paneled study developing a landmark modality of w
hat he called Feminarrative Multiplicitization while sipping his herbal teas and penciling in snide jokes and commentary with a wry shake of his head at the ignorance of past eras in the margins of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto or simply staring out the window and pensively grooming the failing ruins of his comb-over) to solve, not without, he admitted, a touch of hubris, perhaps (but a fertile hubris, he felt), imagining that his post-post-Marxist explorations might in some way provide a sustaining dialectic for the greater public, not in a prescriptivist way, he would hasten to remind those with whom he discussed these plans, but merely as a method of opening people’s minds to the ambiguities of the universe, should the reactionary, conservative political and media establishment that reigned over the West ever allow his writings to reach a sufficient number of readers, though the extremely limited print runs of each of his books (which the university press that published them blamed for their extreme unpopularity whenever they demanded he pay for another printing), even for his most successful volume, Shibboleths of Hegemony, made any real impact unlikely, despite praise from certain fellow academics in the United States and, most prominently, in Paris, where the great philosophers, from Derrida to Baudrillard, had incorporated many of his theories into their later works, Marcel believed, no doubt amazed that a white male from the United States could be capable of such unhegemonic, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-nationalist, anti-heteronormative, anti-reactionary thought, no doubt leaping up with joy upon first encountering his writings, turning to the other patrons of the bookstore and demanding that they read this incredible new book by Marcel X, a USian who had somehow eclipsed them all with his brilliant theories, which sent them spinning around in the streets, dazed by what they were reading, shocked, baffled, enraged, delighted, overwhelmed, buying extra copies to hand out to students at the Sorbonne, to politicians at the Ministry of Finance, to businessmen at la Défense, to tourists at the Eiffel Tower, prancing along in stunned wonder, drawing crowds of sympathetic supporters to hear about Marcel’s books, and sneers and imprecations from hostile reactionaries, like the current Lord Minimus, Baruch Khazâd, a dwarf born in Ukraine and raised on the Isle (where he was forced to convert from Judaism to the Minimal Church as a young boy to escape widespread antisemitism), who had, until the arrival of this joyous crowd of philosophers, been sitting on a bench in peace with his entourage by the river and thinking of all the many Saturdays of his youth spent here in Paris, the dazed summer afternoons, the womanly scent of the Seine, the gentle weather fingering the cotton dresses of the jeunes filles strolling by with their bold eyes and their timid gestures, and the thousand Parisiennes he had deflowered during his plastronnage, a traditional period for the young male dwarfs of the southernmost part of the Isle, during which they would travel abroad and learn the ways of le monde de haute taille, the dwarf term for the world of giants, from which the English derived the word hotel, originally a verb referring solely to this dwarf practice, as the dwarfs would, unaware of (or banned from) inns, pay strangers money to allow them to live in the strangers’ houses during their plastronnage and inevitably and immediately wreck or “hotel” the house in question during a drunken orgy, then move on to the next town, where they would start over with another house and another quantity of the local prostitutes, outraging the locals and inspiring a number of laws barring traveling dwarfs, especially after Napoleon Bonaparte (not a dwarf, but often mistaken for one because of his embarrassingly diminutive height) had conquered much of Europe during what many historians call le grand plastronnage, an adventure which served to reinforce many antinanoidic prejudices stemming from medieval folklore and regional cultural superstitions, prejudices which Lord Khazâd hoped to dispel at Expo 67 with the many impressive exhibits filling his country’s pavilion, a daunting fortress of intersecting concrete slabs designed by the controversial Ukrainian architect Josef Oktopussë, who, like Lord Khazâd, had fled Ukraine, albeit of his own volition, rather than being forced out by the famine of the 1930s, and who agreed to design the pavilion, despite the low pay offered, in hopes of rehabilitating his career (which had stalled after a series of poorly received Brutalist tower blocks in London), winning him enough prestige to get him a contract with Howard Hughes (who was greatly impressed by this pavilion) the following year to construct a number of casinos and hotels on the Las Vegas Strip, all of which were torn down over the next four decades and replaced by the Venetian, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Luxor, and, finally, Paris Las Vegas, where a half-buried concrete block was all that remained of the old structure, hidden within the miniature Notre Dame at Mini-Paris, when Hercule, a few weeks into his engagement there, sweeping up after a game of boules that had taken place earlier that afternoon, noticed that the Notre Dame door had been left open and went inside, finding only this large concrete block imposing itself on the greater part of the dark and cool interior, so that he needed to squeeze around the side of it to get to the back, thinking only that this could be a good place to smoke the package of Minimus “swami grass” he had bought from another dwarf here in Mini-Paris or, at least, of hiding back there from the inane chatter still vaguely audible through these walls for a few minutes, until, reaching the far side of the block, he there encountered, to his surprise, a heavy metal door set into the back of the block, stamped with a faded “radiation” symbol that scared him off the idea of going inside, though, after a minute of deliberation, he did still use the space back there to smoke and would have, had he actually met them, used it as a “love nest” for liaisons with his wives, a pair of identical twin showgirls he glimpsed from afar two weeks into his employment and imagined meeting during the filming of Gold Diggers of 2000 (a “fun, edgy” straight-to-video sequel to the 1933 Mervyn LeRoy musical Gold Diggers of 1933) on the film’s faux-Parisian set in front of Mini-Paris, where, had he actually gone down to the set and met them, he would have convinced these devout Roman Catholic women, who appeared in the film as extras, of the moral appropriateness of such a marriage by sharing his accurate belief that identical twins should be considered one person, that, since they were physically identical, and since they had grown up together, had shared nearly every day of their eighteen years together, shared the same opinions, and even dressed in matching (or, at least, very similar) clothing, they were the same person in two bodies, and therefore, marriage to him would not constitute polygamy and violate the code of their religion, which constituted an argument that would likely have struck them as convincing enough, had he actually spoken to them, that they would have married him just one week after they met and hired on at the casino once filming had ended so that they could stay near him, sneaking into Mini-Paris across a plank thrown over the moat in the back, where tourists were rare, hurrying down the miniaturized Haussmann streets, and waiting for him in the Notre Dame, or parading around Las Vegas with him on the rare occasions he was allowed out, dancing at the most exclusive clubs and betting fortunes at the classiest casinos with his arms snaking up around their thighs as they drank, laughed, shouted to fellow celebrities, then walked out beneath the shimmering canopy of Fremont Street to bask in the gaze of starstruck tourists, who would be astounded to see one of the famous Mini-Paris dwarfs up close, though the twins themselves certainly would have turned their share of heads, especially with the matching red dresses they might have worn when they joined him at the Venetian in late September of 1999 for dinner with Hercule’s old friend, Lord Khazâd, who was in town to seek out showgirls and, he hoped, to reassure the Americans that the Isle, despite the recent unpleasantness involving the ambassador, was still a loyal ally and was a necessary beneficiary of financial support, a subject Lord Khazâd would have, instead of discussing at length (as he did in reality), largely avoided during the meal, focusing instead on making crude references to the anatomy of Hercule’s wives, openly propositioning them, and attempting to grope them at every opportunity, much to the chagrin of Hercule, who would have been vaguely surprised that Lord Khazâd’s own escorts
, a trio of svelte Las Vegas prostitutes, could tolerate such behavior without even the slightest flicker of jealousy marring their faces, mistakenly thinking them to be Lord Khazâd’s new wives, or at least concubines, as Hercule was unaware that the Minimal Parliament, or Dvergatal, to which power had recently been officially devolved, had finally done away with the right of the Lord Minimus to add anymore foreigners to his harem, along with the droit du seigneur and the ability to have Isle citizens executed, exiled, or castrated without a trial, greatly offending Lord Khazâd and inspiring his current, ill-considered scheme to transition the Isle of Minimus to an all-showgirl government, a government that would conform to his whims, both political and personal, should Lord Khazâd somehow succeed in implementing it, despite the fact that giants could not legally hold office on the Isle of Minimus, which he planned to surmount, as he now told Hercule (who sat, in reality, alone, across from Lord Khazâd and his prostitutes at the too-loud hotel restaurant), by simply insisting over and over again that his hordes of imported showgirls were not as tall as they seemed to be, that they were quite diminutive, and were, in fact, pure-blooded dwarfs, pure-blooded daughters of the Isle, of the finest quarters of Dverberg, which is exactly what he claimed of Hercule’s twin “wives” the next morning, when Lord Khazâd appointed them Foreign Ministers and ordered a servant by telephone back on the Isle to prepare quarters for them near his palace, at which point, had they been married to Hercule, Lord Khazâd would have handed him the papers annulling the marriage as he consoled him, reassuring him that he had never meant for this to happen, had never meant to split the twins from their husband like this, though, since, in reality, Hercule had never actually had the courage to even look directly at the twins for more than one second, much less approach them, and had denied even having seen them before when Lord Khazâd noticed them as he walked with Hercule back to Mini-Paris after dinner, the latter felt no guilt in openly stroking their legs or reaching up their skirts as the two dwarfs, the twins, and the prostitutes from the night before ate brunch at an outdoor café in the unpleasantly bright sunlight, and took scant notice of the slight flicker of disappointment in Hercule’s eyes, that familiar old sense of defeat that had lined his face ever since he was a boy in Paris, employed to care for an English gentleman named Sir Glorio Hilliard at the “Nunnery”, that infamous Nunnery, as the lowest or “bottom” manservant, the manservant traditionally beaten each day, cowed under incessant blows from the chaperon’s fist, bloodied long before the cessation of each day’s luncheon, his face always in the chafing-dish, his hands hammered in the American-style guillotine windows, the maids snickering at his misfortune as they ushered their followers out the back door, the wet-nurses grimacing in the way wet-nurses grimace and bellowing orders at him in the way wet-nurses bellow, the sinister club valet whispering to him remarks of a foul character in hopes of causing him to blush, and his feet always aching as he ran half-toppling down the halls to warn his master that one of the master’s mistresses had been spied by her mother during their previous week’s promenade at the Jardins du Trocadéro and was threatening to lodge a public morals complaint, should the chaste shadows of her daughter’s honor again be illuminated by the perverting radiance of the Nunnery’s influence, or that one of his master’s favored inmates had been swept away to a rival clubman’s bedchambers or carriage by that turncoat chaperon, who, because he lived suspended in a constant state of bribery, never fully rose to trustworthiness and “only sank beneath the weight of one’s own coin to the depths of co-conspiracy long enough to upset all one’s plots”, though Hercule was, all in all, treated better than many of the lower menservants of the Nunnery, owing to his master’s relative disinterest in the subject of disciplining his servants in favor of pursuing his amateur literary career, consisting, for most of Hercule’s term of employment, of nothing more several half-finished stories and one floridly adjectival novel about a mercenary clairvoyant of London in the pay of an American gentleman, with the understanding that she would send for him whenever a handsome-enough girl consulted her and would furnish the unsuspecting victim with a description of her future love that would match the American quite closely, so that, when, “by chance”, he happened across her path, he would find, in his beguiled victim, no resistance to his wicked designs, a romance which, despite its origins in the master’s own life, had been rejected by every editor in Paris because of “its close similarity to an episode from Monsieur Proust’s novel” and its lack of a proper ending, as the master lamented for weeks on end, making a pitiful spectacle even during the Nunnery’s irregular yachting expeditions or their bimonthly soirées at local oyster bars, where the waiter girls would roll their eyes at his egotistical tirades against published authors in general and in particular, living and dead, including “that neurotic and sinister Jude, a cringing insect of the foulest Oriental infamy, Francis Kafka” and “that pompous péquenaud, Samuel Clemens”, not to mention “Queen Hemingway, who may be seen flouncing about with half the boys of Paris like a latter-day Madame Ouibeleaux whenever he isn’t scrawling effete, dainty little sentences about canoes and impotence”, as well as a number of other foreigners whose books seemed to him to be crowding out his own more worthy art while he toiled in obscurity with only his fellow clubmen of the Nunnery (known as “Bachelors”, in contrast to those of older brothel clubs, known in English as “Men About Town”), their lovely inmates, and, of course, his loyal manservant, Hercule, to help him “steer between the Scylla of boredom and the Charybdis of complacency” in a country teeming with plague and depravity, as he drunkenly called it one day, when they had all gathered around in their favorite of the dim, pungent oyster bars with mouths full of oyster and hands full of the squirming and unamused waiter girls, a quartet of haughty young sisters from a once-wealthy family of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who had been forced into the middle classes when the girls’ grandfather had lost everything in the Panama scheme and into the lower orders when their father lost everything in the crash of 1931, leaving the young women of the family to cling precariously to their honor as shopgirls and waiter girls and sending the young men to seek their fortune as adventurers in the jungles of that accursed country that had swallowed up their inheritance and in the mysterious depths of the Amazon Basin, where some in the family believed they might still own land, despite the repeated confiscations by the Colombian government of their holdings in the former and the documents affirming the sale of their plantations in the latter to a German firm, which had carelessly left them abandoned for years and allowed them to be occupied by a head-hunting tribe whose economy had been largely based on trading shrunken heads for food and medical supplies from the family’s company before it failed and the land was given over to encroaching vegetation, reed huts, and crazed shamans dancing and wailing before the vast decaying edifices of the plantation houses, praying for the return of their French benefactors, who, at last, earlier that year, emerged from the shivering wall of foliage to reclaim their birthright by gunning down the shamans and forcing the encamped natives to begin restoring the fields and replanting the crops, while all who resisted were tortured or executed along with their families in the Belgian fashion, which derived them almost no profit they could send back to their sisters in Paris, to their mother, or to their grandmother, Madame Virginie Anne-Plaisance Ouibeleaux, the very same Madame Ouibeleaux infamous for establishing Madame Ouibeleaux’s Asylum for Urchins Street, Gutter, Alley and Otherwise in London and its corresponding Asile des Bâtards et Orphelinat Fermé in Paris for the treatment of unwanted boys deemed to be beyond any hope of rescue by adoptive parents (this was before “closed orphanages” were outlawed) because of moral or physiological unpleasantness, such as tuberculosis, hunchback, lameness of foot, thieving, atheism, idiocy, imbecility, or, all too frequently, catatonic onanism, that dreaded disease of the East Indies which killed thousands of Europeans and ultimately led to the evacuation and shuttering of the Asile when the disease spread out of control, giving the c
lub the perfect opportunity to buy the immense building and stock it with liquors to guzzle and prostitutes for whom each man of the club competed against the others as an inane ritual combat they seemed to hope would compensate for their otherwise dull and eventless way of life, mainly consisting of lounging around in their dinner coats or shirtsleeves and puffing away on their pipes amid the billiard tables badly in need of resurfacing and the half-stocked bookshelves, where a few languorous prostitutes, whose strange, veiled uniforms earned the clubhouse from the people of the arrondisement that ironic appellation, “the Nunnery”, could always be found thumbing idly through some of the smuttier tomes in search of distraction or momentary escape from the unexpected tedium of incarceration in the club, a well-paying incarceration, but so unsuited to providing for the social interests of young women that they almost immediately began to scheme against their Bachelors and to deliberately stir up rivalries among them for fun, plotting to drop a rumor of venereal infection here, a rumor of embezzled funds there, to mention that one Bachelor had insulted another, or that one Bachelor had boasted of some superiority over the others that they would seek to disprove in a duel, while these women powdered themselves and carefully inspected each other for injuries and signs of disease in their inner chambers, very carefully, since their treatment by Sir Glorio and the others had already sent their Club Gynecologist to the sanatorium in a state of nervous exhaustion and the city’s Chief Venereal Inspector had, on numerous occasions, vowed to shut down the Nunnery, should he find even a single case of the Scotch Fiddle or the Spanish Gout in this place, which the more pious neighbors had resented ever since the Club invaded it and the rumor began to spread, after one nearby banker’s daughter was glimpsed through a window entertaining a pair of Bachelors with a lewd “Turkish dance”, that they were recruiting respectable or semi-respectable women away from their families to labor alongside girls of fallen morals, sisters of loose virtue, ladies of forgotten honor, and as many as five other varieties of prostitute in entertaining the clubmen with all forty “façons” known to the women of France and several more imported from heathen countries, including that variety of pleasure with which Priapus threatens a debauched trespasser in the carmina of that most depraved poet of Antiquity, Catullus, as well as certain newly-invented acts and displays even the foulest scab-wenches of Hong Kong would have found distasteful, such as the exhibition, by a fifty-woman choir, of pieces by Schoenberg (who, Sir Glorio told Hercule, ruthlessly pilfered the dodecaphonic system from a good friend of the Nunnery, the great Adrian Leverkühn), using only that function (in twelve of the sixty-two possible tones) to which Captain Burton tells us, in his footnotes to the Thousand Nights and a Night, that Captain A. Lockett was forced, in his translation of the Tale of Jafar, to refer by quoting Strepsiades, as he could not “express the bathos of the original without descending to the oracular language of Giacoma Rodogina, the engastrymythian prophetess”, though these gossips of Paris felt no such restraint and found within themselves no lack of the fortitude necessary to speak at length and in the crudest language imaginable of every storied detail of this exhibition, which did, in fact, take place, even if only a few genuinely respectable women ever took part in this particular form of musicianship, or even set foot in the Nunnery in the first place, since most of those who might have allowed themselves to be lured to a life among the mazelike chambers and perfumed mattresses of this crooked old building were frightened off by other rumors, entirely false, spread by the titillated old prattlers of the neighborhood, that the men of the Club were killing the older prostitutes for their own amusement (only one woman ever died in the Nunnery, and the investigation ruled Sir Glorio strangling her to have been entirely accidental) and that innocent young Hercule, in a late echo of the antinanoidic myths spread by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Parliamentarian enemies (who insinuated that she had indulged in improper contacts with Captain Jeffrey Hudson), had been employed to perform the “sooterkin” upon numerous kidnapped women on stage for the pleasure of those watching in the grimy basement theater of the Nunnery, a lie which shocked Hercule when he heard of it while buying apples one foggy morning from a leering grocer who asked him if it might be true then demanded that Hercule come upstairs to perform the act upon the grocer’s wife and, when Hercule refused, frightened, shaking his head mutely, shouted at the boy that he would go to the police and have him and his employers arrested if Hercule would not at least allow him to enter the Nunnery and watch this loathsome performance, screaming threats and imprecations at Hercule as people turned and stared at the boy running back to the Nunnery with his armful of apples, which scattered on the slick cobblestones when a policeman, a notorious antinanoid, assuming that Hercule was a thief, struck him across the back of the head and knocked him to the ground, then kicked him and cursed him until the grocer, who strutted up to watch, declared that Hercule had been boasting of his foul deeds in the Nunnery, and, before hastily changing his answer to “yes”, replied in the negative when asked if Hercule had stolen those apples, forcing the disappointed but conscientious policeman to allow his victim to continue home with the bruised and battered fruit, which were so disgusting to Sir Glorio that he uncharacteristically beat Hercule all afternoon, much to the amusement of the other clubmen, who had heard versions of the rumor about Hercule and believed him to be secretly mixing into their liquors and cakes a South African herb rich in potassium nitrate to weaken their venereal appetites and thereby keep to himself the women of the Nunnery to pleasure them with strange dwarf methods impossible to perform for these giants, who took great delight in repeating among themselves this total fabrication, an antinanoidic slander, Hercule insisted, when, telling Lord Khazâd about his time in the Nunnery in 1966, he recounted this incident and admitted to him that he had not had much luck with women, though he had succeeded recently in sort of sullenly leering at that blonde girl from his apartment building whom he was pretty sure was a prostitute when they passed in the hall, “if that counts as luck”, he said, to which Lord Khazâd answered that it did, although, he told Hercule, it might do to consider broadening his experiences beyond that single (albeit impressive) accomplishment of glancing toward a woman, especially since, as Hercule had detailed, he had not quite managed to make eye contact with this neighbor, despite her retaliatory stare, nor could he summon the courage to look in her direction as she receded down the hall and he fumbled with his keys at the door of his apartment, which the Expo had provided him free of charge for the duration of his stay in Montréal, a city famous primarily, Lord Khazâd claimed, for its so-called Daughters of Saint Catherine and of Saint Lawrence, whose refusal to satisfy their gentlemen customers with any but one particular form of pleasure imparted to the boulevard of the latter saint its notorious sobriquet, which appeared in tiny, gilded letters over the door of their abode, a nineteenth-century hotel (dating back to the construction of the Lachine Canal in the 1820s), where they received their callers under the watchful eye of their stern procuress, a withered old woman known for terrifying clients into sober obedience with her humorless severity, as she had when Lord Khazâd first visited the hotel a week earlier, and as she did when Lord Khazâd, presently, dragged Hercule there in the middle of the night in an attempt to give this younger dwarf, of whom he had become rather fond, an “experience” with women, which would do him some good, Lord Khazâd insisted, slapping Hercule on the back as he bounced around in the passenger seat of Hercule’s rented Peel Trident with excitement and insisting that he had known of a case back on the Isle of Minimus wherein another beardless dwarf had sprouted an enormous thicket of facial hair, “like a hulking beast of a Greek”, after receiving a certain service from a Swedish giantess, meaning that Hercule’s beardlessness wasn’t a hopeless case and that he would, after tonight, be able to throw away his fake beard at last, Lord Khazâd announced, before telling Hercule to “park here, as there’s nowhere to park closer to the place”, pointing to a spot at the side of the street under a streetlamp, where the
y left the car and ventured through the night with frost in every breath, which rose and faded among the shimmering silver stars in the deep black sky of October over the fiery glow of cafés here and there along the boulevard, full of revelers in thin and stylish coats but warm with drink, strolling along, cheering at the sight of everyone they met and embracing each other fiercely as the procuress of the filles de sainte Catherine et de saint Laurent emerged from among a crowd of titubant wassailers shouting Félix Leclerc songs outside their hotel and pulled Lord Khazâd and Hercule into the receiving hall, where they stood for a moment, blinking and squinting through the bright golden lamplight, then waited as directed in two huge overstuffed chairs with their hands around glasses of the provided absinthe and gin while the procuress went upstairs to summon the girls for the séance, to line them up to be ogled by their customers until a choice was made in that big gilded lounge of this brothel, which the city shut down in 1999, leaving it to fade in the memories of the city’s elders, who often reminisced with each other about the many rites of passage they underwent behind those doors, the many new experiences they enjoyed, the many people they met, the time a doting grandfather or uncle took them there to celebrate a thirteenth birthday, the raucous orgies where they could find everyone from the mayor to the parish priest, the prostitutes with whom they fell in love at a young and foolish age, the English cleaning woman who doted over all the young men like a kindly old nursemaid, the mistresses they initiated into corrupt pleasures, or the pair of dwarfs seen one night sipping a cocktail known as le tremblement de terre and sprawled on a pair of plush thrones as the women were arrayed before them so that the procuress (the inmates called her la préceptrice) could point with a collapsible wand at their various features that might inspire in these customers a preference for one or the other, for a bosomly Scottish matron with half a Canadian accent poking out here and there as she recited in English her weary spiel at the behest of the procuress (who was under the delusion that this woman had an alluring voice), a young lady with a hilarious Newfoundland accent (at whom, by contrast, the procuress snapped “tais-toi”), a meager Swiss girl with the glassy eyes of an opium-eater, whose bruised legs flinched at the touch of the procuress’s wand, a blonde granddaughter of murdered Saint Petersburg nobles, who sneered and glared at them imperiously, in exactly the way someone might picture a Russian prostitute sneering and glaring, a Jewess from a family of grocers, who all lived not three blocks away yet had thought for years that she was dead, an angry-looking blonde Austrian with scarred wrists Lord Khazâd picked for himself, and a disconcertingly tall Italian he picked for Hercule, who found himself pulled brusquely up the stairs to the Italian’s room, where she gestured for him to sit on the bed and immediately went across to hunch over the pinball machine, which clanged and buzzed as she wrestled with the contraption in her ongoing quest to dominate it and beat the procuress’s high score, while entirely ignoring Hercule, sitting there fumbling with his drink and looking around wide-eyed at the peeling wallpaper, at the scenes from the Arabian Nights printed within rows of ornate geometric patterns, which flowed up and down the walls faster and faster whenever he stared at them too long, whenever he allowed himself to be drawn in, hypnotized by the absinthe and the industrial cacophony of the pinball machine with its little bullets banging around the labyrinth and its flippers clacking as the prostitute threw her entire body into her battle without ever looking up at Hercule, even when, haltingly trying to make small talk, he asked her where she was from, which she answered calmly, as if unaware of the floor-shaking brutality of the combat beneath her calloused hands, saying that she had emigrated from Venice only three months ago with her brother, who was one of the gondoliers selected to ferry across the new canals of the World’s Fair site the cast and crew of the movie being shot there and to transport tourists around once opening day finally arrived, but who had disappeared their first day in Montréal, leaving her to fend for herself with no money and no job, probably having taken up with some woman and gone west, abandoning everything, the authorities claimed, despite her protests that he would never place anything above his loyalty to the Venetian Mariners’ Guild (she called it “la Categoria”), especially women, whom her brother, like all gondoliers, held in contempt, and that he would never have abandoned his gondola, since these men are required by the strict code of the canal to defend, to the death, their vessels, which every gondolier inherits upon completing his apprenticeship or builds himself using wood (from each of the eight trees the prehistoric Venetians purportedly considered native to their region) that is dyed with a mixture of manganese and lapis lazuli a dark blue, which, to the untrained eye of ignorant foreigners, appears black, though only the rival Black Gondola Society ever use gondolas of a true black, employing a dye they create, according to legend, by a mixture of several ingredients, including gun-powder and the blood of the comely young virgins who are selected every Shrove Tuesday in a city-wide beauty pageant, dressed in the most beautiful white satin with a pair of non-functional gossamer wings attached to their backs, and are then thrown off the belltower of Saint Mark’s Basilica at the start of Venice’s famous Carnival each year under the mistaken belief that an angel will sweep down and catch them before they are smashed against the cobblestones below if they are truly pure (hence the name of this primordial ritual, il volo dell’angelo), a spectacle historians can trace back to the inhabitants of ancient Venice, who did this in order to convince their gods to hold back the ever-encroaching floods that ultimately overwhelmed the entire city and turned their streets into the canals of the present day, which continue to gradually consume the city even as the modern Venetians continue this practice, despite the annual failure of the angel to appear and the grisly demise of each sacrificed maiden, in hopes of demonstrating to God their wish that the waters would recede and allow them to again walk the lost streets of Venice as in an ordinary city, choosing out of guilt to overlook the Black Gondola Society’s collection of the blood as a concession to those whose livelihoods would be lost if this prayer were ever actually efficacious, and choosing out of impotence to allow the Black Gondola Society to operate in the first place (and possibly to placate the people of Venice, who largely have come to view these sinister criminals as folk heroes), an impotence demonstrated by the fact that they have never successfully captured a member in its many centuries of existence and have, in fact, apprehended several legitimate gondoliers in error from time to time, including this prostitute’s brother, who had once spent nearly a week in one of Venice’s notorious floating prisons and now, after overcoming so many hardships in life, was “probably dead somewhere”, she cried, abruptly slumping over onto the pinball machine and sobbing so loudly that the procuress peeked into the room and pulled Hercule out with her, informing him curtly that his friend had finished and that it was time for them to leave, then pushing him out the front door with Lord Khazâd laughing at him and slapping him on the back while slurringly proclaiming this to be “the feast day of Saint Khazâd the magnificent, defiler of women, a drunken super-man” with an arm flung up to the sky, chest thrust forward, face held aloft, and beard describing a wide arc across his chest as he intoned a mad prayer to himself that he spare all these poor sinners wandering these cold streets without his permission, that he refrain from deflowering their many plump daughters as punishment, from lathering these crowds of fools in their fool blood and shaving them hairless, “like they did to whores in the Bible”, like Lord Khazâd himself had done to them after the war, to women without loyalty to their Isle or their bridegrooms, their poor bridegrooms, who had already suffered the Invader to guzzle their beer and dance in their houses, sleep in their beds, chew their boules infestées and ask them what all these little noodles were, and shoot off his shining German guns at the tolerant sheep grazing on the hills of that country which Lord Khazâd missed so dearly, so dearly, he cried to Hercule with a maudlin trill, demanding of himself to know why he had agreed to live in this accursed place and oversee th
e preparations for some idiot festival of the giants (who were incapable of even building their cities in a reasonable fashion with the streets going north and south and east and west, like they did on the Isle, where everything was good and right) while he guided Hercule with his meaty hand to a shortcut through some citizen’s garden on a course to the North Star, on a good straight line “like back on the Isle”, cutting straight across the diagonals, across the crooked streets he rejected and refused to allow to soil his feet any further, then taking a turn dead to the east through the parking lot of a shuttered American-style supermarket that reminded Hercule of a time he had been forced to go shopping for supplies for a class project with some girl from the Henry Clay Frick School of the Kinetic Arts in Kansas City during the War and, after checking their items out at separate cashiers, she, apparently not hearing him thank the check-out boy, thanked him for Hercule, like he was a child or an idiot, which, though he never saw her again after that class, he still remembered, even now, as they headed directly east, by Hercule’s reckoning, a sense of direction perfectly honed in his years as a funambule, which allowed him to notice that each turn Lord Khazâd made was perfectly aligned with the four cardinal directions, forming a grid he sketched out the next day back in his hotel room on a tourist map of Montréal, drawing the lines of their wanderings across parks, through empty lots, down alleys, into milling crowds becalmed by drink and the late hour, under the old gallows, and past the gold plaque commemorating all who hanged there to a field of tall grass jutting up into the moonlight and covered in frost that crunched under their feet as Lord Khazâd regained his earlier bluster and commenced to praise himself and his many awesome deeds on behalf of this sinful world, which he mimed holding over the flames of annihilation with nose turned up in disgust before collapsing in a classic absinthe coma face first into the dark night alongside Hercule, lying next to him but facing the sky on this frigid square of earth where, in 1999, some professional film-makers would shoot a scene for the poorly-received science spectacle Battlefield Earth, thirty-three years from that moment, off in the distant future, Hercule thought, in a time of science fiction itself, of sleek plastic cars gliding through the night, reflected billboards advertising things that hadn’t yet been invented, hyper-modern international jets of the endless Jet Age rising from airfields, girls in garish miniskirts, and men talking on little portable telephones as they strode into that broad dawn of the desert that always invested the city with the mysterious profundity found in even the most trite elements of a dream and that set the miniature Eiffel Tower ablaze up where the sun first hit it full on at the top and caused it to shine, reflected, on the pyramid, black against the low blue sky, near the Pinball Hall of Fame (back before it moved to Tropicana Avenue), a hunched beast, dark among the rococo neon of the surrounding casinos and the floodlights of Mini-Paris, where the other dwarfs, sleeping through their hangovers, were splayed out wherever they had fallen around Mini-Paris, snoring, while Hercule, on his back atop the miniature Versailles, growled with confusion, thinking for a minute as he woke that he was still back there in 1966 and preparing for the Montréal World’s Fair, still plunged into dream, blinking with confusion at the hot air, flavored with desert, filling his lungs, the sound of stereotypical tourists braying around T-shirt stands, and a single cloud up there shaped like pincers in the parched sky, a smoke plume, which the dwarfs, awakened by the wailing sirens going past, thought might mean a house on fire, though they couldn’t quite see what caused it, even from the spot to which they climbed halfway up on the Eiffel Tower, peering out and noticing beardless Hercule, at whom they shouted and marveled, asking each other if maybe all his time among the giants had dulled his ability to overcome a hangover with a simple shake of the head and a quick recital of the hearty song they performed now from their perches over the city, a dwarf “battle madrigal” throat-sung in the manner of the classical throat-singers of the northeastern lowlands on the Isle of Minimus, cantillating especially loudly to wake Hercule, who was sunning his fat body out there, a snail silhouette that barely stirred at their happy cries to wake up and join them in venerating the Nain Rouge before their makeshift altar beneath the massive bell in the south tower of the miniature Notre Dame and thanking that “Father of the Dwarfs” for a good harvest, for fertile women, for Lord Baruch Khazâd’s persecution of his former coreligionists on the Isle (and of “the sinister cretins, who support the Isle’s enemies with their traitorous deeds”), then thanking Him again, and again, with their knees bent in the copied cathedral, their prayers resonant in this crowded hollow, alien to Hercule, propped against the frame of the open door with a gin flask in hand and bleary eyes studying these pursy humps rising and falling and gesturing their borrowed symbols, wheezing their imitation wisdom through the sick-colored dust floating under the plastic stained glass while Hercule turned, bored, to drift out in the morning to the miniature Seine carved in the concrete and up onto the miniature Pont des Arts to vomit lightly over the railing, where he noticed a long black sliver cutting through the water up where it flowed into the canals of the Venetian resort, a gondola carrying a matched pair of blonde women and a shirtless pilot limply heaving himself over his oar with the posture of a corpse being thrown into a mass grave as the women chattered, full of conversation and cheer, then grew quiet and fixed their eyes, first, on the dark cloud of vomit swirling over the sunny white concrete riverbed, then on the dwarf on the bridge above it, who stared back at them as the gondolier brought his craft to a halt to wait silently for the suction of the river filters to remove the offending material from the path of his beloved boat, from the water sloshing around its iron prow, adorned with a bare Venus reaching forth, its firm hull, carved all over with tiny runes, and its oar, bearing the same occult symbols all the way up to the socket for the silver bayonet, which they leave off in times of peace, and which gaped painfully, like an arm reaching out for its severed hand, yet was meticulously kept free of dirt, so that it would always be ready for the bayonet in its scabbard hanging at the side of the weary gondolier, whose staring eyes glinted in the mid-morning sun like that blade would, were he to thrust it into the dwarf’s meaty neck, into his fat guts, which would slither down heavily around the killer’s arm as he laughed in the face of his victim, or into his mouth to cut out the thick little tongue flapping now as he greeted the passengers without apology, drunk, swilling from a flask openly in front of women like a Greek, like a dwarf, like all these filthy dwarfs lurking around Mini-Paris, chanting grotesquely in their pealing voices while sitting up on the roofs of their little buildings, watching the men of the Venetian play baseball in the blue twilight and scrambling to claim the foul balls with a peasantish urgency whenever they landed in the dwarfs’ enclosure, racing and fighting each other, their tiny feet pattering, ugly little faces puckered, doing whatever awful things they wanted to do over there, drinking, fighting, fornicating, begging for the coins of tourist pity, these parasites, these shrunken little bloodsuckers, like the fetal vampires of Arabic myth, charming all the women who still stupidly believed in the ridiculous legend of the “sooterkin”, like these women, who were teasing the dwarf on the bridge in English, which he seemed to understand (unlike the gondolier), probably arranging for a rendez-vous with him later on while the gondolier was standing right there, shirtless, a virile Italian of ancient blood, exhausting himself for their sake, arms rippling now as he lunged angrily into his oar and forced the gondola onward under the bridge and down the miniature river, facing another night alone and hoping, before they reached the end and headed back up to the Venetian, that when they passed again under the bridge the dwarf would be gone, as, in fact, was the case, since he had already gone wandering toward the miniature Louvre, a cigar in his mouth, wishing that women like them would take him seriously, that he had any chance at all with them, that the days weren’t so hot here, and that the library of the miniature Bibliothèque nationale de France held more than just an old People magazine, a Maxim from 1997, and a
Where’s Waldo? (the American Where’s Wally?) with all the Waldos circled vigorously in ballpoint pen, though it had contained several more books until the day of Hercule’s arrival, when the other dwarfs burned whatever volumes supposedly contained antinanoidic elements or were deemed to ignore the dwarf question altogether (“the most pressing moral issue of our time”), including a Reader’s Digest condensed edition of the New York Times Bestselling technothriller author Michael Crichton’s 1968 A Case of Need, another People magazine, a fifteen-year-old Newsweek, a Rolling Stone, Phalloglossia of the Antiletariat: the Acceptable Face of Kaleidocratic Othering in Schizophrenist Oedipalities by Marcel X, a biography of the semi-legendary King Goldemar’s queen consort, Marcella (“a rather skeptical biography, certainly, but that’s to be expected when the object of the book is shrouded in so many obvious myths and the dark distance of centuries”, one of the more charitable dwarfs protested), and a few other books thrown into the flames under hard eyes that were watching them burn with the same cold rage Hercule had seen at the consecration of the Isle pavilion in 1966 and in the live television footage of the bestowing of the seigneurship upon Lord Khazâd a few years before that, which were both marked by similar book-burnings, conforming to the old lowlands way of consecration that had been used ever since the end of the Second Revolution, when the rebels retook the capital city of Dverberg and burned all the Englishmen’s books as kindling under the bound Englishmen, which was little more than arbitrary symbolism now, an imitation of real culture that gave them an excuse to cheer as the pages fell to ashes, which, in a sudden breeze that now fluttered across Mini-Paris, were whipped up into the bright air around Hercule, choking him and forcing him to turn from the sight of the horde marching from the miniature cathedral with all their faces covered in that slack and sated expression of worshipers let back out into the world, looking for him, finding him, then slapping him on the back and asking if he wanted to join them for a raid on the Venetian before their shift as they walked along around him beneath the summer-browned bonsai trees, imported at great cost from the misty seaside gardens of a master cultivator back on the Isle who was highly respected, even in Japan, for the skill with such trees he had acquired as a common field-hand in the old bonsai fields of Kawaguchi among their endless lanes of stunted trees and thousands of laborers bowing with shears in hand, tired and gloomy, out all through the monsoon season, sculpting the miniature trees with the most numbing precision and whisking excess moisture from the leaves with the smallest of paintbrushes yet lit up with weird flashes of quiet joy under tents rattling with raindrops overhead as they looked out into the dark day, smoking their cigarettes around mouthfuls of rice at the dinner hour, in which all conversation was lulled to silence by the prevailing deluge and all thoughts revolved slowly without memory or expectation in the grave light that barely illuminated the tiny shape of the dwarf still out there, bent to his work, alone, gray among gray and too proud to rest, too proud to associate with his tall Japanese co-workers or the stern supervisors, who were looking out from their tents with a slight smile of approval at this fierce dwarf, this descendant of the Welsh “ship’s dwarf” of Commodore Matthew Perry’s flagship (the Mississippi), who elected to stay behind in Japan with the hope of Christianizing the colony of dwarfs on the island of Hokkaido, whose ancestors had supposedly arrived there with Viking explorer Leif Blodnasir nearly a thousand years earlier, fleeing the roving armada of the so-called “Child Pope” Celibate III, who was assassinated on his fifth birthday along with all seven of his wives by the soon-to-be Pope Celibate IV, the decrepit Cardinal Milano, who continued his predecessor’s anti-Viking policies until killed three days later by a confederacy of his enemies, which, upon installing a more isolationist candidate to the throne, ended the campaign against the Northmen to allow the Vatican to focus its attacks on a much more loathsome enemy, a colony of gentle pacifists that had sprung up on Corsica, though, with no way of knowing that their danger had ended, Blodnasir remained on Hokkaido, where he enslaved the Ainu and devoted most of his time to deflowering every Japanese maiden of his nascent empire by convincing them that he and his odd, round-eyed servants were gods from the north and that he, personally, was the mighty Pornocrates, the priapismic god of genital display, by hanging from the windows of his castle each morning white bedsheets, which featured at their center a large red stain as evidence of deeds done in the night and which later inspired the distinctive flag of Japan, and by forcing the Japanese to build immense shrines in his honor and to carry at all times various phallic symbols representing his presence in order to ward off his wandering ghost, which was said to leave his body as he slept to search out nonbelievers and kill them, inspiring the Japanese to create (what some historians claim were) the earliest, explicitly phallic bonsai trees as magical tokens that would protect their owners from the ghost of Pornocrates in a tradition that was passed down through the centuries to the great dwarf bonsai-master in question, Prysgliach Gwrachell, who brought it in the late 1970s to the Isle of Minimus, where the trees’ unthreatening size made them extremely popular to keep in gardens and to cultivate for export overseas to serve in model train layouts, the forced perspective shots of cheap monster movies, and places such as Mini-Paris, where their proportions enhanced the illusion of reality established by these dwarfs, who now headed for the moat behind Mini-Paris with Hercule reluctantly in tow, feeling glum, his bare face chafed by the windblown beards of his tormentors, who persisted in jostling him onward toward the makeshift bridge thrown over the moat behind the Louvre and in dragging him down the access road behind the casinos onto the grounds of the Venetian, where it was a simple matter to infiltrate the empty façades of the fake palaces lining the Grand Canal and wait for the two gondoliers to finish their patrol of the area and strike off for the hotel restaurant, leaving their gondolas attended only by an unneutered bulldog, which had been trained to attack only tall people for fear of it mauling a child and, therefore, ignored the dwarfs, even as they spray-painted obscene cartoons across the jet-black surface of the boats, which recalled to Hercule a vague memory of something he couldn’t quite grasp, something that had happened at Expo 67, and caused him to drift into a reverie, which was interrupted by the enraged shouts of the gondoliers, who had returned unexpectedly, sending the dwarfs scattering as the gondoliers swung their bayonets, nearly skewering Hercule, who was slower than the others, clumsy, tired, old, and who slipped on a puddle into the canal, where he struggled around onto his back to see a pursuer standing on the bank, raising his bayonet to spear him, eyes narrow in a vile sneer and bare chest heaving with a superior strength that rejoiced in an impending violence that was now unexpectedly curtailed by a huge hand reaching down and pulling Hercule away into a motorboat, which roared to life and carried him to safety at the side of his rescuers, who he recognized with astonishment as Sakharin and a fellow painter he knew only by reputation named Yakov Smirnoff, better known for his Russia- themed comedy, including a series of largely unfunny joke books written in collaboration with his dear friend Sakharin, such as their 1987 debut, Mensheviks are Liking to Be Matadors Why (answered within as “because they are to defeat Bull-sheviks!”), their breakthrough 1989 hit Larry and Curly are Fixing Space Ship Why (“Cosmonaut!”), the New York Times Bestselling Citizen Happy that House Building of Him Fall Down Why (“because is reduced to ruble!”), and the comparatively poor-selling sequel Citizen Does Not Look Forward to Being Paid Why (“because the Chekist in the mail!”), all of which inspired in Sakharin a great pride that had forced him to read aloud from them to Hercule on many, many occasions, always taking care to remind Hercule that it was he who had the idea of writing the books in feigned broken English and that it was he again who convinced Smirnoff to branch out from his standup comedy and film appearances, which Smirnoff did without hesitation, trusting Sakharin, the only Russian friend Smirnoff had in America, a steadfast confidant, a reliable advisor, to the degree that, when Smirnoff recently considered moving his daily stag
e show from Branson to Las Vegas, he consulted Sakharin and accepted his invitation to visit with him the latter city, where Sakharin was already scheduled to spend a year preparing for the aerial portrait of the Strip commissioned by the Las Vegas Arts Council, a year he was using, he admitted to Hercule and Smirnoff as they sped down the canal toward Mini-Paris, mostly to get drunk with his French friend Vanessa and to oversee construction on the gated community branded with his name ten minutes to the south of Las Vegas in a formerly desolate wasteland now established for the purpose of a complicated tax scheme as Location City, with each street given its own theme inspired by the romantic locales that dominated his work, such as Olde England Street with “cozy” prefabricated cottages, Heartland Escape Avenue with “farmhouse inspired” duplexes, Patriot Boulevard with houses all modeled after the United States’ White House, and Venice Avenue with small gray-water fountains ornamenting each yard of the ostensibly Venetian-style mansions to symbolize the canals, all built by the Ukrainian émigré Oktopussë, who, after the construction of his ill-fated resorts in Las Vegas in the 1960s, had returned to Ukraine to design nuclear power plants in the mid-1970s, had found himself exiled back to the United States in 1986 after one of his creations proved insufficiently non-hazardous for the people of the Soviet Union, and had returned to Las Vegas to work on several failed projects, including the Caribbean Casino, Countryland USA, the Titanic Resort and, finally, the World Trade Center Casino, Scheme eager to begin work on something, like Sakharin’s gated community, that might actually be built and delighted to be able to speak his native language with his client, an excellent client and friend, all in all, it seemed to him, despite his mild distaste for Sakharin’s paintings, revealed by a grim expression on Oktopussë’s face when he looked them over for inspiration and by a cold tone in his voice when he suggested that Sakharin might visit Venice or even just look at some pictures of it if he wanted to keep painting that city, which was advice well-taken, Sakharin proclaimed into the bright spray, good, solid advice, and the inspiration for this little sojourn to the Venetian Resort, which surely would serve as an adequate substitute for the real thing and had already filled him with excitement for his next painting, which he would title The Grand Canal of Venice and would imbue with an unprecedented level of accurate detail, such as a gondola, a craft he “had never even heard of” before today, and Italian flags, rather than the French flags he had always assumed flew over this beautiful, charming city, which was, he now knew, not in France at all, and was even better than he had imagined it (as, Sakharin insisted, Hercule had to agree), despite the rather touchy boatmen, the foul water that stank of the canal lichen encrusted along the waterline, and the prohibitively high prices at the hotel Olive Garden, which he was happy to see receding in the rearview mirror as they entered the serpentine course of the miniature Seine, where the other dwarfs had somehow already returned from their adventure and were staging a reenactment of the Paris Commune for a trio of morbidly shapeless tourists propped against the railing, producing cameras from within their enormous fanny-packs and whining at each other to explain how to “work” them, then aiming these whirring chunks of expensive circuitry at the dwarfs building a barricade while heartily belting out their usual work song, “Je t’aime...moi non plus” by singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, who Hercule met in 1966 during filming of what was then provisionally titled Soixante-Neuf, agent provocatif when Gainsbourg, as the titular Agent Soixante-Neuf, and the actresses playing his “secretaries”, Brigitte Bardot (as Marianne Blonde) and Anna Karina (as Marianne Brune), appeared on the riverbank beneath his practice line one morning with a camera crew filming them framed against Moshe Safdie’s ultra-modern apartment building, the half-finished Habitat 67, a honeycomb of concrete blocks streaked with the rain that poured almost incessantly that month and drenched Hercule’s clothes as he balanced, shivering, watching Gainsbourg in his manteau de tranchée and Bardot and Karina in their minijupes waiting patiently to pose and mouth their dialogue and listening to the thick dark roar of the river behind them as the camera was adjusted for another take, parapluies retracted, then unfurled again one by one as the director commanded the glamorous trio, with Gainsbourg at the left of the frame raising his first and popping it open, a blue umbrella, shimmering with rainfall, then Karina in the middle with hers, white, and finally Bardot, red, each color the ostensible symbol of some sort of character trait for each of them, or so Gainsbourg claimed to Hercule after lightning forced the Walker and the film crew alike to take shelter in the construction site of an unfinished pavilion beneath a workmen’s platform sprayed with inscrutable graffiti on cold damp dirt littered with cigarette filters, beer cans, dropped nails, wood shavings, a wrench, and a decaying paperback that had spent so much time in the elements that its pages were the brown of autumn leaves and its title was faded to unreadability, leaving only the cover illustration left to identify it, only the crude but eerie sketch of faceless human figures stacked up in rows with a smiling figure at the top, its eyes shut with bliss and its onion-shaped head crowned by a jumble of mathematical signs that unsettled Hercule as he watched Karina idly toying with it before setting it down to flip through the copy of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas that she had raised in an earlier scene (ultimately left out of the film) to cover her face while reading aloud the line, “You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests, behind me, as of no account — making a new history, the history of democracy, making old history a dwarf — I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time”, which she was silently reading again for her own amusement the next day as she waited for the camera to be set up for the ambitious tracking shot that would have followed the monorail from the characters’ embarkation at Habitat 67 all the way to their office in the French pavilion, where they would have first encountered Soviet Commissar Vladimir Dumas (Marcello Mastroianni) and his secretaries, played by Jane Fonda and popular Spanish singer Marisol, deep in conversation with a sinister Anglo-phone Canadian counter-agent, played with understated menace by Peter Sellers, and his secretaries, Ursula Andress and a dark-haired Juliet Berto, who were scripted to notice Gainsbourg emerging from the monorail car and would have whispered in their boss’s ear a warning, terminating whatever devious machinations were happening there as Karina and Bardot approached, circling around the Soviet and Canadian parties with a predatory air, hissing and preparing to fight, but held back at the last second by Gainsbourg, who would have sauntered up into the frame with an insouciant smile and introduced himself, Agent Soixante-Neuf, Frenchman, had the scene actually been shot, had the extension of the monorail line to the apartment building’s subterranean station been completed in time, but, since the extension was still unfinished, the crew was forced to skip to one of the scenes wherein Gainsbourg and his secretaries mock the Americans from above, unfurling the tricolor from their monorail car and shouting “cocorico, cocoriiico” as they speed over the Americans, who are studying a large map in their pavilion, an enormous geodesic sphere created by Buckminster Fuller, through the center of which the monorail line passed, giving the French delegation a chance to mock their opponents each morning as they ride to work, sometimes raining garbage down on the Americans, sometimes taking rifle shots in their general direction, and laughing when the Americans respond with their fingers in the American fashion and babble about the superiority of the USA or fire their gold-plated six-shooters up at the monorail, then go back to business, with the head CIA agent, played by Lee Hazlewood in a ten-gallon hat and neon cowboy costume with enormous and razor-sharp spurs on his boots, always pressing a meaty finger against his map to indicate the various pavilions his subordinates should keep under observation while his secretaries, played by Nancy Sinatra and model Colleen Corby, serve them greasy American coffee from each side of the 1:66 frame, coffee of the same brand advertised from time to time by the small electric billboard on Hazlewood’s hat, which
flashes the names and slogans of the great consumer products of the USA, including Pepsi-Cola, Ford automobiles, and Taster’s Choice, as well as DuPont gunpowder, which Hazle-wood, hidden behind a colossal fiberglass bust of Marilyn Monroe on the half-finished monorail embarkation platform with a bomb in hand, uses in an attempt to blow up the mono-rail in an early scene as it passes through the American pavilion, though his plan is foiled when Bardot, leaning out the window with a can of paint to pour on the Americans, catches the bomb and flings it back into the pavilion just before it explodes, setting fire to a fifty-foot-tall portrait of John Wayne, horrifying the Americans, sending all of them running distraught around the flames as the scene dissolves to Gainsbourg, with a secretary on each arm, walking from the monorail terminus to the French pavilion, the most elegant of all buildings at Expo 67, or so judged by the Québécois agent (Felix Leclerc) waiting outside for them with his secretaries (France Gall and Michèle Richard), who introduce themselves to Gainsbourg and promise that, despite what he may have heard, the Québécois are eager to work with their friends (the French) in countering the hostile elements that might seek to undermine the impending Exposition, such as the inscrutable agent of Japan’s dreaded Public Security Intelligence Agency, a “fastidious Japanese of royal blood, named Nikolas Chu”, portrayed by a heavily-squinting Alec Guinness, often caught by Leclerc gliding with sinister silence around certain Exposition landmarks, taking pictures of infrastructure, support pylons, access roads, construction equipment, cesspits, bridges, electrical stations, and so on, with the help of his secretaries, played by Twiggy and Françoise Hardy, both of whom, Leclerc does not fail to note, were rather Western in appearance and, he surmises, could have been kidnapped from their European parents by the Self-Defense Force in pursuit of cultivating agents provocateurs who might pass without suspicion through security checkpoints where those of Asiatic aspect would rightly be turned away, though Gainsbourg incorrectly assumes this to be paranoia and tells Bardot and Karina, as Leclerc waits out of focus in the background, that he wants to investigate this Nikolas Chu for himself, at which point the shot fades to a bird’s-eye view of the three walking to the Japanese pavilion, Gainsbourg in his blue suit, Bardot in her red dress, and Karina in her white dress from Pierrot le fou (which, to her great annoyance, was often stained pink by Bardot, who thoughtlessly placed her red clothes in the wrong batch of laundry again and again, despite Karina’s repeated pleas), past a team of workmen raising a wall of the pavilion in which the actors had taken shelter from the storm with Hercule the day before, then past the Isle of Minimus pavilion, where a number of loose women had already gathered, as they did each day, making eyes at the workmen but waiting for the appearance from within the complex of any of the dwarfs, to whom the women all morning would call out with lurid propositions that made even Gainsbourg blush as he passed them, hitching up their skirts and dancing provocatively, begging by midday the stoic dwarfs to come over to them, tearing out their own hair, then collapsing, overwhelmed, furious with desire, and obsessed with rumors of an erogenous maneuver of the dwarfs called the “sooterkin”, a maneuver only the smallest and most nimble of the dwarfs could carry out to completion, which was supposedly described in the darkest chapters of the redacted and forbidden portions of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, and which was a favorite indulgence of the most debauched courtesans among the entourage of Caligula, who himself found the “sooterkin” laughable and was given to mocking those women known for engaging in it, unlike Nero, who, according to Cornelius Tacitus, bound himself with wet bandages for a year in an unsuccessful effort to shrink his body down to the necessary size for the act, an act even the libertine Marquis de Sade felt to be so vile that he devoted nearly a third of his infamous L’histoire de Juliette to denouncing it, to scorning and proscribing any attempt at (as he had so regrettably done) investigating this legend, this mystery, this epic of gossip that had now enflamed the coquettes of Québec, maddening them with visions of delight beyond comprehension and driving them into a frenzy by late afternoon that caused them to throw themselves at the pavilion walls like panicking cattle, their shrieks echoing throughout the Expo grounds as armed guards beat them back whenever the women caught a glimpse of a dwarf venturing out from the pavilion, which was a rare occurrence, as most of the dwarfs had set up living quarters within their pavilion and, during the preparations leading up to opening day, almost never interacted with outsiders, except to meet with certain journalists who were allowed to enter the pavilion and interview Lord Khazâd as an effort at damage control, at tempering the international outcry against the current situation on the Isle of Minimus, where the ruling midget caste and much of the middle-class common dwarf caste were accused of engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the downtrodden cretin caste, who were often considered by their fellow dwarfs to be insufficiently loyal to the Isle, owing to perceived cretin support for England during the rebellion of 1799 or “Second Minimal Revolution”, when French-backed dwarf rebels on the Isle of Minimus, the smallest of the inhabited Channel Islands, massacred the local British garrison and declared independence, accepting only after three years of bloody fighting a peace treaty declaring that, while loyalty to the monarch would continue to be enforced, the Isle would be free to choose its own lord, in contrast to the former system, in which the Crown would, contrary to the customs of the Isle, appoint a new Lord Minimus, often outraging the midgets and common dwarfs by choosing a cretin, which was seen later as further proof that the cretins could not be trusted, even though most historians agree that the cretins supported the rebellion in equal numbers to the other two castes, and that the habit of appointing cretins over the midgets and common dwarfs was likely an attempt by the English to drive a wedge between the castes in order to further facilitate foreign rule, which had been a source of controversy and strife ever since a French dwarf revolutionary, having styled himself le Nain Rouge II, led an earlier rebellion against the English shortly after the first dwarf colony ships landed on the Isle of Minimus in the last year of the Elizabethan era, when the English, fearing the influence of dwarf culture and revolutionary ideas on their own peasantry, enacted severe sumptuary laws against the newcomers, infuriating them by outlawing that ancient staple of the dwarf diet known as boules infestées, the swollen testicles of a ritually slaughtered bull sliced from its body immediately after death, sprinkled with fly eggs, coated in the cheese of a midget noble’s breastmilk, and placed in a bucket filled with a citroholic cretin priest’s urine, the acidity of which, according to one account of Isle life (which is largely accurate, aside from a libel involving the dwarfs’ bathing habits), “acts to prevent the key ingredient, maggots, from escaping before the cheese has hardened to a firm and rubbery shell, after which the concoction is removed from the bucket and left atop a stone altar in the sun until it turns black and is ready to eat, the fat and slightly toxic maggots within causing the boule infestée to roll about through their energetic writhing, usually causing their prison to roll off the altar entirely and into the woods, becoming the object of a humorous game, wherein all the male dwarflings of the village are sent out to chase down and return the boule infestée while the village elders prepare cruel traps for those dwarflings who fail to locate the object of their search, leaving these failures hanging overnight in nets, languishing at the bottom of a pit, or writhing in the jaws of a bear-trap until the victorious dwarfling is led out of the sacred brothel temple, where, while devouring his prize in celebration, he has been deflowered by consecrated prostitutes and told to decide the fate of his less-fortunate comrades, forced to choose between ordering their deaths and sparing them, though the dwarfling always, as is custom, allows the others to live, which is a reenactment, according to historians, of some long-forgotten event in dwarf prehistory, his choice supposed by the dwarfs to protect his life against the burrowing action of the voracious maggots he has just ingested, despite the high death rate of these dwarflings, their stomach walls not yet developed enough t
o contain the maggots, in contrast to full-grown dwarfs, who only rarely suffer ill effects, and believe the maggots to imbue them with virile energies that allow them to swim to Guernsey, seven miles to the south, which, whenever the current Lord Minimus dies, the strongest among them raid for pigs under cover of night, carrying the squealing beasts on their backs as they swim home in the turbulent waters (a mighty feat for the dwarfs, as all common dwarfs and some midgets are severely aquaphobic under normal circumstances and refuse even to bathe), where most of them drown, leaving the survivor with the largest pig to be crowned the new Lord Minimus in a process that, aside from foreign interventions, has worked smoothly for the Isle since the Swim of 1604, the second Swim ever held, yet often considered the first, as, in the Swim of the prior year, the dwarfs had drowned en masse when trying to abduct the famously comely Guernsey maidens and the Guernsey men had burned down their church and killed a number of dwarfs in retaliation, inspiring the dwarfs to adjust the ceremony in the direction of pig abduction instead, a less offensive transgression in the eyes of these ‘giants’, who choose to overlook the loss of their pigs in return for the annual tribute paid by the dwarfs of so-called nain rugs, luxurious tapestries, woven in exceptionally fine detail by the tiny fingers of young female midgets, depicting the events of dwarf history and myth”, such as the exile from Flores, strife with the Dutch in Bantam, the two major “Wars of the Isle”, or the heroics of le Nain Rouge IX, who claimed to have visited the moon in his montgolfière, alighting on a lunar mountaintop and stealing from the natives a homeopathic psychedelic later used back on earth to fortify the radical vanguard of his fervently onanistic dwarf nationalist cult, most of whom were eventually assassinated by, as the contemporary newspaper l’Île-Matin put it, “a brachycephalic Spaniard of the utmost notoriety named Francisco, the foulest of all amongst that criminal race, born in the noxious depths of Barcelona of the loins of a didelphic harlot said to carry in her second womb the coins and jewelry she stole from the pockets of incautious travelers, who, for all their searching of her person, could, of course, never find the valuables lost to this woman, a woman who soon determined to impress her infant son into a life of pick-pocketry and other Spaniardry of the like by sending him off to Venice, where he learned the skills of unearned fortune in working alongside the cruel thieves of the Black Gondola Society, those villains (mostly descended from hearty Germanic and Portuguese immigrants of the eighteenth century) who prey upon the greater population of effete and purebred Italians, those least European of all Continental men, whose fragile anatomy and primitive intellection are no match for the burly and clever criminals rowing their raven gondolas invisibly up to their canal-side mansions in the smoldering Venetian midnight, scaling the palisades and stealing noiselessly up to the golden windows, where they look in with envy at the many treasures of the city’s swarthy princes, fattened merchants, decadent papist hierophants, and sinister turquoise barons, whose well-carriaged concubines might be seen there frolicking severally amongst the paintings of old masters, sculptures of a Michael Angelo or a Bernini, priceless manuscripts and incunabula, stuffed animals of the exotic Orient, the mummified remains of trepanated blackfellows bought from their mourning tribes for a handful of glass beads, and glittering antiquities of all varieties, such as the thirty nain rugs Francisco and his comrades spied one night in a palace overlooking the Grand Canal, having reached the highest window by means of the climbing ivy that covers the wall of that unlucky domicile, amidst an unseasonal downpour that rattled the crisp leaves and soaked their coal-black cloaks as they shivered and surveyed the immense vaulted chamber behind the glass, their fingers clinging to the wet ivy, the older Black Gondoliers electing Francisco to venture ahead into the shadows and scout for guards and treasures, which he, naturally, accepted without protest, slipping inside and creeping past the gold lamps, the solemn portraits, a silver abacus, and a snoring courtesan exhausted by her night of revelry, to the thirty rugs hanging along the far wall, covered in patterns (mostly depictions of King Goldmar leading his dwarfs out of Koblenz, the cruelties of the Chinese Emperor Wu Ti, and pornographic scenes from the marriage ceremony of le Nain Rouge VI to the triplet daughters of a mad Irish wizard) that confirmed, in the flickering light of the courtesan’s candelabra, their origin to be the Isle of Minimus, and that the rugs would likely make rich beyond Mammon all the bandits of the Society, including Francisco himself, who was entitled to a share, but one he apparently felt to be lacking, as he never returned to the window as planned and was found to be, when the other men of deviancy at last entered the palace, vanished along with all but one of the rugs, as that was all he could carry on his slender shoulders down the stairs and out through the kitchen, running so quickly that the surprised domestics could but gape as, with an insouciant wink to the young maids preparing bread and omelettes for their master’s breaking of fast, he made his exit, fleeing to his gondola and rowing into history with the ill-gotten nain rugs, which passed through many hands, enriching countless men across Europe, until, at last, they reached England, where they inspired the much-lamented Scandal of the Twenty-Nine Rugs while Francisco hid all the while among his people, the quinquilleros”, a nomadic people of northern Spain, known for their flamboyant dialect, called quinqui, and for their woman’s boot of the same name, a pair of which Brigitte Bardot wears in the opening moments of the film as she awakes in close-up, imitation sunlight draped in bars across her face, listening to the voice of Serge Gainsbourg (as Agent Soixante-Neuf) imploring her from off-camera to get up and prepare his breakfast, as he is expecting a message from le Général later in the morning and he hates to begin a mission on an empty stomach, at which point the shot changes to one from over the bed, showing Gainsbourg lying with Bardot on one side and Karina on the other, both women handcuffed to the headboard above to prevent them from escaping while he slept, as Gainsbourg knows well that they might, should the inspiration strike, should their training take hold of them and drag them back into their old habits, the madness, the nymphomania instilled in them in the Siberian closed city of Saint Nymphenburg by top Soviet scientists intent on creating an army of women capable of effortlessly seducing any Western politician and retrieving from him military secrets that could give the USSR an advantage in the impending conflict that Agent Soixante-Neuf had been sent to Russia to prevent, a goal he accomplished soon after rescuing Karina and Bardot and escaping with them from Saint Nymphenburg, where he had been briefly incarcerated at the center of the all-female city and interrogated or “eroterrogated” by hundreds of glamorous Russian women every day until he escaped from this and fled with his two companions back to Paris, only to discover that their training as Communist infiltrators, their chemical and surgical enhancements at the hands of deranged Cossack alchemists, and perhaps their natural inclinations made both of them nearly insatiable, so that he is forced to satisfy them physically no less than once every three hours in order to keep them from falling into a frenzy and potentially defecting back to the East, as General de Gaulle feared they might, forcing him to advise his friend that he should turn the women over to a team of skilled vivisectionists, who would learn how to reproduce this Soviet seductress method for the good of France, though he trusted Gainsbourg’s judgment when this counsel was refused, remembering well the sacrifices the agent had made during the war as a key member of the Resistance, despite his youth, using his family’s connections with the criminal underworld in Nice, entry point for the foreign LSD critical to their plans (and his loyal service thereafter, during the conflict in Algeria and the unrest surrounding le Général’s return to power, when the whole world went mad and the question on everyone’s lips was, “où est Soixante-Neuf?”), and aware, too, that only this agent could save them from the forces now arrayed against France, whether that meant the sinister Russians who seek to undermine France from within, the Americans who view them as puppets to be manipulated, the left-wing criminals of Tunisia and Morocco plotting unspeakable atrocities, or anyone
else envious of France’s independence, her strength, her culture, her language, for which Agent Soixante-Neuf fights at Expo 67, whenever he isn’t busy chasing France Gall’s character around Montréal, whispering foul propositions into her ear, tugging on her miniskirt, pinching her thighs, kissing her warm throat, teasing her dogs (Problème and Nougat), and even, in one scene, following Gall and her friend, played by Marie Dubois, to a nightclub among the glittering towers of the Underground City’s entertainment district, where he runs a hand over their paisley - patterned Vespas parked out front and goes inside to pursue these québécoises around the pulsating neon dancefloor under the caged go-go wenches and colored lights, imploring them to let this real-life Frenchman give them a lesson in la langue française, which has been too long suppressed by the English- speaking barbarians that hold their province under siege, as the girls laugh at him, calling him an old quignon, and, winking at the go-go wenches, who reach down to grab his jacket and trip him up at every opportunity, ridicule him and tell him to show some dignity, then begin singing Stella’s hit single “Les parents twist” while Michael Caine emerges from the smoky shadows to taunt Gainsbourg and sing along, dancing with the girls on his arms back into the shadows and disappearing, leaving Gainsbourg stymied, with no choice but to go back out to the parking lot and stare up at the simulated stars of the lamps installed in the distant ceiling of the Underground City and smoke his cigarette amid the muffled wail of the club’s music and the giggles of drunk girls somewhere out there in the darkness, into which he stares as he coldly rejects one of the passing troglodytic streetwalkers by telling her that he prefers the films of Marguerite Duras and Georges Franju when she, as is the custom among les filles souterraines of Montréal, asks him if he would like to go see the new François Truffaut movie at the underground cinema, after which he returns to his apartment on the surface to unshackle Bardot and Karina, who had been passing the time by reading to each other the love scenes from The Golden Loins by Sir Glorio Hilliard (the book Ford Madox Ford hurtfully called “the first true Dadaist novel” in a scathing review), his only published book, which, as recounted in the unpublished memoir he wrote shortly before his death in front of a Resistance firing squad in 1945, Sir Glorio wrote “in exquisite isolation from the literary world, crafting each of these characters with the perfection of an ancient god crafting a hero, yet imbuing them with reality, imparting to them a believable, well-rounded personality to meet the obstacles I placed in their path (I was reminded of a line from that Hibernian bumbler Joyce, something to the effect of, ‘all human history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God’, though in this case it was the other way round, a history within my book crafted as a manifestation of myself, the god of the novel, and one, I daresay, far more organised than He who created this world), with none but that fool Percepied (or ‘Horrible Hercule’, as I sometimes called him) to disturb me, telling me, when I committed the error of asking him his opinion, that he could not relate to my relatable characters, who, in changing and growing over the course of the story according to logical premises set forth from the beginning of the novel, were, according to this drivelling peck, unlike the people of the real world, the flesh-and-blood men like ourselves, who, in his view, act entirely without reason, kind one day, he said, and cruel the next, wise, then stupid, and calm, then furious, changing without any warning whatever, acting according to minute physiological conditions undetectable even to the microscope and unpredictable even to men such as Herr Freud, which constitutes such an obviously naïve view of human nature that I had no choice but to attempt to disabuse Percepied of it by thrashing him with my cane and leaving him out in the inclement weather as I laboured upon my tome, refrigerated in the loneliness of an unfinished beach resort decaying in the wind and spray of that stormy coast where a muse, pink with the mania common to girls in prolonged isolation or boredom and perpetually wearing roller-skates, swept down the empty road every other day swinging a bundle of wood for my fire in one hand and a headless chicken in the other on the orders of her father, who feared losing his only tenant, despite my admittedly crude remarks to the girl and my repeated attempts to seduce her by means of my more calculated manipulations, drawn from my knowledge of women and their unfailing desire to be rescued from places such as this by men such as myself, swollen with the appearance of a worldly virility and fatherly superiority I cultivated by berating Percepied in front of her as the dwarf poured us the Valpolicella, ordered in vast quantities and served only during her visits” as part of Sir Glorio’s pastiche of an essentially fictional Continental sophistication, which he would offer her, if she would only succumb to the “laudatory exhalations” and rather precious turns of phrase he knew would eventually lower her defenses sufficiently that, when he at last finished his book and smashed the typewriter with a mallet in celebration (as was his custom), the girl would consent to being stolen away to France with dreams of a marriage Sir Glorio would, in reality, have no trouble postponing until she had so accepted her place as an inmate of the Nunnery that she would end her tedious begging and wheedling and fade into the background to be used just the same as any other woman there, aging quickly from prostitute to wet-nurse, from wet-nurse to dry-nurse, then, finally, to exile from the Nunnery in what would be the middle or late 1950s, at which time she would either continue selling herself on the street or strive, in recognition of her total lack of marketable skills, to join the ranks of the bourgeois Paris housewives parading through the over-gadgeted kitchens of the future, “willing the abstract and concrete virtues of their gender to coalesce”, he wrote, “so that they might mimic the perfection of their models smiling from the hoardings in images promising the personal utopia of one commodity or another, which was destined to reappear later on that night in their dreams of small children, taught no language, wearing these modern icons of the new religion as ornamentation to distinguish their tribes from all the others wandering among the ruins of skyscrapers, where labels from beer cans and the back covers from magazines are glued with human mucus to walls, indicating territory littered with the skeletons of enemies and the vandalised treasures of the great Paris museums”, which these women would often visit in a sad effort to “cultivate” themselves in the daytime while their husbands toiled at the office or factory or made assignations with their younger and more beautiful Hungarian and Algerian mistresses out there in the new neighborhoods, built after the impending war, which Hercule would miss entirely by leaving Sir Glorio’s service shortly after the failure of The Golden Loins in order to attend on a scholarship grant the Henry Clay Frick School of the Kinetic Arts in Kansas City, spending the war years failing to earn his degree in Applied Funambulology (as he had to admit to himself, he “just wasn’t smart enough”) but trying his best anyway, practicing every evening up there on a line strung between two smokestacks over vast and countless buildings that were armored in concrete and steel and smoldering in the gloomy dusk, full of watching men in beat-up hats guzzling coffee next to weary switchboard girls and typing-pool girls who sipped at their cigarettes and were jostled by fat little bosses smoking short stub Cubans on their way out the door to drink away in kitchens at tables under bare light bulbs with radios turned down low the accumulated day that weighed on their shoulders, until at last those radios announced the end of the war and Hercule returned to this strange, hysterical, nervous Paris where nearly all the buildings and streets looked the same as they had seven years earlier but all the people seemed to have developed a taste for melodramatic giddiness and having babies, swarms of ugly little children that peeked out from squalor and met his eyes for an instant as his hired car (which, ultimately, cost far more than Hercule had realized when engaging the driver, embroiling this impoverished young dwarf in a series of humorous misadventures) slid through the muddy streets in search of a revived circus where he might exercise his talents for these disoriented urban peasants (who didn’t know what to do with their new freedom now that the long occupation of their c
ountry had ended), these hatless men and these women wearing next to nothing and always seeming to be calling up to someone in a high window who couldn’t be seen from the car as the driver sped down the long boulevards and swerved around bearded octogenarians in the middle of the street dressed like it was already winter and gazing at the traffic around them like they couldn’t understand what was happening, all these people who came to the circus that first free autumn when they didn’t have any animals and the ring-leader needed Walkers and acrobats to give everyone something to look at while he schemed up ways to import an elephant or train a big dog to work with the lion-tamer, leaving the burden of keeping the audience’s interest to Hercule, who developed more and more dangerous tricks involving dozens of performers, with himself as the star, featuring a more terrifying exhibition every week, a deadlier contraption to evade, a more beautiful ingénue to show off, a higher tower of acrobats to scale, and another flaming sword to juggle, creating a new tradition that soon utterly replaced the old American-style circus with a distinctly French circus (based on human performers rather than exotic animals) that remained France’s preferred form of circusing in 1966, when Hercule stepped on that famous rope over the Saint Lawrence to rehearse for the first time an act he hoped would impress le Général enough to convince him that he should restore government funding to Hercule’s troupe, stripped of it during budget cuts by an unappreciative arts minister, citing the temporary relocation of le Cirque des Nains to Montréal, which Hercule hoped would awaken the hitherto dormant practice of funambulism in that greatest of all North American cities, the city of the spiral staircase, city of the royal mountain and its tricorn crown, the neon crucifix, the boulevard of le Main, the flowering cavern of the Basilica, the Insectarium, the hundred chemins de fer and the thousand trains always thundering in from Vancouver and Mexico City, the fiery letters of Farine Five Roses Flour written across the sky, the twenty-six stations of the shining new Métro, and the great Underground City where Agent Soixante-Neuf in his manteau de tranchée and lunettes de soleil and his secretaries in their minijupes and their faux cils famously search for clues to the mystery of their murdered compatriot, Agent Quatre-Vingt, who leaves them a hurried message (scrawled in his own blood on the floor of the nearly-completed Place Bonaventure) that tells them his murderer is none other than (the notorious international assassin no one has ever captured and whose face no one has ever seen, despite his countless brazen acts of savagery across Europe and the Americas) Monsieur Emmerdement-Maximum, at whose current persona Quatre-Vingt hints in a sanguine footnote with the last of his power by scrawling a crude shamrock before he dies, narrowing the list of suspects to the four agents, Molloy, Malone, Murphy, and Watt (the significance of the film’s obvious allusion to Samuel Beckett, if it was anything beyond trite homage, remained obscure to critics and scholars), in charge of preparing the Irish pavilion, which would have been the only pavilion at Expo 67 within the Underground City itself had, shortly after discovering the dead Quatre-Vingt, Soixante-Neuf not, to cover up his killing of Molloy, the man whose shifty-eyed nature and skill with a firearm both seemed to point to his hidden life as Monsieur Emmerdement- Maximum, burned the building to ashes, forcing Ireland to miss out on the Expo, both in the film and in reality, as, choosing to forgo certain necessary safety precautions, the filmmakers had accidentally allowed their flames to spread from the wheeled containers situated between the camera and the pavilion and it was too late to restart construction, which greatly amused Lord Khazâd when his messenger reported this development to him as he stood on the roof of the Isle pavilion, causing him to set down the lorgnette through which he had been watching Hercule practice his Walk to embrace the messenger and laugh aloud at the thought of the Irish leaving in defeat, as Hiberno-Minimal relations in the 1960s were strained, at best, because of the depraved actions of the former Isle ambassador to Ireland (the future ambassador to the United States), for which Lord Khazâd refused to apologize, for fear of displeasing the ambassador’s wealthy and influential family and thereby hurting his own chances of marrying into it by way of the comely youngest daughter of the clan, who, despite belonging, like all her family, to the midget caste, seemed to Lord Khazâd to be unencumbered by the usual cruelty and insufferable condescension of the upper classes when, shortly before leaving for Québec, he watched her walk alone under the watery trees in the cold Isle morning, umbrella deployed, and bend to breath the fragrance of the flowering borders of his property, of the hedges beneath the willows blurred in the mist, a ghostly figure framed in his bathroom window, her hair a long shadow that brushed across her pale face, her crimson lips smiling sadly, and her glaucous eyes sweeping up to catch him watching her, to catch him dazed by a dream of marrying her and lounging about in their tropical villa together as she winked from the sunny veranda at his many infidelities and bravely endured his refusal to give her a child until he was certain that he would find no better woman to carry his heir, causing him to blush as he returned from this reverie to see the girl staring back at him through the deepening rain, a shell, as every beautiful woman is a shell, he thought, over a void, a black nothingness slowly tainted or colored by a rage that protested the injustice of the decay that would soon take from her that one quality that makes the grotesque reality of female life worth bearing, her beauty, destroying that fragile shell, as delicate as a fresh boule infestée hardening in the sun, a shell that would someday crack and leave nothing but the burning rage that would flicker more and more brightly behind those dark eyes that watched and haunted him as he stepped back from the window, turning to walk aimlessly down the cold stone halls of his palace and, eventually, prepare for his long sojourn in Montréal, where he would find, to his relief, that the workmen needed very little supervision and that he could, therefore, spend his time relaxing and striving to make his presence known to the film crew, or, more specifically, to the actresses, to those fragrant nymphs in their lunettes de soleil and écharpes en laine who fluttered past him, ogling him through their faux cils and whispering to each other a few giggled words on the subject of that highest form of pleasure available to a woman (that strange maneuver known as the “sooterkin”) as the jealous hired gondoliers lead them down to the boats that took them from their apartments to the day’s film site somewhere on the artificial island of Île Sainte-Hélène just before dawn, when the cold dew settled on their manteaux de fourrure and the great river roared from the darkness, which hid the many construction projects lining their path to the cameras and the big lights marking the place where they had to sit around half-asleep, waiting to make their contribution to the mysterious alchemy of modern film-making as the early sun prepared to rise, glowing softly somewhere behind the strange geometric shapes of this island’s futuristic new skyline, ink-black against the faded pink clouds distantly marking the new day, which was greeted, every time, by the “cocorico” of Telly Savalas’s rooster he, as the belligerent Greek agent Homer Malakula, carries in each of his scenes as an eccentric affectation that the director hoped would define his otherwise rather nebulous character, who, along with his secretaries, played by Tuesday Weld and Elsa Leroy, step from the shadows into Gainsbourg’s path to grudgingly warn him, out of an unexplained respect for le Général fifteen minutes into the film, that the British MI6 agent, played by Michael Caine, has arrived in Montréal with his secretaries (Judy and Sally Geeson) and an enormous cargo of machinery, which they are already assembling with the help of Sellers and other Anglophone Canadians into an evil supercomputer (voiced by Marlon Brando) programmed to calculate the most efficient method of exterminating the glorious French language and fed every day with new punch cards and reel-to-reel tape by its secretaries, Britt Ekland and Diana Rigg, who, much to his surprise, Gainsbourg spots later when he and his secretaries go skulking through the bizarre Japanese pavilion, designed like a rustic cabin of logs of wood reinterpreted in Brutalist concrete by a James Frazer Stirling or a Josef Oktopussë, its subterranean levels a labyrinth of secur
ity cameras to evade, oblivious guards to karate-chop into unconsciousness, trained attack-dogs to placate with raw meat from Bardot’s handbag, laboratories full of bizarre scientific experiments to sabotage, and endless, wet tunnels that, seeping with rust and infested with voluptuous fungi, lead down, somewhere under the distantly roaring river, to the darkest depths of the complex, where Guinness, as Agent Chu, at whose appearance a gong splashes on the soundtrack, engages in a battle of wits with Gainsbourg, who had, three days earlier, described, as they sheltered from the rain, his trepidation regarding this scene to Hercule in terms that suggested he doubted the director’s ability to execute it successfully, though it seemed to Hercule, as he made his sluggish evening orbit of the miniature Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, that the movie had turned out reasonably well, from what he could remember of it, had received mostly positive reviews, and had succeeded in inspiring both a short-lived 1980s French television series and a currently in-production remake by Quentin Tarantino, which, when the production company couldn’t acquire the rights, would have to be postponed until 2005 while the lawyers worked out an agreement, would ultimately star singers Benjamin Biolay in the role of Agent Soixante-Neuf and Jarvis Cocker as the MI6 agent, and would be nearly as well-received as the original, which was often mentioned as one of the best films of the 1960s and was consistently available on home video from 1991 onward, winning it many new, young fans, even in the United States, where French-language movies rarely made any money, aside from the occasional propaganda film from the Isle of Minimus, which all the expatriate dwarf community would go see again and again out of respect for the Isle, staring, rapt, at those mindless reels of pastoral maidens herding their sheep around quaint highlands cottages as the announcer lists the many accomplishments of the current Lord Minimus, which the other dwarfs at Mini-Paris would cheer while one of them slapped Hercule on the back to wake him up and encourage him to sing along to the pompous orchestral march that always plays over the end credits and had been named the national anthem of the Isle in 1994 after it was given lyrics by Lord Khazâd, who claimed to have written the tune himself and even collected royalty payments whenever it was performed on the Isle of Minimus (much of the police work on the Isle consisted of tracking down and prosecuting those who played the anthem without paying him), despite an on-going lawsuit brought against him by the makers of Mallrat is Missing, an “edutainment” video game starring the shopping- obsessed computer-generated rapping rat sidekick character from the 1989 straight-to-laserdisc science fiction movie The Virtual Generation, who, as players guide Mallrat’s brother, Ken, through various historical locales, such as ancient Greece and Benjamin Franklin’s favorite brothel, as well as the futuristic, virtual-reality-obsessed world of 1999 in which the movie is set, raps hints regarding his hiding place over the melody Lord Khazâd had supposedly invented whenever players correctly answer a question posed in one of the game’s frequent live-action video sequences, starring Malcolm McDowell and a number of washed-up former pornographic film actresses who were considered to be, aside from their stiff line readings and persistently dazed expressions, possibly the least objectionable element of the game, which was frequently listed as one of the worst video games ever made thanks to its numerous off-putting features, such as the ability for the character to randomly poke his own eyes out by accident, leaving the player to complete the game with an entirely blank screen, be deafened, cutting the sound, get his hands chopped off, so that objects could no longer be picked up, or suffocate, should the player forget to keep pressing the “breath” button every two seconds (or die from hyperventilating if the button is pressed too quickly), as well as the CD-ROM self-destructing if the player’s character dies, so that a new copy would need to be purchased, and the game’s developers calling up players late at night to threaten them, a set of features which did, however, inexplicably appeal to a small group of Japanese teenagers, who, when the game was, after numerous delays, finally released in early 1994 for personal computers and the 3DO, imported it and, through their competitions to be the first to actually finish the game (the publishers had announced a prize of one million US dollars to whomever accomplished this feat, though this was never paid out, as the game was, owing to poor design, essentially impossible to play beyond its first levels), soon gave the game a literal cult following, consisting of hundreds of mostly young people in white robes all over the country who could be found bowed over their computers day and night, their efforts to reach Mallrat an act of worship, their inevitable failure to overcome the numerous glitches and illogical puzzles interpreted as a divine mortification, as a judgment that they had failed to sufficiently align their lives to the pursuit of Mallrat, that they had neglected to share the good news of Mallrat with their communities, who shuffled along out there, crowding to work and crowding back home to their planned- obsolete gadgets and sullen families without any knowledge of the glorious truth found in the search for this street-smart rodent with a nineties attitude and repertoire of outrageous catchphrases in a language many of them could barely understand, but which, with its coughing consonants and bubbling vowels, conjured images of Hollywood utopias far removed from the gray reality of life in modern Japan, where everyone understood that there was no difference between having something and being something, that there was no alternative to consumerism except death, that there was nothing out there in those ever-narrowing streets, densely webbed with electrical lines powering the neon logos of international businesses covering the walls, that there was nothing but what the Americans called the “rat race”, from which this rat incongruously led his cult, saved them, a bug-eyed cartoon messiah in a backwards baseball cap who receded deeper and deeper into the maze of faulty programming and baffling narrative decisions and who only rarely granted them a scrap of encouragement, in the form of a perfunctory digitized rap in the classical “my name is (rapper’s name) and I’m here to say” or “(rapper’s name) is my name and (favored activity) is my game” style, common to what might be termed “square” depictions of said musical genre in the 1990s, combining here a set of lyrics written by the programmers themselves and a beat composed by one of the company’s sound effects designers (Britt Daniel, later of the rock band Spoon) that gave players the hope that they might succeed, which, though this was a false hope, nourished his cult through the many trials that awaited them, through the thirty-two-piece sliding tile puzzle that functions as the door lock on Thomas Edison’s laboratory, the maze in Albert Einstein’s brain that goes nowhere, the band of evil communists and hippies (played by the programmers themselves in cheap costumes, roaming the Mall of America level, where they abduct and kill the player’s character if he can’t answer a lengthy set of riddles that make no sense and a questionnaire written entirely in Norse runes), and extremely difficult combat sequences that involve sinister Chinese hackers in bright red “VR caps” seeking to blow up the joint US-Soviet moon base and the million colonists inhabiting it in 1999, as well as trials found outside the game, where, after one particularly sensitive member of the cult of Mallrat from Tokyo, in hopes of drawing to their messiah the attention of a squalid and ignorant world, attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto during a joint press conference with UK Labour Party leader Anthony “Tony” Blair (who approvingly compared their surroundings to London’s Canary Wharf “revitalisation” project) in a meeting at the newly-opened Yebisu Garden Place to discuss trade and finance reforms Blair hoped would bolster his economic credentials for the upcoming general election of 1997 (in which his party would win a 179-seat majority), the Japanese government rushed to ban the game and arrest the ringleaders of the cult, some of whom were said to be respected doctors and businessmen, at their headquarters in a sprawling compound hidden deep within the vast bonsai fields north of Tokyo, which, for nearly two decades, had gone untended because of their inability to profitably compete with the superior bonsai fields of the Isle of Minimus and had grown into a bizarre forest of delicate but gnarled tendri
ls intertwined up to an even height of seven feet nearly three miles in diameter, blocking even the light armored vehicles and bulldozers of the JSDF and hiding the cultist gunmen firing automatic weapons at the helicopters of the Tokyo police, preventing authorities from reaching the central compound and forcing them to appeal to the police force of the dwarf colony on Hokkaido, which sent a team of its smallest agents to crawl through the dense growth and arrest the cultists, who, when they saw the dwarf agents emerging from the supposedly-impenetrable forest, retreated to the five-level parking garage where they stored their black “loudspeaker vans”, which their surplus Russian Mi-17 helicopter with a distinctive paint job that inspired them to name it the “Mi-Ke” frequently airlifted out of the forest to drive around foreign embassies and Tokyo Disneyland, blaring from their three-hundred-decibel Magnephonic Blast Radius XL loudspeakers sound clips from The Virtual Generation and a warning that all who opposed Mallrat and his impending ten-thousand-year rule of Japan would be crushed mercilessly, continuing until, their mission for that day accomplished, the cultists would return home, switching off these famous loudspeakers, which would later be cited as the cause of the enormous fire that broke out in the compound during the dwarfs’ attack as the cultists tried and failed to start the helicopter’s temperamental motor before succumbing to the smoke of the bonsai fields burning in a searing conflagration visible for miles, which killed all the cultists at the compound, aside from a few dazed young men dubbed the leaders of the cult by the police and media when they were brought to trial and sentenced to death, outraging the surviving cultists scattered around Japan and, for some reason, Russia, cultists who, to placate suspicious neighbors, had little choice but to disavow the extremes of those arrested and reduce the more “cultish” aspects of their activities to a fashion called Mallrat-kei, consisting of a backwards baseball cap, a T-shirt with an obnoxious phrase printed over an iconic drawing of Mall-rat by visual artist Takashi Murakami, baggy cargo shorts, high-top Reebok Pump or LA Gear Regulator shoes, and what they characterized as an “in-your-face” attitude that proved to be so irritating that, in 1999, it had already inspired the crew of a transpacific All Nippon Airways flight to consider returning to Tokyo rather than continue across to Los Angeles even before the Mallrat-kei element among the passengers stormed the cockpit and demanded the pilot change course toward McCarran International Airport (named for former senator Patrick McCarran) in Las Vegas, where the three hijackers, having known they would be met on the ground by police, parachuted from the plane before it landed and, passing off their sudden splashdown in the miniature harbor of the New York-New York Hotel and Casino as part of a marketing campaign, handed out Mallrat brochures and keychains to the staring crowd of murmuring tourists, among which the three hijackers, a four-foot-tall young woman named Lucille Ri and two seven-foot-tall male bodybuilders named Ken Ikeda and Johnny Hatoyama, disappeared, their whereabouts, despite a city-wide manhunt, unknown to everyone except Hercule, who, three days after their arrival, found the mysterious door set into the concrete bunker that was disguised by the miniature Notre Dame ajar when he went back there to look for the bottle of wine Lord Khazâd had demanded to celebrate the prosecutor’s decision to drop the case against the notorious ambassador from the Isle of Minimus (wanted by the United States on dozens of charges, including arson, grand theft auto, cattle rustling, money laundering, drug smuggling, and faking his own death), delighting Lord Khazâd to such an extent that, when informed of this change, he immediately threw the telephone at one of the hotel maids mopping up his bedroom and slapped Hercule on the back while shouting to his servants to book the entire Venetian Hotel, or as much of it as was available, for a lavish party in the Isle’s honor, to be held that very night, then sent Hercule out to bring back one of those bottles of delicious Isle wine Lord Khazâd had given him before he had realized that he only had five bottles left, nearly prancing with joy when Hercule agreed out of weariness and trudged back down to Mini-Paris, thinking about possibly drinking it all himself right then and hopefully sleeping through Lord Khazâd’s party as he scaled the railing out in front of the miniature city, passed the papier-mâché guillotine with volleyballs covered in Halloween masks strewn at its foot, and, feeling like that flayed calf that so often symbolized the dwarfs in Isle literature, walked across the cracked expanse of concrete, which was glowing hotly all around him in the flood of sunlight that burst abruptly through a cloud and illuminated the other dwarfs, costume-smothered, as they went wading through the dazzling air, which sickened them with its heat, then seemed to cool again when another cloud slid across the sun, as if the world had suddenly remembered that autumn was beginning, Hercule imagined, though somehow it never got too hot in the Notre Dame, where it was always the same cool and dry climate, a perfect space for storing the wine that was now, somehow, missing, much to the surprise of Hercule, who cautiously pulled back the heavy metal door of the bunker and peered down into the darkness, down a set of stairs descending indefinitely into the gloom, out of which a girl in a Mallrat shirt and two huge, shirtless men lunged at him, tying him up and subjecting him to an interrogation in English before carrying him through the door and down into the shadows, where, to Hercule’s surprise, they did not kill him, but, rather, introduced themselves and explained their mission as they untied him and led him through the endless reinforced tunnels that extended in all directions to their hastily built underground safehouse for “tea” (actually a limited-edition Mallrat-themed Royal Crown Cola sold only in Japan for three months in 1990 as part of an ill-conceived effort to advertise the ultimately canceled release of the movie that featured him to a handful of Asian theaters) after recognizing, they claimed, that Hercule was, in fact, one of the very people they had come to Las Vegas to save from the assassins of the Black Gondola Society, who had planned to kill him that very night, during Lord Khazâd’s party, to which Lucille would accompany Hercule as his protector while Ken and Johnny, who, like Lucille and all other Mallrat cultists, had renounced their given names in favor of “Mallrat names” taken from characters in Mallrat is Missing, would infiltrate the forbidden top floor of the Venetian in search of clues that might help to explain why the BGS, the cult’s primary nemesis ever since the gondoliers arrived in Tokyo to sink and take the place of a fleet of Mallrat-shaped paddle boats the cult had deployed for the amusement of tourists and children in the canals surrounding Akasaka Palace, had recently shifted a disproportionate amount of resources to Las Vegas, far in excess of what was needed for their current scheme, along with most of its council of elders, who traditionally never left Venice but, rather, remained their entire lives in deep meditation belowdecks on their three-hundred-foot mother-gondola, which had, somehow, in all its centuries of roaming the crowded Venetian canals, always eluded detection, even at the height of their war with la Categoria, the Venetian Mariners’ Guild, in the late 1960s, when the thunder of exploding gondola-bombs echoed down the Venetian alleys on a nightly basis, when the mutilated bodies of bayoneted gondoliers were found every morning streaming long clouds of blood down the Grand Canal like the tails of comets or impaled on their own oars and set ablaze in Saint Mark’s Plaza to be found in the morning by screaming nuns, too hysterical even to call the police, or dazzled tourists, excited by the danger they would recall in a breathless rush at fast food restaurants and over coffee to their friends and co-workers for years afterward, as if they themselves had narrowly escaped meeting the same fate as these gondoliers, whose fellow men of the oar continued massacring each other without mercy or hesitation until, finally, la Categoria was so weakened that its three surviving ministers voted to capitulate and allow the Black Gondola Society to exercise full authority over the Venetian canals, despite the objections of several furious veteran Guildsmen still clinging to the ancient traditions of honor and self-sacrifice they had sworn to uphold as boys learning the ways of the gondola in the Twenties and Thirties alongside their fathers, who, once they had reached the open water, safel
y out of reach of listening ears, bitterly denounced to their sons the artless blundering of the vaporetti, or water buses, that Mussolini was introducing to the city in hopes of breaking la Categoria even as he funded the Fascist-aligned BGS and allowed them to openly commit atrocities against the Guildsmen on a level not matched until the war decades later, which officially ended in 1968 with the leadership of la Categoria disbanding and going into exile while the small band of unbowed Guildsmen who heroically refused their orders to burn their gondolas and leave Venice to the gloating enemy instead rowed off into the night to furtively continue their way of life behind the backs of the victors with their bayonets as their only defense against the BGS when dealing with frequent outbreaks of violence that, despite the open support of their enemy for aggressive neo-fascist groups throughout Europe, allowed politicians in Europe and the United States to unfairly agitate for la Categoria to be placed on a secret international “watch list” of potentially dangerous cults alongside such groups as the Church of the Infinite Temple, which prophesied that the end of the world would come on the twenty-fourth of July, 1999, and the cult of Mallrat, which had, by October of that year, already hijacked three planes, starting with one (like the other two, an All Nippon Airways plane) taken on the seventh of February, 1998 by a single cultist, who directed the plane to land in Hokkaido and threatened to kill a flight attendant if his imprisoned comrades were not released, followed on the twenty-second of July, 1999, when a Boeing 747, painted with the beloved “Pokémon” characters to take advantage of their popularity, was stormed on the ground before passengers boarded in Honolulu by two dozen cultists and hastily repainted with an enormous Mallrat grinning from each side of the fuselage then flown with the help of two kidnapped pilots to the mainland United States, where the cultists, for reasons that never became clear, intended, according to the testimony of the pilot who survived along with one of the cultists, to crash the plane into the Woodstock 99 festival, which had begun that day and which would not, after all, be interrupted, owing to the plane running out of fuel over Illinois, where it crashed in a corn field, which was followed by a third hijacking in late September by Lucille and the two bodybuilders, who, after they had, in an exciting gun battle (about which they told Hercule in an overly dramatic tone that, oddly, made him wonder if they were making the whole thing up), thwarted the Black Gondola Society’s devious plot to start a war between the Isle of Minimus and the United States by making Hercule’s and Lord Khazâd’s deaths look like the work of the CIA in order to gain control over the well-defended canals of the Isle in the wake of the inevitable surrender of the Isle to US forces that would almost immediately follow the Dvergatal’s declaration of war, explained to Hercule, as they lounged, sunbathing “like lizards” (as Lucille said) atop the miniature Arc de Triomphe in Mini-Paris, which had cracked all over in its slow descent into its sandy foundations, that they would still need his help in their further operations around Las Vegas, whether fighting the surviving members of the Black Gondola Society there or generally advancing the ideals of Mallrat’s cult, though he was half-asleep and barely listening to their words, a meaningless murmur, a quiet softness that flowed around him, carrying him into dreams of wandering with Lord Khazâd past the half-finished structures at Expo 67 and watching the bowed construction workers trudging across the dim landscape beneath heavy clouds, of practicing his walk on a line beaded with rain that glittered under the light thrown from cars carrying Steve McQueen, Peggy Lipton, and Ana Martin to film a scene in the geodesic dome, and of sipping martinis behind the tinted glass of the observation deck of a hotel where he was waiting for Lord Khazâd to finish his “business conference” and meet him late in the afternoon on a clear and cool day that was drawing to a close over pine trees filling with shadow and the unusually tranquil river reflecting the wavering image of the translucent afternoon moon, blue on blue over the downtown skyline, which already sparked here and there with distant lights in the shadowed eastern faces of the buildings, darkening as the illuminated west reddened with the first faint hint of sunset then bloomed with a golden fire that glowed beneath the somber deepness of the autumn sky, which was marked here and there by little bright comets of airplanes falling silently as Hercule settled back into the big chair with his feet barely reaching the edge of the cushion and, lowering his gaze from this scene, rifled through the stack of magazines left on the armrest, which included Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Time, and, catching his interest, a tattered copy, from June 1962, of the final issue of Groin, that famous “men’s adventure” magazine, commemorating the publication’s end with a retrospective of their greatest articles from their two decades of publication, starting off with the editor’s thanks to the readers in a short paragraph at the front (after the cigarette advertisements), then a classic article, titled Nympho Housewives’ Perverted Nazi Orgy, from 1956, illustrated in a “realistic” style with a seemingly-innocent suburban woman welcoming a beatnik, a Nazi in full uniform, and a “slobbering black ape” in the back door of the house as her oblivious husband went off to work through the front door, followed by an article from a year later with the headline Reds Train Baboons to Bomb Anytown usa, one from 1958, titled Typing Pool Girls Run Depraved Marihuana Ranch ( featuring an “eyewitness” account of the filthy deeds of these young ladies at their Carson City headquarters), another from that year, called Nazi Nymphos Made Me Their Love Slave, and a 1961 report, headlined Killer Jap’s Perverted Doomsday Plot, which was lavishly illustrated by Mort Künstler with drawings of the sinister Japanese secret agent the magazine identified only as “Chang” (certainly not his real name) tugging on his signature pair of black leather gloves to hide his grotesquely burned hands in preparation for the torture of a captured GI and the same agent two years earlier strangling (with unburned hands) an American commando who, in March of 1942, had parachuted into the heart of Japan’s insidious Nakano School, where, according to the article, the agent had, just days before, been recalled to teach after five years of distinguished service “working first to undermine the government and defenses of Nan-Ching and then to administer the city after his inscrutable and savage fellow Japs invaded” following his apprentice years in “the war-torn nightmare world of occupied Manchukuo, where this insatiably wanton and sadistic fiend was free to indulge his most loathsome lusts upon the trembling maidens of the Orient and the captured daughters of White Russian colonists” during his scientific experiments, involving chemical treatments and vivisections of thousands of pregnant victims, as he attempted to develop a process by which he could manipulate the embryos to ensure they would grow into an army of unstoppable female warriors who would be capable of infiltrating, by seduction or violence, any enemy capital, though only ten of these infants were born by the end of the Pacific War and all but two ended up in prison or dead after they inevitably became frenzied and killed everyone at the unsuspecting Chinese orphanages that had taken them in, which wasn’t possible for these two survivors, who, as the only remaining Caucasian test subjects, might have been discovered by the American forces, who would have studied them and likely traced the scheme back to Chang and his colleagues, living in fear of prosecution for their actions, despite the amnesty given by the occupying force in Tokyo (hoping to capitalize on their research into biological weapons that could be turned against the Soviets), which forced Chang to raise the two girls himself in his palatial estate, hidden among the anonymous industrial parks of the rebuilt Nagasaki, where his team of kidnapped Buddhist monks trained the girls in ancient self-control techniques that would prevent them from giving in to their prenatal programming to seduce and slaughter every man they met and his team of hired newspaper advice column ladies from fifteen different countries taught the girls international etiquette so that they could accompany him on his missions to undermine countries like the United States or West Germany and even beguile some of these fat old diplomats and bureaucrats into giving up some state secrets along with the fur coats and diamond earrings th
ese types of men seemed born to pour over young women, which constituted a plan (to an end ominous and shrouded in mystery) that proved largely successful, though the girls did lash out in violence at school (when their sinister benefactor sent them to school at age thirteen) often enough that they were labeled “sukeban” and had to learn at home from a private tutor, who, in the last of the report’s three illustrations, was shown teaching them English through a heavy steel grid that would protect him from the occasional psychotic outburst of these girls, both of whom were dressed in tight schoolgirl uniforms practically ready to burst off their voluptuous bodies, depicted with obsessive detail by the artist as they posed behind the steel grid over the caption “Jap secret agents advance their devious and unknowable conspiracy” at the end of the magazine, which Hercule finished leafing through and placed back with the others in favor of a Time that belligerently chronicled the life of Fidel Castro and offered gardening tips, which he scanned, eyes glazed over, until Lord Khazâd finally showed up with a pipe stuck in his mouth and a jug of pinard swinging from his finger and called for him to climb down and follow him to “the Hand” to stir up the nightclubs and show these people how things are done on the Isle of Minimus, show them what they had been missing ever since they drove their own dwarf population out, during the Anglo-American War of 1812, after false rumors that a cretin was sending reports on British troop movements to the United States spread from a Welsh palefrenier (or stableboy) with a grudge against a dwarf colleague to generals’ wives chattering among the labyrinths of rococo carpets and miasmically embroidered chaises longues that filled the finest salons of Montréal, then to the generals themselves, who, at first, allowed this rumor to flow down into the torrent of hysterical inanities that poured ceaselessly from these bored women’s mouths but soon came to believe that their dear “betteraves” might have discovered a real plot and ordered all three thousand dwarfs placed on barges and deported to the Isle, where these weary refugees settled in the rain-swept western highlands and down in the coastal towns of Marcellaville and Nouvelle-Chomedey to tend damp sheep that snarled and hissed as they sank into the mud and to raise tobacco that they rolled into pungent dwarf cigars, which, when exported, came to be known as cigarettes and were the Isle’s primary source of income until an American named James Albert Bonsack revealed, in 1880, a mechanical cigarette-rolling invention that made the Isle’s famous rolling industry unnecessary in the eyes of all but the strictest connoisseurs, who understood that only the small hands of a dwarf rolling master could form cigarettes with the true soulfulness that made smoking them so enjoyable and could not be reproduced in mass quantities by some clanking and rattling machine, which the Isle of Minimus labeled la pieuvre mécanique in propaganda leaflets dropped over England and France by the Isle’s fleet of montgolfières in an attempt to convince these countries to turn away from heartless American machinery and back to the more “authentic” traditions that they had cultivated for three generations, all of which, despite the eloquence and impassioned tone of the leaflets, failed to win them many supporters among the giants, forcing the dwarfs, in order to agitate on their behalf against the new foreign ownership of some of their failing factories, to form a trade union, which, despite its inability to halt the mechanization of their industry, remained so important to Isle culture that its crude but memorable iconography and slogans would be referenced in such later incidents as the Isle’s “Elephant Rebellion” against Nazi occupiers during the Second World War, when the Resistance defaced many Nazi flags with imitations of the famous drawing of la pieuvre, and the dwarfs’ strike in Mini-Paris, when Lucille raised her fists and convinced the dwarfs (in a fiery speech that was largely derived from Mallrat’s warning to the Aztecs during the Conquistador level of Mallrat is Missing) that, just as the cruel Emperor Cuauhtémoc’s oppression of his people had demonstrated that he was not a god but, rather, little more than “an ex-ante Bonsack”, so, too, had the owners of Mini-Paris failed to meet their duty to care for the well-being of their subjects, who were denied health insurance, threatened with unemployment, homelessness, and deportation whenever an informer told Management that the dwarfs were planning to unionize, and saw their wages cut back to the very minimum, which Lucille convinced her hosts was unacceptable and grounds for a labor strike, inspiring them in their resistance to this mistreatment with the help of Hercule, who, moved by this opportunity to, for the first time in his life, stand up for an ideal, reminded the dubious Lord Khazâd that the dwarf leader owed Lucille a debt for saving the Isle from the Black Gondola Society’s plot and received assurance that the Isle would give its full support to the grévistes, who, beginning on the first of November, 1999, used their experience building imitation barricades, gained during their re-enactments of the Paris Commune, to construct high walls of debris that encircled Mini-Paris, then patrolled and reinforced this barrier while the authorities wailed at them through loudspeakers to “man up and end this strike” in wounded and indignant tones, as if they were personally offended and could not under any circumstances continue to endure the severe indignity the dwarfs had mercilessly and needlessly inflicted on them as they waited out there, staring at the barricades and wondering what had become of the “hostage”, Mini-Paris’s thick-necked young hiring manager, Brody Cameron, who had been sent in just before the barricades went up to offer the dwarfs a five-cent decrease, rather than the previously announced ten-cent decrease, in their wages while warning them that, if they declined, Management had already decided that, should their replacement by imported Chinese workers be made necessary by the dwarfs’ continued intransigence, the illusion of reality on which the owners of Mini-Paris prided themselves would be maintained by converting Mini-Paris to a “pan-Asian” theme and declaring the miniature Eiffel Tower to be a reproduction, not of the original Parisian Eiffel Tower, but of its replica in China, the Arc de Triomphe to be based on the one built in North Korea to celebrate Kim Il-Sung’s achievements, the Bastille to be a copy of Tokyo Disney’s imitation in its “Le Monde Français” zone, and so on, creating a level of abstraction that greatly confused the dwarfs, who, nevertheless, understood that this scheme would not, despite Brody’s insistence that by “adapting to the current wage climate” they would be helping Mini-Paris to “blow away the competition”, be a triumph for themselves, as they pointed out to him during his sermon, conducted from atop the guillotine platform, though he swiftly countered their doubts by explaining that the Viva Las Vegas Entertainment Management Consortium (the owners of Mini-Paris and several other complexes on the strip at the time) was dedicated to providing an unparalleled entertainment experience at the best possible prices for their valued customers, who, year after year, made Las Vegas not only the number one leisure destination in the world, but a trusted center for business summits and product expositions as well, which could never have happened if they had allowed wages to become artificially inflated above what the global marketplace had deemed reasonable, if they had been distracted from their core directives by complex and unnecessary labor disputes, and if they had lost sight of the reason the industry existed in the first place, which was the consumer, the young man getting married in a few days on a wild vacation with buddies he’s known since they were kids, the high-roller ready to match wits with the world’s best poker players, the mature woman delighted to find that Viva Las Vegas Entertainment Management Consortium-associated casinos each have over one hundred high-tech proprietary slot machines programmed to pay out grand prize winnings more often than those of any other company, the family (he said in tones of awed reverence) looking for all-ages shows that everyone from little sister to grandpa can enjoy, the married couple on a second honeymoon seeking more adult (yet discrete) options, the top business leaders in need of warehouse floor space near the hotels to show off their wares to foreign investors or generous conference hall accommodations for a meeting of regional managers, or tourists who, when they return to their home countries, would tell others about the top-no
tch service at a common-sense price they received from the Consortium’s team of hard-working individuals, whose reported professionalism and reliability “will so astound the listeners”, he said, “that their love for America will burst forth in torrents of childlike wonder as they rush from their squalid huts or apartment blocks (or whatever they live in) and wade through the mud sucking at their shoes to the bus shelter as the rain pours down to wait for transportation to the airport, where, under the eyes of heavily-armed guards, they will apply for a visitor’s pass to the United States and spend their last kopek, yen, or peso on a ticket to this storied land of nightly Wayne Newton performances and freedom, which, as their plane descends to McCarran International Airport, will be seen through a veil of tears of joy while the words God Bless America bloom unbidden from their lips”, conjuring an image so beautiful that Brody could not help but thrust a hand up to the sky and spontaneously break into prayer as the puzzled dwarfs looked on, watching the beady little eyes in his soul-patched face squint shut and listening to his voice rattle with emotion when he asked God to please just let His light shine on this great country as Lucille, flanked by the two shirtless mountains of muscle, Ken and Johnny, strode out onto the platform and proclaimed in her small but fearless voice that they had a patriotic duty to resist this attack on their strike, which Hercule, lounging behind the others, saluted with a hearty swig from a bottle of exquisitely putrid mushroom champagne, fermented in an Isle champagne-tank “sarcophagus” deep within the cave system that riddled the earth beneath the rainy streets of Marcellaville, where the locals toiled brokenly in a futile attempt to prop up an economy still depressed a century after their cigarette-rolling industry collapsed and left much of the western coastal plain a moldering wasteland of used-up earth slowly covering in a shroud of brambles a string of villages and towns full of hermits shut up in their houses as much as possible, only going out to chase vandals away from the vacant black husks of factories, to scrabble at a square of earth that was determined not to give up anything edible, or to shop in the dingy supermarkets under the blank gaze of dead-eyed employees in branded aprons, who were sullenly shuffling the rare remaining merchandise around to keep it from getting dusty on the cavernous shelves as the broken air-conditioning system heaved its hot breath down on squeaky-wheeled shopping carts rolling up and down bare aisles that echoed with loudspeaker announcements of special prices and lost children or the most bombastically melodramatic popular songs of the 1980s, such as the Grammy-winning “Wind Beneath My Wings” by Bette Midler and the techno remix of the Isle of Minimus’s 1988 Eurovision-winning ballad “La fille en peluche”, written (ostensibly) by Lord Khazâd and performed by the Isle synthpop duo Lola et sa Soeur, to which Ken and Johnny danced as the dwarfs milled about drinking during their party up on the miniature Eiffel Tower observation platform to celebrate the one-week anniversary of declaring the strike, an occasion the ring of heavily-armed police waiting outside the barricades marked by reassuring the increasingly agitated journalists still swarming around them that the dwarfs would come to their senses and let their former employer get back to the business of showing people a good time any day now, since they had certainly run out of food and they had no way of getting any more, the police said, unaware that the strikers had been bringing in supplies from Lord Khazâd through the tunnels with the help of the city’s homeless community, who had taken to living underground ever since the Las Vegas municipal authorities decided to forcibly drive them out in order to improve the consumer experience for the paying visitors, who stopped now and then to take a picture of the police or to waddle up and try to photograph themselves in the same shot as one of the dwarf sentries looking down on them from atop the walls, which Hercule, as the others celebrated, inspected in the dim evening light to make sure the police hadn’t taken this opportunity to attempt to breach them before he turned back to the Eiffel Tower, passing the kiosks representing les Halles, where giant workers had sold souvenirs, climbing over the railing that had once been all that separated them from the hordes streaming in and out of the casino and where they would make their last stand if the barricades fell, threading the eye of the crumbling Arc de Triomphe, winding around the Louvre, resting for a minute against the Grande Arche of la Défense, then ambling under the barred windows of the Bastille, from which Brody called out to him with exasperation as he kneeled there under the dwarf-appropriate low ceiling of this miniature prison, locked up, on Lucille’s orders, ever since he had tried to tear a hole through a section of the barricades to let the police swarm in and crack some heads so that hard-working and loyal associates like himself could finally get back to bringing joy to the countless people of all walks of life and from every corner of the globe who relied on the prompt and courteous service of the associates Brody hired after carefully screening all applicants and picking only the best of the best, as he had been taught to do at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received a top-notch twenty-first-century-ready educational experience along side his good friends Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who, after college, had gone on to create a highly popular animated TV show about four little boys growing up in the titular zany Colorado town of South Park, where, each week, the characters face a wide range of topical situations, including religious conflict, poverty, deforestation, prostitution, anthropomorphic feces, and, in an episode dedicated to Stone’s and Parker’s old friend, airing that very night thanks to a computerized animation process that allowed them to complete episodes in just three days, a labor union of selfish “dwarves” that takes over the town’s amusement park and petulantly demands millions of dollars from its kindly old owner so that the dwarves, named Lazy, Commie, Workshy, Lefty, Marxist, Pinko, and Doc Zhivago, can give up working and lounge around while contributing nothing to society, which the children themselves begin to emulate, refusing to do their schoolwork (unless their teacher will agree to give them straight As) until the dwarves’ indolence causes one of the children to be horribly dismembered, set on fire, and eaten by rats when a rollercoaster, deprived of regular maintenance, jumps the track and plows through the town, inspiring one of the surviving boys to announce, “I’ve learned something today, you guys: unions are just douchebags that don’t want to work hard for their money like everyone else does”, convincing the townspeople to drive these evil dwarves out so that those willing to actually earn their income are no longer held back by the sinister schemes of idle layabouts, which Lucille, watching the episode with Hercule in the miniature France Télécom headquarters, viewed with disappointment, recognizing that public opinion, as she explained to Hercule, was not on their side, and that they would need to begin a propaganda campaign to get their grievances heard if they were ever to succeed in their strike, possibly by firing some leaflets out over the tourists from one of the cannons, by sending loudspeaker vans out to spread their message, as they did for His Glorious Majesty, Mallrat the Eternally Omnipotent, back in Tokyo, or by bringing in a journalist willing to present their story objectively, if not sympathetically, like this Marcel X, author of several good political articles for Rolling Stone (Lucille said, holding up the copy from the miniature Bibliothèque nationale de France), in which he had most recently covered the fifth anniversary of musician Kurt Cobain’s death by traveling to Seattle (where he would later become briefly involved in the anti-WTO protests of that year) and interviewing the various fans gathering for a vigil outside their hero’s former house while clad in the flannel shirts he had popularized or reproductions of the Pink Angels Fan Club T-shirt he had reportedly been wearing when he shot himself and tearfully sharing stories about the first time they had heard his music, as Marcel later recounted in his book on the connection between popular culture and the anti-globalization movement of the Pacific Northwest, titled Francis Fukuyama Will Have His Revenge on Seattle, though Marcel’s “day job” was, apparently, doing academic research at a university out east, which had currently, according to the biographical blurb at the end of this Rolling Sto
ne article, brought him to Las Vegas for an anthropological study of gamblers, where he now rushed along from casino to casino with pen to notebook, scribbling at full speed under a black sky pierced by aimless searchlights that jutted up from a day-bright neon landscape swarmed over by the morally slack-jawed, massaging their fat wallets and shouting abuse at their fellow disoriented tourists, clad in relaxed-fit sweatpants and T-shirts billowing majestically in the cool night breeze, which sent them drifting with the crowds toward blackjack tables and novelty hat kiosks, to the bars, to the prostitutes (infinitely better-looking than the ones back home), then, totally vomited-out, tired, broke, and angry, to the vast wall of debris encircling the infamous Mini-Paris to scream obscenities at the striking dwarfs within and to throw bits of garbage over the wall in hopes of hitting one of them, ever more enraged and red-faced as the police stood by with a cautious hand resting on each sidearm, ready, should the tourists’ fury turn from the barricades to them or each other, but, somehow, despite their utter drunkenness, the bachelor parties, middle-manager seminar escapees, college sorority sisters, locals, and Oklahomans congregating here managed to limit their assaults to the strikers and the occasional car parked nearby that needed flipping or burning, aside from three unaffiliated midgets from a popular magic show, beaten on the thirtieth of November by a squad of off-duty male strippers who opposed the Mini-Paris strike, which was, at that point, reaching its one-month mark with most of the journalists gone and the police presence reduced to a sparse cordon of unhappy rookies and old-timers, while the tourists’ litter, which made up most of the barricades, was stinking more than ever, despite the relatively cold weather, demoralizing the strikers, who began to wonder if Brody could be right about ending the strike, especially since they had nearly exhausted the supplies promised by Lord Khazâd, who, in the early morning hours of December 1, came up from the tunnels dragging a heavy goatskin suitcase nearly as large as himself and admitted to Hercule and a furious Lucille (buzzing around him, he thought, like a terrifying hummingbird) that he could no longer fund their strike, since his advisors, Mysti and Brandee, had recently warned him of rumors that certain elements within his administration, possibly including Minister of Defense Sahara and Assistant Director of Social Affairs Champagne, were plotting to use his support for it to discredit him before the Minimal Parliament and force him to step down as seigneur in favor of Minister of Agriculture Kiki, whose nefarious schemes had been a source of constant irritation for Lord Khazâd ever since he had decided to recruit her out of the Las Vegas Show Business and Show Pleasure All-Nude Revue three weeks earlier after spotting her as he nestled into his teenage giantess mistresses’ mass of undifferentiated bosoms up in his private balcony with a big, wet Isle cigar in his mouth and a pair of binoculars in his hand (the better to ogle the befeathered and bespangled dancers below), noticing that this particular girl was possessed of a toplessness that seemed in some ineffable way to surpass the toplessness of her peers as they paraded out into the harsh lighting of the stage, grimacing smile-like expressions out at the sparse audience, who were chewing candies from their fanny-packs and not even bothering to whisper while they discussed what they wanted to go see next, scratching flakes from the parts of their backs they could manage to reach and generally ignoring the girls, who were carrying on, nonetheless, professionally under the sweatstung eye of a taskmaster pianist, who barked reprimands and threatened them with all manner of unlikely punishments each time a girl flubbed a pose, someone’s peacock feathers were drooping, a smile faded, or a particularly glaring misstep caused him to lose the melody and forced him to go in search of it by banging away at the keys in a desperate frenzy while howling up a storm of bizarre and elaborate obscenities that he somehow imagined the audience could not hear, even as he screamed with the full force of his nicotine-filled lungs and flung open the lid of his piano to begin attacking the bare wires with his teeth in a rage, finding his arms and legs increasingly entangled in the piano’s entrails while thrashing about violently, like a swear-mouthed spider caught in its own web, unable, half an hour into the performance, to prevent men such as Lord Khazâd from grabbing a girl or two from the stage and carrying them away, without anyone to stop them except the Mormon bouncer, whose fingers were plunged down his ears and eyes shut tight to keep from being scandalized by the show and who was therefore as useless as the taskmaster at keeping showgirls like Kiki from disappearing into the night and falling in with a band of prostitutes, becoming addicted to drugs, or, worst of all, flying off to the Isle of Minimus to become politicians and to get assassinated, like the late Undersecretary of Commerce Ginger (mysteriously killed by a car bomb after she launched an investigation into one of Lord Khazâd’s numerous money-laundering operations) or Minister of Education Cinnamon (mysteriously drowned in Lord Khazâd’s Olympic-sized Jacuzzi after the Isle’s only institution of higher learning, the University of Phoenix, pulled their local branch, claiming the Isle’s extremely low educational standards made the students impossible to teach), both of whom were loyal members of Lord Khazâd’s own National Strength Party, their loss an unexpected and disturbing tragedy felt personally by Lord Khazâd, who, at both of their funerals, spoke movingly of the need for politicians, journalists, and the common citizenry to mind their own business and trust in his leadership, though it appeared that this message of peace and fidelity had failed to dissuade those now beginning to undermine him with malicious speculation that his support for the strike might indicate that he would support similar actions on the Isle itself, forcing him to, “with a heavy heart”, disown the actions of the strikers, cut off all aid to Mini-Paris, and leave his “dear friend” Hercule to fend for himself with Lucille, whose eyes Lord Khazâd could see shimmering with tears that reflected the stars and the neon shining over the darkened barricades she had helped to build, the barricades she now needed to go off to patrol as her shift began, forcing her to take leave of Lord Khazâd and climb to the top, along which she walked and watched the police below watch her in turn alongside the nightly crowd of tourists (who were furious that these strikers were ruining everyone’s fun with their petulant demands, as if these dwarfs somehow deserved more than “the rest of us hardworking folks, who keep our mouths shut when the company lays off half of us, reduces our paychecks, and cuts us down to part-time so that we don’t get any health insurance and have to live with the pain and no hope of anything ever getting better”), a jostling and howling mob that roared at the sight of Lucille and began flinging up bottles and cans, which she dodged nimbly, accustomed to this sort of thing from her years with Mallrat’s cult back in Japan, where the loudspeaker van taking her back to headquarters from a rally outside the Shinjuku Pornodrome just after she joined the cult at age sixteen was attacked by a gang of boys in leather jackets who turned the van on its side and set it on fire, chased Lucille (struggling to keep up, as she was so much shorter than the others) and her three comrades down an alley between two empty apartment buildings and toward a dry concrete canal, then followed them trudging through its chest-high (for the other three, and scalp-high for her) accumulation of dead leaves, which glowed in a thousand warm colors in the silvery light of the overcast autumn afternoon and which hid her from the boys as they caught up to them and began swinging iron pipes and baseball bats that cracked loudly each time they connected with a cultist, their cries terrifying her as she huddled under the leaves a few feet away, afraid to move, her every breath rustling the leaves, which were still glowing, even down here, several feet down, with filtered sunlight in orange, red, and yellow all around like a cathedral’s nave in Europe illuminated through stained glass, calming her as the muffled screams and laughter faded away and she sank into the lower depths, feeling the damp leaves sticking to her skin and forming a cocoon around her that grew thicker and heavier while she grew more and more tired and let herself sink into the darkness, floating down among ambiguous shapes and colors until the warm light was gone and she was left drifting along in total silen
ce and shadow, curled up in her cocoon of leaves, sleeping, up to the moment that a wiry old collector fished her out with his long bronze hook three days later as he strode along on his custom-made stilts a mile down the leaf-flooded canal, which he picked over each autumn, when the trees dropped their leaves into the canal, which they had lined since the late 1940s as part of an effort to hide the deemed-unsightly modernist infrastructure of this rebuilt Tokyo neighborhood from the wealthy urbanites of the surrounding upscale apartment blocks, who, when this man was a small boy, noticed his skill with stilts as he entertained the other children and their mothers or nannies in the crowded local playground for money and hired him to venture down among the leaves and search for their lost dogs and cats that had, over the past few weeks, run off into the canal, where they had presumably plunged deep into the river of leaves and become lost, though, after hours of sweeping with his hook, and exhausted from balancing on the stilts, he had found nothing but a few pieces of random garbage and a strange bundle of densely-matted leaves, which he examined, shivering in the cold breeze that made the skeletal black trees creak and wail above him in the gloom of late afternoon, then, finding nothing more, he climbed from the canal, sitting down on an old stone bench with part of a half-melted glass bottle fused into it for some reason, where he ran the blade of his stolen GI pocketknife down the heavy bundle of leaves, spreading it out and turning the dark hollow he had opened in it toward the setting sun to see inside, then dropping it with a gasp when a small cat, its fur wet “like a newborn kitten’s”, leaped out and fell to the ground, where it stumbled around at his feet for a moment before walking straight off toward one of the lady tenants, who picked up the cat, looking it over carefully and thanking the boy for his hard work, as did the other tenants on subsequent days, after he found several more of these cocoons, each with a dog or cat inside that returned to its owner and, at first, seemed normal, unaffected by the experience, but, on the first or second night, invariably began to act in ways the tenants found unsettling, they claimed, though they had to admit that it was nothing too obvious or even definitively out of the ordinary, nothing more than disappearing when they looked away for a second, only to reappear on the other side of the room or in a locked closet, staring at the clocks intently, or watching someone sleep from inches away, until something happened a month later that they wouldn’t tell him about, waving away his questions while asking him to go back out there and to start bringing the cocoons, of which they were confident that there would now be more, to the main apartment complex without opening them, to the back of the building, to the little shack behind the garbage incinerator where the maintenance man would come out to take them each evening until the boy was sure he couldn’t find any more cocoons and had swept thoroughly through the leaves with his long hook, which he set down on the sand of the deserted playground as he leaned back on the slide beaded with rain and spotted with rust to relax around noon on the seventh day of his search, taking his lunch break, at which time he had become curious about these strangely heavy new cocoons, he told Lucille, and had pulled his latest find from the burlap sack at his side to cut it open, drawing from across the playground a pair of nondescript men who grabbed the thing away from him and shouted for some time then confiscated the hook and forbade him from going into the canal ever again, under a penalty unspoken, telling him, finally, they were no longer in need of his services and immediately pouring five cans of gasoline into the canal, which they and some other men lit on fire, watching as the flames rose up from the burning leaves to cast long, finger-like shadows from their silhouettes into the smoky twilight as he walked back home, feeling horrible for breaking the rules and losing his first real, paying job, a job that had kept him and his poor father from going homeless for another month and the only one he had been able to find in the area, which was why, when a grim American in a suit showed up at their door the next day and took him to the nearest army base to interrogate him, he insisted to his questioners that he felt he had a special skill in finding the cocoons, that he had a certain telepathic affinity with the cocoons, lying convincingly enough that, after running a few strange tests on him with infrared lights and X-rays and asking odd questions that seemed almost to conflate world history with astronomical events, they told him they had decided to employ him to continue dredging the cocoons from the canal every autumn, allowing, in return, him and his father to come live rent-free on the army base, where, he told Lucille, he lived ever since that day, gathering the cocoons and delivering them to the Americans, albeit altered, because, when his curiosity finally grew too great after ten years of this and he cut open a few cocoons, he discovered that the vanished animals of the first era had given way to people (mostly disoriented homeless men and children), and began replacing them with stray cats and dogs he drugged, plastering the cocoons back together with mud and continuing in his work with no one aware of the switch but those he set free, like Lucille, who, disturbed and distracted, thanked the old man and went on her way back through the abandoned apartment towers to the street and back to the cult headquarters beneath the gray sky and thick webs of telephone lines that buzzed in harmony with the vast drone of the cicadas, back to astonished cultists telling her that they thought she was dead and remarking with great enthusiasm that her rebirth mirrored the resurrection of Keanu Reeves’s character, JC, in The Virtual Generation, the first installment of what Reeves fans often call his “Cyber Trilogy”, which also includes the 1995 Robert Longo film Johnny Mnemonic, a com mercially unsuccessful adventure filmed primarily in Montréal, and the 1999 “action-packed thrill ride” The Matrix, a movie much more successful than the previous two, to the extent that it found an audience even among the striking dwarfs behind their barricades, when Lucille projected a bootleg copy in the miniature Théâtre de l’Odéon during the celebration of the strike’s one month anniversary, with only Hercule falling asleep, though Lucille attributed that to his drunkenness, which he had maintained steadily ever since Lord Khazâd, the previous day, had admitted that he would no longer be able to support their cause, fleeing back through the tunnels the next morning, just as a dwarf neither Lucille nor Hercule could remember ever having seen began stirring up trouble, first clambering up on a crate in his Cold Mercury X steel-toed boots and preaching to the assembled crowd of strikers that, if they really wanted to send the bosses a lesson, they should set the barricades on fire and go on a looting spree along the Strip, since the police wouldn’t be able to catch all of them before they fled with a new television or, at least, a nice hat from the gift kiosk, which seemed to appeal greatly to the audience before Lucille chased this mysterious demagogue away with a sharpened broom handle and put them all back to work patrolling the barricades and setting up rainwater collectors while Hercule stumbled half-drunk and half-hungover aimlessly around Mini-Paris, dropping traps to catch the tiny Amazonian tree frogs Management had, the previous week, dumped from a helicopter into the miniature Seine with the hope that the actors would eventually give in to the stereotypical love of frog legs found among the French they had imitated for so long and catch and eat these specimens of what turned out to be a moderately poisonous species (Ken had planned to become a biologist before he discovered bodybuilding and quickly alerted them to the danger of these fierce little amphibians), which were, fortunately, avoided by everyone but Lord Khazâd, who had, apparently, read in an old book an account of the defunct (yet still infamous) Weighted Gentlemen’s Leisure Club, that debauched pack of morbidly obese politicians and millionaires, led at the time of its fiery destruction by United States president William Howard Taft, and decided that the other world leaders at the next year’s G-20 conference in Montréal (he wasn’t invited, but would show up anyway, dressed in a T-shirt reading “G-21”, and, after a fit of outrage at the fact that the others had only sent their finance ministers, would go on a drunken rampage that would ultimately lead to Lord Khazâd being ejected from Canada) might respect him more if he followed the ancient method of asser
ting one’s dominance as the “alpha male” of a society, namely, gluttony, and, in the last weeks of the strike, became enormously fat, accomplishing this by deadening his gag reflex and regurgitation reflex through swallowing these frogs live and allowing their poison to do its work, then guzzling countless barrels of raw whale blubber and sucking down vast quantities of poutine (for which he had developed a taste during his time visiting Montréal for Expo 67) every day for a full week of noxious odors and hideous noises that frequently drew hotel staff knocking on the door of his room at the Bellagio and asking if he was all right in there and if they needed to call up the hotel doctor, who, when he entered, was so horrified at the sight of the three-foot-tall seigneur, seven feet wide, naked, and encrusted in a mixture of his own filth, bits of poutine, and the blubber five Greenpeace boats had already been sunk by the Isle navy to obtain that he fainted right there in the doorway, as did the outside doctor called in to revive him, though the third doctor had no difficulty reviving his predecessors and examining Lord Khazâd thanks to a rather heartier constitution, built up over the years as the touring doctor for the all-girl Seattle rock band Telegenica, which he had served ever since this trio of unwashed heroin addicts had taken him on to monitor their health during the bizarre on-stage ritual menstruation they had begun in a moderately successful attempt to stir up controversy after the bandwagon-grunge sound of their 1993 self-titled album failed to expand their audience beyond a local scene that, though the band had entirely shunned them in an effort to distance themselves from the increasingly unfashionable grunge sound they had once scrambled to appropriate in favor of (it turned out, nonexistent) listeners who would appreciate the keyboard-filled dirges they quaintly labeled “techno-punk” by the time of Telegenica’s disastrous Woodstock 99 appearance preceding Limp Bizkit, nonetheless used their early song Down With Men as an anthem during Seattle’s protests against the World Trade Organization in late November, which, after hostilities ended in the total victory of global capital, left a number of college kid neo-hippies in machine-printed tie-dyed T-shirts looking for the next great cause to champion, beginning a search that, in early December, brought nearly one hundred of them and their perpetually airborne Hacky Sacks to the makeshift gates of Mini-Paris, where Lucille welcomed them in before the lethargic police could rouse themselves from their boredom-induced stupor and attempt to stop this incursion, which Hercule watched from the top platform of the miniature Eiffel Tower, where he had taken to spending most of his time, hoping that one day, in an alcoholic blackout, he would drunkenly stagger over the railing and fall to his death, end his vile life, free himself from all of this (something he was too afraid to do deliberately), much as how he had once gone out driving at night before he ran out of money, seatbelt off, hoping someone would run into him and kill him, gliding down the highways in his roomy Messerschmitt KR200 at the end of the day between dreamy skies of translucent pastels and the darkness of the shadowed desert, which began to bloom with car headlights oncoming and brake lights receding in a river of white and red flowing through the brilliant electrified city up ahead, covered, shimmering, in a thousand colors mixed together and bleeding into the sky just at the point it would have been filled with stars and blackness, stained instead with radiated pink that seeped down even into Hercule’s car as he hurtled onward in search of escape, reminded of his failures every time he noticed a power line strung up there like a Walker’s line, every time he glimpsed, in a liquor store window surrounded by jumpy tourists and jean-jacketed drunks, a flash of a poster advertising Tight-rope Tequila, every time he spotted a billboard for an acrobatic show on the Strip, seeming to mock him personally, to be telling everyone else out here on the highway about his incompetence, telling the entire world, which was now dedicated to keeping him from forgetting that he was a loser, even the faces in the passing cars, the palm trees shaking their leaves at him, the ugly sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, his own wrinkled little claws grasping the steering wheel, the leering moon waiting down at the end of the road, and the stars that winked maliciously as he emerged from the suburbs and back into the desert and the darkness to the sound of gleeful chatter from a radio announcer advertising the New York Times bestselling novel Tom Clancy’s Valkyrie Paradox: Volume One: Endgame by Barry Khazâd (Lord Khazâd’s nom de guerre, Hercule learned later), a book Lord Khazâd had used the considerable resources of his position on the Isle to print, distribute, advertise, and defend in court from the (accurate) claims of an irate Tom Clancy that he had never authorized this use of the Patriot Games author’s name and, moreover, that the extraordinarily poor quality of writing in this infringement had injured the Tom Clancy brand in the eyes of the public, who could mistakenly come to associate Lord Khazâd’s grotesque barrage of typos and Freudian slips with authentic Tom Clancy products, as had at least one renowned literary critic, whose review mocked Clancy for signing off on Khazâd’s meandering plot and use of a thoroughly plain and terse style that, whenever the hero got a sultry Russian seductress or bosomly Chinese double agent into bed, suddenly went from a “he went out and took a cab to the airport” level of detail to a “his rough yet gentle hands manfully grasped the supple flesh of the powerful thighs heaving beneath the spandex of her unitard as a soft cry of surprise and pleasure escaped her perfumed lips” level of detail, a discrepancy that Lord Khazâd had not found at all troubling as he dictated the book to his secretary from somewhere in the middle of his vast, rotating leopard-skin waterbed, staring up at his reflection in the ceiling mirror and, so deeply skilled at writing that he barely needed to pay attention to the words coming out of his mouth, contemplating his most recent triumph for his people, Expo 2000, the World’s Fair he had somehow managed to wrestle away from what he admitted to be more deserving countries, which was to be held in Marcellaville, on the Isle of Minimus, where tens of thousands of dwarfs in the poorest quarter of the city had already seen their homes obliterated with almost no warning from the government in order to clear a zone of five square miles for the Expo and, of course, for the land developers, who, later on, would presumably use this clean slate to rejuvenate Marcellaville, a town finally liberated from those workshy parasites holding the Isle back from glory by luxuriating in their squalor, in their hideous little shacks filled with hideous little children covered in filth and full of a pestilence they would cough out from their wheezing lungs upon the hardworking people of the Isle in fits of beggary down by the road to the airport by the factory that had to be abandoned when its owners claimed they could no longer afford to pay its workers the wages demanded by the union and was forced to “let them go” out among the dogs and unidentifiable rusted pieces of metal littering the scrubland around Marcellaville to poach bits of garbage that could be sold to the recycler for a few pence per pound after waiting in long lines downtown with others of their kind, staring at the sidewalk and hoping that no one they knew would see them while governesses dragging their shrieking charges and stewardesses brimming with fulfilled potential strolled past them with disdainful frowns to outdoor cafes for lunch, where they would sip their tea and squint through the brightness at the shabby queue, laden with pitiful scrap, as these haughty victors waited for their meals to arrive or for ex-boyfriends, flocking with fellow businessmen, to wave at them on their way to important meetings in shiny new skyscrapers that were adorned with the logos of foreign banks and oil companies or in the big Holiday Inn conference rooms peppered with freckled bellhops carrying plastic trays in and out of the kitchen for the duration of their grueling shifts in service to these sport- jacketed chortlers, who were monopolizing even the atriums and poolside lounges with drunken antics that shocked the maids in the upstairs hallways, the tourists in the lobbies, and passers-by outside, on their way to their own meetings to discuss proposing free trade agreements with China, lowering the Isle’s interest rate on loans, cutting taxes on the wealthiest of the Isle in order to stimulate economic growth, allowing the United States to open a military base on the Is
le, allowing hunters in the North to cull the herds of wild elephants that everyone agreed had become too numerous for the Isle to support, and cloistering Dverberg’s tube-topped foreign exchange “co-eds” within University grounds in order to reduce the strain on local law enforcement, tasked with responding to complaints of increasingly aggressive advances toward these tall foreign women by local gangs of cretin and even common dwarf youths, whom Lord Khazâd defended in a video press conference from his hotel room in Las Vegas by pointing out that “our beautiful young giantess visitors” should, far from wasting the Dverberg Police Department’s time with petty accusations against these wholesome and patriotic boys, who were, after all, only doing what boys all over the world do naturally, instead take the so-called “assaults” as the admiring compliments of boys overwhelmed by such towering displays of pulchritude, an announcement that didn’t go over well at all with certain women’s groups, but that went over extremely well with certain (largely male) “patriotic” groups, which proceeded to flood Lord Khazâd’s militia with a sufficient number of new recruits that he was able to bring fifty of these henchmen over to Las Vegas to work out the details of his latest “eduvertising” propaganda campaign in a small canalside power station that had been shuttered since the 1960s, hidden away just above the waterline in an alcove indenting the steep concrete embankment where packs of scabbed-over dogs picked out their path down and back up again along the footholds of weed-filled cracks while flightless crested vultures perched here and there on the sun-hardened masses of jellied garbage that had accumulated in such density in places that even Lord Khazâd at his heaviest could easily use this flotsam as a walkway connecting the power station with the upcanal tunnel entrance that took him back to his hotel on the Strip or with the downcanal moorings cobbled together out of sheet metal from abandoned kitchen appliances and rough wooden planks nailed together haphazardly for the illegal fishing skiffs hauling up blighted catfish and torpid lampreys coated in a lumpy mucus that was used by the owners of these boats to waterproof their hulls and as an emetic whenever they fell into the filthy water, teeming with bacteria, industrial waste, and the toxic effluence of drained city streets that echoed from up there over the crests of the embankments with the sounds of ostentatious revelry blasted at intervals by the fury of drunken tourists, who seemed to feel their adventures in Las Vegas, characterized by a kind of meticulous gluttony in seeking to catch every last scrap of entertainment to sustain them over the next few years of the joyless drudgery that filled their normal lives, had been, for however brief a moment, interrupted for whatever reason, enraging them, drawing from their liquor-slicked throats a torrent of imprecations that lurked among the sound of incoming planes, jangling coin machines, and celebratory cheers that the solitary fishermen down between the high concrete walls of this artificial waterway heard and pondered silently as they rowed through the inky sludge late at night like boatmen of the underworld to one of the makeshift docks that let them tie up their boats for the day and go shuffling on foot with the night’s catch on their backs for miles down serpentine concrete tunnels to richly adorned theaters rigged up in the deepest subterranean flood chambers, where an animistic priesthood enacted their rituals prostrate before roughly-carved wood obelisks on a low stage they covered with dried palm fronds that crackled beneath their squirming bodies and candles that provided the only light for these fish-laden patrons, eager to witness the raw knots of the priests’ knees bleeding black in the darkness and offer them a share of the night’s fortune oozing all over their arms in the hope that their endeavors might be blessed and free of the poisonous little frogs that had been killing their fish and had most likely been scattered along the canal by the snarling emissaries of the Black Gondola Society, they thought, as revenge for the priests’ refusal to cede authority over the Las Vegas sewer system to these Italian usurpers, who had already sent one of their number, disguised in the standard costume of a Middle Western tourist, to a Las Vegas City Council meeting to lodge a complaint against these homeless fishermen, complaining not, of course, because he was unsympathetic to their plight, he said, but because, as a visitor to this, the greatest entertainment destination in the world, he felt that his otherwise fantastic vacation experience had been diminished by the fear for their safety he felt when he saw them risking their lives in unlicensed watercraft without safety jackets on a body of water that had not been deemed safe for the public and that was not supervised by a trained professional experienced in the maritime rescue procedures that would be necessary to save them from drowning, should their ramshackled boats capsize while they were weighed down by their radiant ponchos, stitched together out of scraps of heavy blankets left in the tunnels by previous inhabitants who had been swept out by floods or driven deeper by the packs of rabid dogs that feuded among the pipes and columns and hunted the homeless down to the flood control system’s lowest vaults, hundreds of feet below the surface, where an entire city of rags and garbage had been built sixty years earlier by industrious Oklahoman Dust Bowl refugees fleeing mobsters and Mormon raiding parties with peculiar “resonating hemispheres” and dowsing rods that unerringly guided them toward their prey during five years of bloody knife fights in total darkness, of waiting silently for the sound of feet splashing through the sewage before springing hideous traps that often left their victims bleeding in agony and screaming somewhere in the tunnels for days as their comrades searched for them fruitlessly, and of entire underground neighborhoods set ablaze with hundreds of trapped people desperately trying to open the blockaded hatches and burning to ash in the superheated chambers, which, even decades later, were still littered with femurs and skulls, as the dead in the underground were, customarily, never buried but, rather, left to be carried away by the rats in recognition of these creatures’ role as the noble custodians of the shadows, honored with reams of painted-over wallpaper someone had peeled from a wall and discarded rolls of film laid carefully on low altars before the entrances to their immense nests of shredded phones books, cardboard, assorted plastic, hair, and unidentifiable miscellany that filled entire quarter-mile sections of the rain tunnels, most of the unfinished subway tunnel, the forgotten basements of burned-down houses where parking lots now splayed far to the north of the Strip, burrows dug by the rats themselves through the compacted desert sands, and the hollow façade of the miniature Palais de Chaillot, where Hercule sat drinking and watching the frogs splash in the fountain while, on the other side of the miniature Seine, Lucille directed Ken and Johnny in their efforts to fix the Eiffel Tower’s elevator, broken during the drunken revelries of some of the less-serious college kids the night before, when some of them had gotten it into their heads to crowd onto the elevator and commit nonsense on the top platform, where Hercule had been trying to sleep, or at least maintain a certain unconsciousness as best he could while he waited out this strike, which, as it extended into December, began to feel painfully meaningless, especially since the owners showed no sign of backing down and over half the newcomers from Seattle had already left only three days after their arrival, lured out by the young police negotiator’s loudspeakered tales of giving up the strike, returning home to their friends and families, sleeping in their own beds, throwing parties, and going to movies, rather than lounging around all day in the miniature Père Lachaise Cemetery, listening to Lucille’s tedious Mallrat propaganda speeches and associated didactic poetry, or patrolling endlessly along the top of the pungent barricades with their heavy makeshift crossbows and harpoons, solemnly distributed to the sentries by Lucille at the beginning of each shift from under Ken and Johnny’s bed, where all their weapons had been stashed for safe-keeping ever since Brody had, on the day of the new arrivals, escaped the miniature Bastille by kicking a hole through the fragile plywood and plaster wall and stabbed two midgets and a common dwarf with a prop dagger taken from the unguarded supply cache before Johnny and an elderly Korean War veteran who bore a large purple bruise across his jaw from a Seattle riot cop’s rubbe
r bullet wrestled him to the ground and chained him up in the relatively secure Conciergerie, where, a week later, he lay thinking about the dwarfs he had wounded as he watched the barred square of sunlight slowly move across the stone floor from his empty water dish toward the gold-painted replica of Marie Antoinette’s chamberpot, which resonated with the sound of a fat fly buzzing tirelessly around inside and the sharp cracklings of his bones whenever he shifted his weight, seeking a less painful patch of ground to lay his aching head or dreaming of his university days, of the new car his parents had bought him when he moved out after high school, of drifting through the endless grid of identical suburban houses late in the blue Saturday afternoon with his friends, who amused themselves by making fun of him for the crucifix hanging from the rearview mirror as he drove them from the University of Colorado at Boulder campus to a party in Denver, south along a highway darkened by rain that had fallen from clouds retreating now toward the horizon, sliding over gloomy fields of wheat sparkling with raindrops in the dimness and beyond the former mining towns of blackened old buildings sagging over the main street with its civic heritage banners and signs advertising guided tours of authentic recreations of frontier communities from the nineteenth century for tourists who would sometimes pull over in their vans and follow the girl around fake cattle stockades and quaint log cabins and down into the old mines to receive a commemorative chunk of pyrite or quartz stamped with the town’s logo before continuing on to Las Vegas, where, presently, such tourists found great joy in shouting at the barricades and complaining at every opportunity about this hideous mess to the local news teams seeking to interview them, staring into the camera and blustering through their red faces that these dwarfs had ruined the only vacation they had been able to take in five years with this anti-American demonstration, waving their fat fingers at the barricades as they whined as petulantly as possible, so loudly that in the relatively quiet morning hours Hercule could hear them clearly from atop the Eiffel Tower, these rotund snivelers, these human fanny-packs, waking him up and keeping him from going back to sleep with their jabbering, so that he would instead climb down the Tower and wander the grounds in a raw temper, hidden behind his thick sunglasses and sparse gray bristles as he watched the sentries patrol the barricade, the designated farmers struggling to cultivate potatoes in the miniature Champ de Mars, and the college girls armed with crude spears and sent to hunt frogs by Lucille, who, when she saw Hercule the morning after the first mass exodus, yelled at him to come help her interrogate Brody, stamping her foot impatiently and making him smile against his will when, as was her custom, she called him Vercingetorix, reminding him of his youth in the Nunnery and the love of silly nicknames that had sprung up among the women there, among the Welsh girls, who claimed they couldn’t pronounce Percepied and called him Perchyll, or the Swiss matrons, who called him Herr Cul as they pinched his backside and laughed at his reddening face before half-seriously promising they would get Hercule a job with one of their various brothers-in-law or uncles who supposedly needed a manservant to accompany them on their arduous overland journeys east for the purposes of importing wiry sherpas from the Himalayas to guide refrigeration trolleys hauling flour down to the noodle factories from the separation vats located high in the Alps, where ratlike scholars pressed their muzzles to the observation windows overlooking the vat rooms while frantically cross-referencing detailed wheat genealogies going back thousands of years in their ongoing struggle to create a flour that would compete with those of the Soviet Union and the United States and restore the ailing French flour industry, which, nurtured by the subsidies of Napoleon III, had once enjoyed a central position in the European economy and had made France’s bread the envy of the world, bread so delicious and plentiful that many young people were drawn to France by tales of its properties as a curative and an aphrodisiac, including several of these Swiss matrons, who, according to Hercule’s employer, had run away from their stern father’s bakery in Lausanne together when they were no more than schoolgirls to come to Paris at the end of the Great War and, upon finding a severe lack of employment opportunities among its sundry boulangeries, and without the means to return home to Switzerland, had, as they breakfasted one rainy dawn with the last of their money in their lodging’s dining hall, seen no alternative but to become the jungfraus de nuit for the future “Mackerel” of the Nunnery, who, in those days, walked the streets with his infamous red umbrella, looking for vulnerable innocents to initiate into a life of sin, and presently noticed them weeping together at their table as the streetlight cast among them watery shadows through the rain pouring down the plate glass window, cracked where a vandal had attempted to smash it the previous night before being chased away by the innkeeper, who told the girls he sympathized with their plight but could do nothing for them, as he was running a business here rather than a charity, then winked at the Mackerel, sliding in quietly and tying up his umbrella, at the sight of which each of these girls at the table felt their hearts pound wildly in recalling the sordid tales of this elaborately mous tachioed man told by some older girls already working for him within their poor old mother’s house on the Boulevard des Capucines, which the Mackerel had heard this aging widow could no longer afford to keep and had saved from repossession by angry creditors in exchange for it becoming a brothel and the daughters its inmates, a bargain the Mackerel had struck with dozens of widows and widowers across Paris to procure, for his own ends, the honor of their nubile daughters, while he approached orphaned girls directly and offered them his protection, should he have found them left to survive by their own wits on the streets, or struck a deal with the headmistress of whatever orphanage, should he have heard of particularly ripe young ladies there incarcerated, as he did with Madame Ouibeleaux, who agreed to allow the Mackerel to send gentlemen into the Orphelinat des Filles and make use of whichever “children of God” met their fancy, so long as Madame Ouibeleaux received half the profits from the enjoyment of her charges and one quarter of the profits from that of the Mackerel’s rescued urchinettes he brought to her for safekeeping, such as these Swiss sisters, whom he delivered that night after deciding they were too young to be kept in any of his regular brothels and too likely to attempt to flee back to Switzerland upon realizing that he had no intention of allowing them to earn enough francs to leave his employ and return to Lausanne but would instead hold them in this life of vice until, like so many others, they had become so degraded that they would no longer wish to depart and would willingly obey the Mackerel’s every command, taking a carriage unsupervised to the home of a diplomat or noble for a night of discrete perversion, dancing unclothed before a mob of braying hoodlums in an unlicensed nightclub, or, as they aged, installing themselves in the Mackerel’s Hôtel du Pébroque Rouge to train their young protégées, who would remind them of themselves at that age, when they had still been innocent enough to take a certain pride in their depravity, as if these things they did were in any way more meaningful than any other disgusting biological process, though the Mackerel insisted, of course, on lecturing them about the spiritual qualities of their work in the most florid terms while he inspected their bodies in the Hôtel parlor each week with a magnifying glass, through which they saw his giant, leering eye examining their mouths, faces, and necks, then moving downward so that, as he prodded and pinched the lower stretches of their increasingly sagging flesh, they could not help but meet, over the top of his head, the gaze of their protégées lined up across from themselves and shiver in the cold air of the Hôtel, which hardly seemed to affect at all those warm young bodies standing proudly straight and bold, did not leave the slightest wrinkle of displeasure on their calm faces, and sank into the matrons’ own skin to suddenly chill them even years later as they reclined in the warm goose-feather mattresses of the Nunnery and waited for a man-servant to appear and announce that one of the gentlemen had selected one of them to ornament his bedchamber that night, a call that came increasingly rarely, they mournfully told Hercule, as their
value had gradually diminished, a tangible lack they felt grow each of the twenty years since they arrived in Paris, as if there were a certain light over their heads that grew ever harsher and threw their features into deeper relief, a swarm of minute shadows that slithered onto their faces and could not be removed, a spectral weariness that emerged from deep within themselves and dragged the gentlemen of the Nunnery toward the younger inmates, slathered in exotic ointments from Egypt and India that sent through the ventilation shafts a bewitching fragrance redo -lent of flowers and sand as these young women no doubt gathered around said shafts that, by a system of mirrors, had been transformed into crude periscopes, through which they observed the gentlemen’s quarters and plotted to entirely replace the matrons in their affections, the Swiss women said, thereby driving the matrons out into the cold night to dodge cruel policemen and fend off the attacks of fellow streetwalkers, deprived of the supercilious guidance of the Mackerel and the protection of his more-or-less loyal team of heavily-armed chaperons, trained in every method of combat necessary to defend, from behind the bullet-ridden sandbags of its gun emplacements and the windows of its guard tower, the Nunnery from the chaperons of rival brothels sent to eliminate them as competitors, despite the Mackerel’s personal assurances that the Nunnery was a private club and therefore not a threat to the open brothels that allowed any clientele to enjoy their women, to the Montparno mobster dives, full of sickly foreign girls quietly coughing up blood as they posed and smiled, to the Italian underground casinos of the Marais, selling tickets to the nightly fistfights that broke out among their notoriously jealous women, or to the shabby houses of La Villette and Bercy, where famous poets spilled wine across their tattered and eternally unfinished manuscripts while dashing to the floor the inmates’ tiaras and robes de chambre in acts of romantic debauchery that, when publicized, bred ratlike sycophants, who, in seeking to nest in the shadows of the poets’ fame, infested these humble brothels and brought such demand for their women and the taste of the authentic poetic life they bestowed that the poets could no longer afford to frequent them and left behind nothing more than illicit tourist traps with re-creations of famous liaisons that had supposedly taken place there, to be viewed for ten sous through peepholes beneath bronze plaques from the Historical Society on the walls reminding visitors of whatever had taken place there during the Revolution as the proprietor shoved at them oversized coffee mugs printed with crude snapshots of their women as souvenirs, keychains with the professionally-designed logo of the brothel and its