Fossiloctopus (2 page)

“How so?”

“Doctor, you live in the biggest house for miles around.”

“Yes,” I replied, confused.

“Why?  There is only one of you.”

I thought.  “I suppose so that people can find me.”

“Exactly.  Because when they need help, they know where to go.”

“And?”  still confused.

“You don’t hide your talent as a doctor, you show the world: ‘Here is Doctor Matthew’s house – come here if you are sick’.  People know that if they need help they can come to you to get better.”

She shook her head at my uncomprehending look.  “This Frenchman – he has money.  How do you think he got through the border with his camera?  You know how the guards ‘tax’ everyone who comes through.”  I was all too aware of the practice – some of the worst fractures I had seen came as a result of a failure to pay ‘tax’.  “So why doesn’t he show us that he is rich?  He could really help some of us.  Instead he buries his money and his past – like it is dirty.  He is a liar, Doctor.  He lies to himself and to us.  This is why I say he is burning his soul.”

At breakfast the next morning, Bernault hesitantly ate his food – sausage, eggs and milk – in the cook’s presence.   He leaned over his plate, mouth thick with sausages and a thick French accent:  “Doctor.  Thank you for the food.  Maybe I’m not suited to eating like the natives, but I must.  I must persist.  It's the only way I can learn their secret history.  I must know who here is hiding – who here fears for justice for the murders they might have committed.  I have my suspicions, Doctor.”

Buranda took off her apron, then, leaning on the table, spoke as a mother chiding her child:  “
Je vais vous dire quelque chose, homme Français: il n’y a pas d’assassins parmis nous.  Voila notre secret – celui que vous cherchez depuis si longtemps.  Il n’y a pas de secret.
”

We both sat, two dumbfounded Europeans, stunned by her fluent French.  The camp might not have its secrets, but Buranda clearly had hers.

SampleNR18j, p

Posterior right scapula shows severe abrasion of acromion process passing mediolaterally to scapular spine.  The glenohumeral joint between scapula and humerus shows a comminuted fracture without callus, indicating peri- or post-mortem damage. Comminuted fractures to the occipital, wormian bone and asterion, with associated abrasion, indicate repeated trauma to the back of the head.

“Oppression!”

The many-voiced cry emanating from the church woke me in the night.  Soon after, an insistent rapping at my door drew me from bed.  A voice greeted me, sounding distant and muffled to my groggy ears.

“Doctor, you must come to the church.  Mzee Mangome clutches his chest!”

I bolted for the church, the glow from within a beacon to my crusted eyes.  By the time I had reached the doors the cold had fully awakened me.

Inside, two masses opposed one another.  To my left, a small group of young, lithe boys, mostly teenagers, stood pointing and shouting at those on my right: the camp elders, most sitting with calm, measured expressions, save those few who were assisting Mzee Mangone, who lay curled on the floor in obvious agony off to one corner.  Both groups briefly turned to watch me walk in, then promptly ignored me as I tended to the fallen elder.  I was a necessary hindrance to their talks.

Debate raged around and over me.  It was useless to ask for silence, so I set about my diagnoses as best I could under the cacophony.  Perhaps my own endorphines allow me to recall a debate that was so peripheral to my task at hand.  My senses were heightened by the knowledge that Mangone might well be having a heart attack.  I worked with one soul, listened with another.  Two people of the same body.

“You are holding us back.  You have heard what they say on the radio.”

Look for signs of chest pain.

“The radio is full of rumor.”

Check breathing.

“But the army is advancing south.”

Scan eyes.

“There have been no confirmed killings.  We will allow them to pass through peacefully.  Their business lies deep in Zaire, not here at the border.”

Take pulse.

“But the blue helmets have pulled out.  There is no one left to protect us. We must strike before we are stricken.  We are ready – let us fight.”

Left arm blue.

“Such fighting is exactly what got us here.  We might not have lost our lands, our jobs, if we had restrained the extreme elements among us.”

Remove constricting robes.

“No person is an element.  You are old enough to remember how the colonials favored the Tutsi, treated us like dirt – like an element.”

Pulse dropping.

“Yes, we are old.  And we remember a time of peace.”

Breathing shallow.

“A time of oppression.”

Eyes unresponsive.  No reaction to light.

“Wages or life?  Which do you want?  I prefer life, peace.”

No pulse.

“To live without liberty is death!  Better that we die trying .”

Breathing stopped.

“You may say so, but you do not speak for the community.  We, the elders, speak for the community.  If you choose to fight and die when you lead, so be it.  We will not allow it.  We declare for peace.”

The shouting continues, a cloud of killer bees inside my numb head.

The old one is dead.

One less voice fuels the debate.

The fervor of argument bounces off the church walls, vibrating through my bones.

But I hear nothing.

A young man’s mouth opens, closes, spits in slow motion, yelling at the remaining elders.  I see it as a disembodied instrument, floating free of the face to which I know it must be attached, a machine.  There are not words.  No words.  Words.  No.

Video:

Black to static to white, bleeding slowly to full color.

A view down a muddy village street, makeshift huts to either side.

A horde of men brandishing machetes and firing rifles into the air cross the bridge leading into the village. 

A low roar of shouts, vehicles in the distance, then silence as the camera’s sound shuts off.

Inhabitant’s scatter for the woods, a large group of women and children – some elderly men – head for the small cement-block church.

From left a group of young men – about ten strong – rushes toward the oncoming group waving machetes.

Uniformed soldiers ooze out from the crowd, take aim at the charging youth, shoot low, for the legs.  Bodies fall.

The onrushing horde threads out, filters the village’s creases, greases the walls with blood.

A black hand reaches toward the camera lens.

Whirlwind blur, the world in vertigo.

A European man, on his knees, in the middle of the street, camera attachments on his back and belt.

Two men stretch his arms out, two his legs, as a fifth machete hacks off his hands and feet.

Pan up to a jeep driving past at high speed, one of the brave young machete-wielding defenders of the village chained by his ankle to the back bumper, his head and shoulders repeatedly bouncing on the road.  Sound comes back as the engine dopplers into the distance.

Follow the jeep, pan left to the church where soldiers throw hand-grenades through the open windows.  Sound lost again in multiple explosions.  Doors blown off.

Pan right: a man holds a bloodied machete in one hand, a human head in the other, high above his head, smiling.

Ghosts crawl over my bones, beneath my skin.  My pelvis aches from childbirth.  My mandible is sore from debate.  My hand is permanently curled in the shape of a camera handle.  My cheek is shattered from a Zairean rifle-butt blow.

I am to be introduced to the court as a witness.  “What did you see?” they will ask.  I will remain silent.  “Where were you at the time of the attack?”  And I will not answer.  “Why do you not answer the question?”  I will tell them: “When do you eat?  When you are hungry.  Sleep?  When you are tired.  Respond to questions?  When you have answers.  I have no answers.”

Time ends when all your friends are gone.  It is a new era.  The time of silence.

Fossiloctopus

It is as big as two fists and glows like gold in the sunlight. Embedded in the amber is a tiny dark brown octopus, its tentacles mummified and sharp-edged, like a poorly-crafted wood carving. How an octopus became stuck in ancient tree sap is beyond me – some freakish cosmic accident, I guess – but there it was on Rhiannon's desk, just like she said it would be. Purple bands encircled the chocolate tentacles up and down the length, like some psychedelic harlequin. One tentacle twirled around another – eternally – as if the thing were wringing its hands and laughing over some diabolical plot. The insinuations – about us – were ominous.

Four Canopus

Fatimah watched the organs fly from their body cavity as his automobile disintegrated in a spray of fiberglass and through-bolts.  Accidents in Cairo are seldom tidy.  As his eyes faded dead, he saw one last glimpse: Osiris, God of the Underworld, catching the organs in canopic jars to be weighed against Fatimah’s soul, thus determining the dictates of eternal justice.  Allah would not be pleased that a mere idol had intercepted one of the faithful – well, parts of the faithful – before he had reached paradise.

These were the contents of the jars:

IMSETY
: A liver – pickled in cheap wine and thin beer.  Soft and cracked through with rivulets of burning alchohol.  A deep brown topographical map, complete with ragged peaks and clear flowing wadis.  An overtaxed sack shot full of holes.

QUEBEHSENUF
: A heart (Professional Egyptologists will note here a contradiction – Fatimah’s intestines were unavailable at the moment of Osiris’ catch, thus, in His eagerness, He grabbed the nearest available organ) – Incarnadine from toughness, not blood flow.  More ruby mineral than muscle, yet ruby flawed.  A tough, brittle thing.  Pock-marked and bruised from self-abuse.  Blood coursed through it like cold water through a cavern – the housing stiff and unmoving, cored out by a bitter liquid until the structure collapses in on itself.

HAPY
: Lungs – Scarred with black furrows carved by opium smoke.  Wheezy pouches frayed from yelling at wife and child.  Depositories of toxic odors gathered through unethical business practice.  Bellows of grime.  Cilia stilled by tar and nicotine.

DUAMUTIF
: A stomach – Stretched to excess.  Flacid with gluttonous over-stuffing.  An acid-churning well of worry and guilt, deception made manifest in indigestion.  A treasure chest of lipids, sugar and vinegar.  Clearing house of burning bile vomit – much to the joy of the liver, which quivered in fear beneath whenever the stomach was filled.  A bucket of filth, unclean contents hiding from Koranic law.

Perhaps Allah wouldn’t mind Osiris’ interference after all.

Jamalerdapala’s Refractor: A History

Of the hundreds of
objects-de-artifice
commissioned by Jamalerdapala, crown prince of Tamil, none enjoys as storied a history as the delightful creation known at the royal court as The Mirror of Scintillating Wings.  Surely more magnificent devices were invented by the prince’s artisans, such as the automaton diorama of Lord Rama handing the idol-god Sri Ranganatham to a young boy (Rama had to relieve himself and had been instructed not to place the god on the ground – you can imagine the result of trusting one’s charge to a mere boy, and a stranger at that).  There were more practical devices, such as the cinnamon-peeling tree bark harvester used by the prince’s gardener before tea-time, or the now infamous dew-recycling morning water pitcher.  But few of these admittedly magnificent oddities have garnered such an international interest as that object known informally as The Butterfly Mirror.

The artifact is intricate, and one could easily imagine the royal artists fidgeting upon their nail beds at night, unable to meditate their way through the problems of design and execution, for months on end.  Luckily for them, Jamalerdapala was a ruler of great patience – a trait uncommon among those of his caste – as well as one of great wealth.  His liberal use of resources, combined with his ability to bring out the best in his subjects (after all, they thought, despite his kindness, he could at any moment revert to royal “sanity” and order the decapitation of the lot of them.  It was always safest to be over cautious in preventing one’s own decollation), created an atmosphere in which it was almost preordained that some measure of lasting beauty must emerge from the court.  An almost perfect something.  An artificial Nirvana, of sorts.

Twenty craftsmen and scientists were involved in its construction.  They worked only at night, in absolute darkness under the influence of powerful stimulants, lest intrusions from the outside world mar their work.  The frame was built first: a filigreed pewter rectangle molded with arcane symbols and pictures of flax and cattle – images that, stylistically, most resemble those found centuries later by Sir John Marshall at the ruins of Mohenjo-daro.  Next, a plate of flawless of amber-tinted glass was fitted to the frame.  Behind the frame was affixed a case, which was subdivided into a hundred tiny compartments, the insides painted matte black so that the ambered glass acted as a golden mirror.  Through the mirrored glass, however, the reflected viewer could see, like fluttering ghosts, ethereal in their near-insubstantiality, the true wonder of the artists and scientists long hours of labor: one hundred finely-tuned and exquisitely-painted mechanical butterflies in 65 different species, from the common white on milky brown
papilio polytes rumulus
through the angelic
papilio polymnester parinda
and
danaus aglea aglea
to the iridescent blue Banded Peacock (
papilio crino
).  Even a trio of that rarest of island butterflies, the Sri Lanka Five-Bar Swordtail (
graphium autiphates ceylonicus
) was represented – more swordtails in one spot than the keenest lepidopterist might see in a lifetime.