The Age of Sinatra, page 4
part #2 of Motorman Series
THE FRENCHMAN, TOPINARD, who collected prodigies, invited interested parties to the Titanic’s library for a get-acquainted session with his two neutrodyne giants, Indole and Skatole. Both male, both standing just over nine feet, they were being taken to Bum Bay for exhibition purposes.
While Indole was dressed plainly in a black hopcloth suit and handmade clogs, Skatole wore on his breast numerous exquisite nickel-plated pectorals and various amulets arranged in sixteen layers. Some of the pectorals displayed elaborate cloisonne work.
Ophelia sketched with easy, gracious strokes of the charcoal. “They burn neut bones to make this charcoal,” she said. “It’s the finest available.”
Hilter went around opening portholes. “Please, a little air, if you don’t mind, Mr. Topinard.”
Topinard, a thin wisp of a man, sat between his giants atop three or four edible editions of Michael Ratt’s Manifesto. “They do offend,” he said.
Moldenke peeled a scabby patch of dead skin from his scalp, discreetly dropping it to the floor and covering it with one of his clogs. “Amen to that,” he said.
After latecomers were seated, Topinard’s session began. “As a rule, these big beasts are liars in proportion to their height. They are indolent, unamiable, irascible, asocial, extremely talkative, and unpleasant to live with. They will not stay in private rooms and they wander about at night, never letting you sleep.”
Moldenke executed an irregular but recognizable smoke ring. “You wouldn’t keep such a wife.”
“And no wife would suffer a husband like that,” Hilter added.
“What about sexing?” Ophelia asked.
“Skatole, let them have a look at your member.”
Skatole unbuckled his wide canvas belt and let the trousers tumble into a foul-smelling mound.
“Surprising, isn’t it,” Topinard said, “when you consider the size of the other parts, what modest reproductive organs my big neuts have. Fortunate, too, as this one has so far married three neut females of average height and fathered, in all, twelve young. Had the organ been proportionate, I’m afraid his life might have been a wreckage. You see, among neutrodynes, giantesses are in critically short supply. Always have been.”
“Can they speak well?” Hilter asked.
“Oh, yes. Oui. Certainement. They came through the last Forgetting with their wits about them. Say something, Skatole, for the people. Mind you, he speaks in some pre-Forgetting English dialect no one remembers.”
The giant hiked his trousers and sat down. Even sitting, he had to bow under the low ceiling and let his flocculus rest on the floor. “John Lennon em I wanpela biknem tru long taim yu harim singsing bilong ol Beatles o Binatang. Long Mande nait long taim em wantaim meri belong em Yoko Ono I kam bek long haus bilong tupela long Nu Yok, wanpela man I sutim em long gan. John I gat 40 krismas. Ol I kisim em kwiktaim i go long wanpela haus sik tasol tarangu indai pinis. Na ol plisman I holim pasim wanpela man Hawaii pinis. Em i Mark David Chapman. Ol plis I tok, John Lennon I bin sainim nem bilong em long buk bilong dispela kilman long apinum—”
“That’s enough, Skatole. You see, complete jibberish. A forgotten tongue. No one has a clue to what it all means.”
“He seems agitated,” Hilter said. “Is he high strung?”
“It unnerves him that we don’t understand his strange blather. I often find him crouched in a corner, weeping and eating his feces. He’s a dedicated coprophage, an unusual condition among big neuts. This, too, adds another dimension to his volatile nature. By far the safest and best work I have found for Skatole is moving his and Indole’s manure in a wheelbarrow. I’d say, together, the two generate about a barrelful in a day. He can perform this work in the open air and at an easy, go-as-you-please pace. Working alone, and with an implement that cannot be turned to harm, he is in little or no danger of being imposed upon, driven too hard, or injured by others. I do have to stand by and keep them from eating too much of it, though, before they get to the compost.”
“Let’s hear from Indole,” Moldenke suggested.
“Indole, show them how smart you are.”
The light weight of Indole’s flocculus, modest, unripe, all but hidden in his great black beard, permitted him to hold his head high as he spoke. “Alexander the Great, seeing Diogenes looking attentively at a pile of human bones, asked the philosopher what he was looking for. ‘That which I cannot find,’ was the reply. ‘The difference between your father’s bones and those of his slaves.’ Shall I go on, Mr. Topinard?”
“ Oui, more.”
“Bien Monsieur… . According to The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, witches rubbed themselves with an ointment to facilitate flying. While the ingredients of this ointment varied from place to place and from time to time, there were four that were considered essential: a thick stew of children’s corpses, preferably unbaptized, and the juices of henbane, wolfsbane and cinquefoil—”
Indole paused for a breath or two, then continued. “There are eight kinds of witches: one, the diviner, Gypsy or fortune-telling witch; two, the astrologian, star-gazing, planetary, prognosticating witch; three, the chanting, canting, or calculating witch; four, the veneficial or poisoning witch; five, the exorcist or conjuring witch; six, the gastronomic witch; seven the magical, speculating, sciental, or arted witch; and eight, the necromancer.”
Without knowing why, Moldenke was suddenly beset with contradictory impulses and unusual urges. He excused himself, quietly left the library, and walked the deck to relax. Glad to see the light on in the ship’s pharmacy, he sought the druggist’s advice.
“Come in, Moldenke. You look blanched. What is it, unlawful impulses?”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Dick.”
“Let me show you something.” From a waist-level drawer whose pulls were badly worn with long use, Dick snatched a drawstring sack. “This goes for twoty-eight zil. Basically, it’s a nice soft bag made from the scrotal sack of a well-aged neut. And inside, this.” He withdrew a lash in which thorns, needles, and greasewood burrs had been woven.
Seeing the lash released a memory from Moldenke’s Indiana past. As an adolescent, his passion for neutrodyne females had been something quite unmanageable. His monkish tendencies ever in conflict with his savagery, he became emotionally encysted and sought relief in passive sexual congress with them. He undressed in concealed places and paid them to lash him until his shoulders and buttocks bled. After such indulgences, his hands fisted, were cold, and wouldn’t open. Hives showed themselves on his back and face. He scratched and raked at them continuously, then rubbed his thumb and forefinger together below his nostrils, as if in sniffing the dander he might intuit a remedy.
“This set has sold very well ever since they outlawed sexing with neuts,” Dick said. “I really don’t understand what it’s all about, but it has to do with Ratt’s pain and pleasure principle. The use of this, as instructed—it comes with written instructions—will help to keep things in balance. You should do your part.”
“All right, Dick.”
“You will be voting for Ratt, won’t you?”
Moldenke crossed his fingers. “I will if you are.”
“It’s not good to be sitting on the fence in times like these.”
“It certainly isn’t.”
“They say there’s a plan to kill him. To kill Ratt.”
“If he exists at all.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Some people wonder if he even exists. So I hear anyway. Not that I think he’s anything but solid and real. It’s probably a rumor. Good night, Dick.”
Once in the privacy of his cabin, Moldenke removed his clothes, knelt on the floor, and dragged the lash repeatedly between his legs, moaning with pain. He closed his eyes and brought forth images of the complex, pleasingly shaped pudenda of young neutrodyne females, which filled him with pleasure.
As he lay abed later, still bleeding in places, it occurred to him that, indeed, some sort of balance had been brought about by the self-imposed lashing. He was at peace with himself, the strange urgings and impulses becalmed. Was it within the realm of possibility that Ratt was right? That he was more a visionary than an idiot? If, of course, he existed at all.
Radio Ratt:
An American troublemaker living on the margin of the Fertile Crescent dynamited the antiquity known as The Living Rock, which has attracted thousands to the Crescent with its charming carvings of pre-Forgetting bears, wolves, serpents, and, strangest of all, a kangaroo. The Living Rock once towered on a corner of the property of the unidentified American, but now lies like a pile of eggshells on a compost heap. The American will be tried today, sentenced tomorrow, and Friday will hang.
MOLDENKE SUFFERED GREATLY in the deadening stillness as the ship entered the quiet waters off the Fertile Crescent and a dank, miserable envelope of bad air surrounded the ship day and night. A victim of ejaculatio praecox, Moldenke had nightly dreams that ended in pollution. His semen had a peculiar consistency and when he masturbated there was a severe cramp in the femoral region simultaneously with the orgasm. Only a small drop came, but afterward, while he was washing, the real semen flowed, as insubstantial and watery as skimmed mulce. He feared he would never father children.
AFTER A SLEEPLESS night, Moldenke walked the deck at dawn. His faith in Nature’s order was shaken when he found a small toad in the ship’s rain gauge. It was destitute of a head and had begun to putrefy. How it came to be there he could not imagine, unless it fell from the sky. Then he saw that the decks were covered with small masses of jelly, each about as large as a horsebean. He carried one of these to Dr. Burnheart, who examined it microscopically and said, “Yes, what we have here is sputum lunae, literally moon spit, sometimes known as sperm astrale, or star semen, thought to be an efflux of the moon. These lumps often fall from the sky, and sometimes prove to contain the ova of insects and worms.”
On another morning stroll, outside the purser’s, he witnessed Topinard punishing Skatole for some offense. “Cochon!’—“Pig” he exploded, a vicious stamp of heavy-soled shoes on the giant’s toes emphasizing his invective. Again and again the shoes descended with violent impact.
Skatole crouched, trying to avert what blows he could. But his face showed great welts, and one lip, cut and bruised, began swelling. The blood ran in a thin cascade from above his right eye and fell upon the deck in great drops, which he smeared with a bare foot.
Skatole cried out, “Na bihain liklik ol I lukim wanpela man I wok long wokabaut raunin haus bilong John.”
Topinard pruned his lips with annoyance and kicked the giant in his shin. “Stop your blather, man! Please! I’m going mad with it.” He washed the giant’s tongue with fatted soap and a scrub brush. “Time and again I have warned you. Do not speak until spoken to.”
Skatole sank to his knees and wept.
Not far off, Indole stared directly into the blinding light of the risen sun, his eyes cast over with a chalky film.
“Why do you do this?” Moldenke asked.
“I want to be blind. This will hurry the process.”
“Good morning, Moldenke,” Topinard said, smashing Skatole’s toes a final time, then extracting a coiled hair two feet long from a pustule on Indole’s chin by popping it with a lit ciggie. “We’ll be out of these doldrums as soon as tomorrow, I hear on the radio.”
“Good morning, Monsieur. My mother says she’ll have a go at stirring up some wind. She knows the ways. And I think I’ll have a go at getting a waiver as long as I’m here at the purser’s. The office should open any minute.”
“I hate bearing bad news, but the purser is dead, possibly a suicide. He was a careless smoker with a long history of accidentally burning his clothes and household goods. One of the health problems causing his depression was extremely malodorous flatulence arising from abdominal surgery. He had a history of striking matches in the belief that the burning sulfur ameliorated the unpleasant odor. The fire investigation revealed the purser was sitting on the pot when his clothing caught fire. He was wearing pajamas with the pants in place at the waist. Burned matches were on the floor. There was evidence the fire started in the crotch area of the pajamas.”
Moldenke said, “It seems unlikely that anyone would select this bizarre vehicle for suicide over less painful and more certain means. And, speaking of certainties … I won’t be getting a waiver today, will I?”
“Not the smallest chance,” Topinard said. “It’s time for me to put these fellows to sleep. They’ve been up all night. They don’t like the stillness any better than we do.”
Toward evening, Mrs. Moldenke gathered passengers for a rally. They formed a tight circle around her and she said, “Now were going to raise the sky with our voices and stir up the south wind. Let’s go … altogether now. Yaaaaaahhhhh … hoooooooo… . Yaaa … hoo!”
The others joined in and shouted “Yahoo” for a time and then fell silent to listen. A groan could be heard from the sea bottom. The Titanic rose on a massive swell and the groan repeated itself, this time a good bit louder. The spray in the passengers’ faces was warm, the surface of the water getting ever steamier, as if it would soon boil.
“It’s the sound of subterranean strata readjusting themselves,” Mrs. Moldenke said. “I think we’ve dislocated them. We should stop now. The sky is already rising. The winds should begin to stir.”
EXCLUSIVE TO THE Observer.
The Agnes Moldenke Interview
G.H. Is it true, about the glue?
A.M. No one could leave a bottle of mucilage around the Moldenke home. It drove me into a frenzy and I would not be satisfied until someone took off the rubber nipple and poured the sticky stuff down my throat.
G.H. Where does that incredible endurance come from?
A.M. As a youngster I hardened myself by undertaking stringent diets and going around naked to the waist when others wore thick, padded overcoats. On Holly Island, I took to wearing a lock of hair on my forehead and had my portrait painted a number of times in Bonaparte’s famous pose.
G.H. Always retaining that youthful figure.
A.M. For a time I took to wearing one of inventor Vink’s La Grecque Reduction Belts whenever I went dancing. Made of radium pellets encased in the purest Para rubber, the device carried fatty exudations out of my body and into a rubber drain bag at a hidden location in my clothing.
G.H. Fascinating. They say you were an endocrine casualty.
A.M. During the Pisstown Chaos I was clubbed in the head by a raging neutrodyne. I became a violent-tempered and selfish paraphiliac. A prickly feeling went through me, a voluptuous pleasure, when animals were beaten in my presence, or if I read tales of cruelty, about torture, the rack, or the gallows.
G.H. And all the surgeries, one after the other, the scar scarcely healed over before you were sliced open again. Which stands out in memory?
A.M. Many years ago, when I had begun to turn yellow, surgeons removed a ten-pound teratoma from my uterus. In it were the small brown teeth, shriveled testes, and knotted hair of an unborn brother, either of mine or my son’s. It was never determined.
G.H. Your son tells the story of the beetles in a matchbox.
A.M. He once presented me with some beetles he’d collected. I slid the box open and daintily bit each of the insects in a way that would immobilize but not kill immediately. Then I put them in a pile on the carpet and watched them slither, agonize, and twitch. When they were dead, I ate them.
G.H. The terrapins. What about the terrapins?
A.M. Once, in the month of Blossom and before the last Forgetting, I was engaged in clearing out a body of marsh land on one of my properties when I came across a den of terrapins. I lined a wooden box with damp neut hair. The terrapins were laid in rows on the cotton and covered with another hair layer. On top of this was placed a second row of terrapins, and so on, until the box was filled. The box was then covered with a blanket and stored in the cellar. There the terrapins slept through the winter while, upstairs, huddled near my stove, I illustrated The Story of Edible Money and wrote my enduring masterpiece, The Book of Surprises.
G.H. We know you use neutrodyne labor in your money mills, but your relations with them have always been strained. Why is that?
A.M. My son and I were sleeping soundly together about five o’clock one morning when a neutrodyne male wearing ornamental headgear and a nightshirt appeared at the bedside and had one foot in the bed when I woke up and screamed. But the intruder merely grinned and then lay down, pulling up the quilts and preparing to sleep. My son grabbed the lunatic neut and tried to gain mastery by holding him to the floor, but he struggled free and and wiggled off into the kitchen, shortly returning with an empty molasses tin, which he slammed over my head before running off at breakneck speed. A rim on the inside of the can sliced my tongue and wedged behind the gum.
