The Age of Sinatra, page 5
part #2 of Motorman Series
G.H. Your son then ran to the shed and—
A.M. Got a pair of tin snips to remove the can, but when that proved too dangerous, glycerine was applied and the tin came off easily. Only the tip of my tongue was lost, falling into the carpet pile, never to be found. Then, of course, when I was visiting New Oleo, I was hit in the face with some acid thrown from the rear window of an Arvian church. I slipped to the pavement, impeded by a loss of vision. When I called out for assistance, a neutrodyne rushed from the church sacristy, bathed my eyes with violet water, and dabbed them with unguent. When questioned, the neut said, “I was only taking lacquer from an old parson’s bench and threw the used-up acid out the window. How could I have known that such a personage as Mrs. Moldenke might choose that moment to walk by?” So, you see, my feelings are mixed. As Ratt says, all things in balance.
G.H. The bad neut harms, the good neut heals. A perfect balance. So then, in addition to your son, you had a daughter, Hetty. Tell us that story. Technically, she was dead, but you brought her back for awhile.
A.M. I taught Hetty to speak in a straightaway and truthful fashion, mimicking the journalese of late Americana. Hetty died one burning hot day when she gave up trying to cool off with lemonade and a bamboo fan and hopped into an old icebox in a fatal effort to lower her body temperature. She was clever enough to prop the door open with a stick, but a sudden gust of wind blew across the French-occupied valley and carried the stick away, slamming the door. Hetty appeared lifelike and normal after death, pliable of skin and ruddy cheeked, not entirely gone.
G.H. The carriage of death had indeed stopped for her, but she hadn’t climbed on.
A.M. Burial hardly seemed proper. So I kept Hetty in the sunroom for many years and gave her a fine corduroy sofa to lie on. Her corpse was a good barometer, the belly swelling at any rise in atmospheric pressure, thus forewarning of dangerous storms, and deflating when fair weather prevailed. Her hair continued to grow on a regular schedule and had to be cut every so often. The tear ducts likewise remained active, oozing a cloudy lymph every solstice, and pungent gases often jetted from her anus. Under a compulsion that began just prior to the Chaos, I began collecting Hetty’s exuviae—saliva, tears, stool, ear wax, dandruff, vaginal discharges, nasal crusts, and fingernail clippings—in airtight jars, labeled by year, day, and hour. These jars I stored in the attic, right next to the sucker weed tonic.
G.H. What, exactly, did you do to bring her back?
A.M. I made her breathe the fumes of boiling camphor oil and ingest acidophilus. First thing each morning she drank her own urine, still warm. I performed moxibustion on her, burning dry moss in little glass jars, then setting them at various strategic places on her body. The heated air made the jars suck at her flesh like leeches, leaving painful red welts, particularly in the cup behind her knees and the outer ankle—both places thought to be important in stimulating the bone marrow and the production of white blood cells. Her chest and abdomen were covered with healed-over lesions and her flesh resembled clay. If I grasped a handful of loose abdominal flesh and pulled it outward, the lobe of skin sagged in place like a doughy breast and remained that way several days, gradually shrinking back. I then conducted a macabre experiment in an effort to improve her digestion. I cooked one gibnut and fed it to nineteen other gibnuts. Then I fed one of the nineteen to the remaining eighteen, and so on, until only one was left. That one I stewed in mulce and blood and fed to Hetty.”
G.H. Her fiery adolescent temper led to legal complications, later, and you intervened.
A.M. In the later part of ’68, just before … or after … I forget… that first big Forgetting, I found work for Hetty at an upholstering firm. A clumsy neutrodyne worker by the name of Cirella dropped a piece of Hetty’s duck cloth on the floor and Hetty hurled a heavy pair of carpet shears at her, severing her flocculus at the root. The neut bled until the end of the day and died when the sun went down. I settled a fair sum on Cirella’s family and, by using my civic influence, fixed Hetty’s stay in the lockup at a merciful week. In her cell, which was the breeziest and most comfortable in the jail, she was provided nightly meals of johnnycakes, greasewood roots, and green gland stew, while her cap, umbrella, and cane were left hanging close at hand. To amuse herself, she gave fellow prisoners charts of their phrenological traits. When that bored her, she trifled with learning to fiddle.
G.H. Then you lost her a second time.
A.M. Back in Indiana, Hetty was picking camphor berries and standing on a ladder when a French pig entered the yard. Naturally the dog gave chase, bumping the ladder and throwing her to the ground, fracturing both her thumbs. Three days later, the monad of tetanus invaded her body and she grew comatose. Realizing the hopelessness of the case, I turned to the bee sting. I removed her clothing and strapped her to an old hickory stump. After lathering her face, throat, breasts and scalp with honey, I retired to the house. The bees soon came in great numbers, stinging her many times, so that her head was swollen twice its normal size and her budding breasts looked like strawberry tortes. But the cure was effective. In a few days she was well enough to bake macaroons and say her daily prayers. She’d become an Arvian, against my wishes.
G.H. Ma’am, do I hear in that a hint of anti-Arvey sentiment?”
A.M. Excuse, please, but I’ve got to make for the pot. I’m gassed up and cramping.
G.H. Sorry we have to end this so abruptly, but thank you so much, my dear Mrs. Moldenke.
A STRONG WIND suddenly rose from the south just as Mrs. Moldenke trundled toward the pharmacy, something of an uphill climb as the ship angled over swells. When she entered, hoping to find a good stock of charcoal tablets, she found Dick half-conscious on the floor, spitting up blood. Dr. Burnheart was attending him. “I’m afraid old Dick here’s eaten some rat bait. He’s been despondent in recent days. All we can do is try to make him comfortable. I’ve already had him swallow Ipecac, hoping to induce regurgitation.”
When Dick vomited everything he could, and while Mrs. Moldenke waited impatiently, Dr. Burnheart pronounced the danger largely over, advised a night’s sleep and a moxibustion treatment in the morning.
“I’ve been cabinbound two weeks,” Dick gasped. “Failing to break wind when pressure was felt, living in fear of diverticulitis, forgetting to take enteric precautions.”
“I’m suggesting,” said Dr. Burnheart, “that this sort of severe malaise is an effect of the dying of the wind. Now that the southerlies have commenced, we’ll all feel a lot better.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll just clench up and strive,” Dick said, sitting up. “What would you like, Mrs. Moldenke? You look a trifle bilious.”
“A bottle of aquafoenic, please, and a tin of charcoal tablets.”
Dr. Burnheart helped Dick to his feet. “All I’ve got left is mummy powder. Mix it into a cup of mulce and there you are. Big shortage of charcoal tablets.”
A veiled woman entered the pharmacy, placed a handful of guida on the counter, and asked for a bottle of carbolic acid. When Dick demurred, she lifted the veil to display an ugly flocculus growing crookedly from her chin.
“After you drink the acid, how long does it take to die?” she asked.
“Not long,” Dick said. “A short wait.”
Then entered Indole, who dropped his trousers, spread his great buttocks, and asked Dick to inspect him for piles.
“I see you’re busy, Dick,” Mrs. Moldenke said, “I’ll take two ounces of the powder, a jar of mulce, and my aquafoenic, then I’ll be out of your way.”
IN THE WEE hours that night, a neutrodyne identified as Randall York entered Mrs. Moldenke’s cabin and forced her to swallow one hundred and forty-four sewing needles after encasing them in paraffin like a mammoth pill. In a few days she complained of considerable irritation of the skin and of itching rashes. Within a week, needles were protruding from all parts of her body. Dr. Burnheart paid a call at her cabin and extracted them with pincers. In the first harvest, one hundred and forty-three were recovered from her arms, hands, breast, buttocks, feet, the lobe of the ear, the vagina, and the corner of her false eye. She said there was no pain attached to the needles’ emergence, even though they came out invariably thick-end first and, unless immediately extracted, disappeared again.
Dr. Burnheart said needles inserted under the skin were known to have been borne through the muscles in many authenticated cases, coming to rest in distant parts from the place of origin, but that a needle introduced into the stomach and then emerging from the ear, as the last of Mrs. Moldenke’s had, would have had to traverse the skull, which was incomprehensible.
Because he had in hand a valid waiver, no charges were filed against York, who later observed, “I got out of bed that day feeling alternately expulsive, phlegmatic, and given to hysteric depression. A crewman had found a blue, phosphorescent slime streaked the length of the ship’s hull. The plesios, he said, have been active during the night. A fire began at my table today when a plate of bread combusted for no apparent reason. I ran amok.”
Instead, the innocent Udo was summarily punished for the assault. An officer doused his hair with fusel oil and set it on fire. Udo ran screaming the length of the ship, then back again, until someone sloshed a bucket of seawater on him and put out the flames, at which time he fainted.
ONE STORMY EVENING the ship was struck by ball lightning, the fiery bolt entering the dining room through one of its skylights and falling to the floor in a ball of white flame. It rolled along, leaving a trail of soot and cinder in its wake, scorching shoes, cuffs, and hems before passing through a wall by burning a hole, melting the heads of nails and jarring planks from their places.
Making its way aft, charring the deck as it went, the flaming ball rolled into Moldenke’s stateroom through a door carelessly, but fortunately, left ajar. Once inside, it came to rest under the bed, where its radiant heat first warmed the bedsprings, then the mattress, then Moldenke, who felt a tingling in his bones. The ball then vanished, leaving behind only a few charred splinters and a half-molten nail.
Radio Ratt:
A prodigious, five-pound death egg laid by a Russian neut, Sergei Machnov, will be exhibited for one hour only at the Katland Ice Palace following tomorrow’s spankings… . And now, a reminder from the Ratt Administration: Necronauts cannot produce their own food and so rely for energy on existing organic matter. Settlers have reported hearing Stinkers in the yard, rooting in the garbage pails. “I couldn’t abide them crunching bones and drinking swill all night,” complained one. The President promises action soon to curb the activity… . Reports have arrived that the charred remains of three American tramps were found in the rubble of a charnel house fire in New Oleo today. The unidentified tramps were asleep in the cellar of the building when the fire erupted in an upstairs wastebasket full of rags.
DR. BURNHEART INVITED Ophelia for a tour of the ships mulcing Facility. With her sketchbook and charcoal sticks in hand, she followed the doctor past the incubator, with a peek into the autoclave room, then up a steep stairway to the pen where mulcing neuts were kept. Also in residence were twenty or more of the ship’s cats, stationed near the pen, some inside it, all purring contentedly. A fusel lamp burning in a corner cast stark shadows against the wall.
“We’ve got nine of them,” Dr. Burnheart said, “named after the Muses. Calliope, Terpsichore, Clio, Melpomene, Urania, et cetera. With daily draining of the dugs, they supply mulce for the whole ship.” He demonstrated the procedures for feeding and watering the little group, how to examine the droppings for worms, and how to recognize dugs that were ready to be mulced. “Wait too long,” he said, “and they’ll burst. The membrane that covers them is paper-thin.”
There were signs, Ophelia detected, of negligence: fecal material accumulating in the pen, algae in the water tubs. Several of the neuts had rotting teeth and furrowed dugs. “Dr. Burnheart, I encourage you to take more kindly to these things. They may be insensate, but we shouldn’t think of them as insensitive.” She began sketching a set of unhealthy dugs.
“I beg to differ,” said Dr. Burnheart. “I assure you, in all my handling of them, I’ve never seen a sign of it. They seem absolutely dead. Animated, yes, but dead. They speak, but do not mean. It’s all in the Manifesto. You must have read it, a woman of your education.”
“Many times. Backward and forward. Edible copies and throwaways.”
“Then how can you possibly take the position you do? Watch this.” Stepping into the pen, he chose one of the females at random and tugged violently at her knotty queue of rich, red hair. The neut had no visible reaction, even though her vertebrae groaned audibly as her head was thrust backward.
“You see? Nothing.”
“I beg to differ with you, Dr. Burnheart. It’s right there in the Manifesto. Stoical endurance, yes, that they have. But not anesthesia. They suffer in some private way we can’t imagine. I don’t think you understand their complexity even as much as Ratt does. They have their customs, their history, whatever they can remember of it. They don’t write, but they’ve got an oral tradition.”
“Ask yourself this, what would we do without mulce?”
“I’m going to the first mate with a complaint. These pens are unsanitary in the extreme. That constitutes maltreatment of neuts, which I do think is against the law.”
“Go ahead. See where that will get you.”
Ophelia picked up the lamp and moved it closer to the pen. “Who is that? Someone is back there, in the dark.”
“Oh, really. Where?”
She raised the lamp even higher, exposing a tableau that sickened her. The first mate, red-faced and breathing hard, dismounted one of the neuts and quickly zipped up his jumpsuit.
“You shouldn’t simply barge in like this,” the mate said. “Passengers are not at liberty to wander the inner sanctums of the ship as they please. And this is not at all what you might think, but rather a matter of science, industry, and experimentation. Tell her, Doctor.”
“You see, Ophelia, if we service them daily, the quality of the mulce is greatly improved. All the men aboard ship have been pitching in and doing their share.”
“These practices are being encouraged by the Ratt administration,” the mate said. “More than encouraged. It’s the law.”
Burnheart said, “It triples the output and enhances the taste.” He selected one of the neuts, bent his knee in genuflection, and took her dug into his mouth. She groaned pleasurably as the sucking went on and shed a tear or two when he stopped. What spilled from the doctor’s full cheeks was licked up by the flock of cats.
“There you are, Ophelia. That’s how it’s done. Kneel down. Have a taste.”
The neutrodyne rubbed her dug with mummy oil and Ophelia knelt to have a suck. Though the nipple was uncomfortably spiked with small hairs, the mulce had such a rich, sweet taste that she had trouble letting go when her mouth was full.
“You see,” Dr. Burnheart said. “The quality of the mulce is directly proportional to the frequency of service. I serviced this one myself, not an hour ago. You may be shocked, you may think it bestial, but imagine the good that comes from it. And these gals don’t mind. They feel nothing.”
“And it restores the balance,” offered the mate.
“It’s right there in the Manifesto,” Burnheart scolded. “What’s bad for one may be good for all.”
“The taste is heavenly,” Ophelia said, lowering the lamp’s flame.
Radio Ratt:
The heavy breathing of neutrodynes under anesthetic resounded through the narrow lanes of New Oleo on Monday when the band shell was transformed into an impromptu dental office. Three chairs were installed and more than one hundred neutrodyne teeth were extracted in the afternoon. With teeth averaging a hundred and a half guida per kilo, such exercises will be scheduled with increasing frequency for the foreseeable future. The spillage of so much blood, and the fact that it was allowed to remain wherever it fell, and there to gradually congeal, caused a great deal of slippage and loose footing among the busy dentists. Quite a few, some say, took nasty and sometimes injurious falls… . In Bum Bay today, neutrodyne mating season commenced. The males were spewing all over town. The sticky, threadlike material drifted in the air overhead, causing general consternation among female settlers of childbearing age. To a one, they could be seen dashing for shelter or opening parasols. The spew ranged from droplets to ten-foot globules. It was cloyingly sweet to sniff, tasty, and edible, like cotton candy.
AS THE TITANIC neared its anchorage off Bum Bay, passengers crowded into Der Kroetenkusser to celebrate the last hours of the voyage. The odor of the City and the sweet scent of neut spew drifted on the night wind. The Chatterjee’s, a neutrodyne French horn trio, played, dancers danced, singers sang, and the sea spray felt cool and satisfying on the face.
“Yellow moon tonight,” Hilter said. “Now the plagues of summer begin. I’ll be glad when my feet are on solid ground at least.”
Ophelia noted Mrs. Moldenke’s absence.
“Mother is very sick with hemorrhagic fever,” Moldenke explained. “Three nights of delirium. Red as a beet. Bleeding from half her orifices. And all this on top of her plantar wart, for which she’s tried electrocautery, acids, and an ointment made of white mud, sucker weed sap, mugwort, and ground daisies, all without effect.”
“The poor woman,” Ophelia said. “No one has ever suffered more.”
“She finds transcendence in it.”
