Son of Man It was
"Hello,
"Is "No, she's with Charles."
"Could I use your telephone?" Vanessa let "Perhaps you should sit down for a few minutes. There's no reason why you can't stay here and call back later."
"Is all your family like this?"
"No. The rest of them tend to be dead. There were some
other
weird things she did. Like the time we visited
" "I know and the octopus was a woman to boot. And not even Lucian's type either. In a way, she wanted to be like Kafka, but she was too lazy to read him, and she wanted to be enthusiastic at the drop of a hat. She's taking up acting as a hobby, and wants to play Charles Ryder in the next adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Speaking of strange women, what are we planning to do about the conspirators living upstairs?" "Oh them. Ms. Van P--- and her maid went out a few minutes ago. The only thing we have to worry about is this new fertilizer they've got dripping on our heads. Otherwise, they won't be bothering us at all tonight." As it happens Ms. Van P--- was walking towards the Harding apartment, completely unconcerned about the temperature. She had left Chattenden Passey with a large number of fake furs and convenient coats, while the maid was dressed only in the waistcoat and accompanying suits. However, it was a cold evening and Ms. Van P--- had given most of her furs to her maid as they stalked the city streets. As it happened, the maid had only the vaguest idea what Ms. Van P---was going to do with her once they forced their way into Harding's apartment. She also wasn't sure if they were actually going to reach the apartment, because although the route was a fairly short one, about eighteen blocks, Ms. Van P--- made so many backtracks, detours, "short-cuts," and she even went so far as to circle one block, which held a rather unpleasant laundromat, two drunken beggars and some very poor housing, three times.
At
the moment the two of them were crouching outside a video rental
station.
The maid had bad memories of video-rental stations, because she
remembered the
time when they were in some small "And where is Aquilla Rogers?" "Back at her apartment, of course. She can't be allowed to go out on a night like this." "If I may be pardoned for asking, why can't she fight her own battles, and why are we fighting them for her?" "To answer your first question, Aquilla Rogers would be a hopelessly weak person to challenge Charles Harding. In fact, if it was up to her she wouldn't bother Charles at all, but fall in unrequited love with him. Now with Harding married that simply can't be allowed. The worst thing she would do was merely denounce him before the world as a lecherous hypocrite and hound him and his wife for the rest of his days. Now that is clearly not what Charles Harding deserves, so we are going to ensure that what he gets is much worse." "But why do we care what happens to her? I mean there must be thousands of completely callous men in the city with thousands of heartlessly abandoned girlfriends. Maybe millions. Why do we care about this one, particularly as she keeps trying to have us thrown out into the street?" "You're not being fair about Aquilla. The reasons she submits all those petitions is so that she can forge them before they're presented to the relevant authorities. I can therefore raise pertinent objections and delay any final decision for months. Why if it wasn't for the many patently false complaints she raised we'd have been thrown out months ago." "So she's on our side after all? But why?" "Because natural ties compel her to do a good turn, and natural ties compel me to help her in return." "I don't understand? Are you saying you knew Miss Rogers before she came into the apartment?" "But of course I did. I knew her when she was still a little girl and still called herself Aquilla Roget." "Aquilla Roget?" "Oh yes. She was named in sort of honor of the grandmother I never knew, a sailor's wife. So she was named after the sea." "Does that mean she's related to Dr. Roget?" "He's her second cousin. Much as he is my second cousin, much as Giles Seinkewicz and Elizabeth Concrete Harding are my and Aquilla's first cousins, which is the exact reason we have spend the past eight months watching over their apartment." "But that would mean? I'm sorry, I'm a little confused."
"Of course you are, and that's perfectly understandable. My
mother
is Catherine Jeanette Roget Vovelle. Her second child was
Aquilla, who
became the best trigonometry student "Charles was always a very understanding person. When Lucian was still Lucy and she was just my annoying younger sister, she would try to train the cat to attack strangers. She had a lot of success, and the cat managed to scratch Charles once or twice, but he was never held it against her. Mind you that might be because the cat attacked me even more. But he was always very tolerant, he was the first person I ever met to (briefly) have a black girlfriend. When we were teenagers he was the natural leader, he was the president of most of the clubs he belonged to, and some of them he'd let me be the secretary. He was always bright, full of charm, very competitive and always willing to do what was necessary. I remember him as the boy who could always listen to women, and offer them his understanding. I remember being in the study hall and looking outside and there was this poor, rather stupid girl, crying in his arms and him saying 'It's all right' and 'things will be better,' and the next day she was amazingly cheerful. And I always envied him a little, envied him his success, his lack of guilt, his popularity, and every now and then I wished that something very nasty would happen to him."
So
said "How's your story going?" "Rather well, actually. I mean I'm no closer to actually finishing it, but I have managed to get another paragraph which does push the story in a new direction. The real problem is that I have so little time to write, mathematics takes so much of my time. So I only write down the most brittle thoughts that come to my mind, and they all shatter on a close reading." "Perhaps. What have you got now?" "Well it goes something like this. And so the townspeople got used to the grove of thorns, and so the leaders sneered at those who thought the grove could ever be removed, they even held official festivals that honored the thorns for the good job they did, and some townspeople began to beat up those who thought that the grove should be removed, and then there would be beatings just to be on the safe side, and these beatings went on for so many years that everyone believed that they too were inevitable and they had always existed, just as the grove had always existed. Then there came one day in June, when the weather was not so hot, when the robins sang almost as clearly and harmoniously as they did before the thorns drove most of them away, when the flowers smelled almost as sweet as they days before the thorns drained away all the water, when the sky was almost as clear and sweet-swelling as the days before the thorns sent up a miasma that clouded the air and gave off a sinister unidentifiably pungent odor, when the light shone on everything almost as beautifully as it had the days before the lead and the dust that came in the attempts to destroy the thorns. On this day everyone rose with just a bit more hope than usual, just a bit more hope that everything was somehow more attractive, before they remembered that they had to work harder to get less food, before they remembered they had to sweep harder and clean harder to less effect than ever before, before they remembered that the grove of thorns existed as it always had, and as it always would, and as it always should. So the people got up, and by the time they were dressed, by the time they had all washed up, by the time they had gotten through their meager breakfasts, they felt exactly the way they felt every other day for the past few days weeks months years decades centuries. But this day was different, because not everyone believed that the thorns were indestructible, that the thorns played a useful and valued role, and by the time that everyone was in the kitchens, in the blacksmiths, in the fish-markets and the meat-markets, in the clerk's office, in the tinkerer's and the artisan-shops, in the churches and the small parks, a rumour began to spread, a rumour that a strange, fantastic, wonderful and completely useless thing was about to occur. For all over the village, the children of the townspeople announced that they were going out of the village to destroy the grove of thorns." "And that's all you've got." "Yes. I'm not exactly sure what should happen next. I mean if Lucian were writing this the thorns would kill all the children in the most grotesque way. I can imagine it now; all my nice little vain Faulknerians convolution turned into Bargain Hemmingway. `Blood. Blood. Gouged out eyes. Major organ [you can insert anyone you please] pierced and bleeding. Intestines everywhere. Bleeding like rotten pus-filled sausages. Hanging around like napkins that everyone forgets to put back in the sideboard.' Actually Lucian would kill me if I made that comment on the screenplays she writes. So obviously hideous tragedy is out of the question. I just don't know what to do next." "Well do you want them to defeat the thorns or not?" "Well I'm not sure. I mean, in my heart of hearts, I would like them to win." "So why don't you? It's your bloody story." "Well, for a start I'm not really sure how to do it. I seem to have shown that there's no possible way to get rid of them. And besides, I feel that some sort of pessimism is required for my fiction, that some sort of general unpleasantness is needed, to say some great misanthropic truth with appropriate dignity, and stoic courage, etc, etc, etc. Maybe I should be like the political scientists who say 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon' is fashionable and who have orgasms reading De Tocqueville." "Well, what's the bloody grove supposed to stand for?" "I'm not sure. When I started, it was supposed to be fascism or Nazism or something like that." "Well, you're not just going to let them win." "Well, they could mean something else, and perhaps there could be some sort of nice compromise, with the thorns more or less in control, but providing something of great value." "Like what?" "I don't know. You know how you are supposed to disarm your enemies by being nice to them? Well Nietzsche once said the real thing you should do to your enemies was to show them that they had done you some good. So I could try something on that." "And what are you thinking up?" "Oh, something like having the thorns read Flaubert to the townspeople, or maybe they could read The History and Limitations of Hegelian Analysis." "Oh, you actually cracked a joke at Chelmnickon's expense." "Yes, I did. Which is actually rather cruel of me considering what just happened to his poor wife." "Oh come on. If you're going to be this deferential, you shouldn't take political science at all. Why don't I help you with the next paragraph?" "Hold on, Deja vu." "About me helping with the next paragraph?"
"No, about De Tocqueville and orgasms. Did I say something like
that
about Isaiah "Pandora Vovelle?" "Yes. As you could probably guess, or you would if your spelling was better, Roda Ellen Van P--- is an anagram, with one less v and an extra n." "And your sister has been helping us spy on this Concrete woman. Aside from the fact that the woman below us is your cousin, why are we so interested in her sex-life, and her life in general?" "Very simple; my cousin was born from a virgin. Therefore, close examination of her is crucial."
The
maid stopped for a minute. "Excuse me, through all the countries
we've
been through, when you were changing passports like others would change
their
shoes, I have seen many unusual things, things that are very different
from the
"My aunt Atala is the exception, and my cousin Elizabeth is the result of this exception." "But why did you change your name?"
"Good question. I want you to imagine, ten years in the past, a
grand ball. In "You mean that was you..." Ms. Van P----, or Mademoiselle Vovelle, as I suppose we must call her, was very disappointed. "Of course it was me, but don't interrupt me in the future. Anyway when they saw this young woman, they were so surprised, they briefly thought that she might actually be a man. The woman came right up to them, and for a few seconds she did nothing but stare..." "Why do you refer to yourself in the third person?" "Be quiet! And she began to speak, and before the entire ballroom she accused the husband of having had an affair with her, of having jilted her, of having left her pregnant." "You never told me you had a baby!" "That's hardly surprising since I was never pregnant." "Did you somehow think that you were?" "By him? Certainly not, I never met him before in my life." "Then why did you say that you were?"
"Well, if you had waited a few seconds I would have told you. The
reason
that I falsely claimed I had been impregnated was that so when I took
out a
small, genteel and very lady-like revolver, and shot him to death at
point-blank
range the authorities wouldn't think that I killed him because he had
used his
position to assist and then cover up grotesquely sadistic murders
committed by
the Ulster Defense Association. They would think that it was a
crime of
passion, and admittedly I was a very good actor. I mean until I
killed
him, no-one ever thought that an "How could you do such a thing? You killed a man with two little children behind him, and you left his wife think that he had betrayed her." "My dear sympathetic maid, when I shot my victim he was dead before I leaped out the window and onto the back of a passing taxi. It took him less than five seconds to die. There are many members of the UDA who would consider it a dishonor if they didn't inflict a baker's dozen on their victims. Now ordinarily I am not a believer in vigilantism, but it's one thing to be merciful to the miserable, the poor and the meek, but we can't tolerate this sort of thing from the rich, the happy and the powerful. It corrupts society." "But what about his family? They didn't do anything wrong." "My dear maid, collective guilt, the concept that people should be punished for actions beyond their control or responsibility is one of the founding principles of civilization. If people thought only poor weak people were gratuitously massacred, or poisoned or worked to death you would breed nihilism, possibly even Marxism. A few murders at the top, and people are much more likely to view their elites more sympathetically. You could say my act was quite socially constructive." A pause. "What did you do next?"
"Oh, I changed my identity to the one you know, met representatives of
the
Flannery O'Connor Brigade who agreed to accept me and absolve my sins
if I
swore a vow never to eat meat again and to plant marigolds in apartment
carpets
all over the world. There was always a Brigade member willing to
give me
a valid passport, so I went all over the world collecting them. I
made
money translating secret documents my country's government needed,
since I have
a positive flair for languages. And then I met you, I rescued you
from a
life of poverty and degradation, taught you English, cured your fears
of
poisonous snakes by putting cobras in your dress, and brought you to "And so now we're helping Aquilla." "Of course we are. She's my younger sister and despite what you may think, I care for you and her very deeply. It's just how families work, like the way an aunt looks after one of her more obscure nieces. I will never let anything happen to you, and once my mermaid soap is universally practiced you need never fear seduction again."
The
maid was not pleased at this, she had grown up in a miserable slum, and
until
she had met Pandora Vovelle seduction was probably going to be one of
the few
bright spots in a generally wretched life. But she kept quiet,
and
followed Mademoiselle Vovelle after she got up from her hedgehog
position. "When they heard the desire of the children, a few of the parents offered their best wishes. Most of them thought that they were not serious, others thought that a confrontation with the grove would show them the limits of what could be done, and a few, a very few actually thought that somehow, someway they could destroy the grove. But most of the parents thought the children were mad, foolish, and their wish was generally evil, ill-thought out, completely irrational, and they wondered who they should blame for this hideous state of affairs. And so the beaters were sent out, first to spank their own children, then the children of other parents and then even the children whose parents were packing them lunches for their expedition, and then they spanked the parents and a few other completely celibate people just to be on the safe side. And so after a hard morning's work, the beaters could go back to the mayor and the councilors and the clerks and said that they had done a good job chastising the children, and everybody was so busy congratulating each other that they only noticed when it was too late that all the children had left to go out to destroy the grove of thorns. "Naturally some of the beaters were sent out to round up all the children so they could be really chastised, but the children found a special way of going to the grove, and the beaters spent the whole day getting lost. So when the children reached the grove, there was no-one there to stop them. They stood before the solid wall of thorns, shared the little food that had been allowed to them before the beaters had hit them, played a few little games and then looked at the enormous grove. And when they saw it, all their hearts sank, for it really was an enormous grove, and many of them thought they should turn back and never go near it again. But there were some strong boys, and girls, children who were used to ordering all the other children around. 'Courage,' they said, 'With a few determined hearts, we can get rid of the grove in a few bold strokes.' And before the rest of the children they walked boldly before the groves, rolled up their sleeves (those who had sleeves), and grasped the stems---and then stepped back, their hands a mass of blood and welts. In a few seconds, the bravest of the crowd were nothing but a mass of cowardly children, shouting for all to hear that there was no way to destroy the grove of thorns. And by this time the beaters had finally found them, and all the children were forced to go home. "But that was not the end of the matter. For the next day, a handful of children returned to the grove. These were the small children, who could be allowed to wander away because they were too small to do any work. They walked to the stems that fed on people's blood, urine, bile, lead, and looked down to the very roots. Then they sat down and together they started to pull out one root after another. It was a very slow job, since they were so small, and they often pricked themselves on the smaller thorns at the base. Bu they gritted their teeth and managed to pull out all the little nettles and put them in a pile where they would dry to dust in the sun. And finally they managed to uncover one root and slowly disentangled it from the rest of the enormous grove. But just as they put it by the needles to dry out as well, they heard a strange, soft and very quiet crying. The sun had already begun to set and it was very hard for the children to find where the voice was coming from. But then they turned back to the giant root they had extracted, and heard the voice coming from it. As they looked over it and peered into the giant thorns they saw at the very base, very little flowers, which were actually very tiny roses. It was they that were crying, and the children asked them 'why are you crying?' And the roses replied that once there had only been vast bushes of roses, but all the townspeople did was pick them bare, so that in order to survive they began to grow thorns, and in order to survive even the roses grew smaller and smaller, while the thorns grew larger and larger, until they completed overshadowed the roses. 'And now we are dying.' and so they did die, and all the children could do was to cry. "Actually that's a little too much," said Vanessa, "but I think this gets the plot rolling along. Don't you agree?"
"Oh yes," said "Fine. Your turn."
"You mean right now?" Giles Seinkewicz was in the hospital room with his father, who had not woken up since the assault. All Giles could do was pace the floor, curse himself for not having swiped better magazines from the reception area and curse the hospital board of governors for not ordering better magazines. He looked outside the dark window. He thought about the prime minister's typically unctuous condolences. All he could feel now was the gloom, the absence of his wife and the possibility of his father's death. Naturally, this inspired him to talk to his unconscious father.
"I have a new idea of how to find my wife. I can't use the signed
statements
that Dramsheet occasionally sends me to find where my wife is, because
the
address is always smudged. But there is a consular official
always there
signing and dating the statement. All I have to do is track down
the
consular officials, and I can trace Natasha's path across "But I feel I should be confessing something to you father, but I'm not exactly sure what it should be. You always wanted me to read books, but you also wanted me to read particular types of books. Maybe that's somewhat sinister when you look at it, but I don't feel resentful, because even if you were a censor on the sly, you always made sure that if I couldn't read one particular book, I should be reading something better. I'm not quite sure that reading every major novel written in Polish this century is quite a substitute for not reading every major novel written in French in any century, but if it had been up to Uncle Sampson I wouldn't have read anything at all. But though once when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child, ever since I started wearing these really dark glasses..." "Giles, please!" "Father, you're awake!" "Of course, I'm awake. Why shouldn't I be?" "Well, you've been unconscious for hours." "What? Good grief, I'm in a hospital." Giles briefly explained to his father about the deadly watermelon. "Do you think you're going to be alright?" "Oh probably. I suppose if I really was in a coma, I should stay in the hospital for a couple of days, but otherwise I feel fine." Just then Avare Seinkewicz entered. "But now I've just got this horrible headache."
"So you're awake. I came as quick as I could, but coming as quick
as
I could involved a six-hour wait at "God we do indeed. Giles, why don't you leave us for a little while, say fifteen minutes." "Better yet, half an hour." said his wife. Giles dutifully left the room, and as soon as he did so John directed questions about the United church vestry board to his wife's neck. But then the door immediately reopened, and Giles returned with another man. "Oh, bloody hell Giles, what is it?" "I'm sorry, father," (Giles took off his mother's hat) "but this man insists on speaking to you." The man stepped forward. "My name is Constable Coffighy." He flashed his credentials. "I have been instructed by Inspector Joseph Tyrone to watch you throughout the night." "Why?" asked Avare. "On the past three successive Thursdays a member of the Philhellenon club has died in suspicious circumstances." "What? John, you didn't tell me anything about this." "It's not anyone you know, well except for Pr. Hermann. But what does this have to do with your guarding us?" "Inspector Tyrone believes that all the members of the Philhellenon club are in danger, and he has therefore ordered that all of them be guarded." "Well," said John, "that shows considerable foresight, and we greatly appreciate it. But my wife just arrived and I haven't seen her in two months, and we'd like a chance to be able to talk to each other. So why don't you take a little nap and come back in a hour so you'll be so much more refreshed." "That is not possible. My instructions are very strict. They weren't very legible, but they were strict." "Couldn't you spend twenty minutes checking the heating ducts and the fire escapes?" "No need, sir. I already spent the hour before doing that." "Great timing, John." hissed Avare. "You wouldn't mind taking a bribe to get lost for a few minutes, would you?" "No, sir, that would be quite impossible." Then John thought up something very clever. "Why don't you start taking your coffee break now?" "You really mean it? You won't complain to the Inspector?" "Not at all." said Avare, "In fact, Giles, why don't you be a very good boy and take the fine constable here to the vending machines where he can get some coffee. Not the ones right beside the corner, the ones that don't work." "Are you sure? They worked fine earlier this evening." "Positive. Instead why don't you take him to the machine on the opposite end of the hotel and down two flights of stairs? That would be such a good idea." Coffighy agreed, and he and Giles were soon on their way. "There isn't any real danger facing us, John?" "No, of course not. As long as you're with me, nothing can happen to you." "Good," she said, as she started undoing the buttons at the top of her dress. "I have so much to tell you about what the Rotary club has been doing." "You know that right this moment I don't really care what those morons are doing."
"Well, it's not as if I gave a shit either..." And she licked
her lips. "Well not right now, if you can't think of anything. You could always go back home and continue writing it." "Well, actually, I'd rather stay here. Perhaps we could think of something else to talk about." "Oh, great, we could talk about my aunt Sarah." "Who's your aunt Sarah?"
"My father's sister, who lives in "Is that possible?"
"No less possible that getting chickenpox four times and getting
frostbite
on the hottest day of the year. Imagine this, my aunt decided it
would be
a nice idea if she left the kids behind for a couple of days and visit "That's horrible." "No, it was horrible when she had to prostitute herself in order to survive the Holocaust. After she was raped for the sixth time by the same nearsighted misogynist Arab pederast, it was silly. And so was the stroke she got when she tried to protest the honorary degree the same Arab got from the Jonathan Institute. And the small nervous breakdown when the still same Arab got a medal from Benjamin Netanyahu." "That's still very horrible." "Well you should read her letters, all 2,021 of them. In every one of them something utterly horrible happens, like the time one of her daughter's weddings was interrupted by a group of terrorists who demanded that the entire Ring cycle should be performed right of the bima." "And what happened?" "Well they had to compromise. They played Aida instead, and one of the tenors sang off-key in just such a way that it aggravated an extremely painful rash that my aunt endemically suffers. And then there was the time when there were in this apartment building, and every time she and her husband tried to have sex, a group of Trappist monks would burst into song." "Don't Trappist monks have a vow of silence?" "She's sure they did it deliberately. And the worst part of it is that they would only sing songs from Carousel." "Let's talk about something else." "What about your story?"
"And this depressed the children very much, and many of them felt that there was nothing to do, but surrender. But they decided that they should not stop thinking of some way to help. And after a few weeks, the children returned to the grove. By now their parents had either gotten resigned to this, since the children were no longer trying to destroy the grove. It was now a very hot day in late July when..."
"Excuse me" interrupted Vanessa, "but fertilizer keeps dripping
on my head." And indeed it had been for the past five minutes, so
Vanessa moved away from her chair and sat on the couch beside "It was now a very hot day in late July when the rosebuds saw the children returning. They saw the children go to each of the plants and to their surprise they heard singing. The children were trying to sing to the rosebuds. They sang nice little songs for the whole day, even when their throats had been parched dry by the heat. Then the next day they came back with little bows to tie around the rosebuds, and the day after that they came back with all the perfumes and nice smells they could find and sprayed them at the roses. And they did all three things this day after day, hoping that this would help the roses grow larger and happier. But that is not what happened. For the songs were really rather silly, and they were annoying when they were repeated again and again, since they were the only songs the children knew, and they were often sung out of tune. And the bows which looked so nice to the children, were too often dull in color, and when the children tied it around the branches, it often choked the rosebuds. And as for the perfumes, the children really didn't have much discrimination in this area, so many of the smells were really rather ugly and nasty, and anyway the rosebuds didn't like them at all. And to make things worse, when the children came to the roses, they often fought, had petty quarrels, and they often left a mess all in front of the grove. So it seemed that nothing had been improved at all."
At
this "Really? Do you mind if I add something more?" "Go right ahead. You've been adding whatever you wanted to the story for the past two weeks." "And to make things even worse for the flowers, every day there were more and more children. It seemed the rosebuds would go mad with the awful toneless singing, and so one day they could only yell at the top of whatever they used for lungs 'If you have to sing to us, try to sing this way!' 'Is that not the way we are supposed to sing?' And with evident impatience the rosebuds spent a lot of time trying to teach the children to sing properly. It was a very long and trying task, and it appeared completely hopeless, for each of the children had these ghastly inharmonious quirks, and though while the rosebuds could help improve their singing somewhat, they could not never get rid of those hideous sounds they kept making. So it was with considerable surprise that the rosebuds heard the children one winter day when there was snow all over the ground, and they heard those quirks again, but for some reason they were not horrible. Indeed their voices, while hardly perfect by rosebud standards, now had a strange beauty that the rosebuds could not have previously imagined. And as time went on and on, they found the new songs fascinating, more complex, richer, and finally pleasurable. And then the roses, who had now grown large enough not to be buds anymore, no longer found the bows as stupid and cheap as they previously found, and began to appreciate the affection with which they were put on, (though they did tell the children to stop tying them so tight). And they began to find in the perfumes intriguing contrasts, and new scents and each day they were more interested at what new smell the children would bring to the grove today. "And so the roses grew larger, and now everybody could see them on the thorns, but the thorns had also not stopped growing larger, and every time a new rose was found, the thorns dug deeper and deeper into the earth, and some people were now accusing the children of having provoked the thorns, of upsetting the natural compromise. And indeed, at the rate the grove was growing, the whole village would be destroyed in a very few years. And perhaps that is what would have happened. But then the roses tried to talking to thorns. The thorns could speak just as well as the roses, but they had long realized that silence is the most effective form of communication for their kind of plant. But they were astonished to find the roses were actually paying attention to them, were actually suggesting, hinting, cajoling, threatening the thorns not to be so cruel and intransigent. The thorns heard the roses out, until they were finished. Then they said they would do nothing of the sort: the village must be destroyed."
"Wait a second!" said "Really? well that's nice to know. You can tell me after I've given my ending." "You can't do that. It's my story." "How is it your story? I've told half of it." "It was my idea. Basically. And I'm going to finish it." "Tthh. Suit yourself, Constantine." "It was only then that someone got the bright idea of singing to the thorns. Now this was very strange to the thorns, who thought they existed only to hurt people." "Just a second, Constantine, but what about your bright idea of showing what good the thorns have done to the community. Seems like old sickly Judeo-Christian compassion to me." "Well, I've never been too uncritically fond of Nietzsche, and I think this will work better. Anyway, not all the thorns were convinced. Some of them were, and they began to shrink and to die. Many of them were not affected at all, but for every thorn that died or vanished away another thorn grew larger and more horrible every day. Soon there were hundreds of these thorns, threatening every one, and the roses, and the children, even the most optimistic of the children, felt that they had made a big mistake in creating these gigantic thorns. But just as the thorns grew larger and larger and just as they were about to strike, they burst into bloom, as the largest roses anyone had ever seen. And every day, more roses were born and bloomed. "But it took a very long time to convince all the middle thorns to go away and not to bother people, for there were still enormous swathes of dead thorns, the sheer weight of inertia of which were gouging into the earth. It took many years for the grove to be properly pruned, for the thorns to stop threatening the children that had come to sing to them. But one day, when all the children had their own children there was no longer a grove of thorns, but a beautiful bower of roses, and every day there was a different scent from the panoplies of memories, and a special sort of singing could be heard. And for the rest of their days to the end of the world there was a world of singing and love, and it was only when there was a death that they remembered the thorns and the beaters. Ta-dah, the end."
"That's not bad, "How were you going to end it?" "Much the same way, only with the thorns discussing the virtues of Athenian tragedy first. But no this works rather well." "Why, thank you. I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier. I couldn't have finished this story without your help. I mean, it does have an essentially feminine tone to it." "Oh? In what way?" "Oh, the way everybody manages to save the grove by being nice and agreeable, and not by fighting each other. That's very feminine?"
"Getting your way by rational argument and humane conduct? Don't
be so
patronizing,
"I'm not patronizing you. I mean everyone says that.
Newsweek,
Chatelaine, people who used to call themselves sociobiologists.
If
"Of course she would, you would be flattering her. But there's
nothing
feminine about this. I mean, imagine Diderot in a tutu, or
Voltaire saying
'I oppose what you say, but I will defend you to the death, and I'll
give you
an extra serving of ice-cream because I'm such a model woman.'"
Vanessa had stood up and made some sweeping gestures to illustrate this
last
sentence. When she sat down again, both of them were
laughing. "But
no, I really don't want to patronize you," said "O.K, we're in front of Harding's apartment. Now what?" "In a few minutes you will go up to the door and find an entrance into the apartment. In a few minutes I will follow you, in my own way." "And then what do I do?" "Oh, nothing to worry about, my dear. Nothing illegal at any rate. Now just stay there in the background while I circle around the apartment for final reconnaissance." The maid went over by a corner a little distance from the recycling bins while Pandora Vovelle walked in front of the apartment building. She duly noted the trees that surrounded the building, which she might have to jump on in order to escape. She noticed the wiring systems and the water pipes she might have to climb up in order to get away, and she noted the nearby buildings and the distance she would need to make a running jump from one roof to another. She was just paying attention to the fire escapes she might have to use if it was necessary to set the building on fire, when she suddenly heard the maid babbling behind her. She looked at her, covered in a pile of incompetently designed furs, and it occurred to her that she had never looked more silly in her life. To make things worse the maid had unbraided her hair, completely destroying any resemblance she might have had to Lucian Rudman. She was now singing an old Siamese nursery lullaby, which was just as nonsensical and sinister as the European ones. Vovelle approached her wayward accomplice. "Isn't it so wonderfully warm?" said the maid. "Of course not. It's minus fourteen degrees celsius. Think, woman, what do you think you are doing?" "I'm singing a lullaby to my baby." "And what baby would that be?" "You, and you're so quiet and well-behaved." "Hasn't it struck you as odd that your infant is talking to you in complete sentences?" "But you're so precocious and intelligent. Just like all my other children." "And how many other children are you supposed to have?" "Seven. Five little boys and two little girls." "Do you really want to live taking care of eight children?" "But it's so easy to do it in the jungle."
"But you don't even know what a jungle looks like. You've spent
all your
life in a "Oh, look. He's come back home." "Who are you talking about? Oh God, you mean that idiot from the embassy." "You shouldn't talk about your father like that." "Look, I regularly hope that my real father gets a non-fatal heart attack. But this man is not your husband, and you have no children whatsoever. Try and remember that. I mean, how could you live in the jungle?" "We live in a giant treehouse, and there's lots and lots of fruit and water, so we all live very happily." "No. This is an illusion. Parts of your desires have been taken from your mind and mixed with the desires of another person. This is not what you really want. It is a distortion made by another person, to make you think this is what you want. This is like the dream that Aquilla had before she was seduced, the dream where her horrible older sister who always dragged her to mass when their mother was away drowns in a freak hailstorm, and where Charles Harding appeared to her as her first boyfriend in a wonderful field. What you want is a dream of paradise, and what you are being given is an illusion that takes your country and reduce it to a uncivilization of rotting stagnant smugly orgasmic sensuality. Now listen very carefully. I'm going to take out a pocket watch and I want you to stare at it very closely." But Pandora Vovelle's frantic attempts to try to break the strange spell over her maid were unsuccessful, the sort of failure that she ordinarily never confronted. She tried to slap her maid into sense, who had now started vaguely unbuttoning her clothes. "For God's sake, wake up. If you take off your clothes you'll freeze to death. Holy Mary, mother of God, please grant me my prayer and help me in this time of trial." Then Vovelle heard a very strange voice. "Of course She won't help you. Or any of the other saints. Your life is as dry as dust. Not for you the walls of dust." And the next second, Vovelle found her mouth filled with a saltish swinish food, that she found she couldn't spit out, but had to swallow. She gasped, she choked, she vomited and then stuffed her mouth with snow in order to wipe out the taste of what could only be semen. As she got herself up she heard vindictive laughter behind her. "Of course, for you, emotions come to you with such difficulty. Allow me to provide some for you." And with that she found herself on what she realized other people called wave after wave of sexual pleasure, but which caused her agony and pain as her mind was invaded and her conscience bounded and gagged by a foreign entity. Desperately she tried rolling around, muttering prayers, biting her own tongue in attempt to break free from these thoughts. "Amusing isn't it? Just like everyone else, you are a slave to your desires. You're just as much a whore as all the others." "No, I am not. And I can prove it." "You shan't get the chance. For all my other victims, I offered them love and desire. But I think I shall let your stupid maid ruin her looks with frostbite and drive you completely mad. And I know just how to do it."
Suddenly Vovelle felt the touch of a dozen hands all over her body, in
every
place, for a very special torture. "No! I may not have
brought
the dagger of St. Francis of "Madame! What's going on?" "Get dressed before you catch pneumonia." Realizing both the cold and her half naked state, the maid immediately did so. "It would appear that I have badly underestimated our opponent. He already knows us too well, and we cannot force his way into the apartment. Moreover, we need peroxide for these acid burns. I'm afraid we have to go back to Chattenden Passey." The two women got up, and hobbled away from the apartment, swearing vengeance and muttering about soft, sweet-smelling boa constrictors.
By
the time they got home, the maid was in so much pain that Ms. Van P---
did not
pay any attention to whoever was in either Lucian's or Elizabeth's
apartment. Instead she took out her key, and used it to open the
door. In this way she prevented the booby traps she had cleverly
set up from
going off, such as the 220 decibel sound alarm that would stun people
who
forced the door into three weeks of deafness, such as the special
mustard gas
compound that would knock out anyone who came in (but leave the
marigolds
unharmed), such as the attack lemmings trained to attack anyone who
came
through the window. She dragged the maid to a couch, and took out
the
peroxide. After applying it to the maid's wounds she let her
rest, gave her
some Siamese tea, and gathered some marigolds and placed them between
her
sleeping maid's breasts. She flipped through her address book,
wondering
what she should do tomorrow, and decided that the best thing was to
have some
other member of the Flannery O'Connor Brigade do some reconnaissance at
Elizabeth Concrete's apartment, while she and her maid would be
temporarily out
for the day before she made her second attempt to confront Charles
Harding. She telephoned her sister and left a message on the
machine to
say that she should spend tomorrow following Adrian Verrall as much as
possible. Ms. Van P---/Pandora Vovelle had a very large and
comfortable
bed, but that was just for show and for occasional guests. As a
matter of
fact she would spend her nights hanging upside down from a
straightjacket as a
penance for her guilt the death of a minor
Because Ms. Van P--- was not walking around her apartment all night,
drops of
fertilizer were not pushed through the holes in the carpet into the
apartment
below. As a result, after the dripping over the living room chair
had
stopped, nothing fell on Constantine Rudman and Vanessa Wilentz as they
were
sleeping together in her bed. In his only partly innocent
drowsiness
Vanessa pushed him out of the bed and onto the floor. "By this
sign you
will conquer, indeed!"
Sex, for Inspector Joseph Tyrone, was something he did not think
about.
For Tyrone, sex was the reason why Vice-Inspector Monagham didn't
concentrate
hard enough to translate his perfectly logical and laconic style for
the other
blockheads to understand. It was also the reason why she had very
conveniently claimed to have come down with viral pneumonia on the same
day the
man who delivered the doughnuts had his day off. So when it is
said that
sex was the last thing Tyrone had on his mind a few minutes before
It
took more than an hour for Coffighy to phone a lock-up guard that John
was
awake, for the lock-up guard up to mention this to one of the
secretaries, for
the secretary to ask another secretary if they had any information on
the
address, for the other secretary to tell the first secretary to call
John for
the address, for the first secretary to call back Coffighy, for
Coffighy to get
John to give the address, and for Coffighy to call back the police
station with
the right answer. Immediately a police car was sent out to
Amritsar
Vistas, but they managed to get lost down a one-way street. By
the time they
managed to get out, to park the car, to break down the door of first
the
building and then the apartment, they were far too late. What
they saw
would shock them for the rest of their lives; in its enormous black
suit and
white shirt it looked like an enormous melted piano. But closer
revelation revealed it to be the hanged body of Oliver Corpse; and
because he
was too large for any drop, a quart of cyanide had been shoved down his
broken
throat. next:
Book 4: The Compass of Death: The
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