Mantissa (21 page)
He sees her chastened and cast-down eyes as she kneels and tinkles away on her samisen – which can only be an improvement on the rifted lyre; then her eventually bared white body, smelling of rice-powder and chrysanthemum leaves, her glossy black hair unpinned, kneeling mutely beside him, her samurai, as she goes through some elaborate and increasingly delicious sexual equivalent of the tea ceremony. The fluttering hands, the seaweed-scented hair, the plump little Japanese breasts; and all in complete silence. Until, finally, maddened (he sees this most clearly of all), he throws her down on the tatami, or whatever the thing is called, and she lies at his feet, inviting whatever ultimate reward he chooses to bestow on her erotic skills. His infinitely compliant woman, true wax at last, dutiful and respectful, uncomplaining, admiring, and above all peerlessly dumb – except perhaps for one or two hoarse and incomprehensible whimpers of discreetly grateful oriental pleasure as her imperious lord and master…
Miles Green has, during this agreeable vision, closed his eyes. But now he opens them again. In some way, quite as incomprehensible as the Japanese whimpers that have just sounded in his right cerebral lobe, he feels as if he is swathed in towels; in either a Turkish bath or a fever.
“Erato?”
She murmurs, seemingly half asleep. “Darling?”
“Why’s it getting so infernally hot in here?”
She pats his shoulder. “Shush. We’re resting.”
A few moments go by.
“I’m itching all over.”
“Never mind, darling.”
He raises a hand to scratch an acutely irritating sensation in his hair. The fingers alight. The next instant he has sat up as if he has touched, not his body, but boiling water.
“Oh my Christ! God!”
The next instant again, with a superbly (in other circumstances) athletic spring, he has leapt clean off the bed and onto the old rose carpet beside it, and is staring in horror down his body. Erato has not opened her eyes.
She murmurs again. “Is something wrong, darling?”
He makes a noise, not an answer: a sound neither as profound nor as universal as the one she had made some time previously in that room, yet similarly indicative of an outrage beyond words, beyond their transcription. As before, this heartrending cry for help
in extremis
evokes no response in its cause; not even, this time, in the cuckoo clock.
However, Erato does now open her dark brown eyes, and leans up on an elbow. She does not quite succeed in pressing the smile from her heavenly Greek mouth. If the lack of sympathy is monstrous, so also, it must be said, and more literally, is the appearance of the groaner; for what he stares wildly down at are his own legs and feet. The former are now strangely bowed, swollen-thighed and stringy-calved, and clothed in shaggy black hair; the latter are not feet anymore, but cloven hooves. His hands claw desperately at his newly bearded face, then to the sharply pointed ears, then up to the forehead, where two stubby horns, each approximately one and three-quarter inches long, sprout from the hairline. One of his hands (remarkably, he has not forgotten his classics) shoots around to feel the base of his spine for a horsetail; but it seems at least he is spared that. Small consolation: the pale North European skin is now so swarthy it is unrecognizable; and only by one or two facial features, had Miles Green but known, can any resemblance to Miles Green be detected. There is certainly no resemblance at all in the last detail of his anatomy, which now juts up and out to a prodigious length and size, tetrorchideously miles indeed beyond the dimensions of its predecessor in that place.
He looks, in a terrifying blend of shock and anger, at the smiling face on the bed.
“You treacherous bloody bitch!”
“But darling, this is what they called the anagnorisis. In Ancient Greek. Besides, I thought you’d like to see what it was like to be me. For a change.”
“This is unforgivable!”
“And you did say I didn’t understand the real you.”
“Change me back!”
She looks him up and down. “It suits you. And besides, our average.”
“Will you change me back, damn you!”
“Actually I thought it would make a variation on the amnesia. This time you could be a severe case of satyriasis.”
“My God, you’re asking for it!” She turns over on her stomach, props her chin in her hands, and smiles wordlessly around and up at him. “You tasteless… I didn’t mean
that!
”
“We can omit the diphthongs. This first time.”
“My God.” He looks down at his ithyphallic self again. “It’s revolting.” He glares up at her, with all the revulsion of a lifelong teetotaller being offered a magnum of malt whisky. “I don’t know how you could even dream… it just shows the kind of woman you really are.”
“Darling… it’s not that. It’s simply that I’m interested in the alphabetical conjunctions that make words. Symbolically.”
He stares down at her smiling face. “Okay. You’ve had your stupid joke. Now change me back. At once!” She bites her lips. He stabs a dark finger at her. “I warn you. I shall write it down. Every damned word.”
Still smiling, watching his face, she begins, slowly, to recite the Greek alphabet.
“Alpha, beta, gamma…”
“I’ll make you the laughing-stock of… I’ll destroy every last illusion about you, I’ll… my God, I’ll show you two can play this game.” He shouts. “I mean it!”
She sinks on the pillow, her arms extended, as if she is lying in the sun, her eyes closed. But still the smiling mouth, turned sideways towards him on the pillow, goes on murmuring, as if remembering a long-lost summer’s afternoon.
“… mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi…”
“You’d better believe it!”
“… phi, chi, psi, omega.”
“Right. That’s enough.”
She continues; or recommences.
“Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon…”
“That’s it.”
“Zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa…”
“I give you one more chance.”
“Lambda, mu, nu was heavenly, xi was actually a bit much, omicron is self-explanatory, pi, rho…”
“That is it. Definitely, conclusively, categorically, ultimately, terminally once and for all,
it.
”
“Sigma, tau…”
“Every damned word!”
“Upsilon, phi…”
“I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live!”
“Chi, psi, omega.”
“I order you to leave my mind. At once!”
“Yes, darling. Alpha, beta…”
How fortunate it is that the room is acoustically insulated. The poor satyr, goaded beyond endurance (even in satyrs), utters the most spine-chilling cry of frustrated rage ever to have emerged from a semi-human, semi-caprid throat. He stands, trembling. Then he makes a weird hopping spring and faces the door; and lowering his head, runs in a wild, scuttling charge straight at it. Fortunate, too, that it is so heavily quilted, for this furious tilt and final butt achieve nothing. The door stands firm. The man-goat merely reels back, not even stunned, only slightly dazed. Behind him on the bed may be heard the continuing murmur of the Greek alphabet. He turns and contemplates the snow-white and now slightly parted legs, the proffered cheeks, the cruppered back, the extended arms, the couched head, the glossy black hair. Glossy black hair! And in his nostrils, so much more sensitive than before, the unmistakable scent of seaweed, rice-powder and crushed chrysanthemum leaves!
“Chi, psi, omega.”
There is a second’s silence. Then the creature on the bed raises herself a little and turns a blanched and doll-like Japanese face around to look back at his. It wears a hideously synthetic smile.
“Hallo, Johnny. You like naughty –”
This time there is no rage in his voice; only the primeval cry of the male, though not perhaps entirely without an undertone of the final shriek of the kamikaze pilot. With two rapid steps and a tremendous bound, almost in imitation of one of the chamois on the clock, Miles Green is airborne and sailing over the foot of the bed, reality found at last. But at the very last millisecond, in the apogee of his flight, just before the unerring descent on target, narrative performs its bitterest twist – or perhaps it is polymorphic Erato, with more delicate judgment and experience in these matters (and since it has become clear that even goddesses can be hurt), performing a hasty act of self-preservation. At any rate, in the tiny interstice of time between apogee and impact, her ephemeral Japanese avatar vanishes.
Implacably the fully armed satyr hits the suddenly empty sheet and mattress, like a jet coming down too fast on an aircraft carrier’s flight-deck; and from which, deprived of any braking mechanism, he ricochets on as if from a trampoline. His horned head strikes with a sickening thud against the wall just above the bed. Perhaps it is less well quilted at this place. Certainly the clock must have felt a reverberation from the blow, for it starts, without any warning, to cuckoo repeatedly. As for the satyr, this time he falls unconscious to the pillow. There, the last transformation takes place. The pale and motionless body lying face down on the bed is once more that of Miles Green.
There is a brief pause. Then out of nowhere appear two pairs of hands, one black, one white. The lifeless body is pulled around on its back. The sheet and light blanket are drawn over it and tucked in, tightly, on either side. The white hands float to the door and one rises to switch on the wall-lamp, a neat, rectangular, apposed white plastic panel, just high enough above the bed to have escaped demolition. Meanwhile a small black, or rich brown, fist gives Mr. O’Brien’s frantic cuckoo clock a sharp tap on its side. It stops its cry. Then one hears Dr. Delfie’s brisk voice.
“Right, nurse. I think we’ve got time for a cup of tea now.” The voice changes tone imperceptibly. “You will have it in my room.”
“Me?”
“You, nurse.”
“Thanks, doctor.”
The door is opened.
“Oh and I forgot. If you could first find a tape and bring it along. There’s something I want to measure.”
“Curtains, doctor?”
“I think that more than probable, nurse.”
The door shuts. The delicate young brown hands fuss unnecessarily around the pillow. Then a West Indian voice, close above, speaks to itself.
“Curtains. The nerve. And she call
you
a racist… honest, Mr. Green, this girl know more in her little toenail about men patients than that one do in her whole skinny white body. You jus’ see if I don’t, next time she turn her stuck-up back.”
The voice sounds from by the door.
“You ever meet that Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Green, you ask him. You ask that man.”
The door closes again.
The oblivious patient lies on his hospital bed, staring, in what must now be seen as his most characteristic position, blindly at the ceiling; conscious only of a luminous and infinite haze, as if he were floating, godlike, alpha and omega (and all between), over a sea of vapor. Merciful silence descends at last on the grey room; or would have done so, were it not that the bird in the clock, as if feeling not fully requited, as if obliged one last time to reaffirm its extraneity, its distance from all that has happened in that room, and its undying regard for its first and aestho-autogamous (
Keep the fun clean, said Shanahan
) owner; or as if dream-babbling of green Irish fields and mountain meadows, and of the sheer bliss of being able to shift all responsibility for one’s progeny (to say nothing of having the last word), stirs, extrudes, and cries an ultimate, soft and single, most strangely single,
cuckoo.
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Mantissa: “An addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse” (
Oxford English Dictionary
) and trivia, mere shadows on walls. It could all be seen as a huge conspiracy, really; and who was at the heart of it? Who else but this totally slippery, malicious and two-faced creature beside him?
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1982 By J. R. Fowles, Ltd.
Cover design by Keith Hayes; illustration by Ali Campbell
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
First e-book edition: April 2013
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
A short extract from
Mantissa
was first published in the magazine
Antaeus
in 1981.
ISBN 978-0-316-25563-9