The Physiognomy (12 page)

“Nothing to laugh at, Mayor?” I asked.

“Torture is not my strong suit,” he said. “For that matter, neither is execution. Is there no other way to go about this? Couldn't she, perhaps, just apologize?”

“Really, now,” I said, “the Master would not perceive such leniency with a kind eye. With that course of action, you might jeopardize the entire town's very existence.”

“I see,” he said. “It's just that I've known this girl from when she was a child. I knew her grandfather. I know her parents. I saw her grow up, and she was such a sweet, inquisitive little thing.” He looked into my eyes, and I could tell he was on the verge of tears.

Although I met his gaze with complete silence, his words about Arla forced me to remember those things about her that had, for the past days, kept her constantly on my mind. I was now certain that it had not, after all, been the Traveler who had blinded my perception, but instead it was Arla's own special beauty and intelligence that had bewitched me.

The mayor, getting no reply from me, began walking away, and, with this, I experienced an unfathomable emotion, almost like sadness. I wasn't sure if it was because I also could not bear the thought of Arla's execution, or if it was that, although I had my thief, little had truly been resolved.

“Wait,” I told him.

He stopped but remained with his back to me.

“There is something I might try.”

He turned and came slowly back to stand before me.

“It is an experimental procedure that I am not sure will work,” I told him. “I wrote a paper on it a few years ago, but it was not favorably acknowledged by my colleagues, and the idea died out after a few weeks of heated debate.”

“Well?” he said as I searched my mind for the particulars of the theory. When I hit upon it, it seemed rather daring if not reckless, but in light of my newly regained powers, and the feeling of great inner strength their rediscovery gave rise to, I began to think that this case might be the perfect opportunity to test this untried method.

“Listen closely,” I said to him. “If the physical features of the girl's face are an indication of the character traits she harbors deep within, then does it not make sense that if I were to rearrange those features with my scalpel, creating a structure that would indicate a more morally perfect inner state, would she not then be reformed from the congenital criminal malaise, resulting in the willingness to reveal the location of the fruit and rendering her no longer in need of execution?”

Bataldo rolled his eyes and took a step back. “If I am understanding you,” he said, “you are saying you can make her good by performing surgery on her?”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Then do it,” he said, and like the lion lying down with the lamb, we each smiled for different reasons.

I made arrangements with the mayor to have her brought to my study at the hotel the next morning promptly at nine. He then asked me if I would join him for dinner at the tavern, but I declined, knowing that there was much preparation to be done if I was going to rescue her from herself.

For the first time since I arrived at Anamasobia, I truly felt at ease. On the way back to my quarters people greeted me with the deference befitting my station. Even Mrs. Mantakis, seeing me enter the lobby of the hotel, addressed me with a certain air of subservience that had obviously been lacking heretofore. I told her to send away all visitors and to bring me some of that blue wine and a light dinner. She told me she had prepared something special for me that evening that had nothing to do with cremat, and I couldn't believe myself that I actually thanked her. She purred like a cat at my grateful response.

Had I still been in the thick of the mystery, I would have been alarmed to see how little of the beauty I still had in my valise—only enough for three or four real doses, but with my new self-assurance that the case would be completely resolved by sometime the next evening, I took a full vial without a second thought.

Then I undressed, put on my robe and slippers, and had a cigarette. True to my old form, I was able, with the enhanced power of the drug, to readily envision Arla's face and the changes that would have to be made to it in order to save her life. I quickly got pen and paper and began sketching my vision of the new Arla.

It must have been hours after Mrs. Mantakis had delivered my dinner and wine that I finally finished making my plans. By now the town was perfectly quiet, a condition, after having come from the city, that I could never really get used to. The sheer beauty was still active in my system, bringing me intermittent visions of splendor. Not one paranoiac image found its way into my head as I worked, but occasionally I would daydream vividly about my idyllic childhood on the banks of the Chottle River.

Finally I sat down on the bed to consider the fame this next day's procedure would bring me if it was successful, and that is when Professor Flock made his appearance.

“You again,” I said.

“Who else?” he asked, now dressed in his teaching uniform and toting the dress cane with an ivory monkey-head handle it had been his practice to carry at official events.

“You're a traitor,” I said to him.

“Did I not suggest the appropriate method with which to apprehend the criminal?” he asked, smiling.

“That you did, but I'm done with you. I'm going to banish you from my mind,” I told him.

“That may be a little difficult since I am really you talking to yourself in a drug-induced haze,” he said. “I can only say and do, can only be, what you desire.”

“Well, what do you think of my plans for tomorrow?” I asked.

“Be certain that you cut some of the intelligence out of the poor girl; she's too smart for her own good. And, by all means, let's have a cut in the center of the chin to ward off those delusions that there is anything in store for her but the meanest existence here in this shit village at the end of the world. The rest of it seems quite good. I don't think I could have done better myself,” he said, tapping the cane on the floor.

“Very well,” I said, “I can't argue with that.”

“My real reason for coming tonight is to bid you farewell. I don't think I will be seeing you again,” he said. Then he held the cane up and out toward me, and the ivory monkey-head came magically to life, screaming in its small voice, “I am not a monkey. I am not a monkey.” As always, Flock left his laughter behind, and I bid him good riddance.

That night I fell into a deep sleep from which I struggled to escape. I revisited again my childhood, but this time what came to me were only the scenes of my father's unbridled anger and the resultant early death of my mother. I woke at sunrise, crying into my pillow as I had done, so many nights of my early life. What a relief I felt when I finally opened my eyes and realized I was free of it.

After I bathed, ate a light breakfast, and dressed, the mayor and two of his miner thugs escorted Arla to my study. I greeted her cordially, but she said nothing and would not make eye contact with me. I had prepared the lab table with straps in order to hold her down in case she became unruly.

“I pray you are successful, Cley,” said the mayor, a note of skepticism in his voice.

I stepped up to Arla and looked directly in her face. “I will do for you what I can, my dear,” I said.

She looked now directly at me and spit in my eyes. I took a step backward and at this instant she brought her knee up into the crotch of one of her detainers. With the suddenness of it all, she was able to break free, and she bolted from the room, across the hall, into my living quarters with the other miner in hot pursuit. She almost got the door closed, but the man was, of course, stronger and was able to pry it open before she could lock it. We all followed immediately.

When I came into the room, she was wielding the knife that had come with the breakfast service and swinging my valise at the fellow who had managed to corner her. “Murderers,” she was yelling. The mayor made a move for her, and she heaved the valise at him, hitting him square in the head. It was finally the miner whom she had kneed in the groin who was able to jump in after one of her lunges with the knife and subdue her. They dragged her next door, kicking and yelling for help. Quickly I prepared a rag with a strong general anesthetic and buried her screaming face with it.

The miners were helping me strap her to the table when the mayor appeared, rubbing his head. “Feisty,” he said with a laugh, but I could see the ordeal had shaken him.

“Don't worry,” I told him. “I'll cut that out of her, along with quite a bit more. By the time she awakens, she will be a new woman.”

“Anamasobia was never so strange,” said the mayor, staring at the floor.

Then I told them to leave and come back the next afternoon.

I put pads beneath her head in order to catch the blood that would result from my cuts, and then fitted her with a headband that had a long piece of cotton attached to it that could be flipped back over her skull while I worked and then brought down over the face in order to mop up the gore that might obscure the area of flesh I intended for incision. With this completed, I methodically laid out my scalpels and picks and clamps, and then brought out the drawing of the new Arla. Through the night, as I had worked on it under the gaze of the beauty, that picture had spoken words of love to me. I was determined for it to become more than an illusion.

The scalpel ploughed smoothly through the skin of her left cheek, and with this first pass, I could feel nothing but the ultimate success of the experiment. I whistled a tune that was popular in the Well-Built City just prior to my departure, a sweet ditty about endless devotion, as I leveled her willful lower lip. “There goes that vain intelligence,” I whispered to her sleeping form while scoring the upper lids of her eyes. I relieved her nose of a weight of cartilage that I knew was at the root of her troublesome curiosity. There was no other choice with those haughty cheekbones but to employ the chrome mallet. My concentration became so intense that all I could see was her face, and it became like the topography of some untamed country that I manipulated from above with artistic finesse and a transcendent vision of perfection. It was all a matter of subtraction, and for a time I wished that the sublime mathematics would never end.

I had worked diligently through the morning and well into the afternoon, taking no break for lunch, when I began to lose my way. The map I carried in my head of where I wanted to end up began to lose its clarity. My self-assurance flickered in and out like a flame in the wind. It was the telltale itching of my skull that let me know I was in need of the beauty. I reasoned that with the drug to bolster my innate genius, I could easily finish the job successfully by dinnertime. Besides, I could not go on without it, because the chills were beginning to run through me, making my sight wobble and my hands shake. I set down the scalpel and went next door for a fix.

I found my valise on the floor where it had landed after making contact with the mayor's head. The thought of that actually brought a smile to my lips as I opened it. I pulled out an unused vial, and to my horror found that it was cracked and empty. Frantically, I pulled out another and found it in the same condition. Then I noticed that there was a violet puddle on the floor. All of the vials were broken. I was without sheer beauty, and the pains of withdrawal were breaking out all over my body like the blows of an invisible enemy. I groaned, but my mind screamed and then dove straight down into a turbulent ocean of confusion and fear. The only thing that kept me from passing out was the thought that I could not leave Arla in the state she was. If I were to fail to retrieve the fruit, it would surely mean my life.

I staggered across the hall, determined to finish the job before I lost all my senses. My mind was already reeling so terribly I could barely stay on my feet. I held myself up with one hand resting on the lab table and with the other I lifted the scalpel and tried to concentrate amid the quaking of my internal organs. The first shivering cut I made I knew was wrong, but there was no erasing here. I pushed on in an attempt to make another cut that would offset the one I had just made. This became a trap, and I pictured myself running headlong, deeper and deeper into a labyrinth from which there was no possible escape. My earlier precise incisions now became a desperate slashing, and the blood flowed freely, sometimes spurting across my shirt. Droplets of it momentarily blinded me. They landed on my lips, and the taste of it brought me to my knees. I struggled back to my feet, fighting off the flashes of blankness that turned my mind into a ball of night.

I continued like this, basically unconscious for some time, before, far off at a great distance, I heard myself scream in agony. Then I fell through the nausea, the freezing and burning of the chills, the tearing of my brain, the silence of my heart to a place I supposed was death but unfortunately wasn't.

12

I got an urgent message from the mayor that there was one more person I should definitely read before making my ultimate decision. “At this time of night?” I said to Mantakis, who was carrying his feather duster.

I put on my topcoat and took my bag of instruments. It was again snowing hard outside, and I only made the slowest headway down the street in the face of the fierce gales. The children had been out in the storm, I could tell, because the street was lined along both sides with frozen effigies of the Traveler. They appeared every now and then from behind the driving blizzard, staring down with cold eyes like a gauntlet of righteous judges. I trudged along for what seemed an eternity through the murmuring, twirling dark, and then suddenly I had arrived.

I knew I was going to trip and fall on the bottom step leading to the church, and I did. Opening the big, crooked door that creaked with sounds of mirth, I entered. I took it slowly over the bridge, which seemed more unsteady than ever. In the altar chamber, only half the torches were lit. “Hello,” I called, but there was no answer. The screen had again been set up, and the chairs we had used for the reading were sitting in the same positions.