Mark Edmund Doten
Salamanders from the window well I took and put in the bucket. To bucket, from window well: the salamanders. Can you understand? A large white plastic bucket, and window-well salamanders, by the fistful. Wriggling black things, each with eight yellow dots—huge dots up and down their rubbery hides, precisely eight or sometimes nine dots apiece.
First: salamanders in a window well.
Then: salamanders in a bucket.
(A bucket filled three-quarters with hosewater.)
The bucket stood on thick, mown grass under the eaves at the house’s west side, killing it (the grass) (the grass what the bucket killed).
Maybe it once held pickles, now it was hosewater and salamanders.
I don't know what the bucket once held, though.
I just need you to understand: Even as a child of four or five, I thought it might have held pickles.
And: Even at age four or five I knew I couldn't—could never in my heart—know if it’d been a pickle bucket.
Perhaps it was pickled eggs. It was either pickles or pickled eggs, I thought, but such a way of thinking is only admissible in support of the principle fact. Viz., what the bucket had once held tells us this alone: How far the bucket had come, as substance. A gleaming white bucket, with no clue to its former utility.
My ideal white bucket, that’s what it was, nothing more or less.
What was on it was a warning label, the outline of a toddler drowning headfirst in a bucket, or rather, in the outline of a bucket (a smaller bucket, and the upside down toddler inside it, printed in black on the white plastic bucket), after tumbling in. No toddler tumbled into my bucket.
No toddler ever came near my bucket. Only salamanders, the ones I threw in.
Next door lived the Enfanta -o-----.
She knew, I thought.
Perhaps it was pickled eggs, and I thought she knew.
My salamanders swam circuits in the strong white bucket—fistfuls of them in complex, interlocking and variable circuits, as the summer evenings deepened. They (the salamanders) so peaceable, even at their most frenzied.
I thought that Mrs. -o----- just might—that she might and did know (her child, the Enfanta -o-----, the most loved and most hated child in New Haven, CT) whether it was pickled eggs, or pickles. Whether it was one or the other the bucket had held.
I think today of the black suit. Of silver bracelets and platinum tennis bracelets, bangles of white gold, black pumps, black hair tied back, the whole apparatus weaving.
I think today of the eyes.
The screen door slammed, and with each step the cardinal points of her body wove through and past each other, wrists, ankles, interleaving, all but the head, the face on the head.
Then she rested her hands on the porch railing, and all was still. Mrs. -o----- noble—imperious, but so, so kind.
Our gazes would meet, Mrs. -o----- in her yard, and I in mine, and in twilight’s first electric drift and falling off she would offer—to me alone, for ten or twelve minutes—as objects of intellection, her eyes.
Outsize black orbs snipped or stabbed or torn (depending on that day’s secret life-factors—the life-factors of Mrs. -o-----, which for her were not constitutive of a secret life but a real and actual life: for instance, her interactions that day with Mr. -o----- and also her interactions with the Enfanta -o-----, so that I grouped her secret life into four categories: interactions with Mr. -o-----, just the two of them; interactions with the Enfanta -o-----, just the two of them; the interactions of all three together; and also those airless moments when Mrs. -o-----, alone in a windowless attic, dropped back into a ladder-back chair, half-stitched sampler athwart fingertips that quivered—though it’s also true that whole sections and cross-sections of our real and actual lives, we keep like secrets from ourselves), orbs cut from the tallow of her face, or slashed, or burned out, depending on light-factors—the attenuated glare of the sun as it eased to the windbreak pines, also the back-porch floodlight, the intensity of which was greater, not less, as the summer wore on, and the moon, the moon.
Beyond or apart from these lacerations or punctures or full-thickness burns, a stillness in the black orbs.
Lacerations to the wax of the face, not to the gleaming black orbs.
Burns, punctures, incisions, acting only on the face-wax, you see—never the orbs!
I dropped salamanders in the bucket—fistfuls.
My bucket held two dozen salamanders, three dozen salamanders at times paddling in strange frantic interlocking loops.
In the mess and frenzy of the salamander bucket—the feet and claws and gaping mouths (imagine the surface tension, the conflicting and complimentary surface tensions, the menisci within the gasping jaw-apparatuses, and the menisci outside or apart from the jaw-apparatuses, and the encircling concave meniscus where hosewater touched the bucket’s wall)—there was a calm.
Do you understand true calm?
The salamanders, as individuals, calm and vacant in the eyes—calm even in their thrashing. But also—this the main thing—the salamanders calm as totality. The roiling surface of the water, the claws and mouths—this totality of salamanders—all of this, in the final analysis, a stillness, a calm, that was mathematical, natural and roiling.
The orbs of Mrs. -o-----, the stillness there of a different order altogether. Mrs. -o-----’s a stillness that countermanded the stillness of the salamander bucket—that is my point.
An oppositional stillness—two stillnesses pulsed out into the green humidity, and there did battle.
The stillness of the salamander bucket pulsed westward, from my yard to Mrs. -o-----’s. And the stillness of those black orbs pulsed eastward, from Mrs. -o-----’s yard to mine, her carriage upright, face unmoving, bracelets frozen at wrist and ankle—a gleam, not a glint, you understand? steady like that—our mown lawns shading electrically deeper.
The Enfanta -o-----, as they called him—his parents called him that and so did everyone else (though at four or five it may have been only his parents that called him that, and I took it for everyone), always the Enfanta -o-----, never his first name (which is -o--)—the Enfanta -o----- the most loved child in New Haven, and also the most hated.
His parents loved and hated him in equal amounts.
His mother dandled him for hours in the house, then strapped him into his stroller and rolled it out, through the screen door beside the picture window, and onto the back porch. She left him outside, strapped in and unsupervised, for hours.
Before she rolled him out, Mrs. -o----- would slide the door open—slowly, time for me to pass back through two gates—first their gate, then our gate—then she’d step out, alone, carriage regal, to offer her orbs—offer them for my delectation.
Seated beside my bucket on the red tackle box, I saw it all.
Face wax victim to grinding compression or sun damage, yet the eyes pure and still.
The orbs immobilized more absolutely than face and carriage.
Carriage and face themselves possessed of and by an immobility of the highest order.
She held herself above the waist—the black suit jacket, and the pale head that topped it—calmly but with the greatest conviction, as eschatological placards are sometimes held.
One always finds such an eschatological placard frozen amid the others—among the dozens and hundreds of placards tensed and raging. Oh, yes, that is where one always finds it. At the wild rallies of end-timers—these rallies which have been with us always, but which threaten us now more than ever—one finds a placard at the perimeter, if you know how to look: a calm and inwardly burning female specter holding aloft her dynamically frozen placard—without which all would dissolve. This lady specter the driving immobile force around which the lunatics, enraptured with the flashing work of their own hands, the beads and tagboard they drive skyward, articulate their rook-like shrieks.
The stillness of her eyes (the eyes of Mrs. -o-----) greater than that of the placard (the lone female placard), is what I’m trying to say—trying to make you understand.
This stillness burning forth with a simpler and more powerful flame.
The Enfanta -o----- now grown, if that’s the word, now seated on the highest court in the land, and presiding over that court.
Mrs. -o----- seated beside and behind the Enfanta, in breach of all protocol.
(But she draws no rebuke.)
Mr. -o----- is dead.
Those summer evenings long dead, and never their like to come again.
I am in my Piper Cub. I am above you, and on the move.
A Piper J3 Cub—this is what I’ve flown these weeks, a vitrine strapped above and another below, paired vitrines essential to my purpose, buckled to the fuselage.
In the weeks and months I’ve been flying—airborne without respite—my purpose has evolved. Before I embarked on my mission, I strapped on two vitrines.
I didn’t understand: why vitrines?
I understood only: vitrines, yes.
To achieve flight without damaging or destroying the lower vitrine—a high-order challenge.
(My secret method?—weather balloons, cables, carabineers, I’ll say that.)
(Also: ballast bags, putty, catchclaws and box cutters, blue or black electrical tape.)
The Enfanta leapt from a clerkship in Foggy Bottom to a vacancy in our highest court—and not just any vacancy. Over the heads of hundreds and thousands waiting their turn, the Enfanta -o----- made his dizzying leap, and at age 28 he was declared chief justice of the highest court in the land.
They said it couldn’t be done, and yet he did it.
New Haven, CT, then Cambridge, MA, then Foggy Bottom, then his epoch-making leap.
Not only vitrines strapped to the Piper Cub, but jugs, too. A Piper Cub’s fuel tank not sufficient—not capacious enough for my purposes (a purpose obscure when I set out, I knew only that he (the Enfanta -o-----) had to be stopped)—therefore: jugs. Eight thousand nine hundred eighty eight jugs, and I stoppered each one with paraffin, then jabbed through a single drinking straw, or two, or three, depending on the position of this jug in my network of jugs, jet fuel pumped tankward through an elaboration of straws—yes, tens of thousands of drinking straws knit a vast capillary network around my Piper J3 Cub.
Within each jug there are also two pipes, one smaller than the other, and a copper plate, and when I roll the plane, the fuel is discharged.
When more fuel is needed, I simply up the Piper Cub’s velocity, thus increasing the dynamic pressure on the straws, as expressed by the following equation: q = \tfrac12\, \rho\, v^{2}, and I roll the plane.
The jugs then hum in satisfaction.
(Jugs on the fuselage, jugs on the rudder.)
Some evenings Mrs. -o----- and I, by unspoken agreement, approached the fence.
Mrs. -o----- silhouetted in the floodlight, tennis bracelet jingling, footfall hushed by the velveteen pump, wrists, tailored fabric, twined and weaving,
So I wrapped my fingers trough the chain-link fence.
She did likewise.
She always said the same words, and always in the same order: "You are welcome to come into my yard anytime you like. You are welcome in the yard, and if you see flies on the Enfanta -o-----, you can brush them off. I would consider it a personal kindness if you would brush away the flies, the ones on the face, and, even more especially, those at the nose and mouth, and the ones at the eyes, as well as the ears—” here she would laugh in an offhanded, almost tender fashion (a tenderness for me, and an offhandedness for him, for the Enfanta) “but,” she said, “of course understand you needn’t brush away any flies—I don't want you to imagine that! It would also be a kindness to leave the flies, you see."
(Jugs on the left wing, jugs on the right wing.)
(Jugs on the struts, jugs on the spinner.)
(Jugs on the landing gear—or rather: in the place of landing gear.)
Mr. -o----- must have been quite handsome. I’m sure of that. But I don’t remember Mr. -o-----.
The red tackle box. My bucket, but also the red tackle box beside it—it was red, a true red.
Just you try and find a true red these days!
Inside: burlap, twine, pocket mirrors, nails, fish hooks, pelts of the muskrat and the mouse, lodestones, ballast bags, clothespins, carabineers, and a container of Morton salt.
I did not keep this salt to torture the salamanders—allow me to say that now.
I did not remove the salamanders from my bucket and salt them, as was the habit of other children.
Other children were torturers, from an early age—I was not.
All of them—the children of New Haven—all of the children of New Haven, CT—kept salt in their tackle boxes. But while some tortured their salamanders with salt, others never tortured salamanders with salt.
I never did—never once tortured a salamander with salt.
But where did they go, my salamanders?
That night—the night in question—I required an empty bucket, and at last it was really true: my bucket was empty.
Empty of salamanders, not hosewater.
But how?
The gates squeaked.
First our gate squeaked, then their gate squeaked. And when I returned with the Enfanta, it was their gate that squeaked first, then ours.
A huge jug ball, that’s my Piper Cub, each jug placed with scientific precision, each making my craft more, not less, aerodynamic.
Flying faster, more efficiently, with jugs than without.
(And then I roll it.)
A network of interwoven jugs sprayed individually with nitrate dope, then again, in the aggregate, the whole assemblage sprayed with nitrate dope, jugs strung together with twine, wire handle jugs and shoulder jugs, a jug ball intertwining and stopped eight-thousand-times over with paraffin.
My first mission: prevent him from growing stronger.
Only the front window, and also the vitrines, clear of jugs.
The Enfanta draws his nourishment from the dots. That is why I am in my Piper Cub, my jug ball, that is what I am trying to prevent.
To intercept them, to no longer permit him the huge yellow dots, the nourishment of the dots, the strength of these dots—that is my mission.
His lackeys clamp mechanical hands over women’s openings: Each night the Enfanta’s brutal clerks, sham medical bags in hand, set out at top speed in trains bound for Wisconsin and Utah, Poughkeepsie and Dubuque, with orders to stop up the women—in service of diabolical aims they provoke miniature, and uniformly fatal, explosions in these women.
Also this: To finish him for good.
You see, I finished him (the Enfanta) once, but not for good.
That is my mission.
Finish him for good this time.
The bucket was empty (I needed an empty bucket for my purposes) (empty of salamanders, not of water) and if there were dead salamanders, I don’t now where they went.
His head a large head, relatively, and his body a big body, relatively, and as I lowered the Enfanta -o----- into the bucket, by the heel, the water overflowed.
I’d never seen my bucket overflow.
On my bucket that outline, on my bucket that toddler falling in, on my bucket that child, that death, and here I was (at age four or five, maybe I was even six, even seven, I can’t say how old I was, but I think four or five—and we left the neighborhood when I was seven, so then seven, at the outside), me with an infant, by no means a toddler, just an infant—but I made the most of my infant, my Enfanta—made the utmost of this gasping thing in my hands.
In New Haven, CT, it only rained in the dead of night. It never rained during the day or evening, when I tended my bucket.
I said no salamander ever died in my bucket, but surely one or more salamanders died in my white bucket. Surely there were dead salamanders, and I did something with the dead salamanders—didn't just leave them in the grass. But I don't know what I did with the dead salamanders.
Perhaps a storm drain. Perhaps I carried them by the tail to some storm drain, then dropped them in.
But on the night I am thinking of—the night I took the Enfanta -o----- from his yard, there were no salamanders in the bucket—and so logic tells us that somewhere there were dead salamanders.
That is only logical.
I would not have set them free, would not have given them their freedom, at age four or five.
They must have died—right?
What did I care about freedom, at age four or five?
I dunked him in my bucket.
I dunked the Enfanta headfirst.
The Enfanta, the Chief Justice (the Enfanta as Chief Justice, and the Chief Justice as Enfanta) opposes in vitro termination—in vitro termination the only topic of interest to the Chief Justice, and hence only cases that bear on in vitro termination are brought before the high court.
There are other justices, but these others have no say in it. The Enfanta -o----- rules them with an iron fist, also with an Iver Johnson safety automatic that he brandishes at the least provocation.
Or he doesn’t brandish it, he simply points to the bulging stock of it, beneath his robe, or Mrs. -o----- does.
The Enfanta dispatches lackeys to Oregon and New Mexico, Pasadena and Boise, all with sham medical bags, wire and burlap assemblages they’ll twist into giant hands.
A murmur of dissent rolls through the chamber, and threatens to break out—she flicks those orbs twice at the bulging stock.
The orbs in her face, the bulging stock beneath his robe.
And all is still.
Salt at the Enfanta’s feet, and a lodestone in the mouth.
Thus did I bring him back.
I finished him, then I brought him back, the Enfanta ever since possessed by a bottomless craving for salamanders—the yellow dots of salamanders to revivify the dots stamped inside his skull.
Huge yellow dots!
I dunked him, you see? And then brought him back!
But: The lashings of acid rain, that horrific acid rain of my childhood—first it brought my childhood salamanders to the brink of extinction, then it annihilated the salamanders of my childhood altogether.
(It is not the children of New Haven who have the salamanders on their conscience!)
Burlap, mirrors, coffee grounds—thus did I achieve my ends, at age four, five or six, thus did the dead Enfanta become again the living Enfanta; thus, in any case, was he brought back.
Salt between the toes and a lodestone beneath the tongue—work the mouth, manipulate the toes.
(Oil refineries are to blame, automobiles, too, and trains, and processing plants—do not blame the children, never the good children of New Haven, CT!)
Wire and coffee grounds, mirrors and burlap, all packed in the red tackle box.
All tackle boxes in New Haven, CT, provisioned for these situations, for moments hopeless beyond measure.
I roll.
I roll.
No, it was not so hard to bring the Enfanta back.
It was not so hard—what I could not do, though, was bring him back all the way.
I placed a baby aspirin in the Enfanta’s mouth, and I worked the jaw.
I placed a salamander in the mouth, and worked the throat.
First aspirin, then salamander.
I thought to bring the salamander’s life to the dead Enfanta—the salamander in the mouth, and that is all.
But in short order I worked the throat, and it went down his throat.
A salamander in the gullet, chasing baby aspirin—then there was no time to lose.
Through the agency of the wire, twine, mirrors and burlap, lashed around the tiny corpse, the yellow dots were transferred to the skull, to the inside of it.
(The Enfanta reaniminated!)
That’s how it happened, that’s just how it happened.
(Not even once did I look to the screen door beside the picture window, in front of which the carriage still stood—I anticipated no movement from that quarter, and there was no movement.)
But the salamander couldn’t stay—he could impart his life to the Enfanta, but he couldn’t make a home in this most hated, this most loved of children.
If a salamander were to make a home in the tiny corpse, dots would travel to the skull, yes, but meanwhile the salamander would live off the stomach tissue, would at last chew through and out of the Enfanta.
So the ritual to remove the salamander: I salted the feet. And a lodestone in the mouth.
First baby aspirin, then a salamander to chase the aspirin.
The ritual of burlap and mirrors to impart life (the life of the salamander, of the salamanders dots, imparted to the Enfanta).
Then salt and more salt, and a lodestone; I worked the jaw and worked the toes, and then the eyes were all at once opening and closing madly, as though played upon by primitive electrical current—and they were! they were played upon by primitive electrical current (the electricity of lodestones, sawdust, wires, aspirin, burlap) (understand: the electricity of all of those together!)! and at last the salamander shot out of the Enfanta’s mouth, up to the eaves, then down again, a perfect arc, slicing the bucket—the water in the bucket—as a knife.
It knifed through the surface tension without disturbing the surface tension, and the surface tension rebound itself instantly behind it.
But it was not a knife.
It was a black dead rubbery salamander with no dots—the dots were in the boy.
Inside the skull is where those yellow dots were thenceforward to be found.
Thenceforward—Harvard, Foggy Bottom—the dead Enfanta has been striving for life (the life I took). He sees the world through those eight (or nine) yellow dots, which are yellow dots in his skull.
Brilliant dots, Jesuitical dots, even-handed dots—he is one of the great geniuses of his age, perhaps the greatest genius.
But only through these dots.
All throughout childhood he would weaken, then I would stuff a salamander down the throat, energize him with that salamander, then remove it (the salamander) with salt and lodestones.
At age three or four, he was able to learn this process for himself—was able to gather his own salamanders.
But still sometimes he feigned weakness, and we reverted to our old salamander rituals.
Once I tried to set him down on my red tackle box—only once.
Mrs. -o----- took all of this in, I’m certain—she allowed all of it.
(Still hating and loving the Enfanta—Mrs. -o----- loving and hating in equal amounts.)
The acid rain was doing in the salamanders, of course—at a much greater rate than children (the children of New Haven) did them in.
Then one day at last Mrs. -o----- cut me out.
First she offered her eyes.
She stripped herself of her bracelets and bangles, folded her suit coat over her arm.
She offered her eyes to me one last time, but I could not see them.
And later, I couldn’t find her bracelets in the grass.
(And why couldn’t I?)
(Why weren’t her lovely bracelets in the grass? The very grass where she dropped them?)
Black orbs I couldn’t look at or take in were offered to me one last time—then I broke away, or she did.
She or I broke away (and it must have been she) and then she turned on her heel.
Right there in the grass, halfway between porch and fence, she stripped herself of her bracelets and cast them down, then she turned on her heel, she went inside through the screen door.
The Enfanta after that turning locked into the house, and raised in the house by his mother.
Mrs. -o----- took terrible liberties in what she offered me!
Night after night Mrs. -o----- had offered her eyes.
If I could explain to you now for one moment the truth, it is this: I would have done anything for her. For her and the Enfanta I would have done anything (for the Enfanta through Mrs. -o----- and Mrs. -o----- through the Enfanta); for them, I would have seen, and did see, the salamander race wiped out—I would have accepted, I did accept, that price—but I never intended this.
I would not consent to the elimination of the human race—she knew this, even then, me just four or five, six or seven, and so she cut me out.
She turned on her heel and cut me out, and it wasn’t so much later we moved.
I think I was seven.
But what do I mean by price?
What do I mean by salamanders, and human race?
There is no one who does not know what all of these things mean—no one now alive in the world.
But the only ones who know it the way I know it are the Enfanta and Mrs. -o-----.
(Mr. -o----- may have known it, too, but Mr. -o----- is dead.)
Salamanders now extinct, the Enfanta wasted, on the point of death—you know that.
But what you can’t have known: That she had seen this moment coming years before, and that is why she cut me out.
Mrs. -o-----, ladder-back chair at card table, labored night and day on the prototypes of the hand—wax hands, iron hands, hands of cotton and dowel—while the Enfanta sat cross-legged on the hand-scraped and distressed hardwood.
(There were no windows in the attic, and I would not have been able to see into the attic if not for the elaboration of mirrors down the hallway and up the stairs—mirrors positioned, so it happened, such that a boy—and no one but a boy—could take in the whole house, every room, every vantage, from the picture window.)
A thoroughgoing student of Woman, the physiology, the anatomy there, she devised a hand to save the Enfanta.
She who had hated and renounced the Enfanta, now only loved him—she traded her hatred of the Enfanta for hatred and renunciation of all other human life—human life at its most vulnerable.
She purchased law books for the Enfanta, and stacked them on the floor.
She lit two lamps—one on the card table, one on the floor, and there in the attic they labored.
Mr. -o----- by then out of the picture.
Mr. -o----- by then dead at last.
(Murdered!)
Countless nights she had loved me, understood me, just as I loved and understood her, our summer nights together: the moon a white bucket, the floodlight a bright white bucket, the rest a deep sweet green, that mown lawn, that breeze, with gasoline at the bone: but she did not love me anymore.
After I finished the Enfanta, she continued to offer her eyes, using me as she’d always used me.
Then she devised her terrible plan (and cut me out).
No termination
No more in vitro termination.
But no birth, either.
Above the wispy clouds now there is the moon, and below I am rolling.
And then clouds are at an end.
(Mrs. -o----- dropped the bracelets and turned on her heel, but before she turned (and after she dropped the bracelets), she said, “You are a dirty boy. All day you peer in my picture window—you are dirty, just a dirty, filthy boy—then you fly back to your own yard when I come to the screen door to chase you away. I assure you, you are a no-good boy. That's my window you're peering in, can't you understand? So just stay away from the window, why don’t you?” Mrs. -o----- smoothed her skirt shakily, and I had the impression, even in the darkness, that she had surprised herself with the force of her own words—that she had not intended to speak so harshly. “Of course,” she said, “it hardly matters. It really makes no difference if one such as yourself peers through my picture window, it's not worth a mention, that’s a fact. But those grimy hand-prints! Hand-prints on the glass which could come only from the filthiest, most debased little boy, one who spends all day and night rooting around in litter and scum—I’ll be glad to say goodbye to those handprints, you can bet on it! You have a home. Don’t you have your own home? Your home is right there, behind you! Here’s an idea, why don’t you just stay home a while?”)
(That night there was a moon—this is why I was able to track her expressions so closely. To see how, after the question of handprints gave her a second wind, her resolve again flagged, so that by the time she had issued her final injunction, one could mark with precision every nerve that fluttered in her eyes as she squeezed them shut—and indeed (though I didn’t realize it then) this was a permanent transition: forever after, a woman with squeezed-shut eyes, watching only through and behind the fluttering nerves of her face—Mrs. -o----- navigating from that day forth by wave of topographical images communicated by her clenched and hyper-clenched eyelids.)
He leapt to the highest court, per her plan, then his lackeys, per her plan, clamped hands of wire and burlap over the openings of women.
To make the transition from salamander to human (to leave behind that pre-human moment when the body still curls in on itself like a salamander, and watches the swimming interior walls of the woman with still black salamander eyes) could no longer be allowed; the transition which occurs at the moment the salamander passes through a woman’s opening, and comes out human—that could not be allowed.
Hands of burlap and wire were clamped to the women’s openings—thus were these human salamanders detonated.
Thus do the women burst.
Mrs. -o-----’s hand, pressed to the opening (women’s openings in Portland, in El Paso, in Miami and Jackson) (and Mrs. -o-----’s eyes clenched).
Not her real hand, but a hand of wire and burlap, of her own design, until the salamander bursts, and the woman’s middle bursts too.
Yellow dots spray into the air, and they fly through the air to the Enfanta, pulled across the whole breadth of the country to his courtroom, by his skull—the Enfanta a dot attractor of my creation (I did not mean for this, for him to attract the dots, through the air, across the whole breadth of the country! Thousands of dots!) and he only grows stronger, or rather grew stronger, until I took to the sky with my jug ball, my vitrines.
For weeks now I have buzzed his lackeys in my Piper Cub; as each woman bursts I am the one who intercepts the yellow dots—I interpose myself, and thusly do I deprive him.
(Mr. -o----- had his throat ripped out—this is my memory.)
(An esophagus torn from the living body, then packed with salt, tied off and placed in the mouth.)
(The mouth of Mr. -o-----.)
I no longer sleep, no longer feel the need for it. My arms and legs draw up and in, my head tips back so that I am looking up out of the cockpit into the vitrine above me, and I fly by pure instinct.
(Thousands, tens of thousands of dots!)
You cannot have a conception of this, I cannot explain to you how it feels—intercepting every dot, and then I roll.
Mrs. -o-----’s black eyes are locked skyward and clenched, and so I fly without lights, below the radar, below the topographical, clenched gaze that omits no light or movement, none that rises above a certain level. When court is not in session, when she is not seated next to and behind the Enfanta, Mrs. -o----- positions herself on the endless marble steps that lead up to the high court, Mrs. -o----- takes it all in, all the whole wide world—all except my Piper Cub!
Mrs. -o----- planned for everything—but she didn’t plan for this.
Vitrines cloaking me from those eyes, that gaze.
Jugs likewise a repellent, also nitrate dope.
Because I am alive, a living human with true human systems, the dots I absorb have an altogether different effect on me than on the Enfanta (the Enfanta -o-----).
No longer dots to reanimate, but dots of transformation: Arms up and in (and skull tipping back).
My Piper Cub intercepts these airborne dots—not some or most of them, but all of them—and more and more I look up.
My head—the jaw line, the skull—perpendicular to any human head.
I have altered my strategies.
I have grown cunning. I am on to something new: No longer dots, but an end game.
Tonight at last I have my plan. The dots have changed and reorganized not my body but my thinking, so that at last I could devise an end game no longer bound up with the lackeys—the lackeys no longer my concern.
I will hit the Enfanta where he lives—in the highest court in the land, where he paces on the marble steps, waiting feverishly for his yellow dots.
I have his yellow dots—you see?
They are in my body!
He could get them if he tore me open, but he will never, ever tear me open.
Pacing the stairs, tackle box in hand (even the Enfanta received a tackle box, just as all the children of New Haven, CT received a tackle box), or rather at his side, he is by now too weak for a tackle box in hand, it rests beside him on the steps (steps of Vermont marble), and he awaits the dots.
Mrs. -o----- positioned there with him, and watching the sky.
For weeks now they’ve been watching.
Those orbs, that face wax, this impossible personage, shrunken now, also dull, also tired and broken, face now longer white but yellow, a dulled yellowed cast, closer to tooth enamel than skin, arm in arm with her son in spite of all.
And behind the clenched lids—I know this—the orbs still gleam.
I fly now for the stairs, those near-infinite marble steps, I am flying straight for them.
He (the Enfanta) must be stopped—it is I who will stop him.
The living deserve a second chance, but not the dead, not the Enfanta, never him, for whom no second chance is possible—he must be stopped.
We all deserve it—the chance to get better!
And so tonight I will offer her a second chance.
In my Piper Cub, I have perfected the art of flying towards my target (the Enfanta) whilst also intercepting the dots; my Piper Cub slips so pleasingly through the air not only on account of the nitrate dope, but also the changes that are happening to my own body as the dots accumulate inside me (the dark, still spirit at the center of all these jugs, the spirit I am becoming) (I’m already alive, alive still, against all odds, and with each dot my body changes).
An algorithmically necessary series of moves, my perfect algorithm.
Not some.
All.
Tonight: the silvery moon.
I think of those summer nights.
I was only four or five, only a little boy—can you understand that?
Those eyes, those orbs, cracked into or scooped out of or crashing through the face wax.
Tonight: all end-time placards frozen.
Tonight: my last chance.
I am within range now, and so I am revealed.
The sound of my Piper Cub all but announces my aims, my ends, and Mrs. -o----- just howls.
Lackeys even now rushing back to Atlanta Terminal, Central Station, Southern Pacific Terminal (Mrs. -o-----’s howling draws them back!), but it’s already too late.
I cut the engine.
They (Mrs. -o----- and the Enfanta -o-----) understand that I’m coming, but they cannot hear me.
Can you understand?
This is how I will finish him now, just now, any moment now, only a few minutes from now, tops—truly finish him.
And in her howling, Mrs. -o----- can’t but fail to see—fail to process the vibrations of her own clenched lids.
I will sail toward those steps of Vermont marble, the Enfanta there, silhouette yawing in the moonlight, a head deranged with hunger, a tackle box beside him, his mother as well beside him. Mrs. -o-----, masking her fear, will place a hand at this elbow, attempt to ease him down onto the tackle box, forgetting that he does not want to and will not and never has sat on the tackle box.
It was I who sat on my tackle box, tackle-box-as-seat a concept the Enfanta has loathed forever—and so, weak as he is, he will wrench himself away.
I will eject myself—my Piper Cub fitted with an ejection seat, at great expense—and crash into the upper vitrine, which I have equipped with a parachute. I will glide down, swinging, suspended on twine from my oilcloth parachute, the security forces will fire at me, at me in my vitrine, they will miss, and when I am in range, will understand me for what I am, for what I have become.
Meanwhile the lower vitrine will detach, will sail for the Enfanta, the Chief Justice, who has wrenched himself away from Mrs. -o-----.
And it will be the end of him.
The Enfanta dead again at last.
Smashed, burned, sliced to bits again, on display in the shattered vitrine—the Enfanta.
Mrs. -o----- will detach from her son, from the love of her son—she will throw herself clear.
A vitrine burning up in the atmosphere.
The Doppler shriek of it.
His (the Enfanta’s) leap away from the vitrine, at the last possible minute, will be nothing but a leap into the vitrine—the vitrine will first immobilize him, then roast him.
The Enfanta, the first and last of his kind, performed an epoch-making leap. He landed in the highest court in the land, and, with Mrs. -o----- beside or behind him, he ruled that court.
But it was not enough.
Black eye belted by black rubbery skin, parachute strapped to my back, suspended, on display, this vitrine, this head like no human head, swinging—I will be there.
The security apparatus will see me and there’ll be no understanding.
Then all at once, they’ll understand.
(Mrs. -o-----, open your eyes.)
(Won’t you please unclench them—it has been too long, years and years too long.)
(I have such pity for you tonight, Mrs. -o-----.)
(Look at me, just you look now—you go on and you look at what’s right in front of your face.)
All together, at the last moment, they’ll understand.
That I am the last salamander, a protected species, that they cannot fire on me, thus they will not fire on me, because I will have become what I always was: salamander.
The opposing stillnesses. The boy caught between.
I don’t remember Mr. -o-----.
The moon, the moon.
I am a giant.