The Jules Verne Steam Balloon Page 15

  17

  Sunlight, once, on their tousled heads beyond the rocks downriver, their voices from the larchwood. Franklin kneedeep in sedge and wild carrot by a granite rockface spritted with mica and dappled with lichen was inviting Pascal to test the rigidity of his penis. O boy, Mariana said, trust my Franklin. I whistled my arrival. Franklin said brightly that they’d seen a badger trot and a grebe. Saw a water rat! Pascal said. The grebe had a golden craw with silver dots. Franklin was full of himself, talking big. I mussed both their heads, remarked that they were in the Serengeti of the saw-toothed chigger, and wanted both of them to soap up at the river, giving particular effort to their legs, and to smear themselves with insect repellent afterwards. Franklin boasted of an infestation of chiggers the summer before. This, he said, is my whatevereth camping trip. He’d been with me and you, and with the Cubs, and once with my troop. I’m the mascot. Sleep in Hugo’s tent, march with him at the head of the column. But I like this better, friends only. Hugo studies God, and is the Greek, Latin, and gym teacher. Thanks, said Pascal, I only go to NFS Grundtvig. I forgot, Franklin said. Holger teaches biology and geography. He’s been to Sicily and Iceland. Frogs and maps, Franklin said. Mitochondria and tectonic plates, said Pascal. Hugo’s twice as old as me plus a year, Franklin said, and has been fucking since fifteen. His dick’s 23 cm. He and my sister Mariana do it every day, because they love each other. Hugo’s papa, he’s a pastor in the Protestant cult, says it’s kin to loving God, who wants us all to love each other. And then Franklin gave Papa a grand rating as a very bright old gentleman, pink and scrubbed, nattily dressed, who lives in a big old house with a flower garden all around it, and hundreds and hundreds of books inside, all of which he has read. Wise, generous, and liberal, especially in the matter of boys’ monkeying with their peters, which is nature, and nature has God for its designer. Franklin omitted the detail of our visit when Franklin came down to breakfast britchesless and upstanding, and got a kind lecture on the way back upstairs, led by the hand, on conventions, decency, and several other matters. Ah yes, Mariana said, and that’s when we heard the little twerp saying that you go around your apartment in nothing but an undershirt and me in nothing at all. I loved your father saying, yes but you’ll notice they don’t do that here, and they do it because they’re very much in love with each other. Mercifully we didn’t overhear the rest of the discussion.

  CLOVER. BUTTERFLIES

  Not so silly fast, one heard Franklin from the far side of the tent. Like this, if you want it to feel good. At supper they sat shoulder to shoulder, shoving from time to time, with silly smirks. Holger, Pascal said, is shy. He starts to say things, and stops, changing the subject. The water rat was just along the river, where he has a trot like the badger’s. Did you know that spiders rebuild their web every day? They eat it at night. Crazy, Franklin said. I hope we hear the owl again. Over the frogs. Don’t they ever sleep? When Mariana and me are spending the night, Franklin said to me, can Pascal come over? We could make a pallet on the floor. Thing is, he said to Pascal, is not to be in the way, to move with, like a dog, and not against. Then we won’t be underfoot. In wintertime we eat around the fire, like we’re doing now. Fried bananas with brown sugar Mariana makes sometimes for a snack at bedtime. With milk. Did, I asked, Pascal like the idea? If so, I could square it with Holger. Pascal, shy, said nothing. What if Holger says I can’t? he eventually said. But, I said, it was Holger who thought up this outing, after this rascal Franklin batted his eyes at him one day and said God knows what. Did I? Franklin said. Casually, calmly. The kid is on his way to being one of the world’s great actors. O yes, that. I’ll come, Pascal said, looking up brightly.

  19

  But why didn’t you tell me, Mariana asked, about this light? And the moths and butterflies and the meadow over the hill? Privacy to love ourselves into fits, yes, and roughing it on the provisions we bring in, and water from a spring, and a cryptogonadal eleven-year-old with an IQ bigger than yours, and my idiot little brother, when they find us, and your father, in time, but not the magic soft long goldeny light. Which, Hugo said, will eventually last all night. That is, it will be the night. I’m not leaving it, Mariana said. I want to live with it, on it, in it, the rest of my life. I must, Hugo said, take you to the Arctic Circle, and maybe this time I won’t be bitten by mosquitoes all over my virile member. Asgar, too. Which we made worse by whacking off as usual before falling asleep. Though it would have swollen up and turned purple all the same, I suppose. It was brave Asgar who boldly pulled his pants down for the Swedish scoutmistress next morning when she was daubing mosquito bites. Oh dear, she said, oh dear, what a frightfully awkward place to be bitten so cruelly. But she daubed away, with several other wounded, girls too, looking on with curiosity having overcome every scruple.

  THE BALLOON

  It was over the meadow beyond the birchwood, descending, its gaudy colors, like those of a circus wagon, splendidly strange against the blue haze of the sky and the soft greens stitched with purple and yellow runnels of wildflowers in the meadow. The wooden paddles of the propeller were idling over. The telescope in its sweep flashed a white disc of glare. The Jules Verne was back, here.

  CLEMENT TO THEODORE

  Add to the evangelium of Marcus: They arrived in Bethany where there was a woman whose younger brother had died. She found Yeshua and lying face down before him said Son of Dawidh take mercy on me. Those who were with Yeshua, his followers, spoke harshly to her, which angered Yeshua, who went with her to her brother’s tomb in her garden. There they heard a loud voice from within the tomb, and Yeshua lifted aside the stone door, and went in, and took the young man in his arms. He sat him on the coffin’s edge and took both his hands in his, and the young man looked at Yeshua and loved him, and begged that he might be with him always. They left the tomb and went into the house of the young man, who was rich. Now six days later Yeshua asked the young man to come to him at night, naked except for a linen cloth. And throughout the night Yeshua explained to him how the world had God for its king, and at morning Yeshua left Bethany and walked to the other side of the Jordan.

  MARCUS XIV:51

  Adulescens autem quidam sequebatur eum amictus sindone super nudo: et tenuerunt eum: at ille reiecta sindone, nudus profugit ab eis.

  SANKT HIERONYMUS WITH OPOSSUM

  A sequence of twelve photographs by Muybridge: a dappled horse named Smith with rider, nude. A lithograph of 1887, the flat carbon of its blacks and silvery graphite of its half tones having the authority of both science and art. Smith’s tail has dashed into an upward spray by the sixth photograph. The sequence records a single four-legged step, or, in horseman’s language, stride. Time lapse between exposures: .051 seconds.

  24

  There was a dialogue conducted by the furniture, as in a De Chirico, where Stimmung, or time with the feeling of music, involves one thing with another, Mariana’s flowery scarf, its Indian pinks, mustard browns, and Proustian lilacs, with the feral cunning of the large photograph framed in thin aluminum on the wall of Bourdelle’s Herakles Drawing His Bow, Hugo’s running shoes, their incisive blue stripes slanted like the insignia of a rank coparcenary with the god Hermes, coffee mugs in an event with light, a map of the Faeroes on the wall opposite the Herakles, a blue javelin standing in the northwest corner, a Cub Scout neckerchief, yellow and black, Franklin the Electrical Beavertooth Rabbit’s, a vase of zinnias, a trapezoidal shaft of soft late afternoon from the skylight to the blue rug, the bed made as neatly as one in a barracks.

  MARCUS X:46

  [They came to Jericho and the sister of the young man whom Yeshua loved and his mother and Salome were there, but Yeshua would not see them.]

  26

  Linen is the clue, Hugo said. Johannes the Dipper wears animal skins: that seems to be very important, and when Yeshua is mocked and tortured he is made to wear a purple emperor’s robe, to satirize what they think are his pretensions to being a ruler. But otherwise he wears linen. Byssos, the garb of P
ythagoreans and the Essenes. Angels wear white linen: that’s standard. A pure garment: animals have not been slaughtered to make it. And as the tomb on Easter morning, linen linen linen, flashing white, pure. A daimon would wear linen when he is apparent to the eyes of the vulgar in this world, though the structural detail is for the daimon to be naked, like the infant Yeshua, signifying sinlessness. And, Mariana said, her chin on her knees, looking out into the beautiful northern twilight, you think that the gospel writers could not wholly detach themselves from the ancient and pervasive Mediterranean belief in daimons as angelic messengers from heaven to an inspired person, a philosopher or a teacher like Yeshua, and gave him one: he’s the adolescent naked except for a piece of linen in the scene of the arrest, and he’s the younger brother Yeshua revives and talks to all of a night, and he’s the angel at the tomb on Easter. He’s all over the place, Hugo said. The revival in the garden has come down to us folklorishly askew. The chap’s name was El’azar, or Eleazar, on in Latin Lazarus. Check out daimons with names, like angels. The night’s conversation ought to be messages from on high for Yeshua, not Yeshua instructing a rich young man whom he has brought back from the dead. He’s also probably the same as the rich young man Yeshua said should give all he had to the poor. And, Mariana said, these things got scrambled around in the writing. First in the telling, Hugo said. Each early community would have had its own history, and over a hundred years details transmute. I tell you an interesting story, but you don’t quite get the drift of all of it. You then repeat the story, and account for certain details in your own way, or the way you understood them. A hundred years pass. Versions get written down, some of them in languages not one’s native tongue. You see? And the daimon had, in one of the longest traditions we can trace in the Mediterranean, a bird form. A dove. More than any other folktale, Yeshua mentions the sign of Jonas. That is, the sign of the dove. Jonas means dove, Mariana said. I do listen. You’re better at this than I am, Hugo said.

  THE BOW OF HERAKLES

  Up these outside steps, Franklin said. Hugo lives here. It was the top floor of the stables, way back, now a garage and place where the grounds people keep their things. Somebody, a teacher here, who left, he taught drawing and building houses and things, made the upstairs one big room, but with a bathroom and kitchen and a skylight. When Hugo came here, all he needed was a bed and a chair and a table to make himself a place to live. Pots and pans and things. Hugo says that what you own should be a pair of jeans, shoes, socks, and shirt. One sweater. But he only talks that way. He has lots of things. This, around my neck on this shoelace, is the key. Mariana has one, too. You first. That big picture, it’s a photograph of a statue in Paris Frankrig, where Hugo bought it. He’s been all sorts of places. Greek, Pascal said, a hero from the myths. Yes, said Franklin, you see he was good and strong and he shot bad things with his bow, things that hurt people. He’s naked because the Grœkere didn’t wear any clothes most of the time, big balls like Hugo’s, but this picture here, which Hugo painted, of my sister Mariana, is naked because girls are pretty with no clothes on. Hugo can paint real good. He has drawn me all sorts of ways, with color pencils, my pecker on view, chinning a limb down by the river, asleep in that chair. A Muybridge, Pascal said, looking at the photograph in twelve frames of the horse Smith. Brancusi’s Torso d’un jeune homme. Hugo says that has purity, whatever the fuck he means by that. Pascal winced. Now I’ve said something wrong, Franklin said. Let’s have a glass of milk. The Torso is beautiful, Pascal said. It has elemental simplicity. In the archaic Mediterranean period the body was shaped that way in Cycladic and Maltese sculpture. Cycladic, Franklin said, Cycladic. Here, Pascal said, taking down a book and flipping through the pages. There, he said, that’s Cycladic. You knew it was in that book? Franklin asked. No, but by the title there was a good chance. You could have said you knew it was in the book and fooled me. I don’t want to fool you, Pascal said. Good milk. Franklin drank his at a go, and licked the inside of the glass held upside down. As he licked, he squeezed the crotch of his short white pants. Pascal sat in Hugo’s reading chair, feet and all, ankles crossed, and sipped his milk. What I think, Franklin said, unzipping, is that you’re not balls up inside anymore. It didn’t look like it when we were camping with Hugo. You get stiff good. And you say it feels neat to play with it. If it feels half as good as mine, you’re getting there. Why would your housemaster friend Holger say you can whack off in moderation if he doesn’t want you to do it at all, you know? See, one pull back and one pull up, and I’m bone-hard and tingling. Pascal spilt a fat dollop of milk on his shirt and pants. Fuck, Franklin said. Don’t get it on the rug. Here, over to the sink. Shirt, britches: rinch ’em in cold water, is what Mariana would do. They’ll be dry again in no time. Underpants, too. Your dick’s half stiff, you know. What, Pascal said, if hr. Tvemunding comes in, or your sister? What nothing, Franklin said. You don’t know those two. They don’t think about anything else. And they don’t snitch. See, pull back, slide up. Everybody at Grundtvig whacks off two or three times a day. I know that, Pascal said. In the showers, in bed, up over the boathouse. Yours has a more mushroomy head than mine. See, I’m getting hair. Hugo’s has big veins all over it, and bumpy ridges. Long as my forearm, and the head’s as big as my fist. See, he said he got it that big by whacking off when he was a boy.

  28

  Do you, Pascal said, know about the nest of crystals in a salmon’s brain by which it steers in a magnetic field? Like a radio, said Franklin.

  29

  The peaches, Mariana said, have been in the spring, in their tin, and so’s the condensed milk, which is why they are so delicious and Hugo is smiling at me with designs in his eyes. One design. All the writing’s to be done by the time Papa gets here, so that he can read it through. He’s going to like the hobbyhorse. And the structuralist analysis of clothes. Wheat and figs will be nothing new to him, or Gnostic static.

  THE GREAT APPLE ROSE

  The stock is large, covered with a dark grayish bark except for the younger branches, which are reddish, armed here and there with great and sharp thorns, but nothing so great or plentiful as in the Eglantine, although it be a wild kind: the leaves are whitish green, almost like the first White Rose, and five always together, seldom seven: the flowers are small and single, consisting of five leaves, without any scent, or very little, and a little bigger than those of the Eglantine bush, and of the same deep blush color, every one standing upon a prickly button, bearded in the manner of other roses, which, when the flowers have fallen, grow great, long and round, pear-fashion, bearing beards on their tops and are very red when full ripe.

  ACORNS

  Earliest dawn, mist, the shine of dew, a single star still in the sky. Hugo could make out the basket of the Jules Verne in an open place in the pines, its rope ladder down. Quark, he called softly. Quark, again. He heard a voice speaking God knew what language: it was more animal than human, full of chirps and ratchety gutturals. He called again. Ferns parting before him, a boy naked as a newt, wet to the hips, strode out with wide rolling steps, waving his arms in greeting. It’s you, he said. Can we talk? Hugo said. Talk? Quark said. You are Quark? Hugo asked. There were the three of them, ten or eleven in age, Quark, Buckeye, and Tumble, voyagers in a balloon of the last century. We are washing in the dew, Quark said, and drying in the air. It’s wonderfully so me tumenge ’kana rospxenava ada zhivd’ape varikicy romenge, Buckeye! you worthless goosebrained chickenhumper, put me back onto Danish. He fiddles with the adaptors on the thread out of absolute gormless idleness. El ruaus della dumengia damaun fa, stop it! Buckeye’s radiantly grinning handsome face rose over the wicker taffrail of the basket. I was getting us all into lingua loci, Crosspatch, while heating the griddle for pancakes, and reading the newspaper we bought in the village. Hi, Hugo, what brings you out to the ship so early of a morning? Tumble is out milking cows. A little from several: so it won’t be missed. Pancakes, blackberries, and milk. Who are you? Hugo asked. Not to say, said Quark. What la
nguage is your name? Quark looked blank, smiling. Buckeye! he called. Ask Hizqiyya Band yot asterisk scanner to give us a printout in Latin letters quote what language is your name close quote, with your referring to Zoon Hex Dyo Hen. Tapped in, Buckeye called down. Green through, red active, here it comes. Here it is. QUARK ULT QUERCUS LATIN OAK EVANGEL DODONA CROSSREF IRISH THEOLOGER JAMES JOYCE CRY OF GULL ARCHETYPE DOVE SIGNUM JONAS ALSO CROSSREF ELEM PARTICLE SYNERGIA MUNDI CROSSREF HARMONY BROTHER BUCKEYE MT OAK GENUS AESCHYLUS OR BUCKEYE TREE ALSO CROSSREF BROTHER TUMBLE FREQ GALLIC TOMBER ENGL TIMBER CROSSREF TREE SYMBOL CONNEC VAR MYTHOLOG DRYAS DAIMONES REQ ROUTES REMIND YOU RESTRICTED EXCEPT DESIGNATE POETS PS HIZQIYYAH TO PATROL WHO WANTS TO KNOW?

  BOULDERS SEAMED WITH GOLDEN SAMPHIRE

  Looking out of the top of his eyes, whistling Mozart, Franklin unlatched the buckle of his Wolf Cub webbing belt, fingered the brass button from its eye, and slid his zipper down. Get chiggers on your behind and balls, Hugo said, if you’re about to do what I think you’re about to do. Which is what? Pascal asked. I can read Franklin’s mind, Hugo said. Several meters back, on the flint path, the Electric Rabbit’s paw was squeezing its crotch, and now its unwrinkled brain slips along an obvious and wholly natural line. That’s not my mind you’re reading, Franklin said. A joke, Pascal said. I’m learning.

  A GARDEN IN POMPEII

  With a stone Hercules in it, Buckeye said. At one end, where the olive a hundred years old was. And at the other, with the seedlings in perforated jars, the bee balm, polpody fern, amaranth and bachelor buttons, was a stone Priapos. Rose, white violet, dogtooth, wallflower, Tumble said, bergamot, thyme, saffron crocus. The Perfumery of Herakles was the sign above the door, across from the shop whose sign was Cash Today Credit Tomorrow. For cool and colors and smell you would have to go to Kyoto or Izmir to find the like. The dog Ferox, remember him? They’d sawn an amphora in half, on the long axis, and one half was his bed, the other, on stacked bricks, his roof. There was another grand garden at the House of the Ship Europa. A stone Ceres. Demeter of the Campania. And up here, peppergrass, so sour and green.