Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“Let’s knock back a couple downstairs in the canteen. I’ve got my ticket in my pocket. We’re saying our farewells, Mitar.”

“We are, but not like this, not on the run,” gasped Mitar. “Also, I’m on duty, listen, I’m telling you …”

But there was no stopping Melkior. “Shot to shot — two shots,” he shouted to the canteen-keeper from the door. She gave Mitar a questioning glance, and he signaled her with his eyes to get pouring. Pouring The Good Stuff, of course.

“You know what I regret? No, I really really regret it … No, you don’t believe me, but I do regret it …”

“What the hell’s there to regret? Here y’are, down the hatch!”

That was after the fifth round of “shot to shot — two shots.” They were clinking their glasses, stuck to the bar like two wobbling jellyfish. Their hands were bypassing each other in the air, everything hovered around them in a state of levitation.

“No, listen, Mithridates … Be Mithridates, being just Mitar is too minor for you. You can call me Eustachius, I don’t mind … Mithridatey, my old matey, see how it rhymes … matey, there’s something I wanted … no, wait, what was it I wanted now?”

“Never mind. Wait, oh God, I’m on duty! If the Major calls …”

“That’s it, right, that’s what I regret: I didn’t kiss the Major, I kissed the other one … ha, ha … And it was the Major I’d meant to kiss!”

“To make a fool out of him? Well, you’re a nasty …”

“No, Mithridates, I’m not,” whispered Melkior hanging his head in contrition, the entire world suddenly starting to spin in his field of vision.

Funny how everything spins. How things have dislodged from their peaceful existence. Everything is moving and traveling on a conveyer belt … Melkior had the idea that it would never come to rest again and was childishly overjoyed at his huge new toy. He kept reaching after it and it struck him as hilarious to be unable to get hold of anything. I’ll just climb onto one of those chairs and take off. And he believed — even though it was comical, as if he were wakeful and watching his dream — that he was going to land at the Give’nTake before the Parampions on his flying chair.

“O Eustachius the Cosmic, I salute you on behalf of the Parampions!” exclaims Ugo in delight. “Did you have a good flight? No snags? There have been many chairs in the air today. Conferences, sir, conferences, held ‘on the fly’ as they call them. Whatever will they think of next?”

Also present are Viviana (without Freddie) and all the Parampions, and Maestro, being singularly pleased, is well and truly …

I’m drunk as a lord, thinks Melkior, laughing at the thought every time he encounters it. He no longer sees Mitar at his side. “Mitar has … mitared away,” he says to some other whitecoats, who grab ahold of his arms and teach him to walk. “No, no, give me Mitar back … remitrify,” he struggles with them, refusing to begin to walk.

“He took off from right here, I saw him! Flag him down, lob a shell at his seat, ha, ha … Let him open an umbrella, ha, ha. He’ll come down then, Mitar the visitor from outer space! Have them roast him Caesar’s heart!”

His legs would not follow the motion performed on them by a pair of very angry whitecoats: they, too, were laughing in their own way.

“Let go of me, pastry cooks!” shouted Melkior suddenly and stood mightily upright. “I’m off to kiss the Major,” he said, seeming quite himself again; which was why they promptly grabbed hold of him again. “All right, all right, you can carry me if you insist,” he said in a slyly conciliatory way, winking “craftily” at the canteen-keeper herself. “Go on ahead, one of you, and announce me. I can’t very well barge in on the Major just like that, on your arms …”

“Okay, we’ll be off to see him then,” said one of the whitecoats, and he winked to a soldier who had happened to stand nearby: “You there, go on, announce him.”

“Who to?” the soldier asked stupidly.

“To your aunt’s aunt … You heard me — the Major!” one of the whitecoats lost his patience.

“Which major?” the soldier was still having trouble catching on.

“Ours, of course, not Major Attlee for heaven’s sake.”

The soldier went out of the canteen; he did not have the faintest idea what he was supposed to do. Which was precisely what was wanted from him: just for him to leave.

Melkior now let himself be led along. His legs trailed on the ground, knocking against each other. But he was in a way enjoying the incapacity to which he had relinquished his body. He was flying through strange spaces where everything was awhirl. He found the “earthly” disorder so wonderful that he kept smiling happily, as if ascending to heaven borne by two strong white angels.

Not even ATMAN knew yet! He had been living for four days above the palm reader’s head, quietly, in slippers, leading a lazy, pampered life of sleeping, lounging in bed, stretching. Watching the flames in the pot-bellied stove … Devils’ tongues, the Melancholic used to say, an intriguing little hell.

And the rain falls day and night … (the poet grabbed at the chance for a metaphor) … as though asking if I’m all right.

Am I all right?

A parrotlike, random question. He was luxuriating in his laziness like a loyal cat, and that was a question that was apt to provoke Fate. Remind it of solutions , reopen the file of the forgotten case. That is the way of the curious imagination of humans: troubling the peaceful waters again, poking at the coffee dregs in the bottom of the cup. Offering Fate small detailed recipes for its own demise. Making suggestions: this approach, I believe, has not yet been tried. Revealing to it, in metaphors, undreamed-of coincidences, inventive novel downfalls. Seductive, coquettish. Artistic.

He had arrived by an early train four days earlier, dead tired and bone weary. He had tiptoed upstairs, holding his breath past ATMAN’S door. The entire house was still sunk in sweet winter sleep. From Mrs. Ema’s room he heard the culmination of some terrible dream — she was again having knives plunged into her belly.

The bed was standing there snowy white and fragrant, ready to receive him. But Melkior felt himself unworthy of its chaste purity. He wrapped himself in an old coverlet and dropped down onto the sofa, which greeted him pleasantly with its tired springs.

He lay there thoughtless and sleepless in a lethargy of vacuous idiotic elation like a dog come home to settle in again at the threshold. He yearned for a hand to stroke him. He stroked his own muzzle and gave the hand a loyal licking. And smiled at his own fidelity.

His thoughts kept reaching for Enka, but they were all half-awake in a stupor, in the image of a tongue of flame trying to reach the hem of a fluttering red patch of fabric which somehow “protected” itself, craftily retreating. He attempted to hold the fluttering with his hands, to catch hold of that feminine-Enkish something, that feminenkish something, wriggling, undulating, and giggling, elusive within his reach and glittering with a blazing gleam which made him feel a terrible thirst burn over his whole body. His arms, empty, fell down outside the coverlet into endless cold spaces and his teeth chattered with fear and chill. He pulled his arms back under the covers, sheltering his head there, too, from the storm which was already distantly roaring in his ears like a raging sea.

Then Viviana showed up, all in shivers of a small twinkling happiness, faceless and featureless, as a dispersed, hazy, blurred memory. But he quickly put Enka (as a flash of lightning) in her place and shivered all over from the tempestuous nearness of her. Again he tried to insert himself into the vortex, to embrace the whirlpool and give himself over to the passionate flood wave, but he felt an icy wind blowing cold once more across his skin, shaking his jaws as if it meant to crumble his teeth.