Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“You’re not going to revive him, are you, Mac?” she asks in great fear.

“Re-viiive?” drawls ATMAN looking Melkior derisively in the eyes. His own eyes come quite close together, flow into one (like two drops of water) to form a large, hard, bulging eye, blue as a plum.

Polyphemus! Melkior goes numb with fear.

“Uh-ah, no, no,” laughed ATMAN with his wide-set teeth. “Not Polyphemus! The embryo of glory in alcohol, right? While taking the animal to be weighed every now and then: a bone and a skin. … The drum gets the skin, right? And what does the Motherland get — a fig? Ah, no, no, you’ll make a dinner for the Croco-dile! Alligatorrr!” he summons the monster.

“Didn’t I tell you it was still over there?” whispers the Melancholic, almost breathless. “Wink to wink — nine.”

In reply to ATMAN’S call, the endless Length of the Great Worm begins to undulate. Lightning flashes and thunder booms from every movement. …

“It will be the ruination …” howls Melkior, but with a singsong lilt as if there were gaiety in it.

“And I pissed on it, Eustachius, ha-ha,” says Maestro bent over double (with laughter) over the railing. “That night, remember reaching eternity ? — well, it was that very night that I … ha-ha-ha, lightning strike me dead!”

“But what am I to do, Maestro? It’s my turn now, he’s coming, infuriated, horrible …”

“… and pissed on! Retreat into the Vatican Library for six years … in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity.” After some thinking: “Have yourself castrated! You’ll be Saint Eustachius the Eunuch, what more can you ask? Ooh, ooh, ooh …” Maestro is having a marvelous time.

At that point, issuing from afar as if it were the echo speaking, comes Don Fernando’s drawling voice beseeching: “Do not drink the water … capture whoever poisoned the reservoir … do not drink the water.”

Downstairs among the crowd a panic spreads, cries, commotion, they rush off straight away to nab the poisoners. “It’s their agents poisoning us.” And I’ve just had two full glasses, thinks Melkior with a desperate man’s pleasure; he is feeling bravery in his stomach, like a small boy who has swallowed a button.

Then there is another voice, sober, accommodating, from quite nearby, from the adjoining room: “Citizens, this is not an exercise. Our country is under attack. We are at …”

Melkior pronounced the word himself, inside, his eyes still closed, and repeated it.

“Good morning,” he said without relinquishing his dream. He wished to retreat into the labyrinths of false sounds, the echoes of amicable distances; to let the sleeper go on toying with words; to grant waking the benefit of another morning from the other world … but the voice from the adjoining room was tenaciously repeating its lesson, practicing a difficult language: Citizens, this is not an exercise. What you are hearing is our guns. Our country is under attack. We are at war.

Our guns! heard Melkior with emotion. He sees hardened warriors, our men, intrepid, smiling self-confidently … O-ri-en-ted … by moss, “Listen up, look at him …” disarray in the image of the stable: Caesar’s croup … Nettle; barking at the lightbulb … piss off, I don’t want to see you again, ever …

Early this morning our capital city was … something like a thunderclap covered the voice from the adjoining room. The announcer cleared his throat, composed. “He’s overcome with emotion at the roar of our guns!” Melkior was trying to retrieve the emotion, but the very words disbelieved their own sentence, scoffed at its sweetness.

“That’s anti-aircraft,” could be heard from the street.

They are shooting at Kurt. Melkior sees him up there, high in the sky, “Duty calls, Herr Professor,” keeping an eye on his Cozy Corner around the corner … Well, well! muses the delighted Kurt.

“Call this shooting? The man must be blind!”

“It’s the height, man, the aeroplane’s way too high up. Reconnaissance, he’s not carrying bombs.”

“Of course, he’s carrying bonbons for the little children. What did I tell you — there he is, dropping chocolates, they’ve got chocolate to spare.”

“He’s dropping leaflets, leaflets!” shouted the judge from the window, educating the imbeciles in the street. Why be rude — it might make them go back for real bombs.

“Parcheesi,” said Melkior.

Do not drink the water , the announcer came on again. There is reason to suspect that the water has been poisoned by enemy agents. Do not use water until we have broadcast the laboratory report …

“Utterly ridiculous propaganda!” the lawyer was saying angrily on the landing. “Why, they’ll be here by tomorrow … what do you think they’ll do … poison themselves? Preposterous. Danica, get me a glass of water!”

“Oh, please, Dad, don’t …”

“Get me a glass of water, you ninny! Take a big one from the kitchen!”

“Doctor, perhaps you really shouldn’t …” came the landlady’s anxious voice.

“Shouldn’t nothing,” the lawyer was shouting angrily. “I’ll show you who’s poisoning the population! They poison the water? As if they had nothing better to do … Ptui, this is mineral water! You want me to crack your skull? I said, pour me a glass of water!”

“I was so scared, Daddy …”

Not to fear, daughter, said Melkior to her, your Daddy knows their plans did not include poisoning … Kurt and ATMAN and Dad and Auntie … Viviana … they all knew. Perhaps Don Fernando was right after all …

“There — has anything happened to me?” The lawyer had performed an ad hoc analysis on the landing and achieved the desired effect. The tenants were looking at him with respect as a man knowledgeable about this new thing that was happening …

God knows what else things will come to … They were retreating to their nests; their locks went click … to be on the safe side.

“Poisoned the water, indeed,” the lawyer was yelling after them, “well, just let me see if there’s anyone else to say they did!”

Melkior felt like shouting: yes, there is — I do! But he nevertheless tucked his head under the blanket and fell to gnawing his already well-gnawed bone: O body of mine … In the intimate darkness, erotically, cannibalistically, he sensed the odor of his body. This is presumably what cannibals and women feel when close up to a man … does that mean I wish to eat, and make love to, myself? The bones (he happened to have a kneecap in hand), gnaw the bones, copulate with the shadow.

The self-abusing autophage. The thrilling presence of one’s own body. And (like that night on the train’s hard bench) he fell to exploring his strange structure. So: an undamaged skeleton … ay, thou poor ghost, is still lying here with me. It knows the lever and scale laws and walk, jump, run, get up, lie down, sit down; knows what “we could fall” means when on a sheet of ice, knows what means a polite bow or a kick (with the right foot, or indeed the left, as you wish), what means the hand moving easily across paper, leaving in its wake black, bent, intertwined, broken threads of tortured thoughts. All those pipes, valves, bladders, pumps, membranes, filaments, communications networks; mechanics, optics, acoustics: the world broken down into tones and colors, odors, tastes, into rough and smooth, hard and soft, warm and cold, sweet and bitter. All those laboratories, cabinets, institutes, precision instruments for a fine reading of life’s safety. … In here, lying with me, is this perfect world: wisely ticking its little time in its little darkness … and outside there’s a war on. And that lethal insect has already been released from Essen, homing in on this perfection …