Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

Picture the scene with me: We’re back at Lambertine’s laboratory three weeks after Hercule spilled the tincture. The rain is pounding against windows; the casements give off a scent of rust that competes with the smokiness from the coals smoldering in the fireplace. Gas lamps around the room are tipped with blue-white flames. Glass and ceramic vessels are lined on shelves, labeled and plugged with corks.

Lambertine has offered his services for free, in a bid for publicity. Attending the demonstration are the librarian, several members of the Académie Française, the six apprentices, and a young maid named Bernadette, who has stopped her work to see what all the hoopla is about. She stands just inside the door holding the pole of her upended broom, her eyes dark and wondering, her lovely brown curls spilling from beneath her lace cap. Hercule, who at this point believes himself to be responsible for the momentous gathering, thinks Bernadette more interesting than a moldy book. He wants her to notice him and strains to convey, simultaneously, his importance and his desire, showing his teeth with a smile that deepens his dimples.

Oh, those Fournier dimples. Through the generations in my family, spouses who should have known better than to marry a Fournier have cursed those infatuating dimples. Poor Bernadette, who, at age fifteen, should be feeling entirely superior to a thirteen-year-old boy, at the moment is helplessly mesmerized by Hercule’s precocious seductive powers. She is staring at him as he smiles at her, both of them ignoring the tension that has overtaken the room as Lambertine applies the solution to the open codex.

At the examining table, Lambertine dabs with a paintbrush. When nothing happens, he wets the brush and begins swiping more vigorously. The librarian nervously clears his throat. Soon both sides of the parchment are soaked. The men gather closer to the table, peering as the surfaces of the facing pages begin to change. Writing becomes visible, letters form words, meaning arises like a ghost, unintelligible, in a language no one present can read, but still concretely, indisputably there, the ancient text reincarnated before their very eyes.

Hercule sees none of this. For the moment, he is not even seeing Bernadette. His gaze has become fixated on a mouse that must have taken a wrong turn and now is scrambling down the doorframe, heading toward the floor.

Hercule watches the mouse. Bernadette, who is not unaware of her beauty, wonders what could possibly be distracting him from her. She follows his eyes, tips her head, sees the mouse inches away, and erupts in a scream.

The French have multiple words for mouse. Does Bernadette cry out, “ Une souris ”? “ Un mulot ”? Whatever she says, it is enough to startle Lambertine’s audience. All attention is fixed on the maid as she attacks the mouse with her broom. The mouse leaps to the floor and flees in a panic, running in circles around the legs of a stool, hopping desperately to escape that particular kind of fury born from terror. The maid beats at the empty space behind and ahead of the mouse. The men, plus Hercule, look on in confusion. What is happening? At that moment, no one can say, no more than they could have read what appears for a fleeting second—a how-to guide for performing a miracle, perhaps instructions for raising the dead, if the old legend is correct, exposed on the surface of the parchment before disappearing under a clay-brown stain that dilates proportionally until it reaches to the edges of both pages and starts to emit a foul-smelling vapor.

The mouse slips through the opening beside a water pipe and is gone. The men glance at each other before remembering the codex. They gaze in perplexed silence at the large, uniform blotch that obscures not just the hidden writing but the biblical verses that had once graced the surface.

It will take them some time to learn that Tinctura lambertina had only been tested on paper, and so it wasn’t discovered until too late that it had an entirely different effect on parchment and worked as a corrosive acid, causing the ancient goatskin to disintegrate.

Staring at the disfigured codex, no one in the group notices when Lambertine quietly backs away from the table. He spins around and walks out the door. He walks out of his laboratory, out of the building, out of his life. Where he goes, no one can say. He is never seen again.

Too bad for Lambertine, my great-great-grandfather would say to the little boys and girls who were the fruits of his happy match with Bernadette. Lambertine was so worried the king would have his head that he didn’t bother to defend himself. But the king was too busy with his own affairs to punish an errant chemist for vandalizing a sacred book. Within a year of the destruction of the Codex K.E., revolution broke out in France, and the king abdicated to his nine-year-old grandson. As if it were somehow his own doing, Hercule would tell his children with a roar of laughter, who would tell their children, who would tell me one day, how the great king donned a seersucker suit and, under the name of Mr. Smith, hailed a taxi to drive him away from the palace.

Meanwhile, the Codex Kraos Ephrip’tus, too damaged to save and too disheartening to examine any further, was returned to its vault, where the Tinctura lambertina continued to do its poisonous work, until, in the end, all that was left was an empty box.

It’s huge, Dan, huge!

Did you say huge, Harry?

I said huge, Dan!

Did you say Hickey’s Used Car Barn, Harry?

That’s what I was going to say, Dan, you beat me to it.

Did you say Hickey’s is having a sale, Harry?

I said

Bang!

Sal Formosa’s old van rang out with an asthmatic backfire as he climbed Cider Mill Lane. He was heading to his final job of the day and what would be his fifth visit to the new Dunkirk Development. In recent months, Dunkirk homeowners were discovering that the construction company had cut every corner possible. Pipes were leaking, weak foundations were already cracking, basements were flooding because of inadequate grading, and light fixtures—Sal’s specialty—were falling out of ceilings. Sal was so familiar with the type of lights installed at Dunkirk that he had loaded up on a supply of the appropriate replacement sockets. The work would take twenty minutes at most, and he would be home before five.

At the bottom of the driveway, a cast-iron jockey stood holding a lantern. He was of the vintage Jocko style, with a red vest and white pants, his original black face painted over in white. The driveway curved past the figure and between the halves of the groomed lawn to the attached garage, where Sal was glad to find extra room for parking. In preparation for an easy exit, he made a K-turn and left his van with the front bumper pointing downhill.

The house was an updated Georgian model, with a brick walkway that passed a side door beside the garage before continuing on to the front door. It always confounded Sal when there were two doors from which to choose. At some houses, a side entrance with its own mudroom was clearly the preferred option for repairmen. At others—as with this Dunkirk residence—two doors sharing a walkway were equally inviting. Maybe the side door here was used as the primary entrance because it was closer to the driveway? How could Sal know?

It was his good luck that he didn’t have to make a decision, for the homeowner appeared from behind the garage, a dripping garden hose in hand. “Hey, are you my savior?” he called, and before Sal could answer, the man said, throwing the hose aside and approaching, “A new day, a new problem. You must be the electrician. Welcome to Dunkirk—Repairadise, we call it. Let me tell you, we were taken. Taken! Can you guess what this monster cost?”