The Best of Electric Velocipede (14 page)

Dr. Black and the Village of Stones

Brendan Connell

Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer:

Out of the blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things.

—Charles Algernon Swinburne,
Nephelidia

I.

Q
uai D’Orsay. Gran corona. A box of twenty-five.”

His German was perfect—far too perfect, too true for him to be Swiss. The shopkeeper nodded, fetched the box of cigars and returned.

“That will be 310 francs,” he said, looking down at the man before him, a strange and gruff deformity who, far from inviting laughter, inspired him with the utmost respect.

The money paid and the shop exited, Dr. Black stuffed a cigar between his lips, lit it and proceeded down the cobbled lane, his thin legs gingerly carrying the main portion, that massive torso and head, those distinct and notorious pieces of matter. His reputation had been made, years before, in more than one branch of learning, in multiple applications of science. The general run of human ambitions he could not help but consider petty things: knaves running after base metals and goring themselves on the illusions of prosperity; pleasure seekers letting their organs of speech hang limp from fluted mouths at the prospect of a few moments carnal interaction. —Oh, he had, upon occasion, been seduced by certain chains of events—but this made him all the more impenetrable to future discomfiture. Dr. Black was a man who knew how to pass fair judgement on the fractured parts of his experience.

He sauntered easily along Stadhausquai, past the Fraumünster (which read 2:00), and on to a café, where he secured himself an outdoor seat, ordered a glass of beer, a plate of rösti and a sausage. The beer arrived, a pale golden, frothing spire, and he attached his lips thereon and drank. A shadow, not thick by any means, lingered over him.

“Doctor—Dr. Black?”

A quivering, pale young man of neat, straw-coloured hair leaned forward.

The doctor licked the white deposit, the yeasty mass of small air bubbles from his upper lip and moustache, set the glass down upon its coaster, and rose to his feet.

“Wilhelm Künzler?” he asked, stretching forth his hand.

The other grabbed it eagerly. “Yes, Sir. Yes, this is Wilhelm. Such a pleasure—such a pleasure!”

“Please sit down. I have already ordered, I hope you don’t mind.”

“Eat! —Oh no, I could not eat right now!” Wilhelm sat down and adjusted his glasses. “I am so eager to carry out these studies with you.”

“Investigations,” Black corrected as he watched the waiter advance through the door, a great steaming plate poised in one hand.

“Yes, I am so very eager to carry out these investigations. In this country, for a student, such opportunities are quite rare.”

Dr. Black, with knife and fork, manipulated his sausage away from the stack of potato cake. “Such opportunities are rare in all countries,” he said, letting his knife pierce the skin of the tube and descend into its flavourful substance. “Have you brought the samples?”

“Yes, Sir—a few. —The rest are still in refrigeration back at the University.”

The young man took several small plastic vials from his jacket pocket and placed them on the table. The doctor, while chewing a mouthful of sausage, glanced at them, opened one, knocked its contents, a few small red lumps, onto the palm of his hand and examined them closely.

“It is, I believe, swine,” Wilhelm ventured.

“Sus indicus.”

“Yes, Sus indicus—but in the other vials: it is certainly some kind of vascular fluid, one would guess from a vertebrate, but I cannot place it. Certainly nothing like this has occurred before!”

“Wrong. A similar incident is mentioned in
L’Astronomie
, in the November 1889 edition.”

He placed the small gobbets back in their phial, produced a notebook from his own jacket pocket and, opening it, handed Wilhelm a very old bit of magazine clipping that he had therein. The doctor took a sip of beer and, navigating his fork to the pile of potatoes, listened as the young man read aloud.

“A perplexing phenomenon has been observed recently in the Entlebuch district of Switzerland. The surface of the earth has been covered above three times by a very fetid, thick, and tacky residue, distinctly plasmatic, falling in nut-sized lumps of irregular shape and particles thought to be as small as 1/5,000
^th
of a centimetre. Specimens identified as masses of cartilage or muscular fibres. The origin of the substance is indiscernible.”

“So this
has
happened before?”

“If we are to believe the article.”

“Quite exciting!”

“I will need to further examine this fluid. I am concerned that it might be a false alarm—some deceptive mixture of silex, chrome, alumina and carbonic acid. If it is of volcanic origin, then the presence of chrome will assimilate it with meteoric stones.”

“But it is surely blood.”

“I will need to go to the location of the current phenomenon in order to investigate.”

“Yes, we must go!”

“You have a car at your disposal, I presume?”

“Of course. We can leave tonight if you wish.”

“No, I do not wish. I want you to pick me up at my hotel at half past eight tomorrow morning.”

“And tonight—would you like me to show you the lights of Zürich?”

“Absolutely not. A quiet evening with books, rooks and papers is what I presently care for. I have been invited to a chess match in Milan next week with Maurizio Ferrantes, and, if I am to come off unembarrassed, my strategies must be honed.”

The
Babylonian firmament in 12 x 3 celestial houses
:

As a boy he became an expert at
checkers age
of
12 notebooks
. Diagrams played an informal chess match with Alabama state champion Jim Lester and won, scoring four wins, six draws, and three losses and then Columbia University (first studying chemical engineering before moving on, grazing off sundry fields of knowledge); spending much time at the Manhattan Chess
Club New
York state championship. Six wins. One
draw. Later:
Havana (night clubs, acquiring visibly vaporous, carbonic habits): defeated champions of Spain and Mexico.
Fulfilling the astronomical omina of Enuma Anu Enlil. Current condition
: Ranked #49 on the earth, amongst its countries and people.

II.

The car sped over the winding highway, lush green pastures off to each side, staggering mountains towering in the near distance. Cows grazed and farmers strode around the precincts of their wooden lodges, toting buckets and large canisters of milk. It was beautiful scenery in a light-green sort of way—bucolic, hemmed in and alpine. They drove through the long, strange tunnel of the Gottard (sinister, toxic) and into the southern canton of Ticino. They turned off onto the Val Bedretto, past Ossasco, and Ronco and then over the Nufenenpass, toward the Brudelhorn; descending along tiers of winding, treacherous roadway and then gliding through the shadows of the sharply-peaked highland. Presently Wilhelm gyrated the steering wheel to the right and the car veered off the highway, onto a smaller road that snuck in between the vertical mountains, a shallow, rushing river off to one side, a narrow strip of ill-tended pastureland to the other.

Dr. Black, his torso easily filling out the seat of the small, European car, struck a match and applied the flame to a D’Orsay.

“You see the beautiful country?” Wilhelm asked, making an expansive gesture with his right hand.

“Yes. By all evidence my power of sight is perfectly intact.”

“In this part of the country, in the remote villages here, the people are very backward.”

“That is one of the drawbacks of a rural existence, but we must admit its calm to be highly pleasing.”

The car rolled on along the road, into the cleft of the valley and along the side of a moraine. Presently the stretch of land widened out slightly and Wilhelm pulled off onto a patch of gravel. There were a few old cars and lorries and then a wooden footbridge which led toward the base of a rugged col, well-littered with boulders amidst which were stationed two or three huts and out of which jutted a stone church tower.

“Is that the village?” The doctor asked. “I expected it to be small, but . . .”

“This is the village. The people, for the most part, live within the boulders. Their houses are carved in the rocks. As I said, the people are very backward here.”

The car doors slammed shut, the bridge echoed under their feet, and the doctor’s cigar, still only partially smoked, perfumed the pure air around them with its stink. His well-polished, patent leather shoes trod gingerly along the rock paths; within the village, his eyes steadily surveyed the solid mineral matter. It was now obvious that they were habitable. Many of them had doors, some steps leading beneath, most openings that functioned to admit light and air to the enclosures and often framed and spanned with glass mounted to permit opening and closing.

“Quite an array of pyrogenous ultramafic affinities,” Dr. Black grinned, running his hand along the side of one of the cottages. “It is like Cappadocia.”

“We must secure lodging.”

“If we can. Otherwise it is the pup-tent for us. —Where did you stay when you were here previously?”

“I was not able to stay, Doctor; I had an exam the next morning on the practical uses of ultrasound in cattle reproduction.”

“Did you do well?”

“Yes, thank you. Most satisfactory.”

The two men wound their way amongst the quasi-troglodyte dwellings, which were laid out at random. Often stone steps led up narrow inclines or the way led through a passage carved in the rock and supported with resinous old timber. The place at first seemed almost deserted, many of the doors were boarded up, the only person they crossed was a fleshy woman bustling around a corner with a cabbage in her arms.

Presently they came in sight of one of the few wooden structures, a small building with a sign which read:
R
IEMENSCHNEIDER,
F
LEISCH &
K
AFFEE
P
RODUKT
.

“Let us make inquiries here,” the doctor said, wagging his beard, the curling black axe, in the direction of the shop.

Inside there were two small tables near the door, and at the other end a butcher’s counter, rife with price signs, behind which sat an iron-haired woman with penetrating eyes and a severe, small-jowled face. Dr. Black expressed his desire for refreshment, and the woman asked him and Wilhelm to be seated. Soon a young lady came out to serve them. With long black hair, a lively oval face, and eyes that sparkled, she was remarkably attractive. The doctor, with all the gravity of a man expressing the most profound truths, ordered a tongue sandwich and coffee. Wilhelm requested cheese and wine.

“And where do you boys come from?” the young woman asked.

“Do we not look like locals?” the doctor said smoothly.

“I should think not! I know everyone in the village by name.”

The doctor introduced himself and his apprentice as “researchers.”

“Researchers—as in scientists?” she asked turning to Wilhelm.

“I am just—just a student,” he faltered. “At the University of Zürich.”

“And what do you do there?”

“Currently at the University I am mostly studying cows—pullulation—their reproduction—artificially inseminating them—I have been inseminating cows.”

“And is it just cows you inseminate?”

Wilhelm blushed. “No, not just.”

She laughed a pile of marigolds.

“Oh, well my name is Piera, and it’s very nice to make your acquaintance!”

The doctor, with the utmost appetite, set his jaws to the sandwich, cleaving out a half moon; the article of food, the ox’s tongue, veritably evaporating under his dentine pressure. Wilhelm nibbled at cheese and sipped red wine. He watched the great torso opposite, the formidable cranium, the beard as couthly cut as that of an Assyrian king: the kymation, the rising cornice of that monument, Erechtheion of thread-like growths.

The door opened, both men turned. A stocky, moustached man came in, taking off a chequered wool cap as he entered. He walked up to the counter with heavy strides, nodding to the doctor and Wilhelm as he passed. The iron-haired woman rose from her seat.

“What can I do for you today Waldmüller?” she said, her mouth showing a set of fine, sharp, piranha-like teeth.

“Frau Riemenschneider,” the man replied gruffly, “I have come again to ask for your daughter’s hand.”

“Apparently we are witnessing a local courtship,” Black said in an undertone to Wilhelm.

“My apologies Waldmüller, but, as I have said before, I cannot accommodate you there.”

“How much for your daughter’s hand?”

“More than you can afford.”

“Come now, what price for your daughter’s hand?”

“Forget it, it is not for sale to you. Why not try the lips of Fräulein Baargeld or the eyes of little Nuzzi instead?”

Black.
What strange custom is this?