Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (55 page)

“You there … whatever your name is,” spoke up Menjou in the end.

“Melkior.” Of course. Here it comes. He had been expecting it.

“You there, Meteor …”

“Melkior!”

“Listen, Meteor,” said Menjou with the greatest contempt, “have you been up to any funny business with her?”

“You won’t thcore with her, my boy …” Herma was saying in an almost friendly tone.

“There have been better Toreadors before you, Mon-sewer Matador, and they’ve all drawn a blank.”

“I was polite with the young lady …”

“Listen to this—he was polite!” exclaimed Menjou, stirring them up.

“She never, never went away like that before, without a goodbye,” said Little Guy to him in a low, confidential voice. “You must’ve offended her in some way.”

“Tho, thee!” jubilated Hermaphrodite maliciously. “You offended the wady!”

“I didn’t say anything bad to her …”

I’m being defensive, thought Melkior, and that’s not good, damn it. The Parampion would have attacked. He would have pulled off a putsch and taken control.

But how do you go about it? (He had long been trying to think of a putsch whereby the red-haired Asclepian would take control of the cannibals.) Perhaps if he opened the window overlooking the courtyard and spoke from there, made a demagogical speech … Oh no, friends and countrymen, I come not to the window to denounce, for Menjou is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men … (muttering in the courtyard—a sign of protest) but only to vindicate my vain heart. You know how weak the human heart is for you are good, kindhearted men; and mine is wounded withal. I would show you my wounded heart, but this dare I not, for I should do Menjou wrong, I should do them all wrong, and they, as you know full well, are honorable men. (Hem, hem—uncertain muttering in the courtyard.) I choose, then, to keep my silence and bear my pain for the sake of peace and for the esteem in which I hold so honorable a man as Menjou. But he says I offended her and was up to, ahem,
funny business
with her … and his words are prompted by love, by care of her honor, for he is an honorable man and doth love her honorably. He knows, therefore, what love is and could certainly tell you what offense there be in one man’s love that there be not in another’s. I know not—alas!—how my sighs can be an impediment to his love. Can sighs infect the air wherein basks a man’s bliss? I am not the orator Menjou is; I have not the power of speech to couch in sweet-sounding words that which you yourselves do know. But he is wise and eloquent, and thus bound to tell you wherein my offense lay. (Let us ask him! Let him tell us!) He will no doubt answer you for he is indeed an honorable man.

But what will he be able to tell you? That I did with but one finger touch her dress; that and nothing more. What private griefs they have, alas! I know not, that made them call me impertinent. They know it. But what impertinence be there in that light touch of a finger—a finger which fear had made to tremble withal? (A voice: Oh woeful day!) Sweet friends and countrymen, a brazen fellow hath not a blushing cheek, as you know full well. Not a trembler he, but a grabber. And I tremble e’en now at the thought of the touch of that sacred dress. Perhaps she expected me to grab her hand and kiss it. What woman does not? As she was counting the beat of my maddened pulse, perhaps she felt the same stirrings in her own blood? And what is it I did? Nothing, or nearly nothing: I touched her dress with a finger. Did this in me seem brazen? (A voice: Never! Another voice: If thou consider rightly of the matter, he has had great wrong. Third voice: Truly spoken! He is a just man, and they are villains! First voice: We see it now—Menjou is a traitor! Second voice: Let not the traitor live! We’ll burn the bed of Menjou!)

Stay, gentle friends! You go to do you know not what. Wherein have I thus deserv’d your loves? What am I to you? (Voices: You are our leader! The Admiral!) Other voices: Hear! hear! You are our admiral! Let us board ships and sail away! A voice (poetically): Let us sail away. Gulls and clouds will ask us: who are you? what do you seek? … and our sails will reply: Melkior sails! Melkior seeks a barren reef … (the poetic voice drowns in tears. All the others begin crying, too).

Blessed be those tears, my people! Away, then! But … wait an instant … for I wish to be quite clean before you. (Voices: It’s all right, you’re clean! Let’s go!) Not quite I’m not, friends and countrymen. (Yes you are, pure as an angel!) No, no, I have passions and lusts flaming inside me. (All the better—that means you’re a man! ha-ha laughter full of admiration.) Yes, but what kind of man? One with low, Priapic passions. Priapus, Priapus, exclaimed … I can’t tell you who, she’s a married woman. As for our chaste, white nurse … Acika (indeed a name to sneeze at, he thought in passing), I tried to embrace and kiss her, too, by force, friends and countrymen, because she’s a smashing little muffin, is she not? (Wow, Admiral, you do take the cake!—this in admiration and approval down in the courtyard.)

“You’re not to trust him, good-looking folk, you’re not to trust him!” shouts a voice from above (
deus ex machina
, thinks Melkior). “You’re not to trust him, he’s up to his ears in love—I know him! (Goodbye Viviana, mutters the voice in passing.) Lets on he’s a cynic—and him an honorable man indeed. Eustachius, be our leader! Our admiral!” and the huge black fillings darkened the sky. Ugo’s appealing voice. But what is he doing here? “Exalted Parampion, it’s you!” exclaimed Melkior joyously and heard his voice strangely distant from himself as though it had been an echo exclaiming.

Melkior felt his nose being pulled. He woke up instantly and opened his eyes wide in surprise. Sitting on his bed was a bulky young man in white, his mouth stretched into a make-believe smile, looking at him in a sticky-sweet way, “Good morning” fairly flowing from his ocular liquid.

“Name’s Mitar. Vampire, they call me. Shh, don’t wake ’em up, I got the moniker here in this very room,” whispered the man in white. “It’s all right—I’m just a lab tech, I came for a drop of your blood.”

Melkior thought he was dreaming. “Friends and countrymen,” he said mechanically and propped himself on his elbows to clear his head. They come to suck your blood in your sleep, the vampires … Old wives’ tales. All the same horror slithered up his back.

The others were still asleep, slurping up the last dregs of sleep before morning wake-up. They blew in and out cooperatively at their common task, Hermaphrodite’s lusty snore taking the lead. Melkior heaved a sigh of envy.

“What do you need my blood for?” he said, looking hopelessly at the gray wall in front.

“All right, so you refuse,” Mitar concluded indifferently. “I’ll report that to the Major.”

“I only said, ‘What do you need my blood for?’” Melkior now fully awake. “I haven’t got two thimblefuls in me.”

“I can make do with one,” smiled Mitar sweetly. “But it doesn’t follow that I’m just a lightweight … I do have some say in things. Know what blood work is?”

“No.”

“Well then.”

“Where will you take it from?” Melkior offered him an arm.

“Take it easy. We don’t have to do it right away. Just relax and lie back down.” He cautiously laid Melkior down on his back and covered him up to the chin. He even pushed Melkior’s arms under the covers. “You’re a patient, you must take care of yourself. If you want to get well again, you’ve got to comply. What do you think we’re here for?”

Melkior yielded. He couldn’t understand what this Mitar fellow wanted.

“Well, there you are, you’re saying nothing. Not that you could say anything—it’s true what I said. Everything can be read from your blood: health and disease and malingering. It’s all written in there as in the Bible, your destiny. That’s why it’s called blood work, and that’s where I’m in charge. What I say goes. And there’s no ‘let me see’ or ‘I wonder if’ with me. I give it to you plain: sedimentation rate, Wassermann reading, erythro and leuko counts, bilirubin, the whole kit and kaboodle. And if I mark it all ‘Negative’ and ‘NTR,’ it’s forward march, direction barracks and not even God Himself can get you off.”

Mitar the Vampire made a telling pause. He then brought his broad, greasy face over Melkior and ran his gaze over him: searching for a likely spot to grab.

“Then again, there’s blood work and there’s blood work …” he cast a cautious glance around the other beds and whispered with a kind of considerate contempt: “Sleeping, the weary heroes … It’s like having your picture taken at a photographer’s: you can ask for it to be warts-and-all or you can have it retouched. Now retouching’s no problem, you just leave that to me.”

“Is this expensive?” whispered Melkior conspiratorially.

Mitar seemed not to have heard the question and went on whispering; this time, in what was more like a private lament:

“Oh, oh, what a greedy bastard I am, from head to toe, God strike me! Look at the size of this!” he boastfully displayed his rotund belly with his trouser belt buckled prudently below it, “that’s my lord and master! The only one I serve—the rest can go to hell. It’s grilled meat, grilled meat makes the world go round, as the poet says—and that’s what’s going to bankrupt me, too. Braised heart, grilled liver, lamb chops, mincemeat steak, not to mention tripes on the fatty side … you’ve no idea how much I like gourmet food, God help me! Funnily enough, I don’t go in much for kebab, not even with sour cream—unless it’s tucked into a grilled bread pocket. I’m a big man for young spitted duck, with fat dripping from the tip of its crispy little bum, he, he,” tittered Mitar licking his lips and purring hoarsely: “Grrr … grr … grill grrates, grrill grrates, that’s what the Gypsies shout who hawk them. Find my taste amusing, don’t you? Your shit’s fat-free, right? A piece of boiled fish, an olive or two, that’s more the way you like it, eh? Oh, and Swiss chard, I bet. I can just see your gut piping
ake me back to my home by the sea
…”

One of the sleepers grunted before waking. Mitar quickly got going with his instruments.

“Let’s get this over with, all right?” he whispered in a seemingly casual way, making his preparations.

“Very well, let’s do it,” Melkior proffered his skinny white arm.

“Retouched, am I right?” Mitar tightened the rubber tube around Melkior’s upper arm. “Jeez, not an honest vein in sight. This is going to be tricky,” he said out loud, worriedly shaking his head; as his head moved he whispered hastily: “Fifty up front, the rest when you get your ticket, OK?”

“How much is … the rest?” muttered Melkior all but unintelligibly.

“Well … another hundred fifty. To keep me flush for taking the girlfriend out. She’s into the green liqueurs, damn her … and they are pricey.” He glanced at Melkior’s undecided face. “All right, a hundred, because it’s you—I can see you suffering. Christ, you are a stingy crowd, you types from Dalmatia, strike you … Turds in olive oil! What can you buy for the money? A pair of pajamas, if that …
Chic à la française
and look at you—so damned miserable you can’t take a decent shit. Look at the state of your veins. Two thimblefuls, you say? Hell, you haven’t got enough to give a bedbug a square meal. Things are tough these days, you know,” Mitar spoke in a whisper again. “There’s a war on, man!” he cried sternly, “and we’re in the army, we’ve got to be prepared!” and he gave Melkior a sly wink: he was saying this for the benefit of “the guys.”

“Shall I give you the money now?” whispered Melkior, watching the short deft thievish fingers on his wretched arm where Mitar was poking around for a spot to puncture with the proboscis of his bloodthirsty device.

“Not here. Meet me in the fancy gents after the morning round.”

“What’s the fancy gents?”

“The better-class bathroom, for you cadet types …” He finally found the vein and thrust the needle in quickly, deft, so skillfully that Melkior hardly felt the prick. He saw the thin pink blood follow the cylinder in the syringe, filling the little glass stomach of Mitar the bloodsucker. My blood, Your Majesty … but he felt himself go pale, the joke had barely begun before it melted away in a strange laxity; sleep seemed to be settling on his lids …

“Hey, look,” Mitar gave him a yank, “there’s a pigeon at the window!”

Melkior awoke with effort and looked gullibly at the window. No pigeon, just a gray day. Dove at the window, he uttered with effort, barely moving his lips, driven by memory’s quaint force as if he’d been obliged to say it, and remained so in a state of apathetic immobility, watching the gray patch of sky above the grim wet roofs. “Taken your fiww of bwood, vampiwe?” Hermaphrodite teased Mitar. “I wouldn’t use yours to fertilize my cabbages,” Mitar replied, but Melkior received it all from a great astral distance and it seemed to him that he was hearing not human voices but the cawing of irritated parrots.

What about the lung X-ray? he thought with mixed feelings of sudden joy and an uneasiness which demanded that he stir from the sweet laxity to which he had fully succumbed. I might see her downstairs … while having my lungs x-rayed. And be alone with her.
Alone together—so
what? The phrase was so promising and exciting—and yet so meaningless. At least in a certain sense.
Alone together
meant trying to approach her using excited, inept words—in fact, false words that could rely only on the hands for help. And everything would be fumbling, with both words and hands: the hands impatient and the words deaf, witless, thrown into echoless empty space. She says, “Talk to me,” and what you want at that moment is to seal her mouth with yours, and even if a word or two escapes there is no conversation to it at all. Desire turns you into a stammerer, a quaking imbecile, an epileptic, an impotent lecher, an angry pig, an onanist poet, an abased devotee, a man with no pride. I won’t go and have my lungs x-rayed! Defiantly, Melkior set to thinking about Enka: enter my kingdom, Kior, and he entered with regal triumph, as Kior the Great. Mitar appeared in the doorway.

“I forgot to take your urine sample. Had a piss yet?” He had a glass like a champagne glass in his hand.

“No,” said Melkior, adding to himself: here’s my cup-bearer.

“Come along then, wee-wee for Daddy,” he showed him the glass as bait.