We return to our separate apartments. All I can think about are dwarfs, hunchbacks, cripples. I sleep and dream of dwarfs, deformed and malicious, with sinister slits for smiles. But when I wake, I have the most curious of thoughts. I remember the weight of the dwarf woman"s body against my side as she stuck the sliver into my palm. I remember the smell of her: sweet and sharp, like honeysuckle; the feel of her hand, the fingers lithe and slender; her body beneath the clothes, the way parts do not match and could never match, and yet have unity.
V.
A most peculiar a.s.signment lies on my desk the next morning, so peculiar that I forget my damaged palm. I am to write a sentence about a dwarf. The Director has left a note that I am to complete this sentence ASAP. He has also left me photographs, a series of newspaper articles, and photocopies from a diary. The lead paragraph of the top newspaper article, a sensational bit of work, reads: David "Midge" Jones, 27, a 4-foot-5 dwarf, lived for attention, whether he ate fire at a carnival, walked barefoot on gla.s.s for spectators, or allowed himself to be hurled across a room for a dwarf-throwing contest. Jones yearned for the spotlight. Sunday, he died in the dark. He drank himself to death. Tests showed his blood alcohol level at .43, or four times the level at which a motorist would be charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.
I pick up the glossy color print atop the pile of doc.u.mentation. It shows Jones at the carnival, the film overexposed, his eyes forming red dots against the curling half-smile of his mouth. At either side stand flashy showgirls with tinsel-adorned bikini tops crammed against his face. Jones stares into the camera lens, but the showgirls stare at Jones as though he were some carnival G.o.d. The light on the photograph breaks around his curly brown hair, but not his body, as if a spotlight had been trained on him. He stands on a wooden box, his arms around the showgirls.
The film"s speed is not nearly fast enough to catch the ferris wheel seats spinning crazily behind him, so that light spills into the dazzle of showgirl tinsel, showgirl cleavage. Behind the ferris wheel, blurry sand dunes roll, and beyond that, in the valley between dunes, the sea, like a squinting eye.
The photograph has a sordid quality to it. When I look closer, I see the sheen of sweat on Jones"s face, his flushed complexion. Sand clings to his gnarled arms and his forehead. The lines of his eyes, nose, and mouth seem charcoal pencil rough: a first, hurried sketch.
I turn the photograph over. In the upper right hand corner someone has written: David Jones, September 19-. The Amazing Mango Brothers Seaside Circus and Carnival Extravaganza.He cleaned out animal cages and gave 50 cent b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs behind the Big Top.
Jones is a brutish man. I want nothing to do with him. Yet I must write a sentence about him for a client I will never meet. I must capture David Jones in a single sentence.
I read the rest of the article, piecemeal.
In his most controversial job, Jones ignored criticism, strapped on a modified dog harness, and allowed burly men to hurl him across a room in a highly publicized dwarf-throwing contest at the King"s Head Pub.
"I"m a welder, which can be dangerous. But welders are frequently laid off, so I also work in a circus. I eat fire, I walk on broken gla.s.s with bare feet. I climb a ladder made of swords, I lie on a bed of nails and have tall people stand on me. This job is easy compared to what I usually do."
I spend many hours trying to form a sentence, while sweat drips down my neck despite the slow swish of fans. I work through lunch, distracted only by a dwarf juggler (plying his trade with six knives and a baby) who has wrested the traffic circle away from a group of guildless mimes and town players.
I begin simply.
The dwarf"s life was tragic.
No.
David Jones" life was tragic.
No.
David"s life was unnecessarily tragic.
Unnecessarily tragic? Tragedy does not waste time with the extraneous. A man"s life cannot be reduced to a Latinesque, one-line, eleven-syllable haiku. How do I identify with David? Did he ever spend time in an orphanage? Did he ever find himself on a beach, his parents dead and never coming back? How hard can it have been to be an anomaly, a misfit, a mistake?
Then my imagination unlocks a phrase from some compartment of my brain: David left the flesh in tragic fashion.
Again, my palm distracts me, but not as much. I see all the imperfections there and yet they do not seem as ugly as before. David may be ugly, but I am not ugly.
As I drive home in the sour, exhaust-choked light of dusk, I admire the oaks that line the boulevard, whorled and wind-scored and yet stronger and more soothing to the eye than the toothpick pines, the straight spruce.
VI.
By now the plants have conquered my apartment in the name of CO 2, compost, and photosynthesis. I let them wander like rejects from "50s B-grade vegetable movies, ensuring that Emily will never stay for long. The purple and green pa.s.sionflowers, stinking of s.e.x, love the couch with gentle tendrils. The splash-red bougainvillea cat-cradles the kitchen table, then creeps toward the refrigerator and pulls on the door, thorns making a scratchy sound. Along with this invasion come the scavengers, the albino geckos that resemble swirls of mercury or white chocolate. I have no energy to evict them.
No, I sit in a chair, in underwear weathered pink by the whimsical permutations of the wash cycle, and read by the blue glow of the mute TV screen.
David grew up in Dalsohme, a bustling but inconsequential port town on the Gulf side of the Moth River Delta. His parents, Jemina and Simon Pultin, made their living by guiding tourists through the bayous in flatbottom boats. Simon talked about installing a gla.s.s bottom to improve business, but Jemina argued that no one would want to see the murky waters of a swamp under a microscope, so to speak. Instead, they supplemented their income by netting catfish and prawns. David was good at catching catfish, but Jemina and Simon preferred to have him work the pole on the boat because the tourists often gawked at him as much as at the scenery. It was Jemina"s way of improving business without giving in to Simon"s gla.s.s-bottom boat idea. Some of the doc.u.ments the Director gave me suggested that Simon had adopted David precisely for the purpose of manning the boat. There is no record of what David thought of all of this, but at age fifteen he "ran away from home and joined a circus." He did whatever he had to on the carnival circuit in order to survive, including male prost.i.tution, but apparently never saved enough money to quit, though his schemes became grander and more complex.
"Most little people think the world owes them something because they"re little. Most little people got this idea they should be treated special. Well, the world doesn"t owe us anything. G.o.d gave us a rough way to go, that"s all."
Soon the words blur on the page. Under the flat, aqua glow, the wound in my palm seems smaller but denser, etched like a biological Rosetta Stone. The itch, though, grows daily. It grows like the plants grow. It spreads into the marrow of my bones and I can feel it infiltrating whatever part of me functions as a soul.
That night I dream that we are all "pure energy," like on those old future-imperfect cardboard-and-glue s.p.a.ce journey episodes where the budget demanded pure energy as a subst.i.tute for makeup and genuine costumes. Just golden spheres of light communing together, mind to mind, soul to soul. A world without prejudice because we have, none of us, a body that can lie to the world about our ident.i.ty.
VII.
The day my parents left me for the sea, the winter sky gleamed bone-white against the gray-blue water. The cold chaffed my fingers and dried them out. My father took off one of his calfskin gloves so my hand could touch his, still sweaty from the glove. His weight, solid and warm, anch.o.r.ed me against the wind as we walked down to the pier and the ship. Above the ship"s masts, frigate birds with throbbing red throats let the wind buffet them until they no longer seemed to fly, but to sit, stationary, in the air.
My mother walked beside me as well, holding her hat tightly to her head. The hem of her sheepskin coat swished against my jacket. A curiously fresh, clean smell, like mint or vanilla, followed her and when I breathed it in, the cold retreated for a little while.
"It won"t be for long," my father said, his voice descending to me through layers of cold and wind.
I shivered, but squeezed his hand. "I know."
"Good. Be brave."
"I will."
Then my mother said, "We love you. We love you and wish you could come with us. But it"s a long journey and a hard one and no place for a little boy."
My mother leaned down and kissed me, a flare of cold against my cheek. My father knelt, held both my hands, and looked me up and down with his flinty gray eyes. He hugged me against him so I was lost in his windbreaker and his chest. I could feel him trembling just as I was trembling.
"I"m scared," I said.
"Don"t be. We"ll be back soon. We"ll come back for you. I promise."
They never did. I watched them board the ship, a smile frozen to my face. It seems as though I waited so long on the pier, watching the huge sails catch the wind as the ship slid off into the wavery horizon, that snowflakes gathered on my eyes and my clothes, the cold air biting into my shoulder blades.
I do not remember who took me from that place, nor how long I really stood there, nor even if this represents a true memory, but I hold onto it with all my strength.
Later, when I found out my parents had died at sea, when I understood what that meant, I sought out the farthest place from the sea and I settled here.
VIII.
At the office, I have so much work to do that I am able to forget my palm. I stare for long minutes at the sentence I have written on my notepad: David was leaving the flesh.
What does it mean?
I throw away the sentence, but it lingers in my mind and distracts me from my other work. Finally, I break through with a sentence describing a woman"s grief that her boyfriend has left her and she is growing old: She sobs like the endless rain of late winter, without pa.s.sion or the hope of relief, just a slow drone of tears.
As I write it, I begin to cry: wrenching sobs that make my throat ache and my eyes sting. My fellow workers glance at me, shrug, and continue at their work. But I am not crying because the sentence is too perfect. I am crying because I have encapsulated something that should not be encapsulated in a sentence. How can my client want me to write this?
IX.
Emily visits me at lunchtime. She visits me often during the day, but our nights have been crisscrossed, sometimes on purpose, I feel.
We go to the same park and now we feel out of place, in the minority. Everywhere I look dwarfs walk to lunch, drive cars, mend benches. All of them like individual palm prints, each one so unique that next to them Emily appears plain.
"Something has happened to you." She looks into my eyes as she says this and I read a certain vulnerability into her words.
"Something has happened to me. I have a wound in my palm."
"It"s not the wound. It"s the plants out of control. It"s the s.e.x. It"s everything. You know it as well as me."
Emily is always right, on the mark, in the money. I am beginning to tire of such perfection. I feel a part of me break inside.
"You don"t understand," I say.
"I understand that you cannot handle responsibility. I understand that you are having problems with this relationship."
"I"ll talk to you later," I say and I leave her, speechless, on the bench.
X.
After lunch, I think I know where my center lies: it lies in the sentence I must create for David Jones. It is in the sentence and in me. But I don"t want to write anything perfect. I don"t want to. I want to work without a net. I want to write rough, with emotion that stings, the words themselves dangling off into an abyss. I want to find my way back to the sea with the darkness coming down and the briny scent in my nostrils, before I knew my parents were dead. Before I was born.
David Jones found his way. If a person drinks too much alcohol, the body forces the stomach to vomit the alcohol before it can reach a lethal level. Jones never vomited. As he slept, the alcohol seeped into his bloodstream and killed him.
My shaking fingers want to perform ridiculous pratfalls, rolling over in complex loop-the-loops and cul-de-sacs of language. Or suicide sentences, mouthing sentiments from the almost dead to the definitely dead. Instead, I write: From birth, David was learning ways to leave the flesh.
It is nothing close to layered prose. It has no subtlety to it. But now I can smell the slapping waves of the sea and the alluring stench of pa.s.sionflower fruit.
Before I leave for my apartment, Emily calls me. I do not take the call. I am too busy wondering when my parents knew they might die, and if they thought of me as the wind and the water conspired to take them. I wish I had been with them, had gone down with them, in their arms, with the water in our mouths like ambrosia.
XI.
When I open my apartment door, I hear the scuttling of a hundred sticky toes. The refrigerator"s surface writhes with milk-white movement against the dark green of leaves. In another second I see that the white paint is instead the sinuous shimmer-dance of the geckos, their camouflage perfect as they scramble for cover. I open the refrigerator and take out a wine cooler; my feet crunch down on a hundred molting gecko skins, the sound like dead leaves, or brittle cicada chrysalises.
I sit in my underwear and contemplate my wound by the TV"s redemptive light. It has healed itself so completely that I can barely find it. The itching, however, has intensified, until I feel it all over, inside me. Nothing holds my interest on my palm except the exquisite imperfections: the gradations of colors, the rough pliable feel of it, the scratches from Emily"s cat.
I walk into the bedroom and ease myself beneath the covers of my bed. I imagine I smell the sea, a salt breeze wafting through the window. The stars seem like pieces of jagged gla.s.s ready to fall onto me. I toss in my bed and cannot sleep. I lie on my stomach. I lie on my side. The covers are too hot, but when I strip them away, my body becomes too cold. The water I drank an hour ago has settled in my stomach like a smooth, aching stone.
Finally, the cold keeps me half-awake and I prop myself sleepily against the pillow. I hear voices outside and see flashes of light from the window, like a ferris wheel rising and falling. But I do not get up.
Then he stands at the foot of my bed, staring at me. A cold blue tint dyes his flesh, as if the TV"s glow has sunburned him. The marble cast of his face is as perfect as the most perfect sentence I have ever written in my life. His eyes are so sad that I cannot meet his gaze; his face holds so many years of pain, of wanting to leave the flesh. He speaks to me and although I cannot hear him, I know what he is saying. I am crying again, but softly, softly. The voices on the street are louder and the tinkling of bells so very light.
And so I discard my big-body skin and my huge hands and my ungainly height and I walk out of my apartment with David Jones, to join the carnival under the moon, by the seash.o.r.e, where none of us can hurt or be hurt anymore.
[Article excerpts taken from newspaper accounts in 1988 and 1989 by Michael Koretzky in The Independent Florida Alligator and by Ronald DuPont Jr. in The Gainesville Sun.]
THE AMBERGRIS GLOSSARY.
A AANDALAY, ISLE OF. The mythic homeland of the piratical Aan Tribes. According to the tales of the Aan, the Southern Hemisphere once consisted of a single landma.s.s, the Isle of Aandalay, populated solely by the happy, peaceful Children of Aan. Only after a great cataclysm-the nature of which varies more from tale to tale than the weather in that part of the world-shattered the Isle into a thousand pieces did the Aan become warlike, each faction certain they possessed the mandate for restoration of a united Isle of Aandalay. Thus did piracy become rationalized as a quest for a homeland. Some Aan even attacked the mainland, claiming it was merely a huge splinter exiled from their beloved Isle. See also: Calabrian Calendar.
ABRASIS, MICHAEL. The first head librarian of the Manzikert Memorial Library. Abrasis is best known for his collection of erotic literature and lithographs. When he died, in his sleep, his body could not at first be removed from his apartment because the piles of p.o.r.nography had blocked the only route from bed to door. Oddly enough, by the time Abrasis" relatives came to collect his things, the apartment had been picked clean. Abrasis bred prize-winning cababari in his spare time. See also: Cababari; Manzikert Memorial Library.
ALb.u.mUTH BOULEVARD. A rather famous thoroughfare cutting through the heart of Ambergris. The site of both the Borges Bookstore and the headquarters of Hoegbotton & Sons, Alb.u.muth Boulevard has long been privy to the inner workings of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. During the civil disturbances of the Reds and the Greens, Alb.u.muth Boulevard served as the main battlefield. Certainly the recent armed struggle between Hoegbotton"s publishing arm and the inscrutable Frankwrithe & Lewden could not have occurred without the events that first unfolded on the boulevard. No one can agree on the origin of the name "Alb.u.muth," or on the limits of the boulevard. As Sirin once said, "Like the Moth, Alb.u.muth Boulevard has a thousand tributaries and streams, so that, ultimately, who can determine its boundaries or the limits of its influence?" See also: Borges Bookstore; Cappers; Frankwrithe& Lewden; Greens; Reds; Sirin.
ALFAR. The ruins of Alfar form, with Zamilon, the only recorded instances of a particular architectural style reminiscent of gray cap buildings. Most structures at both Alfar and Zamilon have been constructed as circles within circles. Alfar, like Zamilon, is of unknown origin, but an additional peculiar tale is told by shepherds in both places: that, on certain nights, Alfar and Zamilon glow iridescent green and red, a sheen that spreads and intensifies so slowly that observers cannot at first recognize the change, but finally cannot doubt the evidence of their eyes. No one has as yet confirmed this claim independently, nor has anyone thought to time these "eruptions" of color, one to the other. What would it mean if Alfar and Zamilon became luminous on the same nights? See also: Busker, Alan; Nysman, Michael; Zamilon.
AMBERGRIS. In folklore, a marbled substance often found on the seash.o.r.e and thought to be a "sea mushroom." Actually produced in the intestine of whales, ambergris can only be created when partially-digested squid beaks are present in the whale"s system. Whalers long sought ambergris for use as an aphrodisiac, in perfumes, and as a folk medicine. Since the founding of the city of Ambergris, however, the popularity of the substance has decreased dramatically. The Truffidian Antechambers discontinued the habit of anointing their ears, eyebrows, and armpits with a tincture of ambergris before holiday sermons. The Kalif no longer eats raw ambergris to stimulate virility, subst.i.tuting live snails. Male rats, however, still enter a s.e.xual frenzy when they smell ambergris. See also: Kalif, The; Moonrat; Rats.
AMBERGRISIAN GASTRONOMIC a.s.sOCIATION. Founded during the days of Trillian the Great Banker, the AGA has published a number of books, including One Thousand Squid Recipes and Experiments with Different Types of Grease. The a.s.sociation achieved a degree of notoriety by uncovering the lost ingredients for Oliphaunt"s Delight: 1 pound of cherries, 17 pounds of freshwater squid, 20 gallons of goat"s milk, 5 pounds of fish paste (preferably flounder) and 1 ounce of asparagus. See also: Oliphaunt, The.
AMBERGRISIAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. Completely unlike the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. The most adventure this group has seen is undercooked flounder at the annual Ambergrisian Historical Society Ball and the occasional paper cut (sweet red relief from boredom!) opening mail sent by similar dullards located in Morrow and Stockton. See also: Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society.
AMBERGRISIANS FOR THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS SOCIETY. Completely unlike the Ambergrisian Historical Society. Never has membership in a historical society been so fraught with peril. Every two or three years, another few members succ.u.mb to the temptation to pry open a manhole cover and go spelunking amongst the sewer drains. Inevitably, someone gets stuck in a culvert and the others go for help, or the gray caps, presumably, catch them and they disappear forever. One imagines the hapless AFTOIS members waving their official membership cards at the approaching, unimpressed gray caps. When not conspiring to commit a.s.sisted suicide, the AFTOIS publishes The Real History Newsletter. See also: Cappers; Martigan, Red; Real History Newsletter, The.
B BANFOURS, ARCH DUKE OF. Best known for being the first to bombard Ambergris with cannon fire. He ruled Ambergris for exactly 21 days. While sitting at a sidewalk cafe, surrounded by his bodyguards, a waiter casually walked up behind him and slit his throat. There appears to have been no particular motivation for the a.s.sa.s.sination except for the usual engrained Ambergrisian dislike of foreigner interlopers. See also: Occupation, The.
BANKER WARRIORS. This sect, comprising the most feared of Trillian"s followers, grew out of the predations of highway robbery. Due to the rise of the merchant cla.s.ses, large quant.i.ties of money had to be physically moved from one city to another. Generally, a banker"s representative accompanied this transfer. Early transfers met with disaster. After years of robberies and payoffs to avoid robberies, the position of banker"s representative evolved from paper-pusher to hardened veteran of weapons" training. By the time Trillian rose to power through the Ambergrisian banking system, the banker representatives had become a powerful, feared security force. Trillian himself named them the Banker Warriors and used them to consolidate his hold over Ambergris. Also influential in repelling attacks by the Kalif. Eventually a.s.similated into the Ambergris Defense Force, at which time women were excluded from partic.i.p.ation. Several of these women (including the noted strategist Rebecca Gort, munitions expert Kathleen Lynch, and fencing master Susan d.i.c.kerson) founded their own chain of banks, bought several other businesses, and moved to Morrow, where they became the core of the most feared security force on the continent. The Ambergris Defense Force, on the other hand, perished to the last man during the Kalif"s invasion. See also: Frankwrithe & Lewden; Gort, Marmey; Kalif, The; Occupation, The; Trillian, The Great Banker.
BEDLAM ROVERS. A southern ethnic group, known for living on house boats and incorporated at an early date into the Saphant Empire. These mystics thrived after the collapse of the empire, adopting their nomadic aquatic life to the River Moth and turning their seasonal perambulations into a lucrative business. Cloaking their mysterious religious tendencies in a veneer of the rational and scientific, the Rovers have developed a reputation as experts on madness and cast themselves in the role of "psychiatrists," much to the dismay of the mental health establishment in Ambergris. The Rovers" riverboats, topped with a mult.i.tude of light blue flags and crowded with mentally unstable customers, usually arrive in Ambergris for a fresh batch of patients the week after the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. See also: Festival of the Freshwater Squid, The; Saphant Empire, The.
BENDER, VOSS. A composer of operas, requiems, and minor rhymes, who, for a period of time, transcended his status as a cultural icon to become a politician and the unoffi cial ruler of Ambergris. His suspicious death sp.a.w.ned a civil war between the Greens, his most fanatical followers, and the Reds, his most fervent enemies. Famous for his defiant speech to the merchant barons during which he exclaimed, "Art always transforms money!" His many operas include The Tragedy of John & Sophia, The King Underground,Hymns for the Dead, Wilted As the Flower Lay, and his masterpiece, Trillian. Bender wrote an autobiography, Memoirs of a Composer, which contains more information on his early life. See also: Greens; Midnight for Munfroe; Nunk, Autarch of; Reds.
BIBBLE, MAXWELL. The owner of a restaurant supply business who changed careers at age 35 to become an art critic. Bibble"s specialty was deep psychological profiles of artists based solely on their artwork. Best known for his misguided and fatuous attempts to identify MartinLake as a member of a squid cult. For a time, Bibble was one of the most influential of the critics a.s.sociated with the New Art movement, although he was unpopular with most New Artists. However, he died in poverty, using copies of his reviews to feed a fire during one of Ambergris" freak cold spells. The sculptor William Blaze took a plaster cast of Bibble"s body, pasted his reviews on the outside of the cast, and exhibited the piece as "The Exhaustion of Criticism"-thereby reviving interest in Bibble"s writings. See also: New Art, The.
BLGKKYDKS, HECKIRA. A Haragck military officer today best known for his oil paintings of remote landscapes. He often painted during campaigns and thus the paintings also have historical significance. The night before the Haragck amphibious a.s.sault on Ambergris, he completed preliminary sketches for a piece he intended to call "The Sack of Ambergris." During the ensuing rout, these sketches came into the possession of the Ambergris navy. For 20 years they were displayed at the MorhaimMuseum, but the trader Michael Hoegbotton found them so compelling that, after the Haragck had largely faded as a political/cultural force, he paid Blgkkydks to live in Ambergris for a year to complete the actual painting. Poverty-stricken, the old general reluctantly agreed, but fell so in love with Ambergris that he lived out his remaining years there. He eventually became a fixture of Alb.u.muth Boulevard, his craggy visage and rickety easel noted on tourist maps of the period. See also: Grnnck, Haragck Khan; MorhaimMuseum.
BORGES BOOKSTORE. The oldest purveyor of printed words in Ambergris, thrice during its long history burned to the ground. Founded by and named after the Nicean brothers Bormund and Gestrand Kubtek, the Borges Bookstore has served many political and social functions over the years. During the conflict between the Reds and the Greens, Bender sympathizers hid in its bas.e.m.e.nt. Before Festivals, patrons can book "reading slots" along its shelves, for it is well known that the gray caps will not pa.s.s the threshold. The westerner Kamal Bakar witnessed the third fire, set by looters during the 300th Festival of the Freshwater Squid, one of the worst in memory: "The sky was darkened by the smoke from the books; burned pages floated up into the air and fluttered back down again like a black snowfall all over the city. Those who caught a sheet could feel the heat and fleetingly read what had the strange appearance of a black-and-white dagguereotype. Once the heat had dissipated, the pages crumbled away between our fingers." See also: Alb.u.muth Boulevard; Bender, Voss; Burning Leaves; Festival of the Freshwater Squid; Greens; Reds.
BRUEGHEL, MICHAEL. John Manzikert"s nemesis eventually united the islands of the Aan despite several times coming close to total defeat. During his 50 years of rule, Brueghel not only annihilated the Kalif"s troops in three historic naval battles, forever relegating the Kalif"s ambitions to the continent, but also established an oligarchic form of government that served the Aan well for the next three generations. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to collect the remnants of the Saphant Empire under his aegis, preserving scientific and cultural advances that would otherwise have been lost. In later years, descendents of Brueghel, calling themselves Brueghelites, would seize large portions of the River Moth to the south of Ambergris and threaten Ambergrisian autonomy. See also: Calabrian Calendar; Kalif, The; Salt.w.a.ter Buzzard; Saphant Empire, The.
BUBBABAUNCE, BARON. The real name of the circus performer "Bauble." See also: h.e.l.latose & Bauble; Kodfan, M.; Madnok, Frederick .
BURNING LEAVES. A controversial arts journal, known for publishing macabre, disturbing fictions and ill.u.s.trations. Published by the Borges Bookstore until the editors printed their infamous Black Tract, which included a perverse "map" of Voss Bender"s naked body, diagramming the various worth of different parts and with short-short stories written about each part (most infamous: Sporlender"s "Tree with Nuts"). Since then, the journal has been funded entirely by advertising and newsstand sales. Burning Leaves published the first works by such future luminaries as Louis Verden, Nicholas Sporlender, MartinLake, and Janice Shriek, as well as the obscene mechanical diagrams of the eccentric inventor known simply as Porfal. The premiere issue featured Corvid Quork"s short story "The Madness of Bird Masks." See also: Bender, Voss; Borges Bookstore; Sporlender, Nicholas.
EXHIBIT 1: THE ORIGINAL COVER OF BURNING LEAVES, VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1; ON DISPLAY IN THE MORHAIMMUSEUM"S "HISTORY OF SOUTHERN PERIODICALS" WING.
BUSKER, ALAN. Busker, long known as a fanatical (and often quite critical) traveler in both the north and south, may also have been a spy for the Kingdom of Morrow. Certainly, there was a time when Busker"s travels among the northern cities resulted in disaster-Stockton, Belezar, Dovetown, and Tratnor all fell to Morrow shortly after Busker"s visits to them. Most famous for attempting to enter the Kalif"s HolyCity by impersonating the Kalif himself. Some historians believe Busker spent a number of months in Alfar and Zamilon, his other journeys undertaken to provide cover for his true activities-research into the link between the gray caps and the monks of Zamilon. See also: Alfar; Kalif, The; Stockton; Zamilon.
C CABABARI. Long-snouted, foul-smelling, fungus-eating, dirt-seeking pigs instrumental in the ouster of Trillian the Great Banker as ruler of Ambergris. See also: Fungus; Trillian the Great Banker.
CALABRIAN CALENDAR. A wonder of inefficiency that used an estimated count of the various islands the Isle of Aandalay had fragmented into as the number of days in its year. Months were named after the nearly unp.r.o.nounceable monikers of old Aan leaders, but the names of months changed as new leaders rose and fell, with the result that many Aan towns employed month-tellers whose sole function was to untangle the knots of names. Making the situation more confusing, each group of Aan on each island began to name their months differently. The charts created by the month-finders began to dwarf those used by mathematicians and mapmakers. Several wars were fought over the allocation of days and months, including the famous War of the Three-Day Weekend, which left over 10,000 people forever unable to enjoy even a one-day weekend. Eventually, under the rule of Michael Brueghel, a reunited Aan people sc.r.a.pped the Calabrian Calendar altogether in favor of the Kalif"s calendar, itself based on the old Saphant Empire"s calendar. Thousands of month-finders had to seek out other careers. Their color-coded charts still reside in many wealthy art collectors" mansions, although the largest collection can be found in the MorhaimMuseum. See also: Aandalay, Isle of; Brueghel, Michael; MorhaimMuseum.
CAPPERS. Individuals hired to clean the sewers. The profession requires nerve and cunning, due to the likelihood of encountering gray caps. The most dangerous duty involves rolling a huge metal-and-wood ball down the main stretch of Ambergris sewer, which runs roughly the length of Alb.u.muth Boulevard. The purpose of rolling the ball (nicknamed "The Monster") -an invention of Porfal"s-is to remove all impediments from the sewer. Sometimes, those rolling the ball will be surprised by a semi-crushed but still deadly piece of fungus or gray cap. The leaders of capper teams are called "martigans." See also: Alb.u.muth Boulevard; Martigan, Red; Monster, The; Porfal.
CAROLINE OF THE CHURCH OF THE SEVEN-POINTED STAR. A heretic from Nicea who left the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star to found her own religion. Unlike the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star, the Church of the Seven-Pointed Star believed that G.o.d had seven points rather than seven edges. Therefore, rather than worshipping the journey toward self-realization symbolized by the edges, they worshipped the goals of self-realization as symbolized by the points. The specific points Caroline adhered to were: celibacy (during certain times of the year, if absolutely necessary), truth, beauty, self-realization, self-worth, love of others, and good hygiene (in some translations from the sacred text, literally, "negation of body odor through soapy immersions"). Adherents to the Church of the Seven-Pointed Star used swords with sharp points but no edge, while the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star used swords with sharp edges but no point. Alas, edges proved superior to points in most battles fought in the streets of Nicea. Caroline"s followers were forced to either commit sacrilege and switch to edges, or become meals for the ever-present salt.w.a.ter buzzard. Proving, one could say, the point of the edges. See also: Mikal, Dray; Salt.w.a.ter Buzzard.
CHURCH OF THE FISHERMAN. Fish worshippers who abstain from eating "our watery brethren" but attain religious ecstasy by catching them and setting them free. Although the Odecca Bichoral White Whale is a mammal not a fish, the biology-challenged adherents of this religion have made it the centerpiece of their spiritual life. The high priest, or Fish Head, delivers his sermons from a lopsided marble altar chiseled to resemble the whale"s head. Of late, Church of the Fisherman worshippers have been implicated in a series of crimes, from stealing dead fish on display at the markets and releasing them back into the River Moth, to freeing Odecca whales from the Daffed Zoo. See also: Citizen Fish Campaign; Daffed Zoo; Odecca Bichoral White Whale.
CITIZEN FISH CAMPAIGN. A practical joke, staged by the writer Sirin, seeking to replace the current Truffidian Antechamber with a stinking, five-day-old freshwater ba.s.s during the Holy Elections (held every decade). Sirin and his New Art friends created campaign posters featuring the dead ba.s.s, delivered stirring speeches in its name, and paraded the candidate around Ambergris on a cart. When the dead fish placed second as a write-in candidate in a field of eight, Sirin and his cohorts had to flee the city for a short period due to threats of physical violence. Groups offended included the Truffidian priesthood and the Church of the Fisherman (which felt Sirin"s real aim was to ridicule the fish they held sacred). See also: Church of the Fisherman; New Art, The; Sirin.
COOKS OF KALAY. A clan of professional cooks who lived in the far western reaches of the Kalif"s Empire, near the mountain fortress of Kalay. During frequent famines, these cooks learned to prepare meals from such unlikely items of sustenance as shoe leather, belts, gra.s.s, flowers, shirts, dirt, earthworms, and insects. Such was their prowess, according to legend, that when the famines pa.s.sed, people still came to Kalay just to eat dirt. They became so famous that the Kalif forcibly transplanted the entire family to his palace at Vonaril, where they still languish, forced for generation after generation to cater to the Kalif"s every craving for a midnight dinner or afternoon snack. See also: Kalif, The.