Fiction: Short Stories & Excerpts by Robert Fuller

Close Call, by Robert Fuller

Hey, next time before you stare too long in the mirror, remember what I’ve always told you. I can see you’ve already forgotten. We talked about whispering. It was while you walked backward through your memories, on some deserted beach, in some forgotten place, either alone or with some imagined companion conjured up out of your own gaze. I thought it was because you were utterly entranced with your own likeness. So actually, it may have been you walking with yourself, muttering occasional expletives that the other you happened to overhear, at least until the pristine beach gave way to an impassable wall of rocks.

As you may recall, once the rocks materialized, you remembered the whispering, even though it was too late. They carried you away to a desolate place, because one of your selves was muttering excessively to your other self. If you’d been whispering, you wouldn’t now be in such a place of desolation, since they would have overlooked you. I can see you now, I can visualize the small room barren of all humanity, bereft of all except a bed and a mirror.

It is the mirror that now occupies you endlessly.

I don’t remember how you managed to get your keepers to allow you to receive outside communications, but I know it’s only been a few months, even though you were admitted to your small room many years ago.

Even so, once the channels of communication were open, you didn’t immediately respond to those who tried to contact you. I think you were probably a bit apprehensive, and you certainly didn’t trust your keepers to any great extent.

I don’t think you’ve ever contacted me directly, and, in fact, I don’t have any hard evidence that you’ve actually received my communications. I can only see—or imagine—you continually, ceaselessly polishing the glass in front of you, almost as if you wanted to polish it away into nothing. And whenever you aren’t polishing the glass, I can visualize you alternately admiring and then glaring at your own likeness, in a state of perpetual confusion about it, sometimes caressing it, and at other times sending it nothing but vitriol.

You have insinuated that your keepers hardly ever concern themselves with you, and, in fact, they are only there to ensure that you are well enough nourished. They are keeping you alive, bodily, nothing else.

I would have thought that your keepers would have presented themselves for your rehabilitation, at least on occasion, but, on the contrary, they’ve willingly left you and your other you—the one that you can now admire or curse so thoughtlessly in the mirror—to do as you please, as if the reason for your imprisonment were, after all that you’ve gone through, of no account.

But the mirror: that is in fact your beginning and your end, and this is in truth why you want to grind it away into oblivion—it is because you will yourself cease to be, that is, finally, irrevocably, you will send yourself, and your now disappeared other self, mysteriously to be conjoined forever, horizontally, to your small room’s own bed of endless night.

These newfangled phones! I’ve never seen this model before. It seems to be some sort of closed circuit. Almost as if one were talking to oneself...

February 9, 2013

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The Set, by Robert Fuller (excerpt—18.)

The little boy’s crayons had been working overtime, meanwhile, some of them almost drawn down right down to the nub, to the point where it was just about time to call in reinforcements. Fortunately, right about then, a playmate of his, a little girl just a few months older than him, marched right up to his lair, wearing a tiny daypack that was just chock full of goodies. In one hand she carried a small musical instrument case.

Darling that she was, she must have known of his passion for expressing himself in the visual arena, and she’d gone to the trouble, hadn’t she, well it wasn’t any trouble at all, actually, no it wasn’t, of procuring a deluxe set, bordering on the ultimate in color fun and excitement, just for him, and it seemed to him once he managed to open up his new treasure trove that some of those colors he’d never seen before, and he wondered at them, he just wondered: how could colors such as these even exist? A leaf swirled into his lap.

Now when he looked down at the scrap of paper he’d just been filling up, and back up at his newly-begotten toybox, he was a bit crestfallen, because it was so clear now that it was a drab, miserly color scheme he’d chosen, one that didn’t at all match up with the majesty of the subject matter, in fact, all of the lines and angles themselves were suspect, so much so that they appeared to be cowering in the shadows, each one trying to hide under each other’s blankets, pleats, puckers, skirts, quilts, and comforters, hoping against hope now that they would remain unheeded, transparent, invisible, camouflaged by the bumps and striations and other imperfections in the very texture of the paper itself.

She had to chide and berate him, even rib him just a wee bit for what she perceived to be a mild tantrum, mind you not more than a two, if that, on her private richter scale, and merely yet another sorry example of an artist being his own worst critic. Once she had had a chance to present her case to him fully, she was certain he would never again impose on himself such a harsh and undeserved judgment and sentence. She pointed out to him demurely that if he were to look carefully enough at his drawing, preferably before he had endeavored to rip it entirely to shreds, he would soon realize that his chosen color schemes, while not necessarily nearly as vibrant or neon as some of the more obviously dazzling, eye-catching, bold, showy, ostentatious, gaudy, garish, lurid, loud, jazzy, flashy, rococo pointy-tipped characters she’d hooked him up with by means of the cutting-edge, razzle-dazzle, hocus-pocus devilry of an artist’s palette in a box, perhaps of the pandora variety, that she’d just bequeathed him, they were nevertheless true to life.

She pointed to numerous places in the drawing where he’d not only gotten the tint or dye of someone’s old dutch or petit goatee just perfect, whether the bristles were uniform, piebald, or salt-and-pepper in nature, but he’d clearly nailed the texture, not only of the stubble, but also of any pockmarks, dimples, blotches, ruddiness, pimples, freckles, lines, wrinkles, or blemishes that he may have been faced with. He daydreamed of barks, water.

And he should have been much more receptive to the sensitivity and suppleness evidenced in the banners, streamers, and confetti that she pointed to, in a grand cabaret sweep of her small hand, which covered a large swath of the loftier regions of the canvas, mostly in cosmopolitan tricolor, but with flecks of liberty green showing through just so, all nicely geometrically arranged as if by divine decree. And did he think for a moment that she was unaware of the infinite detail he’d bestowed in jest upon each little banderole in turn? Why, if you gazed attentively enough, you could even make out the basic gist of what was written on each one, even if you weren’t well-versed enough in any of the languages to be completely proficient in any of them. Locks of hair drifted down-canal.

The constable, just back from a smoke break, looked on with interest, and began to wear the onset of a mischievous grin, as he could see that the boy’s heart was back in it.

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A Feast for the Senses, by Robert Fuller (excerpt)

Dreaming without rain droplets. The rain had subsided. How to dream it back?

Paige, who also doubled as sous chef, had sensed that with a new set of flavors in the mix, it might turn out that the extra pungency and zest could well seed new clouds within their dream.

In the gallery there were several goblets that Smith—Alma, to be sure—had so gracefully adorned with prayer plants, stromanthe, so artfully, such that if you looked just so at those vessels, you could even sense the leaves furling and unfurling, and then, at daybreak, following the sun.

Just then, the sous chef arrived with yet more delectables—garnished as they were with the yellow flowers and trefoil leaf cuttings of the pickle plant, to add just a touch more of the bitter to the baked dish she’d just now dreamed up—which had been carefully spooned into bowls decorated with cave painting images mainly set in the red-orange-yellow range of the spectrum.

These yummies were a variant of truffled mac and cheese, done up with penne pasta cooked in water laced with clam juice, cayenne pepper, lemon salt, ancho chili powder, and herbes de Provence, as well as a generous helping of clams, and drizzled with fish sauce, then drained and baked for a full hour, with a soft melt of black truffle goat cheese added for the final ten minutes.

There was a general hubbub, not right when Paige brought in all those toothsome savories, but only a bit thereafter, once all the mouths in the gallery had settled so piquantly into all the rich, luscious succulence that had been captured by her within her latest culinary experiment.

Almost simultaneously, like clockwork, our brewster Esther brought in trays of small tasters of her newest hefe, with extra wedges of lemon for anyone who might care to add a bit more sour.

Suddenly, a cloud of ester-like aromas: strawberry, apple, banana, pear, pineapple, durian.

Then, a while before the pièce de résistance—the bouillabaisse—the improv show continued.

Paige and Esther—the aromas had by then dissipated—had agreed to team up, to woman up, on the bouillabaisse, which, with subtle hints of cayenne and saffron, was certain to please.

Alma, meanwhile, she had lined up some of her most enticing, enchanting glass casts of a variety of ocean prey, the ultimate catch, visually and sensorily, angled and trawled, extracted and retrieved, and then blown, via blowpipe, into various sea creatures, all set, mirrored, as glassfish.

And they mirrored themselves all around the gallery, repeating and reflecting, sending their own images throughout the whole space of it. And then, just as suddenly as it had almost been forgotten, the play again began, the players all geared up in masks: set to enjoy the impending feast after words, given to eat and to drink, to all possible merriment before the end of their days.

So it was, with sea robin, monkfish, john dory, slipper lobster, velvet crab, sea urchin, vive.

A sea change, then, set to musics of poissons d’or, other minds, obscured by masques, the tragicomedy of existence, house of mirrors with no exit, reflets dans l’eau, bells through the leaves.

Ward in the hospital, une barque sur l’océan: two crabs, two lovers, two thistles, two women in the moor, the woods, the brothel, with trees in blossom, with irises in the foreground, the painter on his way to work, in the courtyard of the hospital, willows at sunset, two red herrings.

Three magpie harlequin cats, a Persian, a Tiffanie, and an exotic shorthair, well, they had until now been either preening themselves, or otherwise luxuriantly napping, hibernating, or couch surfing. Provided with cozy beds, cozy comforters, placed in various discreet cozy locations throughout the gallery, all they did was purr, hardly even noticed by the casual observer.

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A Feast for the Senses, by Robert Fuller (excerpt in Spanish)

Una fiesta para los sentidos

Soñar sin gotas de lluvia. La lluvia había amainado. ¿Cómo volver a soñarla?

Paige, que también ejercía de ayudante de chef, había intuido que con un nuevo conjunto de sabores en la mezcla, podría resultar que el picante y la ralladura adicionales bien podrían sembrar nuevas nubes dentro de su sueño.

En la galería había varias copas que Smith -Alma, sin duda- había adornado con tanta gracia con plantas de oración, stromanthe, tan artísticamente, de tal manera que si uno miraba justo así a esos recipientes, podía incluso sentir cómo las hojas se enrollaban y desplegaban, y luego, al amanecer, seguían al sol.

En ese momento, el sous chef llegó con más delicias, adornadas con flores amarillas y hojas de trébol de la planta de los pepinillos, para añadir un toque de amargura al plato que acababa de preparar, que habían sido cuidadosamente servidas en cuencos decorados con imágenes de pinturas rupestres, principalmente en la gama de colores rojo-naranja-amarillo del espectro.

Estas delicias eran una variante de macarrones con queso trufado, hechos con pasta penne cocida en agua con jugo de almejas, pimienta de cayena, sal de limón, chile ancho en polvo y hierbas de Provenza, así como una generosa ración de almejas, y rociados con salsa de pescado, luego escurridos y horneados durante una hora entera, con un suave derretimiento de queso de cabra trufado negro añadido durante los últimos diez minutos.

Hubo una algarabía general, no justo cuando Paige trajo todos aquellos sabrosos manjares, sino sólo un poco después, una vez que todas las bocas de la galería se hubieron asentado tan picantemente en toda la rica y deliciosa suculencia que había sido capturada por ella dentro de su último experimento culinario.

Casi al mismo tiempo, como un reloj, nuestra cervecera Esther trajo bandejas con pequeñas muestras de su hefe más reciente, con trozos extra de limón para quien quisiera añadir un poco más de ácido.

De repente, una nube de aromas tipo éster: fresa, manzana, plátano, pera, piña, durian.

Luego, un rato antes de la pièce de résistance -la bullabesa- continuó el espectáculo de improvisación.

Paige y Esther -los aromas ya se habían disipado- habían acordado formar equipo, ser mujeres, en la bullabesa, que, con sutiles toques de cayena y azafrán, sin duda iba a gustar.

Alma, mientras tanto, había alineado algunos de sus moldes de vidrio más tentadores y encantadores de una variedad de presas oceánicas, la captura definitiva, visual y sensorialmente, angulada y arrastrada, extraída y recuperada, y luego soplada, a través de un soplete, en varias criaturas marinas, todas colocadas, reflejadas, como peces de cristal.

Y se reflejaron por toda la galería, repitiéndose y reflejándose, enviando sus propias imágenes por todo el espacio. Y entonces, tan repentinamente como casi había sido olvidada, la obra comenzó de nuevo, todos los actores ataviados con máscaras: listos para disfrutar de la inminente fiesta después de las palabras, entregados a comer y beber, a toda la alegría posible antes del fin de sus días.

Así fue, con petirrojo de mar, rape, gallo, langosta zapatilla, cangrejo de terciopelo, erizo de mar, vive.

Un cambio de mar, entonces, ambientado con músicas de poissons d'or, otras mentes, oscurecidas por masques, la tragicomedia de la existencia, casa de espejos sin salida, reflets dans l'eau, campanas a través de las hojas.

Sala en el hospital, une barque sur l'océan: dos cangrejos, dos amantes, dos cardos, dos mujeres en el páramo, el bosque, el burdel, con árboles en flor, con lirios en primer plano, el pintor camino del trabajo, en el patio del hospital, sauces al atardecer, dos arenques rojos.

Tres gatos arlequín urraca, un persa, un tiffanie y un exótico de pelo corto, habían estado hasta ahora acicalándose o durmiendo lujosamente la siesta, hibernando o surfeando en el sofá. Dotados de camas y edredones acogedores, colocados en varios lugares discretamente acogedores por toda la galería, lo único que hacían era ronronear, sin que el observador casual se percatara de ello.

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Max, by Robert Fuller

Max was noodling on his guitar, lounging on the sofa while playing the same three chords over and over again, butchering and twanging them incessantly while mumbling or groaning or falsettoing yet another tired set of lyrics about his ex-girlfriends and how they’d all dissed him and how, even when everything was still good, none of them had been truly worthy of him, with his artistic prowess being what it was and all. They’d all rue the day they let him go. He was going places!

But after a few hours of that, suddenly, in a fit of fury, he threw the guitar clear across the room, breaking most of the strings and severely damaging the body.

“I can’t take this any more! I’m tired of this crap!” He was yelling at the TV, at the walls, at anyone or anything that would listen. No one responded, at least not right away.

He had secretly wanted, for most of his life, to do something more interesting and fulfilling, more elaborate. He had been pursuing his own studies in private for the last decade or so, but only half-heartedly; if he’d mentioned this to any of his friends, he would have instantly been an outcast, a pariah, no longer a member of their cliques.

But he had finally reached his breaking point, and no longer cared about winning anybody’s popularity contest. It wasn’t a matter of having reasoned it through, as a completely rational human being; it was more on the feeling level, in the shape of a nagging intuition that he had been wasting his life and his talent, trying in vain to fit his life experience into the same old tired, formulaic constructs.

After all, the world of sound, just like the world itself, was a vast, swirling, infinite vortex. Why, then, should he submit to tasting just the tiniest subset of a realm that had no bounds, no shackles, and where anything was possible?

His studies, which initially he had pursued entirely on his own, without anyone else guiding him, were an amalgamation of numerous fields and disciplines, not all of which were directly related to music. He felt deeply that, within this infinite, bewildering, wonderful, terrifying universe—which included the universe of sound, since everything was really just some kind of vibration—everything, at all levels, micro, macro, and everything in between, was not only part of a mysterious unity, but was also self-similar, at every level. No matter where you looked, the patterns all merged, converging and diverging at infinity.

An older friend of his, whose studies in music spanned quite a few decades, including an eclectic mix of both formal training and self-directed forays into a wide variety of subjects, had recommended that he look into the study and practice of music theory throughout the many centuries it had flourished prior to its blatant commercialization and commodification. In this modern era, what had at one time been an art form called “music” had morphed into an industry devoted to supplying consumers with the soundtracks and ditties they apparently required to get on with their lives of toil, mostly for business executives much wealthier and more important than they would ever be.

So Max, initially, without much of an idea where this new adventure would lead him, cautiously stepped into the tepid waters of his search.

Even though he no longer considered himself religious, at least not in the usual sense, he very quickly discovered plainchant, with all its elaborate melodies, melismas, peculiar Latin texts, and tropes, and he spent countless summer hours in the upstairs back porch of his parents’ house, adrift in the study of just how the ancient monks and saints had managed to conjure up their timeless, haunting melodies. He was so rapt, at times, with his newfound direction in life that he was completely oblivious to the obscenely high heat and humidity enveloping the solitude of his secret lair up in the sweltering summer air.

His study of plainchant led, logically, to a number of other pursuits that he tackled simultaneously. He soon became fascinated by species counterpoint, as codified primarily in Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum. But when he started to delve into the subject matter, he very quickly became aware that, in order to be able to juxtapose multiple melodies simultaneously, without resulting in some kind of dissonant jungle of cacophony, he would be required to learn a great deal about some of the other laws underlying and underpinning the musical arts. There was the study of functional harmony, which dealt with the chordal structures that came about when you combined two or more melodies. And the idea that there were various ways that chords functioned within the major and minor scales was something that he found intriguing. They were aligned in some kind of hierarchical system, within which the functionality was related not only to the degree of the scale, but also to the chord type (which could be major, minor, diminished, or any number of related chord varieties), as well as to its function within the workings of the harmonic system. This word “function” was elusive, in that what it really meant was that chords based on various scale degrees were grouped together because they fit within certain fundamental chord patterns that had, over the centuries, been tested with a wide variety of melodies, counterpoints, and rhythms—not to mention tested throughout the ever-evolving history of musical styles—and found to bring a certain feeling of coherence, logic, and pleasure to the aural experience.

But in order to truly delve into music’s mysteries and secrets, Max soon became aware that he would have to explore a bit deeper; he was missing an important piece of the puzzle. There was a most basic foundation, a basement, that held up his castle of musical enchantment; and he had, to date, been completely unaware that it even existed.

How had Western musics initially decided upon the major and minor scales, or, for instance, the modes of ancient Greece? Max deduced that he wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to address this question without further study, on a more microcosmic level within this discipline. He would have to take up the study of musical acoustics. But at the time he had no clue that that particular study was to be the next step in his journey.

He picked up the remnants, the bones, of his former guitar, and contemplated what he had just done. It occurred to him that the guitar itself was not the problem. The actual problem was that he himself, along with most of human society, was stuck in self-generating, self-replicating patterns, and that these patterns themselves were never really critically examined by... well, by hardly anyone at all!

He began exploring his own philosophy of the human experiment. (He had no idea how this experiment had initially arisen. There were certain ancient myths about how and where humans came from—and why—but he generally didn’t give them much credence.)

In order to think deeply about anything of relevance, he reasoned, it was necessary—or at the very least useful—to begin from some particular. From within the limitations imposed on him by conditions not entirely, or at all, under his control, it was to him obvious that he couldn’t start by examining any sort of universal “truth” based, most likely, on a bunch of unproven, or merely surmised, axioms.

So: there was the observation that humans, as well as most or all other life forms, tend to replicate.

Now, in the present-day quagmire that humans were suffering through, virtually everything that could be bought and sold on the marketplace was basically a replica of some original artifact, which was then poured into a mold, mass-produced, and then shipped, at a price, to the eager participants, the consumers, within the non-zero-sum game of the global market economy.

But, more to the point, any successful replication of a cultural, or otherwise, merely popular artifact, once a certain critical mass was reached, tended, at least for the short term, to be self-reinforcing. The more copies you sold, the more copies you sold. It was that simple.

And the replication facet of this machine was even more pernicious than that. The replication extended even to the substance, the marrow, of the audio commodity that they were all marketing. “Repetition sells.” If you repeat a tune or a sad or sexy set of lyrics or some other kind of “hook” enough times within a three-minute song, the masses will buy it. They are seduced, they are assuaged, they are mesmerized. They fall asleep.

Max was tired of sleep. Of that kind of sleep.

A few days later, he finally heard from his girlfriend. Max had no idea why she had apparently ignored him for that stretch of time. Possibly she’d heard through the grapevine that he’d thrown his guitar against the wall...

He heard her voice over the receiver; the reception wasn’t so good. He wasn’t quite certain that he understood fully what she was saying. She may not have known herself.

But there was a certain flavor to her tone of voice that he just could no longer relate to. It was her insistence on discussing, on and on, something that he no longer identified with. He wasn’t entirely sure what the topic in question was; he just had this vague feeling that whatever it was no longer suited him, in his present state.

Then he saw it, all at once: their own melodrama was the basis for, was the epitome of, the very same stock lyrics that everyone else in the music business was parroting over and over again.

He walked through the woods on all of his favorite trails in the greenbelt, listening with great deliciousness to the brooks and creeks made fat by last week’s downpours and showers. The faint gurgling of the water was a canvas, made for the birds to paint their rich colors of song, in pastels, oils, and crayon, upon this, nature’s own fabled tapestry of gurgle-song. He was drunk, absolutely soaked in, the sound-rich forest of his own imagination. He walked and walked and soaked everything in.

Later on, as if by magic, he stumbled upon the key he’d been awaiting just recently in the course of his always-fluid musical journey of study.

Helmholtz! As with some of the other paths within his labyrinth of discovery, he had absolutely no idea how it was that he found this particular link, this piece of the puzzle that so tightly bound so many of the other pieces into a unity that was now so rapidly coalescing, converging straight toward the horizon of his understanding!

This missing link, the one he’d been so assiduously awaiting, revealed to him that all sounds could be built up from various combinations of the simplest of oscillations, namely, sine waves. From any given pitch, referred to as the fundamental, you could easily derive a series of harmonics: twice the frequency of the fundamental, then three times the frequency, then four times, and so forth. If you were to add these harmonics together, starting from the fundamental frequency, such that each successive harmonic sounded at a softer volume than the preceding, you would discover that the quality, the sound color, the timbre, of the periodic waveform would change. Any change in sound color would be dependent on the relative amplitudes of all its harmonics. To be simplistic about it, if you were to change the relative amplitudes of the harmonics in a violin sound suitably, it might well sound more like an oboe!

Now, reading further into this thick text by Helmholtz, Max came upon another key. The simple integer ratios of the harmonics, or partials, of any musical tone, also provided the basic framework that musical scales were derived from. The most basic of intervals, the octave, was simply two times the initial frequency. Thus, all octaves, starting from any given frequency, could be expressed as ratios of the powers of two: 1, 2, 4, etc. For octaves lower than the initial frequency, the ratios would be the inverse: 1, 1/2, 1/4, and so forth.

After that, everything got much murkier, much more complicated.

Meanwhile, Max had invested in a new guitar. This one was special, in that it had been made by a local artisanal instrument maker that he’d met in person, which is to say that it hadn’t been mass-produced anonymously in some third-world factory. The sounds, the timbres, he was able to produce, whenever he was totally attuned to his new guitar, were other-worldly, sublime, totally rad.

He studied how the instrument had been crafted. He paid special attention to the layout of the frets, and their relative proportions. He could clearly see, and hear, that, on the low E string, the octave above could be produced by pressing down at precisely the midpoint of the string, and then plucking it.

In the next few weeks, he returned to his native location, deep in the woods, surrounded by the avian-gurgle of water-song. He wandered day by day, not certain of anything, just listening, deeply, deep in the woods. No one bothered him.

His forays into the world of sound, at first tentative, blossomed into many flowers, many petals of serendipity, worlds of audio that he’d never imagined possible. All the birds of the world sang, screeched, jammed in harmony with him. He was never alone.

He became aware of infinite possibilities, all very soft and subtle, of how all the earthly and universal sounds could resonate, speak, howl, within one’s being and conscious awareness. He let them resonate, freely.

♦♦♦

The Inspector, by Robert Fuller

The Inspector was busy. The phone rang incessantly. Finally he picked up.

“Gaudeau, who is it?”

An awkward silence ensued. Then a timid voice. “I have important information.”

“What is its nature? And who are you?”

“I can’t divulge that. But it’s very important. It’s about your case.”

“Nobody knows about it. It’s strictly top secret.” Then a short pause. “What kind of information?”

“I’m familiar with it. I saw your research.”

“What have you heard?”

“You’re researching a hoax. The greatest hoax ever.”

Inspector Gaudeau was shocked. But he kept quiet. “Yes, yes, do tell.”

“I need my anonymity. Don’t trace this call.”

The Inspector whispered fiercely. “You have my word.”

“First tell me something. Why expose this hoax? What’s your angle exactly?”

“You tell me yours. Why do you care? Why help me out? Can’t you expose it? You know so much...”

“I’m trying to help. You’re being very difficult.”

“Just give me something. Even the tiniest hint. A good faith gesture. Then I’ll gladly comply.”

“Okay, here it is. Just a wee morsel. I found the evidence. Now what’s your theory? And why get involved?”

“What sort of evidence?”

The man became furious. He lost his temper. “Why be so difficult!? Give what I ask. Or I’ll hang up.”

Inspector Gaudeau softened up. He needed a break. This might be it. “I mentioned good faith. Humanity has been duped. Fed heaps of lies. So here’s my theory. It was centuries ago. There was a conspiracy. Conspiracy to commit fraud. They made things up.”

“Yes, yes, that’s good. And I have proof. I know the location. Please do go on.”

“They wanted to deceive. To lead humanity astray. That’s why the book. Some stuff was true. Based on historical facts. Facts that were verifiable. That was the hook. That’s what got people. They were drawn in. Like moths to lightbulbs. Like lemmings to cliffs. Like children to pipers. They couldn’t help themselves.” A brief heavy pause. “So where’s the location? The location of what?”

“You’re still holding out. Why you in particular? Were you personally hurt? Do you have standing? I mean legal standing. That judges could accept.”

He held his cool. But Gaudeau was furious. “Is this a court!?” In a heavy whisper. Then he went on. “Are you my judge? My jury, my executioner? What’s this all about!?”

“You’re losing your cool. Won’t get you anywhere. Just answer the question.”

He thought about it. What was his angle? Had he been hurt? What was his standing?

“You’re taking your time. We haven’t any time. This matter is urgent. It needs airing out. Before it’s too late. Get on with it...”

Gaudeau tried something new. Something like reverse psychology. He made something up. Or thought he did. “There was a cave. Thoroughly filled with bats. It was their hideout. The entrance was hidden. Ancient texts document this. Haven’t found it yet. Maybe a treasure map. ‘X’ marks the spot. All cloak and dagger. People sworn to secrecy. That’s what was odd. They knew something profound. Why the secret society? Why keep it hidden?”

The phone remained quiet. For quite some time. A faint humming sound. Somewhat like a buzzing. They were being tapped!? No one could tell. Finally the man spoke. “You are quite right. It was a cave. The bats were ubiquitous. That was the problem. It wasn’t about secrecy. They weren’t hiding anything. They all got infected. They covered the entrance. The world was endangered. They all sacrificed themselves.”

“This doesn’t make sense. How’d you find out?” And then something clicked. He was a bat. And he had escaped. With all the evidence. That’s how he knew. Where the cave was. Gaudeau knew his name. Began with a ‘D’. And ‘D’ wasn’t infected. He was the infection.

‘D’ knew all this. Then the drilling started. Right through the phone. Just two tiny holes. The phone became bloody.

September 12, 2023

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