Together, the two men descended stone steps in near-total darkness. They navigated along branching shafts that ramped steadily downward, scented with the drippings from the cemeteries below which they passed. They stumbled along underworld galleries as dark as catacombs. Progressing below the seepage of cesspits, they passed through stenches so bilious that Felix feared his lungs might be poisoned. During these episodes he took to breathing through a sleeve of his coat.
Every age brought its specific terror. As a boy, Felix had lain awake, afraid the house would burn down. As a youth, he’d dreaded bullies. Later, it was conscription into the army. Or the fear of not learning a trade. Or never finding a wife. After school, his career. After his son was born, he feared everything. His secret dream was to face down such a horror that it would leave him inoculated. He’d never suffer fear of anything, ever again.
These tunnels proved older than he’d thought possible. To judge from the marks cleaved by primitive implements, these walls had been ancient when the cornerstone had been laid by Babylonian magi for the great Cheops of Lethe. Buried thusly, these rank pavements predated the sad jungle-engulfed dilapidation of the fabled Moon Temple of Larmos.
The mud, confirmed by the blatt and klosp of each mugrubrious footfall.
At this juncture Felix took note of a strange effect. A faint luminescence glowed from the stranger’s lengthy hair. Likewise, an orange light seemed to emanate from the exposed skin of the man’s hands and face, a pale shade of the same manic orange that distinguished his fevered eyes. This glow, another detail with which to embroider his future account.
Anxious of becoming lost, Felix had taken to tearing small bits from his notebook and dropping them to blaze a trail for his return. These were nothing vital, not at first, just blank pages. When those were exhausted, he tore out only single words. No word was so important, he reasoned, that its loss spoilt the entire book. Between fits of coughing, he asked, “Is it far?”
“Yon monster? ’Tis it nigh?” the stranger echoed, always a few steps ahead.
“Have we far to go?” asked Felix, ready to turn and retrace his steps. By now he had enough of a monster in his head to surpass anything he might be displayed.
As if reading his thoughts, the stranger asked, “Plan ye to tell the world of my monster?” The echo of their footsteps served as the only clue of more open tunnel ahead. His voice taunting, the stranger asked, “Plan ye to write of it in thine book?”
His sense of the way had failed Felix. Every step felt more foreign. In desperation, he felt in his coat pocket and found a box of matches. He struck one and in the moment of its burning saw that the stranger had outpaced him, and that tunnels shunted off to the side in every direction. The match died, and Felix scrambled to strike another. With it, he saw his guide had pulled even farther away and seemed at risk of outdistancing him forever. When Felix hurried to catch up, his increased speed snuffed the match prematurely. He sprinted a few strides before lighting the next only to see his luminous host almost gone in the narrowing distance. To extend the life of his match light, he put flame to a page of his notebook. It hardly mattered, one page. He could re-create the lost bit from memory. Put to the test, he was confident he could recount all of his excursions through the years into the morass of the underworld. Holding the small torch aloft, he called after the distant figure, “If I lose you, then how am I to find the monster?”
Once more, the flame failed and he was plunged into pitch dark. The stranger’s orange glow was no more.
These stony ways, he recognized, had stood antique before the great Onus of Blatoy. Since even before the ante-Druidical, before pagans had erected the Altar of the Cymric Cleoples. In his astonishment, Felix put flame to still another page of his musings so as to catch one more glimpse of these aged, mesoesomerical surroundings.
Ahead of him, from ahead and behind and around, distorted by echoes, Felix heard the stranger laugh. Likewise, from every direction, the man’s voice assured him, “Ye must not worry.” A duration of silence went on, counted out by dripping sounds and nothing else. Felix struggled to strike another match.
To break the seeming infinity of waiting, the man’s voice spoke, adding, “Methinks the monster will quickly find thee.”
When a new match was successfully lighted and a new page of the notebook sacrificed, Felix lifted it and found himself alone. Fully, totally, and unmistakably abandoned. The light guttered and sputtered out, but he resolved not to waste another match on a page until he’d gathered his thoughts. Anger would serve him as a better ally than panic, and Felix pictured a scene in the not-so-distant future when he’d enter a bar to discover the man who’d led him on this fool’s errand. This was hardly new territory for him: Once more, he’d been discarded, rejected, left behind. He’d survive. If need be, he’d retrace every footstep. Circumstances had forced him to blaze his own path through every lonely, difficult day of his life. Since childhood nothing had been given to him and nothing had been explained, and this empty bequest had built in him a great faith in his own ability. He’d never lost hope. If anything, adversity had only tempered his determination.
This miasmire.
The polystenchous vaporous streamings.
The lack of any sound was so weighty it seemed to press against his eardrums the way water would at a great depth. The silence began to smother him.
Felix M—— found his hands balled in fists. His breathing fast and shallow. A temper tantrum threatened to overwhelm him. The sensation seemed a third-generation echo of scurrying to keep pace with his own father, so long ago, this entire situation evoked a rage he hadn’t suffered since becoming an adult.
“Go then,” Felix shouted after the phantom. “Let me be rid of you!” He shook his notebook above his head in the dark. “You will suffer all the more in my retelling of this.” The stranger’s name remained a mystery, and he cursed himself for not having asked. “It’s twenty years since I’ve sought my way without an advisor of any sort, as my own apprentice, with none but my own encouragement.” He would not be defeated so easily. He was shouting now, his curses sounding the length of every tunnel contiguous with this. He railed about his father’s departure. He ranted over the bullied years of his boyhood. Thrashed, he had none to teach him how best to conduct or defend himself.
Despite the grim diamonsity of predicament, he would not fall prey to nervous ideas. Fear stalked him, only an arm’s length away in the dark, and panic lurked immediately behind that. Left with no point of reference in space, Felix focused on the comforting glulubrious flavor of his own tongue.
To be a boy without a father is to grow guns in place of arms and a loaded cannon for a mouth. Always, at all times to be under siege with no reinforcements. To sprint at full speed into the pitch dark with fury trumping your fear, not aware that what you actually want is to hit a brick wall, or stumble into a pit, to find some limits, some restrictions and discipline. A broken leg. A concussion. Punishment from a surrogate father, even if that father is merely physics, to slap you down and make you toe some ultimate line.
Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and no mentor there to help him or teach him and everyone always laughing. Anger delivered him from catastrophe. Rage kept him from going under. It had come to be his greatest asset and only strategy.
His life was powered by a battery with loneliness at one pole and rage at the opposite and Felix existed, suspended between the two, helpless. His father never knew the bitter raging woman Felix’s mother had become. How, as a boy, she’d lectured him on the weakness of his papa. She’d drilled him to recite this catechism of venom. And as he’d grown to become a mirror of her missing husband, she’d begun to subject Felix to the fullness of her scorned fury. His impossible task, Felix’s trial had been to make a life in this seething home where every slice of bread was butte
red with disdain.
Felix hated his father for relinquishing him to her sole abusive custody. He hated them both, loved and despised them with a passion that dwarfed and colored all else in his life.
To escape, he’d married a woman who already counted her affections by the pfennig and dealt them out as a miser, as scant wages for those behaviors she wished to cultivate in husband and son. Even in the merriest circumstances, Felix’s wife could surrender herself to an unhappy mood. These attributes he recognized, too late, she shared with his mother. Not impossible was the idea that he was acclimatized to finding comfort in such familiar discomfort.
If he failed to return, his son, that tiny model of his self, would bear the brunt of his wife’s animosity.
Felix’s own son, on the morrow that boy would discover the same fate. Felix’s wife would awaken to find his portion of their marriage bed empty. Soon after, she’d learn he’d not been summoned into work. Worry would descend, followed by fear ripening into despair. Choosing his own wife, despite her virtues, Felix had been drawn to a submerged potential for vengeance. A trait of character not far removed from his mother’s emotional frugality.
A train passed by in a tunnel somewhere far above. To describe how the ground shook, Felix vacillated between the words abbeltomish and abbelhomish. The skirling noise was everything, and then it was gone.
His fury spent, Felix paused to draw a breath and in the stillness heard the tread of distant footsteps coming toward him in the darkness. Not the stranger’s, these were dragging, stumbling, heavy footfalls. The monster he imagined as every horror in his mind took shape in the tunnel ahead.
The glory of anger was how it left no margin for fear. Whether what approached in the lightless gloom was the trickster guide or his grotesque infant, Felix made ready to throttle it. To free both his hands, he tucked his journal into a pocket of his coat. Lest the advancing creature anticipate him, he quieted his ragged breathing, bracing his body from legs to neck, ready for the moment he and his adversary came into blind contact. Pitched forward, he ran full-out, pell-mell, throwing punches at thin air, fighting everything and hitting nothing.
His fists became bombs ready to explode on contact. When he sensed the being within arm’s length, Felix threw himself upon it. Every hard joint he wielded as a weapon, his knees and elbows, his fists and the heels of his shoes. As cudgels and truncheons, this arsenal pounded the shape he couldn’t see.
He felt his weight balanced atop and hammering down upon the crushed meat and mangled organs of his unseen foe, and the opponent made little effort to defend himself. Although larger than a child, the figure seemed nonetheless frail. Having rage on his side, Felix pounded away until the other offered no resistance.
The heaving mass beneath him issued a great sigh. In a voice rusted and dusty from disuse, it made a sound. The voice crushed with certainty, it said, “Sohnemann.” In doomed tones, it sighed. “You’ve come.”
In the darkness, the monster offered up a prayer, saying, “Please don’t be my boy.”
Struggling to strike a match, Felix traced the sound of the voice, back, to among his oldest memories. The match flared, and he put it to a page of the notebook.
In the guttering light, a face shut its eyes and twisted to look away from the brightness.
Felix froze in shock. It wasn’t possible. What a cruel trick. The guide, the trickster ruffian had known something of his past and staged this false reunion. It was the prank itself that was monstrous.
Still pinned beneath Felix’s knees, the apparition bade, “I’ve waited, always hoping you’d never arrive.”
Here was merely some hired beggar, a gross imposter, and Felix sneered at the clever sadism of the stunt. He made ready to shove the corpse aside. “How dare you?” he snarled. So wounded was his heart, that he backhanded the frail old man, toppling him to the floor. Standing over him, unable to step away, frozen to the spot by both love and revulsion, he cried, “You are not my father!”
The old man inspected him. “He’s fooled you, as well.”
“No one’s made a fool of me,” Felix swore.
The monster said, “Tyler has.”
In a desperate frenzy, Felix M—— shouted for the guide to return. Wrong-worded as that label had proven, for a guide’s task was to lead one to a destination while this had only led him into confusion and disorientation. Choking back rage and despair, Felix bellowed, “Your fine prank is accomplished!” He shouted, “You have wounded me far worse than any blade or blow might!” He looked down upon the figure on the floor and shouted, “Now make an end to this or I shall—on my word—I shall thrash your vile accomplice!”
The only answer was his own words: blade and blow, thrash and vile, echoing back from the darkness. To make good his threat, Felix lifted the frail figure and gripped him ’round the bony throat and felt his pulse beating like a hare’s heart in the moment before its spine is broke.
At this, in a strangled, gargling voice, the imposter inquired, “My boy, do you still enjoy to invent words? From the first, you’ve always harbored your own secret language.” Here was a detail from childhood that Felix himself had never confided to anyone except his father.
Hearing these words, Felix regarded his tormentor with a closer eye. The man’s brow was the one depicted in a daguerreotype the family owned but disdained to display. The man’s eyes were more-aged versions of the eyes Felix saw each morning in his own shaving mirror. His grip softened on the sagging throat. Felix could only ask, “How?”
The sad eyes met his. The voice, crushed to a whisper, said, “My boy, the same as you.” The lips smiled with resignation. “Tyler will not return, not for many more years.”
Felix asked, “Tyler?”
His father, this man, said, “Your guide.”
Without him there might be no escaping this place. Clearly this man, if he was indeed Felix’s father, clearly he would’ve discovered an exit after searching so long. Still, that was a possibility impossible to entertain. Too appalling for Felix’s mind to accommodate.
Felix considered his own son. The child at home, still abed, asleep. How in an hour that boy’s world would change course, and he would become his own guide. Another boy forced to invent himself from scratch. Another young man who’d grow up helpless in the face of any sullen or angry woman.
“You will see him again,” his father assured him. “That is the sadness of it.” The older man smiled wanly. “In perhaps twenty years. Then, your son will knock you to the floor, in anger and love, just as I struck my own father.”
For here, in these gloomy halls, had Felix’s father found his own father. And here had Felix’s grandfather been reunited with his own sire. Here were his father and his grandfather as well as the bones of his great-grandfather and all who’d been before. Exceeding them, here were the fathers of countless sons.
“This Tyler,” Felix asked, “what purpose does he serve?”
As if the old man could anticipate his son’s growing panic, he smiled warmly. Already, purple bruises were blooming on his pale cheeks and forehead. “Do you forgive your papa?”
Tentatively, Felix said, “I do.”
“Do you forgive God?”
Felix shook his head.
With that, his father swung one arm in a wide arc, slamming a fist into the side of his son’s skull.
Fireworks exploded, sparks that only Felix could see. He rubbed the spot, whining, “You’ve smote me in the ear!”
“Our salvation lies in not only forgiving one another,” his father intoned, “but in forgiving God as well.”
Without apology, his father said, “I will search with you.” He said, “We will search together.”
With this Felix turned to retrace his homemade words: sarcophagied…trickaricious…sepulchrious…mesoesomerical…miasmire…polystenchous…diamonsity…glulubrious…abbeltomish or abbelhomish. He set alight another page of his journal, hoping to backtrack to the first word before his light went out for go
od. As he sought the trail he’d blazed, Felix heard his father call out.
“Let’s not be so quick to find our way back,” the old man bade. “Let us go deeper.” The words, sonorous against the stone. “Let us discover some worthwhile adventure before we return to the light and the air we already love so well.”
The old man had turned and was progressing farther into the labyrinth, plying the darkness. Delving blindly into the dense unknown. After a moment’s hesitation, Felix turned to follow him.
MISTER ELEGANT
Don’t ask how I know this, but the next time you think you’re fat, there’s a whole lot worse you can look. Something to picture, when you’re at the gym counting stomach crunches or hanging knee raises to flatten your ab muscles, just know that some people have a whole other person growing out of that spot on their body. That fleshy, jiggly area under the bottom of your rib cage, where to you is just a “muffin top,” those other people have arms and legs, most of a whole other person hanging over their belt.
Doctors call this an “epigastric parasite.”
Some doctors call that extra person a “heteradelphian,” a fancy word for “different sibling.” It means somebody who should’ve been your brother or sister only got born with their head still inside your stomach. That extra person, he’s born with no brain. No heart. He’s just a parasite, and you’re the host.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
And, please, listen. If I’m telling you this and you do have another person growing out from underneath your arm right now, please don’t get all bent out of shape.
The only reason I’m telling you is I kind of, used to have one, too.
And trust me, what’s worlds worse than some jiggling subcutaneous fat is you popping out some heartless, brainless stranger. Sometimes that happens even years and years after you’re already born.