Fossiloctopus (3 page)

One stood before the mirror and beheld their glass doppelganger surrounded by an astral haze of slowly pulsing wings.  It is reported that when Jamalerdapala stood before the mirror on its completion, he exclaimed “My soul takes flight.  I will ascend to my new mistress, the moon!”

Perhaps the fear of  buoyancy and ascension beyond the physical plane, combined with the prince’s well-known fear of heights, presaged the passage of the mirror from the hands of Jamalerdapala to Sultan Muliyat Khum of  Zanzibar.  The Sultan’s envoy, Gilead Mbano – one must suppose that the envoy was of Jewish descent, perhaps through Ethiopia – on Khum’s hearing of the munificence and glory of the crown prince, was sent to visit the Tamil palace of the generous noble in an effort to establish contracts relating to the exchange of spice for gold and ivory.  While touring the royal forest, the prince noted Mbano’s fascination with and keen knowledge of the local invertebrate fauna.  At the conclusion of the visit, the mirror was sent southbound with Mbano on the Sultan’s dhow, a gift to Khum, but more a gift for the envoy than for the Sultan, whom Jamalerdapala had never met.

Nevertheless, though Mbano sat spellbound in its presence the entire journey back to Africa, the butterfly mirror spent little time in his company.  Upon its arrival at the stone ramparts of the Sultan’s fortress, it was whisked away to the Zanzibari royal harem, where only emasculated males might see its wonder.  It became a favored plaything of the Sultan’s wives and concubines, who stood nude before the mirror, preening themselves, in turn, before the oft-jealous eyes of those whose reflected form was not caught in its golden gaze.  For while silky-veiled rumors of pleasure and delight cast a shadowy erotic mist about the harem, the dwellers therein know only an unending jaded boredom.  The eunuchs, stripped of their libido, viewed the women’s vain displays with a detached sense of spiritual fulfillment – the mirror, to them, was an object of sublime transcendence.

Seven generations of Sultan passed, while the harem remained bathed in an eternal sea of youth, white-hot sexuality and utter ennui.  The Butterfly Mirror was all but forgotten by those outside its carved ivory walls.  An occasional amber glow at night, combined with high-pitched giggles, sighs, and the scent of patchouli hinted at its presence, but only an obscure catalog, inscribed at the time of Mbano’s contract, recorded the actuality of the device.

Were it not for the influx of outsiders seeking to establish a colonial foothold in the area, the mirror might still be in the inventory of the sultanate (decrepit and corrupt as it has become in this age of corporate ascendance).  We should thank the great cosmopolitan, Doctor Phineous Pilander for temporarily rescuing the wonder from dusty obscurity.  Doctor Pilander (who, history has revealed, was actually an irascible merchant of shallow moral character), was sent as Queen Victoria’s emissary in a last, desperate attempt to establish a consul at Zanzibar where previous attempts by the always-stodgy and sometimes-belligerent Royal Navy had failed.  The good Queen Mother had sent with her ambassador a pair of London pigeons as an example of “exotic English aviary fauna” – or so it was printed on the certificate of authenticity tied to each of the bird’s legs.  So impressed was the Sultan – now Umbayar Uthman Fada (the Khums since displaced by another dynasty on the murder of Khum III by bandits) – that he ordered the firing of all the fortress’s cannonade at once (much to the surprise of local fishermen, who received no warning of the coming salute) and the gifting of some token to the British emissary.  The Sultan’s vizier combed the records for a suitable something – anything, for the Fadas were in desperate financial straits . . . relatively speaking.  After an exhaustive search of the libraries, the vizier’s assistants found the catalog entry of the Butterfly Mirror, which was seized at once and removed from the harem.  Suicide spread like wildfire through the concubinage.

It was after Pilander’s return to Britain that the mirror suffered its first mishap.  The queen, though fascinated by the Sultan’s gift, felt it unseemly for a woman of her station to portray a modicum of vanity.  Thus the much-coveted artifact was awarded to Pilander, who had, with much effort, secured the use of a small dock facing the East African coast, for the Royal Navy.  Dr. Pilander, not knowing quite what to do with the mirror, donated it to Tearsham Group, the exclusive men’s club to which he belonged, where it stood under the mounted heads of various specimens of African wildlife entirely inappropriate in their proximity to an object of such beauty.

As was mentioned earlier, this Dr. Phineas Pilander proved to be quite a scoundrel.  His company might be to blame.  At least one of this companions proved the undoing of three-hundred-odd years of attention and upkeep to what can only be described as a marvel of invention and art: Sir Robert Yurr.

Sir Robert had been knighted for an act of bravery that he did not commit.  While masses of poverty stricken family men languished in British prisons under false charges, Sir Robert found himself, despite his best efforts, in a rich and upright social standing that he clearly did not deserve.  Yurr was a thug by trade.  A strapping brute of a man who delighted in the squirmings and whimperings of a victim up against a wet, dirty wall.  It was on one of his nightly forays into the alleyway shadows of Brixton that he happened on a mugging in process.  The muggee was a young, effeminate Prince Edward.  But more interesting to Yurr, the muggers were a pair of gypsies who had swindled him out of a box of cigars some months earlier.  The constabulary arrived in time to see Yurr triumphant, standing atop the unconscious forms of the gypsy twins, the young prince bruised and faint, but alive and well.  The timely arrival of the police might well have saved the prince’s life.  The gypsies were jailed, Yurr knighted, and Prince Edward  never found the pouch of coin that somehow ended up in Yurr’s noble pockets.

After receiving his knighthood, Sir Robert became an object of adoration to the semi-male androgynes of the lower-upper class, who lauded his toughness and rough charisma.  He was invited to hunt in Africa (hence the trophy heads at the Tearsham Group), India, Australia, and the American west, where he proved a cunning and ruthless hunter. Yurr tolerated the daintiness of his benefactors for the sake of the hunt, but despised the chalky paleness of those philanthropists who toadied to his favor.  In ways, one might say he was like a coy mistress . . . but not.

In time this inner contradiction reached a boiling point.  One day, torn between lone-wolf manliness, on one hand, and financial dependence on those he despised, on the other, Yurr went to an obscure corner of the Tearsham Group for a self-assessment.  There he proposed to sort out his feelings and rediscover his true self, money be damned.

He did not like what he saw in the mirror.

The glass suffered its first breakage, while Sir Robert suffered severe cuts to his ulotrichous knuckles.  Both Yurr and the butterfly mirror were removed from position and deposited on the street outside the Tearsham Group.  Here the two parted ways: Yurr returning to a life of thuggery, the mirror being picked up by William John Morrison, a doyen of the arts and crafts movement.

William John Morrison (never merely “Mr. Morrison” or “William” or even – God forbid – “Bill”) was an artist who specialized in stained glass and miniatures paintings.  His quite-capable reconstruction of The Butterfly Mirror was only marred by two facts: 1) the soldering with which he bound the amber shards back together divided the mirror’s face into some twenty-off irregularly-shaped and sized puzzle pieces, and 2) William John Morrison, being true to the principles of the arts and crafts movement, had decided that the butterflies so cleverly compartmentalized in the mirror’s ghostly cloud looked far too modern in their execution.  Thus, in true pre-Raphaelite fashion, he repainted the insects’ wings with scenes from the Arthurian legends (Mallory being all the rage at the time).  Here was the birth of Mordred, there the arrival of the Green Knight in Arthur’s court, here Merlin speaking with his familiar, there Guineverre deceived.  The entire panoply of Welsh-cum-English mythos whirred, clicked, and fluttered in a pewter-veined montage around the viewer’s form.

Most often the Questing Beast and the Grail were seen jumping from shoulder to shoulder of one Anne Skarsinkopolis, an underage Greek maiden who had fallen under the spell of William John Morrison, but whose romantic advances on the artist went un-noticed by the man himself, though another, a young calligrapher by the name of Blake Carmenson, was enviously aware of Miss Skarsinkopolis’s attentions to the oblivious William John Morrison.   A strangely-disconnected love triangle developed with William John Morrison blissfully unaware of Skarsinkopolis’s infatuation, while the dark Greek vixen, in turn, spurned Carmenson’s love.  Unknown to both of the younger members of the trio, William John Morrison had fallen in love with Carmenson, whose fine features and somber manner had set the miniaturist’s heart afire.  Over the course of months, sexual tensions rose to flood stage, with Carmen finally challenging William John Morrison to a duel.  So stunned was the elder artist by the attention, and so enamored had he become of the untouchable young Carmenson, that he agreed to the duel, seeing in its conclusion the fitting tragic end to an unrequited love.  Among the Yorkshire hills (both having travelled several days by coach for the occasion), William John Morrison happily slid his now-broken heart over the rapier blade of his platonic love, crimson blood falling nearly as quickly as the tears that fell from Anne Skarsinkopolis’s cheek at the demise of her own platonic love.  Ironically, William John Morrison’s will ceded all of his artistic accoutrements, including The Butterfly Mirror, to Carmenson.

Blake openly professed his love for Skarsinkopolis, who, as one might imagine, remained distant and unforgiving.  Even the gift of the mirror did not move her stone heart.  In fact, she viewed it as an insult that the young Carmenson should be so bold as to force upon her what was once her lover’s (her words), but could not, would not, give her back the man himself.  Carmenson, on hearing her heartfelt words, retreated into the world of opium, not surfacing from the smoky underworld until well after the Great War.

As the calligrapher buried himself under narcotics and Chinese women, Skarsinkopolis had her name legally changed to Anastasia LeFebrve and moved to America.  Where she met a rich young industrialist; Marty Jefferson – inventor of the heliopede.  In time the pain of William John Harrison’s death was dulled and Anastasia LeFebrve-Jefferson lived a more-or-less typical middle class domestic existence until her husband forgot to renew patent on his device, losing almost all his money in the ensuing litigation that follows in the wake of all American forgetfullness.  The depression soon followed.

In the meantime, The Butterfly Mirror collected dust in their basement while Anastasia raised her children in poverty and cared for an alcoholic husband.

A generation later The Butterfly Mirror was again brought back into public view by the chance discovery of the object by an avant-garde psychedelic painter who was acquainted with LeFebrve-Jefferson’s son; William John Harrison LeFebrve-Jefferson (known by all as, simply, “Bill”).  For one summer of love the mirror, now cleaned and “enhanced” with the addition of rainbow-hued silk flowers along its border, shone bright under the black lights of Chicago’s Milwaukee Street Pipefittery and Galleria, after which it was donated by the recently born-again Bill to the Rockford Historical Museum’s collection.

Upon its arrival in Rockford, the crown prince’s valued treasure was placed in the museum’s basement where Vaughn Orville, retired school bus driver, now janitor, stands before The Butterfly Mirror late at night, smoking his fingers yellow, and dreams of wizards and round tables dancing around him in a spirit-cloud of wings.  At these times he hallucinates and sees himself as a little blonde-haired girl in a bonnet and red velvet, white laced dress.  She couldn’t be more happy.

Kaleidoscopes of Africa

“It has always been the fate of new inventions to have their origin referred to some remote period; and those who labour to enlarge the boundaries of science, or to multiply the means of improvement, are destined to learn, at a very early period of their career, that the desire of doing justice to the living is a much less powerful principal than that of being generous to the dead.

Sir David Brewster

Credited with inventing the first kaleidoscope in 1816

Object 1:A fossilized giraffe femur, 18” long, 2” in diameter, discovered by Belgian archaeologist Jurgin Joachim, 22 August, 1898, on the west shore of Lake Nyasa, in what was then Nyasaland.  The outer surface of the bone looks to have been hewn with an adze or other chopping instrument.  Microscopic analysis shows miniscule flecks of obsidian, invisible to the human eye, embedded in hatched grooves cut lengthwise along the bone’s shaft.  The interior of the bone appears to have been core-drilled, again with obsidian, making the bone into an entirely hollow tube.  When discovered, the inside of the fossilized bone tube held several hundred brightly-colored pebbles, diamonds, and bits of shell, each approximately .5 mm across.  None of the pebbles come from the area, nor are the shells from indigenous species.  The nearest habitat of the relevant shellfish species is Antarctica.  The pebbles are likely from the Indian subcontinent, the diamonds from Angola.

Exhibit 1:A diorama, recreating a scene witnessed by German anthropologist Heinrich Horstmann in the rainforest of eastern Belgian Congo, 1904.  A group of Bemba elders sits in a semi-circle at the mouth of a deep cave, all staring at an arrangement of highly-polished iron shards, the fragments set in such a way that they reflect multiple images of one another.  Immediately outside the cave a young man stokes a small fire beneath a
Tabernanthe Iboga
shrub, the smoke causing a cloud of thousands of gold-banded forester butterflies (
Euphaedea Neophron Neophron
) to take flight over the polished iron pieces.  A half-empty basket of psychoactive roots containing
Ibogain
alkaloid sits next to the elders.