The Physiognomy (9 page)

“Yes,” I said, “but does it surpass one unbearable moment of having to listen to you?”

“I noticed you did not stay to discuss your findings on the Traveler with me last night,” he said, smiling sharply. “It was our deal, I recall, that you would apprise me of your results.”

“Prehuman,” said Arla, coming to my defense.

“That is correct,” I said, “a creature preserved from before the ascendancy of man. Interesting for its novelty as a museum piece but physiognomically empty of revelation.”

“I will pray for you,” said Garland. He turned and walked to the first row of stone pews, kneeled down, and clasped his hands.

“Spare me,” I said, and accompanied Arla to the altar. Waiting for us there was the fellow the mayor had assigned to accost unruly subjects. It seemed Bataldo had gotten the right man for the job, because Calloo, as he was called, was the size of the full-grown bear I had once seen in a traveling circus outside the walls of the Well-Built City. He had a thick black beard and hair nearly as long as Arla's. I did not need the Physiognomy to see that his hands, his head, in short, every part of him was an affront to the common sense of nature. In addition to his strength and size, he exhibited few outward signs of human intelligence. When I gave him his orders, he relayed to me that he understood by means of grunts and nods. I sent him off to fetch the first of the subjects and then set out my instruments on the stone altar just as I had the night before.

If the eight-year-old girl, Alice, whom everyone suspected of having been fed the fruit by her father, had all the right answers, what I wanted to know was who was asking the questions. I sat before her naked form, making believe I was jotting down notes in my tiny book with the straight pin and ink. Along with the loss of my knowledge went this notation system, which now seemed to me an extravagance of the minuscule I could no longer grasp the genius of. Arla was doing a cranial reading as I questioned the girl.

“Alice,” I said, “did you eat the white fruit?”

“Eat the white fruit,” she said, staring at me with an expression that made Calloo look like a savant.

“Alice,” I said, “have you changed recently in your thinking?”

“Stinking,” she said.

I shook my head in exasperation.

“Have you seen the fruit?” I asked.

“Clean the suit,” she said.

“Am I missing something here?” I asked Arla.

She shook her head and came over to whisper to me that the girl was a retrograde two on the intelligence scale and that the measurements showed her to be pure of heart.

“Next,” I yelled.

It turned out that her father was no less brilliant than she. He had an inordinately large penis, which obviously revealed the curse of his ignorance. Arla showed great diligence in measuring this organ, but I cut her off in the middle of her work, saying, “There's nothing there. Next!”

With our lead suspects cleared by Arla's computations and my necessarily more intuitive approach, we began to go to work on the rest of the town. So far, my plan to make it seem as if I was using this opportunity to mentor my assistant had worked well. “And what did you find?” I would ask her with each instrument she applied. She handled the chrome tools with great adeptness, calling out numbers for me to record in my book. I was, of course, going to allow her to catch the thief for me. Occasionally, her confidence would falter, and she would look to me with a question in her eyes. Then I would say, “Go on, continue. I am watching. I will let you know when you have made an error.” With these words of encouragement, she would smile, as if thanking me for my generosity, and I began to think that the whole affair might work out better than I had imagined.

They filed in one by one, a never-ending nightmare of the repulsive and displeasing. With my new blindness, picking a thief out of this populace was like trying to identify a scoundrel in a room full of lawyers. Their nakedness was very unsettling. All that flesh and their blatant sex staring me in the face made my stomach queasy. When Arla ordered the mayor's wife to bend over, I lit a cigarette, hoping the smoke would obscure from me her dilapidated mysteries.

Then, on our twentieth subject, a man named Frod Geeble, the owner of the tavern, Arla stopped in her application of the calibrated navel standard and said to me, “You'd better double-check me here.”

I gave her a nervous look, and she squinted as if for an instant she saw through to my unknowing. Quickly, I put down my notebook and approached the subject. She held out the instrument to me; although I could recall the name of it, I had no idea how it worked. Instead of accepting the standard from her, I bent over and put my left eye up to the fat man's navel, looking in as if peering through the end of a telescope. Unable to think of what else to do, I stuck my index finger into the flesh ditch. Frod Geeble belched.

“Interesting,” I said.

“What number do you come out with?” she asked.

“That was my question for you,” I said.

“I feel uncertain after having discerned evidence of depravity in the abundance of eyebrow hair,” she said.

“Forget your uncertainty,” I said.

“But I read last night, in your work The Blemished Corpulence and Other Physiognomical Theories, that the physiognomist should never operate out of uncertainty.”

In order to circumvent her discovery of me, I stood up and looked Frod Geeble in the eyes, asking myself, Could this man have stolen the sacred fruit? It struck me then that this was the only method of judging another human being that the uninitiated had. The slovenly nature of such a method of discovery made me shudder at the utter darkness so many lived in. Still, I had a feeling he hadn't done it.

“He has brown eyes,” I said. “This negates your concern.”

“Very well,” she said. “He is innocent.”

“Free drinks at the tavern for your honor,” said Frod Geeble as he dressed.

Calloo was on his way out to fetch the next subject when I called him back. “Bring me the mayor this time,” I said.

The hulking miner broke into a broad grin at this suggestion and, for the first time, spoke intelligibly. “Pleasure, your honor.”

I had to smile myself.

The mayor held his hands cupped over his privates as he stepped forward for inspection. Arla showed no timidity but went at him with all of my devices just as she had the others. When she was done calling out her findings to me, and I had gone through the charade of jotting them down with the pin, I asked her to step aside. She moved back. The mayor, though no physiognomist himself, took one look at me and very astutely read the malicious intent in my gaze. The folds of loose flesh on his chest and stomach as well as his bottom lip began to quiver.

“I know,” he said, giving a nervous laugh, “you have never seen such a resplendent specimen.”

“On the contrary,” I said, “very piglike.”

“I am not a thief,” he said, losing his sense of humor.

“Undoubtedly, but I do see a small character flaw that I may be able to adjust,” I said. I got up and went over to where my coat hung on the back of a chair and retrieved the scalpel from its pocket. With the instrument in hand, I walked up in front of the mayor, waving the blade inches from his eyes. “I detect an asinine sense of humor that may be your undoing if we cannot correct it early enough.”

“Perhaps I can simply work at being more serious,” he spluttered.

“Now, now, Mayor, this won't hurt a bit. I'm just trying to see where to make the appropriate cut. Perhaps lower down, near the seat of your intelligence,” I said, and stepped back in order to run the dull side of the blade across his testicles.

“Arla, please,” he said over my shoulder.

Then I remembered that she was there, watching. I wanted badly to vent the entirety of my frustration on him, but the stronger urge to not let Arla see my anger stole my initial impulse to cut into him like a cake.

After I had dismissed him and he was dressed and gone, Arla said to me, “I saw through you.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” I said.

“You were trying to get him to confess,” she said.

“I was?”

“You did notice the aberrant nature of his posterior, did you not?” she asked.

“Be specific,” I said, as if I were quizzing her on her determination.

“The patch of hair he had growing on his left buttock. I believe it is called the Centaur Quality? Unremitting proof of the potential for thievery.”

“Very good,” I said. “I have already put him in the suspect category.”

We saw half the town by nightfall, and I was as far from resolving the case as when I had started. For all I knew, the Traveler had awakened and stolen the fruit. Arla had come up with a short list of possible criminals, but none of them seemed as if anything miraculous had befallen them. Perhaps they were hoarding the fruit till the case was over. I paid Calloo a few belows for his work and just barely caught myself from thanking him. My near slip came, most likely, from the fact that I was so thankful the day was over. I packed my bag, put on my coat, and watched longingly as Arla let her hair down.

“Meet me at the hotel in an hour,” I said to her.

She nodded and left the church. Her abrupt departure made me wonder if she was on to me. I needed to consider if I could safely put my trust in her. But what I needed more than anything was the beauty. I could not remember when I had gone so long without it. My hands were shaking slightly, and I was beginning to feel my skull itch, a sure sign that I was overdue for a violet fix. Garland was still kneeling there praying as I left. I slammed the front door behind me as hard as I could, hoping his wooden Gronus would topple down upon him. Instead, I tripped again on the bottom step and landed facedown in the snow.

9

Mrs. Mantakis was behind the desk at the hotel when I entered, counting belows and chittering furiously to herself like a weasel caught in a leg trap. I wiped the snow off my feet onto the welcome mat and approached her. Even when I was standing before her, she paid no attention to me but went on with her monologue: “If he thinks I'm going to stand out in the cold all day waiting and then be told to come back tomorrow so that he can lay his greedy eyes on my—” I cleared my throat, and she looked up suddenly.

“Your honor,” she said, “so good to see you. You must have had a long, hard day. What can I do for you?” She swept the money off the counter and smiled insipidly to cover her rancor.

“Today was wearisome,” I said, “but tomorrow will be twice that, seeing as I will have to spend time studying you and your husband.”

“Why will that be difficult?” she asked. “My mother used to say I have fine attributes.” Her smile turned into a sneer with the wrinkling of her nose, the widening of her nostrils.

“I didn't know your mother was a veterinarian,” I said. She held her tongue, as well she should have, knowing I was tired.

“Send two bottles of wine up to my office. Also, dinner for two, and it had better not be any form of cremat. I don't care if you have to fry that dimwitted husband of yours. Then get to bed early; there will be a long wait in the snow again tomorrow.”

“As you wish,” she said, eyeing my jugular.

“A town of militant morons,” I said to myself as I trudged up the flights of stairs to my room. Once inside, I took off my topcoat, slipped off my shoes, and lay on the bed. What I wanted was a moment of rest, but, of course, my mind could not leave the case alone. When I tried to recall some of the subjects we had seen, all I could get a picture of were amorphous blobs of flesh. Arla then came to my eye's-mind, and even in my diminished condition stirred my desire. There was no doubt, I was falling in love with her. This never would have happened had I retained the Physiognomy. I could see now that the loss of reason proceeds in a geometrical progression until unholy chaos pushes every methodical theory from one's mind. What was worse, I was not completely hostile to the sensation it engendered.

There was only one thing that could clear my mind, and I got up and went to my valise for a clean hypodermic. Since Arla was most likely on her way, I only administered a sparing dose, seeing as I did not want her to witness one of my deep stupors. The beauty was all I had left to rely on, and true to her form she came to me splendidly, growing out from the point of entry between the big and second toe of my right foot in spreading tendrils of bliss.

I believed the dose too small to bring hallucinations, although the lamps in the room did emit a very faint music—strings and oboes, if I recall. It was just a fine, light feeling that lifted my spirits and gave me the energy to dress. At least the luckless Mantakis had cleaned up the shards on the carpet and replaced the glass in the mirror his hardened brother would hold for eternity. I made a mental note to commend him at bath time the next morning.

He came to my room a half hour later to let me know that dinner had been served next door and that the Beaton girl had arrived. I quickly dabbed a touch of formaldehyde beneath each ear, an aroma the scientific mind cannot resist, and went next door with a low smoldering of excitement in my bowels.

When I entered the room, I found Arla standing in front of the statue of her grandfather, her palms resting gently on either side of his face.

“Communing with the family tree?” I asked.

“Make that rock,” she said, and turned to smile at me.

I was pleased to see she appeared to have left the business of the case behind for a while. I was also pleased to see her dressed not so drably as earlier. She wore a dark green dress with yellow flowers on it that hung well above her knee. Her hair was down and, to my beauty-enhanced vision, literally shining. When her eyes met mine, it was all I could do to keep from smiling.

On the small table, Mantakis had laid out two plates of food. I could not believe my eyes when I saw a real caribou steak, vegetables I could recognize, and not the faintest scent of cremat anywhere. Beside the plates were two bottles of wine, one red, the other blue, along with two fine crystal glasses. I sat down before one of the plates and motioned that she should join me.