(vignette 10) Dominion!

Few of Marie-Anne’s friends knew where she lived.  Only one, Joscelyne Clement, had ever been inside.  Joscelyne thought of herself as a fashionista.  She prided herself on knowing what was in vogue.  Her own home was like a train station.  Out went the old as soon as the new had come to market.  She spent a fortune keeping current.  And, if her furnishings were sparse, it was only because she could not afford more.  Fortunately for Joscelyne, she was married to one of the University’s benefactors, a banker who had come into his own trading on unregulated markets in oil, natural gas and soya beans.  When they got hitched, Joscelyne’s mother reached forward to Marie-Anne, a maid-of-honour, as the bride was processing down the aisle, and, quipped, Honey. Today we’re gonna marry looks to money. My grandkids are gonna be rulers of the world!  Joscelyne, who’d been born Jolene after the Dolly Parton song, had had looks and not a stitch of money.  But, Lord, did B.C. — Bertrand Clement — ever have money.  Joscelyne took to it, as her mother said, like a fish outta water.  B.C. didn’t seem to mind.  A trophy wife was like holding an Oscar at the After-Parties.  It was trite, but they were made for one another.


Marie-Anne was delighted to find her old friend, Jolly, as she had been known in childhood, in the office where she worked as Dominique’s personal assistant.  B.C. was contemplating a gift to the University Library that would have put it on the map.  Millions!  Jolly had accompanied B.C. to his meeting with Dominique, the Head Librarian.  The deal was quashed not because Dominique didn’t know how to sell it.  Indeed, she understood B.C.’s type perfectly and couched her every move and sentence in terms that he would understand and appreciate.  With B.C.’s departure, Dominique was certain that she’d clenched the deal.  It was after the meeting that the deal fell apart.


Joscelyne, begging her goodbyes from B.C., followed Marie-Anne on her break to the Starbucks downstairs.   Why is it, Jolly asked, Head Librarians always have their offices in penthouse suites?  Marie-Anne laughed.  She’d never considered the question before.  They don’t all sit in Ivory Towers, Marie-Anne answered.  The chief of the Public Library, downtown, has her office on the ground floor.  ... Clearly accessible to the public.  Her response inadvertently seeded Jolly’s reservations.  She didn’t trust women who seemed as much man as the man she’d married.  It was, even so, a reservation that Joscelyne didn’t, herself, trust.  What have you been up to?, she asked, adding quickly, What’s it like, ... working as Dominique’s P.A.?   Perhaps it was the caffeine rush of her triple-shot latté speaking, but Marie-Anne found herself speaking freely.  It was something that Marie-Anne would later regret.  P.A.?  Marie-Anne remarked, Oh, I wouldn’t dare speak for Dominique!  Jolly looked puzzled.  Public address system.  — P.A.


Regardless whatever had unleashed her workplace reserve; Marie-Anne sensed, it needed to be caged.  As she later replayed the conversation in her mind, she heard herself telling Jolly that she preferred the term “secretary”.   ... Personal Assistant makes me think of bound servitude.  Marie-Anne’s face muscles, she recalled, gave truth to the statement.  She also recalled that, as Joscelyne probed deeper, she said, Dominique is aptly named.  Marie-Anne’s meaning, intended or not, was clear.  Joscelyne later reported to B.C. as she had it, from an excellent source, that The staff of that library fear the Head Librarian.  Without revealing her source or remarking on Marie-Anne’s personal feelings, she’d go on to recount statistics: Ninety percent of her assistant heads and middle managers had left the library abruptly.  — Two had been fired unceremoniously, with indecorous all-staff email from the Head following them to the door.  — Productivity, as reflected in donor income and grants awarded had fallen sharply, by more than 50% in the last year.   As she continued her litany of facts copied from Marie-Anne’s smart-phone, B.C. could hardly believe that a library could be so stressful; yet, he’d come to trust Joscelyne.  He called the new University President that evening and, without saying why, rescinded his offer of thirty-six million dollars.


The news was delivered personally by the President the next morning.  He’d intended the visit to soothe Dominique’s potential concerns.  They spoke at length.  The President, certain he’d conveyed that the donation was rescinded without malice.  To the contrary, his visit inflamed her.  The former President never came over here!  she told her new assistant heads immediately after the visit, demanding they get to the bottom of “this”.  Dominique took his visit as a signal that he wanted her head.  She was wracked by paranoia, the feeling that she’d been “betrayed”.  She knew that she’d need to offer something up.  Something BIG.

    

   

(vignette 9) Fame & the Torture of Thought

Why is it that when offered a penny for your thoughts, we often give two cents worth in return?  Do we think more of ourselves than others think of us?  Is our stock value appreciating?  In 1968, Andy Warhol offered, in an exhibit catalogue, that each of us would claim fifteen minutes of fame.  In 1909, however, E. M. Forster granted us a mere ten minutes of fame.

---

What Johnny said was not well translated into English, even though he spoke in English. Consequently, he often kept his thoughts to himself.  The world he knew was beautifully simple.  Language had a difficult time containing it.  Language yearned to be expansive.  Painting vignettes in phrases meant to evoke brush strokes that, in themselves, were meant to capture light and darkness, movement and stillness, moments of birth and of death or of less monumental, the more mundane seconds of lives . . . well, it seemed to lay beyond his mastery of simplicity.  — A cloud of algae swimming off the coast of Matagorda Island, for example; its blue-green mass, never the same form from moment to moment, effervescing oxygen: it could not be rendered in words. —   He lacked the power to make them wholly real.  In comparison to the thing itself, they would be mud men.  And, though they might do his bidding, they would sink in the real world.

Besides, he told himself, the canvas that lay between two minds, ...   well, it required a common understanding, if not common sense. Johnny didn’t believe it existed.  It was like painting on water, like suminagashi, the Japanese art of ‘floating ink’ to marble papers.  If it were possible, no two papers were alike.  But, it was worse than that in his mind.  Philosophies and metaphysics almost literally drew words upon words.  Words, themselves, relied upon themselves, almost solipsistically, like the dialogue of two facing mirrors.  Words were randy bastards that copulated when brought together and masturbated when left alone.  Johnny’s mind was a brush filled with words spilling out.  It was Contagion that he dared not let loose.

Still — In moments like these — Dominique bearing down upon him — He used his thoughts as Diversion.  With them, he could make time stand still.  He could draw out moments into eternities, singularities, as the fellows of the University’s Physics Department might say.  Her pressure tactics were sufficiently intense; he felt himself flattened before her.  How much longer, he wondered, could he ignore her?

---

This theory of fame, his mind hammered away, was just a theory, taken in sixty-eight year segments.  If correct, the common man enjoyed no fame at all before 1705.  This much of the theory might well be true.  It was at about that time that newspaper publishing as we know it — knew it, anyway — came into being.  In 1704, the Boston News-Letter was granted a license.  Skip forward, two-hundred and sixty-three years or so; and, the Pelican Rapids Press, as every other small-town newspaper, was making everyone’s business known.  If correct, each of us individually now has a claim of approximately eighteen minutes on fame.     — Johnny was talking to himself.  Eighteen minutes was an answer to his question.  But, eighteen minutes seemed a long time to ignore anyone, let alone to ignore Dominique. —     If correct, it’s probably eighteen minutes in total, summed up in the read-life of a Twitter stream, or, Facebook feed, or, the moments of lucidity afforded our shortening attention span. 

As a theory, though, it’s almost certainly wrong.     — This ability to argue against himself made Johnny his own best opponent in games of chess. —     Economies of so-much-more-to-do in ever less time and for less and less pay, . . . well, they dictate: The theory is hokum!  Even the choice of the word, ‘hokum’ — contraction of the words hocus-pocus and bunkum, LOL — stands as a proof contra-theorem.

Forster saw it coming.     — Johnny was certain of this. —     His short story — short story, indeed — The Machine Stops predicted the fall of social media, the last line of communication, the likes of Twitter, Google+ and the Facebook Wall, even their foreign counterparts, like Baidu.  Forster’s machine stops something like a wind-up clock, like the old ticker that granny bequeathed you in her last-will-and-testament.  That old girl, the old ticker, the antique clock — the one given a stately place on the mantle — it’s fire too, gone out, made redundant, Johnny remarked to himself on the irony of it — it has needs that you keep forgetting to attend to.     — Wind her up! Johnny instructed himself.  Hadn’t that been what he had done with Dominique? —     Warhol, all things considered, was an anomaly.     — He was certainly Johnny’s antithesis. —     Warhol, the attention seeker, could never be given enough recognition; he had to manufacture it for himself.  Self-made manufacture alone guaranteed that fame would be received in the measure required.  It’s surprising that five minutes more fame, alone, sufficed.

In the theory’s contrapositive, then, ...     In the reduction of fame over time, its apogee will be the simple greeting, “Yo!” or “Word”.  No other words will be needed.  Indeed, it’s already becoming so difficult to tell, really, what one means when one is talking.  Appoggiatura — explaining oneself — will lack economy.     — Here, he excused himself for terminating further conversation with Dominique.  It wasn’t much of a conversation anyway. Dominique issued commands.  She didn't expect to be spoken back to, even though most people called that 'normal conversation'. —     No need to polish the penny, Johnny instructed himself, when a dull one, and only one, need do.

Well?  He heard Dominique demand.  He knew that he would be thrown down a well in the morning.  She was his boss, after all.  And, if wolves were to be found down there, he knew they’d be biting his ass.  For now, snapping to, he responded, Benim Adım Kırmızı!  “My Name is Red!”    ... Dominique simply huffed, her exasperation audible, and, turning with her black humour intact, left.  She hadn’t understood a word he said.  Of course, this time, he was speaking Turkish.

    

     

(vignette 8) The Eye of the Beholder

   

That night, after luxuriating in her bath, Marie-Anne penned fresh words, following the date and day of the week, into her diary.

Oh, beautiful.  The bright blue

skies.  My ocean's waters.

You hold me, embrace me

who dares to breathe you

in and out. Oh, beautiful.

Oh, beautiful.  Lolling fields

to bed me, lay me down

beside nettled fences, yielding

to lamp-light, at last

returning.  Eternal.  Beautiful.

Oh, beautiful.  The late trains

call with their clip and clatter

of coming and going.  The rain

of sound falling at  the speed

of light.  So lovely.  So beautiful.

Oh, so beautiful.  The waves’

crescent gestures ordain

rounds of loss and urge return

of those they wish well.

Goodnight.  Dearest.  Beautiful.

   

It was a wonder that Marie-Anne hadn’t accidentally drowned, such was her preoccupation with the President’s body as she lay, eyes closed, in her bath.  Gently rocking.  Pelvis thrusting.  Attendant waves lapping at her breasts.  Envisioning acts unseemly had they not evoked shared intimacy.

Now, she lay in bed wondering how she would ever find sleep.  Until this moment she’d never thought how archaic was her language.  Sleep, after all, wasn’t the sort of thing one found, like a lost button or a coin in the cushions of the couch after a party.  It was her nagging thought that just as she might never truly find sleep, she might never truly know the President’s body.  Oh, he was gorgeous, indeed!

Marie-Anne had reached early middle age unmarried.  It was of no fault of her own, and, certainly not because she was comely.  Indeed, while Marie-Anne had been rotund as a child, she’d grown into a glamorous young woman.  She carried this beauty with her into middle age, touched by the humility of one who could count her blessings in lost pounds.  No, the cause was, in a sense, thoroughly common, ... if a bit old-world.  Marie-Anne’s mother fell ill and infirmed when Marie-Anne was still young.  Attending to her widower mother’s needs as an only-child effectively took her off the market. 

Oh, there was an older brother; but, he was a bit of a miscreant, a reprobate who’d gone to jail for a series of felony thefts.  Under new “Three Strikes” law, he’d eventually gone away for good.  He was put down like a rabid dawg, their mother used to say of him, never failing not to speak his name.  He was little more than a footnote on Marie-Anne’s life now.  She thought of him as “miscarried”, the brother she never had.

She might have said the same of her father.  He’d gone to war and come back a shell-shocked wreck of the man her mother had known.  At first, after he’d come back, he’d drink himself into altered states.  These often left the impression that she was living in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  To secure her own peace of mind, Marie-Anne would ultimately spend most of her early childhood evenings locked away in her room.  She reasoned this was why she had been fat as a child.  Cooped up with enough food to last her into an eternity, she’d finish her homework then spend the night inactively watching TV.  It struck her that she had the life of one of the hens on the farm where her family lived, in a form of captive husbandry.  In the end, her father became prophetic.  If I don’t wake, just bury me here, were his final words.  He was speaking of the floor, where he’d often pass his evenings, prone, beside an empty bottle.  When he died, they buried him behind the out-house, said some words, and sold the farm.  That’s what brought Marie-Anne from up-north, on the rolling countryside of Clyde, to this sleepy little university town.

It was of no matter to Marie-Anne that she remained unmarried now, even after her mother’s late demise.  It wasn’t the dead-end that her friends suggested it should be.  Rather, it marked opportunity.  — Now, don't you let opportunity fly out the window, she remembered her grandpa advising her.  Marie-Anne wasn't going to spend it on the first man that walked by, no matter what her friends thought. —  She was single, not alone.  She could turn heads.  Walk down the street, and, the eyes of every man would be upon her.  Some, so single-minded in their attentions, she thought of them as the walking dead.  One once even drove his car into the back of another that had slowed to give her what her mother called “googly-eyes”.


Strange, she stopped to amuse herself, how in the age of the search-engine that term had been given new life.  She was thinking of the hot married man who told her, Child. I’m gonna look you up!  If he weren’t married, she would have encouraged him with a smile.     ... and, the young fellow she’d passed inside the Country-and-Western bar she that visited for line-dancing lessons with her friends.  He had the annoying habit of saying Bing!, as if she was ringing his bell, whenever she came within “shout’n distance”.  Her friend, Joscelyne Clement, called this his Yahoo! moments.  Joscelyne said this to imply that he was a country bumpkin.  As she looked back on it now in the context of ‘the new age’, Marie-Anne allowed herself to think of the brutes of Gulliver’s Travels rather than the wits of an intelligent search engine.

No, Marie-Anne was not single because she was comely or especially smart, but, because she was saving herself.  Not particularly for the right man, for Mr. Right as Joscelyne named this unknown soldier.  No.  Just, saving herself.  It was what she’d always done and, likely, always would do.  The President was safe.  She could dream of him, or, lay awake thinking about him.    ... Imagine making love to him in the surf on far-flung Caribbean beaches.    ... Write love poems, that were heartfelt if not terribly good, about him.  She could venerate him.     ... but, she could never have him, and never would.  He was safe.  Even Botticelli, had to paint Mars to see Venus.  She understood, it was the pursuit that made her happy.

    

     

(vignette 7) A Memory of Holonomy,or, Sergei Gukov's Theroem

The physicists have it wrong.  She murmured to herself, her head in her hands, listening to voices outside.  They keep crashing atoms into one another.  They should be bending them instead, one around another.

   

   

It was the late 1940s.  War in Europe had just ended.  And, the farmer's daughter was called outside, to help.
   

The moment took her, the way a child is taken ...   into the jaws of a wolf while strolling through a forest.  It was the warmth that most surprised her.  The warmth of the blood as it poured into the bag that she held beneath the pig's throat.  Her father had hung the beast, by its hind legs, from a branch of an oak tree in the yard.  How it protested before he slit its throat.  Her’s was a task that had been her brothers’.  But, they had been called up, to war from which they’d been fated not to return.  The blood’s warmth, she felt certain, would grow cold as childhood memories already had.

   

   

In later retelling of the story, it was she who had held the pig, not only after death but in the moment of death as well.  Hold still, now.  Her father commanded.  These were the last words she could recall before the sound of it, of the gun blast.  Not deafening, but, piercing, as the moment a needle passes through cloth and, instead of drawing a stitch, draws blood from the tip of a finger.  The pig shuttered and fell silent, then still, where it once stood.  She felt, she’d become responsible for its death.

   

   

Years later now, all she felt were the little daily pains that made climbing the stairs difficult.  Each of her ailments, sourced in her bones.  She was becoming Lot’s wife, unable to leave the past behind.  Unable to remember it clearly, she carried it with her like a bag of shells ground into a fine lime plaster.  Memory, was an ancient seabed, now beneath dry land, quarried by grandchildren.  How, she wondered, had so much died here, that its pit lay so deeply layered beneath the surface of the woman she’d become?

At the top of the stairs, she could no longer stand to see; but, through the opened windows, came the crisp clear voices of grown sons playing in the court below.  Their wives — themselves no longer young, and, who’d built carriers of raising their own sons and daughters — were busy, storing regrets of their own.

(vignette 6) How the Cheshire Cat got his Teeth

   

The immediate past President was a man characterized or, rather, caricatured in the student newspaper by his teeth.  He had, as his wife would be the first to admit to the paper’s young reporter, a buxom smile.  Jean-Anne, the First Lady as she preferred to be known to the public, had a Molly-get-your-gun spirit.  Buxom, though a sexist throw-back to a bye-gone era, was the type of colourful word that she always had on the tip of her tongue.  He may have gone on in years, she was reported to have said, but his buxom smile is still as full as the first day he shared it with me.  There was a tenderness in her voice.  Even today, a researcher could coax it easily from between the printed lines.

Jean-Anne meant this as a compliment, as the kind of warm-heart recollection that would endear the students to her husband, then the new President.  It wasn’t to be.  In the cartoon that accompanied this first article, the immediate past President was depicted as a man with an impossibly large grin.  His own first interview with the reporter hadn’t gone well.  He had come off as the stern grandfather.  Over time, cartoons of the President gained precedence over accompanying articles and eventually replaced them entirely.  At the same time, the grin grew, until his head was nothing more than teeth, which ate the body not long thereafter.  As a set of dentures, it — rather, he — would soon be seen biting into the ass of the personified student body.  Jean-Anne’s love, it had become painfully clear, was not shared.

That James Fabricante had been a Doctor of Dentistry before assuming the role of University President was, in the collective mind of the student body, nothing more than coincidence.  But, Dr. Fabricante was blind to it, perhaps even blinded by it.  In other countries, he was aware, a dentist amongst academicians would not have been given the time of day.  Yet, here, he had been shown to the President’s Office.  His name was on the door.  And, he commanded the finances of the institution.

Jim — as he preferred to think of himself — an ordinary man, the kind of fellow you would be happy to be seen with at a barbecue, sharing a joke, slapping you on the back like an ole-boy — Jim preferred to imagine that his detractors referred to him as Drill-bit James.  The pretence allowed Jim to confide confidence in himself.  Surgical extraction was a skill that this University would need, he told himself, if I am to be able to save if from itself.  It would later become apparent that Jim also saw it advantageous to apply the skills of cosmetic as well as corrective dentistry.

The students, closer to their childhood and its juvenile preoccupations than the immediate past President, couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Fabricante’s profession.  To them, he had simply become the exaggeration of one of his prominent physical features.  He was simply a set of nattering, wind-up, plastic teeth.  They issued decree after decree and, for the students, nagging aphorisms.  The student body president was heard to wonder if his admonitions — they were endless — telegraphed the near occasion of their own mortal sin.

The worst offense was railing on about alcohol consumption on campus, after it came to light that apéritifs, wine, and whiskey were being delivered to the presidential mansion in quantities required to sustain weekly dinner parties that dragged on long into the night.  A defence drawn on the responsibility of grown men and women seemed a sophistry that drew the headline, Father knows best — Bubble of responsibility forms over presidential mansion, from the student newspaper.

It was then that the paper decided to silence Dr. Fabricante.  The words of the Presidential Watch column were replaced with a daily picture of the immediate past President.  He was always shown beaming.  The flash of teeth seemed to grow broader day by day.  Drawing attention to the alcohol issue was, in fact, one of Jim’s most adept accomplishments.  It obscured the fact that he wasn’t running the University like an academician but like a dentist.

     

     

(vignette 5) Johnny in the Bag

In the darkness of his flashbacks, there was a single light.  Memory flickered as if a flame in the wind.  A desire, and, trepidation.

Both beside the couch and within his flashbacks, he heard someone demand, Well!  It was Dominique pushing the tall, skinny one, whom Philippe knew as Johnny, for a response.  In his flashbacks, the voice belonged to his father.  It lay somewhere in the darkness.  There, the word implied something more than expectation.  Duty demanded obedience.  And, it was spoken with impatience if not disgust.

Philippe bent down as he’d been taught to, taking hold of the pig behind its shoulders.  In reality, Johnny felt Philippe’s hold of him as something of a force against Dominique’s relentless onslaught.  Now, he prayed that someone would stop her.  No one did.  No one, it seemed, would dare.  She was a force not of nature, but, of something equal to it.

The gun-shot, of course, was verbal.  But, in his flashbacks, it burst from the darkness like a moment of creation.  It was instantly blinding and simultaneously deafening.  The pig seemed to fall in the very same moment, its belly surrendering to gravity.  Philippe recalled his curiosity at the legs falling away.  It was as if they’d never been there.

His own legs buckled as he came face to face with the pig.  The wet of the earth was warmer than he’d expected.  It felt as though it was welcoming the both of them.  He held the cloth bag to the pig’s forehead, where his father’s shot had passed squarely between the eyes.  He collected the blood.  Surely, he forced himself to believe, these were its memories.  After they had coagulated, he imagined, he would eat them.  They would be brought back to life in him.  But, in this moment, they were pouring out even while the life had already drained away.

It was with irony’s touch that reality returned with a wholly different and stuttering flashback.  His mother.  In the years before her own death.  Standing.  At the backyard fence.  In conversation, with the neighbour.  Summer breezes flowing, between laundry hung out to dry.  The both of them, trading secrets.  Savouring the taste of pickled pig’s feet.  Philippe heard his mother, sharing her recipe for blood sausage.  Johnny-in-the-bag, she called it.

     

(vignette 4) The Judgment of the Ordinary

Dominique wore a mask.  To many people, it — or, rather — she seemed two-faced.  Depending upon which way she tilted her head.  Dominique was a self-made woman.  She’d survived a failed marriage.  Then, she survived cancer.  More recently she’d survived retirement from a government job.  She’d been given a golden parachute; but, having been forced out, it only seemed leaden.  She was sinking fast . . . when she’d been offered this job, come to this backwater.  Life taught her that she needed two faces — one kindly, if slightly dispassionate — another ruthless and distinctly paranoid.  The latter tempered the former, as much as the former humanized the latter.

From their ensconcement in the sitting room, Philippe’s cadre — they could hardly be called a clique, the President observed of their loose loyalties — could be overheard commenting.     . . . How life-like! reported the tall, skinny one who masked his own identity with a Peruvian festival mask.  Don’t you think?! Dominique addressed him directly.  The Venetians say that a mask affords its wearer, she heard herself lecturing, opportunity to put on another persona.  The tall, skinny one raised his mask to his forehead to meet her implicit challenge the more directly.  But, she said, removing her own mask, I think it brings to a head one’s inner-self.  She hesitated, to look after his reaction, as with a sculptor’s regard of her statue, searching for its soul.  She smiled, Don’t you think?

The stress she place on the words belied the double-entendre.  Her intention was obvious.  To obliterate challenge.  Everyone within ear-shot recoiled.  The remark struck as a bullet.  The tall, skinny one shrank away, then fell back silent on the couch.  Behind his own mask, Philippe was having flashbacks.  All, the same event.  Each, from a different angle.  Here, Philippe stood in a muddy pen.  The dark earth smelled of wet.  The flashbacks bore the tones and textures of burnt umber and aged egg-white.  The pen was one in a puzzle of pens, a maze of them.  At its center, Philippe held a cloth bag, coated in lard.  He knew what its purpose would be. 

A pig the size of a boar was run through the maze.  When it, at last, had escaped into Philippe’s pen, it stood as if stunned, perhaps relieved, maybe even comforted to have found someone.  They, the two of them, were planets in a void.  The distance faded into absolute black.  Each of them sensed that this place was both a beginning and its end.  Then, came the sound of the gun.

     

(vignette 3) A Day of Rest

      

     

Who knew what the dog knew?  Or, as the Sunday paper voiced the headline the day after Dominque had been seen leaving the President’s residence, IF THE DOG WOULD SPEAK.

Mitchell could only wish that he might pick up the telephone and tell all.  The dirty underwear.  The take-away Chinese delivered to the front gate.  The late nights, falling asleep in front of the TV tabloid news with its salacious headlines and right-wing anchors feigning indignation.  Maybe then the telephone would stop ringing.  Mitchell could enjoy his days.

What did they want anyway?  They, the unknown callers.  Did they expect that a housekeeper might answer?  That she might say anything just to silence the incessant ringing?  Mitchell read the headline.  How trite!, he thought.  He could have come up with that himself.  Sunday was a solitary day of rest.  No one dared call, it seemed, when the President was home.

What did Mitchell really know?  That the life of a University President was a lonely existence?  That an unmarried man would crave company?     — as if Mitchell’s existence was inconsequential.  He couldn’t have known that, not with certainty anyway.  Who was to say what the President did . . . when he went away during the day?  Not Mitchell.  The President didn’t talk much about his work, not to Mitchell.  And, this thing with Dominique?  Well, it simply proved that this college town was far too small, too far removed from the big city in which Mitchell had been rescued so many years ago.  No — Mitchell knew only as much as he himself knew.  It was a dog’s life.  Food and games.  Huggies and walkies.  And, yes, water.  Mitchell loved water.  If anyone was going to make up answers to questions that dared impose upon one’s private life, better it was the reporters than Mitchell.

Mitchell tried, in fact, not to give questions much mind.  Curiosity killed the cat, he told himself.  And, neighbourhood cats were dying or disappearing with increasing frequency.  Why weren’t the papers concerned with that?  Mitchell didn’t want their fate to befall him, and, neither did he know how to control, even affect, his fate.  He rephrased the question: They don’t give a damn about what the cats might have to say!  Cats loved to speak, to rub themselves against you, invading your space, and let everyone know.  You had to command a dog, SPEAK.  Their loyalty was unquestioning.

And, Dominique?  Dominique was one in a string of people that came and went, several sleeping over.  It was no big deal.

      

     

(vignette 2) Trojan Horses

     

   

My English isn't good enough. I know! Philippe pleaded in hopes of quieting his colleagues' laughter. A cadre of free-spirited professional men, they were making their way back to the office after lunch. And, Philippe was the current target of their fun. He could sense his face, turning colour with embarrassment. By the feel of it, it had to be the bright red of his neck tie by now. Philippe sensed that he was in danger of spontaneous internal combustion. He was struggling to have appropriate words at the ready should it come to that. I'm melting. I'm mel-ting! he rehearsed the line from The Wizard of Oz when the wicked witch surrenders her life to a well-intentioned Dorothy.

Moments before, Philippe had spied a Deux Chevaux on the street. It had been the car of his childhood dreams even while others his age dreamt of sporty Mini-Coopers or Alfa Romeo Spiders. It would have been sufficient embarrassment now to have been teased for his enduring love of the plodding Deux Chevaux. The name meant "two horses"; and, even back in the day, other cars well exceeded the horse-power of two. That was to say nothing of the fact that a Deux Chevaux looked like a Clydesdale rather than a sleek stallion. A stallion was sent out to stud. A Clydesdale only ploughed the field. It was a tortoise amongst hares. That is where Philippe got himself into trouble.

Rather than saying, deux chevaux, two horses, Philippe said, deux cheveux, or "two hairs" in English. He hadn't noticed his faux pas until his colleagues drew long-suffering attention to it. Philippe's hair was noticeably thinning; and, his fault gave his colleagues the liberty to draw attention to it. At the age of thirty-two, it might have stung less if he weren't turning into his father. The face that greeted him in the morning mirror and, now, in afternoon reflections cast off of glass doors and windows was no longer his own.

His father's reaction, of course, would have been to strangle the nearest of his colleagues with his own neck tie. But, not Philippe. Oh, no. Philippe was the antithesis of his father. It was here, safe in the knowledge that he was about to implode, that Philippe uttered those words — My English isn't good enough. I know! — as a kind of defence, a shield. It was a shield, however, that his colleagues saw as the puny, plastic kind of thing that a child would bring to Norse history day at school. It only intensified what, to Philippe, seemed their mean-spirited humour. Some of them had even begun literally ribbing him. He was certain that he would go home with bruises.

Philippe's one salvation was safe in the knowledge that he could just walk away. He knew that, among men, as among boys, the pack is as strong as a neodymium magnet. Without drawing any more attention to himself, he fell out of step, slowed and finally stopped, before turning away down a side-street. None of them seemed to have noticed. Not one looked back. No one followed. Their banter could be heard, continuing unbroken, even after he turned out of sight. It was comforting, to him that, in a city this big, Philippe could be alone with himself.

Of course, he knew, ... the difference between two horses and two hairs. His English should be better. Mon Dieu. Sacrebleu. Philippe muttered beyond the hearing of passers-by. He was, after all, the President's secretary, for God's sake. — Dog nabbit! He stopped in his tracks. There was no one to hear him, let alone to answer, when he asked, What am I? A parody of all the cartoons and movies I've ever seen? There was a tiny but growing voice inside, shouting, That ... th-th-that's all, folks! It needn't say more nor say it louder. Philippe heard it clearly. If he were atop any of the surrounding buildings, he'd throw an anvil tied off to one of his legs over a parapet wall. Cartoons and movies were perfectly good means of learning English.

As he stood there on the street, a young man brushed by. He'd probably stolen Philippe's wallet. That didn't matter. The young man had brought Philippe back, down to Earth safely. I remember! he told himself. It was the moment that he fell in love with the Deux Chevaux. Look, his father encouraged him to focus on the approaching car. A 2CV Sahara, one of the Deux Chevaux models. — Roll-back, lipstick-red canvas roof, Philippe recited, the dull monotone of his voice sounding like that of a child with Aspergers and a fascination for cars. — It was the last moment when his father seemed human to him. Look, it's a Trojan horse! It was heading into the city's centre. It's motor, silent as a statue.

There were women inside, most of them using the mirrors to fix their make-up. Pointing to them, Philippe's father suggested, See, they're getting ready for battle, applying war paint. "War paint" was a term from a bye-gone era. Philippe's grandfather used it when he came over to baby-sit. The words referred to his mother's long absences before dinner out. She fix'n the war paint? he'd ask his son, Philippe's father, mockingly. The question sprang off his tongue with a country twang, as if for emphasis. He would relent only when he and his daughter-in-law came face to face. All dolled up, you? Now, his tongue swayed to the wag of a city-slicker. And, Don't you look good enough to eat, yourself, he'd call out as she stepped over the threshold. There was more than a touch of irony in his voice, so much so that, even at his young age, Philippe sensed a bit of what might have been hatred.

Except for the woman behind the wheel, all seemed not to notice the world outside, and, especially not the men, like Philippe's father, staring from the road-side. The site of the Sahara, its two engines, each parched of petrol, pushed by as many men as there were women inside, was something indeed: The beauty of the women — The spectacle of the men — The mystery of how they all fit and jockeyed for position inside the car's cab before the engines had run dry. A Deux Chevaux was more than a car; it was a metaphor. Its mechanics were all manner of probable, even possible, interactions of those associated with it. "Women love a sports car," one advertisement proclaimed, "but, men love women who choose a Deux Chevaux."

It was only as the men in his company returned to their building that they noticed. Philippe had gone missing.

       

(Vignette 1) The Telephone Cord Snaps with the Energy of the Conversation

     

Marie-Anne had just gotten the news.  Dominique had been pictured in the morning newspaper leaving the President's private residence lat the evening before.  The picture showed a woman whose clothes had been tussled.

I always knew she was a hussy, Marie-Anne dead-panned into the receiver.  What she didn’t dare commit to the ear on the other end of the line was that Marie-Anne was secretly envious of Dominique.  No one would say that Marie-Anne could launch a thousand ships, let alone the rubber duckie that was waiting for her in the bath she’d just drawn before the phone rang.

Even as the picture had to make the two matrons go green around the neck, it set their imaginations alight.  Ou là là! purred the woman in the distance as they spoke about the man who surely would be at the center of a national fire-storm.  Grrrr, growled Marie-Anne.  The fine, thin body of the President coursed across the synapses of her brain like the current on the line.