The Oblivion Arms - Part Five
"Communist" was not quite the term, no; nor "anarchist." Books by the key writers of numerous radical schools narrowed Armando's chambers, just as his jottings narrowed the margins of their pages.
He was whatever was against Eli Phineas Tickle -- Finn, who had looked across all Penumbra from a turret of the Oblivion Arms and declared, "This is my complete fiction." Finn, who bowed to no one, who mastered everything save the weather.
The later Adiposal notebooks allude to bombs and guns, plagues and poisons, "accidents" with the intricate improbability of Rube Goldberg contraptions. Armando's writing reverts to Spanish, Latin, Greek, gibberish -- he didn't even know the middle two. In the final stages, his output is mostly a matter of arrows, drawn with red or blue pencil, as if describing minute currents of hot and cold air that swirl at the top of every page.
Despite Finn's wishes, Armando could not legally be evicted from his office at the rear of the Oblivion Arms. He spent most of his time there, working late into the night while the maid dusted around him. Though the opposite of Olivia, she was remotely pretty, an Irishwoman with rosy cheeks and rosier hair who spoke with a vestigial burr.
They were wed in a matter of months. She bore him two sons.
He draws his wife vast cities bearing her name that are nevertheless not as vast as the ones bearing Olivia's -- the conurbations he has left to drown in dust or waves, but whose secret spires continue to press their argument on his dreams.
Calendar pages succumb to wind (someone should close that window), and then the letters start accumulating in his mailbox -- letters from someone who, being dead, theoretically should not be writing letters. He rubs his temples with fingers, as if to massage away this hallucination.
At first he crumples the correspondence, fills his waste-can like a gardener disposing the bulbs of some deadly flower. But the letters keep coming, and the waste-can overflows. (Whoever died of thrush?) How can he not reply?
On The Hamburger Channel they were making something called Burger Kiev. A whole onion bulb, skin intact,was set atop the bun to mimic an ogival dome. On the Homeopathic News Network was a commercial for a very special television event that would be showing on another, corporately connected channel: "A Monk Returns -- The Homecoming of Ananda Nada."
Doubtless our more esteemed entomologists will cavil at the following episode; we offer no "learned" defense, and only maintain that, just as love (per Armando's headstone) can be stronger than death, so too can truth (per Finn's) be stranger than fiction.
For Phoebe Tickle Adipose's burrowing into the failed family romance came at a price. As she trailed a thumbnail across the lines of Armando Adiposa's journal intime and architectural draughts, she would every so often split open a long-dried inkblot, resting like a scab upon the page. Each blot, often formed as an accidental adjunct to a question mark, contained up to two dozen eggs of Coptotermes penumbrus (as we have provisionally dubbed the critter), perfectly preserved -- and ready for action.
The eggs quickly fell to the carpet, and soon hatched; the termites descended through the cheap shag and, after some mandible action, convened in the soft wood below. They seemed to know exactly what to do, despite having awoken from a sleep of decades. In no time, the Oblivion Arms hosted a thriving colony, one whose members were immune to the relative cold of nontropical Vermont -- Vermont in high winter, at that. Blind, ravenous, and perfectly communist, they compromised every plank, jamb, sill, and cabinet; they threaded their trails through the tables and chairs, grout and scallop-shaped soap, and perforated not just the walls but the pictures that hung on the walls. It was as though a reverse Midas were touching everything in sight, some invisible emperor of waste.
The documents Phoebe read, set aside in a loose pile, were already succumbing to the swarm of jaws. Were she to put a hand on the papers -- to refer to an earlier incident -- she would find her fingers sinking in a horror of pulp. The wooden television casing had not yet been conquered. But it was only a matter of time.
Outside it seemed to be morning again. Her little phone was ringing somewhere near her body.
"We forgot about you."
"How could you forget?"
"We're very, very sorry."
"You're saying everybody is outside?"
"Your suite has a different telephone line. We neglected to call. Then we remembered you were in the library."
"Why is everybody outside?" With a stray business-reply card, for a magazine long dead, Phoebe fanned at the sweat that formed in her cleavage.
"I have someone from the police who is going to talk to you."
The sheriff, Pentose Shunt, told her to stay put. To be very still, in fact. Did she have water nearby? She did, a bottle of Naive. Did she have food? Admittedly, yes, a few bags of chips from the lobby machine. And a small jar of olives that had somehow snuck out of her room earlier. And, alas, other foodstuffs. Everything was going to be all right. The structure was fragile, though, and it might take some time before they got her out. They were readying immense aerosol sprays that would armor-plate the hotel, keep it locked in place.
"Why fragile?" asked Phoebe, naked save for panties. She glistened. Her flat paps looked like coins of a realm long gone, their inscriptions rubbed unreadable.
"Are you afraid of bugs?" asked Sheriff Shunt. "Never mind. Just stay exactly where you are."
Murray rubbed his eyes, grabbed at the last kernels of popcorn, the smell of which had permeated the TV room. The set was on, though in his slumber he must have depressed the mute button. All he could hear were some brave birds calling outside, and the ticking of the cuckoo clock. The ticking seemed loud and disorderly. He got up to use the bathroom. He brought back popcorn, diet cola, a bottle of Naive, leftover Chinese, a muffin, and a loaf of bread. There was a special on the making of "Burton!" which he thought might be interesting.
The sun was high and the air was very clear and the whole world seemed carved of crystal. The windows across from the Oblivion Arms -- belonging to a tobacconist's, a card reader's, and an adoption agency -- lashed almost painfully at the unshielded eye. Brilliant, too, were the puddles frozen seamless along the sidewalks, flaring like medals strewn across a treasury floor. And approaching from every petal of the compass were myriad flashes of light: pieces of sun, caught and borne on the lenses of camera crews. It was supposed to be a quiet set, the entire finger of land cut off from the public; indeed, several of this motley army had arrived over Lake Fiss by ice-sled, pulled by dogs now lolling in the sun. But the news, or whatever this was, reaped what it sowed, and curious Penumbrans circumvented the lackadaisical, and in some cases actually sleeping, security. Evacuees of the "fourth finger" snuck back home for a ringside seat -- little suspecting that what they were watching was not a wound but a cancer, and their homes were to go, in time, the way of Oblivion.
Had Phoebe crept up to the small library window, and stood on a kickstool to have the height to peek, she would have glimpsed this legion of light, but obeying police orders she sat, rigid, on her metal-framed chair. Had she been afforded a view, in time she might have discerned amidst the multiplying crowd three familiar faces. The one on the tallest frame would, ironically, be the one she could identify first. It was Ricer Carr, headmaster of the Iliac Academy at Fistula-on-Ane, stylishly fitted in a cape and hat. A few yards to his right, looking uncomfortable in a blue ski jacket, was Luis, agent for Team Adipose -- and, it might be noted, others.
A few yards to his right, that is to say, at the center of attention, was a short figure swathed in thin robes despite the February cold. The garb ill-concealed a well-tended belly, and its loose gray material displayed, to fine effect, the round, serene face that almost seemed to float above it, like a soft, benevolent moon. The eyes were dark and at the same time radiant. They were large and appeared to be all colors at once. Cameras shot him from every angle, and on live television his baldness was as blinding as any pane of glass. There was no fuzz, only a suggestion of where the hair would grow, as though the pate had been rubbed with a mixture of water and ashes.
Ricer Carr was given a microphone. "Ananda Nada," he asked his much shorter companion, "What have you learned about yourself -- about the world -- since entering the monastery?"
Phoebe heard neither the question nor the response (though Murray would have been able to, had he been watching the right channel). The latter sounded more Judeo-Christian ("...and the Lord taketh away") than Buddhist. Had she heard, she would have recognized the voice of "Ananda Nada." For it was the voice of her son.
Khâder Adipose had returned.
Murray Adipose hummed to himself, thinking idly of his wife, his son, his work. His immersion into the restorative waters of the television set had resurrected the melodic impulse -- ah, that zany, fickle sparrow! -- though he wasn't entirely convinced that the airs in his head weren't simply transparent recombinations of the thousand ad jingles he had just drunk in. But what would be the harm? His old teacher from conservatory, whom he always referred to simply as "the Maestro," was fanatical about deleting anything even remotely personal -- including such things as "ambition" -- from the act of composing.
"And what are you trying to say here?" he would ask, his red pencil hovering over a dishearteningly vast area of Murray's score.
"I conceived of this as the 'Sunlight' passage, where the Cave Dwellers finally--"
"Nein!" the Maestro would shout, despite being French. "Nein, nein, nein!"
Murray's knuckles tingled at the memory of his teacher's merciless pencil-raps.
"It should 'mean' nothing. It should simply be... how to say?... catchy."
To which Murray would inevitably blubber a complaint, but to which the present Murray -- revitalized, commercialized, toe-tapping Murray -- would say: You got it!
He was even about to go to the piano and try out some robust and dollarly measures when the phone, lost in the folds of his crumb-crusted blankets, rang.
"Phoebe?" he said.
"Mr. Adipose?"
"Yes?"
"Front Desk here. Uh -- except we're not exactly 'here.'"
"What?"
"We're outside, about a hundred yards away."
Murray tried looking out of the window, but his muscles all seemed to have atrophied. He slumped back into his position of perfect repose. "Good heavens, what for?"
"We're really sorry about this. We thought you might be with your wife in the library so we didn't call the room."
"Is -- is something the matter with Phoebe?"
"No, of course not, sir. Well, that is to say, she's in no worse position than you. What I mean is you're in roughly the same boat."
"Boat?"
"Please keep your voice down. Like I've been trying to explain, your wife knows all about this. She'll call you soon. The important thing is to stay calm. And don't move. Promise us not to move. Is your TV on?"
Murray wanted to say, Are you kidding?
"You might want to turn to channel 88." The connection was bad. "We'll call back," said the Front Desk. "Just don't move."
It was a special on termites. For the first few minutes Murray was convinced he'd seen it before -- an episode of "Maeterlinck Theater" -- although he soon realized he was thinking of a special on bees. That had been pretty good, so he thought this one had potential.
Rare footage of the queen, ten thousand times bigger than the male of the species. Residences that, if put on a human scale, would be "loftier than the dome of St. Peter's at Rome"; residences that, as is, could house a human. A vast field of haystacks turned out to be a vast field of termitaries. Somehow the producers had infiltrated one of these mounds -- attached a tiny camera on the back of one of its members -- and the intrepid bug filmed it all: the rare, suicidal mating flights; the construction of tunnels to venture in the outside world; the battles with their archfoe, the black ant. They could eat their own excreta. They could determine, before birth, which function each baby termite would have: soldier, worker, sex object. As in, they could choose.
The show over, Murray saw that he had been slowly but surely finishing an old crossword puzzle. Something about the termitary mazes had helped him solve this one. There was one word left, a short word, but he couldn't quite get it yet.
Why the police hadn't instructed him to turn to channel 48 is a mystery. Perhaps the producers of the show, now arrayed at a safe distance outside the Oblivion Arms, interfered, worried that some drama would be lost in the resolution. Murray would have seen Ricer Carr interviewing the monk "Ananda Nada" -- that is, the former Khâder Adipose -- who was growing increasingly silent as a policeman spoke, in his other ear, of the dangers inherent in the hotel. It was a grave situation.
The camera loved Khâder. The three-hour, not terribly interesting special on the making of "Burton!" was still on -- sponsored, hey, by Gnomon Cellular Telephone. Khâder made a pratfall and howled in sham pain.
"But before too long, young Khâder would leave the production, striking out on his own," went the narration. "Melancholy Baby" was discussed, and Khâder's departure from that show mentioned. Sugar Remo, his fourteen-year-old replacement, hit the sauce mercilessly and was fired from the show. She was now a porn star in Japan and looked about forty. They showed footage, blue pixels in the shapes of stars covering nipples and thatch. A dog licked her rudely. She sang, in a ravaged voice, "The present is pleasant/And the past is a gas." Then she farted. The canine jumped back. Murray wept.
"I can barely hear you," said Phoebe. "I think we should hang up now."
They had been talking for a half-hour or so, each thinking they were defusing the other's fear, though in truth every minute was an elaboration on dread. She told him about Armando, about Olivia, but there were too many gaps, and she didn't know how it ended.
"That's okay," said Murray.
Now was not the time to tell him his grandfather had gone insane, or why the Oblivion Arms had been so named. She tried to tell him about Khâder, how he was outside and dressed like a monk, but at that precise conversational moment the static turned tremendous -- deafening. It sounded like the termites were walking all along the connection, taking bites out of words in transit.
"Phoebe!" said Murray, practically singing. "I can't hear you!"
"Shut up!" hissed Phoebe. "We can't talk too loud--"
Outside, the aerosols were firing their liquid armor at the facade. It sounded like a forest of rustling leaves, a gargantuan natural sigh.
"I love you!" shouted Murray. He couldn't hear her anymore and he was scared. Philosophy, Burton writes, is what you believe on your sick-bed; and what was love but the most elemental sort of philosophy? It was inherent in the disciplines name. He remembered a slice of their wedding ceremony, her not unplump hand in his -- or perhaps it was the other way around. He remembered Khâder's first commercial, for a scented diaper in a range of floral designs.
He shouted again and again, at the top of his lungs. Shouts you could hear from outside.
Something, then everything, trembled. Ananda Nada stepped back, and Ricer Carr and Luis dragged him, a bit overdramatically, to safety. The aerosols were spent, their protection already rolling off, useless. Now a creaking could be clearly heard, borne on the wind to the yet-silent audience. Then the hotel emitted groans, and clucks, and the sound of a thousand things giving. A beam could be heard falling, somewhere deep inside. The hotel was materially illusion, just a series of holes now, poised exquisitely for collapse. To touch it would be folly. Ricer Carr reached up to dab his brow; Luis unzipped his parka. With a weird, gargly cry, Ananda Nada, his face set between bliss and nothing, broke free from his guardians and stormed the Oblivion Arms. This was when the crowd went wild.
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