Chapter Twelve
The coronel had gone, one evening, to get a new candle. As there was nothing especially exciting about that, in and of itself, let me proceed: walking back down the dim brown corridor, candle in hand, he heard a noise coming through the door of another room. The noise, for some reason, put him in the mind of a huge, flightless, alien bird which was the sole advance guard for an interstellar army which would wipe out everything we knew and held dear. But he was not even close: it was, in fact, Madame Tautphoeus sobbing in her chamber. But the coronel didn’t know that; not yet—you and I, dear Reader, know it, yes, I realise—but the coronel? No. And so, he found himself with a dilemma, namely, whether to heroically save humanity from an invasion, or to cower like a goddamn baby back in his room in the hope of preserving his worthless life for a few more pointless hours. The reader may decide for him- or her-self what he or she would have done. I know what I would have done, although I’m not prepared to divulge it. But the coronel?
Well: he turned—to his shame—and started shuffling away, face warped from existential panic, when he heard the door open.
“Coronel?”
His whole body became rigid, like an unsummoned erection, mid-shuffle. The voice of this alien bird mimicked that of an old lady who was perfectly fluent in Spanish. To what devious stratagems will Earth’s enemies not stoop?, he enquired, internally. Meanwhile, while he enjoyed his inner dialogue, the presumed alien bird was still awaiting a reply.
“Coronel?” it repeated, as if that were the sole Spanish word it had found time to study in its frankly unprofessionally hasty pre-invasion cramming.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” he spat, without turning round. It could probably incinerate me at any moment, with beams from its accursed eyes, he reasoned. So—why hasn’t it done so already?!
“Please come in.”
It knew English too!
Slowly, he turned, pivoting gracefully on his heel, ready to spring and to kill—
“Madame Tautphoeus!”
“Good evening, coronel. It is very late.” She was wiping her eyes.
“You alien scum, dare you ape my species?!” He leapt forward to kill it, but Vanessa, through sheer instinct, stepped to the side, allowing the coronel to collide painfully with the doorframe, then poked her index and middle fingers into his eyes, blinding him, then, whilst he fell to his knees, finally kicking him in his throat, eliciting silence.
He came to on the floor of her sitting room, fully expecting to be tortured and experimented on with no limit to the degradation an alien mind—if they even had minds—could impose.
“You miss him too, don’t you?”
It was that voice again! He rolled over, rubbed his eyes, and saw a hazy vision before him of a nimbused Vanessa Tautphoeus sat on an ottoman, appearing disappointingly human.
He decided to be blunt: “Pardon me, but are you an alien bird?”
“I’m sorry?”
The bird was clearly stalling for time, pillaging its vocabulary for the right words with which to parry him.
“Are you an alien bird?” he pressed.
“No,” she answered. “Are you?”
He chuckled; even in the shadow of death, he chuckled. “Don’t be absurd.”
She shrugged.
“But tell me,” he went on, “who is the ‘him’ to whom you refer?”
“What?”
He felt more confident that, through such verbal circumlocutions, he could outwit an adversary who had, after all, only recently, he could only presume, mastered the basics of the English tongue. “When you said ‘You miss him too’—who is the ‘him’ in that sentence?”
“Why, Inspector Pluck, of course.”
He would have swooned, and collapsed girlishly to the floor, had he not already been lying thereupon. “So you haven’t disintegrated Madame Tautphoeus and transmogrified into her likeness!” he reasoned aloud. “You’ve inhabited her body, snuffed out her soul and ransacked her memories!”
Vanessa, in her robe, unimproved by makeup, looked at him—so would you, had you been there, conversing with the fellow—not through the eyes of a bird, but through sad, wise, wrinkly whale eyes, which conveyed not only her own desolation, but that of the universe, as a whole, ever expanding, ever yearning, ever reaching, since time began, for something out there, in the emptiness beyond matter, but failing, failing, and finally, after all this while, as the coronel could now infer from the face before him, concluding that, in reality, if that’s indeed the right word, there’d never been anything there for which to reach.
“I don’t care if you’re an alien bird, sent to annihilate humanity, or not,” he whispered. “If you love the inspector like I think you do, then I’m on your side.”
He led her by the hand back to Pluck’s room and showed her the shrine (in this instance, with an unanticipated, noble gesture, waiving the entrance fee). They knelt, and stared at the tower of tat he’d accumulated.
“I have a ritual,” he found himself whispering, “which I perform. Nightly.”
“Show me,” quoth his wizened angel.
He shook his head, with unmissable import: “It’s not a ritual you would like to see.”
“Tell me,” she whispered. “Please.”
“. . .It involves. . .” He considered how best to allude to it.
“Keeping the candle lit?”
“Yes, that. . .and. . .”
“Offering a prayer?”
“Um, yes. . .”
“Say it. Please.”
“. . .Evoking a spiritual eruption through my. . .gentlemanly member.”
“Do you mean, stroking your cock to climax?”
He sighed, thankful the matter had been divulged, yet a little wary lest she turn out to be an alien after all, now bent on disseminating the admission of his nocturnal self-abasement through the world’s newspapers and academic journals. “Aye, madame—I mean that.”
She pressed her flaccid palm upon his bare head and begged him: “Let us do that as one.”
Hardly believing his luck, the coronel, sucking up his drool with a manly slurp, panting like a graceless dog, fixed his eyes on his favourite of his painted representations of Pluck; in a flash, his trousers were off and he took his tiny throbbing manhood gently between his index finger and thumb, half-hearing his co-novitiate’s charmless groans as she, fully clothed, manipulated her nether regions towards a feminine fusion with the universe, gazing, likewise, devoutly at Pluck’s image, when all at once, the hamster snapped off—there, between his fingers, it trembled, detached as if finally born, unbloodied and slowly sinking into a dreamless sleep. There was no wailing, no grief-ravaged accusations at the perceived unfairness of his Creator from the coronel, but rather a silent mourning—Vanessa, nodding with gentle understanding, took his other hand in hers (taking care to wipe hers first, as matronly honour and hygiene prescribe), and together they gazed at the little fella, who, having already undergone unaccustomed strain of late, could simply no longer hold up his head with any pride and go on; his place in this world was gone, and so, with irreproachable logic wedded to unstinting dignity, he melted away.
But the coronel hadn’t counted on his angel’s quick thinking—Vanessa scooped up a wad of melted candle wax, slathered it over the coronel’s lonely abdomen and stuck the fucker back on. The crumbly residue, which was all that was left of the coronel’s once-mighty cock, bubbled a little, shocked at this unseemly attempt to, as it were, snatch it up out of the peace of its grave and expose it to yet a few more seconds of unsolicited, demeaning existence. He (the coronel, not his penis) thanked her for her effort, and, rather than try to communicate the hopelessness of such an endeavour, medically speaking, he bade her good night and showed her to the door.
In the morning, when he awoke from a dream of having been surrounded by enemy snipers and, refusing to beg for clemency, steeling himself for execution, he remembered the member of his platoon, as it were, he had lost the night before, winced as he rolled down the bedsheet, and was flabbergasted to behold a miracle: it had fused back to the mothership, although it was, he found it fruitless to deny, even smaller than before, now resembling the runt of a tadpole’s litter. Still, he blessed it, and weeping, blinked his thanks to Pluck’s portrait above.