"All these years of mourning my precious mamma's early and tragic death! 'Poor Fairy! The victim of a thousand misfortunes and too poor to buy a crust of bread!' Do you remember your little joke? I have carried the harrowing sadness of it with me all my life! All that I have done or have not done has been confused and tempered by it. Even now, my final years have been devoted to its bewildering mysteries, it is why I am here, why I have suffered so — and it has all been just a farce! Ah, Fatina mia! Why have you done this thing to me?!"
"Because idleness is a dreadful disease, my boy, of which one should be cured immediately in childhood: if not, one never — !"
"Oh, yes, yes, I've heard all that before! You always were the good little fairy, weren't you? Society's little helper! Civilization's drill sergeant! But I was free! I was happy! And you, with your terrifying heartbreaking parade of tombstones and canon, put strings on me where there were none. You cheated me! All my life," he squawks, lifting up the twisted splinters of his arms and rattling them at the blue-haired figure on the bridal stool, "I have been nothing but a puppet!"
Slowly, though she keeps her back to them still, her head begins to rotate on her shoulders, and the waxen face of the little Bella Bambina of old appears with her strangely rigid smile and rolled-up eyes, bringing a startled gasp from his friends, pressed tight about him. "I love you," the Bambina stage-whispers, piercing him to the quick with her terrible intimacy. "Stay with me! You shall be my little brother, and I will be your darling sister!"
The sight of the Bambina, the dearest playmate he ever had, gruesome as her games could sometimes be, makes his arms drop and would bring tears to his eyes if they had not all been spent, like everything else. How good she was, or seemed to be! How tender, even if she did leave him hanging all night in the oak tree, swinging in the wind like a bell clapper, her loving care! And does she not offer him what he now most wants: just to play again? "I have thought about your little white house, Fatuccia mia," he croaks at last, summoning up all his strength to resist her, "and how much pleasure you promised me in it. Yet when I tried to return to it, you took it away and put a tombstone in its stead! I went crazy with grief for a while, but I learned my lesson well."
"So my medicine really did do you good?"
"I can truthfully say, though I have been diligent, obedient, truthful, and circumspect, I have not had a wholly happy day since. I might somehow have found my way back to one little white house or another, but I was always too afraid. Pleasure was death and dissolution. That's what you taught me. Fun was fatal. No. I will not play with you."
"My child, you will be sorry," sighs the Bambina as her grinning head recommences its slow grim turning. "You are very ill " When the next revolution begins, the head is joined by the upper torso, swiveling at the waist, and this time it is Bluebell. "Hey, wow, teach, you don't look so hot!" she laughs, snapping her gum in her bright white teeth. She reaches up with both hands to pull away the lacy shift and out pop her spectacular young breasts like fat rabbits from a hat, bringing fresh gasps of amazement from the puppets surrounding him. Those breasts, last seen on the Apocalypse, are dizzying alive, the scintillating rosettelike nipples, lightly gilded, throbbing as though with excited little heartbeats of their own. "You need some nourishment, Professor Pinenut! So, why don't you scoot your cute little boopie-doops up here and grasp, as you like to say, my 'civilizing principles?' "
This glorious sight, for which, so recently, he was ready to throw away honor, dignity, life itself, steals his breath away, what little there is left for theft, and he feels riven (literally: he can hear the stifled creaking and snapping deep inside) with an unendurable yearning, not to fondle them — what would he fondle them with? — but simply to rest his dying head there, to hide himself, as someone has said, on the breast of the simple, the vast, the ineffable "I see," he rattles drily, hanging on to his chair arms with both gnarled fists, "you are still wearing my ear."
"You better believe it, Daddy-o! It's my good luck charm!" She reaches up to finger the shriveled black brooch, making her breasts wobble teasingly. "So, hey, what'll it take to trade you for the rest, prof?"
"Certainly, you deceitful ogress, more than those puffed-up things you are flaunting so, a mask like any other. Put them away! The dead ear suits you better!"
She looks crestfallen, deflated, the rosette nipples withering to something more like smallpox vaccination scars, and he almost regrets his own deceit, hoping his nose is not giving him away. "You're right, teach," she says finally, perking up a bit, "I could use a good dressing-down! I've been really rotten, I admit it! A dirty dog! C'mon! You can treat me as rough as you please! I deserve it!" She hesitates, gazing at him hopefully ("That's a pretty good offer!" one of the puppets whispers in his ear, and another asks: "Do you think we could all have a go?"), but when he makes no move, she turns away sorrowfully and begins to rotate once more.
When she pivots around again, it is with her whole body, though the stool at the top of the steps remains in place. He is not quite sure how she does this because his gaze is fixed on the creature appearing before him. This he has not been prepared for. It is his mamma, to be sure, she could be no other, but she has changed. At first he thinks she must simply have aged, he hasn't seen her since the last century, but then he catches a glimpse of the Bambina's wicked smile, Bluebell's milk-fed complexion and fluorescent eye shadow, and hints, too, of a Hollywood starlet he once knew, maybe more than one, a colleague at university, several students, his interviewer on a television talk show, the doctor who removed the peculiar growth on his nose a year ago and prescribed a long voyage, an admiring museum curator who confessed to a platonic affection, his traveling companion in the limousine to the Nobel awards in Stockholm, even (the stray blue hairs on her chin perhaps, the ridge of her forehead) the blue-haired goat he passed on his way into Attila's gut. These features, or suggestions of features, seem to exist not simultaneously but sequentially (now it is the Bambina's waxen complexion he sees, Bluebell's gum-smacking cherry-lipped grin), in a kind of moving montage, flickering across her face like unstable film projections. It is like being under water in a Hollywood pool with naked starlets swimming by and his eyes full of chlorine. Or like trying to put a half-forgotten face together with a half-remembered name.
"Deceitful ogress — ?! How can you say all these horrible things about me, my child?" she asks with a forlorn sigh, and it is as though she has reached in, penetrating easily his fragile defenses, and pulled the little lever that floods his chest with guilt and regret, just as she always did in the old days. "That I cheated you or was unkind to you or abandoned you or misused my power or misled you or indeed did anything all your life long but love you with all my heart? 'Assassina,' you called me tonight in front of everybody! How could you do that, you wicked boy? Civilization's lackey! An avatar of Death! The Great Destroyer! Really! And, 'a son pregnant with his own mother,' what an idea!" She seems almost to be crying, but he cannot be sure, her eyes do not stay in one place long enough. Those fleeting traces of the familiar are now blurred by the strange. Claws on her fingertips. An iron tooth. Smoke curling out her nose, which seems to change shape with every breath. He has seen a scar grow, cross her brow, and rip vividly down her cheek and throat, then as quickly fade and vanish. A moment ago, her ears, peeking out from under hair twisting like thin blue snakes, seemed to be pointed, but now they look like his mamma's once more, the ones he snuggled against when she let him nuzzle his nose in her azure tresses, then — and now again — silky and soft as a passing cloud. "I am just a poor lonely fairy who fell in love with a stupid puppet's good heart and wanted to, well, make him beautiful. And happy." An eye slips out of a socket, she pushes it back. Or perhaps the socket moves to cup the errant eye. His fascination is such that he begins to worry: is this yet another seduction? "You are right about one thing, however. I have always wanted to be a good fairy. I was never one to suck navels or sour the cow's milk. I loved humans and wanted them to love me, even if they were pretty silly and didn't last long. I wanted to live among them in their nice little towns and villages, I never cared for the bog life, but somehow, even when I was being good, I was always scaring them. Maybe I had a way of doing things too suddenly, or maybe it was the holes in my armpits, I don't know, but they were always very nervous around me. I tried my best for a few hundred years, but I never managed to fit in. It was a kind of racism, as you'd call it now, I suppose, and probably I had grounds for complaint, but we fairies, as you know, are not much given to such tactics. We merely poison the wells, smash a few eggs and babies, and infest the beds with rectum snakes. My own response was to try to die. Dying seemed to carry a lot of weight with humans, I thought it might help. But it wasn't in my repertoire, really. I gave it all I had, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. Which disheartened me all the more. And then, just when my spirits were lowest, you came along "