If you’re having trouble with the maths
Come consult our helpful graphs!
The graph’s bars spring up, fountains erupting from the blowholes of two miniature Calliopes. The tallest bears the title, “How Important a Callowhale Is to the Continued Function of the Multiverse.” A very short, squat one, little bigger than an exclamation point, reads: “How Important You Are to the Continued Functioning of the Multiverse.” A pitiful slide whistle sounds its note, and then they’re off again. Marvin turns a somersault and warbles:
Just think of a long shiny pin!
The music scratches to a halt. Mr Bergamot protests, “A pin! Now that’s just silly!”
“Not as silly as an octopus playing the harmonica,” the mongoose rejoins. A rimshot echoes down the Waldorf staircase from nowhere. The octopus and mongoose join arms and serenade the lounge together:
Now think of a long shiny pin!
Stuck down through batting and muslin!
Cotton and linen, silk, lace, and wool, too!
There’s so much that fantastic pin can punch through!
One of the Calliopes leaps off the graph. Her nose sharpens to a wicked silver point. She dives down from the x-axis and the image shifts: a whale shearing through quilts and blankets and veils, sending up splashes of thread behind her.
The pin holds it together, so nice and so neat
That is a pin everyone wants to meet!
The spaces between Mr Bergamot’s tentacles fill with stars, with worlds none of the living or the dead have seen before, shuffling together like cards, like the squares of a quilt, lying one atop the other. All the while the bouncing cartoon callowhale dives through them.
Well, that silk is a universe and so are the laces
The cotton and linen are vast starry spaces
Where nothing goes quite as it goes where you go
And no one you’ll meet will be someone you know
And the fantastic pin that we mentioned before?
Is a callowhale swimming through infinite doors
The stars coalesce into a cheerleader with GO WHALES! stamped on her megaphone. She throws nebulae into the air like pom-poms.
So cheer on the whales and treat them with care
Don’t tease and don’t poke, don’t startle or stare
Without them, the silk would slide right off the linen
And who knows what trouble we all would be stuck in!
The cheerleader frowns and explodes into a puff of animated smoke. The slide whistle slides again. Mr Bergamot takes over once more, and the image he holds changes to Calliope with an enormous thermometer in her mouth and a cold compress on her head.
Now sometimes a whale can get hurt or get sick
Though their hearts are so strong and their skin is so thick.
But we can’t go without, not for one single day
So they make a new whale to play callowcroquet!
A baby whale appears in a shower of glittery fireworks. It wears a lacy bonnet and shakes a rattle with its fin. Calliope and her baby wind up a pair of croquet mallets and whack Jupiter and Saturn through identical hoops.
Marvin the Mongoose, darling of Capricorn Studios, brings it home, while Bergamot’s tentacles fill with smiling faces:
Oh, the life of a great callowhale is amazing!
We hope you’ll forgive us our upside-down phrasing
And the next time your loved one gets vaporised flat
Just remember the pin, and that will be that.
A smattering of awkward applause picks up. The octopus relaxes his arms, the filmstrip clicks off, and our performers bow. But Marvin can’t resist starting up again, high-kicking into a reprise:
If our song has got you spinning
Just go back to the beginning!
OH! A callowhale isn’t much of a whale!
Not a bug! Not a cat! Not a fungus or a snail!
“May I ask a question?” Arlo interrupts the mongoose’s encore.
“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry,” Cythera says, and she means it.
“I understand the girls. But what did you do to me and Horace? We never touched the kid. We drank bottled water. We never did anything.”
Calliope the Carefree Callowhale blushes, two perfect magenta circles blazing on her turquoise face.
“We ate you,” she says sheepishly.
From the Personal Reels of
Percival Alfred Unck
[MARY PELLAM, dressed in a black leotard and stockings, her clavicle and shoulder blades moving as delicately as swan bones beneath her skin, applies makeup in her gilded mirror. SEVERIN UNCK watches her, recording every stroke of the liner crayon with her dark pupils.]
SEVERIN
I don’t want you to go.
[PERCIVAL UNCK balances his camera, Clara, on a dressing table with small blue horses painted all over it. He steps into frame and kisses Severin on the forehead before bending to hoist her up onto his hip.]
PERCIVAL
Mummy and Papa have to go to rehearsal. She’s going to be Isis in The Golden Ass, which is a bit naughty for your age, I think, but you can watch it when you’re…let’s say eight. There’s a donkey in; he’ll make you laugh. Mummy is going to come in at the end and save the day. Won’t that be wonderful? She’ll wear a lovely big crown with an asp on it and carry heaps of roses in her arms. [pause] An asp is a poisonous snake. But very holy.
SEVERIN
I don’t want you to go.
MARY
You can come along if you like, darling. You had loads of fun when we were rehearsing The Great Train Robbery.
SEVERIN
I ate candy and rode the train. But it was dark in there. In the…
PERCIVAL
In the soundstage, Rinny. [His eyes sparkle. He presses his daughter’s small chin with his thumb.] Rehearsal is just practicing, my precious little hobgoblin. Mummy must practice being both Egyptian and a goddess, which is very hard to do at the same time! Why, it’s like rubbing the top of your head and patting your belly at once. A soundstage is nothing to be afraid of, moppet. Just imagine Rehearsal has a capital R. Rehearsal is like a planet Mummy and I go to, like Earth or Mars. It’s a dark cool planet with a lot of lights and people and toys and trains and candy, and when you go there you get to be somebody else and talk funny and dance a bit and say and do everything three times, because that’s the law. Planets always have their own funny laws, don’t they?
SEVERIN
Yes. I hate it.
PERCIVAL
Well, on Rehearsal, it’s the law that you can only cry if Papa tells you to, or sing a song if Papa tells you to, and you can only fall down and hurt yourself if Papa tells you to do it very tragically, like Eurydice when the serpent bit her. Remember Eurydice?
SEVERIN
She let me wear her hat.
MARY
And Eurydice got right up and had a coffee when Papa said, “Cut!” didn’t she? [SEVERIN nods reluctantly.] She was perfectly all right! My, my, we are just all over serpents today, aren’t we? Come on, kitten! You and me are Egypt-bound!
The Graeae
Transcript from 1946 debriefing interview with Erasmo St. John, property of Oxblood Films, all rights reserved.
Security clearance required.
CYTHERA BRASS: Session four, day three. This will be our last session, I think. How do you feel about that, Mr St. John?
ERASMO: Dandy.
CYTHERA: I’ve enjoyed talking to you.
ERASMO: Then you are out of your mind. There is nothing enjoyable in this. It’s just eating ashes.