By the end of January, Tug and Sukey had something they felt worthy of submission to a publisher. Tug found the contact info for an editor at Drawn & Quarterly, an imprint of the global Harmsworth Publishing empire. After querying, he received permission to submit, and off the package went, Sukey’s powerful black and white art deliberately left uncoloured.
Nothing to do but wait, now.
Deep into the bowels of one February night, Tug was awakened by distant music from beyond the spheres. Blanket wrapped haphazardly around himself, he stumbled up onto the frosted deck, finding himself surprisingly alone, as if the rest of the ship had been ensorcelled into fairytale somnolence.
Moonlight silvered the whole world. Pellenera—piping, argent eidolon—loomed atop the bank of the feeder canal. Tug shivered. Did she herald the arrival of a new recruit? Where was the guy?
But no newcomer emerged from among the winter-bare branches. Pellenera seemed intent merely on bleeding out her heart through the ocarina, as if seeking to convey an urgent message to someone.
Tug’s mind drowned in the music. He seemed to be seeing the world through Pellenera’s eyes, gazing down at himself on the deck. Was she tapping his optic nerves, seeing herself on the shore? That music—
Tug had a sudden vision of the Nubian woman, dancing naked save for—
—a skirt fashioned of bananas?
The music stopped. Pellenera vanished.
What the hell had all that been about?
An o-mail response from Drawn & Quarterly came in March, just as spring arrived.
Tug rushed back to the Tom Pudding with an o-café printout of the message.
Sukey Damariscotta was playing a videogame with Janey Vogelsang when Tug tracked her down: Spores of Myst. He hustled her away from Janey, to a quiet corner, then bade her read the printout.
“Oh, Tug, this is wonderful! We’ve done it!”
“I can’t believe it!”
“Me neither!”
Tug grabbed Sukey, hugged her close, kissed her passionately and wildly lips to lips.
Hands on Tug’s chest, Sukey pushed back, broke his embrace.
“What are you doing?”
“Sukey, I— You’ve gotta know by now—”
“Know what?” Her face registered distaste, as if she had been handed a slimy slug. “Oh, no, Tug, you can’t imagine us hooking up, can you? I like you, sure, a lot. I respect your talent. But you’re way too old….”
Time must’ve crept along somehow in its monotonous, purposeless, sempiternal fashion, although Tug couldn’t have testified to that reality. All he knew was that in some manner he had crossed blocks of Carrollboro to stand outside The Wyandot. His old residence of thirty years’ habitation was garlanded with scaffolding, its plastic-membraned windows so many blank, unseeing eyes, unbreachable passages to a vanished era, a lost youth.
In the end, he returned to the Tom Pudding.
What choice did he have in this fallen, inhospitable world?
Sukey acted friendly toward him, even somewhat intimate. But Tug knew that they would never relate the same way again, and that their collaboration was over, whatever the fate of their one and only book.
The voice of Ozzie Vasterling, when broadcast through the intercom system of the Tom Pudding—a system no one prior to this moment had even suspected was still active—resembled that of the Vizier of Cockaigne in the 1939 film version of that classic, as rendered by the imperious Charles Coburn.
“Attention, attention! Everyone report to my lab—on the double!”
Some folks were missing, ashore on their individual business. But Ozzie’s lab soon filled up with two dozen souls, Tug among them.
Weeks ago, Tug might have been as excited as the others gathered here. But since Sukey’s rebuff, life had lost its savour. What miracle could restore that burnish? None…
But yet—
Pellenera stood before the brane-buster, looking as out-of-place as a black panther in a taxi. Imagine a continent full of such creatures! Ozzie sat behind the keys of his harmonium. The brane-buster hummed and sparkled.
Ozzie could hardly speak. “Vibrations! It’s all the way the invisible strings vibrate! I only had to pay attention to her! Watch!”
He nodded to the Nubian, and she began to play her ocarina, as Ozzie pumped the harmonium attachment.
In the cabinet of the brane-buster, what could only be paradoxically described as a coruscating static vortex blossomed. Gasps from the watchers—even from sulky Tug.
With a joyous primal yawp, Pellenera hurled herself into the cabinet, still playing, and was no more.
The vortex lapsed into non-being as well.
Someone asked, “Is that the end?”
“Ha! Do you think I’m an idiot! I recorded every last note!”
Pellenera’s looped song started up again, and the vortex resumed.
Everyone waited.
Time stretched like the silent heist scene in Hitchcock’s Rififi.
Pellenera popped out of the cabinet, carrying something concealed in the crook of her arm, but naked as water herself.
Even from the edge of the crowd, Tug noticed that her naked back was inexplicably criss-crossed with a latticework of long antique gnarly scars, and he winced.
Revealed, her burden was one perfect golden Cavendish banana.
She smiled, and took several steps forward, the spectators parting before her like grasses beneath a breeze, until she came face to face with Tug.
And she handed the banana to him.
A PARTIAL AND CONJECTURAL HISTORY OF DR. MUELLER’S PANOPTICAL CARTOON ENGINE
My first contact with that fabled and archaic humour-generating contraption known as Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine occurred some years ago at a rural auction in Chepachet, Rhode Island. (The literary minded among my readers will surely recall that Chepachet particularly impressed the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft as redolent of the most “antient” New England vibes. But I make no explicit links between Lovecraft’s subjective characterization of the queer village and my discovery of Dr. Mueller’s device there.)
In the dim and dusty barn where the auction was taking place that autumn day, I began poking around among an odd lot of machinery: strange agricultural and household implements of another century. I could discern plausible uses for most of the equipment—save for one device.
An oblong, scuffed wooden case composed of several segments lovingly sealed and decorated with various brass fittings, and featuring three knurled wheels and a protruding crescent disc bearing raised letters and numbers and punctuation around its rim—all frozen with rust and age—and various slots and oval display windows (were those isinglass panels over nacre backdrops?).
The weird little device, resonant with some forgotten technological mana, called out to me, raising all sorts of curious feelings.
I felt I had to have this object, and so I bid for the whole lot, taking it at fairly high cost, forced to contend against the real collectors of old farm tools. The rest of the items meant nothing to me, and I have been selling them off sporadically ever since, trying to recoup my expenditure. (In fact, if any reader wishes to purchase a corn flail, breast plough, barley hummelor or sugar devil for a reasonable price, please write to me in care of this site.)
Over the weeks following my impulsive purchase, I carefully disassembled, cleaned and repaired the machine as best as I was able. Its innards were an unintelligible concatenation of gears, levers, springs, ratchets, pawls, padded balsa wood fingers, cylinder drums, and bellows. There was a central unit that resembled the archaic toy known as a “Jacob’s Ladder,” a series of re-conformable blocks connected by cloth panels, their faces hidden. And a component like the guts of a complex music box also featured vitally.