INCOGNOLIO Page 19
“And shack up with Lamia?”
“That’s none of your business,” Gemma replies. “But, yes, we’re lovers. Have been for years.”
“As were our mothers,” Lamia adds. “In case you failed to notice.”
Ignoring Lamia’s ridiculous assertion, I say, “I’m in the way, I get that. Fine, I’ll clear out. There’s no need to annihilate me.”
“I don’t trust you,” Gemma replies. “You’ll find some way to undermine us, to exact your revenge. But the Age of Man has come to an end, my dear brother, and I’m afraid you’re the fall guy.”
And with that, Gemma pushes me, knocking my feet off the ledge and sending me plunging downward.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
DESCENT OF MAN
Plummeting toward the bay at an alarming rate of speed, I take dubious solace in the fact that my life isn’t flashing before my eyes.
Midway through the fall, however, another quirky response of the human-brain-in-mortal-danger kicks in: My sense of time slows, stretching out until I barely seem to be moving at all.
My first thought is that, although I’m not looking forward to the moment of impact, I can’t say that I’m entirely unhappy with this turn of events.
Still, I wish that I’d been able to drag Gem and Lamia down with me. The image of my sister and that miscreant living together in lesbian bliss—laughing, drinking, frolicking, fucking—makes me want to puke, but that would only aggravate my current predicament.
But no matter how much I loathe my cousin, I can’t deny that this fall would have made a far more dramatic ending to Incognolio than the one I wrote.
This thought leads me to wonder whether Lamia will try to publish my manuscript. But I don’t see how she could use this improved ending, since it would implicate her and Gemma in my disappearance. And now it occurs to me that her glowing praise might have been insincere—merely a ruse to gain my cooperation so she could lure me to my death—a thought that extinguishes my pride in the novel, thus ripping away my final remaining illusion.
As I continue to fall, I find that I can shift my body around, so I start to weigh the various options for landing. Diving position is out, since I could survive the fall only to asphyxiate on the way back up to the surface, and I can hardly imagine a worse way of dying than to drown. The idea of a 75-mile-per-hour belly flop is horrifying, to state the obvious, but at least this “optimal landing position” would ensure instantaneous death.
However, I cannot deny that a small—but rapidly expanding—part of me wants to live, if only to thwart Gem and Lamia and to exact sweet revenge upon those scheming whores. The problem is, I can’t swim, or even tread water, which means that any sort of rescue would be extremely un—
The front door slams, jolting me out of my narrative.
Frame-break! squawks Yiddle, alive and well, perched atop a bust of Cervantes.
I look up from the screen and call out, “Is that you, sweetie?” even though I’ve got no idea to whom I’m speaking.
Hearing footsteps approaching, I decide that it’s Luna, my wife, just home from work. She storms into my study, wearing nothing but a scowl on her face.
“What the hell?” I stand up to greet her. “Why are you naked?”
“Forgot already?” Luna shrugs me off when I try to hug her. “This was my nip day.”
Nip day! Nip day! squawks Yiddle.
“Your what? Jesus, Luna, have you gone back to drinking nips? You know how alcohol affects you.”
“No, you idiot. NIP! Naked In Public Day. Remember? Trump’s lottery?”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. But then I remember—or do I decide?—that when he realized that a second term was beyond his grasp, Trump declared the United States a monarchy, and as king, one of his first royal decrees was to establish Naked In Public Days. As determined by an annual lottery linked to birth date, all females between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five must spend one day completely nude in public.
“It was a nightmare, Calvino.” Luna now accepts a hug as she starts to sob. “Catcalls. Pinching. Ass-slapping. Men—even boys—pawing me, licking me, kicking me, spitting at me. I want to die.”
I stroke Luna’s hair, still sticky from dried layers of saliva, and soothe my wife until her weeping subsides.
“Calvino?” I repeat.
“Huh?”
“You called me Calvino. Is that some sort of pet name?”
Luna steps back and looks at me like I’ve gone nuts.
“Pet name? That is your name. Calvino Lazar.”
Reverse pen name! squawks Yiddle.
Calvino Lazar. I like the sound of it. But how can that be my name? “My name is Michael,” I say. “Michael Sussman.”
“Are you feeling all right?” Luna frowns and then places the back of her hand against my forehead. “Michael is the protagonist of your novel, Incognolio Zlatch.”
“Zlatch?” I feel weak. The room starts to spin. “What the hell is a zlatch?”
“I think you’d better lie down, Cal.” Luna, who has just experienced the worst day of her life, leads me by my hand to our bedroom.
“Here we go.” She helps me down and slips off my shoes. “I’ll brew you some moochi.”
“Moochi?” I repeat, my own voice sounding strange.
Luna shakes her head, looking like someone whose husband has succumbed to early dementia, and shuffles out of the room. I feel bereft, a stranger in a strange land of my own design. I start to cry, but quickly gather myself when I hear Luna returning. She has donned a kimono and wrapped her hair in a towel.
“So, let me get this straight.” I blow on the moochi, which is steaming hot. “My name is Calvino Lazar, the author of Incognolio Zlatch. My novel features a protagonist named Michael Sussman who wrote an unpublished novel called Incognolio, and is currently falling to his death.”
“Oh, he’s still falling?” Luna retrieves a crazy quilt from the closet. “I thought he would’ve reached bottom by now. Wasn’t he falling when I left this morning?”
“Yeah, but I’ve never fallen a long distance, so I had to do some research to nail the scene.”
“What sort of research?” Luna spreads the quilt over the lower half of my body.
“I went bungee jumping,” I say, recalling the sensation of falling—at once thrilling and terrifying, with my breath stuck in my throat and heart racing, I’d never felt so alive. I take a sip of moochi, which tastes like bumble bees. “Off the Seppuku Bridge.”
“The Seppuku Bridge?” Luna tilts her head like a dog. “But you made that up. That’s a bridge in Michael’s world.”
“Is it?” I take another sip of moochi, wondering how it could possibly taste like bumble bees. “Anyhoo. Freefall felt flabulous. So great, infarct, that I booked a ride on a Zorro-gravity plane.”
“Zero,” says Luna.
“Huh?”
“Zero-gravity plane. You said Zorro.”
“I did?” Something seems to be curdling my brine, and I wonder weather it’s the moochi or the crazy quilt. “Well, that made me wait less, which was fun. But it’s nothing like freefall. So, I signed up to go skydiving.”
“You did all this today?” asks Luna.
“Time is subjunctive,” I reply. “It slurs and leaches when you’re falling to your deaf.”
“Hold on. It’s Michael who’s falling to his death, not you.”
Such distinctions seem bestride the point this late in the gnome, so I ignore Ms. Lunatic.
“Well, my first dive had to be tandem, and though I thinks meself open-wounded, I wasn’t wild about having some duderonomy riding my ass for ten thousand feets. So, instead, I rented a wingsuit.”
“A wingsuit? Are you nuts?” Lorna picks up the fone, no doubt planning to have me commiserated. “People get killed on those jumps.”
“Specially when yer group includes two loverly twins on their nip day.”
“So you knew all along about nip day! Why did you act like—”
“I stood alone on the clift after everyone else had humped,” I say, ignoring Lunesta’s attempt to tractor me. “It was so froggy that I couldn’t even see the drop zone. Kneading to gnaw what it’s like to fall without hope of survival, I planned to deploy my parakeet at the last possible Sanka. But as I stood there looking down, feeling immortalized, yearning to make the leap, but faced with the fucked that I’m—”
Emerging from my daydream, I feel myself picking up speed once more and suddenly break through the fog bank, the bay charging up at me like a wall of doom.
As the end approaches, the rushing air drowns out my thoughts, leaving only an enormous relief at no longer feeling burdened by petty concerns of life and death. And as I surrender myself to the void and bid welcome to sweet oblivion, I hear the most delightful of sounds, a sound that is more resplendent than any human song, a sound that can only be the voice of the Goddess Herself, beckoning me to Eden, to Eternal Bliss…or perhaps—I find myself pondering as my consciousness is snuffed out—it could simply be a foghorn.
INCOGNOLIO ZLATCH
a novel by
CALVINO LAZAR
as told to
Michael Sussman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abandoned by a cackle of laughing hyenas, Michael Sussman endured the drudgery and hardships of a Moldavian orphanage until fleeing with a traveling circus at the age of twelve. A promising career as a trapeze artist was cut short by a concussion that rendered him lame and mute. Sussman wandered the world, getting by on such odd jobs as pet-food tester, cheese sculptor, human scarecrow, and professional mourner while teaching himself the art of fiction. He now lives in Tahiti with Gauguin, an African Grey parrot.