DATURA Page 7

  “What kind of fish is it even supposed to be?” I asked the Marquis.

  “Hmm. It could be a pikeperch, or maybe an arctic char? What difference does it make?” the Marquis said. “Or it could be some American fish. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it in this corner of the world.”

  “I have to know what species it is in case a potential customer shows up and asks me, though I have to admit that I have a hard time believing anyone would want to waste their money on something like this.”

  “The world is full of imbeciles,” the Marquis said. “They’re never in short supply. I’ve pinned my hopes to them. I admit it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to waste their money on this. Did I mention that hundreds of thousands of these have been sold worldwide?”

  “You did. But what does this monster have to do with the paranormal and The Anomalist?”

  “Wouldn’t you call a fish that sings and dances an anomaly? Listen to this!” The Marquis pushed a button.

  The abomination lifted its head. Its tail began to flap. It opened its jaws, and I peeked in. I saw a salmon-red cavity filled with white plastic spikes and a small speaker that was blaring, “Don’t be cruel!” Apparently the fish was a contra tenor.

  The Marquis tilted his head to listen, pleased with both the fish and himself.

  “Turn it off, please,” I said. “Judging by its voice at least, it’s a sleazy kind of fish. Does it know any other tunes?”

  “It should also sing ‘All Shook Up,’ ” the Marquis said. “Should we give it a listen?”

  “No, never mind. I have work to do.”

  “Look, it even has a wonderful little stand so that you can put it on your desk.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t put that nightmare on my desk!”

  “On the bookshelf then.”

  “Does this mean that every time I go to the bookshelf to get something, it’s going to start singing ‘Don’t be Cruel’?”

  “Or ‘All Shook Up.’ But there must be an off-button somewhere,” the Marquis said.

  “Find it,” I said.

  The rock ’n’ roll fish made me so very depressed. I started to think about how that kind of junk was manufactured, and it made me want to cry. I thought that maybe there was a person out there somewhere, a single mother perhaps, who had to get up at 5:50 a.m. every morning to go to work at the rock ’n’ roll fish factory.

  She drinks a cup of cheap instant coffee and then wakes up her anemic little child. Feeds and dresses it and puts it in a pram. Waits for the bus in the rain to take her crying, fatherless offspring to the daycare center across town. Then she takes the rush-hour metro, bus, or maybe both, to the industrial area on the northern fringe of the city. She punches in and, under the cruel glow of the fluorescent lights in the prefabricated factory hall, assembles an endless procession of fish. Shoves batteries and speakers into their guts and glues plastic fins to their backs or stands to their bellies. She does this from seven till noon, eats leftover tuna casserole for lunch, and goes on and on.

  The winter sun has already set, but still I see her thin hunched neck in front of me. Her legs are aching by now. Her armpits are sweaty, her ankles cold. I can see her pale, unfailing fingers as she tests the fish. Each one activates in turn and sings to her, “Don’t be cruel!” “I’m all shook up!”

  The Face in the Cheese

  The seed pod of the datura plant is the size of a walnut and is covered in small thorns. When it ripens and splits open, four compartments with light brown, asymmetrical inhabitants are revealed.

  That day was the most bitterly cold we’d had that winter. I had just opened one seed pod and shaken out its contents into a small ceramic cup when the phone rang.

  “We have, in our kitchen, just witnessed a miracle,” a breathless woman’s voice said.

  “What kind of a miracle?” I asked cautiously.

  The lady on the other end of the line was calling from the north. She’d bought a piece of bread cheese from the local dairy, twenty-one ounces, she explained to me. A national delicacy, bread cheese is flat, tasteless, and slightly rubbery. The rounds are baked, which gives the cheese its distinctive brown spots. Nevertheless, many people find it delicious, especially when served with jam.

  The woman and her husband had planned to enjoy some freshly baked bread cheese with their afternoon coffee, but before they could get that far, the wife noticed a certain recognizable image in a cluster of dark spots.

  “You’ll never believe what it is.” she said, lowering her voice to indicate confidentiality. I waited.

  “A face,” she said. “The face of our Lord.”

  I didn’t know how to react. Finally, I managed to say, “Really. To think. That’s quite . . . ”

  “You can even see His crown of thorns. Our neighbors came by to look at the cheese and they also recognized Him right away,” the lady said. “I never thought I’d be blessed in this way! We thought we’d offer your magazine an opportunity. You can come and take a photo of it, exclusively. The whole piece of cheese is still in the fridge. We haven’t touched it, and we don’t plan to.”

  I thanked her for the offer and said that the case was interesting as such and quite unusual, but unfortunately we were very busy at the moment and didn’t have anyone available to take such a long trip.

  “Who was it?” the Marquis asked me, once I had hung up after brief good-byes. I hadn’t seen the man in over a week, but now he’d just happened to stop by to pick up some correspondence related to pyramidology.

  I told him a miracle had happened. Not exactly the apparition of the Virgin Mary, but something similar. Jesus had appeared in bread cheese.

  “Hmm. That would make a good ‘Picture of the Week,’ ” the Marquis said.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “That’s actually a brilliant idea. Why don’t you do a human interest piece. Take your camera and drive up there first thing in the morning.”

  “That’s two hundred-fifty miles! For a piece of cheese? Is that your idea of human interest?”

  “It is,” the Marquis said coldly. “You can spend the night at a motel.”

  The temperature rose quickly the next day, though it stayed below freezing. I informed the bread cheese woman that The New Anomalist was interested in her apparition after all. She was delighted. I drove two hundred-fifty miles in a blizzard, the last fifty miles crawling along narrow village roads behind a snowplow, passing an art barn, a sheep-farm-cum-craft-shop, and a village grocery shop that had been converted into an interactive café.

  Now and then, I had the unpleasant feeling that someone was sitting in the back seat. It was a new phenomenon, a hollow twinge of fear, that I hadn’t experienced prior to that winter. A few times I even glanced behind me and almost lost control of the car on the slippery road.

  The house was a typical small wooden house of the kind built by veterans after World War II, pale green, one-and-a-half floors high. A flower pot had been hung on the porch next to the door. The heather inside it had frozen. Snow had piled up over three jalopies parked behind the sauna cottage in the yard. The man of the house probably spent his retirement fixing them.

  The woman I had spoken to on the phone came to greet me. She sat me down on a couch amid embroidered cushions. Behind the couch was a woven wall hanging, which I thought depicted Leda and the Swan, though the bird in it looked more like a goose.

  “Why don’t we have some coffee first and then you can see Him,” she said. “You do have your camera with you? You’ll be amazed, I promise. It’s just like an icon.”

  Only more ephemeral, I thought to myself.

  I drank a cup of coffee accompanied by homemade sugar cookies. Heartburn was rising in my gullet by the time the apparition was brought in, and I couldn’t hold back a burp. The cheese had been placed in a crystal bowl, maybe even a christening bowl, which in turn had been placed on a doily. I can’t say that I was impressed.

  “There!” the lady said victoriously
, and pointed with her finger. The guidance was very necessary. A sympathetic eye could just make out a splotch resembling a human face in the pattern of spots on the surface of the cheese, just like you can see human faces, hats, churches, and cats, in stained wallpaper, fluffy clouds, or the wood fibers of a table.

  “Oh,” I said. I wasn’t able to manage much more enthusiasm, though I realized that the woman was disappointed by my lame reaction. This house call was starting to remind of me the visit to the Hair Artiste. I decided to give the Marquis a few choice words when I got back to the city.

  “Just think,” the woman said, “I don’t believe this cheese will ever get moldy. It’s still as if it’s freshly baked, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t think that at all, but held my tongue. To me, the cheese already smelled somewhat suspicious. Upon closer inspection, its dried-up edges already had a tinge of green to them.

  I drank my coffee and took some photos of the cheese, as the Marquis had insisted. I’d never had a more ridiculous assignment. I asked the woman a couple of questions, so that I could say that I’d interviewed her. “Where did you buy the cheese? Did you notice the face right away? Has anything like this happened to you before?”

  I soon ran out of questions. I felt hopeless, and everything around me looked ugly and banal. The cushions, Leda, and, above all, the miracle of the cheese.

  Her answers also became short and bland. I realized that the woman was disappointed in her interview and that both of us were eagerly waiting for the visit to end.

  “The bible circle from Sorainen parish is coming tomorrow. A whole bus load,” she told me on the porch, as I was taking my leave.

  “To come look at the cheese?”

  “The cheese, of course,” the woman said. “And on Wednesday another bus load is coming from Kätkälä. I’m charging them a small fee, compensation for the extra cleaning. They track in so much mud on their shoes.”

  I looked down, concerned, but I’d taken my shoes off as soon as I had entered. But the woman still seemed to have something on her chest.

  “I gave you exclusive rights to the story,” she said. “So . . . ”

  “Do you mean—?”

  “Well, I think some sort of small reward would be in order,” she said. “This being a miracle and all. I did give you exclusive rights.”

  “We don’t usually . . . We didn’t discuss anything like this.”

  The air between us grew even colder.

  “On the other hand,” I said to get myself out of the situation, “maybe we could give you all this year’s issues free of charge?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It being a miracle and all.”

  “And next year’s as well,” I said in a panic.

  “Well, alright then,” she consented, still clearly dissatisfied.

  I felt relieved once I’d closed the door behind me, and my mood improved quickly. The blizzard had eased up, the temperature had dropped again, and the starlit sky shone above me. From the cold earth, I looked up into even an greater coldness. I looked at the misty belt of the galaxy, and in the emptiness made out the constellations that human eyes had invented and named.

  In the few steps that I took beneath Ursa Major from the porch to the car, I had time to think: Why did I think the woman was strange and look down on her for seeing the face of her Savior in a piece of cheese? What about the faces in the flowers, the stars, and the symbols in the Voynich manuscript? Or the Hair Artiste and the shadow of a wing in her photograph? And didn’t Mr. Chance, too, see a deeper meaning in coincidence?

  Every eye roams the indifference of the universe in search of signs, figures, images, messages. They can be found everywhere in the cosmos once you learn to see with human sight. Who’s to say whether it’s a strength or a weakness? It’s the way human beings are made, the way we’re born. Why is it that life and meaning seem to spring up wherever we humans direct our attention?

  The car wouldn’t start at first, but once the engine warmed up and I got onto the dark road, I felt that my head was clearer than it had been for a long time, and now no one was sitting in the back seat.

  Would it show more courage to acknowledge right away that humans don’t have a special place in the universe and that our fate is no more important than that of individual cell? We lonely souls playing with our strange brains under this brief sun should not be called cowards.

  The road led home and south.

  Loogaroo, a Classic

  Her name is Loogaroo. A beautiful name, like a song or a distant mating call. Loogaroo herself is beautiful as well, in an unapproachable, exotic way. Her hair falls on her shoulders in a shining bronze swirl, her satin shirt is an iridescent black, and her pale skin, either powdered white or just naturally that unusual shade, glimmers like moonlit snow. Her nose is pierced, with a silver ball hanging from it. She wears a dog’s collar, the kind with metal spikes. She, if anyone, is “cool.”

  I realize that here before me is a woman who could drive men mad, who could make them commit senseless deeds. Despite the fact that she is enchanting in her own way—or maybe because of it—I feel a hint of antipathy toward her. I try to hide it, of course, even though I don’t exactly smile at her. The things she says to me put me off.

  And she, too, remains stern faced. Throughout the interview, she is grave, solemn, didactic. She’s a little over twenty, twenty-five at most. Her attitude could be considered amusing in someone so young if one failed to realize that she is actually a professional of sorts.

  Loogaroo senses my dislike, no doubt, and returns the sentiment. She looks down on me. I can see myself from her perspective. I’m an insignificant reporter, a fastidious and conventional everyday person, who sleeps at night and wakes up in the morning well before the eight o’clock news. I am one of the plain cogs of the society she despises.

  “Why Loogaroo?” I ask. The recorder in front of me is rolling and humming.

  When she speaks, something shiny flashes in her mouth. Her tongue, too, is pierced. She says she was named after an ancient legend. Long ago in the Caribbean, there lived a woman called Loogaroo. This woman would shed her skin at night and turn into a flame and search for blood to drink.

  “But Loogaroo had a strange habit, a sort of compulsion, which would halt her in the middle of her hunt.”

  “Yes?” I ask, when Loogaroo falls silent.

  “If she happened upon a pile of sand, she would stop and count the grains. People who were afraid of being attacked by Loogaroo at night could leave a pile of rice or sand in front of their door in the hope that Loogaroo would stop to count the grains and forget her thirst.”

  “Do you count grains of sand?” I ask.

  “Don’t we all?” she asks in turn. “Recount our own deeds?”

  The answer takes me by surprise. She looks sad and a bit more human than before.

  “How often do you consume human blood?” I ask somewhat harshly, perhaps to hide my surprise.

  I feel embarrassed when she responds, “Do you really expect me to answer such an intimate question?”

  “You agreed to this interview, and our readers no doubt expect exactly these kinds of questions,” I defended myself. “In an interview with a real vampire—which is what you claim to be—I think the question is valid. If you prefer, we can proceed on a general level.”

  “I’d prefer that.”

  “Alright, how often do vampires consume blood?”

  “There’s no exact rule,” she replies. “Some fast for up to six months, but there are also those that need a weekly dose. But all of us must consume blood from time to time. Otherwise we die.”

  “In what other ways do vampires differ from humans?”

  “In many ways. I’m sure you know that individuals like me hate sunlight and have excellent night vision.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I admit.

  “Our optic nerves can process low levels of light more efficiently, and therefore we’re able to see better in the dark
than humans,” Loogaroo explains. “Too much light, on the other hand, causes an overload of information, headaches, and visual impairment. Many of us also easily get sunstroke, sun rashes, and heatstroke. In general we are more energetic by night than by day, unlike humans.”

  I notice that this is the second time that she’s said “humans” instead of “other people.”

  “Do I have this right—that you don’t consider yourselves human?” I ask cautiously.

  “I don’t,” she answers firmly. “We are of another race. Our hearing is better, as are our reactions. We’re faster, stronger, and healthier than humans. We recover from injuries and illnesses faster than humans. We live substantially longer.”

  She doesn’t look at all healthy to me, anemic and a bit lethargic really, but maybe that’s because the sun hasn’t set yet. She’s just woken up. And maybe she hasn’t had her dose of energy drink in a long while? The thought makes me uneasy.

  “I am a Classic,” she says.

  “And what does that mean?” I ask her. “I’m not very deeply acquainted with vampyrology.”

  “It means that I’ve become a vampire through infection. I’m not a Natural Born. A retrovirus infection is required to turn a human into a vampire. That can be a long process. but sooner or later, the person’s chemistry changes irreversibly.”

  A retrovirus infection! Though the recorder is running, I write this down in my notebook and feel very old and worn out. Dear God, the things one must do for a living!

  The sun sets and I get tired, but Loogaroo seems livelier and more excited. Her lethargy seems to have passed, her eyes glimmering black and gold. She even smiles, shaking her thick, silky mane from time to time.

  “You do understand,” she says, “that the need for blood is biological, not just psychological. You must also remember that true vampires are always unpredictable. We are potential killers. When our energy levels drop, when the hunger for blood becomes unbearable, we can’t help but satisfy our needs.”

  “Even if it would lead to irreparable consequences?” I ask.