Having trekked several blocks southward on Milwaukee Avenue, Gregory now approached the border grounds between Bucktown and Wicker Park. Here, every few feet along the sidewalk, he passed either a bodega, or an open-air bar devoid of patrons, or a defunct film developer whose sidewalk display swarmed with yellowing family portraits from decades before, or a Thai nail parlor reeking of lacquer and acrid soap. In between these oily establishments, there often appeared the entrance to a vacant building, whose doors were shuttered with iron grates, blistered black with sun-baked paint. In these rhomboidal alcoves, often tiled in a forgotten mosaic of beehives, acacia saplings, portmanteaux of sun and moon, 13-stepped ladders, and other angular implements, the doors were buried under sloping bank of lukies.
Gregory was approaching the place which, for the past several weeks, had become his daily post and station of labor: the Turkish Baths, which stood just south-east of the verdigris spire of the flatiron tower, planted at the six corners of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. The baths were housed in a deep, old building faced with porcelain bricks. The grout in between these bricks swarmed with a fulgurant black mold, which bit also into the beaten gothic embellishments surrounding its front portal.
Entering the vestibule, Gregory passed through the twilit lobby. Only a single bulb shone out from a cylindrical socket that had been installed in the ceiling. Two cyclopean pillars of raw pink marble, shot through with goldenrod yellow veins stood as sentinels before a set of moist oak doors. Beyond these doors, a rare and muffled activity could be heard: trickling waters, effervescent evaporations.
As Gregory took steps toward the ornate reception desk, carved from an oak identical to that of the doors and stained a purple-brown hue which appeared never to have fully dried, he was compelled to extend his arms into space for balance. The octagonal tiles which furnished the lobby floor were frosted over with translucent patches of melded lukie. Accumulating on these treacherous areas was a shimmering, nacreous sweat which, just the day before, had caused Gregory to take a fall and almost puncture the frontal plate of his skull on a sharp protrusion – an ornately carved cornice – at the foot of the desk. Just before the capital penetration was able to proceed, Gregory had managed to brace his arms against the swollen wood. The violence of this sudden suspension had caused a microns-thin mask of knitted lukies to dislodge from the contours of his face and to shatter against the baroque carving before him.
The carving was a mere six inches from his eyes, basking in the pulsating inertia of the moment: an artichoke enclosed the crowned and pregnant bulge of a pomegranate, from the pinnacle of which projected a miniscule pyramid with a capstone of unadulterated crystal; just above the pointed extremity of the pyramid’s capstone, there hovered a single lukie, its filaments illuminated by some internal, inscrutable source.
Now, with a mettle much tested – with astute circumspection and adroit circumambulation – Gregory navigated his emaciated limbs and corporeal trunk toward a stool behind this desk, whose padded stop was upholstered in tufted carmine leather.
He took a seat.
Before him, built into the underside of the desk’s counter, was an array of open compartments, stuffed unremittingly with envelopes in discrete states of decay. Gregory engaged himself for several minutes with drawing these envelopes out of their holes, one at a time, and holding them just a few inches from his face. Each bore one word only, inked onto the degraded vellum in a tangential, hyper stylized script, the individual letters of which expanded past the space that it was their lot to occupy: here was a morass of vegetal draftsmanship, overshadowing the word as such in a hostile arabesque of detrimental lines.
It was usually not his practice to open these envelopes; they had sat waiting in this lobby for several decades at least – some for a considerably longer time. The glue which held them closed had only just begun to petrify, cracking at every expansion and contraction of the cotton fibers to which it was bound, as it was menaced by parades of vapors, drifting from the baths. But whenever Gregory happened upon an envelope whose glue-petrifaction had fully developed, and had just about opened itself, he was obligated by his… recent employers… to carry out an immaculate routine.
First, he was to set the envelope squarely before him on the dark wood of the reception desk. The sides of the envelope must be perfectly parallel with the desktop.
Then, he was to press down on a round wooden protrusion on the corner of the desk which was carved into the simultaneous image of a human eye and an acorn. This, in fact, was a cylindrical spring-loaded drawer. Housed in its verdant velvet chamber was a magnifying loop – such as those used by jewelers and other grave professionals with a need to look at and see the surfaces of life on a most minute scale.
Screwing the loop into the sunken depths of his eye, Gregory was then made to study the particular word which had been inked upon that particular envelope. At a glance, even the most ancient specimens were legible. The words were usually even quite banal, in themselves provoking little reflection on the part of the viewer, whoever he should be. But under the loop’s distended lens, the letters would become cultures in a petri dish, branching off into wandering tributaries of desiccated ink with all of the agency of a slime mold. Here were knots of strength and deep intelligence; zones of repulsion and attraction; an eros of sublime and sterile syntax.
After analyzing the given word’s effusive growth, Gregory was then to open the flap of the envelope with the sharpened spade that was his thumbnail. Whenever he did this, the contents therein would be exposed to the saturated atmosphere of the baths, whereupon they immediately swelled from humidity. What were these contents? Were they the average contents of an envelope?... At the very least, they were… things. Things at first solid, but then volatilized in the wet air. Things sublimated into snaking coils of buoyant gas which loitered against the ceiling for a time upon release, gathering by the vestibule door. It was here that this… thing… no longer isolated and quantifiable, but conglomerated and undeniable, was forced to wait until the outside was made available to it.
The thing had a great thirst for disambiguation. The thing longed to shed its alien bark and to spray out into that begrimed arroyo of glass, brick, and steel which constituted the breadth of Milwaukee Avenue. The thing would be funneled down this artery by winds blasting off the barren plane of Lake Michigan, whose guiding hand would plunge it toward far-flung neighborhoods to the west; to sub-urban townships; and to the psychologically dismantling zone of concrete which erected a funereal infrastructure of hotels, pulverized train stations, and corporate towers sheathed in polarized glass, all of which connected the territory of Schaumberg to the Chicago O’Hare airport. And where the thing landed, it would imbed itself, establishing a relationship to denatured nature, and would reach a critical mass. The thing would burn its way through the skin of everyday life in previously unforeseen ways and would become more than merely ‘a thing’. And the world that had existed before the thing’s entrance into it would be duplicated. And those whose new world had been utterly conditioned in every aspect by the thing which had announced its own awesome arrival would become strangers to the world which had previously been…
Today, Gregory had removed precisely such an envelope from its crowded slot. Its flap had all but fully disengaged itself from the hardened orange glue, which crumbled and sifted onto the desktop the moment Gregory lifted it to his eyes. The word written on the envelope was a composite one:
“Wing-Tipped.”
Swiping the detritus of powdered glue from the desktop with the sleeve of his aviator’s jacket, Gregory placed the dog-eared rectangle at the precise angle demanded by his employers. Holding his breath, he bent over to retrieve the loop in the manner I have just described. This he pressed firmly into the swarthy lids of his right eye, after which he pored over the envelope.
As the light from the sole bulb in the lobby decanted itself over the steam-warped paper and ricocheted into the oceanic hemisphere of the magnifying lens, I extended myself from the bed of Gregory’s retina to wash myself in the frigid, luminous beams. I came to see: and see I did.
On the surface below me, each letter radiated an anemonic fan of the blackest pigmented ink. In places, the autonomous growth seemed inorganic in outline. This was not scattershot scribbling, merely. It was a cogent language of ratios, patterns of derangement (like the wanderings of rivers over the terrestrial crust of millennia). I looked at this, and I saw it. But soon I became dissatisfied with the powers of the loop’s lens and, desperate to find at a greater resolution that which I had been brought into this world to seek, I ballooned by being forward, pressing against Gregory’s cornea, surging with hemorrhoidal might. As an immediate result, the vessels in the eye swelled with a redoubled flux of oxygenated blood; the shape of that organ was elongated so that it mushroomed past the aperture at the rear concavity of the loop and into the device itself.
The eye had paid no insignificant toll for such extravagance: the caruncle which, hitherto, had served as the hinge of Gregory’s inner conjunctiva, had now snapped in a manner befitting a cheap tapioca bead filled with colored saccharine juice. No doubt, I had delivered that psychic portal to a permanent state of trauma from which it would never recover and, in so doing, had rendered my Gregory half-blind. But, in paying such a needful price with the riches of another, I had attained my fondest wish and broken through the barrier of apparent surface. I now beheld the agents of the black ink’s tumorous growth.
They were humanoid, but impossible to construe as people. People are always torn in twain, always caught up on the spinning axle of a personal schizophrenia, the contents of which are the inner and outer worlds, held eternally apart by a gap of total incommunicability. But these bipedal laborers were unsullied by such angst, evincing no distinction between body and soul. Their heads were jetty walnuts bereft of sensory organs. Yet the convolutions of this supreme appendage bore all the intimations of a perfectly inductive receiver. At once, this ‘head’ was an omniscient antenna – the sculpted, gnurled gem of a universal ear. Farther down their bodies, I saw a pair of arms and legs equally as black as the head, which were employed in the sole act of manipulating the ink, of which they were undoubtedly a part. In aggregate, the beings locomoted much like an assembly of ants, rippling to and fro from the deposits of black ink forming the body of ‘Wing-Tipped’ to the webbed periphery of the envelope, where they unloaded flakes of pigment in a procedural sort of footbridge. The ink was their path, and they followed the traces of their incessant circuit with the dignity of Most Worshipful Masters.
As my excitement mounted, I began to puncture Gregory’s cornea and extrude into the balmy lobby air (which had been trapped inside the loop itself). But, having yet to fully mature, I paid my dues to the angel of prudence and reseated myself ‘behind the looking glass’ of Gregory’s biological lens, now capsized in its own aqueous humour.
The blood vessels in Gregory’s eye had not yet burst, but soon would. I consequently took advantage of the few moments left to me to make some final observations regarding the happy commune spread out below:
They were without number. But whenever I was able to leverage my focus for long enough, I managed to follow the travels and travails of a single corpuscule among them. It had just bent over and uprooted a wafer of ink from somewhere in the neighborhood of the hyphen. It held the debris out before itself: an anthracite offerty plate. As it progressed past its toiling coevals, they removed the minutest of chips from the deposits of ink that had accumulated on each of their torsos; it was these tokens of communion that they gave up to the plate-bearer, who slowly proceeded to the outermost edge of the envelope. Once the lone creature had come to that absolute boundary, it dropped the mound of particulate ink at its feet, whereupon the being collapsed into itself and disappeared from my sight in a cascade of light so perfect – so unctuously pure – that I joined Gregory in his blindness over the span of several minutes.
When my sight returned to me and the trawling black forms came again into view, I saw that the once animate individual I had previously watched over was transformed: in its place stood a crude monument of fused carbon slag, its branching tendrils of obsidian glass piercing the cotton fibers of the paper while its highest point rose into a sharpened tip so acute that it waxed into a realm whose invisibility I knew must be absolute, no matter how greatly one might endeavor to magnify the optical field. Nevertheless, it was precisely at this impossible apex that I began to sense the presence of a faint glow. A light not of sight, but of mind. I had seen. The homunculus was trued. God had made himself known.
How I longed to bear eternal witness to such a spectacle, such a throng; to use Gregory’s body as armature, armchair, and observatory for all time to come. But my trusted chrysalis of meat had his own needs and urgencies. Finally, the vessel walls in the white of his eye exploded under the pressure of my sustained gaze. The quarry of contrasts below was bombarded with planetoid globes of blood. Fearing a hemorrhage even greater than this, I withdrew into the retina, slipping my silvery legs in between bundles of optical nerve fibers and flattening my head into a dense plug.
Having definitively lost sight in his right eye, Gregory removed the loop from it, fished a dark felt cloth from a pocket deep inside the breast of his jacket, and began to wick the sanguine syrup from the inner lens. The envelope had been peppered by the bloody rain, which was already being incorporated into the migrating rhizome of the ink. Once Gregory and serviced the loop and restored it to its previously pristine state, he returned it to the drawer of secret velvet and loaded this latter back into the recesses of the desk.
Now there remained the final task of unsealing the envelope and releasing its contents. Gregory saw this through with measured dexterity: first, he finessed his bladed thumbnail under the flap, then he slit it open in both directions. What remained of the time-hardened glue came trickling out on the desk in a rocky orange powder. The flap, unmoored, rose upon the tension of its own warped pulp to reveal that which lay within.
It was a letter – what else? But this letter was much less volatile than usual, for the first time affording Gregory the opportunity of removing the folded paper from its corrupted sheath and exposing its written contents to view. The text read thusly:
“I might have remained always alone, save for they – save for the fact that they are WING-TIPPED. They are my bipartite trophy, my mirrored brides, and WING-TIPPED. Upon asphalt, upon grass, or in foul water dipped, are they WING-TIPPED. They stun with their glamour and shimmering leather and weather the whimpering storm, being WING-TIPPED. My heart skips a beat when I walk down the street, and whom should I meet but a dame most discrete, who then proffers her meat (I’ve sucked lemons as sweet) with its hot ruddy heat; what should render complete this liase but a cleat smartly kicking her neat pearly teeth: to repeat, I’ve indulged in this treat for the simple conceit that they, and no others, are WING-TIPPED. When my mother was buried, I stood upon that mound of heaped soil with tears blurring my vision. It was a snapping cold October morn, but my mourning was stifled by they, which are WING-TIPPED. At a time in my life, I floated anchorless and without ballast; the memory of a betrayal which savaged my innocence and capacity for unalloyed love was my nightly aperitif before vainly attempting slumber. Anxious for any pretense to leave home, I gathered what little remained of my recent inheritance and moseyed down to the local cobbler’s shop. There, the proprietor greeted me with his fat, liver-tinged lips, moist from licking. He showed me a gallery chock full of them, gleaming behind beveled panes of glass and glaring with a cyclops eye of sheeny sheen a show light suspended above. But nothing could get me fervid – nothing could coax the mealy bankroll from my silken breast pocket, save for they that stood before me WING-TIPPED. A few months anon, an acquaintance of mine called upon me in the way of an invitation: would I join him at his estate to celebrate the grand opening of his apiary? Being that I harbored a mild fear of those galling airborne demons, whose existence constitutes an apiary’s entire raison d'être, I hesitated momently to accept. But then I glanced at the nook of polished wood by the jamb of my front door. Placed on a low marble pedestal beneath a lacquered coat rack and beside a lead urn, there placed for the disposal of freshly wetted umbrellas, they called to me, reminded me that it was time to brandish them before the public eye, so that all might regard them and notice with appreciation that they were WING-TIPPED. Having resolved to satisfy my acquaintance’s request, I directed my valet to ready my coach, for to-day we should tread upon honeyed grounds, the grasses of which would soon be anointed by the dual imprint of those which are WING-TIPPED. No more than a few hours later, we arrived to the sylvan environs of our host’s chateau; he came out to greet us as the coach clambered up the gravel drive, letting out a great leathern creak as it rocked upon its suspension. The young lord smiled a brilliant white smile and flourished the gilt tails of his frock coat as he ushered us through the echoing surfaces of a grand corridor, paneled in ringing mother-of-pearl, and into the back courtyard. We stopped for a moment in a shaded grotto to take tea, and in reposing thusly, I saw to it that my acquaintance and my man both marveled at they which depended from my stockinged feet. I took pains to drape first my left leg over my right knee, and then my right over my left, all so that equal coverage would be duly granted to the WING-TIPPED. After thé, our gracious guide led us out into the open air of the grounds. Here the grass crunched underfoot as verdant shards of stained cathedral glass. Round about stood large, layered cubes: citadels full of buzzing. Then the infernal ones came out to play. They rushed by us in confused swarms, but I saw them minutely. I watched the slow lapse of those vulgar appendages, transparently veined, which allow their kind to take flight. My face was hotly offended. How ever could such vermin deign to behave, to put on airs, as though WING-TIPPED? My acquaintance began to monologue on the minutiae of breeding and keeping them, but I halted his diatribe with a burning stare. And I lifted my legs, one after the other. And I crushed, and I stomped, my exalted accessories carrying me high above the earth, magnificently magnified, and they drew me aloft, oh so WING-TIPPED. When I returned to ground, all was a tamped tangle of carnage. Human and yellow-striped hellion lay equally flattened, flightless in body and soul; I trod upon the pavement of them for quite an hour, enjoying the percussion of my soles upon that queer macadam. Like a goat on a drawbridge, I tapped with my hooves. I sifted their ruins, their pestled effluvium, paced in a circle and deepened the grooves of my tracks in that which had become little more than common waste. A more delicate liqueur of circumstances may never be sipped; and lo, they in which I stride are now, and into perpetuity, WING-TIPPED.”
No sooner had Gregory’s remaining eye scanned the final line of text than the brittle sheets of paper vanished into shimmering rivulets of gas and poured upward through his fingers onto the ceiling. At first, the vapors chased each other around the halo of the lightbulb, directly above where Gregory sat. Then, first gradually, and afterward rapidly, the convolutions of bent reality resulting from refracted light could be seen creeping toward the doors to the entrance; here, the gasses awaited a ceremonious release.
Gregory sat erect upon his stool and watched after this phenomenon for several moments, quietly shivering and rubbing dried remnants of blood from the corner of his lame eye. It was not until a sudden clattering rang out from the opposite end of the lobby hall that he changed his posture. The source of the noise had been the double doors leading into the baths proper. Something was rattling the brazen railing of the doors’ pneumatic handles. The occupants were due to emerge.
Immediately, Gregory sprang to his feet and pressed his fists tightly to his thighs, digging the angular corner of his sharpened thumbnail into the outer seam of the right leg of his jeans.
The oak doors glided open synchronically. Behind them stood a wall of total blackness from which pearlescent flues of thick steam tumbled, obscuring the glinting tiles of the lobby floor. A few minutes passed at this promontory of expectation. And then… what should emerge?
There was a soft shuffling, an icy crumbling and quaking. A hominid being, ghostly in its pallor, came out under the sole lightbulb in the ceiling. It was nearly a man, but clearly lacking organs, muscles, and the mechanical motivation of moving parts. Instead, its limbs were propelled by a mute crystallization of lukies, of which it was entirely composed.
Gregory remained standing, a rigid column at attention before his employer. The striated cords and sinews in his neck rippled and stood out in high relief: these were tension cables stabilizing the bridge between the spit of his ovoid head and the slumped, ambiguous punctuation mark of his torso.
We communed between the
roseate columns of that stately hall. The sequence of events that had begun
with the arrival of the lukies and ended at this point in space and time had
reached maturity. The transaction was complete.
