By Michael du Plessis
A Novel in Thirteen Chapters
I
The jeweler’s heart burns only for the icy brilliance of the gems he facets, while east and west eunuchs with the guile of serpents establish swelling bureaucracies almost certain to clog the arteries of empire. Since the village has fallen under a spell, the full moon never wanes and gallops each night across the sky in a coach of clouds.
II
Insomniac children slaughter their parents with unanticipated verve and inventiveness; the newfound glee of parricide makes their eyes (in sockets hollow and dark from lack of sleep) glint like the lunatic jeweler’s gems. Any time now, the empire must enter its own ponderous night.
III
A man returns from yet another war, some other war, to find his wife, hitherto loyal and docile as a sculptured greyhound, in league against him with an alchemist. Simple veteran, he lets himself be lured by their promise of gold enough to light up an empire. The smirking, severed head of a ventriloquist’s dummy cautions of what’s yet to come.
IV
A series of strangulations accomplished by a shadow in a mask will leave one in no doubt that the mincing intimacy the overbearingly effete butler shares with the pallid lord of the manor verges rather on a complicity one might, all things being equal, turn to one’s own advantage. Whatever will our betters be up to next?
V
Gravemold dulling its gold, the very last chrysanthemum of empire withers. Other flowers turn flesheater, bloodied corollas greedily tearing at those luckless enough to have been lured by the opulent yet quite disingenuous candor of their fat white petals.
VI
There’s a bar by the harbor, a bar by the harbor, they say, and in this bar by the harbor there sits a sad-eyed mermaid, night after night, who’s drinking her troubles away.
VII
It becomes imperative to stop the flow of his conversation with sherry, a situation with which we are already acquainted. Then we discover that, since the insatiable tongues of arson have destroyed the colonial archive in the quaint mountain town of R —, we know nothing whatsoever for certain about this man, his past blank as the glass ball of a failed fortuneteller, his garrulity unstoppable.
VIII
Even here one feels the empire’s dying. If only one could get outside its endless dying everywhere, its corpselike cling.
IX
Concealed behind curtains of a brocade thick enough to smother screams, the effete butler discovers that the lord of the manor has used his collection of African curios (purportedly under a curse) to conceal a secret passage, a discovery that makes the butler’s situation delicate as bone china. Bless to the ends of the empire, the raven, the seagull, the crow, for they intercept the white doves of the Antichrist.
X
More eunuchs. A great deal more guile.
XI
In a bar by the harbor, in a bar by the harbor they say, there sits a weary ex-mermaid, drink after drink, washing the pain of two legs away.
XII
The lunatic jeweler and the butler, effete and sinister, are one and the same! When a color all but speaks, turn the other cheek, and above all, never ever tell anyone. The Pope blesses a porn star’s parrot. An indoor furnace has many uses.
XIII
Your face lovelier than a village under a spell beneath the galloping moon.
Michael du Plessis is the author of the novel The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker (Les Figues, 2012) and the chapbook Songs Dead Soldiers Sing (Chicago: Transparent Tiger Press, 2007). His creative work has appeared in Narrativity, LitNet, and NatBrut, and with Janice Lee, in FANZINE and Plinth. With Lee he is collaborating on a project of poems about decapitations in film and television. He teaches in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
