The Great Game 🎲 Vicinto Prossimo

The Water Damsel

~ 150 years ago ~

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Shake your hair girl with your ponytail
Takes me right back, when you were young

— Bryan Ferry, “If There is Something”

Talfar remembered it with crystal clarity, even though it was 150 years ago to the day. He was only 50 years old when he first saw her along a patch of pavement blessed by the morning sun. She was dancing along the sidewalk, across the street from their ground-floor kitchen window.

Thalphemera was an Aquarelle, the highest class of water damsel, from the adjacent district of Romagna. Her skin was golden and her eyes were a dazzling blue. In his heart, Talfar reworked the words of the universal Bard:

O, she doth teach the sunlight to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the morning light
Like the rich jewel in her Aquarelle ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for sight too dear!

Thalphemera’s torso was blocked by the flower-boxes lining his family’s kitchen window. Yet he could see that her neck and shoulders were as smooth and fine as her calves. A diamond earring and a golden anklet sparkled in the sun.

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The Drug

Somatherin, the hormone of infatuation, hit Talfar’s system like a ferridian brick. Somatherin. The drug-dealers of Fallar Discordia would do anything to get their polished claws on this hormone. They used it as a precursor to manufacture their strongest amphetamines: diathamine, roketamine, and concatamine.

Somatherin riles the hormones, produces euphoria, and obliterates the conscience. It would, for instance, have given Dostoevsky’s ruthless hero Raskolnikov the courage to take full advantage of his homicidal nature. Raskolnikov had the courage to kill the pawnbroker in cold blood, but he didn’t have the psychological strength to deal with what he’d done. If he’d taken somatherin before the act, he wouldn’t have been unnerved, or finally undone, by the gruesome murder. He would have seen the implementation of his amorality in its own light, free from all ethical constraints, unhindered by holy laws or pleas for mercy. He would have been his own Übermensch.

Somatherin would have allowed Raskolnikov to climb the stairs, grip the ax firmly in his hand, and kill the innocent old lady. Where was the moral law? It was nothing but empty air! His hand wouldn’t have shook, and his mind wouldn’t have wavered. Nor would he later have had second thoughts, or third thoughts, let alone the endless chain of guilty subliminal doubts that circled ever-backward to his culpability; ever-upward to his sense of right and wrong; ever onward, torturing him every step of the way from his dingy apartment to the police station, as if he were a penitent rising from a rough wooden pew and walking to the finely-wrought oak of a confessional booth.

Without a drug like somatherin, Raskolnikov was bound by morality to be helpless, a prey to scruples and guilt. He was bound to be as helpless as that scoundrel Macbeth, who tortured himself with notions of crime and punishment even before he killed the king in his sleep.

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The Great Shakespeare Debate

Talfar had always admired Shakespeare. He subscribed to the theory that the great bard wasn’t born in England, but in Vicino Prossimo. I mean, who really believes that Shakespeare was some schoolmaster, or some two-bit actor lighting fools the way to dusty death on a stage?

The Demon Priests of Fallar Discordia also claimed Shakespeare as one of their own. They cited numerous passages in Richard III and Othello as clear evidence. They also claimed to have sent Copernicus to Krakow, Bacon to London, Montaigne to the Dordogne, Cervantes to Madrid, Hume to Scotland, and Nietzsche to Germany.

Yet Talfar was convinced that Shakespeare was planted on Earth by the Vicinese Bright Council. At the time, the Council was trying to lift the hapless humans out of their drowsy Middle Ages. Of course, their patronage of Reason and Art didn’t always go according to plan. In 1600 they watched as the ashes of one of their most courageous spies, Giordano Bruno, rose into the night sky in Rome. The Inquisitors had clamped his tongue, stripped him naked, and burned him alive.

Thirty-three years later they watched their own dear Galileo retract the intractable facts of astronomy. The Inquisitional proceeding was broadcast all over the Kraslika, and plunged the Councillors into a collective funk.They’d been so optimistic about Italy, having earlier gifted that land a trinity of their finest Vicinese writers: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. True, they had an ulterior motive: to give the Italian dialect of Vicinese the linguistic corrective it needed. As one Vicinese linguist put it, “Otherwise, the language was in danger of becoming French.”

The Vicinese Councillors suspected that the Inquisitors were in fact Demon Priests. Yet the great Fallarian scholar Ossobuco argues convincingly that the Fallarians had always championed science and realism over abstract art. He notes, very correctly, that it’s the Vicinese who paint clouds pink and play secret tracks of music deep in the Vatican.

As usual, however, the arguments on both sides are so convoluted that no one can prove anything. The only one who understands it all is an obscure writer from Exeter named Dan Brown. Ossobuco tries in vain to poke holes in Brown’s theories, yet he always ends up in a downward spiral, like Dante’s Alichino and Calcabrina in the lake of pitch. Ossobuco tries to get out of the hole he’s dug for himself by quoting Brown himself, hoping that it will make clear the absurdities that have enmeshed his own arguments in black tar. Desperately scrambling for an anchor in the tempest of scholarship, Ossobuco snatches a quote from Wikipedia: “The further you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, ‘Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.’"

Knocking back half a bottle of Tignanello, Ossobuco convinces himself that such nonsense must securely pin Brown against the wall. Yet to his dismay he reads that Dan Brown has become more popular than ever. He reads the writing on the wall, in large print, with circles of Heaven or Hell in the background. In garish yellow and green letters the poster informs him that Dan Brown has come out with a new blockbuster, one in which the deeper conspiracies of the Vatican are in fact controlled by the devastatingly beautiful gypsy from the TV series Suburra: Blood on Rome, who the Fallarians immediately claimed as one of their own.

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Macbeth

Talfar had to admit that the question of Shakespeare’s origin remained vexed. He was a chameleon, one minute slithering like a Fallarian snake into a garden, the next hopping like a Vicinese nightingale into the highest branches. Shakespeare could squeeze nectar from the most sublime beauty, and also from the deepest treachery — like that of Macbeth as he equivocated en route to murdering his guest Duncan, the king of Scotland.

Talfar had a 300 year-old copy of Macbeth, bound in Warwickshire leather. He used the thickest of black inks to stress certain words — were done, ’tis done, ’twere well, were done, If, could, surcease, success, Might, teach, being taught — which reverberated from one pentameter line to the next. These words shook Macbeth’s soul as he contemplated the terrifying hypothetical cause that he feared would lead him to the inevitable effect that terrified him most:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
 It were done quickly. If the assassination
 Could trammel up the consequence and catch
 With his surcease [Duncan’s death] success; [if only] this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
 [Then] here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
 We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
 We still have judgment here, that we but teach
 Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice
 Commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice
 To our own lips. 

Somatherin would’ve banished all those thoughts, would’ve cut through all those choppy words, like a sushi knife through the flesh of an albacore tuna. The sweet drug would have allowed Macbeth to raise his dagger without qualm, and to sleep peacefully for the remainder of the night. All he’d dream about was the sweetness of pickled ginger massaging his jejunum and the audacity of wasabi clearing his nasal passages. He’d be deaf to the voice that might have floated in the thin air. The voice that whispered in a crow’s voice, Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.

Even if he heard such a voice, Macbeth would think that crows are nasty buggers, but cute in their own way, sassy to the point of worth talking to. Consequences and the life to come are mere verbal nonsense when the tidal flood of somatherin is coursing through your veins.

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Finally, Back to Raskolnikov

Somatherin would also have allowed Raskolnikov to kill the pawnbroker, steal her trinkets, and walk out into the bright Petersburg street as if nothing had happened. As if the universe hadn’t screamed out in horror.

Later that night, when the first dose had worn off, Raskolnikov would take a second dose, which would grant him the stupor of forgetting what he’d done. The next morning he’d take a third dose to face the day, and a fourth dose to face the afternoon, and a fifth dose to stalk the night. In the middle of the night, when “over the one-half world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep,” the drug would call to him, and give him very precise instructions how to get more.

Testosterone, by comparison, was like shandy served to children in a country pub.

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Crystal Blue

The somatherin coursed though Talfar’s body when he saw Thalphemera dancing along the sidewalk. She seemed as if in another world, doing makeshift pirouettes, as she twirled from her family’s apartment in upscale Romagna to the university in Vicino Concentrica. She wore a light green taffesca dress, frilled like the flowers that lined the balconies of the honeycomb apartment across the street.

Like most of the apartments in Vicino Concentrica, this one climbed into the sky eighty floors above the street. But the light at mid-morning came directly from the oost, and this allowed a wide streak of golden sunshine to sweep down the narrow street. Each window-box and balcony was lit up, so that the full lushness of the greenery and flowers turned the street into a surreal landscape of tangerine and marmalade, strawberry and bright ruby red. The plants at his parent’s kitchen window were lime green and magenta, violet and orange, turquoise and orchid.

To Talfar, the water damsel appeared to be dancing naked along the street, her mid-section hidden by the bursts of dragon-lily and heavenly blue morning glory in the flower-boxes. All he could see of her clothing was a thin green strap on her left shoulder, and the leather strap of a purse or handbag. Her golden ponytail sparkled in the sun.

As Fate would have it, there was a gap between the last flower-box and the edge of their window. It was into this gap that Thalphemera stepped, stood framed, and stooped to get a drink at the crystal fountain across the street. No pedestrians walked by. No ragged band of school kids obscured his view. No slow-moving grandmother with a caddy packed with groceries got in the way. It was as if time had stopped.

Thalphemera undid her ponytail and shook her hair in the sun. Talfar was mesmerized by the waterfall of her golden hair.

Throw your precious gifts into the air
Watch them fall down, when you were young

As she bent down to drink, she swept the golden hair away from her forehead with a movement so graceful that the only thing more beautiful could be the eyes that she uncovered as she bent down to drink from the fountain. She dipped her neck down further toward the small jet of water, and then bent her head sideways. Dancing above the sparkling water, her eyes looked across the street. She was looking directly at him, just as he was looking at her. She saw the flower boxes and the widow and peered into the eyes that peered into hers.

Her eyes were crystal blue, like the water from some faraway paradise of blue waters.

It was at this moment that Talfar felt that the Cosmos and its Grand Design were one. The very blood that coursed through his veins told him in no uncertain terms that she was the one. Just like Dante, that Vicinese spy, when he first saw Beatrice along the banks of the Arno:

Thalphemera brought the strands of her hair back together, bound them with a purple hair-band that glistened with tiny silver threads, and skipped out of the frame.

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green / Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes / And she's gone

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