Fairy Tales 🧚 Black Diamond
The Little Merman
While Antonio pinned down his Moby Dick, and while Beatrice dreamed of her future son travelling in the remote corners of the earth, an epic sea-journey had just begun deep inside Antonio’s testicles. He had worked himself up into such a state, yanking and prodding, bumping and burping, screaming and crying, that the fury of his bulbocavernosus muscle unleashed the pent-up captives from their starting gates. Primed with Sauzo Blanco and decorated with iridescent caps of organic mescaline, the frisky little boaters took off into the Unknown, with only the throb of a .005 Evinrude engine to propel them into the dark waters. Off they went, ten thousand little maniacs, Antonio’s little darlings, bent on the first Viking mission of their lives.
Leiv Eiriksson discovers North America, 1893, by Christian Krohg (1852–1925), from The National Gallery of Norway (Wikimedia Commons)
Ah, how exhilarating it must have been for Baldric, that first initial foray into the Waters of Life! How fierce the jostling with his fellow gametes as they thrashed their silver tails in the great Sea of Becoming — or Not Becoming, for how uncertain the goal, and how daunting the prospect of defeat: oblivion in a kelpless ocean of pre-natal Dread! And even if Baldric reached the goal first, what chance was there that his self, his courageous swimming little self, wouldn’t be smashed to bits against the wall of the enormous Egg? And even if he was waved into the docking bay, what memories would be lost once he joined his gamete self to that other gamete, his old frisky self unrecognizable once he fused, divided, grew into fetal shape? To become a zygote was at once a triumph and a defeat of everything he was. For he knew that one day he would either die or leave behind the fierce little warrior who began the struggle.
And once he had grown monstrous, an eight-pound Pantagruel, what ocean would there be left to swim in?
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Ragor was pretty sure that all of this human reproduction was completely insane. Unapproved, unsupervised, and completely random reproduction of cells! Where was the plan? The cells divided into whatever space the moment provided, but the moment wasn’t provided with any meaning whatsoever.
Blue Dreamers on the other hand knew what their lives meant the moment their neurons stretched into space. Their first moments of consciousness were tinged with an intrinsic purpose that went deeper than dreams. Whenever they wandered in their minds into what they didn’t know, or whenever they wandered outside of their consciousness, they encountered, unconsciously another layer of DNA that wrapped around the self that the previous amino acids had woven in their brain. This outer strand was called DXNA, the X signifying that it was unknown to them, always outside their conscious grasp. When in their wildest thoughts they swerved outward from themselves, they felt this outer layer, which seemed like a pleasing mystery, but was packed with certainties. It was an outer band of meaning that was structured in time and space, vast as a band of stars and yet as specific in its course as astronomy and geology could describe. It connected the Blue Dreamer to the universe and calibrated their relationship to it in exact historical terms.
Because humans couldn’t see the point of the DNA and the RNA, the evolution and the continual struggle for survival, they just called it “natural.” Or “natural selection.” Or even “intelligent design.” Or, they said, “It was meant to be.” If anyone asked who meant it, they said, “Why, Nature, of course.” The sophists among them projected a knowing smile, and upped the ante:“Why, God, of course.” When asked where this God was, they’d say, “Why, in Nature, of course.”
Whenever Ragor heard that type of reasoning, he got tired of spinning around and around, in a circular pattern some called logic. Of course it was nonsense. He was tempted to quote from The Book of Blue Dreams, which was wrapped in a sparkling cerulean script around his consciousness, on the other side of the abyss that separated his consciousness from his unconsciousness. The script pulsed inward in ever more arcane patterns into his autonomous neurons, slowing his breathing and balancing his blood. The Book of Blue Dreams counselled the Blue Dreamers: “Forbear those who imagine that they know the reason for whatever reason Nature might offer.”
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As Baldric grew larger, the space around him shrank. Even worse, he realized he was utterly dependent on those around him. And these people were dependent on those around them, and those around them were dependent on those around them, ad infinitum, until there was no fixed point except the circling stars and an obscure passage in Zhuangzi about the Shadow and the Penumbra.
Amidst all of this change, Baldric was forced to remain in one place, tied by an umbilical cord and only slightly mobile in the placenta of his mother’s womb. He felt like a horse outside the Saloon of Life. John Wayne was in there drinking and fighting and doing god knows what, while all he could do was eye the rough tarts climbing the staircase to the rooms on the second floor. It was at this early stage of his existence that Baldric became melancholy, and thought back with nostalgia to the early sailing days when he had not yet been forced into an unwritten contract with heartbeats, lengthening bones, and metal forceps.
He remembered with a certain air of où sont les neiges d’autant the dirty tricks he played on his competitors. He remembered the questions he lobbed at his fellow boaters, catching them off guard and making them waver in their determination. He clapped his floppy little hands in glee when he thought how he had made them propose to themselves alternative theories of return to the starting point via the road already taken. Finally, that poem by Robert Frost came in handy.
Yet he also asked himself this questions as he flicked his wrist on the throttle, beaming an arrogant smile to those he left in his wake. In the heat of competition with the other struggling cells (who he feared had installed inboard motors), he too pondered the conundrum of direction, the disturbing question of why they took one path and he another. Nor could he account for the fact that for every path he chose there was a dozen other paths he might have taken.
He asked himself these philosophical questions, yet he wasn’t stupid enough to slow down and try to answer them. He knew that this wasn’t some triathlon race where he could finish second and try again next year.
To the sperm geeks who rode plutonium-propelled jet-skis he threw out scientific questions, challenging them to calculate the microbiological factors of their imminent fusion — how gamete met gamete, and how the unknown X merged with the unanswerable Y. Some of these nerd cells hesitated, and were hence lost, when Baldric pointed out that a part of their selves was missing; that some strand of their being — an equal and yet not exactly opposite strand — awaited them somewhere else. Some of these earnest souls then set up little laboratories (wasting even more time) to see if what was waiting for them sent out beacons, pheromones floating in the black ocean, buoys to grasp at in the dark. Baldric almost capsized with laughter to think what an irony it was that those who came closest to understanding the facts of life were the furthest from ever living them!
And then he remembered with a slight skip of his little heart how strange was that final leg of his journey into the solemn cavern of the omnivorous Egg.
Die Blaue Grotte auf der Insel Capri, 1835/36, by Jakob Alt (1789–1872), from Collection: Albertina. From Wikimedia Commons (cropped by RYC).
And yet how anticlimactic the days that followed! After all the excitement — the crisscrossing of wakes, the smashing of hulls, the tossing of gasoline-soaked cherry bombs — he was obliged to sit restrained for nine months in utter boredom. For nine full months he was forced to submit to dull technical fusions, the replication of cells and nucleic acids that made him wish he was back in Lorenzo’s bag of magic tricks, jostling behind the starting gates and boasting of his naval strategy and military prowess.
Things just got worse and worse. Whenever he tried to grab the crunchy popcorn that fell like manna from his mother’s esophagus, all he saw was soggy tidbits falling on a thin membrane above his head. The dye in the “all-natural butter” permeated the membrane, scorching his synapses and turning his hair a bright shiny yellow. When he tried to grab the white fluffy starch of the tumbling morsels, the membrane was sprayed with gastric juices and other vile and bilious secretions. It was like being in a car wash and yet never getting to drive.
The only thing to drink was an insipid pink juice that filtered into his stomach from a little rubbery tube. He grabbed this tube with his floppy fingers and tried to bring it to his mouth. It was like sucking water from a tied balloon! Outside, he heard voices extolling the virtues of A & W root beer, Kentucky fried chicken, and charcoal-broiled Sizzler steaks served with fries for $1.99. He also heard about the hegemonic schemes of a man called Dr No. How frustrating it was to hear about such meticulous plans to take over the world, and yet to be left out of them! Or to hear that a beautiful woman called Honey Ryder was jumping into the bed of Secret Agent 007, and yet never be able to see them at it!
Cinema poster for Dr. No - 1962, David Chasman & Mitchell Hooks. Source (WP:NFCC#4) IMP Awards original U.K. quad poster. Date of publication1962. From Wikimedia Commons.
For nine months Baldric was forced to sit hunchbacked in a ludicrous fetal position. Then, just as he was beginning to enjoy loafing around and being seduced by gangster fantasies and the whims of a blond genie, his eviction notice came to him in the form of prodding forceps and a pair of rubber gloves.
Once outside, he wished he was back inside, in his comfortable warm jacuzzi sipping pink lemonade and basking in the radiation of the colour TV. He thus learned his first lesson in Freudian psychology and the logic of fences and green grass.
Baldric was born on March 12 and was therefore a Pisces, which made sense to him since his first memories were of swimming in the currents of the womb. He remembered feeling his mother’s pulse, which he now romanticized, as if it were a cosmic burst, a cobalt wave that sprang from Neptune’s deep. The wave pulsed outward, in the direction of a point exactly halfway between Beta Piscium (also known as Fumalsamakah or the mouth of the fish) and Eta Piscium (Alpherg or the pouring point of water). Thus he entered his contract with Pisces, celestial god of the swimming fish, born of the Babylonian union of the Great Swallow and the Lady of Heaven.
And since Baldric was born in 1972 he also entered into a contract with the great fraternity of rodents. A water rat, he would forever feel at home in the unpredictable currents of Fate. He would have a deep sympathy with his cousins the wood rat, the fire rat, the earth rat, and the metal rat, who ruled the forests and skies. He would also feel warmly toward his distant cousin, the mouse, who lived closer to humans and knew more intimately their strengths and weaknesses. A fish and water-rat, Baldric was ready to enter the currents of life that awaited him.
And yet he was surprised to find the new world around him was so unpredictable! First it seemed to jog up and down. Then, when the doctor turned him right-side up, the world seemed upside down. The hospital was also a great disappointment. To start with, his television, which had become his only source of joy in a meaningless existence, had been taken away from him. Its replacement was an inferior model with a boring green line that blipped like a drunk with nothing to say.
The planet wasn’t inhabited by genies or witches, but by cranky nurses and pompous doctors, none of them plotting murders or making assignments with busty models in a medicine cabinet whose leaking chemicals brought them to a pitch of coital fury. Nor was the world under attack by his favourite Martians, or plagued by a skyfull of flying plates and saucers. What a relief that would have been!
Ray Walston as Uncle Martin from the television program My Favorite Martian, 29 September 1963. Source: eBay item photo front, CBS Television. From Wikimedia Commons.
At home, Baldric was bored out of his hardening skull. With nothing to do, he figured he might as well listen to what his parents were shouting at each other about the Facts of Life and Truth. He soon noticed that their facts and truths were divided into as many subsets as there were arguments to be made, or pretexts to defend.
His parents brandished what they knew to be true like swords in each other’s faces, narrowly escaping permanent laceration. Once, the sweep of their besickled knowledge strayed an inch too far in his direction, slicing one of his Jolly Jumper cables, the elastic ropes that held him in a happy bouncing position between their diametrically opposed views. He fell sideways and scraped his head on the floor below him, which was scattered with the broken fragments of their wit. He vowed never to put himself in such danger again. For he had heard that once one fell from a wall and cracked open the shell of the cranium, even all the king’s horsemen couldn’t put the yolk back in the egg again.
