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The Flum
THE DREAM CLUB
TOPINARD ORGANIZED a Dream Club aboard ship. Meeting daily in the Pipistrel's library, members discussed the previous night's dreamwork, relating the manifest content, then allowing Topinard to offer commentary on the latent content.
At the first morning's meeting, Moldenke began things with a lengthy and detailed apology for his mother's absence. "She would so much like to join us, but she's been quite ill. Her chest and abdomen are covered with healed-over lesions. If she grasps a handful of loose, abdominal flesh and pulls it outward, the lobe of skin sags in place, like a doughy breast, remaining that way several days and gradually shrinking."
All extended the proper get-well wishes, and the meeting was called to order. Major Laffoon was the first to relate a dream, consulting his notes frequently. "With a dream wife, I'm somewhere on the Indiana Particle, lunching in a Squat 'n' Gobble cafe. We are nude, except that I am wearing a top hat, large black shoes and feel very Lincolnesque. I recall the proverb If you go hat in hand, you can cross the whole land. I fidget with the hat, brushing it with my fingers, removing it and polishing it with my sleeve. My dream wife, dressed as a ballerina, spanks my fanny with a rolled newspaper and quotes Honoré de Balzac--`All newspapers are despicable, hypocritical, infamous liars. They kill ideas, systems and people, and flourish because they do.' "
Topinard said, "You have indulged too much in onanism and that is the message of this dream. It is nothing to make light of, sir, for it is the beginning of consumption of the spinal cord."
It was then Moldenke's turn. "The hair mill at the edge of town was being run at full speed. I was in the ginhouse watching the machinery. At an unguarded moment, I lost my balance and fell into the dander box. My landing was soft and I was uninjured, but with all the noise of the gin, my cries could not be heard. Dander and scarf poured down, eventually smothering me. No one was aware of what happened until a child saw a bare foot poking from a bale of hair and a swarm of flies around it."
Ola was the next to speak: "I was one who sold chapeaus, trained ones. I hung one of them on the limb of a tree. When a curious crowd gathered, I called to the hat. It had a name. Brainard. `Here, Brainard! Here, Brainard!' The hat spun from the tree, sailed through the air and landed on my head. When I sold off my supply, I moved on to the next settlement."
It was Topinard's turn. "I dreamt the Captain was murdered during the night. Someone forced entry to his quarters, rinsed his mustache with chloroform, beat him viciously, pierced his heart with a darning needle, scissored off an ear, had a bowel movement on the puce carpet, then bathed in his tub. After a plaster likeness was taken of his face, I was asked to be present at the postmortem. Someone led me to a makeshift morgue where the Captain had been set atop a row of wooden casks. He was slit open, throat to pubis, and the rib cage spread apart. The ship's physician held the liver, staring curiously at one of the lobes, then razored open the scalp and peeled it off as if it were the rind of an orange. I had great pleasure in seeing this and experienced a most delicious orgasm. Then the Captain was buried at sea with a minimum of ceremony. A small crowd of mourners gathered under parasols and I read from the works of Byron: `Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean--roll, ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; man marks the earth with ruin . . .' Here someone picked up the Captain's muslin-wound body and flung it over the rail. ` . . . He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd . . . and unknown.' "
Dr. Dunn was the last. "I am in a courtyard. A torture ceremony is in progress. The victim sits down with pants rolled up. The chief torturer has a broken wine bottle. He repeatedly strikes the victim's ankle with the jagged edges. The sound is quite distinctive, like pounding meat with a tenderizing mallet. After the session is over, the torturer cuts up small iced cakes and distributes them, then takes up a wide bowl with candies and passes it around. A colorful little finch is perched on the lip of the bowl and chirps contentedly as the candy goes from hand to hand."
Topinard thought at length about the dreams and their meanings, then summarized his conclusions after a strong puff on his hair pipe. "I postulate this, my friends, that dreamers keep secrets. There are figures and events we encounter in dreams that we dare not mention to others in the waking life. Let me tell you an example. A little bit ago, in relating my dream of the Captain's murder, I kept a secret from you. I failed to mention a poorly dressed, colorless figure standing always in the, shall we say, wings, of the dream, lurking in the background shadows."
"I've seen it too," Ola said. "That shadow figure."
"Now that you mention it," Moldenke said. "I think it's a flum, but I'm not sure."
"Ditto," said Dr. Dunn.
Topinard began to salivate so excessively he had to place the knotted end of a handkerchief in his mouth to keep from drooling openly.
"The unmentioned dream figure," said Ola.
"Here's my suggestion," said Topinard. "We shall do an experiment. Tonight, when the figure appears in our dreams, we'll no longer ignore it but confront it. We shall ask, `Who are you to be threatening the peace and privacy of my dream?' "
"I'll bet my last guida it's a flum," said Moldenke. "A damned pile of smelly flum flesh."
"They do have a reputation for shameless eavesdropping," said Dr. Dunn. "In the waking life, anyway."
"Suppose the encounter turns violent?" Ola wondered.
"Go after the thing with the utmost abandon. Remember, in dreams you have the power of stoical endurance. And, like a common flum, you have modified sensation. You feel pain less acutely. It makes you a formidable enemy."
All agreed such an experiment would be in the interests of not only diversionary fun, but scientific inquiry. All agreed, as well, to refrain from aquafoenic, mulce, cocaine, sexual indulgence and hair smoking for three days before recording all the details of the fourth night's dreams, when the presumed encounter would take place.
The Dream Club would meet five days hence.
A SETTLER'S COMMONPLACE BOOK
Onety-six. IK. Sleet.
A flum, out scouting, guides its wooden pedal car up the dirt road and parks it in the meager shade of my water tower. The little handmade car has rusted tin-can headlamps and a painted-on grill. It's a mystery how the pitiable creature wasn't stung to death by the wasps in the sumac along the ditchbank.
Its knock is as though the knuckles are made of hard rubber. Opening the door slowly, so as not to startle it, I allow the flum in.
For a moment it stands looking at my feet with its muddy yellow eyes, saying nothing, making no gesture. I offer to prepare a bowl of warm, curdled mulce, which is declined.
I build a fire in the potbelly and it warms its hands against the evening chill, its face ageless and simple, precocious red whiskers on the long, complex jaw.
In the firelight I observe the suggestion of a seam running down the flum's front, over the flocculus, from the khaki tip of the hat, across the lips and chin, into the neckerchief. It appears to be one flum sewn together from several others. Threads of black yarn drape its forehead under the floppy cloth hat, a mockery of hair. It has a sewn-on eyebrow above one of the eyes and nothing above the other.
I talk about the weather and it listens without comment, though the mouth parts open and the dry tongue darts and quivers. When the flum moves, which it seldom does, I hear a faintly audible rasp, as though the joints are dry of lubricant.
Come morning, the flum is still with me, a spider's thread from its shoulder to the wall. It has begun an extended smile, destined to last the entire day.
My wind sock is full to the south, the awnings flapping. The fire in the stove has died hours ago, the sun's last yellow angle narrowing on the flum's placid face. The old clock ticking on the mantel.
Morning again. An icicle has formed where the faucet dripped. The sun is up in a haze, the flum asleep on the tattered sofa. A dead cricket in the bottom of my teacup.
On the fourth day, though there's an egg of sun above the treeline when I awaken, a wet snow fills the gray sky and the flum is gone. Outside, just a greenish, phosphorescent circle in the melting snow where it squatted to defecate. Tracks of the pedal car's wooden wheels lead off down the road that goes north to French Settlement.
Onety-tres. Mist.
My neighbor, Woody Hockaday, sat dutifully at his window, his rat gun trained on the wellspring, where flum had been coming to drink water. He wanted a clear shot.
Cranking open his jalousie, he looked out toward the Little Red Ditch, across a zone of finely ground glass and palmetto. He could see the smoke of their fires, the dust of their ponies, hear the yap of their dogs.
One afternoon, three of them rode up to Hockaday's yard and dismounted. They scaled his wall and went toward the well. Hockaday's pistol blinked in the sunlight and a single shot was fired.
A flum fell over, wounded in the abdomen. The other two shinnied the fence and rode off. Hockaday went out to examine the downed flum.
The neighborhood gathered.
Not quite dead, the flum spoke out for a brief time: "There are three universes in the flum cosmology. One lies in the singularity's future and is dominated by ordinary American matter. Universe two is not our own, but borrowed from the French. It lies in the singularity's past, and is dominated by ephemeral material such as ectoplasm. Universe three--that is where I shall be going very shortly--lies in the spacelike regions of the nanosecond world, and is inhabited by dream figures. It goes without saying that--"
"Hush up!" Hockaday shouted. "Hush up and die."
One of the neighbors lent assistance by smashing the cranium with a heavy brass stanchion. After this, Hockaday used a jackknife to cut into the flocculus until it was widely gapped. Those there saw a soft pulp inside, as though an overripened melon had been opened, and seeds that were jet black, pea sized and had the appearance of obsidian.
Still, the flum had more to say. Everyone stepped back, listening out of respect, but remaining cautious.
"Take care, my friends," Hockaday warned. "If you feel yourself fading, cry out. We will take you to a safe distance."
The flum had its final say. "We do not believe in magic, but in Yogic, a marriage of Logic and Yoga. There are three levels of Yogic. The Pomologo, or `Botticelli Level,' the Porto Venere, or `Venus Trap,' and the Satchmo, what we call `Happy Time' . . . a condition in which the soul sits motionless and all apparent life ceases. The idea of cyclical creations, destructions and great forgettings is a typical feature of Yogic belief. The culture of Yogic as it is known from the Settlement Period is completely sui generis, with no trace of celestial influence. Art is the communication of feeling. Science is the communication of measure. Yogic is the communication of the intuitive leap. And what is the intuitive leap? Even expecting tomorrow's sun is such a leap. This is both what Yogic is about, and what Yogic has nothing at all to do with. . . . Oh, dear. It's all over. Here come the oeufs."
We heard loud gurglings inside the flum's abdomen as the eggs made their way toward the anus, then out into the baggy seat of the filthy trousers. That finished, nothing more was heard from the flum.
Woody cut open the trousers with his knife and harvested three prize death eggs. Despite the overall top condition of the flocculus, the green gland proved to be diseased and was discarded.
Onety-onety-twoty.
A flum tongue was found in the 800 block of Industrial Road by a French airman staying in a local hotel. It was lying in a field 125 feet from the Mummy Mill. The airman was taking a shortcut through the field on his way to the Squat 'n' Gobble when he discovered the body part.
Officers searched the area for the rest of the body, or other remains, but none were found. After officers removed and preserved larvae from the tongue, the organ was sent to the Michael Ratt Institute for examination. Entomologists who examined the larvae thought the tongue may have been there as long as four days before being found.
Officers did not know whether the victim had been alive or dead when the organ was severed. Hospitals and funeral homes knew nothing of the case. Then, two days later, authorities learned that the severed body part might belong to Mr. Elmo Buggs, a resident of Pisstown's flum quarter, who was shot on Onety-29 with a large-caliber handgun by Mr. Delbert Short, American. Short reportedly pulled out the victim's tongue after the killing, and fled with Buggs's two offbreeds, ages six and seven, in his pedal car.
The offbreeds had seen the crime and told officers that Mr. Short threw the body part on the floor of the pedal car, periodically "stomping" on it and cursing Mr. Buggs as he drove aimlessly for two days.
The offbreeds did not know what city they were in when Mr. Short finally discarded the tongue, but said they were aware of their proximity to the Mummy Mills because of the "funny smell" in the air.
Mr. Buggs is married to Mr. Short's former wife.
"Apparently," began the officer's report, "Short came upon Buggs sexing with his ex while the offbreeds sat crosslegged at the foot of the bed, watching. This enraged Short, who weighed three hundred pounds and stood six feet ten inches.
Short was ordered by the courts to serve three days in the French sewer. His ex-wife, Lu, was put to death by hanging. The offbreed children, both unlawful males, were surrendered to licensed vivisectionists.
The second Dream Club meeting, in the ship's library, began with a flourish from Laffoon. "The subvocal metaphor is as powerful as E=mc2. The ancients knew that. Shamans know that. It's what's unsaid that speaks the loudest, in life and in dreams." Here he put back in place a curl of hair fallen across his forehead, though it only fell again immediately. "This mysterious figure, this shadowy manifestation lurking in our dreamscapes. Has anyone any sightings to report . . . ? Moldenke?"
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Over several nights."
With a fingernail filed to a fine point, Ola was picking little seeds from her teeth as she listened. "It was Michael Ratt, wasn't it?"
"I'm afraid so," said Moldenke, lighting a flum-hair cigarette, the fingers trembling.
"I saw him, too. He accosted me . . . in a very unusual way."
"Isn't he dead?" Laffoon interjected.
"Did he live . . . that's the question," said Moldenke. "Tell us, Ola. What happened?"
"Feeling both amative and restless, I went for a stroll on the orlop deck. Because of the chilly rain, no one else was out, until our shadowy figure appeared out of the mists, holding a small caliber gun to his temple--Michael Ratt. `I'll shoot myself unless you let me depilate you,' Ratt said."
"Depilate you?" Laffoon's eyebrow arched.
Ola shrugged, smiled slightly at the remembrance. "Yes, remove my hair."
"Remove your hair?"
"Yes. There it stood, behind a pile of rotting sailcloth, a pigeon-toed, scruffy little flum with a gun to its temple. If I will not submit to its wishes, Michael Ratt, the President of the Particle, will shoot itself."
"Did you? Did you submit?"
"Out of natural instincts, yes. . . . `Come here, you're wet,' it said. `Let me comb you. My cabin isn't far. Afterward, we'll go there. Don't be frightened. If anyone's going to be hurt, it's me.' Now it held the pistol loosely in its hand, the tonicked hair shedding drizzle. Then, putting away the weapon, it produced a fine quality tortoiseshell comb and began combing my hair."
"Imagine that," Topinard said. "Groomed by the President."
"Isn't Ratt dead?" asked Dr. Dunn.
"Not in the dream."
"Of course, I forget."
"C'est vrai," said Moldenke's mother. "Death has no dominion in dreams. . . . Go on, dearie."
"He talked as he combed me, a stream of words. `As I comb life into these black swirls, I recall that each hair is numbered, discrete, a separate entity, unaware of other hairs, yet fully a hair. Each hair must be lavished with care and love, like children. You must tease them, too.' Ratt said it could distinguish, by its sense of touch, fifteen different diameters of hair between thirty-thousandths of an inch and six-thousandths. It figured mine in the neighborhood of twelve, rather thicker than average."
"It's a historical fact," Mrs. Hilter said. "Ratt was a practicing coiffurist before he was President. This all rings very, very true. What then . . . ?"
"I was escorted to Ratt's cabin, which was well furnished and tidily kept, in a state of trance. `Now,' it said, `I've laid in a supply of depilatory and I have tweezers, a sharp razor, brushless cream and bee's wax. I intend to free you entirely of body hair--' "
"All hair? Even--"
"Yes, all hair. Every hair. At the follicular level. `In one way or another, I intend to leave you utterly, nakedly and completely hairless,' it said. `For certain regions, where the hair is stubborn and deeply rooted, I will need a magnifying glass and tweezers. In others, hot wax and depilatory cream should do the job.' "
"It's a typical flum obsession," Moldenke said, lighting his hair pipe. "Depilation . . . deformist surgery . . . Oswaldism . . . it never ends. The nonsense."
"Dear son. Let her finish."
"Yes, Mother. Go ahead, Ola. But hurry. The rest of us want a turn, too."
"I was nude beneath a covering sheet, sitting on a stool, as Ratt snipped my hair, ever shorter, and tweezed my eyebrows away to nothing, all the while talking, without pause, without inflection, quite mechanically. `It is false economy to economize on combs. Too many Americans think anything will do that they can run through their hair, and too often they groom with just a rake of the fingers. You see, rough or jagged teeth in a comb can break the scalp, start little bleedings, and dirty fingernails can invite infection.' "
"He was the one who groomed Oswald Man, wasn't he?" asked Laffoon.
"Yes, indeed," said Moldenke's mother. "And a delicate operation it was, too. They say that hair growing in after death is terribly thin, dry and difficult to manage."
"And then," said Moldenke.
"And then, when I was completely depilated, and after oiling my head and tweezing out a few errant chin hairs, it loosened the sheet and--"
"Don't say it," said Moldenke. "It sexed with you. Ratt sexed with you."
"Yes." She crossed her arms across her breasts and hugged herself.
"Disgusting," Moldenke grumbled.
"Quite a dream," said Topinard. "Did anyone else encounter Michael Ratt? Moldenke? You?"
"I did. I did. I was running a mud duck farm. Raising mud ducks for market. But I was doing it in an unusual, flumlike way. I had nineteen ducks to start with. Then I fed one of the nineteen to the remaining eighteen, and so on, until I had just one left, a fat duck that had eaten nineteen of its fellow creatures. That one I cooked and served to Michael Ratt. When the meal was finished, however--"
A big flum appeared in the library's doorway, returning a copy of The Book of the Particle. "So sorry to be such a disturbance," it said.
"Good Christ!" Moldenke cursed. "What a time to barge in on us, in the middle of--"
"Please. May I say something?" The flum's flocculus was filling with blood.
"Go ahead," Ola said. "Say it."
"No," said Moldenke. "Get out of here. You're going to make us sick with your stupid, pointless, poisonous, unreasonable word spew."
The flum's green gland began stirring inside the flocculus. "Please, sir. May I remind you what it says in The Book of the Particle. . . . All human reasoning is vitiated by a fundamental fallacy, carelessly adopted and uncritically retained."
"Oh, and what fallacy is that?" Laffoon asked, probing his ear for signs of emerging worms.
"This will be good," snickered Moldenke. "This will be grand."
"I'm speaking here of the fallacy of knowing."
"The fallacy of knowing?" Laffoon had never heard of such a thing. Nor had Ola, or Moldenke, or anyone else.
A whitish substance began leaking from the tip of the flum's flocculus, quickly drawing a pair of noisy sawflies. Soon, the already close air in the library grew closer with the scent of lilacs.
"Permit me to explain. . . . And, please, listen now, not to what I'm saying, but to what I'm not saying. Not to the words themselves, but to the silences scattered among them. Look there for the answers. And listen not with your brains or your thinking caps, but with the synedrium."
"Synedrium? That's a flum word if I ever heard one."
"Let me define it for you, sir. A synedrium is the mind of a species. The collective mind, if you will."
"Ah . . . the synedrium . . . go on." Ola moved her chair a foot or two closer to the flum. "I'm beginning to understand."
"Be careful, my dear," Laffoon warned. "Not so close. Not so close."
Abrading one another like sandpaper and wood, the flum's mouthparts reoriented themselves into a circular configuration for higher-pitched verbalizing. The flocculus was engorged to the bursting point, the green gland moving rapidly through it.
Moldenke closed his eyes and turned his head away when the flum began.
"Why did Cook choose a midwinter date for his assault on the Pole? Others, quite sensibly, had opted for warmer seasons. And what of his promise to find the rumored Bavarian burial ground for Cretaceous birds?"
"Don't let it go on with this," Moldenke said. "We'll all be sorry. It's a trap. It's a net."
No voices were raised in agreement, so the flum continued. "Two young Americans, walking through the darkened half of Bum Bay City, discovered a scrotal sack stuck on an iron picket fence. It was freshly cut. That same day the body of Alexander Marto, a Scandinavian, was found hanging from a tree not far away. He had become despondent over failure to interest capital in his airship plans."
"Please. Stop. I can feel the bile rising already."
"No. No more!"
"Flum attacks on the French Camps will commence after the forthcoming congress of Oswaldians."
Moldenke moved slothlike toward the door, his movements so slow-paced as to be unnoticed. It was like walking through a tank of honey. The flum's talk perceptibly thickened the air.
"Many Americans have returned from death with diminished mental capacity and no name. Bobby Fisher, for example, who wears a coat and helmet outfit of lightweight bulletproof chain mail, carries around a ragged mud duck facsimile made of stuffed sox and pipe cleaners and uses commodes built close to the floor so that his feet can touch the ground. These recently returned American necronauts are telling tales of the great beyond that frighten and alarm. They say it's a simple parcourse where you jog, walk and do easy acrobatics forever. Fisher claims he was forced to eat sour cabbage off the ground, to pick up marbles with his anus. Now he suffers agonies of the lumbar and bunioned feet."
Moldenke had reached the door, but found the knob coated with oil. No matter how he tried, turning it was impossible.
The others in the room were entranced by the flum's unending blather, sitting back with contented smiles on their faces.
"Stop!" Moldenke, on his knees, was heaving clear bile. "Stop!"
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