A Description of a Really Nice Sausage

The final assault was to be countered by a massive wall of suicide bombers. The cause was lost, it was clear, but the glory was not, and an awful lot of dead enemies could be a heavenly consolation until the next uprising—in a generation, perhaps—could begin anew.

To be sure of every bomb going off, the jackets were rigged with a dead-man switch. Once armed, the martyrs would keep the trigger depressed with their thumbs until the moment of bliss, then simply let go. The leader used the phrase “let go” in a particulary poetic way. If any was shot before reaching his bliss, he would still blow up, hopefully killing soldiers and damaging equipment.

What ended up happening was tragic. The whole party of them went rushing in a single wave towards the entrenched troop of the enemy. The great wave shocked and took aback some few soldiers in the ranks, who shrank from their weapons and required active command of their legs to keep from fleeing. But several of the snipers, exhausted and determined, put their eyes to scopes and began picking off forward bombers.

And lo, but when the those were picked off from 500 meters away, they immediately exploded and took out twenty surrounding bombers, and displaced another thirty, whose fingers slipping off the triggers, themselves blew up. With three shots, the entire charge erupted in a chain reaction of gore. Twenty seconds was all it took for the rump of the resistance, going these fifteen years, to annihilate themselves.

Rushing onto the pock-marked ground in victory, shrapnel underfoot and smokeless powder residue burning their nostrils, they saw a clear way in to the White City, which they walked singing and with rifles slung.

The public streaming onto the plaza was engulfed by words. At the head of cobbled square, looking haughtily down upon the crowd and surmounted by a brilliant-white cornice of the Imperial style, was the prosept of the National Academy of Letters with its sacerdotal balcony and the little discontinuous wall of planters with arborvitae trimmed into the shape of the Noetic abjad.

The occasion was the pronouncement of the official word for the new devices that were being invented daily that did all sorts of useful calculations and symbolic manipulations. Many were using the prescribed word for unnamed things, sulren, and some variation of the words for information, numbers, text and mixer, or tabular; with many derangements thereof. Others with reddened knuckles resorted to fanciful constructions.

There were arguments. There were many different kinds of devices used for many different purposes, and it wasn’t clear the Academy would treat them all as a category. One knot of commentators by the fountain side of the square, working their intensities up from the whispery, whiskered pronouncements of idle moustache-twisting, came to blows and split each others’ faces along the coarse, leathery grooves of their faces. The one maintained handheld devices were one kind of sulren, larger desktop devices another.

Many in the crowd possessing newer or older variants of the anffer sulartka wielded them, brandished them, ostentatiously did quotidian tasks with them. In the irate disagreements of lots could be heard tense harmonics of envy. A learned bevy with a large encumbrance of such gadgets held forth by the sculpture of Renk the Speech-giver, a little forwards the potters, that a break with existing categories for the sake of distinguishing modernity was asinine, and gave insightful examples of names for each of their countless menagerie couched in terms of pens, paper, abacus beads, tables, pulleys, counters, clocks, and worm-gears. They attracted some acolytes and a space of ignorance about them, which they prized as the moat protecting their intellectual keep.

When upon the balcony appeared the chief Linguist, in attire of the old colonial wallahs, accompanied by the Academy’s presiding officer in a more modern collarless tunic jacket and short neck-beard, the crowd came to attention and instantly contracted. The currents of language and breeze which had wafted amongst them were arrested by their sudden stultifying nearness. The balcony shown with the reflected light of thousands of cast-up faces like a new and voluminous mirror put up into the afternoon light.

The chief Linguist came forward to the balcony whose balustrade he gripped with large, clumsy hands as if to push tumbling off onto the masses. Nothing he could say would be popular instantly, though everyone would repeat it from now on, in speech and print, with the tender, raw sockets of anffer and klinak sulartka healed over and meant nothing more than language scars and snobbish affectation.

“The literary code of the Western Empire, which dates from Received Laws of the Second Oligarchy, specifies a number of crimes. Besides simple blasphemy, sedition, lèse majesté, defamation, and incitement, the law stipulated any who fashioned an antihero into their stories in a flattering light was a felon; in addition, plagiarism was harshly punished.

“One curious addition during the reign of the Falling Leaf Emperor was a law promulgated against the writing of unrealistic literature. The Emperor deigned himself to write, in an adjunct to the decree, a statement saying, ‘We find the constant stream of fanciful stories and romantic novels to be a great detriment to the Eight Lands’ productivity and mental sanity. Therefore we condescend to tolerate henceforth only such works in letters as deal with everyday situations in a realistic manner.’ Which was wielded as a clumsy hammer against thousands of scriveners and eventually, by the law of Confraternity of Lawbreakers, broke apart the three hundred year-old Collegium of Writers.

“The law was rescinded by the Afternoon Nap Emperor almost immediately upon ascension; persecuted writers who remained alive and with their wits—a good deal lost all connection with the world, fictional or real, through the application of the Falling Leaf Emperor’s frightfully talented torture squads—were rehabilitated, and the Collegium not only reinvested with its former powers but confirmed in letters patent to be the only lawful membership for writers, which was later used to the effect of much sorrow and hypocrisy.”

Here Sluigy, having doffed his deerstalker and jammed his one-hitter’s bowl with a sweet and greenish-smelling ganja, sat back and played with his lighter, which in the quiet of his sudden silence emitted a monitory hiss.

Darby hung on the arm of the chaliced Will de Mere. She was thinking at the time, what was the significance of this short man with dark skin, why did all hearken unto him. His talk was interesting in a Sunday afternoon sort of way but the style was not all that impressive, the force of the words carried no one, she was unmoved from the nobleman’s arm except by her own initiative, which catapulted her from the count’s to a marquis’s, on which her bosom half-rested in warm indignity.

Later, having taken out Sluigy’s Counter and Bracket from the library and read it slowly over a week and half a case of sparkling wine, she was more understanding. Two weeks later, having dolored through Sluigy’s Crown Tier, she understood yet more deeply—Sluigy was a wildly inconsistent author. His performance before them was calculated and erroneous, as falsely premised as the aforementioned latter novel. If they had had the privilege of some other visit, they might have found the sublime holding–forth of the Sluigy of Scarful Reveries, which read as if it had been dictated by a dazzlingly bright divus straight onto the page in the austere typeface of late Western Empire graphic design.

Cimetierre was confined to a sick-bed for several weeks, officially over some tremendously awful but civically appropriate intestinal disorder, but really he was resting his aching and broken cock after a misadventure with the Margravine Prätzkin.

The gallant lover, certainly, entertains risks along with his amours; and had he but contracted some chancre or effusion, he would made tea for the archiater and marked his calendar. But that spectacular injury, dreaded in direct proportion (and thankfully) to its rarity, of rupturing his faithful hydraulics at the instant it bore its maximum in inches of head, to have imagined he might suffer it, let alone take precautions over it, would only have shorted his machinery. And so do all gallant lovers, mindful of poxy sluts regardless, thrust forward in wilfull ignorance of the faux pas de coit, as miners ever dash into caves without thought to their collapse.

Although a million new and critical policy questions almost immediately had to be undertaken by the nascent Noete government, each demanding priority over every other, only a week passed before the coalition, precariously mixed, separated itself. The major party had instigated a policy of speling riform, you see, against which some conservative partners rebelled first in growls and then in roars, in proportion to the hisses and shrieks concentred on them by the Cabinet. The reactionaries, whose children were growing up speaking Old Noeto-Cambric and writing the sacred characters with aardvark brushes and lampblack, went with the Cabinet only until it was clear, for the sake of general education, that the Imperial script would not be made a damnatio memoriae.

Robespierre called himself “the Incorruptible.”

There is something to the thought of men like Saint Just and Stalin sitting at desks scribbling furiously throughout the day, their proscriptions read aloud and the blood dripping from their purged enemies’ bodies before the ink was yet dry.

The great Terrors of leftists have a peculiar smell about them separate from the reactions of monarchies. The supposed bals des victimes are delicious.

The following is a frag­ment of a letter by Golias Bauknecht to an unknown Lucretia.

‘I happen to think, based on our recent conversations, that you’d heartily disagree with this characterization, but I think you’ve got things figured out that I’ve only begun to be aware of. Amazing, I think, how deeply one can pride himself on his reflexivity and be simultaneously so opaque to himself.

‘What keeps me writing you, when you flake out and write me little in return? Well, I’ll fess to feeling trapped in a labyrinth, with only a thread leading back out. How many hundreds of ambages and treacherous jagged-edged anfractuosities have I wound this damned twine around, and how loose it feels in my hand, as if the end could lie anywhere anymore, in any dead end or dangling down any blackened punjee pit. And yet I have this abiding faith in someone trusted and loving keeping the end for me just outside the labyrinth’s entrance. And I have to have this faith because otherwise I’m alone among reeking bones and the blankness of same-walls, same-steps, and it’s no minotaur I fear but the possibility, if I make it to the center, I’ll be crowned with horns and become the mintoaur—that the labyrinth was not made to contain a monster, but to make them, as fools carelessly amble in, and learn to loathe the outside, to stalk the maze and sniff horribly in the damp, to find freedom in turns constrained by walls.

‘When I began my career, I found that multiple times per day I walked by the small chapel in the southern wing, which was little more than an enlarged closet with a stained-glass window backlit, a short altar with scripture, and two rows of close and simple pews. No one ever sat in there. So I did. I sat when times were rough. I sat when I wasn’t actually depressed but rather concerned for my colleagues or something in society at large, something big and horrible in the world. I tried to pray—I don’t know Whom to. It was a call out in the dark for something I was missing. And having called out for it in earnest and with humility in the dim little recess of this niche chapel had its own small reward of comfort. I never heard a response, but that seemed not to be the point. It was the fear and trembling. It was the abstract faith in the prayer itself as a means—not to the thing I said I needed—but the fulfillment of some emptiness of my soul.

‘I need to know we could have been a couple. Not necessarily forever, not necessarily married and feeding each other gummables in senility. But that you and I could have been together, and expressed mutual love, and had adventures and good times, and horrible arguments, and heartfelt apologies. And that when it ended, we were both convinced it was the best for us, and parted amicably. I need to know because of all things I’ve missed out on I feel I missed out on something truly special and unique, and perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, and if it were that, at least I could say, well it could’ve happened, but for this and that, and if not, then I don’t know what it is, what have I yearned for so desperately that I muted and abused the feeling of restlessness with every truncheon I could lay hands on: apathy, procrastination, careless momentum, marriage, booze, prescription drugs, theater, books, games, exercise, pogonotrophy.

‘Whom can I address this to? Clearly not to you, Lucretia, who must have a tenuous self-assurance of my emotional stability and an even more tenuous commitment to indulging my foolishness, you who are happy, a country apart, years separated, newly married, you who it never seemed to me needed anybody, though I felt I needed you the most.

‘This is stupid—I just want to get it all out, but then our correspondence must end because it would be awkward and I would have betrayed the terms of an amicable friendship. And if I couldn’t get it out, I’d almost rather just stop corresponding—which would last only for so long, before my shameful yen for you got the better of me, and another pathetic unsolicited chain of letters unfurled greasy in your lap.

‘I’m not getting any younger. For the first time that’s bothersome. I’ve squandered my twenties in marriage and training, neither of which delivered what I thought it would. I want out of this maze and I want you to be holding the thread in the sunshine, I want to see your smile in person again and hold your hand in clean air. I always loved your hands, little stubby but delicate hands that belied their own dexterity. I loved your smile. I loved your eyes, the deep brown like pure oil pigment, the way your eyelids made them almond-shaped and deep. I loved your hips, I loved your hair. I loved you disarming me with everything you said. That more than anything—no one else could, at least not in a way that left me utterly charmed.

‘If it’s a spell I’m under, wish it away or wish its consummation. If not—well, we must reconcile ourselves to reality and its disappointments, and not dwell on imaginary forces, eh? My track record with reckless romantic gestures is not good. I’m afraid to mount so large a one when I’m so sure it would fail miserably.

‘What does scratched out give you? What was it, that others you doubted you could marry, hitched you two together so quickly? Why wasn’t it me?

‘You and Salva and I were supposed to go to university together. Everything fell apart. She was a fling and all the while I loved you. Nothing afterward was quite right.

‘I don’t know how to finish this.’

The letter was found among a large box of fragmentary typescripts, most of them drafts of identified works, some of them clearly snippets of new works that are yet undiscovered. The letter itself is written in Bauknecht’s affected and cramped hand, with one substantial scratch-out that has affected legibility. The rest, to a dedicated scholar, is readily legible, despite a clear urgency and fervor to the writing, not often seen in his measured takes of fiction and verse, where it seems almost as much a pleasure to write as it is to compose.

It was noteworthy that even in his futuristic projects, Bauknecht continued to use a setting that was vaguely mid-C. XX, without a lot of electronic gadgets but still armed with a sophisticated scenery of mechanical objects.

And the women. More has been written about the women of Bauknecht’s fiction than any other aspect of it. The so-called ℓ-type, from the propensity to use names beginning with “L,” (eg, Lysistrata, Lavinia, Lorelei, in respective works), is an engaging, intelligent, usually frightfully pretty though enigmatic and contingently-interested character. The consensus is that Bauknecht must almost certainly have had a single person in mind, on whom these characters are based, one whom he knew well but with whom he had an ambivalent, if bizarrely intimate, relationship.

As to who the prototype for these characters was, and how things ended between her and Golias Bau­knecht—his too-early mutism abolishes a literary guess.

The war wasn’t going well. Daddy forbade the radio to be turned on anymore but I gave the delivery boy two marks to smuggle me some newspapers in with our groceries. There was the government paper which talked spectacularly of victories to come, and the looming disaster on the enemy’s front; and there were the thin-mem­braned free presses which told a darker story. They said our army was daily being pushed back for miles, that the rear guard stuck behind an enormous column of retreating vehicles was being destroyed stock-still on muddy roads. They blamed the government, which gave me a hearty little thrill each time I read it. The seditious libels felt like the imaginings of my future lover setting cool fingers alight on my body. I burned each one in a small glow of my own, kindling the stove.

The servants were all conscripted or run away. My father, laid off from the bombed-out university, could not afford them anyway. I cooked as best I could and kept things tidy while he worked in his study. He wrote translations for the war department and other things on his own. I had to serve him his supper sometimes in the study. He’d pick up a sheaf of papers and walk to the corner of the room. Under the rug was a small keyhole flush in the wooden floor, unlocking which a jagged section of floorboards swung up like a door. Underneath, Daddy’s safe, where he put the sheaf of paper. He closed the safe door gently, like he expected others to hear, and then swung the floor back down, and replaced the rug, and came to his supper and the translation wrung in his typewriter, glasses askew from leaning over. “Thank you my little calla,” he always said. “It smells wonderful. And how did you ever learn to cook like this!”

“You’re too polite, Daddy. All I ever make is simple dishes and peasant stews. Such things as I could remember Grava making for her boys when I was little and ran about the kitchen. What she made for us, I couldn’t do it even if I could get the ingredients. You know I’m a clumsy girl; I have a subtle taste but no grace in the kitchen, nor in anything else.”

“There’s the grace of your mother and more in you,” Daddy would say. “And grace of manner and love, besides. And let us fix your tramping on each suitor’s feet during a simple waltz, we may find you a good husband yet.”

“Oh Daddy, what use do I have for a husband? I have you and this house and a million books.” Which was true but insincere, incomplete. I didn’t want a husband, not in this or any century. But those things were not enough.

“The simplest response is that you will not always have me.” Then his voice darkened, grew quiet: “You will need someone to protect you, always, my little calla.” And though he ate attentively, even greedily, the slops of tubers and small scraps of meat I had brought him, I saw him regard the tyepwriter as a terror, and even lean slightly away from it, so that I was aware even without coming around to read from it some new diabolical thing had happened to our army, and the typewriter’s cold-looking, raspy grey metal case had the look of a rushing storm.

Amanda sancta, mistress o’er my heart
Who by my side in earnest poverty
Stood all this while, our loves as priceless art
Decors our home, and sichlike property

What virtues might I sing that aging comely kept;
Thy humor, and thy soul, and more renew
As if each year were but a night well-slept
And waking they and thou refreshed anew.

The like thy beauty’s face, which sculptors vain
Might try to carve, but mirror best by act
As when a statue out its matrix plain
Ecloses new the beauty it former lack’t.

A time and date to thee no fell mischance;
Thy timeless beauty with my heart does dance.