The centipede that lived in a man’s mouth and curled around his tongue as he spoke
The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 35
It would be correct to call the man a story teller, as every night he was in the local tavern explaining this or that or regaling his audience with some tale of triumph or misfortune. We noticed, however, a number of children in the audience, as well as some people from out of town, who did not speak the language. We drew closer in an attempt to see why they watched him so closely.
In his mouth was a long black centipede which glistened with his spittle. It curled around his town as he spoke, and during dramatic pauses, stood up and bared its fangs at the listeners.
“The nebula is where stars are born.” Knowing this made the man feel peaceful, so he wrote it everywhere. We understood this impulse, as we had a similar practice ourselves. “The nebula is where stars are born.” That was why he was in jail. He had written it all over town. Upon walls. On cars, statues. He wrote it on the trunks of trees. Now he was in jail for it. We were let in to see him. The walls of his cell were covered in his chicken scratch. He was smiling.
It was the middle of the city and the burning of the rice fields had started just outside of town. Also, the cars had been moving, back and forth, since we could remember. Now the city was black and white.
You could hear the clamour of traffic through the dreariness of the monotone city. The building were black. The spaces between them were white.
It sounded like the braying of animals being driven through the city. And in some senses it was. We had made them out of metal, but they were still beasts of burden. The street was black. The cars were white.
Despite the noises that crept through the gloom, other things were silenced by our altered perception. Footsteps were silent. The flights of birds were silent.
The footsteps were black and the birds were black Where the footsteps fell it was white. The birds flew through white.
We looked across the river and began to cross a bridge. The left side of the river was black. The right was white. We tried to discern where the sun should be. The sun was black. The sky was white.
The city was black. We were white. The city was white. We were black. There was no color. There was no sound. There was just white and black. There was smoke. And there was silence.
In the remote step of Kyrgyzstan, we came upon a yurt that was made in the style of the nomads of this area. It was built of a wooden frame and covered in skins and tarps and was designed to be easily dissembled and moved. Outside, a herd of goats congregated, bowing their heads against a strong wind that whipped up dust and sand.
We pushed aside the flap that covered the primary entrance to the dwelling, and it fluttered noisy in the gale. Once inside, however, things were still, and the yurts own greeted us with a warm cup of tea.
Through our host, he told us something incredible.
“I am glad you came,” he said. “I have been working some time on this. It has taken me a very long time to gather all of the parts that I need. I had to travel many days to get some of the necessary pieces. When I show it to you, you must be very courageous, because it can be difficult to witness what you are about to see.”
He went to the far side of the tent and moved a tarp to reveal a wooden box with two holes cut out. From the interior, a glow emerged, clearly bright, but small, as if from a point source.
“What is it?” we asked.
“It is a box,” he said. We laughed. He did not.
“What does it do?” we asked.
“It allows you to see yourself as if you were someone else,” he said solemnly, and he blew into one of the holes. A puff of dust came out the other. He sat back, looked at us, and raised his eyebrows.
“Do you want to try it?” he asked.
There was a long silence.
“I will warn you” he said. “It will reveal things that are not expected.”
“Like what?” we asked.
“Well,” he said. He sipped his tea.
“Well,” he said again. “For one thing, it will show you how strange you look and sound.”
He was a man of about 35, slight, wearing glasses, speaking in English heavily accented by his native German. He demeanor was downtrodden and timid. He had dark rings under his eyes revealing that he hardly slept, and he struggled to maintain eye contact during conversation.
“There it is again!” he whispered.
“There what is?” we asked.
“The Bengal tiger!” he said. “It has never stopped following me.”
We glanced around the room. There was nothing of the sort in this room, which was a parlor dedicated to polite gatherings and light dining. Guests milled about, chatting and laughing. There was a mild growl of conversation, and a light twinkling of glasses, but as for Bengal Tigers, precisely none.
“Where is it?” we asked him.
“It hides among crowds,” he told us. “Its camouflage is flawless. It is as cunning as it is cruel. Whenever I leave my house, it stalks me.”
Fascinating. “How long has it pursued you?” we asked him.
“It has been after me since I came of age,” he said. He began to act increasingly agitated, glancing around the room and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Though, when I was young I could not identify it. It was a beast of some sort, of that I was sure. It haunted me so menacingly that its form became ever more apparent with each sighting, until eventually I was able to identify it. It is the Bengal Tiger Panthera tigris tigris, native to India and Bangladesh.”
We asked him how he had discovered this classification, and he told us that he scoured through an illustrated book of natural history at a state library. Only then could he make a firm identification.
“There are strategies for dealing with Bengal Tigers,” he said, still visibly fearful. “The natives of the Hindu Kush fashion masks which they wear backwards on their heads. The beast will not pounce headlong onto its prey, so it waits in vain for a chance to attack from the back.”
He motioned for us to come nearer. He was whispering now. From inside his jacket he pulled a crude mask with an elastic band affixed to either side.
“I bring this with me when I go to places I know will have people. It looks nothing like me, but it keeps the tiger at bay.”
With that, he excused himself and ducked out of the room, moving quickly down the hall, looking as if he were legitimately being pursued.
“Is he mad?” we asked our host.
“No more so than you or I,” our host said. “Though perhaps his vision is slightly clearer.”
“Well at that time I was so young,” she told us. She looked off into the distance. “At that time I was so young.”
“In those days of course it was a big thing to have a supermarket in town. I mean the type of place that would have all the food. And we were just changing, back then, to go to the market once a week, or two times a week instead of every day. It was about that same time that my father got himself a brand new car which was a long Chevy with white wheel wells that he used to make us kids clean. And if we ever played around it or managed to make it dirty we knew we were really in for it.
It was just becoming easier to take the car out and fill it up with food for the week rather than going back day after day.
And so we piled into the car one week, it was me and my two sisters and my older brother and my mother and my father. In those day it was common for us to all go together to do things like this.
And of course it was so hot. It was August after all. And you know how the weather is out here when it’s hot. It was the sort of day when you could just feel a storm coming. But we knew that feeling. We were used to it, so we piled inot the car anyway.
And we got to the super market. And my father was going up and down the aisles with my mother and choosing the food for the week and we kids were bringing back candy or cookies or whatever we wanted to have and we would try to sneak it into the cart when our parents weren’t looking. And bit by bit outside it grew darker and darker.
And before long I looked out the window and I saw that the wind had really picked up and there were branches and leaves and things flying past the big windows out front and I pulled on my mothers skirt and I said ‘Momma don’t you think we should hide? Shouldn’t we hide?’ I was really scared, because I hadn’t seen clouds like that and wind like that before. But she told me don’t be silly.
Well we kept on like that but before long it was so dark outside and sure enough the manager of the store came on the intercom and said there’s a tornado in the area, and there has been a warning declared. And so the manager ordered all us shoppers into the back room of the store there where the offices were.
It not being a established store there wasn’t anything in there except for a small light and about 20 of us shoppers. We huddled in there and it was hot and it was dark except for this one swinging lightbulb. And my father kept grumbling under his breath like “That car better not have a scratch on it when I get outta here.”
I remember my brother had this big smile on his face like he was about to have his birthday or something. And it was odd to me because I knew he was sacred just like the rest of us but he just kept on similing. And he smiled on and on as the noise outside got louder and louder. Weirdest thing. And he smiled even when the room started to shake. And there was a noise like a car was ebing ripped right in half, and the roof came off where we were.
“The roof came off?” we asked her.
“Striaght off,” she said.
And up there in the sky was all this rain and cloud and lighting and thunder adn it was as if God himself was lookign down at us all angry. And just like that, the wind left that little room, and wouldn’t you know it, it riped the clothes clean off our bodies.”
“No.” we said.
“Yes.” she said. “And if you’ll listen to this—It ripped the clothes clean off. You hear of things ike this. Of a tornado leaving a chicken with no feathers. Well there we were a bunch of chickens with no feathers. It was maybe 20 seconds after that that the storm passed on. They end just as suddenly as they begin. We were all stunned, and we were trying to get ourselves all covered up, but we knew we had to get out of there as a first step, since the wind had blown everything all around. And so the manager of the store he unlocks the door to where we are and we exit out of that little room. and we walk out into where the store had been, and there was hardly anything left. everyhtign was gone. and we wandered out and I remember my father looked out to where his car had been, and it was gone. It was just plain gone.
And we were all looking around ourselves at all the nothing that had used to be something. And all of a sudden it started raining food.
“Raining food?”
“Raining food. It all started falling down what had been sucked up into the sky by the storm. I stil remember apples and bananas and loaves of bread all starting falling around us. And we all just looked at each other. And I looked over at my brother, and he was still smiling. And I just remember him looking around, and there was this deadening silence. Because for the first time we had been revealed, you know, for what we were. Chickens with no feathers, you know. And there were no rich people or poor people or adults or children and it was raining, I mean it was actually raining food. And you know what my brohter said?”
“What?”
“He said, “It’s the Garden of Eden.” He said it softly at first and then he shouted it. And the noise of him shouting that was enough to rouse my father out of his stupor, I suppose, because he walked over to where his car had been, with the white wall wheels, and he took a look across the parking lot and he saw it, and saw that it was completely smashed. And there was my brother running around naked looking at all this food, laughing and shouting like it was his birthday or something. Fresh food from all over the planet, you know. And it really was miraculous, I’ll never forget it, standing there and realizing how much food there was. There was no way we could ever have eaten it all. It was the lowest moment of our lives, in some ways, because town was completely wrecked, but there we were and we the whole ground was covered with good things to eat.
Well, my father took a look at his car and he heard my brother hollering about the garden of Eden. And he walked right over to my brother, and my father, who was still stark naked, hit my brother across the face. He smaked him full on in the face and he said “You’re acting like a lunatic. Stop that! Can’t you see that everything is ruined? You’re acting like a lunatic.”
And the smack, you know, that noise, that brought he rest of us out of it a little bit. And my mother began gathering rags to cover us. And my father went to call an insurance man about the car but of course the phone was out. And the manager of the store went around gathering up the food. Gathering up all that food that had rained from the sky. He thought it was his. He really did.”
“Sometimes there is a love that does not make you feel like you are young at all,” he said. “Sometimes there is a love that makes you feel like you are so old. It makes you feel like you have seen everything, known everything, done everything. There is a love like this.”
“Oh,” we said.
“It comes and goes, I suppose,” he said. “But if you have felt it even for an instant, then you will…you will….”
The photo album, the boat, the Polaroid camera, and their owner.
The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 28
“I’m nearly 80, if you can believe that,” she said, stepping out of the boat. Under her arm she was carrying a thick book, and around her neck was strung an old Polaroid camera.
She walked slowly, thinking about each step.
“I hardly walk,” she said.
We offered her an arm, to steady her.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m so glad you were here to meet me.”
“Someone always comes to meet me,” she said. “It’s the strangest thing.”
She wore a blue dress with a lace collar. On her feet she had old black heels
As we walked up the boardwalk the boat began to drift, as she had not tied it down. It followed behind her, like a loyal dog.
“I’ll just get some more film, then I am on my way,” she said.
We walked into a convenience store, and she went to the counter to enquire about film.
We stood back watching.
“How does she speak the language here?” we wondered. We certainly did not. She returned to us.
“Ok,” she said. “All set.”
She slowly began hobbling out of the store.
“Where will you be going?” we asked her. We had seen her drift into this harbor with no sail, now paddle, and no motor. Now it seemed she intended to climb back into her boat and drift off again.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Wherever this boat takes me. See?”
She passed us the book that she had been carrying. We opened it. Inside was page after page of Polaroid photos, in brilliant colors and stunning composition, which flowed from one into the next as night follows day.
“That’s 60 years,” she said.
The photos were from everywhere. We recognized the landmarks of the Mediterranean coast, the script of the peoples of the Red Sea, the lush tropical foilage of Asia.
She used our arm to climb into the boat, even as we rushed to take an account of all that had been in that book, all that had been seen in 60 years on a tiny boat.
“You just sit there?” we asked her.
“Why yes,” she said, as the boat began to inch away. “I don’t know any other way to get around.”
She waved a frail arm, and the boat slowly moved away from the shore. As she began drifting away, she took her camera and snapped a photo of us, then stuck it into her book.
