| Eleven, The Spelunker (cont. from page 2)
Fiction by Diane Greco OFF.”
By taking a shower, I was flooding her apartment three floors below!
I tightened my robe and returned to the bathroom. She followed close at my heels, to ensure my compliance, I suppose. I turned off the water as she requested, but I could not resist wondering aloud: How was it that no one from the intervening apartments, on floors two and three, was up here complaining about the same problem? She quickly explained that she’d always had trouble with leaks from my floor; the second and third floors, she said, worked like sponges, absorbing water for as long as they could until finally the sponges were overfull and the excess ran down her walls. Her firm grasp of the details of this extraordinary theory lent it a surprising credibility and I thought, either this woman is mad or I have made quite a poor real estate investment. I resolved then and there to re-grout the tub as soon as possible, as a stopgap, and to investigate the local physics later, when her bill from her painters arrived, just as she assured me, more than once, that it would.
Problem #2: the garden. Which was not a garden at all but a sort of catchment area into which the river would overflow after particularly heavy rain. I don’t mind wetlands—after all, having lived in Key West for many years, dampness is hardly new to me—but the mosquitoes were intolerable. So, one afternoon during that golden semester, your first with us, I asked our spelunker, who as you may recall had a reputation for being handy, to build me a birdhouse that I could fill with fruit and install on the deck where I hoped it would attract members of a nearby colony of fruit bats. I had been told that the bats were useful for keeping the local mosquito population in check, as mosquitoes preferred the taste of fruit bats to that of people like you and me (no doubt the bats are sweeter).
I’d seen these bats. One evening, I walked past a tree blanketed with quivering black leaves; as I drew near, their hundreds of lustrous wings rustled companionably and then, after I’d thrown a loose sidewalk brick in their direction, they beat the air into a black froth, overwhelming my exclamation, which escaped from my mouth just as the mass, as one, attained the air: “Die Fledermaus! Die Fledermaus!” An expression which seized me as so terrifically witty, I was compelled to bite my hand.
The spelunker arrived at my condominium in due course, with his toolbox in hand, wearing shorts and a tee shirt. Since I know you need certain details to make your story attractive to the prize committees, I will list them here and allow you to perform your artistry on them yourself (I can’t do everything for you, after all): He had a bad case of eczema, blue bug-eyes, and, unusual for a man so deeply engaged in the so-called life of the mind, lovingly tended, if somewhat furry, quadriceps. Of course, even these details are not enough to make a character Nobel-worthy—for he still requires a name! For my own reasons, which I need not share with you, I shall avoid giving him a lyrical name and simply call him Eleven, to memorialize the fact that he was my eleventh (as you might say) a-man-u-en-sis—and here I confess that I ran, flushed with irritation, to the dictionary when you first used the word in your midterm paper, for which, out of spite, I gave you a D, to remind you of the dictionary, and recommended that you seek the wisdom of George Orwell’s fine essay on power trips and the English << Return to TSAR Volume 8, Number 2 |
