City of Saints and Madmen

13. Brod is clearly a congenial idiot hailing from a long line of idiots of the first order who would be better off counting the fins of the dull fish with which his name rhymes. Brod’s dive took place within the confines of a metal suit connected to an airhose. Assuming Brod was even receiving enough oxygen through his fragile lifeline to avoid brain damage, he had less than a slit of visibility through the poor quality glass of his face plate. Such visibility is, as I have previously pointed out while disposing of the mal-efficient Floxence, rendered moot by the silt content of the Moth anyway. I therefore have great difficulty believing his description of an “intricate device of communication that held me in thrall, the lithe sweep of tentacles forming signs and arcane letters that I could not decipher but nonetheless held me in awe of their magical meaning.” To which I reply: it’s the silt, man! The silt! Remember the silt before you fabricate outrageous lies. (This is good advice for any aspirating squidologist, I believe.)

14. A replica of the blind has apparently been put on display in theMorhaimMuseum for Scientific Advancement in the Biological Sciences just this past Thursday, according to a letter I have received.

15. It would be of benefit to the general populace if this inversion of the usual professional relationship were applied to other fields.

16. By an odd coincidence, the color scheme matches that of the Ambergrisian flag.

17. That the notebooks of these two pioneers in squidology remain unpublished and must be crudely mimeographed by attendants and passed around to their colleagues at squid conferences is a travesty of science, the blame for which falls squarely upon the anti-invertebrate shoulders of the so-called “academic” journals.

18. My father suffered from a similar affliction in his relationship with my mother. Although he did not allow it to ruin his studies, it did “mute” them to a degree. I would like to say that my mother misunderstood my father’s work, but I am afraid she understood it all too well. I loved her very much, despite the circumstances, but I do wonder what might have been for my father if she had left him to his own devices for more than ten minutes at a time.

19. Of Science, one assumes. Not, as one twisted ambivert with mesomorphic tendencies shared with me recently, some anti-squid terrorist organization. Most of the theories one hears are not worth repeating.

20. I sneer at those who claim Furness and Leepin were drunk long before they recorded the fateful events that ruined their reputation. As for a plot to collect insurance on the houseboat — such a rumor will not even receive a reply from me.

21. Certainly not to rescue me, apparently, despite my efforts these many years on their behalf.

22. Eyewitnesses believed Bauble used ventriloquism to create the voices of the characters. However, what if, instead, Hellatose was throwing his voice?

23. Except for the odd children’s comic strip “The Adventures of Hellatose & Bauble” that ran for several years in local broadsheets. A sample of the text:

Bauble & Hellatose are sitting in their circus tent, Bauble on a chair, Hellatose in his wading pool. Bauble is reading a broadsheet on the current state of Ambergrisian politics. Hellatose is imbibing, through a very long straw, a slightly alcoholic beverage with a tiny umbrella in it. It’s been a long day performing complex psycho- dramas for uncaring snot-nosed children…

Hellatose: Bauble?

Bauble: Yes, Hellatose?

Hellatose: Bauble, why aren’t I better known?

Bauble: Better known as what, Hellatose?

Hellatose: As a playwright, Bauble. A playwright. I should be as well known as Voss Bender.

Bauble (absorbed in his broadsheet): Really?

Hellatose: Yes. I should be. I definitely shouldn’t be here.

(Waves tentacles around to indicate the confines of the tent.)

Bauble: You’re a squid, Hellatose.

Hellatose: All the more reason. I should be splashing around in my very own place of honor in a private pud-

dlebox at the theater.

Bauble: There’s no such thing as a puddlebox, Hellatose.

Hellatose (sighing): There should be, Bauble. There should be.

1. My family used squid ink to write with for a time, while we had the squid mills. The squiders would bring it up in a glass container whenever we needed a refill. If I had known what indignities squid endure during ink collection, I would have used more conventional substances. My father, however, continued to use the ink and so it was never entirely exorcised from our house.

III EXPOUNDING WITH BREVITY ON THE PECULIARITIES OF SQUID LORE

A WARY INTRODUCTION TO THE FESTIVAL THOSE WITH MAGGOTS FOR BRAINS, WHO NUMBER MANY AND cure so few, often refer to the “misunderstood” Festival, as if it were some sort of sorely maligned creature, unfairly subjected to electric shock therapy and short rations due to a vice that, if viewed in a more sympathetic light, might be revealed as virtue. The boobish Bellamy Palethorpe, in his weekly tirade for the Ambergris Daily Broadsheet, “Bellamy Retorts,” would take precious column inches away from spraying the arterial blood of his enemies across the printed page to reminisce about youthful festival indulgences, referring to them as “innocent,” “fun-loving,” and “harmless antics.” Even the great lackbrain Voss Bender would at times shrug his shoulders and look to the heavens, as if the Festival existed independent of its participants. It is this kind of cloddish thinking that my mother, for all of her faults, railed against on a weekly basis. For if this theory of non-responsibility were universally applied, many an insensate, myopic fool, tripping through life in undeserved freedom, could hope for “redemption through reinterpretation”—a ham-fisted piece of Truffidian theology and a favorite dream of prison/asylum inmates.

The “truth”—and every squidologist is always painfully aware that today’s truth may be tomorrow’s chum — is that the Festival, as Martin Lake once put it, “exists whole and darkly glittering in the mind of each citizen of Ambergris.” I would travel farther than Lake and state that each separate version/vision creates a splinter Festival — and another, and another, until, turning upon that distant stage, no stars above for comfort, one finds oneself trapped in a hall of fractured mirrors comprised of so many reflected Festivals that it becomes impossible to choose the real Festival, even should freedom depend upon it. The various accumulations of rituals and odd customs, gathered together and twisted into a beggar’s pack before being offered up by smug experts as the “festival experience,” have no intrinsic worth.

The true “festival experience” cannot be fully explained even by the most learned squidologist. At the height of the Festival, one almost feels at home as, surrounded by squid floats and revelers in squid masks and squid balloons and the musky odor of fresh fish and seaweed, one can almost pretend that the trail of the light-festooned street is the Moth itself, and the revelers freshwater squid, gathered for social intercourse. The giddy energy, the sense of swimming upstream caused by the heavy thickness of the people you must brush up against to walk along the sidewalk, the sloshing of drinks in their glasses and cups, the wild surge of conversations, like the trickling of water over rocks downstream… There is such longing in these memories.

I experienced my first Festival more than 15 years ago. Freed finally from the ancestral home, from the magnifying-glass attentions of my mother and the febrile energy of my father, I was taking classes with the esteemed squidologist Chamblee Gort and breathing in such liberty as I have not known since. The Festival came as a revelation to me. It wakened in me all of those long-repressed feelings that I had accumulated in my youth among the books, reading tome after tome in that library as large as many people’s houses. Like many others, I ran naked through the revelers, clad only in my squid mask and lost myself in the crowds. It was only later, when I