invigorated by the thought that I would soon get a chance to do some real work. When I was ready, I grabbed my bag of instruments and my topcoat and went next door to the study to inform Aria that we were to return to the church. On my way across the landing, I called down to Mrs. Man-takis to bring us up some tea. She offered to also prepare dinner, but I declined, since a full stomach was likely to put me in too generous a mood.
I found Aria at my study desk, writing in a notebook of her own. She sat rigidly upright, but her hand moved furiously across the paper. In the minute I stood silently and watched her, she had filled an entire page and gone on to the next.
'Tea is coming,' I said finally to alert her I was there.
'One minute,' she said and continued writing.
I was slightly put out by her failure to officially acknowledge my presence, but there was something about the controlled desperation with which she wrote that prevented me from interrupting her. She was still writing when Mrs. Mantakis brought the tea.
She entered with a look in her eye that suggested she did not approve of my young female guest. 'Did your honor enjoy the mayor's party?' she asked while setting the silver tray down on the table before me. She wore the most ridiculous bonnet and a white apron with ruffles and angel appliques.
'Quite a gala,' I said.
'Just after you left, they barbecued the fire bat and there was enough for everyone to have a little piece. You know, they say it makes you see better at night.'
'Before or after you vomit?' I asked.
'Oh, your honor, its taste is quite special, like a spicy rabbit, or have you ever had curried pigeon?'
'You're through,' I told her and pointed to the door.
She scurried out with her hands folded and her head bowed.
'A regrettable woman,' I said to Aria as I lifted my teacup.
'I'm coming,' she said.
Finally, she came and sat with me. The top button of her blouse had unfastened and her eyes were tired and beautiful. As she poured herself a cup of tea, I asked her if she would like to assist me in performing a reading that night.
I saw great promise in her when she did not ask who the subject was but simply replied, 'Yes, your honor.' She showed no sign of excitement or fear. She barely even blushed. When she sipped her tea she nodded vacantly at a spot an inch away from my eyes. It had taken me years to learn that technique.
'Now then, what did your grandfather reveal?' I asked, breaking her spell on me.
'He's a classic sub-four with traces of the avian,' she said.
'Did you notice anything unusual, as I did, about the eye-crease-to-jaw measurements?' I asked.
'That was the most interesting part,' she said. 'It's only a hairsbreadth off the Grandeur Quotient.'
'Yes, so close, yet so far.'
'Holistically, he's a three,' she said.
'Come, come, there is no place for nepotism in Physiognomy. I'll retire my calipers if he is any more than a two point seven. Anything else?' I asked.
'No,' she said, 'but as I rubbed my hands across his face, I had a memory of him telling me a piece of that story he had referred to as the 'Impossible Journey to the Earthly Paradise.' It is just a fragment, but I remembered it vividly. I wrote it down in my notebook.'
'Give me a few particulars,' I said.
She set down her tea and leaned back. 'The miners had come to an abandoned city in the wilderness and stayed there for three nights after having done battle with a pack of demons. Grandfather had killed two of the creatures, one with his long knife and the other with his pistol. He had pulled their horns out with a pair of pliers in order to keep them as souvenirs.
'The city was near an inland sea and composed of huge mounds of earth riddled with tunnels. On the first night they stayed there, they witnessed strange red lights in the sky. On the second night one of the men reported seeing the ghost of a woman, wearing a veil, walking through the crude streets. On the third night, Mayor Bataldo's uncle, Joseph, was killed in his sleep by something that left a hundred pairs of puncture wounds. Whatever it was that had killed him followed them out into the wilderness for many days till they crossed a river and lost it.'
The night was frigid and the snow blew relentlessly against us as we made our way toward the church of Anamasobia. A flock of urchins was working on a snowman out in front of the mayor's office. If I didn't know any better I would have thought it was meant as an effigy of myself. Had Aria not been beside me and had I not been on an errand of official business, I'd have put my boot through it. 'No matter,' I thought, being in a good mood, 'their congenital ignorance is sufficient punishment.'
A few moments later, Aria called over the wind, 'Did you see those boys were building a likeness of the Traveler? It has become a childhood tradition ever since he was discovered.'
'Children,' I said, 'a race of bizarre deviants.'
Then she said something and actually laughed aloud, but her words were swallowed by the wind.
I never thought I would be pleased to enter that Temple of the Off-Kilter, but not to have the snow driving into my face made the church almost acceptable. As Aria closed the big misshapen door behind us, I stood for a moment, listening to the immediate silence and behind it the wind howling as if at a great distance. Her hair was wet and the smell of it seemed to fill the dark foyer. My hand involuntarily came up to touch her face, but luckily she had already begun to move toward the bridge. We crossed over, myself a little unsteadily, reeling with her wet-forest scent. I'd have given a thousand belows to have been reading her that night instead of Garland's six-and-a-half-foot dried-dung manikin.
The father was there, waiting for us, and somehow he had moved the Traveler to the flattened boulder that was the altar.
'Your honor,' he said and bowed, his disposition apparently having lightened since that afternoon.
I waved halfheartedly to acknowledge him.
'Aria, my dear,' he said, and she went over to him and kissed him on the forehead. As she did, I noticed him rest his pointy little hand lightly on her hip.
'How did you get him in here?' I asked, wanting to shorten their coziness.
'The Traveler is light,' he said, 'almost as if he were made of paper or dried corn stalks. Of course, I had to drag his feet, but I barely lost my breath bringing him up the stairs.'
The thought of Garland losing his breath seemed a near impossibility.
I stepped up to the altar and rested my bag of instruments down next to the subject's head. Aria followed and helped me off with my topcoat. As she removed her own, I began laying the tools out in the order in which I would need them.
'Can I be of assistance?' Garland eagerly asked.
'Yes,' I said, not looking up from my work, 'you can leave us now.'
'I thought I might watch. I'm keenly interested,' he said.
'You may go,' I told him without raising my voice.
He sulked over to the corridor that led to his office, but before he finally left, he offered an aphoristic blessing: 'May God be everywhere you are about to look and absent where you already have.'
'Thank you, Father,' Aria said.
I turned to look at him and quietly laughed in his face before he disappeared down the corridor.
'Hand me that cranial radius,' I said to her, pointing to the first instrument, a chrome hoop with representative screws at the four points of the compass; and, with this, we began.
In order to perform the reading, I had to overcome my initial revulsion at touching the brown shiny beetle-back skin of the Traveler. One of the first things we learned at the academy was that dark pigmentation of the flesh is a sure sign of diminished intelligence and moral fiber. In addition, the consistency of it, like a thin yet slightly pliant eggshell, put a fear in me that my sharp instruments might leave a crack in the subject's head. I put on my leather gloves and then set to work with the radius.
The slender nature of the cranium made Mantakis's thin head seem almost robust, but at the same time there was something so concise and elegant about this expression of Nature that the computations, when I figured them in my workbook—a tiny leather-bound volume in which I recorded all my findings in secret code with a needle dipped in ink—at once pointed to both a severe paucity of rational thought and a certain sublime divinity. The numbers seemed to be playing tricks on me, but I let them stand since I had never read anything before quite like the Traveler.
'Pass me the nasal gauge,' I said to Aria, who stood close by me, rapt with interest. Now I could see that to have invited her along on this venture might have been a mistake. I did not want her to sense my uncertainty in the face of the Traveler. What could be worse than a pupil discovering a lack of confidence in her mentor?
'He is most peculiar looking up close,' she said. 'Nothing physically would suggest anything but the weakest link to humanity, yet there is something more there.'
'Please,' I said, 'we must let the numbers do the thinking.' I fear she took this as a reprimand and was from then on completely silent.
The bridge of the nose began almost at the hairline, and instead of flanging at the nostrils tapered to a sharp point with two small slits, like the puncture wounds of a penknife on either side. 'Madness,' I muttered, but, again, I put down precisely what I found. Instead of the math solidly confirming my suspicions that he represented a species of prehistoric protohuman, the measurement was in direct ratio to that of a Star Five, my own and Aria's illustrious physiognomical evaluation.
The hair itself was long, black, and braided, and appeared as healthy as Aria's beautiful tresses. There was a point where the braiding ended, but the hair had continued to grow a full six inches. From the look of it, I was forced to wonder if it was still not growing beyond death, slowly reaching outward through the centuries. I removed my glove and tentatively ran my fingers through it. Soft as silk, and I could almost feel life in it. I wiped my hand on my trousers and quickly put the glove back on.
I continued, calling for Aria to pass the various instruments— the Hadris lip vise, the ocular standard, the earlobe cartilage meter, etc. I took my time, working slowly and carefully, recording, as always, precisely what I found, yet all the time a feeling of frustration was mounting in my intestines. The representative mathematics of this strange head was acting more like magic, conjuring something utterly superior to even my own features. When all I had left to apply was the calipers, my specialty, I stepped back from the altar and motioned to Aria that we would take a break.
I turned away from the Traveler and lit a cigarette in order to calm my nerves. Sweat trickled down from my brow, and my shirt was damp. Aria said not a word but gave me an inquiring look, as if I should relate to her my findings so far.
