acodexofourtime

[acodexofourtime]

The Chamber of Ultimate Solutions

Long before Doctor Orfeo came to Santa Ninfa, when Enrico Benedetto was a much younger, more hopeful man, the country was recovering from what seemed a long nightmare. It had been a short time since the war, and its effects still felt like ground glass to the heel. Many in the city knew someone who vanished without a trace, lost to the myriad fronts and in so many cruel ways: disintegration, exile to the moon, and the quick injustice of a shot to the heart, and that was that. The city’s municipal cemetery was so burdened with the onrush of scrip detailing the lost and their approximate place of disappearance that it stopped offering individual memorials and started constructing one for all lost soldiers.

In order to put those sorrowful times behind them, the people of the town found new ways to govern and to take care of themselves while the administrative region tried to rebuild in one moment, and invoked austere measures in the next. As services crumbled and the street lights went out one by one, Angelo “The Shark” showed his hand, in force. His crew of hench folk would scurry about, establishing order and basic services, turning the rubble pits into garden oases. In time, Angelo became Don Tartufo, known for his hard shell and simmering interior, his tooth sweet for money and crushing all dissent. While the water and electricity came back on, it kept running through sheer intimidation,terror, and a steady collection of bribes. People went about their days with a bit of money in their pocket for bribes and some more money tucked behind their ears for bread and tomatoes. To say that the city came to suffer under Don Tartufo’s yoke was no exaggeration.

On the day that Enrico returned to Santa Ninfa after a long absence in Canada, he went to the harbor overlook down the old tufa causeway. In a single motion he took off the iron ring he wore on his pinky, swearing to the mysterious islands beyond that he would shape his native land for the better. Drawing out a faceted bronze ring from the local Engineering Society, he slid it onto his index finger, and clenched his fist to his heart, swelling with the pride of new ideas.

A meaty hand slapped Enrico in the back of the head. “Nice ring, weenie.”

Enrico wheeled around, and faced down two dog-faced goons from Don Tartufo’s squad of enforcers.

“Care to contribute to the harbor fund?”, rumbled the first enforcer, a man as wide as he was tall, with a grayish cast to his skin from old stubble, and his bangs obscuring his eyes completely.

“Do I have a choice?”, asked Enrico.

“We always have a choice,” grinned the second enforcer.

With that, the first enforcer popped Enrico in the eye, and the second swept him up by the ankle to shake out his pockets and tug off his ring. After the pair collected their fee in pennies and baubles, they dumped Enrico under a clothesline in front of an old tenement. Enrico dragged himself back to his apartment, and, clad in a blank eye, sat in his wood-paneled study, stewing within himself. He grabbed his old fountain pen, the heat from his grasp softening the celluloid. His ears began to steam, and his body gave off heat as though it was a pot-bellied stove. Setting aside his half-melted pen, he picked up a pencil which quickly charred. In his anger and frustration, he drew up a plan for a sunken road the likes of which the Etruscans would be proud of, and which he himself would never build outside of his own dreams.

It was a mere week before he finished, and by that point, he had begun to cool down. At the last moment he picked up his phone, his thumb-print melted in the resin of the handle.  He dialed his friends, the Melon Brothers, who worked in the archives.

“It’s me. I need a favor from you both. I just designed the most vengeful road to nowhere you’ve ever seen. It starts at the old castle; I just need a good end. I need it to be the chamber of ultimate solutions for Don Tartufo and his cronies.”

Having answered Enrico on speaker, the Melon brothers looked at each other, pushing back their blond hair from their eyes in unison.

“Say no more,” Austin Melon said, leaning towards the little transistor, “can you get down here this afternoon? I think we can look into a few options.”

“We have a file on these kinds of places,” said Stephen, the second Melon brother, as he leaned forward absent-mindedly, and bumped heads with his brother, exclaiming “Oh, my head!” in a pained way, his eyes closing and his hand flying up to stifle the pain.

“Is everything all right over there? I thought I heard two bowling balls smashing together.”

“What do you think, brother?,” asked Stephen, still clutching his head.

“Fine,” said Austin, and shook his head at Stephen.

“If you say so. I’ll let you take care of whatever you have to take care of. I’ll be down after lunchtime - thanks!” said Enrico, as his melted phone dripped black onto the workbench below.

After Enrico hung up, he found that the morning hours had faded, and before he knew it he threw on his coat and sped on his way across town to the City Archives. In the Melon brothers’ dark office, they pored over an ancient map of a tomb built over a vein of lava. The three of them were united in their extreme dislike of Don Tartufo and his ham-fisted rule over the city. They knew they would have the blessing of its citizens if they were to design a trap for the crime boss. They put in a few phone calls and cobbled together the funds to start work in a few weeks.  

The groundbreaking ceremony was brief, held at twilight, and punctuated by the sound of countless bats that swarmed the silhouette of the moon. After the first week of digging was done, lead by a foreperson who supervised the work site with the help of her dog companion, who she could communicate with fluidly by singing old, crooning songs of nostalgia, an ancient thermae network was uncovered, replete with effigies of caryatids, murals of wide-eyed tentacled faces, and human forms with wings spiraling through a network of pink cloud. When they had the site ready to go, with the old mysterious chamber rigged up as the ultimate destination out of the city, it was advertised as a hilltop movie house in a forgotten ruin. An invitation to preview the movie house was penned by Enrico on papyrus, written with dark iron gall ink, and sent by courier to Don Tartufo’s manor.

One the appointed date, a white brocade carpet was rolled out, and Don Tartufo arrived with his entourage of scarred faces and switchblade knives, lead in by the Melon Brothers, who wore matching yellow and blue striped suits. At the end of the carpet stood Enrico himself, wearing a white suit, accented with a carnelian eyed skull bolo.

“Enrico,” grumbled Don Tartufo, “what a thing to do to a place that belongs to antiquity!”

“What can I say? I’ve always loved the past, Don Tartufo,” grinned Enrico, ushering the party beyond the threshold of leering visages and fanciful, whirling forms.

The double doors to the theater stood within a corona of red light at the end of the short antechamber. Their windows were black and riveted around the edges. The others in the party held back, as Enrico and Don Tartufo approached the doors first. Don Tartufo looked over at Enrico and suddenly grabbed him by the bicep.

“From this moment to the next, we’re going to trade places in this world. Don’t argue with me about it. I already know.”

“With all due respect, Don Tartufo, but there’s no replacing you.”

“I’m telling you, I saw it already in my black mirror. I want you to know it was my choice.” With that, Don Tartufo turned back to the party, and glowered, “This is is a private showing. Everyone go home.”

Don Tartufo turned again to the red shadowed doors and pushed them open. A hollow, echoing squeak of metal on metal resounded through the room. Don Tartufo hesitated a moment, then entered, and closed the doors behind him. A scraping metallic noise came from the other side of the closed doors, as though a heavy latch was being secured.

Don Tartufo looked up at the film that was being projected for him. It was something very old, and beyond anything he had ever had the time to see. As it unfolded before him, he started to approach the screen, advancing down the twinkling lights of the aisle path. His pupils dilated as the screen grew brighter and brighter, chromatic aberrations cantering around him. “It’s just like the faery rings he read about when he was a boy, he thought to himself,” and he held up his hand, which was growing transparent like water, fading in and out of subsistence.

No one knew exactly what happened to Don Tartufo that day. His spectator wingtip loafers were found standing in front of the screen, and nothing more. The Mathmos Theater had opened in the most mysterious capacity it could, and its proprietor, Enrico, was carried by a surging crowd of cityfolk from the besieged neighborhoods of Santa Ninfa up to Don Tartufo’s castle. Over time, even after Enrico came to be known as Don Benedetto, he never forgot about Don Tartufo’s prophecy, and he wondered if it was in fact a curse.

#The Continuing Adventures of Doctor Orfeo

[acodexofourtime]

The Misadventures of Buddy Crapo: By Land, By Sea, and By Air

Deep in the verdant jungle of his dreams, it was a long journey before Buddy Crapo, intrepid assistant to the Empathic Botanist, Doctor Mikare, arrived at the place he and his friend, Samson Seamus, journalist at large, had been seeking for so long. First having traveled by blimp along the Sirocco winds, they followed a route that they transcribed from an etched obsidian plate uncovered from the sea after three thousand years of burial. At the map’s end, a quick turn down a massive sinkhole, half-hidden by an ancient beech forest once sacred to the Carthaginians, led the hovering craft through seemingly endless ways of strange, star-crossed void. They found themselves on the side of a dormant volcano overlooking the coast of some far-flung place, choked with jungle as green as an emerald under the eye of a sun that was as fiery as a citrine, and just as radiantly hot. Knowing a good place to stop when they saw one, Buddy and Samson asked the blimp pilot to leave them off.

The pilot stared at the two of them a good long while, figuring they were nuts for chartering him, and crazier still for wanting to venture into this unfamiliar landscape. He chewed his pencil with the left side of his mouth and used his right hand to pull the lever to send down a long wrought-iron anchor on a polished cable, which whistled through the firmament before emitting a thud and a tiny swirl of sand on the distant sandbar below. After bidding the pilot adieu, Buddy and Samson shimmied down on pulleys with rucksacks full of camping gear.

Traveling by day, and setting up camp each night, Buddy and Seamus took note of everything they saw as they searched for the rare sybilline onion, the most empathic of the psychic alliums known, to date, in the world. After Seamus wrote his entry for the day in his tall reporter’s notepad labeled, “The Misadventures of Buddy Crapo: By Land, By Sea, and By Air”, Buddy would stay up late, half in his sleeping bag, and gaze up at the stars, biting his fist as tears rolled down his apple cheeks. In the morning, the two young men spent their time washing up, Buddy scrubbing down his crew cut, and Samson dusting off his curly long-on-top ‘do, before setting out.

It was about a fortnight of this routine before they found themselves at the threshold to a village ringed with solar panels and wind turbines.  They pled their case with the village mayor, a woman with arms as powerful as the oldest of the regional mangroves, who took pity on them and opened up an old palm leaf codex for them, offering her best guess as to where they should direct their search. She gave them her blessing to investigate and sent them towards a lagoon deep in the jungle.  They found themselves in the shadow of a ruined palace, square in shape, built of massive, porous volcanic stone blocks that were fixed without mortar.

“This looks like our place,” said Buddy, pulling aside a curtain of vines and exposing a mysterious wood-framed doorway, engraved with a repetitive undulating pattern of lines and dots.

“We’re lucky we had the blessing of the local Mayor,” replied Samson, “I remember her saying that without that, the kudzu would have gotten us in its clutches again.”

“That was that Brazilian kudzu. I don’t think the stuff that grows around here is nearly as feisty. Hey, check this out, Samson!”

Buddy found himself passing under the eaves of the doorway into a massive space, walled in on four sides and without a roof. The interior was paved with dark, cracked stone, and a large central basin of lighter stone held a pool of rainwater. At the northern end of the cloister stood a vine-tree embedded in the wall, covering a central niche.

Buddy pulled aside some of the vines, and caught sight of something in the half darkness within the hollow of the niche. Before long, Samson was next to him, helping him pull back the rich foliage. A tall idol carved of a massive block of lapis lazuli stood before the two of them, its form unlike anything they had ever seen before. Its face – wherever it was, seemed to look through them without eyes, smile without lips or a mouth, and smell them without a nose. In time, the colors around the two young men faded to gray. The sounds of the forest beyond the ruined palace dimmed  and gave way to a crackling electricity, with the smell of plasma carried on the wind. The statue emitted a faint blue aura, and the electric glow intensified by the moment. A distant hum struck the horizon, and Buddy lost control of his right hand, lifting to his ear, and closing his eyes to focus even more on the sweet sound. A melodious chant echoed through Buddy’s senses, and Buddy knew it by heart in an instant. He more than knew it; it was a part of him, and he couldn’t resist chanting it back. The statue and Buddy chanted in unison until it seemed as though moments no longer had any meaning, and suddenly Buddy and Samson were one person. Bamson himself, standing taller and wider than either of the young men, separated slowly, as though he were an animal cell going through the process of division. Out of the ectoplasmic morass that joined the two forms rose the sybilline onion, their nucleus rising of its own accord, and hovering within reach.

An eternity later, the two young men came to their senses, and the pale phosphorescence of the purple sybilline onion came drifting to rest at the base of the statue, which looked as pitted and ancient as the rest of the complex, no more than another piece of andesite. The boys both knew it by sight and by heart, they had found the grail they had been seeking. Beholding the onion so suddenly was too much for Buddy to bear. He wept , so much so that it became torrential, and before he knew it, Samson, the onion, and he were in a flooded space, swept out of the complex on a wave of tears and sped downhill at blinding speed. They caught themselves on an old coracle of woven branches, tethered on a little stone piling just beyond the ruined harbor, Buddy clutching the onion under his arm. The vine tether stretched with the rush of tears until it snapped, and sent the coracle adrift on the bright blue ocean, aimless, until the two of them waved down a passing giant albatross. The titanic bird took pity on them and swooped down to give them a lift back to Santa Ninfa.

~~~

A fortnight after Doctor Orfeo and Doctor Mikare met, they secured a little blue skiff and rowed out to the mysterious island that held the azure jewel of the flooded forest which Doctor Mikare had been studying. Doctor Orfeo kept a small straw box full of metaphysical seedlings in his lap, and Doctor Mikare wore a crystal vial full of Buddy Crapo’s tears.   Together they had hatched a plan to foster cooperation between the plants of the flooded forest and the ghostly vegetables that had plagued Santa Ninfa. Above them, a speck blotted upon the horizon. If the two Doctors squinted, they could just make out the shape of a giant albatross and his passengers, who waved to the Doctors below.

#the continuing adventures of doctor orfeo

[acodexofourtime]

Love, From Vicki Island

As he rounded the bend in the old tufa causeway that led to the harbor, Doctor Orfeo got a feeling that things would continue to not be as they seemed that day, and perhaps for a long time to come. Having defeated another obstacle in the launderers’ quarter on the bluff above the harbor, he was one ally richer and poorer in time and energy. This was the case for his more recent adventures.

Thoughts about Doctor Ione raced through his head - but he also thought about an ancient plague of infectious orange blood that spread like quicksilver through the Greek colonies in Campania during the pre-Roman era. He thought about Don Benedetto, too, even though the Doctor tried to put him out of his mind. There was so much more that needed to be done, beyond even solving the mysteries that besieged the city of Santa Ninfa.

Sometimes he imagined scenarios where the city was encouraged to evacuate to a nicer town along the coast, one where the only problems were ones of a municipal nature rather than a metaphysical one. For whatever reason, Santa Ninfa stood at the threshold of worlds and was always known for burning the candle at both ends.

On one side, the old volcano, and on the other, the sea. A long line of metaphysical doctors like Doctor Orfeo had visited the city in old times and kept a council of doctors, the Association of the Psychic Lancet, which held the reality warp that emanated from the very foundations of the city at bay. But as years passed, the Association’s purpose was forgotten, and their institutional knowledge waned until attrition and time finished it off for good.  After the eldest member retired to a vineyard, all that was left was the most junior member, a woman who kept a shimmering cloud in her cupboard.

After selling off the old Council offices, a squat building of tan masonry with terra-cotta reliefs depicting miraculous works, and locking the front door for the last time, she left it to memory in the half darkness. She later held a little boy’s hand in hers as the two of them boarded a dark car and left the studio that was their home since the boy was born. The little boy looked up to the red-framed window with the stained glass floral rondele, and knew it was the last time he’d ever look on the street from that vantage.  “That was some time ago,” thought Doctor Orfeo.

Doctor Orfeo gazed through the pitted archway of veined marble, past the old bronze gate, and saw a woman standing by the iron railing around the harbor overlook. For a moment, he thought she was Doctor Ione, but he knew better. She looked over her shoulder as he approached and stopped a distance to her left. After a time, they looked to one another and exchanged smiles. She wore a long indigo colored coat with amber embroidery, and her round glasses reflected the blueness of the sea.

“There’s nothing like this place,” he said.

“Not in the whole city. I’ve read that this used to be the site of a lagoon some two hundred years ago. A precious ship sank and they built this overlook on top of it, vowing that no finer vessel could ever dock here again,” she said.

“You’re well versed in Santa Ninfa’s history,” replied the Doctor. “I’m Doctor Orfeo, it’s a pleasure meeting you.”

The woman smiled, “Doctor Mikare, Empathic Botanist. Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard about your work, Doctor Orfeo. Our fields are very different, but I was wondering if our paths would ever cross. I study the flooded forest that emerges every so often on the horizon. It tends to dry up, so I need to keep it going sometimes. If you ever see a green boat, that’s me. Empathic plants grow in that depressed island; a geode of time and space. I water them with my assistant’s tears so they’re never forgotten. He’s off in the jungles looking for rare onions as we speak, so now I’m waiting for him to return so I can get back to work.”

“Those plants must have considerable spirit. I’ve only read about such things, never seen them up close. But if they could grow anywhere, it’s here, this is as good an axis mundi as one can find, the place where the sea meets the horizon and then some.

“Yes,” Doctor Mikare replied, with one hand still upon the railing, “after one of the oldest volcanoes went dormant, it tore a direct line to the metaphysical realm. If you were to walk down one side of the sinkhole, you would get the impression that it goes on for about 300 kilometers, but it’s really a lot smaller. I teach the plants down there half-forgotten languages, so that it creates a kind of seed bank for the future.”

Doctor Orfeo smiled at that thought. The metaphysical crab apple that was hiding in his  coat pocket stirred with intensity at the idea of guzzling tears for breakfast. He patted his pocket softly and looked back out at the horizon beyond the railing. “I have an idea. This city is getting overrun right now with plant spirits. Do you think your empathic plants would have it in them to host some new neighbors on their island?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Doctor Mikare, and the imagined idea played out in her inner mind like a grand play.

As they hatched a plan, Doctor Orfeo quickly drew up some notes on the back of a colorful postcard with a blue and violet scrollwork border, emblazoned with the proclamation, “LOVE FROM VICKI ISLAND”.

#the continuing adventures of doctor orfeo

[acodexofourtime]

Stink, Stank, Stunk

Doctor Orfeo knew when opportunity knocked on his door; he wasn’t all serious business at the end of the day. He knew that the note he had in his grasp was written by Doctor Ione, his heart of hearts, and it had been far too long since the two of them had met down by the water, the place of Doctor Ione’s usual emergence. The Doctor’s heart felt a crush of emotion as he flopped his long quiff back, and smoothed out his onyx colored coat of brocade.

This was the very coat he’d sent away for twelve years prior while visiting an ancient merchant spirit on the high street of the ruins in Delos. Visions of two brothers riding upon dolphins as they overtook a swelling wave of white foam danced in the back of his consciousness as he went over the legend of the coat as told by the long-dead trader, who was all too happy to have another customer.

Flooded by memory, with nary a moment to lose, the Doctor plinked a couple of coins into his coffee cup and nodded good-bye to his server, a young man who was in the midst of making another round of coffee for good measure on an archimedean contraption wrought of clay and copper tubing. The Doctor nudged his chair back in, and made off, dodging another, older server who was set to bring a tray bristling with cannoli and shots of amaro to another table.

The young server watched as Doctor Orfeo traversed the street paved with glittering mica bricks and escaped up the long zig-zagging staircase that led to the next neighborhood up. The Doctor’s form grew ever more distant in this way until it was a mere speckle on the afternoon skyline. Considering that for a moment, the young server took a drink of his ristretto, and thought again about leaving town for a few days to relax in the apple orchards.

After a time, reaching the Granite Heights neighborhood, the Doctor began to make his way to the old overlook park built upon the Decurion’s tomb of ages past. He passed under a stucco archway clad in Sunday laundry, and lingered in the narrowing street as he heard a sigh on the wind. Brow creasing, the Doctor suddenly dove a hand into the pocket of his coat. The sound drew nearer, and began to build in intensity as it took on the character of stones rapping against the cool walls.

Without a spare moment, the Doctor turned and threw a resin vial of turquoise liquid over his shoulder, pausing to shut up his eyes and ears as a flare of verdigris light erupted with what felt like a dry coolness. The cold light revealed the formed spirit of a crab apple that fell from its tree well before its time. The lumpen ghost took on an expression, glowering at the Doctor after being forced to manifest so rudely. It made a quick lunge at the Doctor, which the Doctor was just able to side-step. It spat wickedly pointed seeds at the Doctor, which he managed to deflect with his raised right arm, clad under his sleeve with a long puncture-resistant bracer.

In response, Doctor Orfeo doubled back a few paces. He drew out a tiny lyre suitable for playing in the palm of the hand. Its strings were colored vermouth green, silvery purple, acid yellow, and deep red.

“Your time running wild comes to a close, Spirit. You need to calm down,” the Doctor said, in a hushed tone. He knew there were mere moments before the scene would be happened upon by members of the public, or worse, by the local authorities. He began to strum the deep red string, then the acid yellow, then the vermouth strings, which announced a thunking, multi-tonal melody. “Stink, stank, stunk. You will come with me to learn how to exist in this world. Release yourself from the pain of being away from the Source.”

The phantom crab apple seemed to be made of opaque stone in that instant, crystallizing rapidly, though retaining its organic structure. Its features seemed to grow more serene by the moment. It glided languidly through the air towards the Doctor, and when the Doctor opened his coat to it, it shrunk down to the size of a thimble, and nestled into an interior pocket, apparently at rest based on the coo of relief that came from that very place in the garment.

Doctor Orfeo, his brow beaded with sweat, threw himself against the cracked wall at his back. He closed his eyes as he fumbled with the little lyre, putting it away and composing himself for another moment. He turned towards the end of the narrow street, and faced the way he intended to go: towards the blue horizon where he knew he could find the water. For an instant, he thought he saw the outline of his beloved in the old open gate that led down to the harbor.

#the continuing adventures of doctor orfeo

[acodexofourtime]

Be My Demitasse

“Life emerged from the sea, and after a time, it found its way back to it,” thought Doctor Orfeo as he poured himself a cup of coffee from a small aluminum pot.  There he sat at a café overlooking the lower reaches of Santa Ninfa, each building drained of joy as much as the next.  He watched as his little golden spoon dove into the crests of white crema that swirled over the surface of his dark coffee, and set the spoon aside to take a sip.

It had already been a year since he last saw his counterpart from the deep ocean, Doctor Ione, having promised each other they would focus on their respective work.  He could almost see the errant strands of seaweed woven into her hair.  Her skin was the color of rich dark sand, the depths of which could contain an entire universe of life and the fossils of waves yet to come.

Not long after he received a note from Don Benedetto’s servant on that day, saying farewell to his guardian cloves of spectral garlic hung just inside the entryway to his room, he left Santa Ninfa’s spider web of narrow streets, snaking his way to the villa set upon the bluff overlooking the city, passing by no shortage of ossified birds, lizards, and perhaps the outstretched effigies of people that were melded to the walls of the tufa that formed the Don’s Citadel, after centuries of volcanic eruptions peppered its ancient gates with their still forms.

The Doctor was led into Don Benedetto’s grounds by a sleepless henchwoman with a long braid that would whip to and fro like a metronome with every step, a detail which Doctor Orfeo did not miss, leaving him with a surprised smile as he tried to turn his attentions to the square-planed formal gardens leading up to the front double doors of the seashell white villa.

Inside, thick tapestries suffused the walls of all light, and mustard and walnut colored floor tiles echoed back each step as they made their way up a grand staircase into the Don’s chamber.

The Don himself was small, suffused with a crackling crimson mist, his features sallow and half hidden by pleated indigo sheets.  A forking mustache told the time in shadows upon the sides of his mouth, and his brows was creased with perspiration, which the Doctor noted as a side effect of anxiety more than a symptom of illness.

The Doctor, drawing out a small vacuum tube from his black and silver bag, began by asking the Don, “ How do you do, Don Benedetto.  I already know why you summoned me. I see your condition and know what to do to treat it. I just wrote a paper on it, in fact.”

The Don grunted in reply, “I am not given to grand statements here.  Name your price, and it’s yours.  Just help me.  No one else can.”

Doctor Orfeo paused, looking at the Don square in the eye as the Don’s henchperson stood in the back, wringing her hands about a jointed lead pipe.  “Money is one thing, but there’s a mine that you own outside the city, Don Benedetto.  I have seen to it that many of the miners are becoming immaterial - their essence is no longer of this time, or the next.  They have given their past to you, and they have no future to speak of.  I think the profit of that mine has declined to the point that it’s what we can call, ‘a well that has run dry.’  Give that mine to them, and let them pay you dividends.  You’ll see what they make of it in turn.”

The Don’s eyes nearly bugged out.  “My mine?  You’re fucking nuts, with all due respect, Doctor Orfeo.”

The doctor popped a small woven cord into the tail end of the glass vacuum tube.  His eyes turned calmly back to the Don.  “Yes or no, Don Benedetto?  I can help you here and now, or you can seek out the help of Doctor Mesmerato from the bottom of the barrel.”

Don Benedetto groaned, “You are a wicked man, Doctor Orfeo, and I will never forget the vice you shoved my head into today.  My memory is longer than the pain I’m feeling each time I breathe in this prickly smoke!  They have the mine.  As soon as I say it, mark my word, it’s done!”

At that, Doctor Orfeo held the vacuum tube up to the troublesome mist, and withdrew a small square black box, depressing a red button.  The vacuum tube began to glow with a blue, then red, then yellow light and then, with a loud bang, it suddenly opened by way of a tiny glass hinge at the top of the bulb, sucking up the miasma with a crackling scream, dragging it out of the air and the Don’s very nasal passages.  Once the bulb filled up with gas, the little glass hinge sucked itself closed.  With that, the Don’s pallor came back and he sat upright in bed as though nothing at all had ever happened.

The Doctor exhaled, “You should be fine now, Don Benedetto. If you’ll excuse me, I have to make my way back to my own affairs. I’ll let you send a message to the mine.”

With that, Doctor Orfeo packed up his things and left both the Don and the Don’s henchperson in the room, where he was led out by a man with a rather crooked nose, the Doctor’s right ear trailing blood.

Now, long after the fact, all that the Doctor had to show for it was this miserable table on a humid day, and the shadow of a sudden visitor before him-  a paid messenger with a tiny head wearing the featured Augury wings of the famed Fleet Foot Delivery Service, who extended a telegram his way and fished out payment from the money Doctor Orfeo had set aside to pay the cafe bill.  

Doctor Orfeo gave the messenger the stink eye, and opening the telegram, was confronted with a statement written in a hand he knew well: “BE MY DEMITASSE.”

#the continuing adventures of doctor orfeo

[acodexofourtime]

Spectral Allium

Doctor Orfeo and Doctor Ione met in the cemetery of their lives. They met in the hidden places of power that were long forgotten to most. They were never seen together in the daylight, meeting solely at night and during fleeting moments when they would become real to one another, otherwise separated by the fabric of reality itself. Sometimes Doctor Orfeo would experiment with ways of astral projection, and sometimes Doctor Ione would create effigies for Doctor Orfeo to inhabit; none of their methods yielded any significant manifestations aside from meetings with stray sea spirits that wandered a long way from the ancient Nuragic civilization of an offshoot dimension. So it was that all they had together were infrequent, fractured moments that they strung together where they would hand each other epistolary tablets and walk together, talking about what they found to be important. Somehow they always found each other, despite Doctor Orfeo’s wandering business of performing miracles all along the western coast of the country.

In Santa Ninfa, so ahead of schedule, the two began to meet in a secluded park situation on a low point near the harbor, the entirety of that dreadful city spread in drab majesty behind them both, its lights reflected in the water, scintillant like a treasure trove that was dropped in the deep recesses of the night. Reaching out for Doctor Ione’s hand on the first night that he arrived, Doctor Orfeo was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep sadness that he could not bear to tell her about. He could only look into her eyes and see the hermetic perversions that would churn the rotation of the earth back to daytime, sunlight tearing the covers off to reveal the rotten sights that bedeviled the dust caked streets, the burdened populace, the scraps of newspaper and Italian banana peels that blew about in the volcano winds.

During the day it was back to work for both of them: Doctor Orfeo would depart his rented room in a three-storey white brick and terra cotta building, and Doctor Ione would emerge from a dalmatian colored conch shell planted in the sea floor. They lived parallel lives, one doctor on land, and the other in another world, under the sea. Without one, the other’s miracles -- such as the cure for the child with a thumb that turned wooden, or the man whose mouth became a conduit to a grocery store for sea apes -- would utterly vanish.

“This is really some stupid business we’ve gotten ourselves into,” Doctor Ione said to Doctor Orfeo in the last night of May, “wouldn’t it have been easier to practice medicine this whole time, like we thought we were going to do?”

Biting his lip about it, Doctor Orfeo looked away from the glowing halo of smoke from the volcano in the distance, and turned to Doctor Ione. “I always think about that. Maybe once we’re done here, we can move on from this work. The seal is broken, but we can always try to escape the floodwaters.” There was doubt in his mind in that moment, and he knew she could sense it. They went on with their evening until one in the morning, when both parties flickered out of existence for a moment, taking the deserted harbor park with them, the place becoming nothing more than a wide gravel path between buildings. Doctor Orfeo reappeared in his room, and Doctor Ione reappeared in hers.

The following morning, Doctor Orfeo departed early as he always did, and set about his way through the city, taking appointments. His last one that day ended with a case involving the city’s star artichoke seller, who was stricken by bouts of depression because she had shouldered a grave burden for years: a bulb of ghost garlic belonging to her aunt had haunted her for years, floating alongside her at all hours, dragging her down like a proverbial carbuncle glued to her butt. The garlic didn’t say very much, though it could have, and that would have been preferable to the artichoke seller, who went by Alicia Cartago on all official paperwork, and Sandra among friends. After convincing the garlic that it was better off finding a new source of life energy, Doctor Orfeo carried it in a glass fishbowl back to his room in the evening. After ascending the stairs he found a note pinned to his door:

Doctor Orfeo, by the humble request of Don Benedetto, you’re invited to Palazzo Serpentine tonight at eight. The note had the address for the Palazzo Serpentine along the bottom; it was in a neighborhood high above the city itself, in a house that could see eye to eye with the volcano in the distance.

Doctor Orfeo knew of that house. The note left Doctor Orfeo with a sense of trepidation. There were more than ancient water sprites living on that hill. There were things beyond the brother and sister spirits and shades he knew. He only opened the door to his apartment after his new garlic ward began to pester him with questions about whether he had freshly ironed linens inside, and whether he would send it back to the astral realm today, tomorrow, or the next day.

“Not yet,” the Doctor said without looking down at the garlic, “we may have to work on other things first.”

#the continuing adventures of doctor orfeo

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The Continuation

Ten long years after the Wilson Brothers grew up and began living in the blessed light of the double-smiling eagle, there was another incident of note. It occurred in the ruinous little city of Santa Ninfa, which sat half-propped above the warm depths of the sea on a precipice riddled with the tombs of long-forgotten ancestors, their faces obscured by masks of bright colored clay. To be honest, the place was basically slumping into the sea like some kind of ornate, shredded accordion that couldn’t hold itself up as well as it used to. Salt-frosted windows and creativity were all that seemed to keep it going in that time, and in true creative spirit, it had a lonely opera house named after a favored brand of oat milk ice cream.

The star of the opera house, a young castrato by the name of Clarence Bonaventura, had been discovered slumped in his dressing room chair, frozen solid by his own stagnation. From the day of the dress rehearsal to the evening of the opening night, the opera company tried to thaw him. They held a grease lamp under his feet, steamed his armpits, and even tried to ply him with his little dog, King. It only seemed to make his appearance frostier by the second, so that icicles hung from his nose and an ice zucchini began forming behind his right ear.

Medically, the doctors could only say that Clarence was as good as dead. The last police officer left in that degenerate city was called in by some unknown agent, and the case was made to issue a death certificate. After three days of relenting, the officer forced the issue, and her legal will couldn’t be denied any longer and the opera company relented.

That morning, Dr. Orfeo, a young surgeon of dark mien was the sole patron at the counter of Cafè-Bar Happiness, drinking a pistachio cappuccino as he thought that, of all the roads he traveled, he never expected to be brought back to this place so soon. For a moment, a flicker of humanoid form alighted by the stool next to his before it blinked away. Looking away, his mind stormed with memory and regret until he snapped out of it, noticing the headline on the back of the barista’s newspaper: 

“OUT OF COMMISSION: Authorities say Opera Singer will Never Thaw!”

After asking the barista about the case and hearing about Clarence Bonaventura’s plight, Dr. Orfeo finished his drink, paid his tab, and made off for the opera house with a swirl of his dark coat, beating the rickety ambulance there by mere minutes.

He strode in past the box office, past the usher that tried halfheartedly to stop him, and stormed all the way to the backstage dressing room, where he found a somber crowd gathered around what seemed to be more popsicle than castrato.

“Hello,” Dr. Orfeo started, “I’m Doctor Orfeo, a surgeon recently arrived in town. I heard about Clarence’s situation and came right away. I know how to help. I’ve seen this problem before, and it isn’t a physical problem; it’s an issue of spiritual architecture.”

After the opera company barricaded the way up to the dressing rooms, Dr. Orfeo got right to work, drawing a chalk circle around Clarence, then withdrawing a vial of a blue quicksilver substance, which he emptied out into the circle. He knelt down near the circle and withdrew a small sheaf of pineapple paper with esoteric symbols written on the front and back, and began singing the code with a soft dirgelike quality.

And what happened next caused noses to bleed all around the doctor; it was so incredible that no one knew if they were coming or going anymore. The pool of strange fluid began to surge with its own light until it took on a galactic quality, swirling madly until it became a maelstrom. Then, emerging from the whirling force’s eye as a grasping hand, then a sinuous arm, then a gyrating torso, a turning head, and a pair of stomping feet was THE DANCING MACHINE. Steam cooed from its dancing emanations. It snapped its faceless attention on Clarence, and lunged at him with a leaping double-kick, tap-tap-tapping its heels over the ice zucchini and shattering it into a million pieces. The astral form danced all over Clarence in ways no one could figure out how, defying laws of logic and gravity, with the sounds one would normally hear at a chiropractor’s office.

In the blink of an eye, it was all gone. There was nothing left of that spectacle aside from a tiny marble of surging blue, which the Doctor picked up, and swallowed as though it was a mere pill. Wordless, he went to see himself out, leaving behind a completely restored Clarence Bonaventura.

Someone from the crowd asked Clarence if he was feeling alright, and if he knew what had happened. He just gave a look in the direction the Doctor went in, and said, “I think someone raw-dog denim dick dialed me.”

#the continuing adventures of doctor orfeo

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The Big Linguini

A mere week after he had arrived by boat to bright skies and frigid air, Willis found himself in some trouble, haunted by all that he had left behind. He ran through the thickening darkness towards a lumber mill, the howls of wolves in the distance.

Hauling himself into a tall lumber bin, Willis wrapped his scarf around his mouth to stifle the heat of his breath and laid out as though he were a piece of wood himself. He laid there like this in stillness for some time, the wolves howling around him like they had nothing better to do.

Amid the lumber, its wood covered in claw marks, Willis was confronted with uncertainty. Outside was death, and above him was the rounded silver moon.

He spent that time focusing on the moon, and the last thing he saw before a veil of sleep took over were two foreskins, silver and shriveled, linked like two bright rings.

When he awoke the next morning, his nose bleeding, he headed towards the call bell for the workers at the mill. He found himself among friends, and stale coffee brewed with eggshells served in old tin cups. He managed to get a ride later that day to a train station, and got on his way out of Canada, southbound for the United States.

Years later, perhaps long after his physical form left this world, a pair of brothers went rooting through a drawer full of knick-knacks and found hidden at the bottom a yellowed lacework box with a toggle clasp. Inside were a pair of luminously fossilized foreskins, two perfect rings intertwined.

The mummified rings of skin sat there amid other faded relics: a pocket knife with a mother-of-pearl handle, a two-cent stamp depicting inner joy, and a tin model of a grocery scale.

“I have good news brother,” said the younger of the two. “Good news.”

“Wait, do you hear something?” interrupted the older of the two. “I think something is scratching at the window.”

#The Continuing Adventures of Doctor Orfeo

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Živa, also Šiva, Siva, Siwa, Żiwia, Sieba or Razivia, was the Slavic goddess of love and fertility. She was worshipped throughout what is now Poland, the Czech Republic,Slovakia, Slovenia, and Germany (and especially the Elbe (Labe) river valley), before Christianity expanded into the area. Her name means “living, being, existing”. Sieba’s consort was Siebog, her male equivalent.

She was said to have a temple on Mount Zywiec, and people would go to the temple to pray for good health and long life. Some traditions have it that she turned herself into a cuckoo bird.

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by Hannah Starkey by k17k on Flickr.

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On March 8, 1877, in the Church of St. Francis Xavier on 16th Street, “the shriek of an hysterical woman in one of the galleries, and a heedless cry of fire which followed it, created a panic.” (NYT, 3/8/1877) Seven people were killed in the ensuing chaos. This newspaper clipping from our Picture Collection attempts to illustrate the scene in an era before news photography.

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Yaroslav Gerzhedovich, Fallen King, acrylic on paper, 14 x 20 cm, 2011

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The Devil running a woman through with a pitchfork, artist unknown