The Days of the Oryx
Listless, he found himself back on the sofa. There was shit to do, nonsense, ignorable, but the wheels of the infernal machine nagged at him anyway. And there was this conviction again; that delight, which sashays in like a lioness, is best greeted with silence. He reached for his pen, but it bled air. Nobody wants to hear the creak of your smile, worse, the reason it’s creaking. Words are for struggle, the slow ferry across the muddy river between this joy and that. Keep your fucking ecstasies to yourself. Right now you’re drinking dirty coffee and beer in the sun, swatting flies with your hat. The boat’s out in the current, full of trucks and old ladies salting cockroaches to sell as snacks. She’s squinting at the boys cannonballing off the dock into the brown water, the low sun furring her skin to honey, and as you pinch the moment between finger and thumb, she glances over, catches you. If you were dead now you’d have missed this. You light a cigarette, pass it to her, she smiles, not at you, but at it all. The error bred in the bone. Not universal love, but to be loved alone.
Every now and then the Gods, bored with Olympian backgammon, would reach down a louche arm and plop an Oryx next to some unsuspecting bloke just to see what would happen. Poor codger never knew what hit him. One minute he’s plodding knee-deep through the bog behind an old bullock, next there’s a fucking Oryx standing there in the mist. And it’s glowing.
That night he goes back to his hovel and everything’s different. Instead of raw wurzels, he coddles a soup, a kind of Mote de Queso, with crème fraîche and marjoram from out by the shitting rock. The Oryx is draped across the hearth, making arch comments about the window treatments, wondering if there are lemons to brighten the bog water. He makes a bed of horsehair close to the fire, fueled by the last willow branches and best of the peat, and lays her on it. She asks him to read her oryx stories, and despite being unable to read, he fashions something about a naughty oryx who stole the farmer’s crab apples and was only saved from the butcher’s knife by the intercession of a valiant mongoose. And he watches her sleep. She makes little peeping sounds, nocturnal oryx snores, and he soothes her by stroking her between the horns. In the morning, as he trudges through horizontal rain in search of fresh liverworts for her breakfast, the Gods visit him. “The Oryx will need Friulian figs.” they say. “Oh, and your bullock is dead”. “Thank you!” he replies, grinning glassily.
Asked what he was doing the seventeen years between books, he said ‘falling in love’. I coil another skein of pasta. He wasn’t thinking about his place within the canon of his contemporaries, he says, because being in love was already more than he could manage; and reserving space to farm the motions of the heart seemed absurd. I think he almost said sacrilege. To audience yourself from your own life for the sake of describing it? A tattered coat upon a stick. I finger the stem of my glass. He’s right, of course. An afternoon of gin rummy with two bottles of prosecco is more than Yeats; it is everything Yeats was trying to say.
So why do it at all? Well, because he knew what he felt was true, because he was there. And you can’t watch the Venice movie every morning at 4.30, nested on the swaddled sofa, all pocketed fur of arms and legs; so in the gaps between, maybe belly up to the magnitude, choose to make what’s important visible.
The Oryx, it turns out, is a whole toolbox of surprises. Its limbs, which fold tidily beneath it like a picnic table when purring in repose (most of the time), unravel telescopically to receive offerings in the form of acorns and crushed thimbleberries, minutely parceled in the silk of the silver-laced butterpillar. Its hind legs serve as bottomless repositories for processing intoxicants. “If you think that oversize amphora’s gonna cut it,” says the Messenger of the Gods, “think again. Dust off the cauldron.” The Oryx begins slurping hard ambrosia through a dedicated gap between its incisors shortly after breakfast, making a chirping sound not unlike the burr of a field cricket whenever she requires a refill, which is all the time. Between ladlefuls frothing to the meniscus, she polishes off the New Yorker Crossword with practiced nonchalance and – despite having cloven hoofs – breaks the Codger’s rummy heart with four homicidal aces and the Jack Queen King of Spades. The skin of the Oryx is covered with gossamer dust, like a moth, cobwebbed with skeins of golden fur along the forelimbs, the nape of the neck and at the sides of the horns. It requires oiling with Etruscan myrrh twice daily. The Oryx’s irises are green and rotate mesmerically like those of a cartoon cobra, inducing instant vertigo in its victims, followed by the undying devotion of a spaniel. The Oryx comes with a warning sticker, but it is small, and sadly Codgers are blind.
Nobody likes Edmund, obviously. But no-one likes Susan Lucy or Peter either. Only a damp teabag – C.S. Lewis – would offer them as exemplars of sibling propriety. Spare Oom? Ugh. You can almost smell the old boy’s halitosis. And stroking the shaven Aslan is the sort of thing you want to avert your eyes from, even on the radio. The White Witch is a keening bore. Mrs Beaver, funny name, whatever. There’s really only Tumnus, goaty round the nethers, squirming on an enema of his own remorse. “Oh, oh, oh,” he cries, like the unholy love child of Lucky the Leprechaun and Sinead O’Connor “I’m such a bad Faun.”
On his way up the mountain, Bad Faun Tumnus smiled to himself. The Oryx was trailing, winded, her legs stabbing at the slope like spastic compasses. The plains of the Serengeti are neither rock-snaggled nor blackberry-brambled. She wasn’t built for this. Hoofing lightly over the rim of the sitting stone, he allowed himself a whinny of delight; the sun was low, the breeze scented with earth and fallen leaves. The magic jar of negronis lurked deep in his pouch. If there was a happier faun in all of Narnia, he’d eat his fucking hat.
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