Jacques Barbéri

trans. by Edward Gauvin

Death in the Garden Like A Pilot in His Craft

A limp, leaden mass. Sleep ebbed and flowed in waves. A weight on his chest. Eb leapt to his feet; the pressing became a tugging, a pain in his right chest. His eyes and hands sought out the sore spot, and he saw the toadlouse. Massive! Like a misshapen, squamous baby suckling at his nipple. Mouth pressed to his skin, eyes shut, it savored the blood slowly forming powdery little clouds beneath the transparent skin of its torso. Eb grabbed it and yanked with all his might; the toadlouse whimpered, then let out a piercing cry. Its body now lay twitching on the gleaming break room floor. Its buccal protrusions still bit into his flesh, the spur hooked between two ribs, the digestive tract yawing on Eb’s belly. He tried to slip his fingers under the ring of cartilage around the toadlouse’s mouth. With an obscene sucking sound, the heap of viscera came unstuck, hit the floor, and burst, splattering an orange blend of blood and gastric juices.

Eb was white, the room blue. And death orange.

The wound didn’t hurt that much; the creature had anesthetized the area with a flick of its tongue to conceal its violation.

Flustered by the creature’s invasion of his slumber, Eb pulled on his iso-suit, unlocked the drydoor, and stepped out into the fridgeway.

He drove slowly, and after about an hour, the first slabs of meat came into view. They loomed in the distance, ice, and mist, like enormous red tongues strung up on giant hooks. Eb grinned. He’d believed the species extinct, the entire flock of bone and muscle vanished into thin air. A dozen miles now lay between the kitchen and the first frozen slabs. He loaded up the back of the truck, trying to cram in as much as he could, but it was pointless. On the way back, the uppermost slabs of meat, atop the crimson mountain, always wound up falling off. When Eb noticed, he’d stop, toss ’em back on . . . and a few yards later, they’d fall off again. Hopeless. He never could get a head start on his next round.

Eb shut the fridgeway door behind him and sat down on the closest chair. He was beat.

“Hey, kid. Tired yet?”

Into the kitchen, wearing a white jumpsuit, came his boss Paul Rigutti, the colony’s high butcher. 

“Colony” might’ve been pushing it. There were the Stanfords, Dany Ucello, the Grubers, Lisa Berton, Paul Rigutti, and Eb. Simulcondos planted underground, a tiny habitation complex in the flanks of the planetship. And on high, far, far away, atop a boom ten miles long, in his panoramic cockpit, the pilot, Madhawk.

But madness stalked them all. Ever since the walls had begun liquefying, and mutant animals, hybrids of all sorts, had started infesting bedrooms and bathrooms, offices and kitchens.

“This toadlouse almost killed me,” Eb muttered.

“Yet here you are.”

“I killed it first.”

Rigutti burst out laughing. “Aw, you know those suckers ain’t real. It’s just the deep-space loonies, kid, that’s all. C’mon, back to work.”

“What if they really are coming from the surface, mutated by powerful stellar radiation?”

“There’s no more air up there.”

“So they say.”

“Listen, time’s a-wasting. Meat’s got to get cut up and shipped out. We’re already running a week late. So quit lollygagging.”

Eb had a fleeting vision of a steak three fingers thick, cooked rare, dripping with cognac sauce.

He fell in step behind his boss.

Lisa Berton was roasting beneath a bank of infrared lamps. A plump homunculus strolled across her body andlicked her lady parts. She sat up abruptly, and the homunculus hit the floor. Its delicate limbs shattered beneath the weight of its belly with a sound like snapping twigs. It started scream.

“Shut it, half-pint! All you had to do was hold on!”

Lisa Berton was pissed off. In spite of the pleasure they could procure, she despised these surface freaks. The homunculus began screeching even louder. She grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and tossed it on the bunk. She cranked the potentiometer all the way up and dragged the lamp as close as she could to the little creature. Its skin turned brown at once, and the blubber began to sweat. It tried to scrabble up the bunk, in vain; the smooth surface offered no purchase. It was getting visibly thinner. Its eyeballs wobbled in the hollowed sockets; its charred tongue protruded from its mouth like a licorice stick.

Soon there was nothing left of it but a few bones rattling in a little brown paper bag.

As she slung the remains of the homunculus into the incinerator, the evil, gratuitous deed she’d just committed unnerved her. She’d killed calmly, unflappably, in cold blood. Then Paul Rigutti’s constant refrain came to mind. The deep-space loonies. She now had proof what he said was true: none of those critters were real! On the other hand, they were all slowly going soft in the head. The planetship was turning into an asylum.

Suddenly she thought of Eb, and her chest swelled. “Tonight you’re mine,” she murmured. “One night with me, you won’t want to go hide behind your dead carcasses to jerk off anymore. Put up a fight, and I’ll kill you . . . Hell, you might be a surface mutie too, a sucker conjured up by my diseased brain.

“I’ll stab you right in the heart with no regrets.”

Lisa’s simulcondo was fabulous. Solid wood furniture, a centrally located freestanding fireplace with a brass hood. The fake windows looked out on 3D reproductions of damp, misty forests. In the foreground, black swans and golden ducks glided across a stunning lake.

On the table, tempting dishes set guests drooling. Cubes of beef slick with soy dressing, shrimp in spicy sauce, caramel stir-fried pork, exotic fruits and fine wines.

Paul Rigutti was chatting with the Grubers in front of an open window, and even though Eb was too far away to hear, he could almost figure out what Paul was saying from the man’s expressive gestures. Louise Gruber pretended to follow along, but the conversation clearly annoyed her. Now and then, she’d gaze off into the trees, or at the ponderous but graceful flight of the lake’s web-footed denizens. Then her skin would soften up, relax, the lines of irritation and tedium vanish from her childlike face, and a make-believe breeze ruffle her long dark hair.

Eb turned to Dany Ucello.

“Don’t you think this abundance of food, this . . . waste, is kind of shameful? Yesterday I had to drive a dozen miles before I saw the first slabs. A dozen miles!”

“Not to worry, Eb. The fridgeway’s got to run what, sixty miles?”

“Yeah? What if it stops at thirteen? What if, in a year, there’s nothing left to eat? What’re we going to do then?”

“Search me. Ask another colony for help, maybe?”

“Impossible. You know we’d have to go up to the surface for that.”

“So? We’ve got suits for that. We can use ’em.”

“What if the other colonies are in the same boat?”

“Look, I didn’t want to say this, Eb, but you’re being a real drag. This is no time for dark conjecture. We’re at a party! Drink. Get shitfaced. Forget all that for tonight, will you?”

Lisa Berton came over to them.

“What’s the matter, boys? You all look so serious. Here, have some punch! You’ll feel better off the bat.”

And indeed, after the third glass, Eb did feel a lot better. The food was wonderful and the wine superb.

As always, at Emilia’s insistence, the Stanfords left early. Behind the oaks and pines, the sun was setting, haloing the ducks and swans in powdery gold and bronze.

The alcohol gradually softened shapes, mellowed sounds, made colors pastel. Lisa was rubbing up against Eb without inhibition. The Grubers had gone, bored by Paul’s unbroken monologue. Merry from vast quantities of wine, Paul had set his sights on Dany, who listened to him with half an ear. Lisa’s hands were wandering over his legs, kneading the fabric. Everything was blurry. He went with it, devoid of all feeling, his senses too dulled to muster any reaction. To his surprise, he got hard. And when his gaze fell on Lisa’s hands, admiring the ballet they were performing between his legs, he saw the slug. Big around as an arm, it squirmed, drooling on the red silk cushion between them. He sat bolt upright, abruptly shoving aside Lisa, who let out a brief moan as she sank to the carpet.

“Paul, over here! Come see one of our hallucinations!” Eb was red, shouting, choking with rage. Paul sauntered over, wearing an ironic smile.

The carpet was scorched in the snail’s wake. Apparently, it was secreting some kind of acid. Its latest advance left a few inches of bared concrete bubbling lightly.

“Pick it up, Paul. It’s only a hallucination, right? So there’s no danger. Pick it up and toss it in the fire!” Eb’s voice had risen to a scream.

Smiling the whole time, Paul leaned over and grabbed the animal. Then he headed slowly over to the fireplace. He let the viscid mass slide into the flames. It wriggled for a moment, and then a greenish cloud burst, and the loathsome odor of mildew filled the room. Paul turned, still smiling. He took a few tottering steps, then collapsed on the floor in front of Eb.

His right hand was bathed in blood.

The mutants were invading every room in increasing numbers, leaping on their many legs from the air vents, poking their tentacles up from the enameled toilet bowls.

Emilia Stanford, who’d found herself cupped by gigantic suckers while peacefully urinating in the public restroom, hadn’t dared do her business over any hole of any kind for a week. She shat in a newspaper and peed in glasses. Sparks of madness gleamed in her sad eyes. Before going to bed, she must’ve made and unmade her bed several times over, shuddering at the idea of lying down on a planar spider or a ribbon scorpion.

Despite the fresh scars crisscrossing his right hand, Paul Rigutti remained steadfast in his beliefs. The critters were delusions, and their manifestation in reality an inconsequential novelty. But the same sparks that danced in Emilia’s eyes danced in his.

When Eb reached the first slabs of meat, an uneasy feeling gave him pause. Something wasn’t right. He looked around, trying to pick out anything out of the ordinary, a change in the environment. That was when he heard the noises: little wails punctuated by sucking sounds. At that very moment, he realized why he felt uneasy: he couldn’t see his own breath. He ran the last few yards between himself and the meat and made out the first toadlice clinging to the crimson and yellow flanks like bizarre mountain climbers stopping to rest en route up their wall of flesh.

The rotting carcasses stained the ground with oily puddles. To Eb’s left, there were cracks in the fridgeway wall, and a horde of malformed creatures, more or less toadlice, oozed through the breach to flop jiggling onto the floor.

The fridgeway’s walls flew past the truck. Tormented by the vision of horror now seared on his retina, Eb braked at the last minute, and the truck embedded itself with a crunch in the kitchen door. When Eb stepped out, Paul Rigutti ran up, breathless, cursing at him.

“Don’t get all worked up, boss. Even if the truck’s totaled, it doesn’t matter. I’m just holding out hope that those freaks haven’t eaten through the spacesuits, and our neighbors are knee-deep in food. Or else your freaking hallucinations will be the end of us. And believe me, you won’t be spared!”

The spacesuits seemed to be intact. Dusty, a little moldy in creases and folds, but to all appearances, usable. 

Bedridden, tossed about on a sea of blankets and fever, Emilia was futilely fighting off a wave of imaginary monsters. Her husband had given up meat delivery to look after her. The neighboring colonies would probably be surprised by the sudden stoppage, but the absence of any means of communication precluded the possibility of warning them. Louise and Charles Gruber were, more than ever, essential to receiving foodstuffs from the other colonies. True, the shipments were haphazard, full of random selections, as if the work of a psychotic computer. If resupply broke down, they’d have no choice but to starve to death. For now, they could still contemplate survival. Dany Ucello had set out down the fridgeway, where the meat slabs were liquefying. He hoped to patch the cracks, get everything running again. Paul smiled.

“You’re all insane,” he said, chewing morsels of rotted muscle. “This meat is marvelous.”

Lisa had not been seen for several days. She no longer even kept up her physician’s duties, visiting Emilia’s bedside. Counting on her was useless. Eb knew what he had to done.

He felt like he was in a full-body cast. It was a bad feeling, like one of those nightmares where you’re rising toward the shallows of sleep and it feels like you can wake up, claw your way to the surface. . .but no, it turns out you can’t, and sleep unfurls long tentacles to pull you back down toward the depths of night. 

The airlock’s outer door opened, and Eb set foot on solid ground. Moving forward, he tried to imagine that a giant had swallowed him, that he had devoured its internal organs, and that he was now taking control of its motor functions. 

Eb, a butcher in a spacesuit, advanced in small, supple bounds through space beneath the icy twinkle of distant stars, toward the exit hatch on the neighboring simulcondos, which rose up in the distance like the pillbox of a lone sentry left to guard the planet. That was when he saw the trucks. At that very moment, a little whistle drilled into his right ear. He checked his manometer. The pressure was slowly decreasing. He bounded at once toward one of the trucks.

In vain, he looked for a door, the pressure getting dangerously low, when he spotted a handle on the roof. Of course, there was an airlock! Stupid of him to think he could access the cockpit directly. The internal pressure was now almost at zero, and he felt the fabric of his suit sucking tight against his legs, arms, torso. His entire body was thinning down, having difficulty propping up the weight of his big round head. He was suffocating. The airlock door was stuck; rather, he had no idea how to open it. Discouraged, he lay down on the metal hull, exhausted, awaiting death. And fainted just as the ground opened to swallow him.

WE ARE ALL INSANE—the banner had been burned into his eyes right before he went under.

He came to inside the airlock. The door had shut automatically, and his spacesuit’s visor had cracked from impact with the floor. Guess somebody up there likes me, he thought, trying hard to smile. He peeled off the suit like a molting reptile and entered the cockpit.

The controls were simple, even simpler than those of his own truck. It was nothing but buttons. He pressed the one that said ON. There was a low hum, and the big machine started shaking. He set course for the nearest colony on the small onboard computer and hit the AUTOPILOT button. The truck came to life, and the powerful treads wrapped round the base of the metal monster kicked up a spray of dust as they propelled the vehicle forward. It all seemed so easy! But he was too exhausted to speculate about the degree of reality in the world he inhabited. Sleep fell upon him like a bird of prey.

When he woke, a weird idea obsessed him, the result of a dream he’d just had. In his dream, he’d gone through the same ritual actions as he did in what he called reality: put on the spacesuit, entered the airlock of the simulcondo complex . . . But when he’d been about to set foot on Earth, he’d been sucked into the void. There was no longer any atmosphere around the planet that traveled through the void of space, and he’d stabilized at a certain height, a prisoner of celestial gravitation, a human satellite accompanying the planet toward its unknown destiny. And to tell the truth, he failed to see how it could be otherwise. Such were his wandering thoughts when he noticed the neighboring colony’s entry hatch was right in front of his vehicle. The truck was still, awaiting orders. He pressed the DOCKING button. The truck moved forward slightly, and its snout tipped groundward. He was now vertical, and a green light began to blink. The two airlocks were lined up.

He had just entered the first simulcondo next to the airlock when a booming laugh drilled into his ear.

“Hey, Eb! Back already?”

Paul Rigutti was lurching toward him with a rolling, helter-skelter gait. His face and hands were covered with purulent boils, likely expressions of the spoiled meat he insisted on ingesting.

It can’t be, thought Eb. This is some kind of diabolical trick! Overwhelmed by a sudden panic-tinged rage, he rushed at Paul, at what he wished was an illusion. The big butcher’s considerable bulk stopped him cold. It was like running into a wall. Eb passed out, almost happy at what had happened.

Emilia was dead, carried off by fever. Richard Stanford had followed soon after, plunging a knife into his own heart. The tragedy had allowed Dany and Lisa enjoy a few days’ fresh meat. Eb had never been able to bring himself to such extremes. “You’re wrong, kiddo,” Dany Ucello castigated him. “Just forget where the barbecue’s from, and you’ll find it’s damn tasty.” Hypocrite, thought Eb. By turning them down, I’m leaving more for everyone else, which on the whole Dany appreciated.

The Grubers had barricaded themselves in the room where food from other colonies was coming in. What had been skimpy for seven people proved largely enough for two. Paul, who still acted like he was in charge, the leader of a colony devoured by forces of entropy from the surface, had tried every means at his disposal to knock down the solid metal door, but in the absence of explosives, any such attempt was doomed to failure. Wherever he went, a trail of putrescence betrayed his passage, marking out the area where he paced and crisscrossing the snails’ acid streaks. Little by little, he was losing his human aspect, becoming a gastropod, fungus, mold.

After spinning his wheels for three days in the simulcondo complex and in his own head, trying to swallow a few grilled toadlice but unable to keep them down for long, Eb resolved to try and reach Madhawk. If a solution to their problems even existed, it could only be in the pilot’s cockpit on high, ten miles over their heads.

He tried to enter the elevator, but the door wouldn’t open. Glowing letters appeared on the small screen above the sliding doors: DISPLAY YOUR APPOINTMENT AUTHORIZATION. Eb began to laugh. “What authorization? Open up already, you fucking tin can, open the fuck up!” A brief flurry of lights frazzled the screen.

THE AUTHORIZATION GRANTED BY COLONY SUPERVISOR MR. PAUL RIGUTTI. Eb guffawed. “Mr. Paul Rigutti? He’s lost his marbles! He’s pile of stinking rotten meat! In a few days, there’ll be nothing left of him but a puddle of slime!” The lights blinked. DISPLAY YOUR AUTHORIZATION. ASCENT IS FORBIDDEN FOR ALL PERSONS WHO HAVE NOT BEEN OFFICIALLY DESIGNATED. Eb realized there was no point insisting. He hadn’t eaten in so long that he was slowly spiraling into an increasingly uncontrolled cyclothymic state. He swung between fury and fits of laughter; he had the giggles when he went to request a signature from his former boss, who said, “Well, look who’s out of his funk!”

Paul had trouble holding the pencil with his right hand, which looked oddly like a leprous stump.  Somewhat grossed out, Eb helped him get a grip on the little piece of wood. And, after a fashion, the graphite moved across the blank sheet of paper. The merry hysteria abruptly left Eb’s face.

“When are you going to stop eating that rancid shit? Quit messing around, Boss! You’re going to die! Look around! What happened to the Grubers? The Stanfords? And this slime you’re leaving all over, and your filthy worm-eaten face.” Paul smiled. Oh, what’s the point, Eb thought. I’m crazy, wasting my energy like this. He headed off toward the elevator laughing, nervously brandishing his authorization over his head.

“It’s just you and me now, Madhawk!”

The elevator seemed to take forever. Several hours locked up in that crammed compartment, sometimes laughing violently, sometimes drumming with his fingers on the sheet metal walls. For a moment Eb thought the ride would never end, rising up into the farthest limits of space, piercing the very membrane of the cosmos. . .The door opened. Madhawk was waiting for him, seated at an enormous console that pulsed green, yellow, and red.

“So glad to welcome you to my cabin, Eb. To what do I owe your delightful visit?”

Disconcerted by the directness of the pilot’s approach, Eb didn’t know what to say. He stammered a few words of gibberish, then let himself collapse into the nearest seat.

“You look tired, my boy. The deep space loonies, no doubt about it. Here, let me share some good news. Sensors have detected a hospitable solar system. Our journey is nearing its end. Soon we’ll be back in orbit, wedded to a new, life-giving star. Soon we’ll all be able to start over from scratch.”

The gentle stream of words from Madhawk’s mouth soothed Eb. The android pilot’s perfectly symmetrical face made dissent seem unthinkable.

Just then, a thunderous noise reverberated throughout the cockpit. The console lights began blinking madly, and Madhawk let loose on the joysticks like marionette worked by a palsied puppeteer.

Then all the blinking lights went out at once. At the same time, a noise stopped. A noise that, for Eb, had until now always been part of the background. A noise that had always been there.  And suddenly a forcefield had been shattered, loosing upon the senses a fury of new stimuli greedy for receptors.

A humongous waterbird with a simian visage was embedded in the cockpit’s broken windshield. Madhawk must’ve hit it head-on, almost on purpose. But Eb looked past it, making out strange constructs: parallelepiped structures quivering all over.

Squinting for a closer look, he noticed isolated movements, parts that were still. And realized to his horror he beheld a city in ruins, swarming with unidentifiable life. He turned to Madhawk, his mouth brimming with insults, and his jaw sagged.

Madhawk’s flesh was distended, accessorizing his clothes with patches of bizarre muscular and nervous ornament. A tie streaked with blood and lymph wrapped round his shirt collar; a belt buckle bobbed on the swell of his stomach.

The Earth hasn’t moved, thought Eb, but everything’s changed. IT’S ALL GONE TO HELL. They roasted the Equator, iced over the poles . . . Who are we in this post-apocalyptic experiment?

“It’s all fake, isn’t it?” he said, staring the pilot down. For the first time, reality rose up before him.

“What are you talking about, Eb? You’re losing your mind. We’re heading for a hospitable solar system. Soon we’ll be there. Look . . .”

Eb turned toward the windshield and saw the stars, the inky black the planetship was whizzing through. The bird was still stuck in a crack in the broken glass. Blood spattered its golden plumage in dazzling designs. Eb didn’t know what to think anymore. 

He waved goodbye to Madhawk. A gust of warm air ruffled the pilot’s hair.

The elevator doors closed behind Eb.

Dany Ucello was by the fireplace, grilling slugs. Maybe I can stomach them this time, Eb thought. And he ate with his fellow crewmembers. Apparently, he couldn’t take toadlice, but slugs were just fine.

Full and sleepy, he stretched out on the carpet, refusing to leap to any hasty conclusions, or take any irreversible step toward insanity.

Lisa Berton’s scream tore through the room.

He rushed to her room; now he was leaning against the jamb, breathless from the effort. Lisa was in her bunk. Several homunculi were busy about her body, licking her breasts, her genitals. But there was no longer any point to their devotions. Lisa was dead. Sucked dry from inside by a planar spider. The creature’s abdomen lay spread across her face, legs tangled at the back of her skull like ties on a carnival mask. A smooth white mask, slightly hairy, without eyes, nose, or mouth. And beneath the mask, the head on the end of its extendable neck was deep in its victim’s mouth, in search of sweet delicacies, malignant desserts.

Lisa’s body stiffened with one a final, desperate jolt and, sinking back down, trapped an unlucky homunculus beneath it. It attempted unsuccessfully to wriggle out from under the mountain of flesh, its mouth widening in a ridiculous soundless yowl. It was being smothered, it was begging, it was braying into the void. It was ridiculous. Everything here was ridiculous.

Eb drifted away, laughing out loud.

Repairs had been simple and the truck now rolled along without a hitch. The fridgeway walls flew by, and Eb seemed pensive.

“Hey, boss, you got a cure for the deep-space loonies?”

The fleshy mush that still answered to the name of Paul Rigutti turned to him with a smile.

“Just one, kid. You got to believe in Reality. The one and only reality that rules us all: Faith.”

To his own surprise, Eb smiled. In the distance, the first slabs of meat appeared.

In the mid-‘80s, Jacques Barbéri (1954—) burst onto the French science fiction scene and even academic studies stateside, but was not translated until 2010, first by Michael Shreve and then by Brian Evenson. Cosmology, entomology, and poetry fascinate this experimental musician, Italian translator, and former dentist, the author of over a hundred stories and fifteen novels. The story in this issue is taken from Barbéri’s first collection: 1985’s Kosmokrim.

Writer and translator Edward Gauvin (PhD, USC) has received residencies and fellowships from the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the French and Belgian governments. The translator of over 80 short stories and 350 graphic novels, he has spoken on translation, French literature, and comics at universities and festivals, and will be returning to teach at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference this summer. Find him at edward-gauvin.squarespace.com.