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a fictional truth
Posted on 2006.05.29 at 21:54Current Location: home on the strange
Current Mood:
sproink
Current Music: the ramones, les baxter
The following was emailed to an aquaintance who recently aquired first one new email address, then a second. I had to do something.
Oh just stop. Two email addresses? It's too confusing. Now I don't know which address to send harrassing messages to. It's not easy trying to convince people I'm a mean person, you know? It takes a lot out of me so I can only pretend to be mean to a few select people each day. You've actually been on my reserve list since Tess started working at Cingular. She currently gets the brunt of it, but she's getting wise to my techniques and is becoming more adept at dodging subtly disguised psychological manipulations.
I was going to start being mean to Dianna but she's just too nice and besides she's pretty big and could probably kick my ass if she got a mind to do so.
I could just pick all the people whose email addresses show up in your communications but most of them probably wouldn't get it that I'm actually being mean to them.
So that just leaves you.
Where do I start? I guess I just have to go for the throat and reveal your darkest family secret, that of your Great Great Uncle Nicola. A brilliant inventor and true man of the old country, his emotional fragility got the better of him, poisoned his life, and ultimately drove him to unleash a mutant vacuum cleaner onto a band of wandering gypsies one autumn night by the full of the moon, setting off Hitler's invasion of Poland in the process.
You thought no one would ever know. Your grandparents tried to keep it hidden. Your mother alluded to it only as a baseless rumor. I, however, have discovered the ugly, ugly truth.
It all begins in 1921, doesn't it? Nicola is graduating from the technical university in Warsaw, a brilliant electrical engineer and the Great Slavakian Hope of his people. A bright career lies ahead of him, promising amazing scientific discoveries, academic accolades, fame and prosperity. But on the afternoon of his graduation, the hand of fate, wearing a refrigerated glove of malicious intervention, places an unalterable bend in his path.
Nicola's half-brother, Gustavo, a perpetual embarrassment to the family, general micreant and well-known rabble-rouser, shows up at the graduation ceremony after having been missing for months in pursuit of hedonistic delights. He is in the company of two strange men who are dressed in garish, inappropriate clothing, all of them sporting gigantic mustaches. They are-gypsies!
Gustavo invites Nicola out to the gypsy encampment for an evening of celebration. It's a special night, you see, as the newly-crowned Gypsy Princess is to choose a mate from her myriad of suitors.
Nicola, sheltered and naive, has just spent six years of his life in the dour confines of academia, his only human interactions having been with the stodgy, gray men of the faculty and their sycophantic followings of students. He listens as Gustavo and his comrades tell of the care-free and thrill-a-minute life of a gypsy. They laugh heartily from time to time while telling their stories, occasionally stroking their thick, black mustaches. Nicola finds himself laughing along but somehow feels slightly inadequate when reaching to his upper lip to stroke his own, pencil-thin mustache.
The men tell him of wine, women and Turkish smoked herring. His vivid imagination begins to paint pictures from the descriptions he's hearing and it's, ah, well, ah, it's really exciting to him! Deep inside he realizes how drab his life has been up until now, that he's never, really, lived. In the darkest, most remote regions of his spirit a lust arises, long-hidden, long-denied, like some sallow-eyed middle child, starving for attention. It is the lust for pulse-pounding irresponsibility!
Compelled by the power of Gustavo's sociopathic persuasions, the colorful costumes of the two vagabonds, and, ignoring the advise of a faculty proctor to stay away from those idiots, Nicola accepts the invitation to go to the gypsy camp.
Evening draws near as the four men arrive at a clearing in the woods, where several clans of the tea leaf-reading, knife-throwing, concertina-pumping, tambourine-smacking scoff-law gypsies have circled their brightly painted wagons. As he watches a full moon rise, Nicola thinks that if the westward wagontrain migration in America had been designed by Gepetto De La Renta, this is how it would have appeared.
A crowd gathers around one of the wagons, centrally placed and decorated with large amounts of fringe just for the occasion. Gustavo confides to Nicola that this is the wagon of the Gypsy Princess and she will emerge shortly to begin the selection process.
"You, also, could compete for the hand of the Princess, my half brother. She is young, she is fickle, a flaming spark looking for dry wood on which to land. She could choose any one of us. Oh, did I mention she is beautiful beyond comparison? Here, just slip on this bandana. It's a sign of your eligibility."
Gustavo has produced a silk bandana from inside his vest. Black, with white polka-dots, it is much like the ones all the other young men standing about the wagon are wearing.
"Here, let me help you put it on correctly" Gustavo offers.
A strange feeling comes over Nicola as the bandana is knotted at the back of his head. It's as if consciousness itself, like a snake in spring, has shed its skin. Suddenly the sounds of the camp, previously just a din in the background, become like individual parts of an intricate cantata. The colors, textures and smells of the camp fold in as well, blending, playing off one another, like some great Pointilist painting. His fingers begin to tingle, the feeling then sparks up the length of his arms and into his body, like the electrostatic charges he's felt while working in close proximity to large electrical generators.
Nearby,a group of the gypsies has been standing around a campfire playing hypnoexotic music. The pulse of the sound has been building, building and, just as it reaches a climax, the door of the fringe-draped wagon slowly swings away from its frame. In a dramatic sweep, out steps the annointed Gypsy Princess-Carmen!
Gustavo had stated she was beautiful. He lied. She is more ravishing than any creature to have walked the face of the planet to this point. Her dark hair floats in waves about the stunning contours of her face, a face for which kings would pine and queens wilt in irretractable jealousy. Her limbs, her curved frame, her whole being glides in a motion so symetrical, so mathematically perfect as to erase all understanding of grace that has come before.
She steps to the field as bachelors form a semicircle around her. The music begins anew. Dancing, weaving, judging, she moves around the inside parameter of the line of suitors, stopping, looking, flirting, leaving aloof, moving on.
She comes to Nicola, standing there in the line, looking so out of place with his proper little mustache, still wearing his suit jacket from graduation and that ridiculous bandana on his head. She wants to laugh at his appearance but then catches a glance of his eyes. There's something deep there, something sensitive and vulnerable and perceptive, reflective. All she's known of men before this has been the brash, noisy gypsy boys. She's caught off guard, just for a moment, then remembers who she is, the Gypsy Princess! She maintains her composure, keeping up her dance. Giving in to a compulsion though, she can't resist. She extends one perfectly-formed hand toward him, their eyes unite, her tiny fingers touch his cheek.
An entire universe unfolds between the two of them right there, and they're the only ones that can see it. The cosmos itself whispers to both of them, shows them the condition of the human race, the relentless suffering brought about by humanity's own willingness not to grasp and understand, and says to them that things could be so, so different.
The two of them seem frozen in some weird bubble of accelerated reality. It lasts an eon, it lasts four seconds. She moves away.
The dance goes on most of the night. Carmen chooses finalists by dropping a small fragment of colored cloth in front of each selection. By pre-dawn, only three remain, Nicola, Gustavo and some rotund dork named Davy, all bad skin and a funny smell, who's still unmarried even though his family has a lot of connections. The pressure is on. Just as in any culture, it's all about the politics. Carmen's clan stands to gain a lot if she gets hooked up with Davy. She looks at her parents, both of them glaring at her, grimacing, urging as if to shout at their fullest volume, "Choose Davy, you moron!"
He is repugnant to her.
She looks at Nicola, looks into his eyes and can sense that other-worldliness again, can hear that voice again, "Things could be so, so different."
Torn, indesisive, inexperienced, the event has stopped being a game. In a mad instant of uncertainty, she chooses Gustavo.
A cheering crowd rushes forward to sweep the new couple away, like sports fans hoisting their game-winning heroes. Carmen looks back to see Nicola standing alone, crushed, the life in his heart slowly oozing out in a pool of grief at his feet. She yanks a brooch from around the front of her chemise and drops it to the ground.
The crowd moves on. Gustavo, in a daze like that of an animal struck by a vehicle, mortally wounded but not yet dead, picks up the brooch. He sees it's hinged and, pulling it open, discovers a lock of her hair. Trembling, he places it in a jacket pocket and turns, shattered, to return to the technical institute in Warsaw.
Bad news there awaits. High men in high places had waited for him that night to discuss his placement following graduation. Upon learning that Nicola had instead chosen to spend the evening in the company of those immoral gypsy scumbags to help them crown a new queen, a rash, punishing decision is made. Nicola is castigated, assigned to work in development at an obscure factory in Bulgaria that produces household appliances.
He accepts his new assignment without uttering a sound.
Throwing himself into his work, he finds clever ways to improve toasters and irons. He tries, tries his utmost to forget. For a while, he succeeds. Locking his mind to the tasks at hand, he soon produces new designs for clothes irons and toasters that are nothing short of a revelation, reducing weight and manufacturing cost while drastically improving efficiency and energy use.
With a bit of political pull, the factory director secures for Nicola a new position as head of development in the newly formed Department of Advanced Vacuum Cleaner and Radio Development Research!
A celebration is in order, so the factory director takes Nicola out for an evening. "You've been working too much, my boy. All work and no play makes Helmut a dull razor."
They go to a local cafe, all merriment and frolic. Nicola plays along, caught up in the revelry, thinking for a moment that maybe he really can move on. But fate must have her way. The staff at the cafe begins playing these records everyone has been raving about. They're by this new musical sensation, a blazing jazz guitarist and gypsy who goes by the name of Djingle Beerhaardt.
Then it all comes back to him, that night at the gypsy camp, the hypnoexotic music, that moment of altered reality, the touch of Carmen's hand upon his cheek. Something twists inside him, something heartless and bent on revenge. He returns to his apartment and opens the closet, removing the suit jacket he'd worn on graduation night. There, in the right pocket, untouched since he'd placed it there months before, is the brooch with a lock of Carmen's hair, that talisman of something that burned and transformed inside him but that he could never, ever possess.
Slowly a plan comes to the fore of his thought.
He spends years at the factory, pushing the limits of development and new ideas for radios and vacuum cleaners by day, receding into the darkened confines of his personal lab by night. Each new innovation that comes to light for the improvement of appliances is really, really, just for incorporation into his plot of malediction, to be carried out by a contraption at once beautiful, at once a curse, a machine born from love unrequited.
Years pass. Nicola declines several offers of advancement as he knows the increased responsibility would only defer him from his real purpose. His youth gone, nothing can change the brooding intellectual man with a mission that time has carved him into.
His machine goes through countless tests, trials and prototypes. On August 30th, 1939, he boxes up the instrument of his vengeance and boards a train headed to Poland. Disembarking in Warsaw, he stops by a factory where an old school chum is director. Presenting falsified documents of invoice, he procures a huge amount of electrical cable to supply power to his automaton.
The plan now fomented to its utmost, nothing can stop the execution of his intent. He has waited a long, long time. Tonight, tonight, you see, is the crowning of the new Gypsy Princess, daughter of Carmen and Gustavo.
He hires a lorry and driver to transport the cable and box containing his invention and heads for the woods. Stopping at the last village before the gypsy encampment, he again presents falsified documents, this time to the director of a local power station. Hooking his electrical cables into the power grid, the lorry moves toward the gypsy camp, trailing power cable behind. He rolls out four miles of extension cord before arriving at last on the outskirts of gypsy central, just as a full moon begins to rise.
The box unloaded, Nicola produces a wad of bills from inside his jacket, handing it to the driver. "Go back to Warsaw and forget you saw any of this."
The driver's heavy eyebrows leap up an octave in shear unbelief at the size of the wad.
A hardened grimace comes across Nicola's face, his left hand twitching a minimalistic gesture of dismissal with each of the two words he utters.
"Go."
"Now."
Without a word the driver climbs behind the wheel and departs, leaving Nicola, the box and the end of a long line of cable hidden behind an outcropping of trees within shouting distance of Gypsyopolis. A full moon begins her ascent.
Nicola uses a crowbar to make quick work of the shipping crate. Cord connections made, he brings to life the stand-by system of his life's work. She waits patiently, just as she had in his cloistered workshop. Pointing her in the right direction, checking his radio controls, he is ready. He produces a bandana from inside his vest, the same one that Gustavo gave him so many years ago on that fateful night. Wiping the sweat from his brow, peering across the short distance that separates him from the target of his derision, his thumb triggers the switch to activate the machine child he has named-Carmenita!
She moves. She moves on DC servo-driven wheels, years before their time from an engineering standpoint. Everything that she sees and feels feeds back through the remote control to Nicola. Glints of dulled, polished metal shine from her cylindrical body as vague light from the campfires bounces off her. Servo-controlled hand-like mechanisms move across ported openings in her weirdly sweeping vacuum cleaner nose as she controls the air to play a song by the gypsy jazz master, Djingle Beerhaardt. The song blends in perfect, hellish harmony with the high-pitched whine of Carmenita's draft. She rolls into the center of camp.
Festoons! Dozens of castanettes and colored bandanas, caught in the horrible suction of the mutant industrial vacuum cleaner, swirl about in the moonlight as if possessed. Screams of fright and amazement issue forth from each denizen of the camp as they realize that perhaps the Devil himself has stopped in to see what's shaking.
Children, women and dogs huddle, paralized with terror, beneath the wagons. Carmen is among them, fearing for the integrity of her hair.
The men of the camp, led by Gustavo, group together to fight Carmenita the Electro-Harpie, only to be repeatedly beaten back by the rapidly undulating hose of her gleaming nozzle or assailed by the constant stream of debris headed down the vacuum hose, only to be folded into compressed, hyper-dimensional space built deep inside the robot.
Yes, it's working, working! Nicola had devoted the entirety of his genius, the whole of his life to this night. He reads the meters on his controller, the timing must be perfect. Technicians of this age or even the distant future may only dream of building a creation as perfect, as insidiously integrated, as Carmenita. The plan is that when Carmenita has ingested enough inert matter, a chain reaction will begin and the hyper-space fold built into her internal compartment will suddenly be able to ingest every molecule of inert matter within one hundred meters, leaving living tissue untouched. The result, of course, is that the entire gypsy nation will be stripped bare of everything it's ever known, just the way Nicola was that night eighteen years ago, ruining his entire life.
But as the critical moment approaches, an unforeseen event takes place. The door to a fringe-covered gypsy wagon located in the center of the camp swings away from it's frame. Everyone in the camp gasps in fear, doesn't she know enough to stay within the safety of her wagon? No harm must befall her. A second passes, then what seems a century in anticipation, when a figure appears from the confines of the wagon. Out onto the field steps the Gypsy Princess-Wanda!
Her mother had been the manifestation of grace and beauty itself, but now that book, too, must be rewritten. The world's finest artists would shave their own hands off with dulled garden trowels at the realization that, if they lived a thousand years, nothing they ever created could hold a candle to Wanda's fairness. Gravity itself melts away in aquiecense at her very presence. The world's most sought-after flowers, nay, the essence of the symmetry of loveliness itself, longs to be named after her. To put it briefly, she's a honey.
Unlike her mother, hiding beneath one of the wagons, Wanda knows no fear. On the contrary, she's fascinated with machines, and decides this one must be her wedding present.
She approaches. Plucking a drifting fez from the sea of air that's formed a whirlpool of gypsy accoutrements drifting around the camp, she places it on her head and begins a dance around Carmenita.
Carmenita's special circuitry includes a scent analyzer. When she catches a whiff of Wanda, well, funny things happen. Part of the programming Nicola had built into her includes recognition. He used the hair sample Carmen had dropped in the locket to make sure an extra level of vengeance was placed on her family, to make sure Carmenita ingests the hair. But that's not what happens. Carmenita, a hideously complex piece of machinery, recognizes Wanda as kin! They dance together. Carmenita kicks up the rhythm, mutating the musical lines and passages out into be-bop, even though it hasn't been invented yet.
In a mesmerized trance brought about by the the sight as scintilating patterns of castanettes, bandanas and the occasional tambourine spin orbit-like around the camp, over the cooking fires, through the quaintly painted horse-drawn wagons, Wanda dances faster. Carmenita plays faster, too, steadily improvising, something Nicola had not programmed her to do.
Nicola jams furiously at the controls of the remote, vainly attempting to induce Carmenita to complete her mission. She does not respond. Her music becomes wilder, more intense, as do the air currents drifting around the camp. All fear is vanquishes as the entire gypsy population joins the dance.
As if from nowhere, an errant fireplace shovel, swirling through the moving air at high speed, whacks Wanda across the back of the head. She stumbles forward, dazed, her arm extending to help her maintain balance. The handle of the shovel falls perfectly into the grasp of her hand. Still stumbling, woozy, she falls toward Carmenita, unintentionally holding the shovel like a fencing foil. The broken shovel end plunges straight into one of Carmenita's input ports, cross-wiring key components of her circuitry. A massive feedback begins, made stronger by the energy of the dimensionally-folded inert matter compacted into Carmenita's belly. The feedback leaps through the four miles of extension cord, traveling at bizarre frequencies and amperes hitherto unknown in AC current. When it hits the power station at the village, it spills out into the entire power grid, plunging three quarters of Poland into a blackout.
At that very moment in Berlin, Germany, Adolph Hitler is having second thoughts. Maybe conquering the world isn't such a good idea after all. He's just consulted his psychic, who tells him beware, don't strike unless there is a sure sign.
A knock at his chamber door, and into the room is issued a young lieutenant.
"Mein Fuhrer, a report from the border, the entire country of Poland seems just to have been plunged into an unexplainable blackout. They have no electricity!"
The rest, as they say, is history.
Oh just stop. Two email addresses? It's too confusing. Now I don't know which address to send harrassing messages to. It's not easy trying to convince people I'm a mean person, you know? It takes a lot out of me so I can only pretend to be mean to a few select people each day. You've actually been on my reserve list since Tess started working at Cingular. She currently gets the brunt of it, but she's getting wise to my techniques and is becoming more adept at dodging subtly disguised psychological manipulations.
I was going to start being mean to Dianna but she's just too nice and besides she's pretty big and could probably kick my ass if she got a mind to do so.
I could just pick all the people whose email addresses show up in your communications but most of them probably wouldn't get it that I'm actually being mean to them.
So that just leaves you.
Where do I start? I guess I just have to go for the throat and reveal your darkest family secret, that of your Great Great Uncle Nicola. A brilliant inventor and true man of the old country, his emotional fragility got the better of him, poisoned his life, and ultimately drove him to unleash a mutant vacuum cleaner onto a band of wandering gypsies one autumn night by the full of the moon, setting off Hitler's invasion of Poland in the process.
You thought no one would ever know. Your grandparents tried to keep it hidden. Your mother alluded to it only as a baseless rumor. I, however, have discovered the ugly, ugly truth.
It all begins in 1921, doesn't it? Nicola is graduating from the technical university in Warsaw, a brilliant electrical engineer and the Great Slavakian Hope of his people. A bright career lies ahead of him, promising amazing scientific discoveries, academic accolades, fame and prosperity. But on the afternoon of his graduation, the hand of fate, wearing a refrigerated glove of malicious intervention, places an unalterable bend in his path.
Nicola's half-brother, Gustavo, a perpetual embarrassment to the family, general micreant and well-known rabble-rouser, shows up at the graduation ceremony after having been missing for months in pursuit of hedonistic delights. He is in the company of two strange men who are dressed in garish, inappropriate clothing, all of them sporting gigantic mustaches. They are-gypsies!
Gustavo invites Nicola out to the gypsy encampment for an evening of celebration. It's a special night, you see, as the newly-crowned Gypsy Princess is to choose a mate from her myriad of suitors.
Nicola, sheltered and naive, has just spent six years of his life in the dour confines of academia, his only human interactions having been with the stodgy, gray men of the faculty and their sycophantic followings of students. He listens as Gustavo and his comrades tell of the care-free and thrill-a-minute life of a gypsy. They laugh heartily from time to time while telling their stories, occasionally stroking their thick, black mustaches. Nicola finds himself laughing along but somehow feels slightly inadequate when reaching to his upper lip to stroke his own, pencil-thin mustache.
The men tell him of wine, women and Turkish smoked herring. His vivid imagination begins to paint pictures from the descriptions he's hearing and it's, ah, well, ah, it's really exciting to him! Deep inside he realizes how drab his life has been up until now, that he's never, really, lived. In the darkest, most remote regions of his spirit a lust arises, long-hidden, long-denied, like some sallow-eyed middle child, starving for attention. It is the lust for pulse-pounding irresponsibility!
Compelled by the power of Gustavo's sociopathic persuasions, the colorful costumes of the two vagabonds, and, ignoring the advise of a faculty proctor to stay away from those idiots, Nicola accepts the invitation to go to the gypsy camp.
Evening draws near as the four men arrive at a clearing in the woods, where several clans of the tea leaf-reading, knife-throwing, concertina-pumping, tambourine-smacking scoff-law gypsies have circled their brightly painted wagons. As he watches a full moon rise, Nicola thinks that if the westward wagontrain migration in America had been designed by Gepetto De La Renta, this is how it would have appeared.
A crowd gathers around one of the wagons, centrally placed and decorated with large amounts of fringe just for the occasion. Gustavo confides to Nicola that this is the wagon of the Gypsy Princess and she will emerge shortly to begin the selection process.
"You, also, could compete for the hand of the Princess, my half brother. She is young, she is fickle, a flaming spark looking for dry wood on which to land. She could choose any one of us. Oh, did I mention she is beautiful beyond comparison? Here, just slip on this bandana. It's a sign of your eligibility."
Gustavo has produced a silk bandana from inside his vest. Black, with white polka-dots, it is much like the ones all the other young men standing about the wagon are wearing.
"Here, let me help you put it on correctly" Gustavo offers.
A strange feeling comes over Nicola as the bandana is knotted at the back of his head. It's as if consciousness itself, like a snake in spring, has shed its skin. Suddenly the sounds of the camp, previously just a din in the background, become like individual parts of an intricate cantata. The colors, textures and smells of the camp fold in as well, blending, playing off one another, like some great Pointilist painting. His fingers begin to tingle, the feeling then sparks up the length of his arms and into his body, like the electrostatic charges he's felt while working in close proximity to large electrical generators.
Nearby,a group of the gypsies has been standing around a campfire playing hypnoexotic music. The pulse of the sound has been building, building and, just as it reaches a climax, the door of the fringe-draped wagon slowly swings away from its frame. In a dramatic sweep, out steps the annointed Gypsy Princess-Carmen!
Gustavo had stated she was beautiful. He lied. She is more ravishing than any creature to have walked the face of the planet to this point. Her dark hair floats in waves about the stunning contours of her face, a face for which kings would pine and queens wilt in irretractable jealousy. Her limbs, her curved frame, her whole being glides in a motion so symetrical, so mathematically perfect as to erase all understanding of grace that has come before.
She steps to the field as bachelors form a semicircle around her. The music begins anew. Dancing, weaving, judging, she moves around the inside parameter of the line of suitors, stopping, looking, flirting, leaving aloof, moving on.
She comes to Nicola, standing there in the line, looking so out of place with his proper little mustache, still wearing his suit jacket from graduation and that ridiculous bandana on his head. She wants to laugh at his appearance but then catches a glance of his eyes. There's something deep there, something sensitive and vulnerable and perceptive, reflective. All she's known of men before this has been the brash, noisy gypsy boys. She's caught off guard, just for a moment, then remembers who she is, the Gypsy Princess! She maintains her composure, keeping up her dance. Giving in to a compulsion though, she can't resist. She extends one perfectly-formed hand toward him, their eyes unite, her tiny fingers touch his cheek.
An entire universe unfolds between the two of them right there, and they're the only ones that can see it. The cosmos itself whispers to both of them, shows them the condition of the human race, the relentless suffering brought about by humanity's own willingness not to grasp and understand, and says to them that things could be so, so different.
The two of them seem frozen in some weird bubble of accelerated reality. It lasts an eon, it lasts four seconds. She moves away.
The dance goes on most of the night. Carmen chooses finalists by dropping a small fragment of colored cloth in front of each selection. By pre-dawn, only three remain, Nicola, Gustavo and some rotund dork named Davy, all bad skin and a funny smell, who's still unmarried even though his family has a lot of connections. The pressure is on. Just as in any culture, it's all about the politics. Carmen's clan stands to gain a lot if she gets hooked up with Davy. She looks at her parents, both of them glaring at her, grimacing, urging as if to shout at their fullest volume, "Choose Davy, you moron!"
He is repugnant to her.
She looks at Nicola, looks into his eyes and can sense that other-worldliness again, can hear that voice again, "Things could be so, so different."
Torn, indesisive, inexperienced, the event has stopped being a game. In a mad instant of uncertainty, she chooses Gustavo.
A cheering crowd rushes forward to sweep the new couple away, like sports fans hoisting their game-winning heroes. Carmen looks back to see Nicola standing alone, crushed, the life in his heart slowly oozing out in a pool of grief at his feet. She yanks a brooch from around the front of her chemise and drops it to the ground.
The crowd moves on. Gustavo, in a daze like that of an animal struck by a vehicle, mortally wounded but not yet dead, picks up the brooch. He sees it's hinged and, pulling it open, discovers a lock of her hair. Trembling, he places it in a jacket pocket and turns, shattered, to return to the technical institute in Warsaw.
Bad news there awaits. High men in high places had waited for him that night to discuss his placement following graduation. Upon learning that Nicola had instead chosen to spend the evening in the company of those immoral gypsy scumbags to help them crown a new queen, a rash, punishing decision is made. Nicola is castigated, assigned to work in development at an obscure factory in Bulgaria that produces household appliances.
He accepts his new assignment without uttering a sound.
Throwing himself into his work, he finds clever ways to improve toasters and irons. He tries, tries his utmost to forget. For a while, he succeeds. Locking his mind to the tasks at hand, he soon produces new designs for clothes irons and toasters that are nothing short of a revelation, reducing weight and manufacturing cost while drastically improving efficiency and energy use.
With a bit of political pull, the factory director secures for Nicola a new position as head of development in the newly formed Department of Advanced Vacuum Cleaner and Radio Development Research!
A celebration is in order, so the factory director takes Nicola out for an evening. "You've been working too much, my boy. All work and no play makes Helmut a dull razor."
They go to a local cafe, all merriment and frolic. Nicola plays along, caught up in the revelry, thinking for a moment that maybe he really can move on. But fate must have her way. The staff at the cafe begins playing these records everyone has been raving about. They're by this new musical sensation, a blazing jazz guitarist and gypsy who goes by the name of Djingle Beerhaardt.
Then it all comes back to him, that night at the gypsy camp, the hypnoexotic music, that moment of altered reality, the touch of Carmen's hand upon his cheek. Something twists inside him, something heartless and bent on revenge. He returns to his apartment and opens the closet, removing the suit jacket he'd worn on graduation night. There, in the right pocket, untouched since he'd placed it there months before, is the brooch with a lock of Carmen's hair, that talisman of something that burned and transformed inside him but that he could never, ever possess.
Slowly a plan comes to the fore of his thought.
He spends years at the factory, pushing the limits of development and new ideas for radios and vacuum cleaners by day, receding into the darkened confines of his personal lab by night. Each new innovation that comes to light for the improvement of appliances is really, really, just for incorporation into his plot of malediction, to be carried out by a contraption at once beautiful, at once a curse, a machine born from love unrequited.
Years pass. Nicola declines several offers of advancement as he knows the increased responsibility would only defer him from his real purpose. His youth gone, nothing can change the brooding intellectual man with a mission that time has carved him into.
His machine goes through countless tests, trials and prototypes. On August 30th, 1939, he boxes up the instrument of his vengeance and boards a train headed to Poland. Disembarking in Warsaw, he stops by a factory where an old school chum is director. Presenting falsified documents of invoice, he procures a huge amount of electrical cable to supply power to his automaton.
The plan now fomented to its utmost, nothing can stop the execution of his intent. He has waited a long, long time. Tonight, tonight, you see, is the crowning of the new Gypsy Princess, daughter of Carmen and Gustavo.
He hires a lorry and driver to transport the cable and box containing his invention and heads for the woods. Stopping at the last village before the gypsy encampment, he again presents falsified documents, this time to the director of a local power station. Hooking his electrical cables into the power grid, the lorry moves toward the gypsy camp, trailing power cable behind. He rolls out four miles of extension cord before arriving at last on the outskirts of gypsy central, just as a full moon begins to rise.
The box unloaded, Nicola produces a wad of bills from inside his jacket, handing it to the driver. "Go back to Warsaw and forget you saw any of this."
The driver's heavy eyebrows leap up an octave in shear unbelief at the size of the wad.
A hardened grimace comes across Nicola's face, his left hand twitching a minimalistic gesture of dismissal with each of the two words he utters.
"Go."
"Now."
Without a word the driver climbs behind the wheel and departs, leaving Nicola, the box and the end of a long line of cable hidden behind an outcropping of trees within shouting distance of Gypsyopolis. A full moon begins her ascent.
Nicola uses a crowbar to make quick work of the shipping crate. Cord connections made, he brings to life the stand-by system of his life's work. She waits patiently, just as she had in his cloistered workshop. Pointing her in the right direction, checking his radio controls, he is ready. He produces a bandana from inside his vest, the same one that Gustavo gave him so many years ago on that fateful night. Wiping the sweat from his brow, peering across the short distance that separates him from the target of his derision, his thumb triggers the switch to activate the machine child he has named-Carmenita!
She moves. She moves on DC servo-driven wheels, years before their time from an engineering standpoint. Everything that she sees and feels feeds back through the remote control to Nicola. Glints of dulled, polished metal shine from her cylindrical body as vague light from the campfires bounces off her. Servo-controlled hand-like mechanisms move across ported openings in her weirdly sweeping vacuum cleaner nose as she controls the air to play a song by the gypsy jazz master, Djingle Beerhaardt. The song blends in perfect, hellish harmony with the high-pitched whine of Carmenita's draft. She rolls into the center of camp.
Festoons! Dozens of castanettes and colored bandanas, caught in the horrible suction of the mutant industrial vacuum cleaner, swirl about in the moonlight as if possessed. Screams of fright and amazement issue forth from each denizen of the camp as they realize that perhaps the Devil himself has stopped in to see what's shaking.
Children, women and dogs huddle, paralized with terror, beneath the wagons. Carmen is among them, fearing for the integrity of her hair.
The men of the camp, led by Gustavo, group together to fight Carmenita the Electro-Harpie, only to be repeatedly beaten back by the rapidly undulating hose of her gleaming nozzle or assailed by the constant stream of debris headed down the vacuum hose, only to be folded into compressed, hyper-dimensional space built deep inside the robot.
Yes, it's working, working! Nicola had devoted the entirety of his genius, the whole of his life to this night. He reads the meters on his controller, the timing must be perfect. Technicians of this age or even the distant future may only dream of building a creation as perfect, as insidiously integrated, as Carmenita. The plan is that when Carmenita has ingested enough inert matter, a chain reaction will begin and the hyper-space fold built into her internal compartment will suddenly be able to ingest every molecule of inert matter within one hundred meters, leaving living tissue untouched. The result, of course, is that the entire gypsy nation will be stripped bare of everything it's ever known, just the way Nicola was that night eighteen years ago, ruining his entire life.
But as the critical moment approaches, an unforeseen event takes place. The door to a fringe-covered gypsy wagon located in the center of the camp swings away from it's frame. Everyone in the camp gasps in fear, doesn't she know enough to stay within the safety of her wagon? No harm must befall her. A second passes, then what seems a century in anticipation, when a figure appears from the confines of the wagon. Out onto the field steps the Gypsy Princess-Wanda!
Her mother had been the manifestation of grace and beauty itself, but now that book, too, must be rewritten. The world's finest artists would shave their own hands off with dulled garden trowels at the realization that, if they lived a thousand years, nothing they ever created could hold a candle to Wanda's fairness. Gravity itself melts away in aquiecense at her very presence. The world's most sought-after flowers, nay, the essence of the symmetry of loveliness itself, longs to be named after her. To put it briefly, she's a honey.
Unlike her mother, hiding beneath one of the wagons, Wanda knows no fear. On the contrary, she's fascinated with machines, and decides this one must be her wedding present.
She approaches. Plucking a drifting fez from the sea of air that's formed a whirlpool of gypsy accoutrements drifting around the camp, she places it on her head and begins a dance around Carmenita.
Carmenita's special circuitry includes a scent analyzer. When she catches a whiff of Wanda, well, funny things happen. Part of the programming Nicola had built into her includes recognition. He used the hair sample Carmen had dropped in the locket to make sure an extra level of vengeance was placed on her family, to make sure Carmenita ingests the hair. But that's not what happens. Carmenita, a hideously complex piece of machinery, recognizes Wanda as kin! They dance together. Carmenita kicks up the rhythm, mutating the musical lines and passages out into be-bop, even though it hasn't been invented yet.
In a mesmerized trance brought about by the the sight as scintilating patterns of castanettes, bandanas and the occasional tambourine spin orbit-like around the camp, over the cooking fires, through the quaintly painted horse-drawn wagons, Wanda dances faster. Carmenita plays faster, too, steadily improvising, something Nicola had not programmed her to do.
Nicola jams furiously at the controls of the remote, vainly attempting to induce Carmenita to complete her mission. She does not respond. Her music becomes wilder, more intense, as do the air currents drifting around the camp. All fear is vanquishes as the entire gypsy population joins the dance.
As if from nowhere, an errant fireplace shovel, swirling through the moving air at high speed, whacks Wanda across the back of the head. She stumbles forward, dazed, her arm extending to help her maintain balance. The handle of the shovel falls perfectly into the grasp of her hand. Still stumbling, woozy, she falls toward Carmenita, unintentionally holding the shovel like a fencing foil. The broken shovel end plunges straight into one of Carmenita's input ports, cross-wiring key components of her circuitry. A massive feedback begins, made stronger by the energy of the dimensionally-folded inert matter compacted into Carmenita's belly. The feedback leaps through the four miles of extension cord, traveling at bizarre frequencies and amperes hitherto unknown in AC current. When it hits the power station at the village, it spills out into the entire power grid, plunging three quarters of Poland into a blackout.
At that very moment in Berlin, Germany, Adolph Hitler is having second thoughts. Maybe conquering the world isn't such a good idea after all. He's just consulted his psychic, who tells him beware, don't strike unless there is a sure sign.
A knock at his chamber door, and into the room is issued a young lieutenant.
"Mein Fuhrer, a report from the border, the entire country of Poland seems just to have been plunged into an unexplainable blackout. They have no electricity!"
The rest, as they say, is history.
bitchy