Grandpa’s fae was sealed much earlier, probably already back in 1848, in New England. During an explosion a devilishly big iron rod zinged into the noggin of a decent chap named Phineas Gage. It entered through his face and exited through the top of his skull.
Translation by Tim Wilkinson
Grandpa’s fae was sealed much earlier, probably already back in 1848, in New England. During an explosion a devilishly big iron rod zinged into the noggin of a decent chap named Phineas Gage. It entered through his face and exited through the top of his skull. In those days steam machines no longer counted as novelties, but for boilers to blow up was still a common occurrence. I have no idea exactly what the hell detonated next to Phineas’s conk, matbe a locomotive, butin any event it must have been a huge bang, because the pipe shot through his head like a rifle bullet. One minute Phineas was still negotiating ho many tons of coal should be brought from Lethbridge, Alberta, and the next minute, like a salt mine, he was standing motionless in the smoke with a sooty face, as inanely as if Chaplin had just pelted a custard pie in his face, in his head a foot-and-a-half or 60-cm length of boiler tube. It had gone through him with surgical precision and jointlessly, there was not even any seepage of blood. For a couple of days he just sat without aking ny move, just blinking his big, serious cow’s eyes and from time to time asking, “What happened?”
The others had no clue what to say.
The day approached when Phineas, bit by bit, would recover from the shock and fingered his chin.
“I need a shave,” he said, and at last gotto his feet and staggered off to th bathroom. The others chewed their nails with worrying about what would happen if the tube caught on the door jamb, but no, it didn’t. Phineas stepped through the door without a hitch, took out his shaving brush and set it down on one edge of the sink, turned on the tap, looked up and that, friend, was when it began to dawn on him that he had been sitting around for three days with a bloody great pole im his bonce. That was why he had felt no urge to get up, sleep or eat, though he had been made to drink from a beaker of water; that was why everything was so strange, with the whole world looking like he had never seen it before like that, in a live, direct broadcast. Or precisely the reverse: as if the world were composed of magazines that had been fairly skillfully cut and pasted.
A rare, but not unique case. I myself have seen the like, and moreover here in San Francisco. When I was a child, every summer a sea pelican whom we called Pablo used to turn up on the beach under Cliff House. A good few pelicans sit about in the bay area from spring on, but Pablo was a truly unusual creature. He was a spectacle is the same way that the multitude of sea lions on view at Pier 39 in Fisherman’s Wharf. One spring he returned to California with an arrow in his body. The arrow had entered under his crop, almost disappearing into the stomach, then, having travelled the length of the neck, popped out under his beak. On that account anyone could recognize Pablo from a long distance way, not due to the arrow but to his unusual, sashaying way of flying. The bright sparks ferreted out that they spent the winters in Paraguay, or more specifically the region between the Paraguay and the Pilcomayo Rivers as it was exclusively the Guaicurú Indian people who forayed in that part of the world and hunted with arrows of the kind he carried in his body.
The San Francisco Chronicle always reported on Pablo’s journeys. The old pelican got the most out of life, a big vagrant, vanishing and then turning up again a dozen times in just a single year. News of him was received at various times from Mexico and Florida, and on almost a weekly basis between Los Angeles and San Francisco. However much he roved, though, he was basically one of ours, a San Franciscan pelican.
Nature conservationists watched his every step. Many people regretted that he did not find a mate and lived a solitary life. After a while had elapsed a number of overzealous Greens got it into their heads to help Pablo in his disadvantaged situation by surgically removing the arrow so that he could regain his position a fully fledged member of the West coast pelican colony. A basin was set up for him under the rock-face at Cliff House, in the place where the surf of the Pacific Ocean runs its course for a good long way over the sands, where anyone could watch events in comfort from the widows of the pristine-white restaurant. At all hours of the day the basin waited the ever-hungry Pablo with fish. Two days later, to the greatest delight of the guests and patiently coffee-drinking scribes, he was captured and, with onlookers being held back by a police line, the arrow was removed—an operation from which Pablo dies the next day. After that he was stuffed, the arrow was reinserted, and he was exhibited in the museum of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
The boiler tube was also extracted from Phineas’s head, but, unlike Pablo, he got away with that, too. I have to say, it would have been kinder for him to kick the bucket. Both for him and for many thousands more.
He had a jet-black crew cut and short-cropped moustache, slightly sallow complexion, and coal-black eyes. His look radiated vitality, humour, and — believe it or not — love. Yet after the rod, to everyone’s amazement, was dug out of his skull, all of Phineas’s charm was lost, darkened to pitch, and he radiated fuck-all. He flipped out. He cursed like a docker; he became aggressive, quarrelsome, coarse, and ranting, a veritable scourge. He looked at everything with hatred. Phineas Gage was changed into a morose scoundrel by the boiler tube.
In itself, from my grandfather’s point of view, that would not have been disastrous, only Gage had a frail, Catholic little wife by the name of Deonna. She was, even at the best of times, jittery, chlorotic, blonde-haired woman, and now she was stymied by two things at once. For one thing, her husband had trudged off to work as a meek, standup fellow but returned as a turbocharged Nero. He turned into a shithead such as the whole neighbourhood had never seen the like for 25 years. For a second thing, Deonna was blocked not only by a changed husband but by the sheer figure. Earlier she ha not come across anything evil. Her most jarring recollection was when, a wafer had leaped out of the hands of Father Félibien on the second Sunday of Lent: it sprang onto the altar, struck the bench, bounced twice on the stone floor before the padre, by then scrambling on all fours after them, managed to clutchit. So, what about Deonna? Since she was sitting in the first row and she broke into a sweat, it passed through her mind that the wafer might roll down the alatar steps and in the end it would be up to her to catch it! But was she in any way permitted to do that? Hey presto, just like that, to grasp Christ’s body? Faced with the music hall of Lent, Deonna: some moments are a lot more dreadul than that. A tube from a diry boiler can bring about a change that not even hundred psalms will efface. Deonna found hersel in the entrace to Hell, and above its lintel the following was inscribed:
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Maybe even that would not have been enough to do the dirt on Pa, but Félibien advised the skinny little woman: skedaddle before even worse trouble comes alomg. That in itself shows how a Félibien, for all that he was a devout priest, was an enightened soul. Deonna had entered an eternal alliance in accordance with the rite of the Roman Catholic Church. That need not have stopped her taking to her heels; probably not even Phineas Gage would be all that cut up, only in her time of trouble Deonna clung more than ever to God and the Church as for her they represented her only solace. Thus, without the Church giving the nod it not have occurred to her to leave him. Félibien reassured her:
“My dear girl, trust in the Lord and write a letter to His Holy Father for the marriage t be considered as non-binding as the Devil has taken possession of your husband, and it will urely not leave him. Your lawful huband’s soul has now gone to damnation and is not serving the Mother Church but the empire of Beelzebub, the Underworld.
Enthused by the idea that perhaps, with Rome’s permission, she might be rid of Phineas with a clean concience, Deonna did indeed write, or rather got the parish priest to write. Félibien Suspected there waslittle chance of their receiving a favorable reply from Rome, since Pope Pius IX was by no means an enightened man. For that reason, so that the letter should be a dead cert, the priest first had Father Iñigo, the trendiest exorcist of the day, come by.
That step gave another nudge to grandfather’s fate. News of the impending exorcism carried the names of Phineas and Deonna further afield than had the frightening accident and miraculous escape combined.
Iñigo’s itsy-bitsy assistance was of no use, of course. Phineas would remain a malicious brute even if shot through the heart with a silver bullet. Getting wind of what was going on around him, he soaked up still more of it. He walloped Deonna so soundly that even if she had been literate dhe would have been unable to write any letter as bothe her hands were broken. Deonna convalesced in the parish, and althought it seemd unlikely that Phineas would seek her out, the parish and the church were guarded night and day by four strapping miners. She had not yet recuperated when said letter, in Fr Félibien’s elegant handwriting, was sent off to Pius IX. The letter even appeared in issue No. 78 of the Review of the History of British Medicine. Goblin forwarded that to me, and if it is of interest it ran as follows:
In earnest prayer to God, ask Your Holiness the Pope, blessed father, the vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ on earth, to grant dissolution from the vow I made to Phineas Gage and ask God to dissolve the holy bonds which you presented to us and man cannot interrupt. God sees that from the bottom of my heart and soul I love the man who received in Christ the name of Phineas Gage, but I stand with a pure heart before the Lord God and all his saints even when I assert that the man with whom I am obliged to share my bed is no longer Phineas Gage. I do not know, it being known only to God Almighty, what has become of Phineas Gage, but it is certain by now that this man is not the same as him.
Your Holiness may have heard the frightening case that Phineas Gage suffered in February of last year in which his body survived but in all certainty not his soul. As a result of an explosion, a piece of iron bored through his head. I know that God’s ways and ends are inscrutable, nor do I seek to get to the bottom of why things happened the way they did, or particularly how, but I am certain that his soul departed through the hole that the piece of iron punched in Phineas Gage’s head, and Lucifer and his dark host moved into its place. It may also be no chance that this was done to him by a steam engine, a machine which according to many derives from the devil. It was in vain that I turned to the Lord in prayer to return to me my husband’s soul; in vain that Father Iñigo, holiest priest of the Church of Christ, tried to reason with Lucifer; everything was in vain, the evil helper of Phineas Gage continues daily to exercise his frightening authority over me.
He strikes and beats me wherever he can reach me, whatever I do, and, like a wild stallion, he assails me whenever he fancies. Several times a day he keeps me bound up, even on the Lord’s day, he does not go to church, he holds the priest in contempt, he urinates on the crucifix and often masturbates on it. His willy is many times bigger than the old one and always at the ready, purple-black like a ripe aubergine, with a surface like sandpaper. Against my will Phineas Gage thrusts it into my mouth with such force that I choke and his untold sperm on every single occasion when I plead for nourishment or a sip of water.
Fr Iñigo’s recent intervention infuriated him so much that he broke both my arms, nd since I was left wiyhout any chance of resisting, he stuffed a rag into my mouth andin the dead of night dragged me off to the church, He tied me with a cattle tether to the altar, forced the monstrance open, thrust wafers and candles that had been put aside for first commicants