Beneath Unwashed Robes
Being a Prophet: Noel's autobio­graphical novel

 

Front cover

Prologue: Awakening
1: Discovery
2: Adolescence
3: Submergence
4: Preparation
5: Escalation
6: Recreation
7: Inflation
8: Prophetry
9: Preachery
10: Diary
11: Trial

Chapter 7: Inflation

We were speeding through the night, the blue whale and I. Faster and faster we went. The wind tore at my neatly trimmed moustache, twisting it into waves, spirals, Moebius bands and finally a shape that could only be described as escheresque. I was still in the weird kind of trance the vision of Morambar had put me in, and so I spoke little. A long time passed. Finally I shouted against the wind: "Where are we? We must be far from Jamaica by now!"

"Actually, we're a few hundred meters off its coast", the blue whale roared. "You haven't given any directions, so I just swam circles."

"Oh", I said sheepishly and looked to the right, where the Hawaiian businessman's resort whizzed past me, its lights blinking in the pattern I had composed. "Well, then go, um, this way!" I waved into the opposite direction.

"Okay", shouted the whale, and off we went.

Soon after we had left the Jamaican coast for good, the sweet exotic scents of the night faded and gave way to the stale, cold greyness of the nearing dawn. It was the time for regrets, and I started to feel uneasy. I had no idea what Morambar wanted from me, where he wanted me to go and where I should build that temple he had been speaking of. And I missed Bombadillia already.

To suppress these nagging feelings, I decided to engage in a little conversation with my new-found companion. "So who are you?" I asked the whale.

"My name is Cindy", the whale replied. "Cindy the Blue Whale", she added needlessly.

"So you're a girl", I concluded.

"You didn't notice? I thought this gave it away", Cindy said and shook the gigantic blonde pigtail wig on her forehead.

"Of course." I nodded. "And how do you fit into all of this? What is your relation to Morambar and his army?"

"Oh, I run errands for him occasionally", Cindy replied, "But once I was the girlfriend of someone you know. Pseudonymus Roghater."

I burst into sudden laughter. "What?" I gasped.

"Yes. That of course was before he contracted this horrible spam sickness. Which, by the way, was inflicted on him by an evil scientist in a twisted experiment, so Pseudo is completely without guilt for that... Hey, what's so funny?" Cindy wanted to know.

"Well, you're like..." I started. "I mean, he's a jellyfish, and you're..."

"A whale. Is there anything wrong with that?" Cindy's voice took a certain threatening undertone.

"Well, I know", I giggled, "I know of course you both live underwater, usually... and you have no weight there... Still, I wonder how you managed to..."

The tearing wind ceased, for Cindy had come to a full stop. "Are you saying I'm fat?" she asked with a cold voice.

I was laughing almost too hard to answer that question. "Well..." I gasped. "For a whale, I suppose not... but for a man-sized jellyfish, oh my God..."

A cold wave splashed against my feet, tearing me out of my joyful mood. I jumped up. "What's that?" I complained.

Cindy did not answer. She had begun to dive, and I was standing in water that was rising at an alarming rate.

"Hey, don't do that", I demanded. No reply came, and the water splashed against my thighs.

"Come up again!" I yelled. The water gargled to my belly. "I take it back. You're not fat. You're just... let's say, you have heavy bones, and..." It gripped at my breast with cold, wet hands. "You're a supermodel!" I squeaked in panic. "You could run the catwalk in Versace underwear! You could hide in the shadow Kate Moss casts at noon in equatorial regions! Sparrows carry you to their nests because they mistake you for a stick!" It was ironic, I thought, for after all, I was a trained underwater warrior - but I had no beard anymore to store air in. And the pull of Cindy's massive body would drag me far enough underwater to drown me. The whale did not react to my pleas at all. It seemed that Morambar would soon have to look out for a new prophet.

And as I rose to my toetips and the waves splashed against my chin, a thought whizzed through my mind. Prophets used to do amazing things, like healing people with a touch or turning water into wine. When he destined me to be his prophet, had Udunvagor also bestowed super powers upon me? Would I be able to call upon him for help? It was worth a try. I was not really interested in turning the ocean into wine, that would just have left stains on my clothes. All I wanted was that damn sulking whale girl to rise.

At the top of my voice I shouted at Cindy: "Rise! By Morambar Udunvagor, I command thee! Rise! Tolkien, I call upon thee, make her rise!"

I held my breath. I was balancing on the back of the whale, while the water gargled around my lower lip, and counted the seconds. The descent had stopped. Cindy was not going down anymore. And then, slowly, the water receded. My chin fell dry, then my breast, and finally the back of the whale broke through the water surface. I was standing there, soaked to the skin, my heart beating wildly. I shook off some clams and one young yellowfin tuna which had crept into my clothes. "Thank you", I sighed and did not know if I was talking to Udunvagor or Cindy.

"What are you doing?" Cindy roared as soon as her mouth appeared over the water. "What is this wizardry?"

"What... wizardry?" I managed to say.

"My belly!" shouted Cindy. "I suddenly feel so... I dunno... full." She burped, then she blew a little air our her breathing hole, but that seemed to give her no relief.

"You mean you're still trying to dive?" I asked, alarmed.

"Yes, only I can't!" answered Cindy. "There's too much air in me right now. Too much buoyancy. Whoah, I didn't feel that way since Pseudonymus last cooked me his famous bean soup." She burped again, then she blushed. "Sorry, I don't usually do this in public... burppp... I'm quite well-mannered usually, but I just can't help it..."

I looked down. The whale was higher above the water than ever. I also thought that she had become, well, more 'heavily-built' than before. In other words, she was rapidly expanding. In still other words, she was looking more and more like a balloon.

And then, exactly like a balloon, Cindy rose from the water and floated into the air. "I don't think this is right at all!" yelled Cindy in panic, and for once, I agreed with her. The inflated whale shot up rapidly, caught by favorable winds, and it was a matter of seconds until the water surface glittered hundreds of meters below us.

And there was another thing that added to my discomfort. Though she was now almost perfectly spherical, her belly - where the expansion had begun - was still the lightest part of Cindy, and that meant, she slowly rolled to her side until the belly pointed upwards. I, stuck on her back, tried to clamber up to her former underside, but Cindy's skin was wet and slippery, and I could not get a secure hold. I tried grabbing her left flipper, but missed it, slipped down - and fell.

"I just... hope this thing is glued to your head somehow", I gasped as I dangled in the air, fidgeting around helplessly with my legs, clinging to the outermost end of Cindy's huge blonde pigtail, which I had grabbed in the last possible second. Beneath me, it was a long way down to the sea. I had water beneath me, surely, but if you fall from a height of about five hundred meters, it does not matter whether you land on water or a brick floor.

"Make it stop!" howled the whale. "I'm afraid of heights!"

I fidgeted some more. I sent a prayer to Tolkien and then another one to Morambar, demanding Cindy's return to the water. But obviously my new-found power was exhausted for now. Finally I gave it up and thought of more practical improvements to my situation. I started to move my legs more rythmically, and the pigtail started to swing violently. With a stunt that would have made Tarzan proud I managed to swing up to Cindy's belly and land on it, praying that she was not ticklish there.

With something resembling ground under my feet, I calmed down a little and actually started to enjoy the flight. Even Cindy, once she had overcome her initial fear, relaxed and accepted this new experience. A strong north-easter blew, and we were pushed along faster than anyone could have traveled in the water. My clothes soon dried in the wind and the warm sun, getting only slightly moist again when we whizzed through a huge white cloud. We almost bumped into an angel who was sitting on top of it and practised playing the harp, but his angry and rather un-angelic curses soon faded behind us. We overtook a guy in a balloon, who seemed slightly frustrated - I later learned he was Steve Fossett, and we had stolen the new speed record he had targetted. When I became hungry, I caught a swallow and ate it raw. At noon, I lay down for a little siesta. I knotted the end of the pigtail to my moustache, just to be on the safe side, but the ride was so smooth I was in no danger of falling.

When I woke up, it was much colder, and the sun had set in the west. We had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and were floating over Europe. I started to wonder how long Cindy's inflated state would last - maybe it was just imagination or the different lighting, but I thought she had become a bit less rotund, and the ground was a bit closer. But still the ride was uneventful, and I searched my pockets for something to do. I found a copy of Horus Engels' "Commentaries on the use of irregular verbs in Lord of the Rings and the hidden messages they form", and I read a few pages while Scandinavia drifted by beneath us. It was dark, but the book had been written with luminous ink to be readable underwater. It was also written in an obscure dialect of Old Hittite, which made it slightly tedious to read, but I had lots of time after all.

Further and further north we went. Somewhere over the plains of Siberia, snow started to fall around us. An eery red and green light flickered over the night sky, as the aurora greeted us in its homeland. An equally eery blue light on the ground indicated we had reached Novaja Zemlja, the ancient nuclear testing area of the then still existing Soviet Union. Absent-mindedly, I started to hum a tune of an almost forgotten German pop starlet named Maus Bunt. "Novaja Zemlja, es waren keine Semmeln da..."

"Watch out!" cried Cindy suddenly. Something loud and noisy whizzed past us. A few hundred meters over us, it exploded in a blinding ball of fire.

"Dammit!" Cindy yelled. "Anti-aircraft missiles! Hold on tight!" She flapped her fluke and made a sharp turn. Another rocket narrowly missed us. The explosion was so close that it singed my moustache.

"Let's get out of here!" I shouted. But, alas, an upside-down inflated blue whale is not nearly as manoeuvrable as, say, a flying brick. The third missile detonated so close that Cindy was thrown around in the air and rotated uncontrollably. I howled in pain as I slipped off her back and ended up hanging on my moustache, which was still knotted to the pigtail. Then, with a very unpleasant tearing sound, a large part of my moustache was ripped out. Seperated from my safety line, I fell once more, and this time for real. "Tolkien, save meeee!" I wailed as I spiralled towards the ground.

***

I later learned that Cindy was all right. The Soviet recruits on the missile launcher were young and inexperienced, their fingers were frozen and their stomachs full of vodka. They fired a few more shots, but again they failed to hit her. More southerly winds blew Cindy back into central Siberia, where she finally ran out of air over Norilsk and landed smoothly on a field outside the town. After a short walk into the city she was able to catch a train back to the sea. She still got into quite an argument with the station officials, who wanted to make her pay for all the fifteen seats she occupied, while Cindy insisted that, being a single person, she only needed a single ticket. This, however, was little more than a nuisance compared with being inflated or shot at.

***

I, meanwhile, was in a slightly more dire situation, spinning towards the ground at an alarming speed. I do not know how long I fell, because I was not really in the mood to stop the time. But fortunately, by then we were close enough to the ground to make the fall non-lethal, if the surface to land on was soft enough. And it was. For with a huge splash I landed in what I had expected least - a colossal iron pot full of mashed blueberries.

I gasped and struggled, then I carefully got up. I noticed the pot, at least five metres wide, was shallow enough that I could stand in it, immersed in blueberries up to my neck. The pain in my right foot indicated that I had a strained ankle, and my upper lip was sore and bleeding all over my utterly ruined moustache. But otherwise, I was fine.

About two dozens of people were standing around the pot. Most were middle-aged women, typical babushkas of the Siberian countryside, burly and tanned from a life of hard work on the fields. All were sprinkled with blueberry juice from my impact and were obviously quite angry.

"You fool! You ruined our annual Blueberry Harvest Celebration!" yelled one of them with a rural Russian accent. "Now look at the mess!"

"Did you at least wash your feet before jumping in?" clamoured another.

I stuttered an apology, but it fell on deaf ears. The atmosphere was getting more and more violent, but fortunately I was saved by a small man with receding hair and a fine suit. He and a big, grim-looking guy - his bodyguard, I supposed - were the only males present. "Now, now, comrades!" the man said. "Let us not forget our manners. I am sure this was just an accident. Boris Nikolayevich" -he turned to the big man- "hand this comrade a towel, and me too. And then we will sit down and talk. I like talks. I am not a violent man, as you all know."

"Thank you", I managed to say. The man wiped the blueberries off his face with the towel the big guy gave him, but the mash left a clearly visible stain on the right side of his forehead. From experience with the blueberry jam my mother made when I was a child, I knew that it would be extraordinarily hard to get rid of this stain again, especially with the kind of soap that was produced in the final years of the Soviet Union. However, it seems not to have impeded this man's further career. Shortly after this incident, he rose to be the leader of the Soviet Union, which he then disbanded for reasons that never became clear for me. Maybe he just wanted better soap.

The small man helped me to climb out of the pot, and we made our way to a shabby hut that was standing nearby. There I cleaned myself as far as possible and dressed in the only garment I found, a white nightgown from one of the babushkas. It was much too wide and hung almost to the floor - just like a robe. "I like this", I said to myself. "Fits for a prophet, I think. I will keep this style. Much room to store stuff, too", I added when I found a pocket which contained a small flask. I opened it and found out that it contained the best vodka I had ever tasted. "Here, take a sip", I said to the burly bodyguard.

"Uh, no thanks", the bodyguard growled with a very deep Russian voice. "I'm a teetotaller. Never drank alkohol. Bad stuff. Makes you weak."

"Well, that's a shame", I said. "Won't you try a single sip? Come on, it's really good."

The bodyguard looked at me uncomfortably. "Hmm", he grumbled. "Well. One sip. Just because you ask so nicely." He took the flask into his bear-like paw and tried the vodka. His face brightened a little. "You're right", he growled. "This is good. Who would've thought." He took another, deeper sip.

I am not very proud of this episode - in fact, I thought hard about whether I should write it down at all, or just try to forget it. But you, dear readers, deserve to know the truth. Because after this first temptation, for which I was responsible, the bulky guy named Boris started to drink regularly. By the time he followed the small man with the blueberry stain into office and became President of Russia, he had become a full-blown alcoholic, with catastrophic consequences for his own health and the health of his country.

However, at this moment I had other things to worry about. I left the hut and looked at the surrounding landscape, for which the word 'desolate' seemed to be an euphemism. The southern part of Novaja Zemlja consists of patches of tundra, interspersed into rocky, deep-frozen wastelands. Mountains rise here and there, low but already covered with eternal snow caps and glaciers. In fact, I was not sure where these women had found such a large mass of blueberries, until I discovered that the nuclear explosions of the past had warmed up several isolated valleys enough to allow some rudimentary agriculture. But even so, this seemed an unlikely place for the huge temple Morambar had ordered me to build. I wondered whether I was really destined to be here. Maybe Cindy should have carried me somewhere else entirely. "This would be a nice time for a sign", I muttered to myself.

"Now this is extraordinary!" one of the babushkas boomed behind me. I turned around and saw one of the women reading in Horus Engels' book, which must have slipped out of my pocket when I fell. Several others were staring over the babushka's shoulders, trying to get a glimpse of the work. "Most impressive!" the woman cried. "I would never have guessed Tolkien used the word "slept" so cunningly!"

"Yes", crowed another woman. "And there: it is exactly the one hundred and eleventh word on the page! He must have foreseen the publisher's printer settings! How exciting!"

"You... you read Old Hittite?" I asked, slightly confused.

"Oh yes", boosted the babushka who held the book. "Everyone from our village does. You see, our little hamlet beyond these mountains is named Novaja Niznevartsk­neftejugansk­oblastskaja­severnaja­schtschpnipno­dnjetrpetrovsk­rabotschnigrad. Just to memorize that name trained our brains so much that we now are much smarter than the average Russian peasant. I have five university degrees, and my hobby is winning Go world championships."

"I write novels!" crowed the other woman. "You might have read them. My pseudonym is Leo Tolstoi!"

"I invented the hydrogen bomb!" yelled a third woman.

A great feeling of joy and relief overcame me. I had not been misled. I had found like-minded people. "Great", I said. "Well, what would you think about joining a Tolkien cult? We could convert others to our cause and bring enlightenment to the world. Incidentally, this is what I was told to do. What do you say?"

The women nodded, one after the other. "On one condition", said the one with the book. "For our services, you will provide free copies of Tolkien's works, Western editions. We have the Soviet editions, but they are so heavily censored they're no fun to read."

"Can do that", I assured. "The first thing, of course, would be to build a reasonably sized temple" -I waved into a random direction- "over there, perhaps."

"Well, I designed the Taj Mahal, I should still have the old construction plans", said another babushka. "We could re-use those easily enough. Perhaps with a few more towers this time, the first try ended up more drab than I had thought..."

I grinned. This was getting better and better.

"Excuse me?" a male voice yelled from the shore in the west. I noticed that a big and slightly rusty yellow bus was approaching, carefully avoiding the rocks and deep holes in the ground. A round yellow face appeared on the window, a face that was located between a red robe and a huge, very peculiar yellow hat. Behind him, in the bus, I noticed dozens of similarly dressed people. "Excuse me", repeated the Buddhist monk, "we are looking for a Neil Quilsky or Kicksly. We believe he is some sort of prophet who can lead us to enlightenment. The jellyfish man told us we should worship him and do his bidding."

"Sure... sure", I said. By now I was in a kind of ecstatic trance, resembling the feeling when you have just won the lottery jackpot. "Let's start right away..."

And so my second rise to power had begun.

Next chapter