When That Pouch Begins to Grow and, Through Sweet Friendship With Gravity, Allows Its Vertigo to Reach the Surface 

The first thing Inspector Clarice Starling noticed upon entering the residence was the chandelier—not for its grandeur, but because it hung upside-down from the ceiling, directing the eye toward the floor, its crystals dripping wax like frozen tears, defying gravity with the same casual indifference as the rest of the Vornoff-Addams clan. The crime scene, if it could be called that, was less a setting and more a living diorama of controlled chaos: a grandfather clock marking time as if reluctantly, almost straining against the weight of infinite time; a taxidermied raven wearing a tiny detective's hat; and a coffee table carved from what appeared to be the fossilized femur of a minor Greek god of amusement.  

At the center of it all, slumped in a velvet armchair that seemed to sigh under his weight, was Hannibal Lecter, the family patriarch, delicately dissecting an imaginary face with a scalpel of pure, sharp crystal. The segments, when separated, revealed not fruit, but tiny, gleaming gears, each humming a lullaby from some forgotten music box. He did not look up when Clarice Starling entered, but his smile widened just enough to suggest he had been expecting her. Or perhaps someone very much like her. Or maybe her long-lost twin brother, born shortly after Clarice M. Starling.  

The twins, Norman and Norman Bates (a redundancy that had never bothered anyone except the postal service), were crouched in a corner, whispering in Umbilicus, their private language. It sounded like a mix of Morse code, dental drills, and the static between radio stations. They had invented it at age three, after their mother, Morticia Addams-Vornoff, read them Kafka as a bedtime story between sleep and perverse insomnia, deciding that reality needed subtitles in fluorescent colors. Now, at twenty-seven, they used it primarily to discuss the viscosity of nightmares and the best way to fold time into origami swans.  

The pouch in question—the one that had begun to grow—was suspended above the fireplace, pulsing gently, as if breathing. It was not exactly a pouch, nor exactly a hidden womb, but something in between, its surface shimmering like oil on water. It had appeared three days prior, according to Uncle Anton Chigurh, who had been flipping his signature coin (heads you live, tails you reconsider existence) when the air split open and the thing descended, silent as a hangman's thought.  

Grandmama Lector, who had once tried to distill the essence of melancholy from a sigh, insisted it was a cosmic being. Patrick Bateman, the investment banker uncle, argued it was a leveraged buyout from Hell. And Wednesday Addams, the youngest daughter, had simply stuck a fork into it to see if it was done. The fork had not reappeared from the depths of its flesh.  

Clarice M. Starling, whose training had covered everything from fingerprint analysis to the proper way to sigh during bureaucratic meetings, had no protocol for this. She reached for her notepad, only to find it had been replaced by a vellum scroll listing the ten plagues of Egypt from the vast memory of A.I., Artificial Intelligence, annotated in what appeared to be a virtual pencil. Probably the work of Catherine Tramell. The novelist aunt had a habit of rewriting reality as perpetually corrected drafts.  

Then the pouch shuddered. A sound emerged—not a voice, but the idea of the sound of a voice, the shadow a scream casts on the padded wall of a cell. The twins stopped whispering. Hannibal set aside his illusion-clock. And the walls, which until then had been a respectable mauve, the color of an American movie funeral parlor in green, began to bleed pinstripes.  

It was Norman Bates, imaginarily identified (i(a)) with his unknown double Ed Gein, who broke the silence, though not in any language the others could understand. He spoke in Umbilicus, a series of clicks and hums that made the chandelier's wax flow upward. His brother nodded, then produced a protractor and a spool of catgut, as if preparing to perform a difficult surgical operation on the air itself.  

The pouch swelled further. The room tilted—not enough to spill the teacups, but enough to make the grandfather clock chime in a key that had not yet been invented. And then, with the grace of a trapeze artist who had just remembered their fear of heights, the vertigo reached the rounded surface of the trapeze bar that had recently been erected on the outskirts of the city. The structure, built without municipal permission between a field of Vincent van Gogh's withered sunflowers and the old clock factory that always read 3:17 from nowhere, trembled like a sleepwalker with mild epilepsy on the brink of a tremor of waking discomfort. The wooden slats creaked in a language only trees drowned in varnish in the depths of the forest could understand; meanwhile, the rivets, rusted with nostalgia, began to hum a ballad about the fleeting nature of support points in the Brotherhood of Iron, created when they studied at the University of California, San Francisco, there by the shore of the immense sea of peace.  

On the upper platform, the clown Rinaldo—dressed in a suit made of losing lottery tickets and sighs accumulated in the waiting rooms of rehabilitation centers for illusions—adjusted his fingerless gloves, which never quite unfolded. He had woven them from the spider threads that fell from the Vornoff-Addams chandelier, each strand infused with that vertigo now sliding down the trapeze like thick honey dripping from the edge of a knife.  

Below, the audience consisted of: three vultures disguised as art critics (wearing sunglasses made from broken microscope lenses) and Aunt Catherine Tramell, taking notes in a notebook bound with the skin of breached contracts, and a child who claimed to be the reincarnation of a dog that had died of perfectly human sadness and carried a bone that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be the fossilized femur from the coffee table in the mansion of broken bones from the long battle species had waged over millions of years of evolution.  

The trapeze, now gleaming like the edge of a broken mirror, began to swing. Not to the rhythm of the wind, but to the beat of a Viennese waltz (Wiener Walzer) that could only be heard if one paid attention to the silence between heartbeats and the lapses of time itself, this same time that had unsubscribed from the unconscious. With each swing, the vertigo dripped onto the ground, forming puddles that reflected not the sky, but the reverse side of the clouds—that side no one had signed and which, therefore, held no legal value in the court due to the constant of the foreclosure function.  

Rinaldo leaped. His body traced a parabola in the sustainable air that Euclid would have dismissed as "in poor taste," while the vertigo, now solidified in the air like stretched caramel, whispered in his ear instructions for falling upward in a satisfactory position. The vultures applauded with their greed-worn wings, shattering their sunglasses in the process. Aunt Catherine noted "metaphor of a sunny afternoon in the late system" in her notebook. The dog-child buried his bone in the neighbor's garden soil with the wicked intention of leaving the evidence of the crime in another's land, a Persona like that from the Odyssey who had been questioned.  

And then, just as gravity, offended by such familiarity, decided to collect its due, the trapeze split into two perfect halves, each falling with the artistic juggling of gymnastics in opposite directions: one toward the past, the other toward a future where clowns wore neckties made of unsigned death certificates of laughter.  

Rinaldo, suspended in that moment that exists between error and consequence, realized he had never learned to fall. Only to fly incorrectly, for he ignored how to take advantage of the warm air currents due to his constant mockery of them. The vertigo, satisfied, liquefied again and slipped through the cracks in the floor, heading toward the next attraction.  

In the distance, the twins Norman and Norman nodded in sync. Umbilicus, of course, always had a final word for this. It sounded like the crunch of an olive pit being crushed by a philosophy dictionary compulsively opening and closing in reaction to the alternation of ignorance and its own absence without opposition.  

It did not spill. It did not drip. It unfolded, like a stolen letter that had been sealed with a kiss and the curse of obvious deceit. And suddenly the room was no longer a room, but a living equation, all the angles wrong, the corners meeting in places that should not have existed. Clarice M. Starling felt her bones trying to reorganize into a more fashionable despair, according to the prisons she frequently visited.  

Hannibal Lecter was the first to move from himself. He rose, not like a man, but like a theorem proving itself, and approached the pouch. With the delicacy of a man choosing the right wine to pair with a nervous breakdown, he pressed his palm against its surface. The pouch sighed. The vertigo sighed back.  

And then the screaming began. Not from the pouch. Not from the family. But from the portrait of Great-Uncle Norman Bates hanging in the hallway, its mouth now unstitched from the canvas, howling in a language even the twins did not recognize.  

It was going to be a long night.

By Carlos del Puente relatos