I have fruit flies nesting in my sink, I think. If it comes up I say: I don’t know what caused it, really. I’m thinking of getting a venus fly trap, if you can get those here. But I know what caused it. I left the sink dirty over the weekend when I was away. I don’t mind them. They’re smaller than regular flies, no buzzing. They scatter when I move. There’s no smell, other than the stench of dense heat when I first open the door. I bought some biscuits, didn’t know the bag had airholes, left it on the counter. It was covered in crawling black spots within seconds. Now I keep things more clean. But I swear that bag didn’t have any airholes. I saw the fruit flies first when I reached for some onions. I opened the cupboard door and it was like the points of a cloud fleeing in separate directions. Again, I had never let them in the cupboard. When I last opened that very same door, there wasn’t a fly in sight.
A year ago now, it must be, I discovered a new text, that became a favourite if only for its reputation. The Song of Evil by Clarice de La Valliere, written in the dark slums of 19th century Paris. I must have heard of it somehow: a reference from one of the surrealist sycophants that later lifted La Valliere’s work out the grime and exulted in it, or a quote from some philosophy book of the 20th century infected by that whole current, hopelessly listless and pining for a more rigid sort of defiance, or just a picture of the cover, cropped on someone’s coffee-stained desk, or a name slid across the bar in the sort of back-and-forth conversation unemployed graduates share in, in their year of wallowing erudition before action, again, seems possible.
It can’t have been the cover, which is a glossy painting, or photograph, or a mock-up (I can't tell which, it’s that sort of detached realism) of a maximalist 19th century living room toned in brown. The book is printed nonstandardly in some squarish shape, so you can tell it was an independent job. That and the typeface—not a book I would buy for its beauty. In fact, it’s embarrassing. With a book so ugly, it’s obvious I sought it out. I waded through every comparison and recommendation I could find. Because of that, I bought an ugly copy. If I had come across it at a bookstore or been lent it by a friend its status as a thing rather than as a series of abstract qualities would have been primary, and I would not have my eye caught by such an ugly thing.
Two thirds through the book I was done with it, though I’d still call it a favourite. It was uniquely evil. I never thought a text could be evil, but eventually all its lurid prose, its spiralling, exhausting content, and indeed the ugliness of the book itself—all embodied an evil that made me sick to my stomach. Never before had a book inspired sickness in me. But here, these isomorphisms of language and world, this scant biography of the author (filled in with the translator-editor’s intrepid speculations, which invoke all sorts of wordplays in deciphering the pseudonym ‘de La Valliere’), even the structure of its similes, all made my head spin with evil, evil imprisoned textually until some aesthete made it famous, at which point the spores scattered and entered my body and plugged their roots into my stomach and skull. And though I certainly did not pack it when I moved abroad, owing to my being done with it—both because I got enough out of it, and because the thought of reading on repelled me—it appeared there on my nightstand, my own abandoned copy.
Daniel’s disappearance caused a stir. Like us, he was new staff at the school. A friendly primary school teacher. What else can I say? I never spoke to the man. I can’t imagine anyone paying him any mind. The most impolite among us raised the possibility of a bad accident, amnesia, serious illness. Around those more sensitive you would make damper platitudes. I hope, I’m sure, I pray, he’s alright. I couldn’t imagine any reason other than death for such a sudden abandonment of work and his ensuing radio silence. The HR lady I was friends with, MJ (she named herself for Michael Jackson), was tasked with finding him. I thought it was a bit romantic, a HR lady turned detective. She was already a stern woman. One who had left her international school, studied abroad in Europe, then returned to work at the same international school, and consorted mainly with the English and European staff. You could say that while she was at home in her home country, she was an exile, both from home, and from the walled garden in Switzerland she built for her student life, now left behind. And she was Western in a kitschy way, in a way that no Western person could be nowadays, because she found aspects of Europeanness sexy that for us would be too tired. For that reason, I could imagine her as a Poirot. And she was butch enough that I could imagine her as joining the new breed of detective, post-Clouseau, but not quite Columbo. An amateur, but no Miss Marple. A detective from a show whose gimmick was fish-out-of-water toughness and the latest in forensic science. She majored in the culinary arts—maybe she could taste the victim’s blood like Hippocrates and tell, seerlike, their cause of death. I would often bring her sparkling water and crisps from the corner shop for lunch. Daniel was safe, but I would never see him again.
The whole thing was confidential. We received an email two weeks after the initial disappearance informing us Daniel was safe and sound. I tried to pry, asked the headmaster's wife without asking her, employing some generous question. I think: so will Daniel be joining us again next week? I hope he’s alright. And she said, well, he certainly can’t return here—not a word for weeks! I assumed mental breakdown. Though while he was still missing, I raised the possibility of a curse: I initially thought Daniel taught maths, and another maths teacher had fallen off his horse recently and banged his head, and one of the new maths teachers was needlessly, unfortunately annoying. But Daniel didn’t teach maths, so the curse now seemed too broad a hermeneutic. And when someone let slip MJ’s discovery: that Daniel had done this before at his previous school, mental strain, some unseen burden on this man I didn’t care about, an intricate burden that could collapse at any moment and vanish him under itself, began to seem likely.
I exchanged The Song of Evil with an English teacher at the school. She was ten years my senior and I thought she was very beautiful. It was her accent, which I will keep to myself, and her lovely dresses. Blue was her go-to, sometimes yellow. Once black, with black eyeliner. They looked a bit like curtains or tablecloths. In return I received Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which I didn’t care to read—in this case, out of sheer disinterest, rather than disgust or a feeling of completion. Now, she found me attractive too after I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf for her class so I asked her out and she said yes, but the next day she said no, because she was committed to a man ten years her senior, a single dad who also taught at the school. Fair enough, at least I know she finds me attractive, I thought, with only the slightest feeling of abject loneliness, that I could never be close to another human being, and really I had no idea what I even wanted, asking out a woman ten years older than me, but it was because I just wanted to do something or not do something, and I didn’t know what it was I wanted, and I wasn’t afraid or bothered by this, so my response was to act arbitrarily, based on the basest considerations, engaging in pursuits that would never end—it wasn’t that they “would not end well,” but that they wouldn’t even begin, because with such pursuits I didn’t have to think about what was going on, and I didn’t care about what was going on. I lent the book, in truth, not yet realising I had never packed it—but I write now in full knowledge, now that she’s enjoying it, at a quicker pace than me, since she’s already 2/3 through. She’s the committed sort: on her second PhD funded by her parents, two self-published books with garish covers (a sign, truthfully, of artistic sincerity—of doing things for the sake of effort), and some other things. She, essentially, does things.
Clarice de La Valierre died unknown at 25. He was originally from Uruguay, but adopted a pseudonym in Paris, rendering him untraceable. He self-published two books to no fanfare while living off stipends from his father. It is debated whether he was insane. The argument in favour seems, to me, wishful thinking—an artist whose work is broken, or improper, maybe unfinished or bad in some important way. He must have been inspired or mad! But it’s just putting words together, you can be perfectly sane and do that. He might have once met Victor Hugo, by the way. His writing exhibits a desperation to turn one’s mind inside out, to peel the soul and lay bare its ingrown roots, I think. Any manuscripts other than what he published are lost. Some scholars insist that feuilletons published under the name Maurice Valery, including penny dreadfuls, a few theatre reviews, and a review of a new translation of Lykophron’s Alexandra, are also by him—because the names are a bit similar, and because Valery has some recognisable preoccupations: adopting the voices of insects and animals (in the theatre reviews, no less), a focus on blotched, pockmarked, bloated, or green skin, a focus on hair and its absence, similes in which men are likened to deadly predators (especially sharks and polar bears), a complete lack of appetite (this, you can feel), and a certain symptomatic separation between characters, between them all and the world which is often bridged arbitrarily. That these scholars read so much into stories of purse-snatchers and the 19th century Parisian theatre, read by no-one even back then, written by an entirely different Frenchman no less, seemed to me ridiculous.
I solved the fly issue by pouring a mixture of boiling water, vinegar, and baking soda down the drain. I never had such issues with drains, or such a need for concoctions, before moving here. It seems to me that good pipes are essential for goodness—in the kitchen, in the throat, and in the guts. Good pipes, excellent pipes, make everything wonderfully clean. I can’t send mail here, it takes three months to get anywhere.
My skin is green, too garish to be evil. I’m bloated with blood (guess whose?), my pores are dusty, caked in crispy films of phlegm. My hair perpetually leaves my head by its own will, since the hair is a state within a state with its own sovereignty, and the same can be said of my teeth, which are past yellow and into green. They flee my mouth and clatter, like iron pellets, because they don’t want to rip the throats of any more innocent schoolgirls. No one can agree whether I was once human. But they agree that I’ve slipped from something. I am not the world’s, nor God’s, enemy—I am their slipping.
Fruit fly, beautiful fruit fly. I love you the most. Not the shark or polar bear, nor the carrion-feasting vulture or maggot. You, fruit fly—too quiet to be good. Not pointless—no, nothing but a floating point. Long ago, when evil was an easier job, you were the lowest sort of spirit—the simple sprite, the black ball of soot, crossing through walls and doors and bringing light pestilence. But now evil is rigorous, scientific. You’re special (primitive). You maintained the old art of decay while I pioneered the industrial slaughter of innocence. For that, I respect you!
Maldoror, don’t talk down to us. We’re simple, but we don’t accept backhanded compliments. Yes, you’ve had your revolution. You spread your black cloak, audibly unfurling like a stage curtain (narcissistic), over the world, now not like a demon with deceiving eyes trapping humans in dark dreams, but rather like the embodiment of indiscernible mirage, the daydream that falls forever. The way to maintain your trickery against everyone, both the vacant and the perceptive, is to make your illusion exactly alike to truth. To make every thought malformed even when it is born laboriously. And, to make a world in which perception itself is unneeded, irrelevant. The perceptive cannot help but notice this, and are trapped by their perceptiveness, seeing no reason to strain their eyes further. Clever and terrible in one word. But you still need us. Who is the most imperceptible illusion of them all? The moving spot that could be dust, that could have not moved at all. I’ve read your book. It’s impressive. That poor Frenchman, who thought he wasn’t you. What killed him? What kills everyone? Rot, decay, pestilence. Don’t disrespect our work.
Alexander, thank you for your words. Thank you, Maldoror. Thank you, fruit flies.
[Enter Daniel]
The midday sun was blaring and Daniel would later come out in a heatstroke. A heatstroke so bad that he would catch himself nearly vomiting, just after having bought icecream—he would have preferred water having finished his hike, but it would be a bit longer ‘til he came across a store, and for now a replenishing ice cream stand was all that could be found. The ice cream shocked his system with such coldness that he felt disabled: he began shivering and sweating at once, in the sun and the breeze back on low land that quaked too powerfully, and something rose in his stomach. But that was later. A healthy man, he climbed up to the day’s sun, pointlessly, as if breaking the day’s privacy. He saw the last of the substations housed in brick in which the powerlines were mustered, the city to his back, rumbling, when up ahead at the outcropping he saw a man climbing with rigorous steps, up the steepest incline, with his long legs driven by his cane that was like a third appendage. Then the man was up and was as tall as the brick substation, which was not a meagre building. His head just inched out the roof. He was ten, eleven feet tall. He paid Daniel no mind. Daniel only noted that the man stole his hard-fought peace. Peace that he needed so desperately—for what? Was he dissatisfied? Work was, in fact, going excellently. What compelled him up this too-hot hike, on a weekday, when he hadn’t even informed the school of his absence? What exactly was he doing? Daniel was now on the third hour of his hike. Until then he had not seen another soul. Daniel climbed higher, and Daniel addressed the man first, first with a nod that was reciprocated, and then:
Beautiful view, isn’t it, Daniel said, to which the response was that it’s beautiful down there, too, and in response, the air is horrible there, but going only this far out, it’s already a lot cleaner, then the tall man pointed out the powerlines, the substations, the still visible city and its audible rumbling, they were all still here, and Daniel thought as the sun beat down from directly above, all that wasn’t too bad, and the man agreed it was a more mundane sort of pollution, pollution of sight, and Daniel rejoined that it was peaceful in its own way, these signs of civilisation add a certain comfort, though for the man it was this disgusting peace that seemed to be the problem, the presence everywhere of human well-being.
Daniel asked the man how he knew English and he said “jail.” Daniel’s face turned taut then slackened into a deliberate, defusing chuckle, and he tapered off his shock, oh, well, that’s quite common, isn’t it? The man then said he was joking, and asked why Daniel was here. He answered this ambiguous question: I moved here for work. But you’re not at work, the man replied. I’m not at work, Daniel confirmed.
The excessively tall man sat on the rocks outside the door of the substation, his long legs perched up like a grasshopper’s. He began to rub his legs together to sound his cicada’s chirp. With vigour, he rubbed his face, which sweat had dripped onto, with the soft pads of his arms, and blinked his black eyes.
The tall man asked: do you know who I am? Daniel responded, yes, I’ve met you before. Yes, I remember now. And I remember that I swore to kill you, years ago, with my family dead at my feet, my wife who was my peace, and my saintly little boy. But it was you that did it, responded the tall man. No, it was you. Now that I remember, I’m myself again. You weren’t yourself before? I was something pathetic. Not worth talking about. Because I wasn’t sick enough, or I didn’t know I was sick. When you were working? Yes, when I was working. What is your job? I am a teacher. Do you hate your children? Yes. Do you wish they would die? Yes. Will you kill one for me?
A child died at the school last week, of sickness. I never saw Daniel again, though I never really met him in the first place. The fruit flies are still here. Apparently, you have to keep at it. The eggs gestate for months, so just one concoction poured down the drain isn’t enough. That only kills one generation and leaves another to be born. I went to the mountain that day to break something. To let myself slip outside, outside the city and myself. I gave her the book, but it’s back in my flat again, on my nightstand. Apparently it was the pollution that killed the kid. The woman, she read the whole thing. She’s dedicated, always commits the whole way. A cult was established for Daniel. A shrine was made with an image of his face. In the weeks before a replacement was hired the children were found praying for him, in a circle, chairs pushed up against the walls, in the dark.
Alexander Gradus is a Russian-Jewish writer residing in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Gradus is inspired by his study of ancient literature and the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and has written previously for Bruiser Magazine, Phi Magazine, and the Oxford Student Film Journal. Substack: orlov.substack.com; Instagram: @alex.p.gradus.