CultureHack, Tumbled

HOLD THE COPROPHAGIA

They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper, decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely with slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, somehow ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s many artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she had read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.

She took off her coat, hung it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to remove her shoes. The Piblokto Madness Bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivy to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,’ she added.