All Tomorrow's Parties

17. ZODIAC

THEY take Silencio, naked, the black man with the long face and the fat white man with the red beard, into a room with wet wooden walls. Leave him. Hot rain falls from holes in the black plastic pipes above. Falls harder, stings.

They have taken his clothes and shoes away in a plastic bag, and now the fat man returns, gives him soap. He knows soap. He remembers the warm rain falling from a pipe in los projectos but this is better, and he is alone in the tall wooden room.

Silencio with his belly full, soaping himself repeatedly, because that is what they want. He rubs the soap into his hair.

He closes his eyes against the burning of the soap and sees the watches arrayed beneath greenish, randomly abraded glass, like fish from some warmer season frozen hard in lake ice. Bright highlights off steel and gold.

He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended: the multifold fact of these potent objects, their endless differentiation, their individual specificities. Infinite variety arising from the expression of dial, hands, numerals, hour markers… He likes the warm rain but he needs desperately to return, to see more, to hear the words.

He has become the words, what they mean.

Breguette hands. Tapestry dial. Bombay lugs. Original stem. Signed.

The rain slows, stops. The fat man, who wears plastic sandals, brings Silencio a thick dry cloth.

The fat man peers at him. 'Watches, you say he likes? the fat man asks the black man. 'Yes, the black man says, 'he seems to like watches.

The bearded man drapes the towel around Silencio's shoulders. 'Does he know how to tell time?

'I don't know, says the black man.

'Well, says the fat man, stepping back, 'he doesn't know how to use a towel.

Silencio feels confused, ashamed. He looks down.

'Leave him alone, Andy, the black man says. 'Get me those clothes I brought.

THE black man's name: Fontaine. Like a word in the language of los projectos, a meaning about water. The warm rain in the wooden room.

Now Fontaine leads him through the upper level, where some people call out, selling fruit, past others selling old things spread on blankets, to where a thin dark man stands waiting beside a plastic crate. The crate is upturned, its bottom padded with foam and ragged silver tape, and this man wears a striped cloth thing with pockets down his front, and in the pockets are scissors, and things like the thing Raton liked to run endlessly through his hair, when he had balanced the black perfectly with the white.

Silencio is wearing the clothes Fontaine has given him: they are large, loose, not his own, but they smell good. Fontaine has given him shoes made of white cloth. Too white. They hurt his eyes.

The soap and the warm rain have made Silencio's hair strange as well, and now Fontaine tells Silencio to sit upon the crate, this man will cut his hair.

Silencio sits, trembling, as the thin dark man flicks at his hair with one of the Raton-things from his pockets, making small noises behind his teeth.

Silencio looks at Fontaine.

'It's okay, Fontaine says, unwrapping a small sharp stick of wood and inserting it into the corner of his mouth, 'you won't feel a thing.

Silencio wonders if the stick is like the black or the white, but Fontaine does not change. He stands there with the stick in his mouth, watching the thin dark man snip away Silencio's hair with the scissors. Silencio watches Fontaine, listens to the sound of the scissors, and to the new language in his head.

Zodiac Sea Wolf. Case very clean. Screw-down crown. Original bezel.

'Zodiac Sea Wolf, Silencio says.

'Man, says the thin dark man, 'you deep.