The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children by Brendan Connell

the odour made him undeniably queasy. He regretted having not arranged for a private flight.
    “ A cloudberry liqueur,” he told the young woman, his pale temples dewed with perspiration.
    When the head of blonde hair shook, negating his request, and strawberry-coloured lips opened, expressing the actual state of the alcohol selection, Allen knew that he was amidst savages, on a downward course through trials and sufferings.
    Sufficing himself, morosely, with a whisky sour, he curled up toward the window, withdrawing his organ of smell away from the bovine aroma that surrounded his neighbour. Down below he could see what he believed to be Pakistan, or Iran, an immense stretch of desert, pock-marked like the surface of the moon,—dried up canals scoring it, lonely hills casting blotches of shadow,—yellows, reds and browns, —tranquil, verdureless landscape.
    He swallowed at the mixture in his hand, trying hard, desperately, to repress all thought. . . . The reason he was flying. Uncertainty, crawling through him like a caterpillar. Images entering, then fleeing his mind . . . of debauch, power, shame.
    XV.
     
    When he returned, his cheeks were hollow, his moustache an enormous black and misshapen patch, like Indian ink spilt on fresh-fallen snow. The wilderness of his eyes revealed nothing,—they were inscrutable, at times shining like tin in the sun, then becoming suddenly dull, lifeless as those of a frozen fish.
    A solid gold Genesh now hung from his neck, its four arms swimming beneath his throat, its trunk and the viper curling around its body seeming to curve with undulations of mystical life. When Li Chi innocently asked about it, Allen’s face grew ashen, his lips tightened, he drew further into himself, scurrying off, shutting his unsteady body within the walls of the library, out of which were heard groans and the sound of weeping.
    Later, he emerged like a beast, threw a half dozen of his best suits in the fireplace and ignited them. With quick, whip-like words he dismissed all but the most necessary staff. He wrote a cheque for a large sum, flung it at Li Chi, and, with a voice shrill as a bird’s cry, sent him packing.
    Savagely he strode from room to room, hands clasped behind back, his hair flying with impetuous motion. The mansion seemed too small for his flurry, for the breadth of his shame. How much he would have liked to have spit out his suffering like the pit of an olive. Thoughts of severe acts of penance rode through his heated mind. He could picture himself stripped naked, rolling across North America, over the busy highways of the East Coast, through the Midwest, past thousands of miles of corn, the skin rubbed clean off his flesh, him spiralling over the Rocky Mountains, into California, his body one open sore,—sand, pebbles, bits of broken glass embedded in his carcass. . . . Or else he could sleep on a bed of nails, prostrate on razor blades, brush his teeth with a butcher’s knife, bath in burning coals. . . . In India, from his hotel window, he had seen men, there on the public streets, saw off their limbs, howl out mantras, prayers, while the blue bottle flies thickened around their bleeding stumps, a few devalued coins occasionally clinking before them, from the hands of a passerby. . . . Others, on pilgrimages, hooks buried in their sides, carts attached to the hooks, the weight of the load stressing the meat of the body, creating open holes, pliable and repugnant. . . . Yes, he could see himself running through the streets, flogging himself with tassels of wet leather, a crown of thorns on his head, thick, sappy blood drooling down his face. . . . Because, after all, it seemed to him as if those emaciated ascetics he had witnessed were, if not happy, certainly content,—something he had never been. And then his ego had been attacked; he had unsystematically read, perused in confused incomprehension, countless ashramic and indological publications, crypto-Buddhistic, overtly