The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

But then I saw what he held, and the mysteries under the floor seemed unimportant. It was a most curious item; a flask, like Pasteur had created, but that was like saying a Chevy Sedan is a carriage much like Maximus Creed from Rome had cobbled together in 200 B.C. A large bulb at the bottom held a clear, broth-like liquid, but the neck of the flask swooped down in Pasteur’s S shape, and then split in three, one swooping back up into a spiral that nearly reached two feet high, and then ended at a sealed glass nipple. Another branch of glass wound round itself, creating knots and curlicues; I counted at least three different sailor’s knots and one Celtic knot, and seven more I couldn’t identify, some seeming to actually have glass tubes entwined with it that started nowhere and ended nowhere. This whole complex mess wound round the bulb in a spiral, swooping back up to form the open mouth of the flask. The third branch was the strangest, stretching up and then coming back down to go back into the bottle, and, as far as I could tell, back out the bottom, only to fold back and actually form the bulb of the jar itself. This made it a Klein bottle (named for Felix Klein, d. 1882, and, unlike Pasteur, apparently a man not to be derided by Dr. Lambshead), sharing its inner and outer side.

I stared at it, flabbergasted by the sheer mastery of workmanship. It could have been my previous unfortunate upchucking situation, as I rarely find myself at a loss for words, but I simply looked from the flask to the doctor, and waited.

“You see, Pasteur managed a reasonable solution for everyday basic bacteria, proving that they can’t pass a normal S bend. But you know he was killed by bacteria? Some say it was a stroke, but it was a bacterium with skilled navigational instincts, the kind of thing that laughs at the S bend, and is capable of trekking the fine capillaries, avoiding white blood cells, to attack at the most vulnerable areas in the brain. If he’d developed and learned about this flask in the years before I was born, he could have flummoxed the bacterium and lived longer.” He pointed to one of the sailor’s knots in the flask. “Here’s where they usually get caught, in the Figure of Eight Stopper. Just get outright lost. They rarely make it to the Angler’s Loop,” he pointed to the final knot.

It was true, the open tubes had varying amounts of grime near the opening, with dead bugs caught in the knots, and some even having followed the dead-end tube and gathered in the nipple, but all of the glass near the bulb to the flask was perfectly clean. It was even clean on the outside.

I pointed to the bulb. “What do you have in there?”

He waved his hand again, and I wondered how many of my interview questions he would brush away. “Something pure, I can tell you that, untouched by neither smart nor ignorant bacteria. I’m saving it for a special occasion.” He winked at me.

He took the flask with us inside and then offered me more tea, which I politely refused. We went on with the interview, not mentioning the cabinet again.

When I heard of his death in 2003, I wondered if he’d ever used what was in the flask, or if any of his journals would detail its contents. I also wondered if, perhaps, the flask died the same death as whatever crashed to the ground during my visit, and went from “something pure” to “something Paulette has to clean up before it spreads.”

Regardless, in perusing the recent auction catalog for the few unearthed cabinet items that survived the fire, I was struck by the following description: “Glass abstract sculpture. Unknown origin. Composed of several curving and circular parts. Badly scorched and melted.” Unfortunately, the item had already been bought, and I could not act on my sudden impulse to own it.

1972: The Lichenologist’s Visit

As Told to Ekaterina Sedia by S. B. Potter, Lichenologist