Duration 3.29
Appis (Arris) Fallabus is a Regest-speaking young male man. He is partially blind, sensitive to temperature change and has poor circulation. Nightly he is obliged to lubricate himself with Spanish oil.
Interviewer: "Is it true that you are plagued with body lice?"
Appis: "Yes, it is. Everything you could imagine, ticks, lice, termites, tapeworms. Everything. You name it. After a change in the weather it's especially bad - worse in summer and impossible to get rid of at sea-level. Within reason I've been advised to make them moderately comfortable by wearing wool, but I live with it."
Appis, whose comprehension of Metropolitan Dutch has not entirely disappeared, had been born and brought up in Zeelem, an isolated village surrounded by canals that only appeared to empty due to evaporation. In winter, every inch of water in Zeelem turned to ice, and the body-predators that worried Appis slept, froze or other-wise temporarily capitulated.
Interviewer: "It is said that you identify with swallows, is this correct?"
Appis: "Yes, it's true, but nowadays that's not unique, is it?"
Appis would have been an expert long-distance ice-skater save for the fact that his mother believed it was dangerous for him and his poor circulation to spend too much time out of doors in the winter. Appis's mother was not a victim of the Violent Unknown Event. As she grew older and as her son remained the same age, she discovered a new worry for each new season. She could not have too many seasons left to be anxious about, so Appis patiently waited to be set free to enjoy immortality on his own. In the meantime he managed a kite factory, in some part satisfying a desire for unaided flight in himself and in the nineteen million other victims of the VUE.
Interviewer: "Is it true that your father was killed by a bird-counter named Van Hoyten?"
Appis: "My father was at the Amsterdam zoo studying saltwater fish when Van Hoyten was employed there as a bird-counter. They quarrelled, apparently because my father had a fox tattooed on his chest. It was said they were rivals."
In the summer Appis flew a yellow stunt-kite to intimidate the birds who he blamed directly for his predicament.
Interviewer: "I'm told you drink saltwater to crack the ice in your pancreas?"
Appis: "I do? Perhaps you're confusing me with someone else. My father was always experimenting - putting plaice in the canals, and stimulating the salt-glands in pelagic birds."
Interviewer: "What do you think of the theory of the Responsibility of Birds?"
Appis: "Well, the coincidences seem inexhaustible, obviously. But I leave it entirely to the experts."
When flying his kite, Appis left swallows alone, knowing that a single bird of that species could be preyed upon by no less than a dozen different types of parasite at any one time and that was punishment enough.
The Falls Biographies
