An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  Here Oxenshuer’s vision falters. He does not know how the trapped men chose to handle the choreography of their deaths. He knows only that whatever their decision was, it must have been reached without bitterness or panic, and that the manner of their departure was calm. The vision fades. He lies alone in the dark. The last of the drunkenness has burned itself from his mind.

  “Come on,” Matt said. “Let’s do some wrestling.”

  It was a crisp winter morning, not cold, a day of clear hard light. Matt took him downtown, and for the first time Oxenshuer entered one of the tall brick-faced buildings of the labyrinth streets. Inside was a large bare gymnasium, unheated, with bleak yellow walls and threadbare purple mats on the floor. Will and Nick were already there. Their voices echoed in the cavernous room. Quickly Matt stripped down to his undershorts. He looked even bigger naked than clothed; his muscles were thick and rounded, his chest was formidably deep, his thighs were pillars. A dense covering of fair curly hair sprouted everywhere on him, even his back and shoulders. He stood at least two meters tall and must have weighed close to no kilos. Oxenshuer, tall but not nearly so tall as Matt, well built but at least twenty kilos lighter, felt himself badly outmatched. He was quick and agile, at any rate: perhaps those qualities would serve him. He tossed his clothing aside.

  Matt looked him over closely. “Not bad,” he said. “Could use a little more meat on the bones.”

  “Got to fatten him up some for the Feast, I guess,” Will said. He grinned amiably. The three men laughed; the remark seemed less funny to Oxenshuer.

  Matt signaled to Nick, who took a flask of wine from a locker and handed it to him. Matt uncorked it, drank deep, and passed the flask to Oxenshuer. It was different from the usual table stuff: thicker, sweeter, almost a sacramental wine. Oxenshuer gulped it down. Then they went to the center mat.

  They hunkered into crouches and circled each other tentatively, outstretched arms probing for an opening. Oxenshuer made the first move. He slipped in quickly, finding Matt surprisingly slow on his guard and unsophisticated in defensive technique. Nevertheless, the big man was able to break Oxenshuer’s hold with one fierce toss of his body, shaking him off easily and sending him sprawling violently backward. Again they circled. Matt seemed willing to allow Oxenshuer every initiative. Warily Oxenshuer advanced, feinted toward Matt’s shoulders, seized an arm instead; but Matt placidly ignored the gambit and somehow pivoted so that Oxenshuer was caught in the momentum of his own onslaught, thrown off balance, vulnerable to a bear hug. Matt forced him to the floor. For thirty seconds or so Oxenshuer stubbornly resisted him, arching his body; then Matt pinned him. They rolled apart and Nick proffered the wine again. Oxenshuer drank, gasping between pulls. “You’ve got good moves,” Matt told him. But he took the second fall even more quickly, and the third with not very much greater effort. “Don’t worry,” Will murmured to Oxenshuer as they left the gym. “The day of the Feast, the saint will guide you against him.”

  Every night, now, he drinks heavily, until his face is flushed and his mind is dizzied. Matt, Will, and Nick are always close beside him, seeing to it that his cup never stays dry for long. The wine makes him hazy and groggy, and frequently he has visions as he lies in a stupor on his bed, recovering. He sees Claire Vogel’s face glowing in the dark, and the sight of her wrings his heart with love. He engages in long, dreamlike imaginary dialogues with the Speaker on the nature of ecstatic communion. He sees himself dancing in the god-house with the other city folk, dancing himself to exhaustion and ecstasy. He is even visited by St. Dionysus. The saint has a youthful and oddly innocent appearance, with a heavy belly, plump thighs, curling golden hair, a flowing golden beard; he looks like a rejuvenated Santa Claus. “Come,” he says softly. “Let’s go to the ocean.” He takes Oxenshuer’s hand and they drift through the silent dark streets, toward the desert, across the swirling dunes, floating in the night, until they reach a broad-bosomed sea, moonlight blazing on its surface like cold white fire. What sea is this? The saint says, “This is the sea that brought you to the world, the undying sea that carries every mortal into life. Why do you ever leave the sea? Here. Step into it with me.” Oxenshuer enters. The water is warm, comforting, oddly viscous. He gives himself to it, ankle-deep, shin-deep, thigh-deep; he hears a low murmuring song rising from the gentle waves, and he feels all sorrow going from him, all pain, all sense of himself as a being apart from others. Bathers bob on the breast of the sea. Look: Dave Vogel is here, and Claire, and his parents, and his grandparents, and thousands more whom he does not know; millions, even, a horde stretching far out from shore; all the progeny of Adam, even Adam himself, yes, and Mother Eve, her soft pink body aglow in the water. “Rest,” the saint whispers. “Drift. Float. Surrender. Sleep. Give yourself to the ocean, dear John.” Oxenshuer asks if he will find God in this ocean. The saint replies, “God is the ocean. And God is within you. He always has been. The ocean is God. You are God. I am God. God is everywhere, John, and we are His indivisible atoms. God is everywhere. But before all else, God is within you.”

  What does the Speaker say? The Speaker speaks Freudian wisdom. Within us all, he says, there dwells a force, an entity— call it the unconscious; it’s as good a name as any—that from its hiding place dominates and controls our lives, though its workings are mysterious and opaque to us. A god within our skulls. We have lost contact with that god, the Speaker says; we are unable to reach it or to comprehend its powers, and so we are divided against ourselves, cut off from the chief source of our strength and cut off, too, from one another: the god that is within me no longer has a way to reach the god that is within you, though you and I both came out of the same primordial ocean, out of that sea of divine unconsciousness in which all being is one. If we could tap that force, the Speaker says, if we could make contact with that hidden god, if we could make it rise into consciousness or allow ourselves to submerge into the realm of unconsciousness, the split in our souls would be healed and we would at last have full access to our godhood. Who knows what kind of creatures we would become then? We would speak, mind to mind. We would travel through space or time, merely by willing it. We would work miracles. The errors of the past could be undone; the patterns of old griefs could be rewoven. We might be able to do anything, the Speaker says, once we have reached that hidden god and transformed ourselves into the gods we were meant to be. Anything. Anything. Anything.

  This is the dawn of the day of the Feast. All night long the drums and incantations have resounded through the city. He has been alone in the house, for not even the children were there; everyone was dancing in the plaza, and only he, the uninitiated, remained excluded from the revels. Much of the night he could not sleep. He thought of using wine to lull himself, but he feared the visions the wine might bring, and let the flask be. Now it is early morning, and he must have slept, for he finds himself fluttering up from slumber, but he does not remember having slipped down into it. He sits up. He hears footsteps, someone moving through the house. “John? You awake, John?” Matt’s voice. “In here,” Oxenshuer calls.

  They enter his room: Matt, Will, Nick. Their robes are spotted with splashes of red wine, and their faces are gaunt, eyes red-rimmed and unnaturally bright; plainly they have been up all night. Beneath their fatigue, though, Oxenshuer perceives exhilaration. They arc high, very high, almost in an ecstatic state already, and it is only the dawn of the day of the Feast. He sees that their fingers are trembling. Their bodies are tense with expectation.

  “We’ve come for you,” Matt says. “Here. Put this on.”

  He tosses Oxenshuer a robe similar to theirs. All this time Oxenshuer has continued to wear his mundane clothes in the city, making him a marked man, a conspicuous outsider. Naked, he gets out of bed and picks up his undershorts, but Matt shakes his head. Today, he says, only robes are worn. Oxenshuer nods and pulls the robe over his bare body. When he is robed he steps forward; Matt solemnly embraces him, a strong warm hug, and then Will and Nick do the same. The four
men leave the house. The long shadows of dawn stretch across the avenue that leads to the labyrinth; the mountains beyond the city are tipped with red. Far ahead, where the avenue gives way to the narrower streets, a tongue of black smoke can be seen licking the sky. The reverberations of the music batter the sides of the buildings. Oxenshuer feels a strange onrush of confidence, and is certain he could negotiate the labyrinth unaided this morning; as they reach its outer border he is actually walking ahead of the others. But sudden confusion confounds him, an inability to distinguish one winding street from another comes over him, and he drops back in silence, allowing Matt to take the lead.

  Ten minutes later they reach the plaza.

  It presents a crowded, chaotic scene. All the city folk are there, some dancing, some singing, some beating on drums or blowing into trumpets, some lying sprawled in exhaustion. Despite the chill in the air, many robes hang open, and more than a few of the citizens have discarded their clothing entirely. Children run about, squealing and playing tag. Along the front of the dining hall a series of wine barrels has been installed, and the wine gushes freely from the spigots, drenching those who thrust cups forward or simply push their lips to the flow. To the rear, before the house of the Speaker, a wooden platform has sprouted, and the Speaker and the city elders sit enthroned upon it. A gigantic bonfire has been kindled in the center of the plaza, fed by logs from an immense woodpile—hauled no doubt from some storehouse in the labyrinth—that occupies some twenty square meters. The heat of this blaze is tremendous, and it is the smoke from the bonfire that Oxenshuer was able to see from the city’s edge.

  His arrival in the plaza serves as a signal. Within moments, all is still. The music dies away; the dancing stops; the singers grow quiet; no one moves. Oxenshuer, flanked by his sponsors, Nick and Will, and preceded by his brother, Matt, advances uneasily toward the throne of the Speaker. The old man rises and makes a gesture, evidently a blessing. “Dionysus receive you into His bosom,” the Speaker says, his resonant voice traveling far across the plaza. “Drink, and let the saint heal your soul. Drink, and let the holy ocean engulf you. Drink. Drink.”

  “Drink,” Matt says, and guides him toward the barrels. A girl of about fourteen, naked, sweat-shiny, wine-soaked, hands him a cup. Oxenshuer fills it and puts it to his lips. It is the thick sweet wine, the sacramental wine, that he had had on the morning he had practiced wrestling with Matt. It slides easily down his throat; he reaches for more, and then for more when that is gone.

  At a signal from the Speaker, the music begins again. The frenzied dancing resumes. Three naked men hurl more logs on the fire and it blazes up ferociously, sending sparks nearly as high as the tip of the cross above the church. Nick and Will and Matt lead Oxenshuer into a circle of dancers who are moving in a whirling, dizzying step around the fire, shouting, chanting, stamping against the cobbles, flinging their arms aloft. At first Oxenshuer is put off by the uninhibited corybantic motions and finds himself self-conscious about imitating them, but as the wine reaches his brain, he sheds all embarrassment and prances with as much gusto as the others: he ceases to be a spectator of himself and becomes fully a participant. Whirl. Stamp. Fling. Shout. Whirl. Stamp. Fling. Shout. The dance centrifuges his mind; pools of blood collect at the walls of his skull and flush the convolutions of his cerebellum as he spins. The heat of the fire makes his skin glow. He sings:

  Tell the saint to heat my heart

  Tell the saint to give me breath

  Tell the saint to quench my thirst

  Thirst. When he has been dancing so long that his breath is fire in his throat, he staggers out of the circle and helps himself freely at a spigot. His greed for the thick wine astonishes him. It is as if he has been parched for centuries, every cell of his body shrunken and withered, and only the wine can restore him.

  Back to the circle again. His head throbs; his bare feet slap the cobbles; his arms claw the sky. This is the god whose name is music. This is the god whose soul is wine. Tere are ninety or a hundred people in the central circle of dancers now, and other circles have formed in the corners of the plaza, so that the entire square is a nest of dazzling interlocking vortices of motion. He is being drawn into these vortices, sucked out of himself; he is losing all sense of himself as a discrete individual entity.

  Leaping shouting singing stamping

  Rising climbing flying soaring

  Melting joining loving blazing

  Singing soaring joining loving

  “Come,” Matt murmurs. “It’s time for us to do some wrestling.”

  He discovers that they have constructed a wrestling pit in the far corner of the plaza, over in front of the church. It is square: four low wooden borders, about ten meters long on each side, filled with the coarse sand of the desert. The Speaker has shifted his lofty seat so that he now faces the pit; everyone else is crowded around the place of the wrestling, and all dancing has once again stopped. The crowd opens to admit Matt and Oxenshuer. Not far from the pit Matt shucks his robe; his powerful naked body glistens with sweat. Oxenshuer, after only a moment’s hesitation, strips also. They advance toward the entrance of the pit. Before they enter, a boy brings them each a flask of wine. Oxenshuer, already feeling wobbly and hazy from drink, wonders what more wine will do to his physical coordination, but he takes the flask and drinks from it in great gulping swigs. In moments it is empty. A young girl offers him another. “Just take a few sips,” Matt advises. “In honor of the god.” Oxenshuer does as he is told. Matt is sipping from a second flask too; without warning, Matt grins and flings the contents of his flask over Oxenshuer. Instantly Oxenshuer retaliates. A great cheer goes up; both men are soaked with the sticky red wine. Matt laughs heartily and claps Oxenshuer on the back. They enter the wrestling pit.

  Wine in my heart today,

  Blood in my throat today,

  Fire in my soul today,

  All praise, O God, to thee.

  They circle each other warily. Brother against brother. Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel, Osiris and Set: the ancient ritual, the timeless conflict. Neither man offers. Oxenshuer feels heavy with wine, his brain clotted, and yet a strange lightness also possesses him; each time he puts his foot down against the sand the contact gives him a little jolt of ecstasy. He is excitingly aware of being alive, mobile, vigorous. The sensation grows and possesses him, and he rushes forward suddenly, seizes Matt, tries to force him down. They struggle in almost motionless rigidity. Matt will not fall, but his counterthrust is unavailing against Oxenshuer. They stand locked, body against sweat-slick, wine-drenched body, and after perhaps two minutes of intense tension they give up their holds by unvoiced agreement, backing away trembling from each other. They circle again. Brother. Brother. Abel. Cain. Oxenshuer crouches. Extends his hands, groping for a hold. Again they leap toward each other. Again they grapple and freeze. This time Matt’s arms pass like bands around Oxenshuer, and he tries to lift Oxenshuer from the ground and hurl him down. Oxenshuer does not budge. Veins swell in Matt’s forehead and, Oxenshuer suspects, in his own. Faces grow crimson. Muscles throb with sustained effort. Matt gasps, loosens his grip, tries to step back; instantly Oxenshuer steps to one side of the bigger man, catches his arm, pulls him close. Once more they hug. Each in turn, they sway but do not topple. Wine and exertion blur Oxenshuer’s vision; he is intoxicated with strain. Heaving, grabbing, twisting, shoving, he goes round and round the pit with Matt, until abruptly he experiences a dimming of perception, a sharp moment of blackout, and when his senses return to him he is stunned to find himself wrestling not with Matt but with Dave Vogel. Childhood friend, rival in love, comrade in space. Vogel, closer to him than any brother of the flesh, now here in the pit with him: thin sandy hair, snub nose, heavy brows, thick-muscled shoulders. “Dave!” Oxenshuer cries. “Oh, Christ, Dave! Dave!” He throws his arms around the other man. Vogel gives him a mild smile and tumbles to the floor of the pit. “Dave!” Oxenshuer shouts, falling on him. “How did you get here, Dave?” He covers Vog
el’s body with his own. He embraces him with a terrible grip. He murmurs Vogel’s name, whispering in wonder, and lets a thousand questions tumble out. Does Vogel reply? Oxenshuer is not certain. He thinks he hears answers, but they do not match the questions. Then Oxenshuer feels fingers tapping his back. “Okay, John,” Will is saying. “You’ve pinned him fair and square. It’s all over. Get up, man.”

  “Here, I’ll give you a hand,” says Nick.

  In confusion Oxenshuer rises. Matt lies sprawled in the sand, gasping for breath, rubbing the side of his neck, nevertheless still grinning. “That was one hell of a press,” Matt says. “That something you learned in college?”

  “Do we wrestle another fall now?” Oxenshuer asks.

  “No need. We go to the god-house now,” Will tells him. They help Matt up. Flasks of wine are brought to them; Oxenshuer gulps greedily. The four of them leave the pit, pass through the opening crowd, and walk toward the church.

  Oxenshuer has never been in here before. Except for a sort of altar at the far end, the huge building is wholly empty: no pews, no chairs, no chapels, no pulpit, no choir. A mysterious light filters through the stained-glass windows and suffuses the vast open interior space. The Speaker has already arrived; he stands before the altar. Oxenshuer, at a whispered command from Matt, kneels in front of him. Matt kneels at Oxenshuer’s left;