Member

by Michael Cisco

  Now the thin lip of the moon flashes, and there’s a slender bolt of lightning from it to the ground in front of me, on the far side of the pool. Moonlightning is silent. The only aftermath is a rush of tepid air, which blows aside the dank odor of the water and replaces it with a confused efflorescence like the breath of a big garden.

  “That’s the planet I’m from,” I think. “All that misery, the terror of life. Life as a terrifying curse, much more terrible than death, returning without reason or sense or mercy over and over again, like an implacable enemy that will beat you down no matter how many times you get back up. The labors of Sisyphus, but in a frenzy, not knowing where this labor came from or why you do it, except that it’s simply your life.”

  What’s over there?

  Between the trees there’s a pathway lined with stones, running between low stone walls back toward a looming, dark building. There’s an inscription above the gateway’s arch: The Castle of Beasts. Walking its halls, I notice all the carvings and statues are of animals, all executed in the same style; whether they’re birds or bugs or other kinds of creatures, they all have a kind of curvy, sinuous plumpness and cute sexiness, as if they took sensual pleasure just being in their elastic bodies. The echoes of my footfalls come back to me down the shadowy corridors, and to my ear they sound like hoofbeats. Blurring, the candlecakes are coming out of little apertures... in their dim, blonde glow, I see a number of figures moving. Women in white summer dresses, and some men. A face—a woman’s face.

  I recognize the woman from whom I got the bag. The whites of her eyes are eerily bright in her darkly tanned face, and there’s a mole beneath them both. Her hair is so sun-bleached it looks almost white, the color of lemon sherbet. Her cheeks puff out and her mouth makes an O; the candleflames flutter and vanish as the whole chamber is traversed by a flash of far-distant lightning. In that faint, brief light, I see the tendrils of smoke from each little candle immobilized like ectoplasm calligraphy, trailing from the cake. A last glimpse of her, too, as she sort of bows out of sight, showing, for a moment, the soft hollow of her collarbone, and the softer hollow further down.

  The cakes light the way to a grand hall. But, through the heavy doors, there is no vast, imperial theater; there’s soil, trees, a gorge in the near distance, and a dim slope of heaped boulders, raspberry-colored stones smooth as river rocks, marbled taffy white.

  There’s a commotion somewhere. A noise, like a machine working at a construction site. I follow it, leaving the stones.

  The ground is trembling again. The source is down there in a courtyard. No scaffolding and machinery, just a whole mob of Operationals. It’s a brawl, a very slow brawl, with what looks like two sides. They’ve paired off and they’re pounding each other like line workers driving spikes, raising and lowering their fists as if they were almost too heavy for their arms. Each crashing blow gets an answering one, and makes the earth jump. Every face is a locked grimace of pain and fury. And helplessness.

  No castle, no stone terrace for me to stand on, no courtyard. Just an empty lot, a few houses back there; tall grass that rattles as the Operationals exchange blows. A few lie on the ground—something is happening to them. I kneel down by one of them. He’s dead. Another, a woman, her head thrown back, lost in long weeds. She’s dead. It’s her—the woman I’d just seen.

  Then a voice that sounds like a ghost being sucked backwards down a corrugated steel pipe erupts from the dead man behind me.

  “Chorncendantra!”

  With a look of agony on his face and pain contorting every limb, he’s back on his feet again and staggering toward his enemies, lifting his fists.

  I hear that voice again, this time coming from the woman. Under my hand, I feel her heart begin to beat again, hard. Not quickly, but hard, so hard it nearly throws off my hand. It doesn’t seem possible a heart should be able to beat so hard. And it’s in time, too, to the blows, which all seem to fall at the same interval. Maybe timed to the rise and falls of those huge cubes on a distant planet, maybe that’s their clock or their time-machine. She gets up too, and I look away. I don’t want to see her face.

  That was her dream, I think. The Castle of Beasts. That I’d wandered into. I trespassed there. Sorry.

  “Chorncendantra!”

  I’m starting to feel conspicuous—I should get away, but not so far I can’t keep watch on her. That will be easier to bear from a distance, too. Perhaps this is what Laff Riot, back in front of the Operationals’ house, was telling me to wait for.

  I hurry over to the houses, trying to keep to the shadows. They’re overgrown, both the shadows and the houses. In through a drooping screen door that wheezes as I push through. Blank plaster walls. A junkroom littered halfway to the ceiling on my right. The windows in what I take for the back parlor should overlook the fight. They do, completely. The field is empty.

  “Now that one,” a cool voice says, right inside my ear, and I know it means me.

  A chill flushes over me and sinks into my body.

  “I’m alive already!” I yell. “I don’t need it! I’m alive already!”

  That chill contracts up my limbs and tightens around my chest.

  “I’m OK! I’m alive! I’m OK! I don’t need it!”

  It reaches my heart. The pulse gets heavier. Not faster—only heavier. I feel it thud in my ribs. Each one heavier, heavier. Not faster—if anything, a little too slow, a little too measured, deliberate. My heart isn’t responding to my fear or to me—my heart is obeying someone else.

  Each beat gets heavier. I feel them in my temples. In my hands, in my feet. I clutch my chest. The pulse is so strong that it’s like a soft blow against my palm. The next blow is not as soft, the next still less. My body is swelling—my chest hurts, and my arms, like after you spin around and around with your arms outstretched until all the blood is whirled out into your fists. My whole body feels like that.

  The pulse is getting stronger.

  “You’re killing me!” I shout. “I’m not an Operational! I’m alive already!”

  “Make his heart ten times stronger,” the cool voice says.

  My heart slams against my ribs. My eyes nearly pop from their sockets and, as I look helplessly toward the door, two jets of blood spurt from my tear ducts and spatter the wood. Why don’t I fall down? The same force that is strengthening my heart is holding me up, keeping me together.

  “Twenty times stronger,” the voice says.

  Blood jets from my eyes and ears, fills my mouth. It’s coming out of my skin, trickling all over me like perspiration. That steady, measured beat is battering me to pieces from the inside out, sets the boards in the floor rattling, makes the wobbly sideboard tinkle its crockery. I can’t stand still—something is propelling me across the room and out through the open window, in a short drop to the street, trailing blood, mewling, slobbering out my pleas for mercy, my apologies for whatever for whatever. Ramming in my chest so I can feel my ribs vibrating and shivering.

  “He’s losing blood,” the voice says.

  Now, I put one foot before the other in time to the regular beat of my heart, so loud I can hear it echo back to me from the buildings lining the street. I’m getting hot all of a sudden. My marrow bones are white hot. I can’t speak, even to beg, anymore; every pulse sends a mouthful of blood from my lips. My blood leaps from my face, way out before me onto the sidewalk. Blood fills my eyes but my feet keep walking. Heat washes over me, now from outside. An acrid smell—leaping flames.

  Strangling, I’m trying to explain, begging—

  “You didn’t set a fire,” the voice says, “so now you will make up for it by extinguishing one. One hundred times stronger.”

  My shoes explode. My clothes burst into shreds. My skin ruptures in countless places. Blood shoots from my body in all directions—I’m blind and deaf. My tongue splits and turns to mush, my cheeks tear, and I know I’m walking into a burning building, directly into the center of the flames. Put out the burning building with your o
wn blood.

  *

  A lone bird, calling.

  It’s the world’s death rattle.

  Dying gasps, and struggles.

  Such a distinct call from such a small and delicate body. It’s sharply repeated, rebounding from the buildings and criss-crossing the street.

  Is this the better world? Where birdsong can be heard without fear that this will be the last time, a world where the wilderness goes on forever.

  There’s no fatigue in my legs, nothing to tell me I’ve been walking for a long time already, the bag in my hand, as I thought a moment ago. There’s only an inner whisper that tells me how much time has gone by, that perhaps another day has come and gone while I was off, wandering inside a heavy metal album cover. Now I’m sitting in a silver bell of liquid glass, moonlight for short. Maybe this is my dream. I could be lying somewhere, dead.

  Glancing down, I get my first good look at something terrestrial and solid in what feels like ages: a big, flat rock, glittering in the moonlight with snailsnot and mica. I look at it, and the black shadows hidden in the grass just beyond it, and my troubled frame of mind lifts. From somewhere in my mind comes the memory of a Chinese poem I read once:

  low flutes, icy wind,

  silver and glass and ice

  life is not always thirsted after

  At this point, I return with joy to the discipline of my practice. The wind slides a few high, narrow clouds across the moon.

  I’m looking up at it through the blackened rafters of a charred room. I’m cold as ice. My mouth tastes like blood. Souring blood.

  My body is black. I lift my arm and black flakes fall from my skin. The flakes scrape away easily, and beneath them, my skin is no different than I remember.

  I take stock. My body is fine, covered in dried blood but fine. I’m stark naked, lying on the floor in a half-burned building dripping with blood. The stink of fried blood is everywhere, mixed with the odor of burnt plastic and insulation, woodsmoke and soot. My heart isn’t trying to blow itself out of my chest anymore.

  I feel fine. I take a long breath.

  “Satisfied?” I yell, at the top of my lungs.

  There, neatly framed by a ragged, charcoalated hole in the wall, sits my bag out there on pavement the moon changes to tabs of mercury nougat. It must have been placed there, since I don’t remember carrying it. Thoughtful Operationals. The top of the bag is a little folded down, making me think of a dog, patiently waiting for its master with its head on its paws. I step gingerly out through the hole in the wall and scrape my bicep anyway. Just a white scrape. My bandages burned or blew off, too. The injury to my leg is gone, though. I seem to be fully repaired.

  The house isn’t much to look at.

  “I hope it was worth saving,” I say quietly. My voice sounds hoarse and bitter. There must have been a lot of screaming.

  All right, I’m outside in my birthday suit. The stars twinkle overhead, and maybe their star is among them. Anyway, school isn’t letting out any time soon.

  The Operationals have their own planet.

  That wasn’t the smoking, high desert world of the shaggy beings. Those worlds are part of one system, with what they call a contact sun.

  I have the proto-crazy sensation I know more about this than I’m letting on to myself, like there’s a schematic for this all in the part of my head reserved for inaccessible memories.

  It’s not that I don’t know or that I can’t remember, it’s that I almost do have it, something, in my mind, and I almost don’t, so I must be careful not to make up plausible things; it would be virtually impossible not to mistake inventions for knowledge or memory. This is a kind of training.

  Clouds float past the moon. The light fades and swells.

  I think I’m reasoning, but is this something I can know? I sit down on something hard and rub my head. A second voice, also mine, says: because, yes or no, the result will be rational, correct and train... train me.

  Train me to be what? Wrong question. But doesn’t there have to be a model, maybe an immanent one that takes shape as things get realer? My confidence in the method is beginning to give.

  I take a sterner tone with myself. My behavior must be brought strictly into line with principle.

  All right. What principle?

  I feel my face slacken.

  I don’t know. Just principle. Any principle. Principle is enough, principle may come. Like a demon.

  A leaf crackles. An older man in a black body stocking, carrying a wand over his shoulder like a shovel, and a big brown paper shopping bag with loop handles, comes tripping out of the shadows between the houses. He’s watching his feet.

  “Where’s your partner?” I ask.

  He glances up at me, then back down at his feet, walking as carefully, and shakily, as a man on a tightrope.

  “Busy,” he says, and sets the bag down at my feet. “There. A fresh set.”

  I look down. The bag is full of clothes.

  The man is walking back the way he came, his head down. He waves without turning.

  “Have a good one,” he says.

  The clothes are more or less identical to what I’d been wearing. Right out of the fire, my body feels as clean and tender as if I’d just taken a long shower.

  How do I avoid snap judgements, hasty decisions? Clouds cross the moon. The tree shadow fades and returns. The strong tree of regular practices.

  So my being caught up in this delivering and chorncending doesn’t have any independent existence, it wasn’t waiting for me in time and space, a mission or a set of instructions can’t exist on its own. The mission has to be accepted and carried out, the instructions have to be followed. Any less than that, and there’s nothing there at all.

  *

  A little while later I notice a star on a tree trunk. It’s high off the ground, made of rusty iron, folded right into the bark. I aim carefully, feeling the gun getting heavier in my hand. The length of tape glows faintly, so I can see and be sure it enters the slot in the center. A moment later, I wonder if I haven’t goofed. My instructions had been to fire on buildings, only. No, I had had no instructions; the officer simply told me what was expected. I have to assume he was sent to me for that reason.

  Beyond the trees, and across a crumbling parking lot framed in rusted chain link fence, I find another woods. The bag is lifting me up, floating me along. I cross a body of water that chirps like a night full of crickets.

  Then I walk into a woods that grows steadily denser until the darkness is total. My feet begin to sound on floorboards, and, as my eyes grow accustomed to this suddenly deeper lightlessness, I make out the walls of the narrow hallways hemming me in.

  He leaps up the moment he catches sight of me. Actually, he must have sprung from his chair right as the door began to part from the frame, because he is already clear of the table and advancing in full stride toward me through the bar of shadows that divides the room. I get my first real look at him as he emerges from that shadow, the whites of his eyes first. He stops abruptly a pace away; everything about his carriage prepares me for the snappily outstretched hand, but he keeps his hands at his sides and cocks his head back. Then he leans forward and grins at me; his eyes are brilliant, like sapphires, but they look as if they don’t go all the way back into the sockets somehow. From his manner, he seems ready to burst out laughing, but he only shows me his even little teeth.

  A wave of fatigue hits me out of nowhere; I’ve been a few dozen steps ahead of it until now, but it catches up with me and everything goes grey, dim, muffled. Without a word, he takes me lightly by the shoulders and steers me over to a chair on this side of the table; then he sets himself down in the chair opposite, facing me, pulling it up under him.

  “Give me a minute,” I say. My mind is clearing.

  When I look up at him again, I can’t imagine him ever being out of that chair.

  I get the impression he sits by the window, so that, every now and then, he can extend his arm at full length t
hrough it and sample the very slightly cooler, very slightly fresher night air, which seems to brush against his upturned palm like the belly of a huge, docile animal.

  The remainder of the apartment is lost in a clear, bright darkness that belongs in the great outdoors. It smells a little like cats.

  The wall on the far side of the window doesn’t plummet straight back, as I assumed. It angles inwards, sharply, to form a tiny compartment with a toilet. The door is peeled back and flush against the outer wall. The floor inside is minute white hexagonal tiles; there’s a heavy porcelain sink with a shiny steel intestine and the toilet beyond that, gleaming white in a soft, snowy disc of light falling from somewhere up above.

  “This is a lucky sign,” he says. His small, very red mouth moves a little too much as he speaks, and he tosses a forelock away from his brow as he says it. “A courier so early.”

  “I’ll be with you in a moment,” I say.

  “Take your time,” he says magnanimously. “I have plenty to spare, for now. We never get visitors here.”

  Toying with his fountain pen, all covered in gold, he distracts himself while I get my wind back. He puts his arm out through the window for a moment. Without preamble, he brings his hand back in, takes the pen in its fingers, extends the hand out again, and drops the pen into space by rotating his entire arm and letting it fall from his open palm, all as absently as a child.

  “You wouldn’t have anything to eat around here?” I ask. Not that I feel hungry, but days have gone by since I’ve eaten anything and that can’t be good.

  “I’m afraid not,” he says. After a moment’s thought, he adds: “We don’t eat.”