Member

by Michael Cisco

  “Fibrokinetic,” he murmurs, seeing my surprise. Raising one hand, he taps the base of his neck and his fingernail clicks. There’s something back there, looped around his throat and pressed to the skin, the size shape and smoothness of a barrette.

  “That’s the mount. The fibers are too fine to see with the naked eye. I control them, and they wrap around things, pick up, carry, hammer, bolt, saw. Takes real skill to displace your motivations onto the fibers, and use imaginary tools. Takes money, too.”

  He lets his head roll back now.

  “There are only six of us. Music’s done.”

  I go over to the door and look out at the haggard, grey-haired hills, the artifact inhaling its own lurid glow.

  “Do you know what we’re building?” he asks my back. His voice has a faint note of hope in it that makes me look back at him.

  “Don’t you?”

  He shakes his head, eyes on me.

  I shrug. “Me neither. I don’t even know if this is the site I’m supposed to deliver to.”

  I ask the man his name, and he says “Yunis.”

  The lanes of the camp are deserted. The moon, better than half full, leans down over the artifact and recites something to me in a gentle, dry voice. As I walk, the passing barracks appear to lean toward me, hurrying past me in the other direction. Through the windows I can see the darkened rows of beds where exhausted Operationals lie sleeping.

  An artifact like a wall that runs from horizon to horizon—that might even divide the globe for all I know—completely hidden from view by tarps and scaffolding, still under construction after who knows how many years of constant work, and nobody knows what it’s for or what, if anything, it does. Like Chorncendantra. Huge, old, ongoing, alive, engrossing everyone and demanding frenetic, purposive activity without offering anything but the promise or impression of having a purpose, absurd and solemn.

  Maybe it’s enough to participate, and that makes your opinion on the topic as valid as anyone else’s. It could be that it really is too complex for one person to understand, but complexities are only bits of information that dwindle to insignificance when you take a long enough view of something to get its general outline, and I can’t even manage that. Or maybe I can. Look at the artifact. A big wall. And Chorncendantra. A big game, like children playing at being spies. The problem is that there’s no way to relate the big picture and the little one; the medium-sized picture, where the connections all are, is invisible.

  The game didn’t invent me, that’s my problem. I’m only butting in. No one knows what to make of me, but the unconditioned independence I show makes me potentially useful to them, provided they can figure out what to do with me. Now, I want to play, but not as a pawn.

  The admonitions to be oneself, follow one’s own law, and so on, are converted by the “angel” into phantoms of egotism, signs of a desire to stand above the level of others. There is a sleight of mind in there, which turns the impulse to cultivate differences and particularities into the impulse to see oneself as better than others, such that being different is conflated with superiority. By that argument I am morally obligated to be a conformist, but, and this is truly insidious, the idea that I want to be better entails an onerous comparison, so that now I am supposed to be striving, as one of many more or less identical examples of a given species, to be the best of them.

  Black alleys with light from the next street behind them form wings on either side of me. The camp drops off my back and I hurtle forward against the hills. I keep the artifact on my left.

  Knowing everything is not hard. Anyone who has been convinced hasn’t learned, it’s not what or how much you know, but simply how you know, only to be at rest in the act. No property to come between you and the world, no rind or cover or fantasy or nothing between you and fantasy, perfect toughness, or numbness; whoever it is doesn’t teach or even know, he doesn’t know himself for what he is supposed to be and this is his discretion or part of his sanctity and he doesn’t teach he acts, whether he’s being observed or not, and all his acts are riddles, which doesn’t mean they have secret answers or other meanings but just the opposite. What’s left after all the traditions are broken but a tradition of breaking traditions with nothing left to do but break itself? He pays attention to impressions but he doesn’t think about himself, complete and perverse, preoccupied with abstractions, but not obsessed with them. Obsession is a passion to possess something and here there’s nothing to possess. I tell myself that, and that I’m just a thing that sees, and all I am is just the wake my eyes trail behind them with nothing to own, but it doesn’t sound or feel true.

  I come into the camp on the far side. Off in the distance, I see a crowd of silent, hooded, lumbering figures with brooms, scrapers and tiltbuckets on rods. They might be cleaning the camp, or heading out toward the artifact. Rows of earthmoving equipment and some cars are parked nearby in a dirt lot, and they’re all wearing clothes—hats, neckties, corsets, lingerie, parks department uniforms. There’s a skiff in a fur coat upside down on top of one of the trucks.

  The camp has no clear boundary, only a gradually increasing density of more or less uniform buildings, all of them up off the ground on short pilings. Of all of them, only one seems to hold any alert life, and that’s a longhouse with a porch and an open door spilling dingy yellow light and thin smoke. I sling the bag over my shoulder and go around to peek in through the smeary windows.

  It’s a narrow hall inside, filled with steaming beer drinkers who wear furtive looks on their faces, the uncertain gaiety of getting away with something, for now. The men look like daguerreotypes of old writers, smoke is with them but not actually connected to their cigarettes. Most of them sit with their elbows well forward on the battered tables, the table edges in their armpits, and their heads down between their shoulders, but there’s a group toward the back that is considerably more animated. They’re better dressed, for one thing, which makes them seem less soggy and dissipated; they’re drinking coffee from cups and saucers, for another, and having a vigorous conversation over blueprints.

  The man who does the most talking is large, grey haired, with skin like wax paper, powdery white, and a pale pink glow radiating unwholesomely from inside it. He suddenly holds up his finger with recollection on his face, excuses himself, rises, and crosses to a door in the rear of the room. I follow and station myself at the window overlooking as he enters the next apartment and snaps on the light.

  This room is like the office at a gas station, and there’s a large, garish painting of a bobcat in a tree on the wall behind the desk. More blueprints, a bookshelf painted on the wall below the painting, which I think is also painted directly on the wall. The man checks something on his desk, then takes some keys from the desk drawer and steps to the outer door, unlocks and opens it. I hear his deep indrawn breath as he steps outside in his shirtsleeves, sighing with relish, although the air out here is lousy, and then he walks over toward the parked cars. He’d looked white enough to me, even unnaturally pale, but he’s plainly black now, out in the night; his head is bald, with a lightly greyed fringe. After a few steps he pauses, scans the lot with a slow movement of his head, turns back around, and sees me.

  He smiles and waves to me casually.

  “Just making sure the cars haven’t been stripped,” he says, approaching me jauntily. “Can’t have naked cars. You never know when a child will come along and see something she’s a bit too young to understand. Wouldn’t be decent.”

  He waits for me to respond.

  “That sounds reasonable,” I say finally.

  He lowers his voice.

  “People steal the clothes right off them. I don’t know who—ah!”

  The confiding tone drops and he points eagerly at my bag.

  “Are you bringing us something nice?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “I’d wanted to ask you about that. Is this a good time?”

  “Sure! Sure! Come in for a minute!”

  The bobcat has a clar
ity halo, so that it and the ‘air’ for a few inches around it are much clearer than its murky surroundings.

  I sit down on the visiting side. He’s white again with the light on, and brushes papers away from a desk full of silver needles and black coins; pulling out the drawer again he puts the keys so deeply inside it his arm goes in up to the shoulder. There’s a sheet on the desk, near this end, showing me what he was working on. A translation of something, with a heading or name at the top: Clwrwbwak.

  The conversation from the main hall, which blows in under the divider door along with stale cigarettes and beer, is unbelievably loud, considering I hadn’t heard a thing when I peered in through the windows. Maybe I’d spied on a lull.

  “So,” he says, still rummaging in the drawer, his cheek bunched against the desk. “Why so late?”

  It seems to me he may be trying to hook the keys without being able to see what he’s doing.

  “How late is it?”

  “I mean, late making the delivery.”

  “I came down with something.”

  “Feeling any better?” he asks, raising his eyebrows and smiling so broadly that his kindness seems put on.

  “Yeah, I’m feeling irie. Look, I was wondering if you could tell me something.”

  He straightens.

  “Oh good! That makes me feel important!”

  I don’t like the way he says this. From the office and the blueprints I’ve been hoping he was either a High Rational himself or at least someone who might know something, but his manner puts me in mind of a small town postmaster who thinks he’s finally started moving up in the world because he’s been enlisted to help take a census.

  “You ask me why I’m late. Is this a delivery you were specifically waiting for?”

  “Sure! We’re always waiting on a delivery.”

  “Is this the specific delivery you were expecting?”

  I suppose,” he says, blinking and cocking his head.

  The room at my back explodes with laughter. It’s so loud and sudden I all but start up out of my seat.

  “I don’t handle deliveries myself,” he goes on, glancing past me at the source of the noise. A flicker of irritation skips across his rubbery face.

  “Well who does?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Who handles deliveries?”

  “Guerrero. He’s the foreman.”

  “Is this camp his, too?”

  The laughter is only just starting to die down. There’s a new noise: stamping feet, and an accordion. This office smells like cats, too.

  “Well, yes...” he seems not to know exactly how to answer me, as if my question were strange.

  “So he runs both camps?”

  “I suppose. Anyway, he was only just talking to me... ah, when was it? A few days ago... Anyway, if I recall...”

  The effort to remember makes him screw up his face.

  “He mentioned something about—no, he called to me, from out there...”

  Without warning there’s a crash behind me. Someone must have run full tilt into the door.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I ask. “Maybe if you start at the beginning.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he nods. “Let’s see, I was inside making a salad when...”

  He shambles to the corner of the room and untwists the knob on a metal bottle labelled SLEEP GAS connected by copper pipe to the next room. The racket in the next room soon dies down, and now there is only the sound of bodies crumpling to the floor, overturned tables and chairs clattering, and a faint hiss.

  “There,” he says, returning to his desk. “Now we won’t be interrupted. So anyway I was making the salad, there in the next room...”

  Instead of sitting down, he paces to and fro, looking at the floor, and gesturing as he talks.

  “...I heard Guerrero calling me from outside. Or—no! It was Clare!”

  “His wife? Is this place under her jurisdiction, too?”

  “Sure,” he says, hastily, trying not to lose the thread. “She called me on the telephone, and—or she knocked at the door... Knocked at... She never knocks. Well, anyway, it was something to do with getting my attention and talking to Guerrero about the slime, and the way things have been going, and he said there was probably going to have to be another delivery—but then, I believe we received one. That might have been the one he meant.”

  Staring at the papers scattered on the desk, he seems to get lost in thought. I watch his eyes flick from one sheet to another. The light in here is so dim I wonder how he can make out anything.

  “Slime?” I ask.

  Without looking up, he nods once, silently, his lips compressed into a thoughtful line.

  “What slime?”

  “The whole purpose of the artifact. Slime collecting.”

  “This whole thing is just about some slime?”

  The man doesn’t answer or alter his posture; he only snorts silently.

  “Not just any slime?”

  “Give me the slime.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m beginning to wonder about you.”

  “Star jelly, you know!” He looks at me, waving his hand irritably, as if he shouldn’t have to explain such things to me. “The rot of the stars.”

  “You mean the stuff they find in meteorites sometimes?”

  “Sure. The stars fill up with water. Star water. Jelly. Now... I was out by the lot, talking with Guerrero—no! I was in here and he came up and spoke to me through the window.”

  He points to the window, and his face suddenly turns to smoke. It ripples, exposing the teeth in a trembling, uncertain grin.

  Someone is at the window. A luminous woman. I only catch the briefest glimpse of her as she seems to float in the trees. With a clatter of his heels, the man scrambles into the closet, whipping the door shut but not permitting it to slam. A wan light is playing on the window sill now. She must be peering in. I’d have to go around the desk to get a look at her, and I don’t really want to do that.

  She must be standing there, waiting. I sit tight.

  The books on the shelves behind the desk are all fakes designed to fool people at a distance. The titles are only for show, and up close they make no sense. Bedwetting Made Easy. CANDY GAMES AND CONTESTS! Silent Scum: Selected Poems of Regibald Hokenstreme. Control Voyage: A No-Person Narrative. PARTY PLANNING.

  The telephone rings very softly and I pick it up.

  “Hello? Expresso Jerk-o.”

  There’s an answer that I can’t make out. It sounds like someone’s buffing the receiver.

  “He’s out of the office just now,” I say. “Is this—?”

  “Yes, I’m back.” The voice says. “I’m back, you unworthy man.” The voice smiles seductively at me.

  I glance over at the window. Is there the outline of a cheek there, and is there a bare shoulder, sculpted in moonlight? It’s her voice, through the phone.

  “So... what’s new?” I ask.

  “Chorncendantra.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where I’m supposed to bring this bag to, would you?”

  “Not here, friend.”

  “The other side?”

  “Always.”

  “I’ll leave the bag here and wash my hands.”

  “Leaving it isn’t the same as delivering it.”

  “How about turning on a light? If leaving it and delivering it are different, what makes the difference?”

  “Not what, who.”

  “Well?”

  “You.”

  The voice has an accent I can’t place. I turn to the window. The glow there is a little more intense, softer than starlight, and the wind picks up in the trees, lifting a few pale strands of long hair by the glass.

  “Me, huh?” It’s the best I can think of.

  “You, Ernie.”

  “You know that’s not my name, but you’re just going to call me that, right?”

  “I’m not the kind to call you Pete.”
<
br />   “I like your team uniform better.”

  She laughs drily. The phone clicks. The window looks just like it did before. The trees outside sway in the wind.

  The closet door flies open and Chief Potato comes puffing back in, mopping his brow.

  “Was it her?” he asks, without not knowing. “Was it bad?”

  “I’m not so shook up.”

  “Wait till it happens to you a few times,” he says as he takes his seat. “You won’t be able to stand it. Now... as you were saying?”

  The smile on his face is something out of a nightmare. Sweat trickles to either side of his glassy, unblinking eyes.

  “You know, I’m done. I forget.”

  “You were saying?”

  “Forget it. I’ve changed my mind. It’s OK.”

  There’s a clipped knock at the door, and two elegant-looking black women come in, wearing detective badges on their belts. The lights begin to flicker, not that they were that strong to begin with, and now they blink out. Come back a second later. Go back out. Meanwhile, the first of the two women, who is both older and more personally attractive to me, introduces herself and her associate, both of whom turn out to be inspectors.

  “There’s been a gas attack in the next room,” she says. “Everyone in there is out like a light.”

  The lights go out. The lights wink on, and both women’s eyes swivel, first the one who spoke, then the second one, to the canister in the corner, which is still hissing.

  Now they are both looking at the man behind the desk.

  “Ernie?” the older one asks.

  “Well, that’s—urk!”

  The lights go out. The lights wink back on.

  I look.

  Stabbed.

  “Damn,” the older inspector says. “That makes five stabbings this morning.”

  “And it’s only one fifteen,” her partner says.