Member

by Michael Cisco

  “That animal,” I say, “would probably rather take its chances and die on the ice than live a long comfortable life here.”

  “You can’t know that,” a voice answers me after a while, in a tone that expresses only a pretty weak interest in what I’m talking about. “It’s fed here. Much more reliably than it could provide for itself.”

  “It doesn’t just want food. It has instincts to hunt and kill that it isn’t allowed to exercise.”

  Speaking my mind to strangers like this feels new and strange to me. It’s strange to feel like talking.

  “I mean, where’s the reverence? Is this right? For these animals to live at the fiat of a pack of gawking primates?”

  The one with the eyebrows makes a face.

  “I’m afraid I’ve never been receptive to pontificating and sermonizing. Let’s say, I’ve had more than my share of them. I don’t want to give any offense, but don’t you think there is something shabby in the way some persons use animals as proxies, and voice their own selfish feelings by means of them?”

  “I’m only talking about whether or not this seems right to me.”

  “But, if it’s wrong, isn’t it a wrong perpetrated against the animal?”

  “The animal and the wrongdoer at once.”

  “The wrongdoer!”

  “Well, doesn’t this mob of people here lower itself in becoming a mob?”

  “What do you expect? Just more fine human beings.”

  “You sound so derisive that it seems to me you find it an inherently preposterous idea.”

  “It’s you who finds it preposterous, because you’re not serious about it, you only want to seem that way to cover up your irritation at the... your petty irritability.”

  “I never denied that I was irritable,” I say, “even much too irritable, but so what? Admitting that doesn’t make what I say untrue—those are ill-bred children and they will grow up to be unpleasant.”

  “Unpleasant!”

  “I supposed we all go mincing on our toes with crustless sandwiches?” another one says. This one I can see, because he isn’t standing outside the circle of excessively bright electric light, the way most of the others are. A sneering young man with clear skin and eyes, who leans almost doubled over the railing, with his head down like a gargoyle, only glancing sidelong at me.

  “Obviously,” I reply, without being deterred in the least, “I’m not complaining because I haven’t managed to live inside the cartoon you’re describing. While I did exaggerate myself just now, I think you can see the spirit of my remarks is reasonable enough.”

  “What are you arguing for?” an older woman near me, short and stocky, says, in a way that suggests she thinks all argument is pointless. She looks around herself, not at any of us, as if she expected only to remain in the background, but there’s an astuteness about her that might mean she is following our disjointed, ungainly conversation better than I am.

  “Just ignore them. The higher man on the higher path looks beyond the mere mortals around him, and to him their voices are nothing more than the buzzing of insects. See through them.”

  That’s the sneering young man.

  “That’s just phoney elitism,” I say.

  “Certainly, snobbery, superiority over others,” the older Indian man says, “but that’s just it, because everyone thinks they’re superior to everyone else, so in being superior, you’re still only being ordinary. Only the same as everyone else. There’s nothing more ordinary than to think you are the only one, the superior one. The least conformist thing is to hate yourself, sincerely to hate yourself, without secret vanities.”

  “But then you’re still rejecting everyone else as beneath you,” I say.

  “I said sincerely.”

  “Fine, sincerely, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve set out not to conform.”

  “Yes but below, by being below, not above the rest, it’s different.”

  “It’s not different. It’s the same, because you’re still trying to be better.”

  “Then what should I do?” he seems to be asking the question seriously.

  “Give up and stop caring one way or another about better or worse. Be rational and then, if you conform, it will only be by accident of reasoning, instead of as a result of blind imitation. Then the conformity will be truly your own. What I could never stand was just the disfigurement of my own image as I saw it reflected in other people.”

  Someone lets a bottle rocket or something fizz up into the sky. It whoops once and goes poof.

  “Well,” someone says morosely, “we’re only couriers. Not even Operationals.”

  “I don’t envy the Operationals,” the Indian man says. “Their outlook is too stern. You’ve seen where they come from.”

  There’s a general nod of assent, but the young man is suddenly indignant, like someone just slapped his mother.

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Do what?” I ask.

  “Go inside the bag! You’re not allowed to climb down in there!” he points to my own satchel with a trembling finger. “It’s cheating!”

  “I’ve climbed inside mine,” Indian Eyebrows says.

  “Nobody ever told me not to,” the old woman says in surprise.

  The tenor of these responses seems to isolate the young man in his purity.

  “You can’t! It’s not allowed!” he urges. “They know when you climb into a bag. They keep exact records of every use of it, and you’re getting demerits every time you use it for a forbidden purpose. Ignorance of the rules is no defense for them.”

  This gives the rest of them pause. I pause too, to think it over.

  “I don’t buy it,” I say after a moment, although I have no reason to believe more one way than another. “I’ve seen where the Operationals come from, where the High Rationals come from...”

  The others are nodding.

  “...I’ve seen where those shaggy things the guys in the gorilla suits are imitating come from.”

  Now they all stare at me.

  “The smoke planet?” one asks.

  “You’ve seen Wa-Zo-Li-Reng?”

  “Big shaggy flying things? Sure.”

  They’re looking at me with their mouths open, as if I had casually alluded to some enormity beyond my ken. It takes them some time to recover any of their former volubility.

  The Indian man moves in closer to me.

  “I don’t say I believe you, but, whether it’s true or not, what you say, I wouldn’t be too free with that information. The Wa-Zo-Li-Reng are sacred animals to the Operationals. Outsiders are not so much as to know they exist, let alone see them with their own eyes.”

  Suddenly, they’re bombarding me with questions about what I saw. While I try to answer them all as best I can, the young man is lividly trying to silence both me and everyone else.

  “Stop!” he keeps saying, raising his voice as much as he dares. “This is exactly why we’re not supposed to climb down!”

  When I get to the thing I saw myself attached to, though, they all fall silent and listen.

  There’s the trestle, off in the distance. Seen through its arch, there’s a red glow, as if a trace of sunset still sheltered there, while the sky above the trestle is the black plum color of the darkest part of a bruise.

  “Have any of you made your deliveries yet?” a voice asks sadly.

  A low, embarrassed mumbling comes from us all.

  “Anybody know about a construction site?”

  “...a bank building—not the branch, but the office annex?”

  “...1652 Tennisbarl Ave?”

  “...a truck caravan, ten trucks, first truck is green with a white logo?”

  “...a pharmacy called Brarenbroim’s?”

  “...the corner of Mecrcer and East Hoynt?”

  “...the independent zoo?”

  “...the cafeteria at the school of economics?”

  “...the Dongen and Unwin funeral home?”

  “...th
e branch of the International Go Society on Banrnk Street?”

  “...No...”

  One by one, they’re peeling off into the wind, although I don’t get the feeling they’re really gone. Outside this one circle of too-bright light, flickering with moths like living snowflakes, the darkness is all that much more impenetrable, so they might all be just there, a step away.

  “Well,” I say. At least the moths will hear, if they can hear things. “We’re all running wild goose chases for the High Rationals, and we were chosen because none of us wanted to be human anymore.”

  The children have fallen mostly silent. The woman inside the ticket booth is unselfconsciously taking off all her clothes, and they’ve all gathered outside, eyes riveted on her.

  “Now, why does that make us better suited to serve their ends, whatever those are? Because they aren’t human, either? Or did it only make us stand out, like the squeaky wheel?”

  I’m walking in a little circle, reasoning out loud. The woman in the booth is only visible because of the little light that dangles from the canopy of the baby carriage, parked directly in front of the booth. The mother has climbed into the carriage and is holding her baby up.

  “We’re part of the dispensation of Chorncendantra—”

  “Shhh!”

  I can’t tell if the voice comes from near or far. It might also have been a fragment of something one child was whispering to another, in which case it might have been “shhhe...!”

  “—and it’s not inconceivable that this runaround might be a useful distraction, or maybe it generates energy or something. Or we’re toys. I have to wonder if, like me, you adopted a discipline. Or was just wanting to be out of it enough?”

  I wait a moment.

  “...No answer. Well, I tried being systematic. I imagine a tuft of food stuck in my lower back teeth (this worked, by the way) whenever I’m hit with the impulse to acquire some status symbol I see others have. After a while, when I would, say, see someone with a certain type of wrist watch, the edge of my tongue would automatically begin probing along my back teeth, for all the world as if there were something caught there... Face was tough.”

  The woman, having removed the last of her clothes, perches again on her stool and begins filing her nails.

  “...I taught myself to look across my ears. Not pay too much attention to what was in between. That is, whenever I’d catch a glimpse of myself in a window, or in a polished metal surface. To have done anything like try to divest myself of my face, anything too radical, would have only meant attaching more importance to my face. I wanted the opposite. So I chose to rely on only a simple measure.”

  The stillness is full of attention. What if the children aren’t really watching the woman, but listening to me? I step half out of the light and look around with dazzled eyes. The bulbous yet dignified white smudge of the polar bear is visible up there on the blue rocks, and there might or might not be human shadows around me. My eyes just won’t become accustomed. They seem to know I’m going back into the light again in a second, but I belong in more than one light.

  “No point,” I shrug, resuming my probably symbolic circles. “There was no point in mind. Of course there must be, somewhere, a deep-down psychological one like I wasn’t loved enough or loved too much or something, but this impulse to go away is the only really solid thing. And is this anything to do with my past? Does it have to be?”

  The woman has gotten off the stool and swims around inside the booth. She moves back and forth, waving her arms in long windmilling strokes. I see her breasts shift as she rolls in space, the silhouettes of her feet kicking languidly in midair.

  “And giving it a name or reason only means giving it another ordinary human name or reason...” I say, starting to feel alone. Perhaps they’ve been drifting off. It’s what I would have done.

  “Why not wait,” I go on with less and less zest for the subject, “and see if it won’t take on another, incredible name, once I manage to realize again that none of this, not any of it, can be real?”

  The linty clouds open, like a little iris in the lint. Where the moon was, a colossal, shapeless machine now treads the sky; I’ve seen it before—with globes that simply swing together above and below it without any visible connection to the body of the thing. It isn’t watching, I realize, any more than the huge headlike thing I’d seen was watching. They don’t watch, they calculate.

  That thing up there doesn’t see me, but it thinks a model of me in a model of this zoo. A shaggy form leaps across the face of the machine, from the top of one of its globes onto the body. Now a figure, formally dressed—I can see the necktie—swims up the body, kicking its legs like a frog.

  A line has formed around the ticket booth, disappearing through the rear door, which now hangs ajar. Inside, one of the children has climbed up on the stool, holding out a handful of food. The woman nibbles at this stuff, which resembles a handful of pencil shavings, while the others pet and stroke her.

  “It’s all the same to me if I deliver these spells or not. But that’s because I have no idea what happens after. If I only can become a Flying Dutchman, that’s one thing. It doesn’t matter how hard I apply myself, or how lazy I am. If I just deliver the stuff finally and that’s it, then all I get for my trouble is a chance to go back to the way things were, which doesn’t seem possible even if I wanted to go back, and I don’t. Or I go on to some other unfamiliar problem. Actually, it would be the same problem. Same as always.”

  The woman emerges from the booth and walks out among the children, drawing them in around her with gathering motions of her arms. Now, as she walks away from the booth, not exactly in my direction, but more or less towards me, they are climbing on her. She becomes a swaying tower of giggling children and strides past me, clearing the entire polar bear enclosure with a single step. I realize now she’s making a beeline for the hovering machine, which must be descending to meet her.

  —She’s a High Rational. Must be.

  When she’s gone, it’s just me and the polar bear, both watching the direction they took with what I imagine is much the same look in the eyes, his and mine.

  I pull the bag around from behind my back. I grip the handle. There’s a sound of crickets, and my leg sweeps elastically through space. My weight shifts onto it and I vault after her, my body bent back, a pressure of air in my face.

  No, you don’t. Not like that.

  It’s hard to keep my eye on the spot where I last saw her, because my point of view has shifted so far up. Her voice answers me, but only in my imagination.

  “You realize you can’t catch me. Formally, this is impossible.”

  “Is this impossible?”

  “You and I cannot be in...”

  In what?

  “...the same place at the same time.”

  What do you call what we just were? I’m not interested in you anyway, and none of this is real. But I want to see that machine of yours.

  The artifact hurtles toward me, sprouting out of nothing to fill my vision. I put on the brakes, letting the bag swing back around behind me, and stop with a jolt that sets off my hickups.

  I know that ratiocinating machine is behind the artifact, because of the vibrations. Those globes knock together silently, but they send out a kinetic knell I can feel. I touch the artifact, and it tingles. The sighing sounds more like panting. I can’t see it, because I’m up so close to the wall, but I think the globe machine is flying or even riding directly above the top of the artifact, scraping it with air turbulence, and there’s a feeling like... the meditative detachment of a man killing other men, not caring about pain or death, something like outward violence revolving around an inner calm. Except this machine doesn’t really have an inside; just outside, and an outer effect, grinding away from me like a train with shrieking brakes.

  “All right,” I say, “O.K. That’s fine.”

  I hear a pop from far off to my left, where the trees draw in close to the camp, and a ping just a li
ttle ahead of me. I throw myself down flat and land on a hickup. Another pop follows immediately, this time from considerably ahead of me. I don’t hear where it goes.

  “Stay down!” a voice whispers at me, harshly, from the doorway of the nearest bungalow.

  “Bullets again? We going to get -hic!- knives, too?”

  Something spats into the ground not too far away from me.

  “You come tearing into camp like that, you’re going to set them all off!”

  The forest bristles like heaps of firecrackers. The air buzzes and I press myself to the ground, turning my head toward the artifact. High above me, there’s an irregular opening all encrusted with scaffolds, and I can see through the artifact to the sky beyond where the machine hovers, contemplating what it sees in its inner eye. The woman swims up to it through the azure air, trailing the children from her ankle like a kite tail. Good for her.

  I turn back to the doorway of the bungalow.

  “Is this over? Hick!”

  The voice doesn’t answer right away.

  “Are you hit?”

  “N-hic!-o. No. You?”

  “No.”

  There’s a soft click. Whoever it is has shut the door.

  *

  Wait.

  Wait.

  Wait until something worth waiting for comes along.

  I’m lying in the infirmary. I’m not ill. It’s just the only place I can lie down. Whenever one corps of Operationals is out of bed and working, another one is sleeping in the same beds. One group gets out of bed and another tumbles in, swapping body heat. The day is taking its course outside, but the windows have all been covered with impenetrable curtains, shrouding the room in total darkness. Close my eyes and look, part of the discipline. “With joy I return once again to my practice.”

  I see faces, hands closing, moving infrared figures, a fake eye in a wax face with heavy eyelids gazing fixedly off at an angle, a flash of the sun that pulses across my whole field of vision evenly, a whirling carousel teetering this way and that, a brilliant pastel red and yellow apple, close up of a millipede or something creeping away on a white plaster ceiling, a bridge with high towers angling into a fog bank. None of it means anything. These images are just like the observations I make about myself and call insights. They don’t stay in place, not like touches of paint added to a portrait that gradually takes shape; they just float away into nothing. The spot turns blank again. No picture forms. The touches vanish, like the touches of my day. Is this really what I think I’m doing? Or am I just a dabbler after all?