Member

by Michael Cisco

  I want to go back to that more hardboiled thoughtstyle, because I believe it takes me places I wouldn’t visit otherwise.

  Guerrero wants me here.

  His wife is a Central; that probably means she can tell him where I fit or decide it.

  So he’s most likely squirrelling me away until I can be useful to him.

  He may be playing one side of Chorncendantra off against the other—it occurs to me I have no idea how this game works for the players. What’s their stake? How would I become useful?

  It’s what I carry that’s useful, and he can accept, or even take, the spells and prizes from me whenever he likes, but perhaps he isn’t allowed to. It might also be possible that they are at their most valuable immediately upon their delivery. Or perhaps, as they are only immanently about to be delivered.

  I watch leprous green and maroon ribbons inside my eyelids and wonder what Chorncendantra wants me to do. If it is a thing with desires, and I think it is. It is, at least, a thing composed of desires. Keep shuttling to and fro like a loose ball bearing in a cuckoo clock? Or is this suspense a sign that I am expected to take the initiative?

  Perhaps I could compel Guerrero to accept delivery.

  I intend to make my delivery in my own best interest. It could be like suddenly hitting on a number and throwing the whole wallet down on it and winning, never mind what. Never mind what.

  The superstitions of childhood never entirely fade away; they are the first gropings toward logical thinking. They are like the arbitrary melody at the opening of a piece of music that will be permutated through an exhaustive series of variations. As a boy I believed in fate. That means I’ve had to learn to fight off the impulse to understand everything I see, as if it had been set deliberately in my way, so I believe in fate even though I see confusion: Chorncendantra, shaggy creatures, bandages, the Returner of Life, spells in cans, Clare Guerrero’s glass eyes, and her triangle, and her brother, the giant decomposing plant cranium I was attached to, tape guns, the decapitation ritual, the other couriers, the human circulatory centrifuge, emanators, those older men with the wands if there wasn’t just the one of them, the hovering machine with the two spheres, Operationals, Guerrero himself, the contact sun, bullets that shoot themselves and knives that stab themselves, High Rationals, the fellows in the gorilla suits with the tire treads down the front, the Chorncendantramantra about explaining things again.

  There’s no reason why all this must have a pattern. Even if it is ordered by Chorncendantra, what is Chorncendantra’s order? You can figure out a game, but that doesn’t explain why you play it. Maybe no reason to play is what makes a game a game. Then again, in ordering it, I give it the form I need it to have to get what I want, whatever that is.

  That’s the problem exactly. I don’t know what I want here, because I don’t know what this is, and in order to learn if there is even anything here for me, I have to play the game anyway. Play for time. So that’s what I want here—to know if there’s anything of value to get out of it. And the longer I stay, the more I put up with and go through, and put others through for that matter, the better the pay off will have to be. I’ll be invested then. I already am. The longer, the more.

  My entire left leg is bandaged. I’ve already started on the right, with a single loop around the ankle. As far as I can tell, I have plenty of bandages left. But it is troubling, writing off a whole limb. It is borne in upon me that this may be what limits the duration of my play. I have to get out before overall mummification.

  So now I’m waiting, waiting for the instructions to come around, for Chorncendantra, or Guerrero, or whoever it is, to get around to telling me what to do.

  It occurs to me that I might try to get closer to Clare, and see just what is it about her. Perhaps she can assign me to delivery somewhere on her own, but she might need Guerrero’s official permission or something like that first.

  If that’s true, then Guerrero might be holding it over her, in exchange for another thing. Unlikely. But then that might be the kind of element that’s keeping me in limbo: not that I’m being held up myself, but that my being held up is an effect of a strategy that doesn’t bear on me in particular.

  Round and round. So I get up and trip over a chair almost and then get out the door and start looking for Clare Guerrero.

  Her bungalow. The door is ajar. I knock and get nothing, so I take one step over the threshold and call. There’s an answer somewhere inside and I follow it, calling again, not too loudly, as I travel cautiously down the hall.

  “Come in! Come in! What is it!”

  I home in on the voice, through a doorway. Clare Guerrero squawks once and leaps behind a latticed screen that stands in the far corner of the room.

  “What are you doing here?!” Her former impatience has given way to outrage. Women sure have taken to removing their clothes around me lately. Clare’s lie strewn all around the room, hanging on the backs of chairs, a pair of stockings is draped over the dresser like the dragging legs of a worn-out cartoon character.

  I could pretend I hadn’t seen anything, and feign confusion, but I’d looked nearly straight into those transparent, new moon grey eyes of hers. Her pristine body is a surprise; perhaps she has an older face, perhaps her face alone has aged.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Guerrero,” I say.

  “What are you pestering me about? Come on! Come on! Out with it!”

  “Is this a bad time—because I—”

  “It’s neither as good nor as bad a time as any other time,” she snaps. I can hear her dressing hastily, and now she emerges, stamping over to the bureau without a glance in my direction.

  “You’ve chosen this time to bother me, you might as well get it over with.”

  The dress she’s thrown on is black, rigid, and angular, totally squaring off and flattening her figure, with a skirt that reaches down past her knees and stiffly holds its hem out, making her legs look like bell clappers.

  “I’m just wondering about this delivery.”

  “Make it, if you want.”

  She’s lifting up pots of make up and female what not and rapping them back down again, apparently searching for something in the tray on the bureau.

  “To whom?”

  “Leave your bag with me,” she says, waving her hand dismissively in the direction of the door.

  “I’m not so sure I leave the bag. I might only have to—”

  “Leave the bag.”

  “What about Guerrero?”

  She sighs irritably.

  “He’ll get his part.”

  “Is this right? He has no say?”

  “You make the delivery or you don’t. You’re the courier.”

  I take a step toward the bureau.

  “How do I know he gets his part?”

  Clare snatches up a rope of pearls and clasps it around her neck.

  “The High Rationals arrange the distribution. What does it matter? I think you have an exaggerated idea of the importance of what you’re carrying.”

  “Maybe I’d like to ask the High Rationals about that.”

  “That’s up to you. Now if you don’t mind I’m very busy.”

  She goes back to the other side of the room, picks up a jeweled wrist watch, and straps it on.

  “I have an appointment with High Rationals myself. They’re waiting in the next room, now.”

  “Well, let me come with you.”

  Now she finally turns to look at me, and I wish she hadn’t.

  “Impossible,” she says quietly. “You’d be wasting your time.”

  “It’s my time.”

  “Mine, also. They aren’t at my beck and call.”

  “You’re a Central. A planetary one, or so I’m told. They’ll wait a little.”

  She smirks. It makes an even worse complement to her hollow eyes. Turning smartly to the bureau again, she says, in a raised voice.

  “Fine, come along! See for yourself.”

  There’s a small black purse on the bureau
, and she takes it up, opens it, looks inside quickly, then clicks it shut again. Now she lumbers around to the back of the screen and disappears through a door she leaves hanging open behind her.

  The room beyond is like a ship’s cabin: small, and completely sheathed in honey-colored wood panelling. There are a couple more doors and many cabinets. A baby stroller sits there by the door opposite me as I come in, and Clare is bending down seriously, looking its occupant in the eye.

  “Is this a High Rational?”

  She nods.

  The stroller holds a hispanic toddler with lustrous black hair trimmed in a bowl cut and shaved above the ears. He has clear black-and-white eyes that look up intelligently at me from a calm, very round face.

  “A little small, ain’t he?”

  “He’ll never be any bigger,” she says. If I weren’t already accustomed to the harshness of her voice, I wouldn’t be able to hear the dreaminess in it just now.

  “They all this little?”

  “Of course not.”

  Suddenly, Clare points, and there, sitting cross-legged inside one of the cabinets, is a hispanic girl, a little older than the boy. Her face is catlike, framed in shoulder-length black hair, cut like Clare’s, and the moment I see her she begins to speak in a steady, little girl’s kazoo-bugle voice. I don’t recognize the language.

  “She’s his sister.”

  “High Rationals don’t reproduce. They sprout fully formed from huge white flowers or something.”

  “That’s true,” Clare says, giving me a long, penetrating look. “But some of them have sisters just the same.”

  “Do they have cousins, too?”

  I’m looking deep into those grey hollows now. Deep enough to see the dim, pink blood vessels glowing in the back.

  “You know,” I go on. “They’re big and shaggy? Smell like a stack of pancakes?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asks quietly, shaking her head a little. She’s using the softened tone you take with someone who is bewilderingly oblivious to how busy you are.

  “Those shaggies from the smoke planet,” I say. “They play an important role in the game, don’t they?”

  “Oh,” she says suddenly. “Of course.”

  “I don’t mean the officers,” I say.

  “I’m afraid I still don’t understand.”

  “You understand. All right, I’ve seen ’em. They fly and they’re all covered with long black tapes, and they write and carve things inside hollow stones. What do they do that matters to the game and what are they doing around here?”

  Clare strokes the spot between her eyebrows with the middle talon of her right hand and sighs. “I wish you would talk sense. These High Rationals are not going to be with us for very long.”

  I glance down at the boy.

  “Is this one here to help you administer Chorncendantra?”

  The moment I say it, they both make the gesture I’d seen moustache man make before, closing the thumb and forefinger of both hands in one link, then another link.

  “We’re not administering it, we’re living it,” Clare says.

  I say “Chorncendantra” again. Both of the children solemnly repeat the gesture.

  So I kneel down and take a look into those clear black eyes, and he returns my gaze with wonder.

  “Hi,” I say.

  I don’t know if Clare is having her little joke with me but one way or another I’m wondering as much at him as he is at me. Radiant with health and equanimity. And me, with my fraying clothes and covered in bandages, a bruise on my forehead I don’t even remember how I got, lean and unshaven like a shipwreck escapee.

  “I could use a little help,” I say, pulling the bag around. When I hold it up, open, for him, his eyes rest on me for a moment before they switch to the spells and prizes, which are beginning to show signs of mold, unless it’s frost. Then he looks at me as before. The moment I expose the spells, Clare strikes her triangle—I don’t see her rummaging for it nor where it goes again because I keep my eye on the boy, but it could be she simply plucks it out of the air. The tone makes one sour twist in the air and very gradually decays, shedding layers of volume one at a time like the dance of the seven veils.

  “I’m supposed to deliver these, but I don’t know where they go. Do you know?... Is this where they go?”

  I’m turning to the girl when he reaches out and lightly bats the back of my left wrist with his chubby palm. My eyes are in motion when I feel the touch and something flares—a bit like breaking the beam of a sharp reflection off a car window, although I don’t see what could be so bright or so reflective in this windowless wooden room.

  I blink flashes of a blazing sun-beach, or what just so happens to resemble one; black, crumbling shadows of the low waves in bronze water, and a glittering strand of blinding mirage, looking like a bank of broken glass. Maybe a little fringe of white sky.

  The girl has lowered her head and peers intently at me. I can’t see her for the flashes and the phosphorescent purple negatives that alternate with them. Leaning forward, she puts out an arm, rummages in the bag, and pulls out of one of the prizes. These are distinguished from spells, I suppose, by the number 8 or infinity symbol transparency fixed on one side of the metal case, and by the sparse, incomplete-looking scrollwork, little better than elongated S letters lying on their sides, that run along the raised edges of the metal scales. The little girl drops the prize into her lap, giving it a brief look, and then leaves it there.

  “Is this it?” I ask Clare. She doesn’t answer, but, soaring up above me like a ship’s mast, she has closed her eyes, and leans with one hand on a counter.

  Neither the girl or the boy make any further move toward the bag, even when I hold it out to the boy and give it an encouraging shake. I stand up. Taking the prize from the girl would involve making a lunge for her crotch. With a sigh, I close the bag. My sigh draws an especially probing look from the boy. Still blinking away flashes of beach, I can only guess that she continues to fix her attention on him.

  Too much looking. He looks, she looks. Clare might look at me now, and the prospect sends me backward, the way I came. As I withdraw, Clare comes back to life and closes the door between us at the first opportunity. I don’t hear her move away—is she listening? Listening for the sound of my listening? This has been a kind of defeat for me, in a way I don’t understand. When I head for the hallway, there’s Guerrero in his wheelchair. He’s been listening. I edge past him, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me, craning around in his chair, which he cannot turn around in the narrow hallway, as I go by.

  Clare’s brother stands outside, by the outer door, listening. He’s still wearing the flashy getup I’d last seen him in, but it’s covered in dust, like he’d been wandering in the desert, and even from a few feet away I can smell a strong odor of smoke coming off him too. Nodding at me once as I go past, he plainly wants to go on listening, even holding his breath to listen. His mouth hangs open, like a pocket inside out. That undefinable air of punchinthefaceability about him has appreciably diminished; he’s as fragile as dragonfly wings, like someone who’s just stepped out of an ordeal, weakened and dulled.

  The lane between the rows of barracks is perfectly even and empty. There are no lights anywhere in the camp. The sky over my head is not a color I’ve ever seen a sky be before, a sort of hollow alien purple with froths of red smoke, and there’s nothing in it but one planet, gleaming steadily, directly above the artifact. A shrill horn, or a protracted whine of brakes, comes over the rooftops from somewhere to my right. The canopies around the artifact billow in some wind, and the rest of mankind is farther and farther away. “With joy I return to my practice.”

  Here’s a gap between two barracks, and my old chum, the one who called me “Pete,” who had been listening, quickly turns away, head down, hands in pockets, trudging down the alley. I leave him be. Through the windows of the next barracks I can see the attractive inspector standing in the aisle between two rows of occupie
d beds. The Operationals sleep with their feet toward the walls. Arms at her sides, shoulders slumped, the inspector looks defeated, even with the bundle of quince blossoms in her hair. Perhaps she’s been trying to wake the Operationals, or get them to talk. If she’d seen what I’ve seen, she’d know that they are born and reborn in labor and suffering, that life, from their standpoint, is poverty, monasticism, a bitter duty with no rewards, except for rest. The High Rationals are just the opposite, and the two species peer uncomprehendingly at each other from either side of a teeter-totter called Chorncendantra (link link) that just wants to coil and uncoil if it isn’t a winnable game, and I don’t think it is, but then again maybe she’s also listening.

  At the far end of the barracks, there is a partitioned section forming an office or no, it’s a common room. I mistook it at first for an office because of the long table there, lit only by a single lantern toward the near edge. A stout man with a gleaming bald head is seated at the table, evidently going through some loose papers and taking a light meal; a few small plates dotted with crumbs are mixed in with the paper litter.

  He springs up suddenly, driving his chair back, so abruptly his sizeable gut seems to pop up like a balloon he’d been holding between his legs. Like the comic strips, he actually is wearing a vest and jacket, striped, and so snug they look more like a kind of work uniform than perhaps they should. Turning to cross around the edge of the table nearest me, he nearly trips over something and then, as he begins to press himself into the engulfing darkness of the rest of the room, his jacket sweeps the table and sends papers and a plate tumbling to the floor, then catches on a loose nail and jerks him back. The table slides a few inches with a groan.

  His eyes ablaze with furious, exhilarated irritability, the stout man turns back to the table and, after an inscrutable moment of keen attention, pounces, and begins wiggling his fingers a few inches above the top. Beneath his fingers a transparent figure takes shape, becoming in a few seconds a tiny red demon, glistening with oil, whose pleasure it is to snag people by the clothing, trip them up, and scatter their things. It is stricken with paralysis by the terror of being seen, evidently, and the man immediately snatches his fork and pins the creature to the table by its tail.