Member

by Michael Cisco

  I picture everything that happened, unconsciously substituting the appearance of someone else I know for my own. This person does exactly what I did in my memory; it’s just that I see Darren, or Yunis, or Loring, or Clare, instead of myself.

  The man sitting opposite me likes his bit of pointless coughing. Self-important and dry, like a scholarly article. Always a bad sign.

  After studying his face for a few minutes, I get his attention.

  “You should play trumpet,” I say.

  To his blank look, I answer, matter-of-factly, “Sorry... Sorry, but there’s something about your face... Don’t you think—playing trumpet would be just the thing? It might be what saves you.”

  There comes a moment when, after having gotten used to the idea that you’ve done all you can, you suddenly realize you can do more, that the path goes higher still.

  They were decoying me, keeping me busy on her wedding night, because they didn’t want me to interfere. That’s what all the celebrating was about, the Operational dance, and why Vissi Sislelemmy was recruited to quibble with me, and send me on a fool’s errand. It turned out she needn’t have bothered because I was already running an errand for a fool. It’s what Clare meant when she told me I was in the wrong place. From the get up he was wearing, I figure Darren was the groom. She was the bride, riveted in a gown of steel. He was pawing at her as Clare broke me in. Clare must have been pleased with the outcome; she’d taken an interest in me from the moment I’d arrived, or so she said, couldn’t take any positive steps in that line without some kind of conflict of interest I can’t quite make out, but, once I’d screwed everything up following my own lights, there was no reason for her to refuse a windfall. She grew younger and younger, right before my eyes.

  “I like to go home, put the nice jeans on. I like to go home, put the nice jeans on. I like to go home, put the nice jeans on. I like to go home, put the nice jeans on. I like to go home, put the nice jeans on.”

  “I’m a lonely man, I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing. I don’t do nothing.”

  “Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally!”

  “The meeting for Tuesday doesn’t happen til Thursday. The meeting for Tuesday doesn’t happen til Thursday. The meeting for Tuesday doesn’t happen til Thursday.”

  *

  “The greater part of this I will explain again...”

  I don’t know why I wanted to play or what I expected to get out of playing, or even whether I expected to get anything out of playing. Chorncendantra isn’t life. I’ve returned to life. My life. My life of being a prick, skulking, sneering. I didn’t ask for an all too lively instinct for identifying stupidity, but I suppose dwelling on stupidity and ugliness, and getting disgusted and becoming disgusting, and crawling to the margins, is something I can be blamed for. For which I can be blamed. You... by which I mean me, I mean I, want there to be a destination: stupidity and ugliness drive me away, but also into somewhere else. Somewhere down deep, Chorncendantra is intelligent and beautiful, I thought, and I wanted to be a part of it. Want. Want to be a part of it. Present tense. Too bad. Membership revoked. There’s no way back. I remember trees, a chute of low stone walls, a silhouette looming up, an arched gateway that named it the Castle of Beasts... inside, she was there, and a slope of huge boulders striped red and white like peppermints.

  “You climb peppermint boulders to get to the Lightning House, of course.”

  I’m going back.

  I find a room. It isn’t hard. And the bits and pieces I need, likewise all easy to come by. Intuition tells me what to do, and a confused idea about atomic nuclei. We’re showering in the nuclei of atoms from distant stars, stripped naked and precipitated through space by stellar magnetic fields. I know the feeling.

  I build a cloud chamber, about as big as a mid-sized home aquarium. The work continues until the experiment is ready, and then, without pause, I begin the experiment. As the particles, fresh from outer space, pass through the chamber, they draw streaks of vapor that crumble into granules, then sift toward the floor. I kneel down beside the table and watch them. There’s some kind of relationship between cosmic rays and lightning. I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand it. There is one, that’s all.

  Now there are two streaks at once, coming in from two different directions, angling together. They touch. They collide.

  The air in the room fluoresces all at once, and there’s a shout of fright.

  My view of the chamber is as distinct as ever. The table is plainly visible in front of me, but the room leaps and wobbles in flashes of dazzling, cold light, and the flashes light up another place, not this one. In perfect silence, bolts of lightning twist in upright rows within black walls, writhing, trying to escape. There are leafless black branches in the high windows, and a thing surrounded by ornate candlesticks or something—I can’t see the thing, it’s “off-camera”—and there’s a round doorway in the wall to the left that angles down what must be a steep flight of stairs.

  I notice movement down there.

  After a minute, a gigantic old man, dressed in a sort of a black woolen nightshirt, crawls up into the room. He has meaty hands and forearms that are sort of piebald, hairy with white hair, and gashed with deep, dry cuts, evenly spaced. His huge head is lowered, bald on top, with a fringe of curly white hair that’s thickest above his ears, like earmuffs. Raising his head, he struggles on all fours, his eyes fixed almost desperately on some object, black eyes in a face that looks like it’s been dipped in flour. His clownish looks are wildly at odds with the expression of pain and determination on his face. The features are puffy, the skin coarse, the nose is nearly shapeless, the lips are thin red wet and droop at the corners like a dog’s.

  Now he’s struggling to raise himself on his knees while holding a heavy stone bowl in both hands. The bowl is full of trembling. An imploring, altruistic expression claws at his face, though he doesn’t speak, or make any sound. In the flashes I see his face clicking through the gestures of a mute appeal, apparently not for himself.

  The flashes break in on the room I’m standing in, but for the last few seconds there’s been a third scene I think I see in glimpses as the light falters and before the room with the table reasserts itself. I shift my attention to that dimmer scene and it supplants the lightning room.

  Part of an abandoned house. In front of me there’s the corner, with an open door in each wall. Inside one I can see a darker, burnt-out room, and beyond, through the ragged hole in the wall to a silvery pre-dawn landscape of mirror-like ponds and leafless copses to the horizon. I have to lean forward a little to get a better look through the other door. No roof over that floor, and heaps of broken boards, and a woman standing on the far side of the heaps, holding herself. Her livid, downturned face is like a silver medallion.

  I’ve lost her. But who is she? I don’t know this woman. It feels as if I did, and it feels as if I were losing her, that I love her more than anything, forever. The last rending words have only just been said and are still only just dying away. In a sense, they are still being said, only not by us. The sound is settling into the walls. The words will be back, but she will not; the distance between us now will only yawn wider and darker and colder, and become a frozen wound. I haven’t forgotten this. I never lived it. And despite what my vehemence may seem to belie it really is true, but something is putting amputated memories and emotions into me from some other life so that, when the woman looks directly at me from so far off, anguish makes me try to subtract something from that gap and I reach out my arm for her.

  I love her, and I’ve never seen her before in my li
fe, don’t know her name or what her voice sounds like, or what went wrong certainly not that. Her face in the gloom, eyes brimming with angry tears, mouth forming words without sound. The ruined house on another planet disappears and I see the room with the table, the crashing of the light that hurries to enfold me with an increased urgency, and the old man is climbing to a higher room up steps of solid rock whose edges are keen as knives. This edifice was not made by human hands, the old man is not a human being, this is another planet, where lightning is trapped inside the walls of a monumental structure of unimaginable size. This is one of the planets that revolve around the contact sun, this building is like the Returner of Life or the pyramid of the High Rationals, and the old man is the custodian who preserves life when the sun goes out.

  A bolt of lightning stands inside the next room. It’s a hollow tower of kinked light that shivers stiffly, and shifts dreamily in place like the shimmering outlines of leaves silhouetted against the earth.

  A woman lies on her back in an alcove, half-smothered under an oppressively heavy black garment. Her colorless eyes are fixed and dull, and while her chest convulses from time to time, she doesn’t appear to breathe. Dust has settled on her face and eyes.

  With a look of horror, the old man brushes the dust away and lifts the woman’s head gingerly over the basin, which receives blood, streaked with albumen, from her mouth and nose. The old man’s lower lip trembles and glistening lines appear on his cheeks.

  The same windy landscape, stirring grass, wet on the outside but dry and dead inside, a black ocean. A seagull circling. The sky above me is completely black, deep, clear, and starless. The ground at my feet is bare and black and gritty, the texture of iron, and there’s a riveted seam between my feet. The whole planet is riveted together out of colossal iron plates. Blinding flashes light up the sky almost as bright as daylight, coming from the horizon on my right, then from the horizon on my left, then overhead, so long winter shadows lean first this way then that way, sunrise and sunset, then in reverse, east and west, then north and south. For an instant, the mountains are blazingly illuminated, bare of vegetation and raked with vivid, tightly confined black ravine shadows. Near me, the black foothills descend to the iron plain, and there is a defile of tumbled peppermint boulders forming a natural ramp up into those hills. Blinking here and there, lit now on one side, now on another, the gull circles near me.

  Suddenly, it swings downwards. With a crash of splintering glass it collides with the cloud chamber, sweeping it from the table and falling with it to the floor.

  Now there’s only the room, the bird’s cries of pain and fear, the noises it makes as it struggles, the reverberation of my cry of shock and the strangled, incoherent murmuring that I suppress. The bird’s caught in the frame and broken glass of the cloud chamber, struggling to escape. The body is bent nearly in two and the blood spreads eagerly. The gull is crying. As carefully as I can, I smash its head under my heel. It dies immediately, I think.

  *

  I’ve been having visions of the planets in that artificial solar system. The planet of the High Rationals, who run or at least believe they run the games, who take credit for inventing everything. The Operationals who do all the work. The Centrals, who coordinate things somehow, not in a political way but in what I can only describe as a magical way, using symbols. The shaggy flying things and their smoke world. I don’t believe I really was there all the time; although I can’t prove it, my intuition tells me that the artifact has a world of its own, and that there was some kind of dimensional trickery involved that opened it on one side to the smoke world.

  Every vision shakes me like a rag doll. They all left me with the feeling I’d seen something familiar, or connected to me, except this last one. But I can’t sort it out. There was something familiar there, but it wasn’t familiar to me. That familiar feeling, and the others associated with it, were edited into me.

  That was her planet, although the woman I saw wasn’t her. She. I couldn’t tell what color she was, for one thing; her skin looked silver, and she was far off and half in shadow. Wouldn’t that have made it harder for me to recognize her if I did know her? The reproaching, tearful face, though, comes back to me in close up. It wasn’t that woman.

  Each vision had its own mood. The High Rationals let off a crazed, giddy exultation. The Operationals: stoic fury and torment. The smoke planet’s turbulent inhumanity. The steeliness of Clare’s world. The mood of this one was loss. That loss continues to unfold right now, on a planet on the far side of the universe, and what haunts me is the idea that what is being lost might still be within reach, like light from a sun that’s exploded in the meantime. Then, I’d be climbing peppermint boulders.

  I never know what I’m doing. Everything I know I learn from hindsight and even then who’s to say that’s right? But what was that editing?

  *

  “Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally!”

  With joy once again I return to my practice, because the halls of joy are open. I walk, holding my head level.

  You tell me, you order me, you don’t have a face and I’m going to meet you face to face, I feel your arms tightly wrapping around me, I’m doing it the way you tell me.

  Leave me alone, you’re getting your wish. Hostility and jealousy for all! The unrealness of aloneness... when you get so alone that even your hallucinations are strangers... the blast of fear that hits you when you see how out of it you’ve become...

  Distractions multiply uncontrollably in public places until nobody can manage to have a coherent thought linking more than two simple nouns together. The result is that you can’t keep to your own thoughts; you keep finding bits of advertising and pop music and news in there. Everything mass produced, just for you—electrified flows of televised faces trying to turn my learning into their old bullshit, into sweeteners that kill; since I was a child, I’ve never been able to stop myself from listening. I liked to slip away and sneak off into some big silence. Now I struggle to get through the eerie tedium of the day. The same people over and over, the same fourteen faces reshuffled. A million microcultures at varying stages of rise or fall—shattered by agonizing hatred. We shit you out of the world even though I bleed their blood and they live on mine.

  it’s mine

  what about

  it’s mine

  and X?

  I don’t know. It’s not mine.

  whose is it?

  it’s his.

  Even worse when others reduced to idiocy like myself offer me their confidences.

  “You know, that room reminds me of another boring story about stuff you don’t care about; y’see, there was these...” For god’s sakes make him stop I’m gonna send my attention span to a rape treatment center. They don’t know I’m not a real person.

  A piece of self-criticism you do not really intend to act on is effectively self-pity. I have to force myself, if not especially hard, to take an interest in my own life. It is, I imagine, though not confidently, like forgoing the opportunity to take in the landscape from the windows of a moving train because some altruism, never defined, makes me feel compelled to inspect the engine and the brake parts on the locomotive, even though I don’t know anything about engines or brakes. I think I’d rather leave the machinery alone and lose myself in contemplation of the view. This is almost certainly a mistake.

  *

  “Sit down, Sally! Sit down, Sally!”

  I am the guardian of this park. I always stand in the concrete square at its center, and from here I can see nearly all the grounds. Except for the part that is screened from my view by the clubhouse, as it is known: a long one story building with a trellis for wisteria running along one side, two bathrooms one per gender etc. I can’t say what the interior looks like and I’ve never seen the far side of the building, but, being who I am, that is, the guardian, I know that it hides from me only a narrow margin of lawn sloping down to the street. That portion of the p
ark is plainly visible from the windows of the houses opposite, so my vigilance is not especially needed there and I don’t worry too much about that. One day I will take up my sword (which stands by me, always in its scabbard, always inside its carrying case, leaning against a post, within arm’s reach, never exposed) and go, never to return.

  The presence of the square is indication enough and everything, the need for a guardian, the position he is supposed to take up, the necessary procedures attendant on the numbingprocess and resignationsprocess and the inscription of the terms of surrender, etc., follows from its being here. A concrete square.

  The park seems peaceful today. I can’t tell if it really is peaceful. All I can say is I experience today an unwonted absence of disharmony with my surroundings. There was rain all night, suddenly clearing at dawn, so the world is damp and rainchilled under a brilliantly clean sky. The vegetation is so fantastically vivid it seems unreal. Each diamonded leaf is attended by a distinct shadow. Huge living scalps float by, disguised as clouds. Everyone is scribbling descriptive passages into their notebooks; the ocean of words is a kind of infinity but how could you even begin to compare all the writing that’s ever been with the far vaster ocean of water? The comparison is barbaric.

  There’s been little need for me, that’s for sure. There’s all sorts of suspicious activity, usually at night, but I have no authority to interfere with it by any positive measures; I’m not in any way able to do so even if I had, and after all there is no accounting for suspicion when a plain transgression right before your eyes is the thing to respond to. To which to respond. But my presence here does seem to repel, or at least discompose, those who come here to do what they would rather not be observed doing. A couple arrives at dusk and sits at a park bench not fifteen feet away from me. Three minutes later, laughing with embarrassment, or perhaps at me, they leave again. Cars drive past, slow, then departing as they see me. Once, a little man came toward me and he was surrounded by some kind of field; I could tell that he meant something, but what? No message, just a messenger, sent to me but with nothing to say, just sent. He left, and went back home no doubt, if messengers have homes, sat down and continued the work his visit to me had interrupted, creating his “enduring legacy.”