I wait. I wonder if I am on the earth. Many things here are surrounded by fields, and I’m not prepared to insist that this is an illusion. For some reason, it would be better for me to think that they were projected by me onto things, but that reason is in an out-of-the-way place just now.
Did I get chucked out of Chorncendantra after all? I’m positive it’s possible; Chorncendantra does have a boundary, and not everything is inside it. Things don’t seem all that much less weird, though, since my disgrace.
What things?
It might be a lingering disorientation that diminishes gradually. Then again, not only don’t I mind things being weird, I prefer them to be, because I’m lazy, and I like the restfulness of mental surrender to circumstances and events there is no profit in trying to understand. I simply go on registering sensations, which take on in my mind a greater vividness and tenacity as the effort of thinking about them is balked by the equal likelihood of any frame of reference, although the strangeness stagnates if I stop trying to understand, it’s true.
But it is natural, as a man who has never had any real experience of life, and who conducts himself entirely by principles—very imperfectly conjectured principles—for me to try to understand, so making the effort is actually less of an effort than trying not to. What’s more, the results of my efforts are often diverting. They are explanations of all different flavors.
Dunes of these explanations tumble up in my memory like heaps of clay animals, brightly painted, molded quickly and without much care by someone who’s just looking to kill some time, have a little fun. Every now and then, it can also be interesting to root around in the heaps, in the same way that it can be interesting to root around in a closet that’s been stuffed and shut up for years.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a furtive movement in a high window belonging to one of the nearby houses. Binoculars slip back between a pair of drapes as I turn my head. A boom microphone whisks into a chimney.
The door I’ve been waiting next to suddenly flies open and a huge man in a black tunic and a policeman or chauffeur’s hat charges out. The instant he sees me, he lunges at me, grabbing for the letter in my hand. Without thinking, I leap out of his path. Missing me, he stops himself with a few loud stamps and rounds on me again, swiping at the letter like a fishing bear.
“Gimme that letter ya jackass!” he shouts.
“Is insulting me necessary?” I say, dodging him again.
“I got a lot of other unnecessary things to say,” he growls.
Now he comes swinging at me. I duck under his fist and ram my shoulder into his solar plexus, surprisingly, and he staggers backward with a loud, unintentional cough. He pauses to recover his breath, rubbing the place I’d hit. His tunic is too tight.
People hidden in the houses all around us are watching, and I hear more footsteps, running, drawing closer.
Suddenly, he starts coming at me again, moving quickly toward me and then back away, wary but still determined to try to get the letter from me. He lunges, backs, lunges right at me making his play. His thick arm is straightening toward me when I hear—
“STOP!”
The footsteps rushing toward me, which might have been only a step or two from my back, stop, the man in the tunic, open mouthed, recoils from me. The tension gathered in my body stays where it is, unused. The word seems to appear in our midst as though it were written in the air, or in our minds, or my mind, even if I did hear it, and quickly remember hearing it. There was no mistaking this command, or that it was a woman who uttered it.
The letter is taken from my hand, I don’t see who by. The bulk of the man who attacked me jostles as he retreats through the gate and slams it behind him without a backwards glance.
The feet of the unseen runners, who came either to my aid or his, or for themselves, patter hastily into the distance.
I didn’t see who took the letter, but I don’t believe it was any of these men. There was too much delicacy in the sensation as it was pulled through my fingers: firmly, but with a kind of finesse that suggested a woman’s touch. Perhaps she retrieved it on her own account.
With a sigh I shake off the intensities of my alarm and reconnoitre. The street, the houses, are dark, and might have been freshly evacuated months ago.
The afflatus of events is escaping me, and though I don’t want it to, I can’t seem to manage. I suppose I could try to prime the pump by breaking down the gate, vaulting over the wall, or breaking into the tower, surprising the Empress in her bath. The letter would be in a glass box on the vanity table, or pressed between the leaves of a heavy Bible. Or cinders in the grate.
The only sign of life now is a towering smoke stack, turding a thick plume of steam into the sky.
I fix my eyes on it and walk on with a feeling like the rightness when a melody resolves. Everything is already over. Things keep happening, though, and that’s what gives me the unshakeable impression that I’m daring to abuse a very shaky license. Playing hooky. Things are continuing to happen past the end of true events, and I want to stop people and explain to them that there’s no point in any further activity, because none of this counts any more.
After a farrago of invigorating sneezes I search for the dazzling white plume of steam melting into the blue, but I can’t find it.
It was a woman, after all, with steam for hair that congeals in snowy masses on cold mornings. Waiting must have tired her out.
I’m stuck.
Anything that vanishes suddenly is a woman. Not only do I not know which way to go, although my not caring takes much of the sting out of my confusion, and only now do I really understand that I was orienting myself toward the steam.
I can’t get over the idea that I’ve missed the end of the story, and I’m just rattling around an empty backlot after the crew and the actors have all gone home. Gone home and died.
The buildings here have irregular facades, slightly uneven windows, like a piece of lace stretched out of shape slightly.
And mashed together into a cake.
The compartmentalized buildings with their boxy faces, some sagging inward, and others slightly concave. If I stopped, and stood stock still, or let myself collapse to the ground, and waited long enough, would the sky go out, and everything disappear, and the story end? There don’t seem to be any other living things here, not even a stick. Even the air is lifeless—I might as well be indoors.
What stops me is the idea that, should I do what I am considering doing, everything will go dark, matter will all dissolve and become neutral, but my stubborn continuity alone will refuse to break. I’ll be the same, the one desperate, undissolved thing in a barren, lightless chaos. I walk as fast as I can, swinging my arms until they get tired, then shoving them deep into my pockets. There’s the letter again!
The envelope has been neatly slit open. What I assume is the same page remains inside the envelope, and there’s something written on the side of the paper that is folded outward.
Unfurling the letter, I see that the inner surface is covered in Beitha Kukju letters and a large seal of burgundy-colored wax accompanies the final, ornate signature, trailing diminishing titles. So this was plucked from my fingers in the moment of command, opened, read, closed, and introduced into my pocket without my knowledge. I shove the letter clumsily back into the envelope and slam into the ground, having neglected to watch where I was going as I examined it.
The wind is knocked out of me. I draw breath and bellow. The sound comes from my outraged body, and part of my spinning mind listens to it with interest as it recedes down the surrounding streets. It is the only sound here.
After I get my wind back, I examine my knees and elbows, all of which are barked through my clothes. Dismally I hunt for the letter, and find it lying neatly across two cobblestones, half in and half out of its envelope. Only then do I notice, for the second time, the writing on the exposed outward side, of the letter. It reads as follows:
Cretin—
Do NOT
read these words aloud, and do NOT register their presence on the back of this letter in any way! This includes staring at the words, poring over them with your nose an inch from the paper and moving your lips, or crying out to me or to anyone else or otherwise calling the attention of anyone other than yourself to these words: the words you are at this moment reading! If you are being watched, or merely overlooked, or if you simply feel you are, then do NOT read this yet, but wait until you are certain you are not being observed!
Your stupidity has cost you this chance, but you will have one more. Meet me at the place I have indicated below. This is to be ABSOLUTELY secret. If you fail this time, you fail period.
Unsigned.
She actually unsigned the note. But what gets me is that she had the time, or rather the speed, to scratch it all down after opening the letter and reading its official contents, and before depositing it in my pocket.
Then there’s the extraordinary manual dexterity she must have, considering that this message, which could only have been dashed off at top speed, is not only legible, but beautifully written.
I believe I’m justified in reading and re-reading this note right away, because I’ve never felt more entirely alone and unobserved than I do now.
There’s more—beneath the fold, a simple, hand-drawn map of the streets has been penned in green ink, with a large cross at the point of rendezvous. The message was written in purple ink. She not only drew this map, which is remarkably detailed and accurate, considering the many little side streets and fluctuating street names she has to take into account in order to direct me, a person whose intellect she holds a pretty low estimate of to boot, but she even provided for the eventuality by carrying two different pens or perhaps, if they were fountain pens, two different inks.
There’s more: she drew a clock face with the time of our appointment, and connected it to the marked location with a large, very distinct arrow. So, I either take this at face value and assume she has superhuman powers of draughting—who else but she could have done this?—or I have to consider the possibility that the note is a set up, or perhaps the “cretin” message isn’t actually intended for me, but was directed toward her, and had been written on the reverse side of the letter from the start.
In any case, something is going to happen at the place indicated on the map, so that’s where I’ll go.
There—now I see the steam again, pouring itself forth “in such an ecstasy,” coming from what seems to be the same stack or one of the group to which the one I remarked before belongs. Smokestacks everywhere, on all hands, like the remnant pillars of temples that have collapsed, but I haven’t altered my orientation at all since I saw steam the first time. That steam was dead ahead, and so is this.
The snowy whiteness of the steam greys as the day grows more and more overcast, until it is just as dark as the nearly black stormthunderheads covering the city. The tautening of nerves, the attending inner flash, going only as I look away from power so abruptly present and gone, linger, another snap, and there’s no tension or building up, only bewareness, and the flash comes and goes before you know it with all the softness of a phantom that goes with nothing before it.
The air is skittish, it twitches like a cat dreaming about hunting—a funny feeling, a little ill earlier in the day, some lightness like a pipe of air blowing along the migraine—so much more honest than the labored clamor of the bells—to imagine or feel ‘nature’ out of a murky purplegrey sky, the clean alkali light, feeling like an expansion of the bone around my temples, human jealousy, giddy with jealousy, flickering pets of starlight as fitful and sparkling but more vaporous, the light released from its monotonous staring, and then a fragment of some other day vaults by, guttering snowlight in cream ashes, a violet burst, the brilliance flashes, never extinguished but pinwheeling away into space over the stormcity; the webs reach almost to the ground, the spiders conjure the filaments with their yellow eyes, and white pupils, invisible in the glare of their sparklike bodies, and scatter along the crevices in the clouds as familiar to them as neighborhood boulevards. Blindingness makes me jump clumsily into a doorway and then a snap which, deafening me, jostles the ground. As the rumble shatters itself and rolls away, I catch, through the singing interference in my ears, the sound of a window breaking a block or so away and the glass tinkling on the street.
The door I am leaning against gives way and I tumble into a foyer. The wild jabs of my wheeling arms somehow prevent me from losing my balance too much, and, instead of hitting the floor, I collide with one of the walls and slide, angling toward the floor it is true but not so rapidly that I can’t, with a presence of mind uncharacteristic of me, get my feet back beneath my weight. I right myself, pause to look around a moment, and then rush up the flight of stairs in virtually the same moment I see them. Finding another flight on the next landing, I hasten up these, encountering no one. A trapdoor here, in the ceiling. I yank on the dangling line in my enthusiasm and, as the ladder comes telescoping directly at my face, I lunge down so that it only lightly grazes my ass as it ejects rattling. Squeezing myself painfully back around it again, I scramble up into cool dustiness, catching sight at once of a beautiful window. With some blundering I’m able to get over to it, shoving cases and things out of the way—I unfasten the window, fling it open, and gorge my eyes on the purple and blue eruptions. Throwing the window open admits not one more breath of wind, nor one drop of rain. The city is dry and as airless as a tomb, even though the clouds rush by overhead like a river upside down. Eons of human beings watching storms, looking at the clouds and the lightning with such jealousy; with the same ancient instinct I want to wave my hands like a conductor and pointing out where and when the next crash should be.
Wandering idly from room to room, I remember my appointment. Specifically, it’s this clock, dully ticking on the mantle, that reminds me. Smells like cats in here. I check the clock face drawn on the map. Two hours ago. I should race to the spot she marked and hope she hasn’t quit it in final disgust, but instead I charge off in the opposite direction, inwardly sure that she’s already back at home or on her way there and that I might be able to catch her or, at least, go to where she is and be there, even if she’s given up on me entirely.
Everything looks different. I follow a street for block after block until I’m brought up short by a little tea house with a huge red star hanging out in front of it, something even I couldn’t possibly have failed to notice. I’m lost.
*
The tea house. I returned to the spot in front of the tea house and tried again another way, over and over. I had no method, and in short order I realized I was already rushing down the same street for the second time, and not too sure it was only the second time.
Now I’m sitting on a stool that’s a bit lower to the ground than I’d like, at a table not more than a foot square. Whoever sat here before I did has left behind a full cup of steaming tea and a couple of enormous wet footprints. I feast my eyes on the wonderful color of the tea, and the contrast it makes against the cup’s limpid, almost luminous whiteness. I take in the glowing wooden tables and stools, leafy little planters, a trickling fountain made of striped stones. There’s a revolting odor of food, like fermented styrofoam. The brisk, self-satisfied old ghoul joking with the other attendants, her embalmed look, baring all her teeth in the colorless gums. I drink only the sensation of sitting down.
A rattle of bells. The door admits a jaunty little boy who joins me at my table, slurping at the tea without a word.
“Well, what’s your story?” I ask uninquisitively.
He looks askance at me, and slurps some more, seeming to consider his reply. Then he looks around.
“Are you the first one here?” he asks coolly, starting to speak before he is fully looking at me again.
“Playtime, huh?” I swivel one way and then the other, craning my head around my shoulders in a pantomime of looking. “Well, little guy, I guess it all depends on what you mean by... the.”
/> His manner is brisk and businesslike. He’s wearing a jacket that fits him very well and a cap with earflaps pulled down and fastened beneath his chin; his cheeks are plump and rosy and his lips scarlet.
“So, it’s time to talk about my wife,” he says.
He folds his hands on the table in front of him. The stool is well adapted to someone of his size and he appears to be entirely comfortable.
“—ah ha ha! Have you met her?” He points at me, evidently at a reaction to mention of his wife he thinks he notices in my face. I’m not aware of there having been any new developments in my expression; my face feels like a rubber slab hung on a hook. Perhaps he’s trying to initiate a reaction by supplying the effect first and allowing the cause to be assumed.
“What’s your sign?” I ask monotonously. “Come here often?”
The boy takes up the sugar pot from the next table and sweetens the tea.
“I’ve been looking all over for her,” he says. “I think she’s hiding.”
“Parking tickets?”
“Is she beautiful?” he asks me wonderingly, raising his voice to a high pitch as if he wanted to know if I was sure.
“What do you think?”
“I’ve never seen her. Our marriage was arranged.”
“Ah.”
“The wedding was done by letters.”
“Like, ‘Dear Brat: I do. Take it easy—Wifey.’?”
“She used wax.”
Before I can stop myself, I whip the letter from my pocket and show him its more formal side.
“Like this?”
He nods profoundly.
“Are you marrying her too?”
His manly suavity has been steadily disappearing.
“I thought you could only marry one at a time,” I say.
“Me too,” he says dejectedly. He stirs the tea, slopping a little of it into the saucer, then releases the spoon in the cup and returns his hands to his lap, without tasting it.
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