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by Michael Cisco

  “So, is she beautiful?”

  Hearkening back to the glamorous, unreal idea of beauty I’d had when I was a boy, I’d have to say, no, those images have nothing to do with the weary face that appears, lips compressed with disgust and impatience, in my mind. I want to give the child a kind answer, but I don’t know whether truth or lies are kinder. And it’s still a matter of opinion in any case.

  “She looks fine, kid,” I say. “There’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “So she’s not beautiful.”

  “It’s hard to tell. She’s mad all the time.”

  Keeping his hands in his lap, the boy forms his lips into a tube, lowers them into the tea, quietly slurping. He plays, dipping his mouth in and out, through the meniscus. A few minutes pass in thoughtful silence.

  “Have you kissed her?” he asks, looking up at me curiously.

  “Nope. Say you wouldn’t happen to have any letters on you, by any chance?”

  “Nope.”

  “Darn. I was hoping you might know her address.”

  “The palace,” he says.

  Right on cue, a man in a plaid coat and a peaked fur hat appears at the door.

  “Boy!” he snaps.

  The boy slips off the seat and, with a grin to me, rushes over to where the man stands.

  “Get back over there!” the man says angrily. “And you’d better be there when I come.”

  To my surprise, he doesn’t follow the boy scampering back down the street, but comes over to my table and stands there, looming over me.

  “You’d prefer a booth, friend,” the man says, baring his teeth at me dreamily. One of those incisors has what looks like a little bit of tar clinging to it, up toward the gumline, and something like a short length of wire or a fine twig sticks out of the tar.

  “I’m fine right here. I feel about as lively and mobilizable as a bronze statue.”

  I don’t like it when people loom over me. If he looms any further, I’ll get up in a hurry and bang the top of my head into his chin.

  “Magnanimize yourself, friend,” he says. “I got an important message for you.”

  “And pray tell how do I keep my thoughts and my desires and my mind in sight at all times and protect myself from messages that are ‘important’ to other people, but not to me? That’s what I’d like to know. You got an important message about that?”

  “Come come,” he murmurs, patting the air gently as if momentarily transfixed by the memory of some phrase of music. “Need not be so brash.”

  Shoving both hands through my hair I pilfer a moment or two of privacy for myself, there in the shade between my elbows, hunched over the table.

  “Sure, OK. Why not.”

  I gesture vaguely to the other seat without looking at it. The chair wails against the floor, and the table jostles as the man settles himself. When I raise my eyes again, he’s got his nose practically in the tea cup.

  “Ugh,” he says, sniffing.

  He keeps his nose in the tea cup for a long time, sniffing, and emitting ejaculations of distaste at intervals. The sound is mostly trapped in the cup.

  As this seems likely to go on for a while, I wave my finger and flag down a waitress, who slithers out from behind the bar at the back of the room without a sound.

  “Can I get a coffee?”

  I don’t want any coffee, but this man’s behavior causes me to imagine that he’s made his move, and is waiting for me to make mine. The man raises his head and lowers it into the coffee mug when it comes, sipping noisily, without using his hands. Then he straightens up and looks at me levelly.

  “It’s lukewarm,” he says.

  “Are you going to spew it from your mouth?”

  “I’m going to complain,” he smiles. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  But of course he doesn’t move a muscle. As I have no intention of being baited into asking for anything, not even an “important message,” I take up the first pastime that presents itself to me. I pick up the paper knapkin, unfold it, fold it into shapes, tear it in places. The ripped edges are fibrous and seem not so much to end as to vanish gradually in an infinitely-increasing tenuousness.

  “Would you call the waitress again?” he asks.

  “Did Venus just enter the seventeenth house of Virgablo? You can talk now? Because Gawd, I love these crazy conversations. I’d better.”

  “Could you please call the waitress...”

  “Waitress,” I say quietly, without turning around or looking up from my knapkin.

  “Mr. Thanks,” he says quietly. “The message I got for you is important.”

  “So you said, Mr...?”

  “Teeth.”

  “Right. So look, Teeth—”

  He cuts me off, insisting the title be appended.

  “Teeth,” I say, “You got to understand that, just now, you’re the courier, not me. It was decided by those on high that this is—”

  I point to myself.

  “—no longer a courier, or anything else as far as Chorncendantra is concerned. Now if you got a message for me, then I’m every bit as entitled to jerk you around as they were to jerk me around. Fair’s fair, right?”

  “You ought to be more sympathetic,” he says, baring his teeth again in a wolfish leer. Without thinking I rise to my feet, snatch up his mug and toss out its contents, scattering them, for the most part, across those teeth and eyes, with some entering at the nostrils as well to judge by the splutter. He splutters, pushing back from the table and hanging his head forward over the gap between his spread legs, swabbing himself with his long reedy fingers. But he quickly turns his dripping face to me, a face full of coffeesplash, my favorite kind.

  “What’d I do?”

  He reaches for the knapkin I’d been tearing and folding, the only one on the table, and, as he nearly has it, I notice characters written there on the paper. With a lunge, I rake it from the table and out of his reach.

  “Not that one, not that one!” I mutter.

  A quick glance around and my eyes discover a knapkin dispenser sitting on the counter. I rush over and seize it, only to be jerked back by the chain tethering it to the counter. There’s even a heavy padlock that says HARDENED on it, attaching it to a huge metal ring that would have been less out of place in a dungeon. So I’m reduced to pulling out tufts of knapkin, like a magician prestidigitating scarves out of a cat’s asshole or something... pigeons, whatever they use... and then replacing the dispenser and hurrying back to the table with an uncouth bouquet of dishevelled white leaves, tripping on the chain, which had contrived to get itself wound around one of my legs, and thus being all but precipitated to the floor. As it is, I only stagger, and knock over a chair, which I right immediately so as not to have to come back to right it later.

  Teeth is already at the door by now, still holding his head down so as not I suppose to drip coffee down his shirt.

  “Hey! Hey!” I call, brandishing the knapkins.

  Teeth opens the door and shoos me with his free hand, not looking at me. I follow him outside, rush around in front of him, and dab at his face with the wad of knapkins. Teeth swats at me, getting angrier every moment, and, when his hands become fists, I back off, trying to explain that I want to palliate him by helping to clean him up. Teeth glares at me, snarling, his streaked face looking tigerish.

  “High and low I look for you, and this is the thanks I get!”

  “All right I’m a prick,” I say, “but you still have a responsibility to whoever gave you that message to give to me to give it to me.”

  He drags his fingers down his face a few more times and says nothing.

  “You want to slug me? Go ahead. Go ahead, I won’t do anything.”

  I spread my arms, telling him again that I won’t do anything, and he punches me. The word is cut in half. His fist lands high on my chest, just under the collarbone on the right, landing with force but not much pain, hard enough to knock me down.

  I get up.

  His moo
d has brightened considerably.

  “An orbiter is to be assigned to you,” he says.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s all there is.”

  When he’s just at the end of the narrow alley—it is an alley, not a street: I must have gotten turned around somehow—he stops and extends his arm, looking back in my direction, pointing at something. As near as I can tell, he is indicating a black wine bottle with no label, which lies on its side on the brick sill of a high, small window.

  “You pointing at this?” I shout, waving at the bottle.

  Teeth simply pockets his hands and steps out of the story.

  I regard the bottle for some time. It’s far too high up. I throw a few stones, bits of rubbish at it, even manage to clink it a few times, but it might as well be epoxied there.

  Next. I extract the knapkin from my pocket and examine it; characters are scrawled all over one side, distorted at the brink of legibility, and the light here is too weak to read by. I try to scan the first word and a lead ball appears in my brain. The sensation lifts the moment I close my eyes and banish the word from my sight. I try again, and the feeling returns at once, like a smothering hand, crushing me under oppressive sleep. The contour of the first word is familiar though; I do think I could read this, if only this weird sensation would stop.

  The absence of ideas howls at my back like a fatal ice storm.

  What do I do? It’s all the same.

  How do I make it not all the same?

  This may be my salvation for this particular minute, this line of reasoning, if I can manage to open it: if I’m being sent messages and assigned wine bottles, it might follow, given I don’t know how many givens—but just now it seems like I have to swallow any number of assumptions to salvage this train of thought—I say it might follow that the game isn’t done with me, and perhaps never was.

  That’s not what matters, though, or not just yet, whether it stopped doing with me; only that it is doing with me again just now matters.

  He did say he’d been after me for a long time, so it is possible he hadn’t been informed of my disgrace. So this could be the tail end of an involvement that is actually over, but, is this a slip? Is this something I could exploit to involve myself again?

  I am intuitively certain that he did not put that wine bottle there, and this suggests that, even if he is following obsolete orders to their completion, there is some fragment of the game’s sprawling, unmanageable machinery still attached to me.

  A little project occurs sweetly to me, something to do! I leave the alley. Teeth went that way, so I will go the opposite.

  Here is a street. All according to expectations. I flip a coin and turn right. Intersection. Flip a coin and turn left. Intersection. Flip. Right. As I walk to the next intersection I flip the coin again to determine whether I will turn when I get there, or continue straight. I continue straight for three more blocks, and so on. Lightning flickers in the distance. Every now and then, a snowflake. The light here, close to the ground, is very pure.

  Now, stop.

  No.

  No.

  No...

  There.

  Still too high to reach. On its end this time. One side is raked with rusty scratches.

  Is this to keep me in or out?

  Slow down, son. Order your thoughts like an onerous grammatical exercise. Bore yourself calm. Surely this could be a different bottle, but how likely is that? I haven’t been forgotten.

  *

  It’s true, what the machine says. I return with joy to my practice, or I would if I knew how.

  “All I want... All I want is, to resume my practice, while all the world, all around me, is just going to baboon their shittyassholes,” the machine says.

  It isn’t my orbiter, which observes a sphinxlike silence or, if it speaks or relays speech, it is always too far away for me to hear. This machine is another formless, nameless whatever next to which I’ve accidentally set myself down. Perhaps it has lived a life more or less like mine simultaneously with me, and we’ve both washed up here just now. The machine is not too prepossessing.

  I want to return to my practice, but the people, who have exploded into the streets all of a sudden in the last few days, restore a tedious frenzy to the city that must have been typical of it the way it was before the silence in which I’d first inmated it.

  Well, so what? But they’re too distracting.

  What right have I to complain? I am the interloper.

  This is their city. But then again by what right do I set myself outside? The idea of rights seems too stupid. Where do I get off setting myself against or beside them? The answer is obvious. By a right I paid for with suffering for I forget what.

  I avoid them, but they casually home in on me anyway. I turn onto a short side street, hoping it will be empty. At first, I think it is.

  I’m wrong. There’s someone coming on the northern side.

  All right, I’ll go down the southern side, where the pavement is empty.

  He crosses.

  His diagonal path will intersect mine and he will pass nerve-wrackingly close, behind my back, a loss. I make a left at the T intersection, and there’s someone walking, a complete figure in the middle ground, continually modified by the activity of walking, approaching on the west side of the street.

  As I cross toward the east side, which is closer to my destination and whose pavements are empty, a couple rounds the corner up ahead and proceeds down the east side pavement, to block me. But there’s been an oversight—normally, there would be an idling car, glaring down the street with its foul headlights. No car tonight. I can walk in the street, avoiding the people on both sidewalks.

  By the time a car has been dispatched to shine its blinding headlights on me, I have passed the oncoming couple, and no reinforcements have appeared at the corner on the east side. The opposition is slipping. I take to the pavement. The machinery runs smoothly, but it is possible, by moving in an irregular way, to wriggle out of synchronization with it.

  Somebody left a salad out on the curb, with no bowl around it.

  I turn into a street, and there’s a loitering figure. It could so easily be empty, and that’s what is so infuriating. Only one person, only a few minutes. I avoid that street and take another. Someone there, too. Further up the street, and people crossing, practically throwing themselves at me. Charging for cover, execrations. Losing my composure, shouting—it’s the sort of thing that gets you knocked down. Everything’s fine as long as it’s only play, or only practicing, because everything can be taken back, nothing goes past the extent of my tentative reach. I’ve got to keep playing—I’ve got to hover in sweet inconsequence, I’ve got to make my blank, and that means nothing that can’t be undone should be done: my resolve to play I grip like a knife in the teeth.

  When I stop, whenever I try to resume my practice, the people distract me, and also the meaningless, unimportant writing on the knapkin. Without being aware of what my hands are up to, I sneak it from my pocket and begin tracing over the characters with my finger, feeling the raised letters, like worms under the skin. Oppression mantles me virtually the instant I set my eyes on the writing on the knapkin, and the relief is correspondingly abrupt when I take my eyes away again. The sensation combines the worst features of a burdensome weariness, unleavened by the pleasure of being half drunk with sleep, and vertigo, stripped of its lucid excitement. What’s left is laborious dizziness, blindly groping for itself; my head is dragged down, my eyelids droop.

  As an experiment, I fold the knapkin so as to hide most of the writing, and then look only at the first letter. The sensation returns, no different for one letter as for them all. I struggle to commit the first letter to memory, and then quickly write it down in a notebook.

  Caution prompts me to try the first letter again, rather than move on to the second right away. I repeat my experiment, writing the first letter down on another page of the notebook, and then, the charm, a third time,
on a third page. Asking myself whether or not I feel confident that the letter will be the same on each page, I decide I am, and check the pages. Three pages, three entirely different characters. I’d like to believe that there are as many messages as there are modalities for writing the first character, but I don’t. I believe I must assume this is a message, with a peculiar content in the older sense of the word. Otherwise it would just be a representation of language in general, and you can’t call that a message any more than you can call the abstract concept of beauty beautiful. Probably, I’ll have to read the whole thing at once, or not at all.

  As I sit here, in a snowbound little square, grinding my eyes to no avail against this maniacal writing, I suddenly hear a sour, metallic note that springs into the air from somewhere close by. Clare’s triangle. I’m so used to bounding to my feet and charging off at its peremptory summons that I do bound to my feet, nearly forgetting the knapkin, nearly letting it fall from my lap into the snow, and nearly failing to snatch it as it actually does fall, nearly failing to snatch it out of the air and pocket it.

  The chime repeats.

  By allowing my eyes to be drawn to the source of the sound, they pick out the familiar contour of my orbiter, which has discreetly materialized this side of a window overlooking the park. It occurs to me to go get it, and I manage to clamber over the low iron railing that borders the area in front of the building. The window I want is the second over from the right, top floor, which appears to be the third. The distance between myself and this window I greatly reduce by clambering on top of a gigantic tank, shaped like a canister lying on its side and attached by an overly-elaborate network of big ducts to the basement. Maybe heating oil.

  Surveying my prospects from on top of it, I see the wall is varnished with ice. A few jumps, slipping and sliding on the also icy as well as curved surface of the tank, I manage to get a purchase on a windowsill and draw up to it my left foot. Planting that in a corner of the deep sill, and with my right shoulder wedged against the other side, I find I can’t seem to get my right leg up and it hangs down. My mind doesn’t seem to be up to solving this problem; it gets to the idea that my right leg hasn’t got sufficient room to bend, and then stops.