The singing went on.
Now, how (Bron looked away so as not to be noticed staring) could I possibly have mistaken her for that other? (Others had joined the singing. And still others.) Her face was wider; underneath the dirt, her hair was brown, not blue; from her neck hung only a single, rusted chain.
The song she sang (among the dozen others singing) was beautiful.
The voices were rough; seven-odd stuck out, raucous, unsure, off-key. But what they sang—
Bron felt his hand squeezed.
—kept rising, and rising over itself, defining a chord that the next note, in suspension, beat with beautifully. His back and belly chilled. He breathed out, breathed in, trying to inhale the words, but catching only: “... all onyx and dove-blood crinkling ...” to miss a phrase and catch another: “... love like an iced engine crackling ...” which, in terms of the dozen words he’d first heard, was profound.
The woman on the rope began a high descant over-soaring the melody.
Chills encased him. His eyelids quivered.
The acrobat, legs braced wide, shoulders and long hair back, face up—sparse red beard scraggled just under his chin—sang too.
Voices interwove, spiring.
His ears and tongue felt carbonated.
His scalp crawled with joy.
Something exploded in the refuse can. Red sparks spattered over the rim, spilled on the gravel. Sparks, blue-white, shot up in a four-, a six-, a dozen-foot fountain.
Bron drew back.
“No, watch ...” she whispered, pulling him forward. Her voice sounded as if it reverberated down from vaulted domes. Awed, he looked up.
The fountain was up over two dozen feet!
Sparks hit the shoulder of the woman on the rope. She was chanting something; he heard: “... point seven, one, eight, two, eight, one, four ...” She paused, laughed, let go with one hand to brush sparks away. For a moment (as though she recited some mystical countdown) he thought her image on the mural would tear loose and, flapping, spiral the bright pillar into the holy dark.
The guitarist bent over her instrument, hammering on with her left hand and, with her right, flailing furious chords. People began to clap.
He raised his hands, clapped too—weakly: but it shook his whole body; he clapped again, wildly off-rhythm. Clapped again—had the song ended? There was only the quiet chanting of the woman on the rope, her voice measured, her eyes fixed on Bron’s: “... five, nine ... two ... six ... one ... seven ... five ...” Bron clapped again, alone, and realized tears were rolling one cheek. (The sparks died.) His hands fell, swung, limp.
The red-haired acrobat started another flip—but stopped before he left the ground, grinned, and stood again. To which Bron’s reaction was near nausea. Had the flip been completed (at the silence, the baby pulled from the woman’s breast, looked around the square, blinked, then lurched again at the nipple and settled to sucking) Bron realized he would have vomited; and even the incomplete handspring seemed, somehow, incredibly right.
Bron swallowed, took a step, tried to bring himself back into himself: it seemed that fragments were scattered all around the square.
He was breathing very hard.
I must be incredibly overoxygenated! Purposely, he slowed his breath.
His body still tingled. Anyway, it was exciting! Exciting and ... beautiful!—even to the point of nausea! He grinned, remembered his companion, looked for her—
She had moved over near the people at the smoking can, smiling at him.
Smiling back, he shook his head, a little bewildered, a little shaken. “Thank—” He coughed, shook his head again. “Thank you ...” which was all there was to say. “Please ... Thank you—”
Which was when he noticed that all of them—the girl with the guitar, the woman on the rope, the still panting acrobat, the woman sitting on the crate with the baby, the matted-haired woman with the scars and that eye, and the other dozen around the extinguished can (a sooty trickle of smoke put a second vertical up beside the rope)—were watching him.
The woman who had brought him glanced at the others, then back at Bron. “Thank your She raised both hands before her, nodded to him, and began to applaud.
So did the others. Half of them bowed, raggedly; some bowed again.
Still smiling, Bron said, “Hey, wait a minute ...” Some negative emotion fought for ascendance.
As the woman stepped forward, he fought back and, for the moment, won. Confused, he reached for her hand.
She looked at his, a little puzzled, then said, “Oh ...” and showed him the palm of hers (a small metallic circle stuck to the center) in explanation; perhaps because he didn’t appear to understand, she frowned a little more, then said, “Oh—” again, but in a different tone, and, with her other hand, took his, clumsily; well, it was better than nothing. “This is a theatrical commune,” she said. “We’re operating on a Government Arts Endowment to produce micro-theater for unique audiences ...”
Behind her, somebody picked up the lamp (the beam swung from the mural), turned it off. The woman with the mirrors hanging from her toes was climbing the rope, hauling herself back into the dark.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.” Again the gray-caped shoulders moved with gentle laughter. “Really, you’re the most appreciative audience we’ve had in a while.” She looked around. “I think we’ll all agree to that—”
“He sure is!” a man, squatting before the refuse can, called up. He seized the can’s rim, yanked. The can opened. The acrobat, on the other side, caught one half, pulled something, and—clank!—clash!—clunk!—the whole thing folded down into a shape the two of them lifted and carried off into an alleyway.
The rope climber was gone: the rope end, jerking angrily, went up, and up, and up into the black—
“I hope you didn’t mind the drugs ... ?”—and disappeared.
She turned over her palm again with its metal circle. “It’s only the mildest psychedelic—absorbed through the skin. And there’s a built-in allergy check in case you’re—”
“Oh, I didn’t mind,” he protested. “Cellusin, I’m quite familiar with it. I mean, I know what ...”
She said: “It only lasts for seconds. It gives the audience better access to the aesthetic parameters around which we’re—” Her look questioned—”... working?” He nodded in answer, though not sure what the question was. The hirsute, scarred woman took hold of one of the poles edging the mural and pulled it from the wall, walking across and rolling the loose, rattling canvas with great swings.
“Really ...” Bron said. “It was ... wonderful! I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever ...” which, because it didn’t sound like what he’d intended to say, he let trail. Behind the mural was a palimpsest of posters. The last of the canvas came away from: “Look what Earth did to their Moon! We don’t” The rest had been torn off:—want them to do it to us he supplied mentally, annoyed he knew it but not from where. Like lyrics of a song, he thought, running through your head, that, basically, you didn’t like.
The woman dropped his hand, nodded again, turned and walked across the square, stopping to look up after the rope.
Bron started to call, but coughed (she looked back) and completed: “—what’s your name?”
She said, “My friends call me the Spike,” as one of the men came up, put his arm around her shoulder, and whispered something that made her laugh.
The variety, he thought, that subsumes her face between mild doubt and joy!
“We’ll be in this neighborhood for another day or so” (The man was walking away) “By the way, the music for our production was written by our guitarist, Charo—”
The dark-haired girl, pulling up the cloth case around her instrument, paused, smiled at Bron, then zipped it closed.
“The backdrop and costumes were by Dian—”
Who was apparently the hairy woman lugging the rolled mural over her shoulder: before she turned off down the alley, she gave him a grotesq
ue, one-eyed grin.
“Our special effects were all devised by our tumbler, Windy—but I think he’s already getting set up at the next location. The solo voice that you first heard singing was recorded by Jon-Teshumi.”
One of the women held up what he realized was a small playback recorder.
“The production was coordinated by our manager, Hatti.”
“That’s me too,” the woman with the recorder said, then hurried after the others.
“And the entire production—” The guitarist (Charo?) spoke now, from the corner—“was conceived, written, produced, and directed by the Spike.” The guitarist grinned.
The Spike grinned—“Thank you, again—” and, with an arm around the guitarist’s shoulder, they were around the corner.
“It was great!” he called after them. “It was really—” He looked about the empty square, at the poster-splotched wall, at the other streets. Which way had he come? The emotion Bron had been fighting down suddenly surged. He did not shout out, No—! He lunged instead for the low archway and loped into the alley.
He had already turned at two intersections when his mind was wrenched away from what was going through it by the shambling figure that, thirty yards ahead, crossed from corner to corner, glanced at him—the eye; the chains; the sunken chest; the high coordinate lights made a red snarl of the hairy shoulder: this time it was the gorilla-ish man—and was gone.
At the corner, Bron looked but couldn’t see him. Were the Dumb Beasts, he wondered suddenly, also part of the charade? Somehow, the possibility was appalling. Wander around the u-1 until he found him? Or some other member of the sect? Or of the cast? But if the initial encounter had been theatrical prologue, how would he know the answer he got were not some equally theatrical coda? Meaningless communication? Meaningful ... ? Which one had she said?
He turned, breathed deeply, and hurried left—sure he was going wrong; till he came out on the familiar, plated walkway, three intersections down from where he’d entered.
And what had been going through his mind?
Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelarmronoriminos ... And ‘mu’ and ‘ro’ were the thirteenth and seventeenth syllables! From out memory’s detritus they had reachieved their places, fixed and certain.
Was it the brief drug? Or some resonance from the theater piece? Or simply chance? Walking slowly, strangely pensive, he reviewed the mumble again. In the swing between pleasantry and unpleasantness, the Spike’s laugh returned, either as something that effected, or that was, the transition.
The mumble rolled about his mind.
Then Bron frowned.
The third syllable ... and what about the ninth? With sure memory of the thirteenth and seventeenth, another came that he had not reviewed for years: The Instructor, at the last meeting of the Poor Children he had attended, had stood by his bench, correcting his pronunciation of those two syllables again and again and again and again and again and saying, finally, “You still don’t have them right,” and proceeded to the next novice. The class had recited the mumble, several more times, in unison: he had been able to hear that his own vowels, for those syllables, three and nine, were, indeed, off. Finally, he had looked at his lap, slurred over the whole thing; and hadn’t come to the next session. The truth, undercutting present pleasure—the new feeling (the Spike’s face flickered a moment, in memory, laughing) was somehow part of the first negative one he had tried to suppress back at the little square (the No—! he hadn’t shouted)—was that, having nothing to do with the thirteenth syllable, or the seventeenth, or the third, or the ninth, he had never, really, known the mantra.
All he had (once more the syllables began to play through) was something with which he could, as he had done with so much of his life, make do.
The realization (it wasn’t the drug; it was just the way things were) shivered his vision with leftover tears that—no, that wasn’t what she’d laughed at ... ?—he blinked, confusedly, back.
2. Solvable Games
The death at the center of such discourse is extraordinary and begins to let us see our own condition.
—Robin Blaser, The Practice of Outside
Bronze clasps, cast as clawing beasts, snapped back under Lawrence’s wrinkled thumbs. Lawrence opened out the meter-wide case.
“What I mean,” Bron said, as the case’s wooden back, inlaid with ivory and walnut, clacked to the common-room’s baize table, “is, how are you even supposed to know if you like something like that ... ?” He gazed over the board: within the teak rim, in three dimensions, the landscape spread, mountains to the left, ocean to the right. The jungle between was cut here by a narrow, double-rutted road, there by a mazy river. A tongue of desert wound from behind the steeper crags, alongside the ragged quarry. Drifting in from the border, small waves inched the glassy sea till, near shore, they broke, foaming. Along the beach, wrinkling spume slid up and out, up and out. “Do you see?” Bron insisted. “I mean, you understand my point?” The river’s silver, leaving the mountains, poured over a little waterfall, bright as falling mica. A darker green blush crossed the jungle: a micro-breeze, disturbing the tops of micro-trees. “There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts—I mean, if there is such a sect. But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real? / don’t know how big their endowment was ... and maybe the ‘endowment’ was part of the theater’ too.”
“Well, her name is certainly familiar—”
“Is it?” Bron asked in the quiet commons. “The Spike?”
“Very.” Lawrence assembled the astral cube: the six six-by-six plastic squares, stacked on brass stilts, made a three dimensional, transparent playing space to the right of the main board, on which all demonic, mythical, magical, and astral battles were enacted. “You don’t follow such things. I do. I even think I’ve heard something about the Dumb Beasts—they’re the fragments of some bizarre sect that used to go by just a very long number?”
“She told me some nonsense like that.”
“I can’t remember where I heard about them—that’s not the sort of thing I do follow—so I can’t swear to the validity of your beasts for you. But the Spike, at any rate, is quite real. I’ve always wanted to see one of her productions. I rather envy you—There: That’s all together. Would you get the cards out of the side drawer, please?”
Bron looked around the side of the vlet case, pulled out the long, narrow drawer. He picked up the tooled leather dice-cup; the five dice clicked hollowly. Thrown, three would be black with white pips, one transparent with diamond pips, and the fifth, not cubic, but scarlet and icosahedral, had seven faces blank (Usually benign in play, occasionally they could prove, if you threw one at the wrong time, disastrous); the others showed thirteen alien constellations, picked out in black and gold.
Bron set the cup down and fingered up the thick pack. He unwrapped the blue silk cloth from around it. Along the napkin’s edge, gold threads embroidered:
—the rather difficult modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system (Lawrence had not taught him that yet; he knew only that θ was a measurement of strategic angles of attack [over different sorts of terrain N, M, and A] and that small ones netted more points than large ones) proceeded. As he pulled back the blue corner, two cards slid to the table. He picked them up—the Wizard of Rocks and the Child Empress—and squared them with the deck. “Lawrence, the point is, even if he wasn’t a member of their company—I mean, there was a woman member of the sect who definitely was with them—unless that was just makeup too. It was as though, suddenly, I couldn’t trust anything ...”
Lawrence opened the drawer on the other side of the case and took out a handful of the small, mirrored and transparent screens (some etched with the same, alien constellations, some with different), set them upright beside the board, then reached back in for the playing pieces: carved foot soldiers, mounted men, model army-encampments; and, from this same drawer, two miniature cities, with their tiny streets, squa
res, and markets: one of these he put in its place in the mountains, the second he set by the shore. “I don’t see why you’re so busy dissecting all this—” Lawrence took up one red foot soldier, one green one, sat back in his chair, put the pieces behind his back—“when it seems to me all that’s happened is, in an otherwise dull day, you’ve had—from the way you described it—something of an aesthetic experience.” (Bron was thinking that seventy-four-year-olds should either get bodily regeneration treatments or not sit around the co-op common rooms stark naked—another thought he decided to suppress: it was Lawrence’s right to dress or not dress any way he felt like. But why, he found himself wondering, was it so easy to suppress some negative thoughts while others just proliferated?—like all those that had been forming about that theater woman, the Spike: which, essentially, was what he had been avoiding talking about for the last quarter of an hour.) Lawrence said: “If you were asking for advice, which you’re not, I’d say why don’t you just leave it at that. If you don’t mind comments, which I must assume you don’t, because despite all my other comments, you’re still talking to me and haven’t merely wandered away—” Lawrence brought his fists together above the mountains—“I can only suspect that, because you haven’t left it at that—the only logically tenable conclusion—there probably is more to it than that. At least as far as you’re concerned. Choose—”
Bron tapped Lawrence’s left fist.
The fist (Bron thought: Perhaps it’s simply because Lawrence is my friend) turned over, opened: a scarlet foot soldier.
“That’s you,” Lawrence said.
Bron took the piece, looked around at the other side of the case, and began to pick the scarlet pieces from their green velvet drawer. He stopped with the piece called the Beast between his thumb and forefinger, regarded it: the miniature, hulking figure, with its metal claws and plastic eyes, was not particularly dumb: during certain gambits, the speaker grill beside the dice-cup drawer would yield up the creature’s roar, as well as the terrified shouts of its attackers. Bron turned it in his fingers, pondering, smiling, wondering what else he might say to Lawrence other than “yes”—
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