The Divinity Student

by Michael Cisco

  “Where did this come from?” he asked.

  “Higher up classified—ep!” raising his hand to shut him up, “No no sorry nothing more can’t tell you strictest confidence!”

  The other letter will introduce him to the word-finder. He shoots towards San Veneficio, confident that this is where he is meant to go, he is starting. He has a momentum that came out of the sky. The dark marble walls draw near, black veined with green as far as his eyes can see. Beyond, the city bristles with spires and precarious minarets, lonely groups of statues standing against the sky atop copper domes, glyphed obelisks of polished basalt, gilded fountains, gargoyles; it’s a city of monuments. Above, birds circle rising on hot currents watching below in lazy ascent, quiet.

  “This is the Eye Gate,” says the driver, raising his index finger from the wheel. A circular breach in the wall a hundred feet across looms up and swallows them, flattened at the bottom where it meets the road, and around it the Divinity Student can briefly see a pointed ellipse carved deep into the wall; huge triangular pieces of green jade gleam, smoothly radiating out to form the iris around the pupil-gateway. Lictors, in their heavy coats and bloodred gloves, silver face masks shining, turn this way and that, bored, waving the traffic into the city.

  They drive up the Street of Dogs, making for the central plaza. The streets weave and twist passing through people’s houses and doubling back on themselves. The buildings are old and venerable, white plaster and modest columns, flat onyx streets, searing hot sunlight, smells rushing in through the window—orchards, wisteria, grilled meat, and people smells, carried on hot desert air. Finally, they make their way up the Street of Wax and into the plaza, vast and wide open, a colossal fountain at the center, buildings for giants looming all around. He pays the driver and makes his way to the fountain.

  The plaza seems to curve downward as if San Veneficio is the only city on a tiny planet, hanging over the sky’s open void. He weaves through currents of natives in white cotton, wealthy ladies walking pet monkeys, occasional dignitaries in loiters, and he follows in their clear wake, pardoning himself in Spanish. Now and then he checks to see that the letters are still in his pocket as he hurries to the fountain.

  There, he stands a moment in the spray, watching luminous fish circling sluggishly, the level of the water surging and dropping every few seconds as if the pool is breathing. He looks back at the town, eyes smarting from the dancing reflections on the water, and then thinks for the first time to check the letters for addresses. They are blank.

  Not knowing where to go, the Divinity Student sits on the clammy bank of the fountain and waits. People pass in streams and groups, cars roll by. Unthinkingly, he reaches into another pocket and produces a small metal weight on a cord that Fasvergil had given him back at the Seminary. Sheltering himself from crowd and wind, he spits in his palm and swings the weight like a pendulum above his open hand. His face drains and closes—he watches the swinging weight. Dry lightning sparks near the mountains on the horizon as the pendulum’s point first swings over his palm. Even in the middle of town he feels completely exposed to the mountains and the freely moving air. He stretches a little into the rising wind—for a moment his hand is a still point. The weight swings back and forth, each time rotating a little more to the left, until it finally stops, hanging at an angle in the air. He gets carefully to his feet and orients himself by the pendulum’s direction; he starts walking. The weight floats before him taut on the end of its tether like a dog on a leash, pulling him to one corner of the plaza, down close streets, past shouting water-sellers with earthenware vats and brass ladles, air growing closer—the sky rumbles overhead, people race to hide their stalls under umbrellas or find refuge under the awnings of clay buildings. Candles burn in absentminded alcoves, spice and paraffin smells, his eyelids droop and he feels lightheaded, but the pendulum tugs at his hand, threatening to come loose, he pushes himself off the voices of the fruit vendors and shouts of old women, shuffling awkwardly among the milling people.

  Finally, he staggers into a small laundry with sweating walls. Steam billows hissing in corners, more Spanish over shrieking presses. He’s pulled through to the back door and out onto a catwalk above a narrow alleyway. Stairs lead up a scarred brick wall to a deepset door with frosted glass panes. He scales the stairs and goes in, pocketing the weight and string. A tiny waiting room with oak paneling and red wallpaper.

  The contrast of the brightness outside and the dimness here makes him blink. A plain woman is sitting behind a miniature desk in one corner, making columns of numbers in regular handwriting on tiny sheets of ruled paper. She looks up at him blandly.

  “Is there anything you want?”

  “I’m here for my appointment,” he rifles through his coat and produces the letters. She looks at them distractedly with two quick gestures.

  “You should see Mr Woodwind,” she says, and directs him up a flight of stairs concealed behind a potted rubber plant.

  The stairs are narrow and shallow tilting down at an angle making them almost impossible to climb. He picks his way carefully up, following a series of random landings and new flights, lit always by red light through glass-filtered fixtures.

  Woodwind’s door is enameled, set directly into the wall, ajar and moving gently back and forth with the draft. The Divinity Student pushes it open with his fingertips.

  Inside—a vast room, narrow but deep, with high windows, light filtering through a white haze, a smell of books. Shelves loaded with notebooks line the walls, their covers bulging with yellowing paper. Three clerks are shuffling about the room in excessively long robes, carrying stacks of printed pages, an occasional page spiraling to the bare wooden floor. Having crossed the room three times bearing ever larger stacks of paper, one of the clerks pauses, peering nearsightedly at the Divinity Student.

  “I have letters of introduction for Mr Woodwind.”

  The clerk sniffs at him dubiously and trudges off, absently waving the Divinity Student after him.Woodwind is standing at a table in the far corner: a tall whitehaired man with rolled sleeves and an apron. He is excising a page from an open book with a long pair of tweezers—dropping it into a pan of clear gray liquid. Having soaked it thoroughly, he retrieves it and plies it over a blue fire; his heavy brows knit as he reads the page’s new contents to a clerk taking dictation. Finished, he brings the page down just over the fire, and it bursts into flames. Black tatters flutter up to the ceiling. After repeating this several times, Woodwind sets down his tweezers and looks at the Divinity Student in irritation.

  The Divinity Student offers him the letters. Woodwind tweezes them out of his hands, opens the envelopes with a few deft strokes and studies the writing offhandedly. Then he drops both the letters into the flame and they vanish brightly, Woodwind snapping his fingers for his secretary.

  “The register the register” he mutters.

  Woodwind’s secretary appears with an overstuffed ledger and flips hastily to a page half covered in meticulous illegible handwriting. Woodwind himself scans down the page with his tweezers, looking up only at the end:

  “Yes we have an opening for a word-finder,” he says in punctilious monotone.

  Offered, accepted. Woodwind snatches up another page from the book in front of him and dredges it in the pan. The secretary presses a small buzzer on the wall; a thin reedy tone trills across the room. Within a few moments the young woman from downstairs appears at the door, and, directed by a hurried gesture from the secretary, walks over to him.

  The Divinity Student looks back at Woodwind and his clerks, another flash of burning paper.

  “I’ve been hired.”

  She inclines her head a little to her left.

  “You’ll be the new word-finder then.”

  He has nothing to say. He nods.

  She is satisfied and extends her hand.

  “Let me show you.”

  He follows her into the hall and up the stairs to the fourth floor landing. The red walls narrow u
ntil he’s hunching his shoulders inwards to get past. Her perfume is wafting back in her wake, passing in currents over his face until he feels ready to topple over backwards. Finally they come to a small door in a cul-de-sac, set directly into the center of the wall. She turns to open it for him; he looks intently into her face, her bookish face, which returns his gaze calmly. The doorway is narrow, he has to brush up against her to get into the room, passing through a curtain of her perfume and the serene scrutiny of her sphinxlike gaze. He steps up onto a high scuffed floor, and she smiles as he turns back to her.

  “Come on.” She walks across the small office with its low ceiling to the back wall, a little window there with asymmetrical panes, shining with dusty light that seems to collect within the membrane of her blouse, making it glow like a paper lantern. She indicates a desk to him.

  Slowly, he follows. There are three other desks in the room, a man at each, transferring columns of words from notebooks into codices by hand. Their presence is irritating, reminding him of the Seminary: the insect-scratching of their fountain pens, sleeves rubbing along word-wooden corners rattling papers. He steps up beside her, standing in a warm pool of light. With a modest gesture, she pulls his chair out for him, like a maître d’.

  “You should find everything you need in the desk,” she says in a low voice, as if she doesn’t want the others to hear.

  He thanks her.

  “Anything else?” Eyebrows raised, a small shake of her head. He stares blankly back.

  She nods pleasantly.

  “Yes, that’s all. Any word that you encounter in your daily rounds that’s not in the dictionaries should be recorded in your ledger. New words only, please.”

  She stands upright again, looking down at him. She stares at him. Then she leans down close to his face and wishes him good luck. A moment later she vanishes out the door and down the stairs.

  As soon as the door is shut, one of the others wheezes and snorts. His partner giggles. The Divinity Student opens his desk, finding a notebook with the first dozen pages or so ripped out, a new fountain pen and ink bottle, and a huge binder with a sheaf of paper unopened beside it. Underneath the notebook, there is a small leather-bound dictionary in impossibly tiny print with a magnifying glass tethered to it by a faded ribbon. He pockets this and the notebook and reaches for the filing drawer.

  One of the other word-finders clears his throat.

  The Divinity Student looks up. It’s the one who snorted as the woman left. He’s heavy with short black hair and a threadbare black sweater, a pale, doughy face with small black eyes like currants. He rises from his desk.

  “Switch desks with me! Yours is bigger!”

  The one who giggled is looking on conspiratorially, grinning.

  “You deaf? I said I’ll take your desk! I waited, didn’t I?” He briefly turns to the giggler, who nods once, “I didn’t take it right away—I don’t think you want to give me any trouble!”

  The Divinity Student fills his fountain pen calmly. He is already ignoring them.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you!” The snorter says.

  The Divinity Student pockets the pen and caps the ink bottle.

  The snorter stares at him a moment, then sits back down at his desk again. “Idiot,” he mutters.

  three: the car

  Pausing in mid-stride, two black dogs stare at the Divinity Student as he emerges from the office. Recoiling, he claps his hands and steps backwards into the threshold; they scrabble headlong down the stairs with clicking feet—a bad omen. With a rustle of papers, he recollects himself and follows them down slowly. At the bottom of the stairs there’s a secondary door opening out onto a narrow street, old plaster walls leaning in to meet overhead, windows and sagging trellises, washing on lines, a thin trickle of people weaving out towards the plaza. He steps over an old drunk word-finder, hands tattooed with old words in blue ink.

  “I’m interested in rivers.”

  Eyes on the cobbles, the Divinity Student makes his way to the corner, smelling food and garbage. There’s a small cafe, two walls open to the street, scuffed white and orange checkerboard tiles reach to the low curb, a field of sturdy white metal tables and chairs with the occasional long-faced readers and chess players. He notes that some of these are playing against mechanized opponents.

  “Chess is a game of competing algorithms,” he thinks. “One piece is gradually predetermined by the action of play to end the game, either in checkmate or stalemate. All pawns are agents, like me.”

  The Divinity Student navigates fast to the counter, at chin-level above glass display cases smeared with white transparent finger and palm marks. A willowy wall-eyed student takes his order and his money without looking at him, assures him it will be brought to his table, and disappears.

  He turns and finds a seat close to the street, grown quiet and still. Across the plaza he can see crowds of miniature silhouettes frothing around the buildings as cloud shadows glide flexibly across gleaming stone courtyards. The city settles quiescent in the early afternoon. He turns his attention to the pocket lexicon, flipping through at random: afflatus, epiclesus, soteriology—these he knows—ylem catches in his throat; a kid in a coarse white apron clatters the tray down in front of him and shuffles off, drawing his nose along his sleeve. Alone again, the Divinity Student pours smoky-looking tea through a sieve over three sugar cubes. Two leathery, triangular pouches lie black and brown in grease on his plate. He cuts into one with his knife and steaming oil dribbles out, a spicy smell, tiny white curls that look like pearly onions inside, and some soft blue powder. He eats quickly, burning his tongue. For some reason he still needs to eat.

  Were it not for the coppery hair thatching his head, Mr Ollimer would be unrecognizable—of all the people he has ever met, not one of them can place him in their memories save by the color of his hair. In feature, figure, dress, and behavior, nothing immediately remarkable, as empty of distinction as a technical drawing. He is the third word-finder upstairs at Woodwind’s, apart from the giggler and the snorter. The Divinity Student looks up to see him standing expectantly by a nearby table, eyebrows up. Their eyes meet.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” Ollimer asks seriously.

  The Divinity Student raises his right hand in a small wave indicating the chair opposite him; Ollimer rushes to sit, nodding, looking down.

  Ollimer toys with a napkin; he’s groping for words.

  “Those bastards,” he finally says in a birdlike voice. “I was transferred only last week and of course I had to end up with them. They pulled the same tomfoolery with me about my desk.”

  The Divinity Student responds with another gesture, eyebrows up, a small frown, slight inclination of his hands.

  “They started talking about you the moment you left the office, but I wouldn’t worry.” Ollimer flicked a look at him. “They won’t dare give you any trouble as long as they think you’ve got Miss Woodwind’s favor.”

  “Miss Woodwind?”

  “Yes—the secretary—don’t you remember?”

  “I meant to say I didn’t know she was related to—”

  “—Oh yes, I’m sorry, I misunderstood—yes, she’s his daughter.” Ollimer rocks forward and backward as he speaks.

  The Divinity Student’s gaze drifts off, follows two Koreans passing, carrying a drum.

  “I just met her. How could I have won her favor?” he says after a moment.

  Ollimer pouts and thinks a moment. “Her demeanor around you, I suppose. She’s fairly peremptory with us . . . ” Ollimer leans in closer and taps the table with his finger. “You really ought to take advantage of that, if she genuinely does favor you. There are advantages . . . ”

  “You’ve never been her favorite.”

  Ollimer grins as if the Divinity Student had made a joke. “Oh no, certainly not me.”

  The Divinity Student tips his head back and gazes up past the rooftops to the sky’s racing white and blue.

  “Where did you receive your trai
ning?” Ollimer leans his elbows on the table and holds his hands in front of his face.

  “I’m a Divinity Student.”