The Divinity Student

by Michael Cisco

  eight: the commission

  In an empty garage that. yawns onto the street the. Divinity

  Student wakes, lying on his side, coming to himself only after staring at the supernatural brightness outside, blades of grass poking through the pavement, looking hot enough to burn. Turning to rise, the light stays in his eyes and colors the shadows.

  This morning he won’t go to Woodwind’s, instead he forces himself sternly through the light, to assemble ingredients for today’s experiment. After two hours he finds a chemistry shop on Jack-o’-Lantern Street; it’s an impersonal place, simple metal racks with bottles, a counter, a plain old man behind the counter blowing test tubes from glass glowing pumpkin-colored. He pretends to browse awhile, always embarrassed when he has to buy something, eventually he gets up to the counter, has to wait five minutes for the attendant to finish blowing a flask. Finally, he manages to exchange a grubby bill for six long silver cans of formaldehyde in a brown grocery bag. A brief stop along the way back to buy some bread from a street vendor with a monkey, and he returns to the garage ready.

  The first thing, he goes out back, under a tree, crumbles the bread and piles up the crumbs, kneels there nearby and waits. It’s quiet. He keeps his eyes on the pile, begins rocking gently back and forth, feels his coat moving on his shoulders, blood in his temples. He does it slow, humming, burns a little prayer written on the formaldehyde receipt on a bare patch in front of him, writes a signature in the dirt with the matchstick. His palms tingle, warm all the way up to the shoulder, that’s good, like a little silver filament up each arm. The Divinity Student sits rock-still and waits.

  A lizard appears through an overgrown gap in the wall. Expressionless with concentration the both of them watching the pile of crumbs, he’s drawing the lizard with a quiet sound he makes in his nostrils, breathing the hot air out so as to make a pitch that sounds like straw rubbing together. The lizard likes that—it’s brown, a foot long. Legs moving in circles it comes forward to get that bread; the Divinity Student’s eyes go black; two black clouds settle over his eyes, black clouds like swarms of flies, and up comes the lizard. It starts eating the bread.

  The Divinity Student’s hand whips out, strikes the lizard with certainty on the side of the head, sending it sprawling on its side, legs in the air—it thrashes and dies. The Divinity Student gets to his feet and runs inside, coming out again with the bag and a bucket. Hastily, he pops the tabs on the cans and pours the formaldehyde into the bucket, all of it, and then snatches up the lizard and eases it in, coiling it at the bottom of the bucket, his eyes tearing from the sourness of the stuff. With care, he lays a board over the bucket’s mouth and weights it with a cinderblock. In a day or so, it’ll be mature, heated in the sun. He pauses to draw a special mark on the bucket with charcoal, and turns towards Woodwind’s.

  The office is empty; the building is quiet. He’s there, filling his ledger, every stroke of his pen scraping on the silence, until that is stilled too. The room is poising itself, something invisible is gathering—looking up from the page, it seems to him this place is more than empty, more than abandoned, that no one has ever been here, that he is dreaming the office, or that the office is dreaming him.

  He pushes back in his chair and goes to the window, but outside the city is static and motionless; he can see no one. A set? Turning around, he examines the office, floor, walls, ceiling, furniture, all made of the same dull wood, stained black in places. The place could have been carved from a single block of wood, or maybe it grew this way naturally.

  Pen and ledger rest waiting on his desk. Unconsciously, he puts his notebook into his pocket.

  He rifles through Ollimer’s desk, looking for the Catalog fragment.

  What are you doing?

  I’m trying to find that bit of paper Ollimer got from the tree the other day.

  What paper was this?

  A fragment of a Catalog of unknown words . . . the original was destroyed somehow . . . he showed me one of the entries once . . .

  Shouldn’t you wait for him?

  I don’t trust him. What I’m looking for now, he got it from an oro, the same oro who sent me to Magellan to learn the formaldehyde protocol—don’t you remember?

  An oro?

  Yes—a tree spirit.

  Do you mean to tell me that you’re breaking into his desk because you suspect him to be in league with trees? Trees that hand out Catalogs?

  The Divinity Student starts slamming drawers in Blandings’s desk, and then Householder’s. Were they involved?

  Then he stops. He’s heard something. Motionless, he tries to look out through his ears, finding only the sound of his breath, his heart.

  But then, another tiny clinking sound, coins flattening on each other, through the wall.

  Slowly, crumpling himself up into his hearing, he draws up to the wall, placing his feet with such care that not even a mote of dust is displaced, and presses his ear to the cool wood paneling.

  The coins drop, one by one or in pairs.

  He feels his face go hot and red, his collar tightens, for a moment he feels something like a fever thrum in his temples and along the seams of his cheeks and forehead, and his throat constricts around his breath. Something moves in his belly; he wants to shake or fall down, but he holds himself absolutely still, breathing through his mouth.

  It takes him a long time, but he gets through the door and out into the hall, not knowing what’s happening to him—but there’s nothing at all. Everything is as it should be, and as it always was, except abandoned.

  Then he hears it again, behind him, and he looks and there he sees it. He hadn’t ever noticed before, but here in this one place, the wallpaper is stretched tight over a door-sized hole in the wall. The heat and closeness of the past week has made the paper sag, and now the opening is visible. The noise comes from in there.

  Dizzily, he steps forward and parts the paper with his fingers. The paper is red and velvet-feeling, opening easily along a seam, dilating without tearing to let him into the walls. The darkness grows transparent by degrees, and then he can see two candles burning on a tiny shelf set high above him. They burn before a small sepia photograph of a blank-faced woman with clear eyes, hanging on the wall, and beneath the shelf Mr Woodwind lies, sternly sleeping, hands folded on his chest, leaning against an upright board.

  Will he wake up? The Divinity Student creeps forward, but again comes the rattling of coins, very near. Then he sees Miss Woodwind, sitting smiling beside a card table smoothly set with a white cloth, with a scales and a cashbox. A Chinese lantern sheds red light down over its tassels, makes her white dress glow red. To him it seems as if a veil or shadow lay between them, he can see her distinctly and yet she is vague as a blurred photograph. She extends her hand to him.

  He waves his hands. “What?”

  “Your notebook!” she says with a grin, and light flickers across her features, kaleidoscoping all colors from her lips and eyes, her temples, cheek’s hollow, and beneath her chin.

  He hands it over, coming closer, into her fragrance, and he can see the perfume in a glassy fog around her. Miss Woodwind lays the notebook smartly on the balance. In a few moments she efficiently tallies the new weight of the book and compares it to the old, reckoning how many words he has collected by weight, and calculates his pay on a chart. She counts out seven heavy gold wheels from the cashbox and extends them, cupping the money on her fingertips, so that as she drops them into his palm, her nails brush his skin just barely, only just touching him. This is all she has to do. Now he won’t forget her looking up at him through the gleam of the gold, nor the touch of her hand. She smiles at him, pleased.

  Another wrong turn, he looks around in anguish, lost. The streets weave sometimes changing direction; he’s recognizing the buildings, but the streets don’t match. The Divinity Student is following the train tracks, another passing in a blast of diesel pushing hot air and thick flakes of dust before it, electricity snapping at the synapses. These
trains run aboveground, their tunnels burrow through buildings, not earth, roaring through restaurants, hotels, private homes, churches, libraries, hospitals. The Divinity Student is staggering, disoriented, sweating in the wake of the trains, thinking only that he wants to sit down with her at the table and watch her filling columns of words; he’ll gladly be a mirror-glass, simply to sit by her and watch, bathed in her cool breath; or a lens for her to see through, so that he could be frosted with the rays that beam from her eyes, and these ideas push everything else out of the way. Dimmed and confused, he boards the train.

  Under him his seat is rocking, only lulling him further into reverie, they plunge into the bowels of some public building, lamps streak by in horizontal bars of light, a fetid smell creeps damply through the car vents, and through his faint reflection in the window he can see the tunnel walls falling away into nothing on either side, rusted parallel tracks lying brown on lifeless gray earth, rancid pools, and occasional lamplit islands, a few men in construction uniforms lying idle.

  He rides for a long time, people pass through the car, men in suits, lictors, old women. Some boys horsing around.

  Fragments, incomplete ideas, but he’s sobering a little. They crash out into sunlight again, the train shrieks and complains—melancholy sighing of old metal—and stop at a tiled station with slanting roof of clouded glass. The doors hiss and roll open.

  A hand seizes his arm and drags him out through the doors, before he can react they shut behind him and the train drags out into the street sending a car skidding into a heap of trash cans to avoid it. The Divinity Student turns and finds himself alone on the platform, but he recognizes the station now. Outside, he can once again find the familiar streets and buildings, and a familiar city once again.

  From the Divinity Student’s journal, more recently: “I see those cats everywhere now. Last night I think I saw an albino cat. Led me to an infirmary I had not seen before, eerie brick houses and sodium lights. Everytime I go out at night, there they are.”

  The garage was only two blocks away, he lurches in and drops onto the gutted frame of an easy chair. Now he’s pulling himself together, finding that again. No more feeling whipped about, he cleans himself out—and then goes to the bucket out back. Who knows how long it’s been?

  He drags it inside and sits on the cement floor before it, shedding the day’s last strange fragments, and watching sunset light gild his hand through a cobwebbed window. He removes the cinderblock and the plank. A cold, flat odor out of time, not emerging from the bucket but just all about him instantly, as if it was his own native scent, there it is. The monitor lies inside, already blanching, skin ribbed with folds.

  He was brought here—to learn this. He doesn’t know why yet.

  No prayers now, only quiet, he reaches in, down, so that his fingers touch the bottom, bringing up the heaviest, richest lees on his fingertips, stinging cold and fuming on his hands and shirt cuffs. He does as Magellan had shown him; he atomizes the formaldehyde with a blow of breath, a nonsense word, sending it out like a sneeze, tiny droplets drift like snow in space, and he lets them fall boiling on his face. He breathes it into him.

  For a moment he sits, feeling the vapor creep in his nostrils and down into his chest. A shadow falls past his eyes, a dry voice dusts his ears, whisper past ears into head, dry hands tug at the back of his eyes, clap behind nose, rustle in throat. Dry warmth settles on flesh and skin, cool to the middle, low to the ground, baking earth heats his belly, eyes watching the sides all the time, dry sounds, cracks and wheezes, grass parts in front of him, dry-faced insects scrabble away, dull thud of footsteps, giants streaming all around—light falls in sheets on his face, figures blazing ghosts around him, hollow ground and hollow air, empty noises, hollow, unmoored, gray-faced the Divinity Student tumbles down with his vision’s passing shivering on the garage floor.

  nine: the butcher

  The Divinity Student wakes with a soft head, lying on a concrete stoop. He was dreaming, a river carrying him away; now he sits up shaking his head alarmed, doesn’t know where he is—walked in his sleep. These are all symptoms of something . . . his mind is too foggy, he can’t remember. Around him, a slanting narrow street with white walls flaring in the sun, small children in cotton trousers running to crest the hill kicking dust, cinnamon brown door at his back; he looks down and sees the notebook in his hand, his thumb still jammed tightly between the pages, holding his place. He opens it and looks at words he doesn’t remember collecting but that touch his memory with vague suggestions—these two leapt at him out of a poolhall eight blocks from here; and that one floated down onto the page like a leaf, a woman speaking to her neighbor from a second-story window, and she let that one word drop clean and clear from a stream of unintelligible gabbling. Sleepwalking, he has collected them himself, without knowing. The Divinity Student stands up and counts—he has gathered more words in one day of sleep than in any day of waking. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?

  With uneasy steps he navigates down the street to a crossroads, chickens scattering in his path, complaining in his wake. A kerchiefed woman beats a rug in front of her house singing “La, li, le . . . ” (thump) “ . . . lu, lo . . . ” and he asks her for directions. Red-brown face and fluttering hands heavy over her apron, her soft voice shows him in Spanish, goes back to hitting her rug.

  The Divinity Student climbs ponderously up Horse Street. His body feels like a patchwork of ill-fitting parts. Tired of the desert, tired of the city, walking up the street feeling leaden and weak—make sure you survive killing yourself, that’s the way to go, and the red-green light winks on in his chest like an eye in the heart and it all comes into him at once. It’s too early in the story but he can’t wait, he jackknifes twenty feet straight up and tears off across the roofs, rolling over steeples, around the chimneys, ripping weathervanes and antennas loose, caught in his clothes he wears them like forgotten wire hangers, bounds over streets kicking up tiles, arms cartwheeling, face set a motionless stone mask, feet planting so hard he breaks through wood and plaster and down through someone’s dining room table, he smashes it in two, spilling food, breaking plates, family too dumbfounded to—he careens through the picture window taking the sill with him wrapped around his neck—strong enough now to punch through brick walls, outrunning dust clouds, his shadow so strong it’s cutting through the foundations of buildings and sending cobblestones flying up after him like a wake in water, nothing in him now but city and desert. Cars watching him make abortive gestures—“Don’t try it—we’d be ashes before we got within two dozen feet of him—no good while the spirit’s on him.”

  A scent of dead flesh twists his track, he goes flying into a butcher shop, a horse carcass, pelt and hooves, eyes staring, tongue dangling a foot out of its mouth, the Divinity Student sends the butcher block flying, picks the horse up with one hand and runs outside to the trough; a single kick punctures wood, sends water sluicing out. One-handed, brandishing the body overhead, he stops the hole with a stone, just picks it up and shoves it home, empties ten gasoline cans of formaldehyde into the trough and dumps the horse in, spilling sour chemicals, weathervanes, and the windowsill, and, too impatient to wait, he jams his head under the surface and grabs the horse by its ears, ramming forehead to forehead he glares into glassy eyes and strains the horse-life in through his teeth, sucks it out in one mighty inhalation. His head rears back out of the chemicals streaming, and he staggers back against the wall of the shop shaking, a horror of dust and water and the fit that’s on him, people stopping, hands on throats and mouths as he drops to his knees eyes widening to the sun—so who does he run with now, and where, eating grass warm from the meadow or drinking from that trough once years ago, rutting in tree shade, pulling the bit down throwing the rider, now it’s he who’s doing the riding, the Divinity Student, his horse spirit boiling out of him as he shakes his head and droplets of formaldehyde spatter the crowd, snapping witnesses’ heads slapping their faces with images of each others’
past, and, terrified, they run like rats. The Divinity Student traces curves in the dirt with his hands and shoeheels, throwing up clouds of dust, and feels the spirit wrenching loose with a pull towards the sky. Red-green light dims and fades in his chest.

  Teo Desden, the butcher, drags him sympathetically back into the shop and props him against the display case. The Divinity Student, soaked and exhausted, pants to catch his breath. Time passes, and he comes to himself once again.

  So, the Divinity Student sits watching the butcher. Desden works alone in the empty shop hacking mutton; rows of sheathed cleavers and razor-sharp knives with smooth stainless steel handles hum on a white counter, making the room look like a surgery. Gleaming meathooks on a chain hang over his head, along the back wall, one red raw animal smeared with white marbling swinging in the currents from the overhead fan; smells like wet concrete and rain, a clean place, regular thocking sound of Teo’s cleaver making clean bone splits, chops and ribs sliding along red streaks to nestle on lettuce in cool glass cases. The floor is checkered, the far wall one vast and spotless mirror—the Divinity Student notices that Desden stares at himself all the time he’s cutting the meat, contempt drawing lines taut around his mouth, turning his glazed eyes inward. He’s marked, his bare forearms and hands are scarred and cut in places, his lips and fingertips are badly chewed, and the Divinity Student sees how deliberate the butcher’s carelessness is. Desden mutters something at himself and breaks the animal’s back with one springlike hack of his cleaver. He tosses beautifully sliced slabs of meat into the cases, pulls on the chain to bring the next body around, gliding effortlessly forward on well-oiled wheels, pulls it clear off the hook and starts slashing recklessly at it, perfect cuts flying off and piling up neatly despite themselves next to him on the counter.