The Traitor

by Michael Cisco

  I was brought to my uncle Heckler’s house, although I had never been there before. I am exhausted by this work, with a particular sort of exhaustion I felt for the first time as I lay under the window in my uncle Heckler’s house. Lying there in a trance I watched him moving about in the room, looking for something. He didn’t find it, and left the room. Apparently, he shortly thereafter sent word to my parents that I was ill and could not be moved for a few days, and that he would look after me until I “got better.” To the present I have never “gotten better.”

  I stayed with my uncle Heckler then. We hardly spoke at all to each other during this time, and I believe I was all the better for it. I had never been in such a quiet house—although the neighborhood was anything but quiet. My parents’ house was deafeningly loud by comparison with my uncle Heckler’s house. I remember the walls were as bare as the walls of my cell, and the place was perhaps just as dingy—but it wasn’t filthy, the way my parents’ house had been filthy, and my parents’ neighborhood had been filthy. My uncle Heckler had built all his own furniture; despite his incompetence with tools, he had insisted on it. So there was not a table or chair in the house that stood level on the ground, or did not seem at any moment about to collapse. Looking back, I can fully understand my uncle’s preference for his own work, however badly made, and his intolerance for any sort of ornamentation or decorating, and his work around the house seemed to me to be entirely typical of his way of doing things. He would inaugurate work on a piece of furniture, a table for instance, with a simple, but entirely practical and even ingenious, design in mind, and work on it with great care. But then he would run up against the inevitable snags, and, rapidly losing all patience, would bang the rest of the piece together all at once, in a kind of soured frustration to get the work over with. He was especially inept when it came to hinges, panels, and drawers—they were either so tightly fitted that they were impossible to open, or else they were only barely joined to the piece at all and prone to fall off. One corner of a table would be admirably worked with level wooden pegs, and then the others would be slapped together with nails, more nails at each corner, such that the last corner would be bristling with nails, most of them driven only halfway in and then bent down over the others and pounded down into the wood, creating an uncouth wen of bent nails.

  I can’t say I enjoyed staying with my uncle, but it was a relief. He didn’t say a word about my fainting fit, and what went before, but I simply could not doubt, and do not doubt now, that he understood perfectly everything he had seen.

  Three days after my fit, an old friend of my uncle’s came to visit. He was a tall old man with bony wrists and a white beard, neatly trimmed, and he wore a great many complicated garments of shabby black material, not unlike what my uncle Heckler wore. They sat quietly together on a bench by the door and drank my uncle Heckler’s wretched tea, talking in momentary fits and spurts, in low voices. I had never seen anything as dignified as the two of them, sitting together, alternately turning their heads to speak directly to each other’s ears. The visitor looked at me a number of times, with none of the levity that so many old people affect when they have anything to do with young children, especially strange young children. He was looking frankly at me, and I started trying to think of some obliging way to justify his interest. At one point he came over to me and, without saying a word to me, took my hands and examined them closely, paying particular attention to the palms and fingernails. He also looked at my eyes and my forehead in an attentive, appraising way. I was not uncomfortable to be looked at like this. Shortly after, he said something briefly to my uncle Heckler that I did not catch, and left. That night, my uncle Heckler explained to me that his friend was an apostate, like himself, and we discussed this briefly. I expressed interest in the apostates, mainly, I believe, to please him. He nodded, as if to say this was certainly no surprise to him, and left me to sleep. The next morning I asked him again about the apostates, and we talked about this for a few hours, I asking him questions, he answering them. Finally he told me that his friend, and he, my uncle Heckler, were also both members of an apostate society, the Society of Blankness, being spirit-eaters, the two of them. The world being full of spirits, many of them dangerous or at least irritating and troublesome, he explained, the spirit-eater is the supernatural rat-catcher. He went on to say that the Society, which was the Society of the spirit-eaters, was comprised of persons whose souls were equipped, who knows why, with “blanks,” who possibly may not have had souls at all, and who, by virtue of this empty or open spot, were able to consume and even to digest disembodied spirits. My uncle Heckler explained that the blank spot in the soul was the cavity into which the spirits could be drawn, much as the lungs draw breath. The visitor and he both were “blanks,” as he put it, and they both had a strong suspicion that I was also blank. He explained to me that I was to become an apostate like himself, and that he and his friend would initiate me into the Society.

  In a way it all seemed to be behind me already, or at least long-decided, long-assumed, and inevitable. And at the same time of course it was hopelessly unreal. What is a child of less than ten to understand in all this? I knew only that I would go where they asked me to go and do what they asked me to do, because they were the only people in the world who seemed prepared to bother with me at all.

  My uncle’s friend, whose name was Vyo, returned the next day with a cart, and together we went up into the foothills. The foothills there were naked, and one could at any point watch them recede into the distance all the way to the horizon in every direction, all identical, without much interference from trees or buildings. Vyo brought us to his village, which was an apostate village, situated on a rocky promontory jutting from the side of one of the higher of the foothills, or rather from one of the mountains at whose feet the foothills were gathered. The village was small and silent. We drove together in the cart along the muddy main street, and I could see many people, in fact every house was wide open and I could see practically every occupant—certainly every house was so wide open that only those residents taking refuge in the smallest rooms or crouched behind the low walls were out of view, and many of them, hiding from us, emerged prematurely as we passed and we saw them anyway. They all seemed a little frightened of one another, or withdrawn from each other; they clearly never spoke to each other except in desperate moments, and at that time I imagined they all seemed sad to me. The place was nameless and silent and sad to me, full of people who were essentially unable to speak to one another, because they were apostates. I also, already, felt unable to speak to any of them, and a little afraid of them, and after a time I felt unwilling to look at them any longer and gazed down into the cart.

  Vyo brought me into his house, and there I was made an apostate and initiated into the Society. My apostasy was almost instantaneous—Vyo, in a weak, beautiful old voice, asked me a series of questions to which, as my uncle Heckler had previously instructed me, I did not respond. A brief and simple ritual, performed using only the most common household items readily to hand, converted me. As an apostate, as I remain now as I write, I felt no closer to them, no special fellowship, except that the sudden—I would call it an eruption if that weren’t too sudden and explosive a word for what was a realization so slow in coming that I feel it has yet to fully arrive even now, forty or fifty years later—feeling of being quietly sad was inserted into me (that’s really no way to put it, but I don’t want to dwell on it any more). I have, ever since, been gradually collapsing as a result, although I regret my apostasy no more than I regret being born—neither of them was avoidable. Nor was my meeting Wite avoidable, nor was my change as the result of meeting Wite.

  My initiation into the Society of Blankness was also to a considerable extent my training, or at least the creation, within me, of the conditions that would make my training possible. The spirit-eater, they say, is guaranteed a livelihood, he will always have spirits to eat and so he will always have food to eat as well, that is actual
physical food. This useful service which it was my privilege to join would in time indubitably present me with the opportunity to be of assistance to the most revered authorities.

  There was little in the way of a regimen. Vyo began placing burning cold droplets in my eyes, more and more every day, and my eyes were always burning and smarting, especially when I rolled them in their sockets, when they would sting and the pain would increase so much I’d whimper and totter weakly against walls and furniture. I remember looking up at Vyo’s long, pensive face as he would take my head in a single one of his big bony hands, and his soft fingers would rest lightly on my face, pulling my eyelids apart to apply the cold drops from the dropper. I had bad headaches and was constantly tired, but unable to sleep, and with little appetite. I couldn’t think of anything but my painful eyes. Occasionally, and with no special enthusiasm, my uncle Heckler would assign me an exercise: I would be asked to look at a tiny tableau through a narrow hole, bored through a thick plank. I had to stare for very long periods of time through this miniature tunnel at a collection of dummies and doll furniture, or at small pictures, describing them in minute detail until my head began to swim and I could not keep my eyes in focus. I passed out at least once. My uncle later explained to me that this exercise had as its only point the production of these nauseated, faintheaded, painful states, and said that my last observations immediately before falling unconscious or otherwise failing were the only ones of any value.

  Eventually, after some time, perhaps ten days, Vyo and my uncle Heckler set me in a chair, facing a mirror. The mirror was only a few inches away from my face, and they instructed me to do nothing but stare directly at my own image in the mirror until instructed to stop. The mirror was small, so that, as I sat before it, my face filled it, and the mirror in turn filled almost my entire field of vision. Vyo and my uncle watched me in silence. I am sure that at some point they simply left me alone, creeping stealthily out of the room. I sat and stared into the mirror, at my own face, without stopping. My eyes were in such pain that even moving them slightly was impossible—I had to stare straight ahead of me, into my own eyes, in the mirror. After only a few moments the outlines of my face were losing their distinctness, and I quickly lost any sense of recognition of my face. I stared motionless into the mirror, and in that time I seemed to be confronted with as many faces as there have ever been, all the possible faces stared back at me, including animal faces and the faces of buildings, trees, streets, rocks. I could not move, nor shut my eyes, nor even turn them away, and for no reason at all I stayed there and stared, feeling sickened, breathing very hard. Then all at once, suddenly, the mirror turned a blazing white, as if I were hanging only a few inches from the gleaming, polished surface of the moon, and the light was so bright it drowned out my reflection and shined right into my head, through my brains, so I could feel it at the back of my skull, on the inside. When I saw nothing but light, I knew, although at the time I had no way of knowing, or at least of saying or understanding this, that I was staring into the blank spot; what I did understand, precisely then, was that I had been staring at the mirror exactly as I had stared at the girl and her boy, when my uncle was watching, when he must have decided to bring me into the Society.

  After that, I was worse than ever. I was awkward before, my father constantly reproached me for breaking things, everyone in town called me clumsy and called me stumbler especially. But from that time onward my entire body was a wooden limb, or I could also say, as Wite has said to me, that from that time on I was armored inside my body. Furthermore I could see that both Vyo and my uncle Heckler had the same clumsiness, and more—I could see the separate elements, the two sides of the automated statues that their bodies now were, and I knew without asking that they saw me in the same way. Not everyone appeared to me like this; for some, like my parents and siblings, and most of the people I have ever met, so I should say like most and not like some, there is a more or less complete harmony with the automaton so that it is more like a garment or a cosmetic, and less like a glass eye or false teeth, but this is also immediately clear to me on sight. My sight remained permanently altered, although what role the droplets played in this is unclear to me. I suspect they were simply intended to make use of my eyes painful.

  One night, before I returned home, and I only mention this because I’m convinced I should, without any real reason and certainly without hope of being convincing myself, but one night, after being kept indoors for many days, I went outside. It seemed to me as though I were on the moon. I hadn’t been allowed outside for days, and once I was out in the open air the hills were not familiar-looking, the world was unfamiliar-looking. The village was built of shavings from the moon, brilliantly white and blue, and it was so beautiful that I felt as if my heart was splitting, and tears poured out from around my cold, hard eyes. Disgusting as it might sound, I am not confessing this or saying it to be honest, but only to say it, that I was overwhelmed, and I seemed to be up among the cold forms of the stars, and I babbled to my sleeping uncle and to his friend Vyo in the house, thanking them over and over again because I was grateful to them for this. They kept mercilessly away from me, leaving me out among the stars, where I turned in every direction and, finding nothing, curled in on myself like a wood shaving. I was frightened by how beautifully everything struck me. The stars and the moon were perfectly silent and shining, and I could see the world remotely below me, possibly encased in a glass shell that would not readmit me, my having left. I was seeing spirits for the first time. My uncle explained this to me when he brought me in out of the street, where he had found me that morning, soaked with freezing dew, stiff and ill. I had nearly died, or so he claimed, in the street in the middle of the night, under the moon and an unusually clear sky, visible to the horizon on almost every side. It is insofar as I remain there that I am able to see spirits now, all around me as I write this.

  Eventually my uncle brought me back to our town, down below, but not until after many long, pointless days of sitting around Vyo’s house in silence, looking out the windows, or down into the weak tea that Vyo would make for us. I believe now that my uncle was trying to save me the shock of returning home, or perhaps he saw that this was impossible, and was waiting instead for me to build up enough strength to survive the inevitable shock. He told me nothing at all to prepare me, and so I was taken completely by surprise when we first arrived. As Vyo navigated the streets, steering us back to my uncle’s house, I was assaulted on all sides by the spirits. This was the first time I experienced spirits as a massy weight pressing in from all sides as if they were trying to pop me right out of the world. I remember I had wanted to stare out at them all at first, and then I was so terrified the next instant that I buried my head in my uncle’s coattails. I also remember him patting my head once or twice, because here as at every moment up to this point he had known exactly how I felt, and in hindsight I see how he must have reproached himself. He and Vyo both had long faces as they brought me into the house, and I don’t doubt that they understood completely what they had done to me.

  There were no spirits in my uncle Heckler’s house, he had blanked them all. They wouldn’t even come up to the windows, they were so afraid of him, and this was a relief for me, not having them around. I could watch them in safety, and then venture out among them, knowing I could run back inside if necessary. Now more than ever I stayed away from my old house and my family, and, with one exception, I didn’t see any of them up close again for years. This exception being one of my older sisters, who came by my uncle Heckler’s house to find out about me—she was the one who relayed to my parents the news that I had become an apostate and a spirit-eater. My parents were utterly disgusted with me and all but disowned me the moment they found out, as if this were necessary considering they had never actually owned me in practice. That final rejection was something we had both seen coming for years, for almost my entire life up to that point, and whether we understood it or not, that was what we were both waiting for
. At that point, my parents were more or less free of me, and I was more or less free of them. When it happened, I felt, for the first time, as if I missed them—but I did not return to see them. Now I think that I did not miss them at all—what I was missing was what I ought to be missing. Formally, I missed them, but not really. Certainly, not those people.