The Traitor

by Michael Cisco

  In the year or so that followed, my uncle Heckler taught me to read and write, although my stupidity so exasperated him that he gave up several times, and had to be persuaded by Vyo to take up with me again. Some of his other apostate friends would drop by every week to teach me math and history, with limited success. Then afterwards they would sit together by the door in the summer and by the fireplace in the winter, eating peanuts soaked in coffee. I learned from them about the Alaks, who had brought the apostasy when they invaded, a very long time ago, at least four generations. They had sewn our country into their patchwork Empire and had installed a governor to rule us. Many of my uncle Heckler’s friends, including Vyo, had ancestors who had collaborated with the Alaks, and converted to their religion as well, perhaps to curry favor. The Alaks interfered very little with the interior workings of the country. The people still lived much as they always had. They all hated the Alaks, to such an extent that the rulers and their retinue had to jail themselves in their garrisons, emerging only under heavy guard, and keeping always “underground.” There was an Alak garrison in my town, and had been since before I was born, but I had caught only a few brief glimpses of the Alaks themselves. I understood that there were more in the capital. At the time I was curious about the Alaks, but no one in my family had wanted to talk about them. The apostates seemed to be on good terms with them—I was surprised to learn that many of them were meeting with the Alaks regularly, mostly for religious services, and there was perhaps some sort of pensioning or dispensation for the descendants of the collaborators as well. At the time, they told me only that the message of the Alaks was love, and that they ruled not because they were the best of all people, but were the best of all people because they had been selected to rule, I presume by Providence, and that this might change at any time, so the Alaks believed. They did not, and still do not, insist that this selection had anything to do with them personally. They were eager to assure the world that they did not consider themselves superior, they were eager to be accepted by the people they conquered.

  It was at one such religious meeting that it was decided I should go to the capital of the province with another one of my uncle Heckler’s friends, a woman whose name I’ve forgotten. I did. I spent my adolescence there, in the capital, and became what is called a success. And when, on one occasion, I found the time to return home to visit my uncle Heckler I learned that he had died. His body had been stolen before it could be buried and was presumably burnt or discarded on the outskirts of town by partisans. I saw one of my sisters in the street that day, and she didn’t recognize me. I didn’t make myself known to her. She saw how I was dressed (as an apostate, in an Alak garment) and she spat, but she saw only an apostate, not her brother, who would have inspired in her an even deeper loathing. The few apostates remaining who had known me as a child told me everything, feeding me peanuts soaked in coffee, about how Vyo had been torn under a runaway cart and languished for three months before he died. The only spirit-eater in the vicinity, who could have helped him, was deliberately sent away. Who there in town would have carried a letter to me in the capital? Not a single letter reached me. I never stopped crying the time I was there.

  Chapter Two

  I returned to the capital and forgot about my hometown, never mind what it was called. Let that name be forgotten. If I hadn’t made a deliberate effort to forget about home, to insist that the capital was my only home, I would have been completely unable to work. My hometown was never anything really like a home to me in the first place; I thought of it as my “home” only because I’d never had anything more like a home; it was a habit of mind, and nothing more. The longer I stayed away, the more wrong it seemed to call it home, as the mere, the meagre web of associations that bound me to it, that were all that made it anything like my home, disappeared, until finally I was offended and ashamed to call it my hometown—but what else could I call it? The capital was no home to me either, although I had perhaps less cause to feel that way. What do I mean? The capital was no home to anyone. There were more apostates, I hesitate to say “like me” because they were not converts and they were nothing “like me”—they were born apostates, and so they were nonetheless strangers to me. They did practically nothing together, not as apostates; even their, our, infrequent rituals were sparsely attended, and often the native celebrants were outnumbered by the representatives of the Alaks, who were very polite and full of respect, but who refused to have anything to do with any of us.

  I distinguished myself as a spirit-eater—I “made a name” for myself. I have no idea what was said about me, or how such notions take form in general, but, after a few years, the Alak representatives hired me to spy for them. Everyone in the capital employed spirit-eaters, the city was seething with spirits, they would have utterly ruined the town if it weren’t for the spirit-eaters. A town filled with spirits is oppressive, the memory of such towns is too good, no one can forget, nothing goes away, death hovers everywhere, fragmentary remains of grasping lives poison the air, and as soon as a space is cleared it is newly infested. Many of my clients went on to become my “victims,” there was no end of call for me, and I could get in anywhere. It was impossible to work with people the way I did and not absorb an infinite number of incidental data, and these were for some reason invaluable to the Alak representatives. Let me be clear—I never worked with the Alaks themselves, only their local deputies and imported officials. Actual Alaks were pointed out to me only very rarely and at a distance. I impassively answered all the questions that were put to me by the authorities and met every request that was made of me. I went from house to house like a machine, without the slightest concern, utterly neutral. When arrests followed, I stood by the road and watched the armed men, watched the suspects being brought, bound, out to the street and carted away, all with a statue’s face. There is nothing to be said about those days—they were a blank. Blanking was my business. I blanked everything to my level; I leveled and cleared away the rubbish, and it was all rubbish then. Now there is Wite, who is with me at this moment as I write, at this very moment, and every moment, as I lie awake, as I glance up at the window and the moon in its branches, and he is clearing me aside, if I haven’t been cleared already, if I wasn’t born clear and off to one side in the first place. Wite also guarantees me that I am still here, still the one I’ve always been, because he never allows me any solitude. I am completely alone, but I’m alone with Wite, and so I can’t disappear. I can’t disappear until I disappear into Wite, or until he lets me disappear. I am sustained by Wite, who also compels me to subsist against my will, such as it is. I’m exhausted. Now Wite pulls my strings, and I have only enough strength left over to succumb. There is so little to be said about me. As I write, that little is reduced more and more.

  I married. My wife died fifteen years later of the disease that is killing me now—that will kill me. We can’t do anything about this disease. A rag that has been thoroughly soaked in water can absorb no more, no matter how long one holds it in the stream, and under the effects of this disease a spirit-eater is like that rag, he, or she, can take nothing in, not even to be healed.

  We had one child, a son, who has by now utterly disowned me. He moved back to my hometown and attached himself to my parents and brothers and sisters, and, by bringing things as it were full circle, has precisely and deliberately erased me as if I had never existed for him. Disgusted by my so-called crimes, he has evicted me from his life, or rather this is what he believes he is doing—if anything he has bound himself more tightly to me by making it his life’s work to get free of me than he would ever have been as merely my son. Now I have mentioned them both, my wife and son, and now I will pass on to other things and mention them no more, except to say that they deserved better.

  What is it like to step into the midst of people and to be immediately accepted, to have a place made for you and to step into it immediately, at the first possible instant, falling into step with the others, perfectly naturally? How
does it feel to meet and embrace someone—does your heart shine like the sun? I am unable to speak convincingly about such things because I’ve never felt anything of the kind; I’ve never even felt as if I ought to feel that way, but for some reason could not, at any time. The people surrounding me, with whom I’m supposed to have so much in common, and with whom I actually have nothing in common—these people make no impression on me of any kind. No matter how I deal with them, or under what circumstances we meet, they might as well not be there, they might as well be anyone else, or perhaps it would be better to say that I might as well be anyone else, or be not there at all, for the difference it would make. None of my so-called compatriots could touch me in any way. If what they say is true, and they shine with compassion and fellow-feeling when they meet each other, then I am on the other side, with Wite. Wite and I were alone together, and for that reason we had everything in common. Wite has taken complete possession of me. Almost complete possession of me. Wite is the person I should be. I can never be Wite, and so there is nothing left for me but to testify for him here. There is a white patch on the door, and in the dark I can see it almost shining, and it looks to me like Wite’s face, and I imagine his face sliding into view through the door, his eyes shut, his face blank, as it was when he died. Likewise I have stopped up the window with my old satin housecoat, feeling the cold so little now, and the moonlight that is reflected from the smooth stone of the windowsill shines up on my robe, lighting the creases from below, and together they resemble Wite’s face. The spirits circulate through the room from the patch on the door to the satin robe, impaled on the irregular edges of the bars at the top of the window, and then back to the patch again, like current between the two poles of a battery, and this is an entirely appropriate image, which is why I include it. They rush back and forth with the greatest possible speed, as if it were urgently necessary to get across the room, and then they turn back again as if they were momentarily confused, as if they were hunting something down, they seem to miss me time and again.

  I stopped up the window because it distracts me. Even in the middle of the night there’s no end of scurrying on the street below. The capital was like that; people wasting their time running crazily from place to place, getting more and more frantic until they’re prepared to shove people out into the traffic, trample them underfoot, so desperate are they to get to whatever trivia they have to do, and this can only produce more of the same hysteria. A round of ordinary business, buying a few articles here and there, is an exhausting task, and you stagger back through your door four hours later as if you’d just been in a fistfight. People point to the so-called intellectual life in the cities, especially in the capital, but how could it be otherwise, even the purest simpleton is bound to start asking “why” when he’s confronted with these heaps of disgusting people everywhere. When there is always someone to occupy the space you have only just vacated, where every breath you draw and every morsel of food you take is pulled right out of someone else’s mouth, how can you help but ask by what right you take them, and especially, by what right do the others demand them of you? No one who lives in a city can manage it except at the expense of devouring others, even if a single killing is spread out over several victims. Even the simplest task becomes as draining as a fistfight when the city is involved. Every task, no matter how inconsequential, becomes absurdly overwrought in the city, where you have to struggle like a prizefighter merely to keep your head above water. By comparison, my rise, such as it was, was effortless. There are few spirit-eaters to begin with, despite the demand, few that actually practice, few who are actually able to do it well enough, or who do it consistently, or who care to do it for a living. Certainly a great many would be offended at the prospect of becoming a spirit-eater, that is to do it professionally. Many of “my circle,” certainly most of the Alak representatives, regarded me as a kind of prostitute. I was more or less a successful prostitutor of my “little gap of soul.”

  I became a spy for the Alaks and improved my standing immeasurably. They took me on and gave me a salary, and saw to it that I had nothing but rich and influential clients, the kind with secrets they wanted to know. These were not secrets for me, because blanking demands that everything be made open and drawn out, out, if not into the light, at least out. I would enter a home and, when it was made still, I would allow the gap in me to draw the spirits out, like a tiny whirlpool that empty spot in me would draw them out and through it into me, where they would become that empty spot, blank. And as I “ate” them, they would have to give up everything, all their power, all their strength and will, their intelligence such as it was, their memories, and all these would be surrendered to me. I, at no cost to myself, could then give over to the Alak representatives those things that they wanted. The work was simple. I was like a statue, no, like an implement, in so many different hands. I did nothing for myself, or as little as possible.

  The details of this life are not important, not relevant, not even interesting. I only insisted that I keep going, and to do this I had to keep my head down low, and keep my eyes on the ground, and do nothing to waste my flagging energy, but to stare fixedly at that distant point where perhaps things would begin to open for me once again, or where things would finally close to me altogether, this difference was something I didn’t make much of. Wite also had this stare—it was one of the first things I had noticed about him. From his pupils came two fine gray threads of almost invisible light, thin as hairs, perfectly straight, stretching out before him like railroad tracks; when the tracks are laid, the train must then travel down those tracks and remain on them at every moment, or jump the tracks and be crushed by its own force. His gaze, like mine, cut everything away but that narrow beam on which he advanced. Those two threads stretched into his eyes and down into a gap inside like mine, or, since a gap is just nothing, with no substance of its own, it would be more correct to say that those two threads fell from the gap, upon which he and I both opened. The gap is a void that folds in on itself and is infinite, forever escalating its demands. This is what eats the spirits, although to speak of eating in this case is misleading—the spirits are eaten in the same way that a diver is eaten by the water; I mean that no active relation may be attributed to the water. I think that the action is the spirits’, and not any property of the whirlpool. I think they draw themselves to it.

  When I have eaten a spirit, I do not feel filled up with it, in fact I don’t feel it at all, but I discover its vitality in myself accidentally. This vitality simply appears somehow in me, without my noticing. People used to remark on how well-preserved I once looked. Were I not so ill now, I would look younger than I am. When I finished blanking to the client’s satisfaction, I was then bound by the rules of the Society, which had an entirely different character in the capital than in my hometown or in Vyo’s town, which was almost a secret army in the capital, I was bound by its strictest rule to then dispense what surplus of vital animation I had accumulated in my work in the service of a number of charities organized by the Society. In particular, there were wards and wards of sick children, many dying, who were languishing for want of money to pay the doctors. Once or twice a week I would pass down a different aisle of beds, pressing my hands on their foreheads, transferring the animation I had stored to them, as ordered. After a few months of this I felt I knew more about disease than any doctor, because of course I had touched it time and again, in the wards, touched it directly, and I had felt it recoil and shrink when I touched it. And now, of course, I know disease the way one would know an old wife, but now I am too weak and too accustomed to try to drive it away. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t frighten me. It does frighten me.

  Wite was a spirit-eater, like me, for a while. When I met him, he had become what they, the Society, call a “soul-burner”—he had started hoarding the spirit-power, and was “burning” it to sustain himself, or to overreach himself, to overcome his human limitations. How childish that sounds! He simply began using it as he wi
shed, and paid no attention to the Society, he seemed to forget the Society altogether and all at once. As a consequence of this so-called “misuse,” the soul-burner becomes more and more spirit-like; his body begins to deteriorate. When a member of the Society is labeled a “soul-burner,” he is immediately considered to be under censure, and a warrant is put out for him. You see how different the Society is in the capital! If he doesn’t take steps to undo what he has done, then after a very brief time he is labeled an “incorrigible” and thereafter he is subject to summary execution. In practice, a soul-burner is considered incorrigible from the start; in practice he receives no grace period. I was preparing to retire, and had never encountered a single soul-burner, when news of Wite reached me. I was told he was a foreigner who had been living in the western part of the country for a few years, still young, and under suspicion from the start. When it became clear that steps to censure him were underway, he disappeared, apparently heading for his home, in Heipacth. His journey would bring him into the vicinity of the capital. I was told he was in the woods, making his way to the border on foot. He was described to me by the Alak representatives as something of an ogre, pillaging isolated homes, leaving behind him a trail of victims, racing with inhuman speed through the forest with gore dropping from his hands, this a typical Alak description, the Alaks were the greatest warmongers in the world but the prospect of violence always filled them with a kind of abstract dread just the same, they wrung their hands over isolated and strange violence just the same. My so-called “fellow-countrymen” were anxious and frightened. Our Prince Eskellde, who now took his orders from the Alak governor, took steps to secure the city and assembled a party to find Wite. They made their preparations with the greatest possible publicity, but the Prince seemed genuinely determined to be satisfied only by Wite’s death, that they should not return without his carcass. At the last minute it was decided that I should accompany them, despite my age, as a gesture from the Alak representatives. I protested, but my so-called superiors would not even speak to me or admit me into their presence—I was informed by letter that I was to go. Even so, I drafted a refusal and submitted it to them. I was informed that my letter had reached the Alak representatives in lamentable condition, but that I should not be concerned, and that it was taken for granted that I really had every intention of going, that I naturally understood I would be arrested if I did not. That I understood my so-called expertise in this area, as the leading spirit-eater in the capital, in actuality the leading Alak spy in the capital, would be indispensable to the party.