The Traitor

by Michael Cisco

  Wite and I entered Heipacth through a cleft rock, climbing up into Heipacth along a ravine. I had never left my country before and I found the air in Heipacth unwholesome, especially in the ravines, and in that ravine in particular. At its lowest point there was a narrow riverbed filled with stinking black muck that exhaled the most unwholesome air I’ve ever breathed. My uncle Heckler once told me that Heipacth was “poisoned,” and now I know he had spoken as accurately as could be desired. I followed Wite along the riverbank as best I could. I remember watching his back. He rode with his head thrust forward and down, and his coat would be thrust up along his back so that the collar stood high up on his shoulders and his head was completely obscured by his back. I had to watch him closely because the few trees there were had grown so enormous that they almost completely blocked the sun. I could only keep my eyes on Wite’s back, and the world turned into a tunnel. After a while I remember feeling that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Wite’s back, that I would spend the next few hours staring at it. Then for the first time it occurred to me to be frightened of Wite. I stared at his back and I was suddenly terrified that he might turn around and look at me, and that instant I was certain that he inevitably would, and that I would be staring at him like I would stare in a nightmare, and then he turned around and looked at me. He turned his head just as if it was a nightmare. His face was the color of ice even in the total shadow of the ravine. It was unrecognizable. A sound was emanating from it, one that I had heard before, but which I cannot describe. It seemed to come from every direction, and affected me like a scream. Then he turned his head away, and all the while I had continued to follow him, even though it was impossible. It never occurred to me to run away, any more than it would have occurred to me to wake myself up from a nightmare, even to notice that it’s a nightmare that I’m having. The most terrifying thing about a nightmare is precisely that you’ve forgotten you’re dreaming. So I followed Wite into Heipacth. Only a few moments later we took our bearings in a clearing and I was able to look at Wite calmly; we were through that change.

  For weeks after that, there was next to nothing to see but infinite forest and Wite’s inconstant face. Once in Heipacth I noticed the horses were haggard and disheveled, that Wite and I were both covered with filth and hanging in pieces. We followed the courses of brooks into Heipacth and slept at random intervals on their banks, sometimes down in the rushes, on sandbanks narrow enough for one man to lie sideways, with his feet curled, and we would wake with our hands trailing in cold water, turning to mush. I would knock my numb hands against rocks to restore the feeling. My clothes never dried out and smelled of mold. Wite would drive his horse unrelentingly, forever redirecting it, pointing its head away from the mountains and down into the woods again. He hardly ever spoke—he drove on toward his cousin’s place with dire impatience and unwavering confidence in his powers of navigation. The sky was always gray, and the moment immediately preceding sunrise and following sunset, when the air fluoresces blue, seemed prolonged, especially deep among the trees—the raw cold of that fluorescence always gave me a feeling of insomnia, no matter how much or how little sleep I might have had. We plunged headlong almost every waking moment, and Wite collapsed from exhaustion and sickness a number of times along the way. He was deteriorating, his body was rejecting him. There were no signs of human habitation, although Wite assured me we passed close by several well-hidden Heipa towns; they communicated with each other along massive branches in the forest canopy, woven together to form suspended avenues and aqueducts, and they lived down inside the more massive trees, and in burrows underground. They all lived fathoms underground.

  Wite was my entire society then, really no society of any kind. I chose him to the exclusion of everyone else. But through him I met his cousin Tzdze, and she became the other polestar for me; she lived removed from the cities, and I loved her as much as I loved Wite. I never loved Wite; but I did love Tzdze. If you weren’t expecting confessions of love, you shouldn’t forget you know absolutely nothing about me and have no business to expect anything, this or that, from me. You’ve had entirely too much time in which to put out your fine phrases. Now you will have to listen to mine and without jumping to conclusions or trying to fit together what I say, or deciding in advance what it’s all about. Futility is what it’s about. I have absolutely nothing whatever to do with that “all” in your “what it’s all about,” that’s the all you’ve crept under but it isn’t mine. Because of them, Tzdze on the one side, and Wite on the other, I was finally able to cut myself off from cities and societies and what you would expect—from you, to put it in a word. I emphasize that I took perverse and willfull pleasure in cutting those bonds to you, that I certainly felt Wite’s deadly altitude sinking its shadowy roots into me as I turned finally away, and I was ecstatic, I was filled with genuinely savage ecstasy to feel that canker sinking into my heart at last, to see the faces of that handful of friends and colleagues in my mind and to say no to them—finally no. For all your endless good qualities and the goodness of your hearts, and I was constantly meeting good-hearted people, and perhaps even partially because of that good-heartedness, just for the perversity of rejecting such good-heartedness, I will turn aside from you, and if you try to interfere with me no matter what your intentions you will become an enemy. What a fierce, tonic joy it is to have enemies! I turned away once and for all, so many times, and I won’t stop turning, not ever, even after the end. When I followed Wite into the forests and resolved to do everything in my power to help him escape, to fulfill his plans no matter what, I made him the full scope and set of my society, which was no society, and in all its viciousness and hatefulness, the bitterness and poisonedness of this decision, I took the greatest possible pleasure. By reducing myself in this way, in the most unconditional and unhealthy way, I suddenly was content, even in the muck and confusions. I knew Wite wanted to destroy those cities, that he was their annihilating opposite, and now I was a part of him, already a part of him and his plan. I was an invaluable element in his plan and in his opposition to the cities, and I will be honest for once and confess—this testament is a boast, I’m gloating over all of you for once—precisely because I have no right to, precisely because I stole that right for myself. He pulled me along at his speed, ever increasing speed, until suddenly we passed through a yew hedge and Tzdze’s house appeared in front of me, all balconies and buttresses, filling my vision, covered with brass tusks, and I could see spirits teeming thickly there, screaming to each other, these invisible-intangible tropical birds, bright visible and audible to Wite and me. We rode directly into the courtyard. I had never been welcomed at a house before.

  But Wite, when he came through the door into the courtyard and brought his horse up short, when he looked up at the walls and the mountain towering overhead . . . I saw his face split again as if it was about to burst, and I felt I was about to burst, we both were bursting just being there, within the walls of Tzdze’s house, with the mountain towering overhead—the house recognized Wite, and what’s more, it recognized me! Both Wite and I, neither of us had ever been recognized anywhere, we had no place anywhere, but now suddenly Tzdze’s house recognized us. Don’t expect any explanation. Let explanation rot and crumble away to dust and less than dust. Even in the forest, where we had been more free than ever, where we were at liberty to be welcome there, we had never been recognized. In the forest we take our places wherever we want, there’s nothing to prevent us, we belong there but nothing’s been done to admit us, nothing has been done to us. At Tzdze’s house, Wite and I instantly had our place, and we were both ready to die, we had never felt anything like this before. I started shaking. Wite was off his horse already, out of breath, his head flashing back and forth, looking. A moment later he saw Tzdze, who had come to the balcony overhead and was looking down at us, along with her younger sister. Except for the difference in age, Tzdze and her younger sister looked exactly alike. I could see their white faces, dark hair, and dark eyes, and
their small hands on the balustrade, as they both looked straight down at us, one head lower than the other. Wite and his cousin looked at each other for a long time. I remember watching them. One of a pair of gardeners was asking me questions in Heipa, and I suppose I said something to them in Alak, they took the horses to the stables. We had appeared unexpectedly, in shocking condition, but they, with perfect graciousness, simply led our horses to the stables. Another pair of house servants met us at the rear door and took us inside. All the while I imagined Tzdze was still standing on the balcony with her sister.

  I didn’t meet Tzdze until later, and I assume Wite went to speak with her in private first. I was left with nothing to do, having been deserted by both of them—but Tzdze’s house was something like them both, and there were many times I could very easily convince myself that I felt them with me. Without any ceremony at all, I was conveyed to a room, which was my room. As if it had been waiting for me all my life. My room was small with disproportionately large windows, which were filled with light but deeply recessed. I remember being dazzled as I first entered it from the darkness of the hall. The house was tenanted by countless servants. I saw different persons every time I looked out of my windows or left my room. But the house was always perfectly quiet—at most there would be whispering or very light footfalls. There were no common meals—from that point on I no longer ate with Wite, nor did I eat at first with Tzdze or her sister, or in any company during my stay there. The food was brought to my room. I mention this to explain that there were no chimes used to announce meals. The only chime in the house belonged to an enormous clock built into the walls on the ground floor, which rang every hour with a low, dull, monotonous thudding. It had a ponderously long, heavy pendulum that swung over a great distance. The ticking was audible through the walls and floors throughout the house. I remember sleeping there in Tzdze’s house more deeply than I’ve ever slept. I would fall asleep almost instantly and sleep for the most part without dreaming, without waking, without moving, until morning, when I would revive quietly, without feeling either tired or refreshed. I would wake up feeling as if no time had passed, or rather, that the intervening time had been removed somehow, without altering the fact that my body had slept. Now that I can’t sleep at all I find it impossible to forget the way I slept at Tzdze’s house.

  I met Tzdze that night, and only briefly. I had gone to my room and cleaned myself up. There was a bath drawn for me across the hall, and I washed myself with great pleasure. I walked back to my room, across the hall and put on the clothes I found for me in my room. Doing these homely things I felt like I was playing. The servants appeared only when they were required, otherwise I never saw them unless they were just leaving the room, having just finished whatever it was they were doing. As I said, the house was full of servants. I couldn’t imagine there was that much to do, but everything there was spotless, in perfect working order, with not a single squeaking hinge or loose board. The presence of the servants filled the house with tension. Outside of my room, every trace that I left behind was instantly erased. They all seemed to me to have very honest, very cold faces, and I wonder now what sort of beings they were. They were nothing like people at all. After I had made myself presentable, as presentable as I could be, which must have been pretty bad all the same, I was at liberty to look around the house. The air in the house was exceptionally good—it was like the air in libraries. There were many rooms, most of them small, most of them sealed and unused for years, but the air was everywhere the same, not stale. There was no dust. Most of the house was dark. In those rooms that Tzdze frequented the walls were covered with polished brass screens shaped like trellises of vines and flowers, and here and there one of the blossoms would be made of either extremely thin porcelain, glass, or crystal perhaps, and there would be a place for a light inside. The floors were made of polished wood, smooth and red, red enough to appear black, and reflecting. Tzdze’s taste was perfect. I was going through the house when a servant found me and brought me up to introduce me to Tzdze. She was in one of the upstairs rooms, also decorated with brass vines and flowers, and some of these were lit up as I described. The resulting light was very soft.

  The image of Tzdze and Wite as I saw them together when I entered the room recurs to me so often that I find it hard to imagine seeing it for the first time. Wite was standing in one of the corners, by the window, which was high and small, with faint moonlight on his face. Tzdze was sitting in the middle of the room, her chair was turned halfway to face Wite, her face was in half-profile. She was beautifully dressed and perfectly erect in her chair. There was a table beside her chair, with a light that shone on her face. She was looking at Wite in an attitude of expectation, and she was sitting bolt upright, with a stern expression, looking very young and strong, and her features stood out so sharply they appeared to be carved in the air. She turned her attention to me as I came in and she introduced herself politely. I don’t remember what I said, except that I told her my name. My voice sounded so idiotic that I decided to say as little as politeness would permit. She told me she wanted to thank me for her own sake, and on Wite’s behalf. She didn’t look at Wite at any time after I came in. He stood motionless in the corner. I seem to recall his pale face hovering in the corner of my eye. Tzdze said that she wanted me to stay with her as her guest and to promise to give her whatever help she might ask, and I agreed. It’s possible that was the moment I understood that I never wanted to leave. At that moment I thought Tzdze was asking me somehow to help her cousin kill himself, and that she had decided to help Wite to kill himself as he had planned. I assumed Wite had explained to her why he had come and what he planned to do, and that she was prepared to help. I had hardly been able to think about it, I had no ideas—but my head was full of nonsense, of ridiculous and presumptuous words, and I didn’t want to earn her contempt by using them. My head was all whirling and I was completely unprepared to speak, nevertheless, I think I said something absurd like “I understand.” Under circumstances like these “I understand” is always a piece of stupidity or cowardice, I don’t know what it is but it’s always a lie or a confusion, no one can “understand.” Tzdze’s attention was so intense that I began to feel exhausted. She noticed and said, “You seem tired.” I think I waved my hands somehow. She said, “Well, then, good-night.” I said good-night to her, and then to Wite, and left.

  It was only when I awoke the next morning, in my room, in that house, that the full force of my first impression struck me, that the atmosphere of Tzdze’s house was an atmosphere that adhered to Tzdze and Wite and which emanated from them both. I had lived in the city most of my life, and as I looked back from the bed in which I lay, as I do now in my prison cell, everything about the life I had led before I joined the hunting party, especially my life with my wife, none of it made any sense to me from the point of view of Tzdze’s house, nor could I understand how I came to be there. My wife’s death was a terrible loss to me in every way. I have lied, saying I won’t speak about my wife. My memory of her is sealed with the kind of pain that doesn’t yield anything to learn or any dignity. I married her out of pain, lived with her in pain, and when she died I suffered again, always the same. When my son turned on me and shouted in my face, then I felt something like amazement, although it was only the occasion that surprised me, not the attack, which I had expected, which, in a way, I had been enduring continuously for years. But when he left, and I was completely abandoned, I felt only the urge to laugh, although not to laugh uproariously. I only shrugged it off; it was all too pitiful not to be funny. In my work I was a success, and I felt my accomplishments only made my continuing to live any life more perverse. Only my resignation, which by then must have been almost complete, made it possible for me to enjoy anything. Then, of all possible times, I am surprised by this miracle, waking up in Tzdze’s house!

  I never permitted myself any sentimentality, I despised everyone and was hated for it, I was paid in kind and I owe nothing, nor am I owed anyth
ing. I was no slave—I succeeded because I enjoyed betraying my countrymen to the Alaks, do you see that? And because I knew I was making the Alaks more hateful to my countrymen by yielding so many up to them. I hated the Alaks as intensely as I hated the vicious men and shrewish women of my own so-called country. Wite and Tzdze were my own kind. I loved them both. I was prepared to make them any sacrifice, all kinds of worthless, frantic offerings. When I went to the window, I saw Tzdze on one of the balconies below mine, which was set enough forward that I could see its far edge. Tzdze flashed past in an instant, from left to right, and the shock it gave me held me by the window for a long time. Tzdze emitted a single note that made the house ring; an infinitely extended, inhumanly pure note shone from her.

  The next day, Wite gave me a tour of the grounds. I’m sure he’d wanted to go alone, but he was weak that day and leaned on my shoulder several times. Even with me he was practically alone. I could sense the terrible, ghostly strain he was under; his face was even more bloodless and rigid than usual, and he had a stricken expression. We walked together through the grounds like a pair of condemned prisoners, and he would look up again and again to the mountain that loomed over the estate, at whose feet the estate was. The mountain rose up directly from the ground along the back border of the estate. In particular, I noticed Wite would glance again and again at a small stone outbuilding high up the slope. It was hard to describe, looking like a small, isolated porch with a heavy, curved roof. When Wite finally spoke, it was to tell me that this small building was the place he had chosen to die. He was looking up to it as he said this to me, with dread. I asked him if I could stay, and he replied that I could as far as he was concerned but that I would need to ask Tzdze for her consent. Although he didn’t entirely belong there, it seemed impossible to imagine Wite coming to rest anywhere else but there. Now that we had come to rest, Wite seemed paralyzed. Neither he nor I had anywhere left to go or any reason to leave, and so we inevitably stayed. While we were touring the grounds, Wite asked me questions about the Alaks and the spirit-eaters, about investigations. I had no idea whether he was interested or not, but he listened with the same agitated, stricken expression I had seen on his face before. I told him what I could, and his questions reminded me of a time when I had been out of the city for a few days. When I had returned, I had heard that a group of my so-called countrymen, partisans, had been arrested for the usual crimes and were sentenced to die. In retaliation, their comrades had kidnapped a number of Alak representatives, including the sister-in-law of one of my supervisors. She was my wife’s closest friend, one of the only people who ever visited us, and she was pregnant at the time. The magistrate had ordered the execution to proceed, and the hostages were discovered drowned the same day. I was there watching as they were pulled from the water—my supervisor and his brother were there, and I remember his brother collapsed when they pulled his wife out. I went over and looked at her. I asked her where she had been and she told me, and I directed them to a house several streets over. This was the only time I had ever really wielded power—I told them where to go; I had worked with this particular supervisor for years and he, from a distance, knew precisely what I could be depended upon to do. As it happens, he didn’t survive long after. Under his instructions, the men followed me to the house—the partisans were packing their things into a cart in the street, tossing stuff down from the upstairs windows. They panicked when we appeared, and I suppose this convinced the soldiers; they surrounded the house and started tearing it apart with axes and bars. Moments later they were dragging partisans out of the house and tossing them into a sort of cage on wheels, banging on the bars on all sides to keep the prisoners heaped up in the center of the cage, the partisans inside cringed and wailed as if they were being beaten themselves. One of the two ringleaders had not been found inside, and I was asked to go in and ask the spirits—of that I will only say that they didn’t know, and that I ate them all within a few minutes. Then a soldier rushed up to me and brought me around to the lot behind the house. I heard screams. The first soldier through the back door of the house had fallen through a hole in the floor, and broken his leg horribly. They had dragged him out into the yard. The foot and lower part of the calf were almost at a right angle to the rest of his leg, his blood was gushing out onto the ground. I was disgusted. I was horrified at his pain. I was disgusted and I was horrified at his pain. I had just blanked the house of spirits, I was filled with their animation, so I seized his leg in my hands. The bone slid immediately back under the skin and knitted together, and the muscles over it, the blood stopped coming out, the skin closed, and his leg was restored. As his screaming stopped in abrupt surprise I was suddenly overcome with fury at the ringleaders of this idiotic band of so-called patriots, for all their childish destruction and for lowering me to the task of cleaning up after them, for forcing me to witness this disgusting spectacle and take part in it, for killing my wife’s friend (the supervisor’s sister-in-law) notwithstanding how little she meant to me, and for killing her in the name of the pettiest and most absurd of causes, so I simply demanded of myself the location of that other of the two ringleaders, the one who had not been found, and suddenly I received a vivid impression.