The Golum

by Michael Cisco

  Kipe comes up behind him, peering over his shoulder. With two fingers he nudges his partner in the back, and Pracke reaches into his coat pocket and brings out one of the Prefect’s handkerchiefs. Carefully he handles it, touching only the embroidered edges with the ends of his long fingernails. So suspended, he holds it up against the night sky to flutter in the wind for a moment like a flag, showing an all but luminous unstained white square with initials in one corner. Slowly Pracke bends, and turns in space over the body, and lays the handkerchief over the dead face. It settles there, creased along the middle.

  Together, Pracke and Kipe stand and wait. The others have retreated a little way off, watching the open box, intent and anxious. They are all totally still. The hissing in the grass abates, and suddenly the sounds of the city far off in the distance are just audible again, and the long low breaths of the monitors who are also watching, also totally still.

  A dark spot appears near the center of the handkerchief. It spreads as they look and start and others appear, the cloth begins to sag inwards a little with a new weight of bloodstains and then his hand reaches as he sits up to lift it from his face, crumpling the cloth in his hand. He’s sitting up, staring at it intently, with all his concentration. The momentum of his forward motion levers him to his feet in one continuous slow upward curve, his heavy black coat brushing the edge of the coffin. Pracke recoils without moving, feeling his body sinking into itself, an uncontrollable shuddering inside, his throat tightens and he feels a hot, weird pressure behind his eyes—Kipe also feels this way, he can tell even without looking. All he did was step out of the coffin, hovering a little above the ground, looking at them, the light from the headlights reflected in his glasses. The figure looks like it was smeared there like a smudge on a pane of glass—except for the shining spectacles. Kipe makes a convulsive gesture meant to signal one of the men to turn off the headlights; those two disgusting reflections, angled to one side with the tilt of his head—Pracke imagines them gone, the figure occluded by ordinary shadows, and the thought merges with a hysterical impulse to shut off the lights so that he won’t have to keep looking at him. He imagines their relief if the figure, crying out or dropping to his knees, would take sadness and hopelessness back into himself—they’re paralyzed—Kipe realizes he’s looking back at them.

  Then he abruptly settles his feet on the ground, the full weight of his body returning. A moment later he’s gone.

  Pracke runs to the edge of the cemetery and scans the slope. Down below, a dark figure is bobbing through the grass. He turns to Kipe and the workers, telling them to bring the car, and then he takes off down the hill. Lights sweep drunkenly behind him as he hurries, and then, turning round the incline and onto a narrow dirt path, he’s out of sight of the car. In a few moments, he is walking beside the Divinity Student. For the first time, he notices that the Divinity Student has a ponderous metal brace running the length of his right leg, which nevertheless appears to support most of his weight as he walks, trailing dead earth from his shoes. Pracke hadn’t seen it under the coattails at first, or perhaps it hadn’t been there before. The Divinity Student is gasping with the strain to keep moving with eyes fixed straight ahead, set on San Veneficio, and clouds of torn bits of paper flutter out from between his lips. His shoulder slams hard against a tree and he spins to one side, careening over a rock by the side of the road. He crashes down into the dead grass, flailing his arms and legs. His head rears up, eyes twitching back and forth, and his legs and arms writhe underneath him in a completely uncoordinated attempt to get him back on his feet. Kipe pulls up on the running board of the car, jumping off lightly and rejoining Pracke. They are accustomed to handling dead bodies, but they hesitate to approach the Divinity Student, who is seething back and forth in the tall grass like a broken machine. Eventually, Pracke musters himself and steps forward. Seizing one shoulder, then Kipe the other, together they drag the Divinity Student toward the car. Under his coat he feels like a bag of sticks, his joints poking out in all directions, wrapped in flesh like wet cardboard. He exhales a few more bits of paper with a retching sound and goes limp. Pracke and Kipe push his chin down onto his chest and load him professionally into the car, accidentally battering his leg brace on the fender and front seats a few times. They crumple him against the opposite door and clamber in swiftly behind, shoving the broken leg underneath the front seat to make room for their feet.

  During the trip back, they avoid looking at him, sitting close together against the opposite door. Occasionally, Pracke glances at the other side of the car, but there is nothing to see but a vague patch of denser darkness against the blue-black desert flashing by the window. Motes of light from the city start to accumulate in the car as they approach, condensing into an almost invisible haze around them, dusting the Divinity Stu dent’s face and hands so that they glow faintly, the color of sour milk. The car passes through the city gates and he lunges backward like he’s just touched a live wire striking his head hard against the ceiling, then jerks to one side, crashes once against the door, and goes still again. Everyone in the car turns to look, Pracke and Kipe staring mutely from the other end of the seat—it took only a moment. The Divinity Student is cluttered across the door, his right temple against the window, looking straight ahead—the driver shunts quickly through traffic, toward the police annex.

  From the window, the Divinity Student watches people passing in the busy streets. The streetlights peer down overhead, and the people’s faces and clothes are folded, with heavy shadows pointing down. The thick glass of the window muffles their voices, so that only a melodic hum is audible, like an orchestra tuning up. Standing in doorways, sitting outside on patio chairs, pushing vending carts with hanging strings of bells, walking alone or with another or in groups, walking pets, standing against a wall, entering and leaving buildings, chasing across the street, each with a valence trailing a wake like a fan of cords woven out of each gesture, and each wake mixing currents in the street with the lights and traffic, a flock of pigeons scattering in front of the car and swimming around the window where the Divinity Student sits, drawn down the street in the closed car. It veers to the left and stops on an empty side lane with steep iron-faced buildings looming up on either side, and then rocks as they get out. Kipe opens the opposite door and the Divinity Student staggers forward off-balance; he stops himself, planting his heavy braced leg. While Pracke and Kipe pay the diggers, he shambles out into the middle of the cobbled street, his head lolling forward.

  A car with blazing lights careens around the corner. The men look up. It accelerates down the street, howling and shrieking, steering for the Divinity Student, who stands facing the other side of the road, oblivious. He buckles and flies upward bouncing once on the hood and again across the windshield shattering it with his leg brace, his body spins over the car beneath him and then dashes to the ground—the car wheels around the corner and disappears. Pracke and Kipe run over.

  “Is he all right?” Kipe is bending over him.

  “He wasn’t all right to begin with.” Pracke kneels by the Divinity Student. His body is bent, face down, palms up, the legs twisted to one side. They take him by the shoulders and help him stand, steering him toward one of the gaunt doorways on the nearer side of the street.

  “The Coroner ought to have a look at him,” Kipe suggests, trying to get a better purchase on the Divinity Student’s shoulder.

  Pracke appraises the Divinity Student’s condition with a cursory glance, then nods. “I don’t think he’s fit to speak with anyone right now, anyway.”

  They pull him through the door, into a tall, narrow lobby with white walls and a polished wooden floor. Pausing a moment to kick the Divinity Student’s feet into position underneath him, they turn down a long, narrow hallway off to one side.

  The door at the end swings open with a kick, and they drag him across the threshold. The room beyond is a warehouse of huge banks of tall freezing-cabinets for the storage of bodies. Each one is divided into c
ompartments with shiny steel trapdoors and tongues of metal on rollers for holding the corpses. Aluminum ladders glide along metal tracks atop each cabinet. Luxurious fans hang over the broad avenues between the freezers, spinning slowly in the thin air near the ceiling. The floor is gleaming white tile, glowing in the dim light. Here and there along the walls are small offices with corrugated steel walls and small-paned frosted windows. Pracke and Kipe head for an office in the rear corner, with a gurney and a few racks of surgical and garden tools, resting in glass cases filled with green sterile solution, out in front. With a final effort, they drag the Divinity Student into the enclosure and toss him into a swivel chair, which rolls backwards under his weight until it raps against the flimsy corrugated wall. Pracke sits down by the desk, and Kipe goes to find the Coroner.

  The Coroner is there a moment later, still dressed in his white autopsy outfit, rubber gloves, apron, and skullcap. He has a young face with an earnest expression. He radiates energy. Kipe stands in the doorway and indicates the Divinity Student with a theatrical gesture. The Coroner steps in and begins studying the Divinity Student immediately, peering into his throat and ears, listening to his chest, tapping his knees. He works silently, with sure, steady hands. He takes a big embalming syringe from his apron and drives the long, thick needle into the Divinity Student’s neck, angling down toward his shoulder. Holding the syringe in his left fist, he strongly draws the plunger back and a thick, clear fluid flows viscously up into the dropper, threaded with tiny grains of black. The Coroner pulls the needle out abruptly and squirts some of the liquid onto his fingertip, holding it up to the single lightbulb in the room, hanging over the desk, looks at, and then smells it. He frowns and wipes his hands on his apron. He steps forward and pulls back the Divinity Student’s eyelids, staring at his eyes.

  “He’s blind.”

  “ . . . He didn’t act blind.”

  He produces a little flashlight and shines it in the Divinity Student’s face. Then he looks around at them.

  “I don’t see how these eyes could possibly work.”

  Then he seems to think of something. He presses his palm across the Divinity Student’s forehead, and then lays the back of his fingers against his right cheek, leaving behind fading purple bruise-marks on the Divinity Student’s paste-colored face.

  “He’s got a fever. A high high fever.”

  “Contagious?”

  “If it is, you’ve already been exposed plenty.” He puts his hands on his hips. “But I suspect it has more to do with decomposition.”

  With his right hand, he gently touches his first two fingers to one side of the Divinity Student’s throat. “Yes he’s very sick,” he says, almost to himself.

  The Coroner is distracted; his eyes wander. Then, abruptly turning his attention to the legs, he kneels and starts fiddling with the brace.

  “I didn’t expect he’d have that,” Pracke says.

  “It’s welded on,” the Coroner says, rocking the hinges in his fingers. “Tight as a vice from his ankle to his hip.”

  “Is his leg broken?” Kipe asks.

  “It would have to be—in at least two or three places. Permanent breaks, most likely. I’d have to cut the brace off to find out.” He inclines his head and thinks. “I’ll leave it,” he says, “unless you insist?”

  They shake their heads no.

  The Coroner steps back and looks at the Divinity Student as a whole. He takes a flask of formaldehyde from his back pocket, sets it on the desk, and sits down, still looking at the Divinity Student. Suddenly, the Divinity Student springs from the chair, his eyes wide open, and he seizes the bottle. He bashes the top against the edge of the desk, breaking off its short neck and spilling a little onto the floor, filling the room with a familiar smell that neither Pracke nor Kipe had smelled before. The Divinity Student jams the jagged mouth of the bottle against his lips, tips his head back, gulping convulsively, his eyes jerking shut and tearing. The Coroner’s face is only inches away, watching him, motionless. The Divinity Student drains the bottle and drops it on the desk; it clunks and rocks back and forth; the Coroner’s hand stops it. They’re all staring at the Divinity Student, standing with most of his weight on his braced leg, wet mouth hanging open and ragged from the broken glass, but no blood, no gasping. He curls backward, settling into the chair and silence again.

  “Well, is he okay?” Pracke asks after a moment.

  “I suppose. Is that all?”

  “Well, will he be able to speak with the Prefect?”

  The Coroner produces a tongue depressor and gingerly applies it to the Divinity Student’s mouth. Wrinkling his nose at the smell, he peers down the Divinity Student’s throat as Pracke obligingly angles the hanging overhead light.

  “As far as I can tell, he is physically capable of speech,” says the Coroner, heading for the door. “Whether he has anything to say is none of my lookout.”

  Now they’ve given up trying to question him. One sat on his right, and the other on his left, alternating their tones and modes, threatening, cajoling, promising, enticing, waving the formaldehyde bottle in front of his face—nothing. A voice on the telephone informed Pracke that the Prefect had already returned to his bed, and would inspect the remains in the morning. The detectives went away, locking the door behind them.

  The Divinity Student has been lying on the desk for several hours, in the dark, motionless. With a single jolt of one shoulder he now rolls to one side and collapses to the floor knocking the desk chair over. Using his cane, produced from the lining of his coat, he tries several times to get to his feet, repeating the same useless, spasmodic motions every time. Finally, he somehow levers himself upright and propels himself out the door, knocking it open with his weight alone. His surplus momentum carries him down the corridor between the freezer units, shining ghostly blue in the dark warehouse. He blunders out into the street, and reels drunkenly on the pavement, flapping his desiccated arms like a mummified bat. The Divinity Student shambles down the street.

  Nearly blind, with painstaking effort he traces the textures and shapes of each facade with his heated fingertips until they cool against cool stone and thick polished wood, cool as if it were saturated with cold water. The wood glides silently back into the shadows on rough iron hinges and the darkness of the chapel swallows him. With spidery steps he crosses the nave and pulls up before a stained-glass window gleaming faintly above him, suspended, shining, in shadows. Scaffolding scales the pillars—the ceiling is being restored. There is a length of rope among the tools by the base of one of the pillars. The Divinity Student picks it up, works it for a moment, and then looks up. He can now see. With his shaking hands, he throws the line up, and it catches in a hook-like projection of stone at the top of the arch. The rope hangs in silhouette against the window, its dangling loop encircles an angel’s face. The Divinity Student pulls himself up the scaffolding with one arm, holding the end of the rope in his other hand. He gets to the top of the scaffold, and with a single gesture swings himself onto the platform. He ties the rope to the trellis, leans out, seizes the swinging noose, and fastens it around his head. Then he climbs back out on the scaffolding, taking up as much slack as possible. He kicks out with his braced leg, dropping a few feet straight down and then stopping abruptly. With clement eyes, the angels watch him swing back and forth.

  THE MORGUE AND THE BREWERY

  Of course there is a circus in San Veneficio—open warehouses with dirt floors and straw on the ground. The nightly audience sits hushed and excited in fleets of folding chairs on graduated risers, with their backs to the open air. In the center ring, Teo rises up from over his table gleaming with knives to face racks of mirrors, one in front of the other, lined up forty feet away, with small spaces in between, several side by side. They catch his reflection like the knives on the table, blazing with the white of his spotless uniform. With nimble, scarred fingers, he raises one blade and then another, hurling them with lightning speed at the mirrors, snapping them faster a
nd faster, his right hand does all the throwing, his left hand feeds the knives one after another, until Teo’s hands are a blur eating knives from the table and flashing each one a shining reflection of Teo’s tense face to dash through the mirrors and plunge through his face, his hands, his chest and abdomen, arms and legs, a blazing stream of spinning knives buzzing from his hands and chasing each other into the mirrors, breaking them in sequence and crowding after each other in their haste, thunking solidly into silvered glass and plywood backings. As the last knives leap from the table and across the room, his face is twisting, his lips furling up, baring clenched teeth. Shatter the last of his reflections and turn to face the crowd who gasp and pause to catch their breath, nearly forgetting to applaud.

  Now Teo’s returning later that evening to his home in an adjacent lot, an old shed, now his place to stay. His uniform blazes white in the gloom. Without putting on the lights, he steps to his closet and looks inside, by moonlight, at his old spotless apron. He brushes it with his fingertips, and pulls two big knives from his belt, holding them tight, one to each hand, bright and sharp against the dark.

  Then an uncategorizable impression—a low, uneasy chord received like a tactile sensation. Or also like the minute flux of a small earth tremor, registered in his stomach like a jarring loose, or a glancing blow, the clumsy superimposition of a previous self. Teo thinks a moment, but the feeling is gone. With care, he takes down his apron and puts it on, and then, pocketing his knives, he leaves the shack and the circus grounds.

  Overhead the sky is a patchwork of clouds stitched with bright silver borders where the moon shines above. The air is clear and still, warm and cold evenly mixed, frictionless. The streets are empty, small stone buildings with little onion-shaped turrets and leaning gables, all lightless and quiet. No streetlights. No sound. Everyone is sleeping. He travels along the perimeter of the city, weaving over uneven streets, muted and expectant. Presently he turns down a narrow side street, heading for the smooth stone wall of a tiny chapel a few doors up from the corner, with two recessed stained-glass windows and a heavy wooden door, set into a telescoping, arched doorway. It glides open with a touch on rough old hinges, and inside all is dark and still. Teo passes through the door and steps down into the chapel on steps worn smooth as brook pebbles, and he scans the room in the dim half-light from the short, wide colored windows that punctuate the walls just below the flat roof. As he looks, he sees one window is broken by a shadow, slowly turning.