From where his head falls, he can see a few buildings across a narrow, empty street. He’s lying on a thin strip of park by the water. Presently, he starts scrabbling along on his belly, the wet grass lets him slip along without too much trouble. He can see smudged figures moving in the street—they ignore him. He keeps his head low to the ground, turned toward the street, the grass brushing by against his cheek. With his one working eye, he sees a surgical supply store across the street—actually down a short side alley opening onto a bigger boulevard on the far side. Mechanically, the Golem begins slithering toward it—the cobblestones tearing at his underside, the cloth of his shirt worn away, he narrowly misses being run over by a huge, clattering shape. He manages the sidewalk and batters the door with his left arm—it’s unlocked. Inside, bleary figures shriek and draw out of his way, he can hear echoing protests from someone standing over him, nudging his broken ribs with the toe of its shoe. The Golem ignores them, his eyes have fixed on a bottle of formaldehyde on a conveniently low shelf. He knocks away the stopper with a swipe of his arm, falling forward off-balance, then rolls over onto his back, tilting the bottle off the shelf with him, splattering the formaldehyde into his mouth. With his left arm he heaves the bottle downside-up and pours it in, feeling it chime through his limbs—his ruined left leg straightens, the back of his head uncollapses, his ruined right eye inflates in its socket, his body’s form is restored, although still broken and rent apart. The bottle drained, the voices now silent, the sounds of footsteps rattling out the door, he seizes a second bottle, rolling over onto his back, much stronger now. He balances the bottle on his back and seizes an IV stand by its base, pulling it along with him as he crawls out through the back of the store into a courtyard, open to one side, littered with rubbish, machine parts, an old car. The Golem navigates through the clutter and crawls into something like an old chicken coop. With increasing pain and irritability he props the bottle on a ledge over his head, dragging the bottle down from the IV stand. He knocks the stopper off the bottle of formaldehyde and jams the stopper from the IV bottle in its place, catching up the few splashes of formaldehyde with his mouth, as best he can. The formaldehyde runs down the tube and trickles out the needle. The Golem fumbles impossibly with his sleeve a moment, then gives up and jabs the needle directly into his neck. He drops his head back on the planks and passes out.
When the bell rings, the Golem is shocked awake. He turns the bottle upright and plucks out the needle from his neck, wandering unsteadily out into the street. A series of chimes are being hung in the air, one at a time, ornamentally reverberating from the dingy storefronts, trickling around his feet. He cranes his ears in a circle and begins to follow the sound toward its source, not so much the bell as the hand ringing it. Streets swivel around him, figures run by or sit and gnaw illusions like praying mantises. The city is scored across with fissures where the segments of the raft are caused to float side by side, by means of heavy girders, bearded with seaweed, and by curved bridges. Small channels help divert the weight of the water beneath onto the top of the raft, making it more neutrally buoyant—large, flat, sluglike fish cruise by in the channels, nibbling at the tarred lining and glancing girlishly up at the Golem with their dead eyes. The bell makes them wince and shrink back into themselves.
The street the Golem is following opens out—the museum occupies one side of the deserted square. He wanders toward the museum portico haphazardly, and looking up only a moment he notices a pair of golden eyes watching him from a quiet corner of the bell tower . . . and a small coral smile . . . in a pale face . . . This figure seems to be wearing his clothes, and holds a painted fan, and vanishes back into the shadows of the bell tower to the laughing cries of its birds. The Golem rushes up the steps and knocks the heavy bronze doors open, staggering into the lanes of the endlessly radiating galleries; his brace clatters on the hard floor, the noise carols through the dark, into the corners. Phantoms everywhere pull back obscurely, through patterned ravelings of shade in the lee of looming windows and curtained foyers, bewildered and annoyed by the noise. Under glass in every exhibition, the bell’s softest note is humming in place, biding itself without diminishing, below the threshold of audibility.
There skittering along a railing or flashing by at the far end of the room—fluttering wings, the glint of a perfectly round, webbed eye, the dry scraping of claws on marble floors . . . the Golem follows the bell tower birds, clambering after as best he can, always late. Unable to move fast or adroitly, he is only just able to catch a glimpse of them before she disappears again. On several occasions birds erupt from the dark only a few feet away from him, he hears the rustle of her skirts, but so fast do these eruptions come and go he has no time to move at all, even to jerk back in surprise. In the dark, he can’t see them coming—but here, in this corner, he sees a woman’s foot—there on the banister, a woman’s hand—and her fragrance, blown here and there by the energetic flapping of birds’ wings, lingers everywhere in the air, stronger and less strong by turns. This fragrance materializes from time to time in tiny flurries of bees with bright yellow stripes, and the humming of bees’ wings and the rapping of birds’ wings grows louder as he searches, but only by barely perceptible degrees.
The Golem is getting impatient. He is now standing on one side of a partition wall running the length of an enormous room. This wall is broken through with windows at floor level, and the other half of the room is several feet lower. When he sees the flash of her teeth in those windows on the other side, he bashes the glass in with a few light knocks of his brace and ducks through the window, landing on his braced leg, this coils beneath his weight like a spring and then rebounds, shooting him along the partition, following the cooler, less dusty contour in the air left by her body as it passed a second earlier. He is brought in this way to the base of a flight of stairs, which he climbs. There’s another gallery at the top—the trees have thrust their branches in through the empty windows, their silver-dollar shaped leaves wiggle along the ceiling. In the light of those windows, shining for the most part beneath the branches, he can see a deep gulf in the floor, opening onto a vast orchestra pit far below—there are heavily curtained boxes on the walls facing him across the gulf. As the Golem peers down into the darkness, the idea that she is present, watching him, begins to grow in his mind.
Night has fallen above ground, and Miss Woodwind has slipped stealthily into the park. Nimbly picking her way through the dense bracken, beneath the wiry black limbs of the barren trees, she pursues upstream the course of a flickering, talking brook, whose slick rocks shine like opals in the moon’s waxing light, whose fragrant billows fold along the edges of its bed with a crinkling sound. Now, close to the source, she kneels beside the stream.
In a box furnished with two elegant, white-upholstered, gold-painted chairs, and hung all over with heavy golden ornaments, he sees a magnificent, queenly woman—her skin is as white as paper, her hair is as black as ink—the fiery roll of her black bangs shines like a polished oil drum—her pointed lips and nails are scarlet as the red of my binding—her mistletoe eyes are maned with black lashes coal-sable—her dress striped gold and blue like quire-stitches—she appears beneath an arch, because the arch is our symbol for the dream.
Miss Woodwind slips her left hand under the water, along its bed, until, lying on her side, her entire left arm cradles the stream like a bolt of cold cloth—with dreamlike slowness she brings her right arm up through the air and down to rest on the surface of the water.
Christine smiles into space at first, her face gleams. Then she seems to notice the Golem—her eyes widen, whitening their sockets, and from her lips escape the inverted white arch of her gloating grin—a baroque, sharky grin glistening with venom, a grin you want to suck like hard candy—a jaw breaker. Her throat is girdled with a garland of beautiful paper flowers, which promiscuously offer their jasmine and orange blossom perfumes to the engorged air.
Miss Woodwind’s softened senses tell her that her left
shoulder has slipped a little—and with a gradual inclination forward, she then tilts all at once and slips beneath the stream, holding it still in her arms and borne off by its current into the dark. As a cold dream presses its lips about her form, the water turns dark, shivers and divides into randomly mingled ribbons of black and white, scribbling across each other, form lines, illegible words . . .
A spur of desire, new to him and alarming, penetrates the Golem as he first lays eyes on Christine. From now on, his cane is also a sword with a broken blade, upon which every word he speaks will be in elegant handwriting finely engraved. He ransacks his mind for some way to cross the gulf separating them, but knows already that she will not stand still. But her eyes are glimmering with light like a madwoman’s, her purring face is all opalescent syrup on the cold, lightless air, the tresses she indistinctly shakes are as splendid as a crown, her teeth are sheathed in a membrane of dewy saliva, like oil-of-glass, which gives luster to her coral lips, her chalcedony breath sifts across the breach to alight on his face.
“Go away!” she says. Did he hear those words, or only find them written inside? They are associated with the echo of a faraway and thrillingly low voice—but her lips didn’t move. Again he hears, or somehow receives, the caressing words “Go away!”
Still wracking his brains for some way to cross to her—even as her eyes, her presence, rivets him to the spot, stops his arms and legs. Her breath, her perfume, the air throbs around her like a pulsing mouth, a soft and trembling babyish lip . . .
Now she seems to laugh at him, or almost—“Haven’t you gone yet?”
The Golem is beginning to feel light-headed. He shouldn’t have tried his feet so quickly, he hasn’t healed properly. He feels the puncture in his neck and wishes for the IV. But he doesn’t take his eyes from Christine.
She hasn’t stopped smiling. If anything, she’s smiling more and more. It hasn’t been more than a moment since she last spoke. Her hands, which up until now had been clasped demurely in front of her, now rest on a lever protruding from the floor.
“Very well—catch me if you can!”
The lever is pulled—although Christine still has not moved. With a dull rattle of wooden cogs the walls of the museum unlace around them like unmeshing fingers and spread to either side like wings, galleries and hallways scrolling smoothly past, and Christine, her face now streaked with tears, her mouth livid and pale, the lips compressed, drifts past in an alcove lined with vermillion fabric, and out of sight. Her bowed neck will become an arch passing over him. The Golem stares weakly around at the moving walls and scanning doorways, finally bolting through an aperture at random, and from there trying to thread his way out again. The museum churns, swapping floors and rooms, basement for attic and back again, shifting in all directions at once like a moving labyrinth, but eventually the Golem manages to navigate out into the square again. Behind him, the museum withdraws into the shadows, still disarticulating and sliding through itself like an elaborate explosion. He can tell that she’s already far away.
THE SECRETARY AND THE MUSEUM
Christine never takes the same street twice, but she knew that she would inevitably be seen. He lurks everywhere, setting up precisely timed “spontaneous” encounters, parting the city at every corner with his skulking, waiting to meet her again. She watches the dripping eaves overhead as she weaves across short bridges and suspended walkways toward the heart of the city, where the monumental buildings rise directly from the water, some nearly brush the roof of the cavern, while others penetrate it and rise higher still. As she moves into their shadows she can feel a cold exposed feeling shiver across her back, and turning she catches a momentary glimpse of him before he melts again into shadows of his own. The same loping silhouette, where had she seen it before?
She turns and slips around the corner onto her street. The desultory lighting from hanging lamps and unshaded windows fills the street with a pallid glow the color of watery milk. Without running, assuming she is even now under his gaze, she hurriedly glides through the doors to her building and into the elevator. As the doors glide shut she remembers how she’d seen him, looming ominously over her open windowsill from across the cavernous distance of her bedroom. Distant enough for her to escape. She had hidden herself in the tiny milk-drop compartment in the wall and watched him come creaking through the door and scan the room with a slow sweep of his leaden, pasty face. It had seemed to her that his face telescoped out into the room on a stalk, peering into corners and behind the drapes, but nothing like that had actually happened. He had simply failed to find her and left hastily, perhaps in the hope of catching her outside.
She moved house right away. She’d rather negligently arranged to have her expense money sent to her directly—but after a narrow escape in the mail room she now picks up the plain yellow envelopes—filled with the strange, scorched-black paper coins engraved with ghostly white letters that are the currency here—at the post office. Now he is after her again; he’s found her new address somehow. She wants to get a few things from her apartment before she moves on again: it wouldn’t do to cheat him of these precious few glimpses.
Something batters faintly against the floor of the elevator, directly beneath her feet. Christine jerks away—another blow harder this time and the thin plywood panel pops up, the metal floor distends. Christine presses against the doors watching the numbers change with rapt attention. Another blow and this time she can hear the metal tear and the sounds of the shaft come echoing through. Behind her she is listening to his hands scrabbling along the edges of the rent he’s made, pulling the metal wide apart. The floor light shifts the bell rings and the doors swing open, she flits out into the corridor even as she hears the floor giving way, the doors clicking shut.
He’ll catch her on the stairs, her door, even locked, wouldn’t stop him—it hadn’t the first time—so she runs to the window at the end of the hall. Stepping out onto the ledge she estimates the distance to the next building. Glancing back—he’s stepping out into the passage, silhouetted in the elevator light, bent with his hands hanging down and his arms curved in beneath him. With all her strength she stiffens her body and rises in the air, her skirts twisting around her legs. She sails, executing one complete revolution with her arms outstretched, across the gap, glimpsing water flashing hundreds of feet below where the foundations sink out of sight, and tilting gracefully back onto the cushions of the air she drops feet first through the opposite window. From there she need only traverse the length of the hall to the opposite stairwell.
The Golem follows only moments later, crashing down onto the fire escape outside, which bends under his weight with the sound of shrieking metal, the rivets pulling free from the wall. The slats snap beneath his feet and he has to pull himself through the window by the jam—his weight nearly wrenches the frame loose, the glass in the panes squeezes then shatters, but he lunges forward in time, is not tangled up and dragged down the building’s considerable length by the collapsing fire escape. Christine is already at the stairwell. Loping after her, he pulls the door off of its hinges and it falls awkwardly to the floor. From the landing, he can see her face staring placidly up at him, smiling, spiraling down into the blackness. She’s sliding down the banister, circling round and round out of sight, lit intermittently by the windows in the fire doors.
The Golem leaps down to the first landing, scattering broken tiles where he lands. Using the banister poles to sling himself around he leaps again and again, from landing to landing with jarring force, whipping around to pounce once more, sending cracks up the plaster walls and deafening reports rebounding along the shaft. Far below, Christine’s shining white face recedes in concentric circles, trained on him, and smiling . . .
Down a dark corridor and across the ensuing room; large, damp, irregularly lit, many doors, oversized packing crates stacked high on its floors, and immediately before her, a short flight of plank steps. She stops for a moment puzzling which way to go, the door swinging shut behi
nd her—thud thud thud down hundreds of storys.
Someone emerges from behind the plank steps opposite the door, holding her arms folded across her chest. She is plain, with blonde hair piled on top of her head, and wearing a heavy coat, buttoned, with the hood thrown back. It’s Magellan’s secretary.
“Go on, up these stairs and out that door—here, I’ll unlock it for you,” she’s pointing to the steps where she’d been hiding, pulling out a rusty ring with a number of keys.
“Why Miss Woodwind, whatever are you doing here?”
She trips up the plank steps, unlocks the door at the top and throws it open, revealing an arched passage of dank black brick.
“There’s a train station just beyond the end of the passage. Don’t hesitate, but go as quickly as you can.”
“You still haven’t answered me—why are you here?”
But Miss Woodwind is looking past her, over Christine’s shoulder, across the room. The pounding on the staircase is getting louder. She rustles down the steps again and takes Christine’s shoulders in her two weightless hands.
“I’ve managed him before, don’t worry about me. I’m here for you, Miss Dalman.”
The Golum Page 8