Once, when he was exploring, he came across a long fleshy wall punctuated at varying levels by tiny pockets of air, trapped on either side by thin, translucent membranes. By pressing his ear to them, he could hear sounds welling up from deep inside the fish, thrumming through them. He would return there often, at different times, to acquaint himself with all the many different sounds the fish made, depending on what it was doing. On one occasion, he was walking down the wall when a face came into view on the other side. It appeared in the window as if someone had been waiting, leaning up against the opposite wall, and then had rolled over to stare at him out of the black pits of its eyes. He looked more closely—its mouth was moving in its blurred face, expanding and contracting like a leech as it tried to speak with him. Its eyes stared and stared. He could hear its voice buzzing through the membrane. He edged closer and turned his head, both to hear it better and so as not to have to look at it. When it finished, he looked up, expecting the face to be gone. It was not.
Why did he stay? It was fully within his power at any time to leave. All he had to do was place his hand upon the Holy Book and whatever he needed would be given to him; he could sunder the fish apart and float to the surface safely, be conveyed on currents stirred by his own hand to the shore, and strike the city in half right down the middle, to hunt out Christine. Hand resting on the Book, he could command her to do anything, compel her to surrender herself, and she would have no choice. But he is somehow prevented—and this, and Ollimer, as an example—how is he prevented? In whose power is it to prevent him?
Over and over, this refrain cycles in his mind like a skipping needle, and enmeshed with it is his sense of Christine. Opposing stands his feeling that he can’t act unless summoned to act by the story he is living. And that anything she was compelled to do would be worthless to him, divorced from her by want of consent. In amongst these thoughts he reviews their last encounter, whether she had sought him out to lure him deliberately into a trap, or to: what should he say—surrender to him, parlay with him, capture him; the sense is somewhere in the overlap of them all. If she had meant to finally permit him to catch her, then why wear the mask that made it impossible? But still, he felt she meant him to catch her. He could never catch her without her consent, and while he could compel her even to consent, that nevertheless did not constitute “catching” her. The hide-and-seek waited on her leisure to end, and for that he would have to satisfy her of his patience. But if he did prove his patience, she would willingly come from her hiding place and give her consent to be caught. Everything, for him, depended on that. So he stayed, and did nothing. But was she going to send for him? He knew she could sense him down there, but was she expecting him to escape for himself?
In the end he thought of nothing but her, feebly hoping that somehow the constancy of his concentration would make him more difficult for her to ignore. Perpetually exhausted by all this thinking, he retired to the lower, darker chambers. There was a sort of pale, whitish egg-shaped room that he liked—he guessed it was superfluous and that the fish never used it. There were attenuated conical indentations in the puffy ceiling, supported at the top by rings of bone that held them open to the lighted cavity overhead, like skylights. He would collapse in one of the bright circles of light under one such skylight in the middle of the room and lie there, half-propped against the wall, with his legs sticking out in front of him and his heavy coat bulging out above his shoulders and around his head—thinking about Christine.
Consistent effort is its own best camouflage. It’s only in moments of repose that one realizes how expensive it is, especially when there’s nothing to show for it. The Golem was subject to intermittent palpitations of piercing longing and sentimentality, to stagger woundedly up to Christine, and she would finally hold out her arms to him, and he could finally permit himself to collapse, having her to support him. She would buoy him up on her own warmth and breath, and when he thought of her he felt tortured and frantic. As time went by his exhaustion deepened and he allowed nervous helplessness to seep in. At his lowest point, he reached into his coat pocket and laid his fingers thoughtlessly on the torn cover of his Book.
Instantly she was there, right at the border of the circle of light in which he was sitting. She was lying on her side, with her upper body raised, supported by her hands, one flat on the floor behind her and the other poised on its fingers in front of her, as if he had stretched out an invisible hand, swept her up out of the city and tossed her down again here. He stared at her, not yet completely aware of what was happening. She was disheveled and shocked.
“You’re not going to cheat, are you?” she cried.
Christine was only dimly visible in the half-light. She was pale and her face was framed by her dark, unruly hair so that it seemed to hover over her black dress. Her face was gleaming, and her features were shadowed as if they were folds in a single sheet of light. A shiny string of black buttons bisected her down the middle.
“How dare you bring me here!” she cried dramatically.
He took his hand away from the Book resignedly.
She vanished.
There are props constructed to simulate banks of tiny lights, but that are actually just rows of holes in a board with a single lightbulb burning behind them. Individual holes may be covered with tiny panes of tinted glass or plastic, but the “lights” are really only one, plain light. When that bulb is extinguished, they all disappear. The Golem was manufactured by design—he wouldn’t attempt to destroy a desire when he could simply destroy himself. So he winked out, and all his desires vanished, too. His fingers had relaxed and released the Book, and without bothering to see if she was still there, he pulled his hand from his pocket and let it fall with the other in his lap, letting his head droop down onto his chest.
He had noticed one ghost in particular that seemed to be actively trying to attract his attention. It was a figure so eroded by time that he was unable to determine in it even the vestiges of its sex, circling around one corner of the long, low chamber with the skylights, where Christine had appeared to him. Unfortunately, even when he became fully aware that it was trying to communicate something to him, it was so exhausted and dissipated that its message never reached him complete. The best it could manage was a series of apparently unrelated, attenuated pantomimes, but even this trivial effort cost it so much that its gray, flimsy substance was stretched to almost invisible thinness, and the Golem found it hard to distinguish the spirit’s form from the background. Eventually, however, he came to know its schedule well enough to anticipate its appearance, and he would stand as close as possible and in such a way as to block the light from behind him, so that the ghost would be in his shadow, easier to see.
It would come then, preceded by dashing blows of vindictive, biting cold that spun out in horizontal arcs like the folds of a whirlpool from the spot where it was about to materialize. The next moment, it would appear as if it were being extruded from between the crushing weight of two dimensions into the limitless vampiric emptiness of three. The Golem would have to wait for it to pick up his presence, often for as long as half an hour, even though he was standing directly in front of it (as far as he could tell). Then it would instantly begin again the chain of inexplicable motions that it seemed so urgently to want him to decipher, but which were so vague that the Golem was unable to make out anything but a repeated cluster of similar hand motions, where it flapped its fingers and made a pincer of its two palms. All the while, it teetered back and forth as if it were standing on the deck of a ship, or an unstable chair. This would go on for something like an hour, then it would simply unravel before his eyes, as if unable to hold together any longer, still trying to repeat the same feeble gestures.
The Golem watched this display with increasing boredom and indifference until it occurred to him to search the spot where the ghost routinely appeared. He found a rumpled magazine concealed from sight in a pit in the tissue that had subsequently collapsed, creating a pouch in the floor. Th
e ghost never bothered him again, so he assumed this was what he had been intended to find.
The only thing in the magazine worthy of notice was a short fairy tale which went as follows:
“When Y was still very young she lived in a kingdom in the forest that was ruled by a Prince and Princess who were so similar that they could have been brother and sister. Their greatest passion was hunting, and together they would ride hard behind the hounds regardless of what the quarry might be, their eyes and teeth glistening like diamonds in the smooth, glowing planes of their pale faces. Their lances were so sharp they left a wake of severed branches and boughs behind them, cleanly cut without so much as a tug on the haft as they coursed past, holding them so that the blades hovered inches only above the ground. Their horses had been bred from horses and deer to make them as lithe and nimble in the heavy timber as they could be, and the Princess’s mount in particular, which had two small velveted buds of horn, the size of walnuts, sprouting just below its ears. On one such occasion, the Prince nearly impaled Y on his lance, coming across her unexpectedly in the path of the hunt. She had been wandering on her own for days and was very weak and tired. The Prince swept her from the ground onto his horse with a single swing of his arm and carried her back to the royal pavilion, where he and his Princess would stay when they were hunting.
“The Princess and Prince both were enchanted with Y, and they looked after her as best they could. They gave her some food and drink, encouraging her to eat as much as possible, but they kept her talking to them and walking around the campsite when more sensible people would have realized she should have been permitted to sleep, being close to dropping with exhaustion. Y was so disoriented herself that she did not manage to tell them how tired she was.
“The two sovereigns passed the night telling Y the story of how they met, but she was too tired to really pay much attention. One of them had certainly come from a long way off, either searching for the other or at the other’s request, and indeed it turned out they were related, although in what way she couldn’t remember. Dawn broke unexpectedly, and in a flash they were up on their horses again, with Y riding behind the Princess in the same saddle. The Princess’s body was fragrant and warm, soft even in its tight lacings and sturdy dress—unlike the Prince, who was all solid and hard as ice. Y slept fitfully with her arms around the Princess’s waist and her head cushioned on the Princess’s soft back. At one point, she asked the Prince, who was riding near, what they were hunting. He shouted back that there was a criminal in the vicinity who had been terrorizing the citizens, a kidnapper, murderer, and thief. From the Prince’s description Y got the impression that this criminal was something of a rebel general or usurper noble as well, with designs on the kingdom.
“A little while later, Y awoke to the sound of horns and a sudden jolting as the horse underneath her started forward at a full gallop. The dogs were baying in long, reverberating yelps that hung in the shimmering spaces between the trees. It was sunset, and the forest was swimming in a thick, golden light that made the buzzing midges and motes of dust look like flecks of gold swirling in the hot, soporific air. The sun itself emitted jabbing lances of light that stabbed into her eyes and made her squint, so that all she could see were tenebrous silhouettes with faint patches of color, as if she had a screen in front of her eyes. Apparently, they were catching up to the usurper. Like a reply, she suddenly jerked back at the sound of a scream from somewhere nearby. She looked around one side of the Princess’s back, and at the same moment felt a jolt run down the Princess’s other side, and there was a scream, exactly like the first, from right in front of them. She switched sides and saw a figure tumbling to the ground in tall grass between the trees in a small open space.
“The Prince and the Princess came together and began speaking eagerly to one another. From what she could make out, it seemed to Y that they had been chasing the usurper in different directions, and both claimed to have killed him. Then they dismounted, and the Prince took her by the hand, and the Princess’s hand as well, and they all went together to look at the body. The Prince released her and knelt, while the Princess held her shoulders as if to force her to look. But when the Prince turned the figure over, it was a wooden dummy.
“‘Look!’ the Prince said, with no more wonder in his voice than if he’d just noticed something interesting in the newspaper. ‘It’s not a person at all. It’s not even alive.’
“Nevertheless, they tied it to the Princess’s horse and dragged it back to the pavilion. There the royal soldiers and attendants charred it in a fire, spitting on it and ridiculing it. After a while, Y could make out another sound murmuring below the insults of the soldiers. She listened closely and determined that it was the dummy, speaking. It was soliloquizing in a faint but steady voice that it was unvanquished, that it would take over the kingdom regardless of setback, that it would overwhelm them all, and so forth, on and on, in a continuous drone. The soldiers shredded its clothes, they tore out its hair, they spattered it with mud, and shat on it, and then threw it into a cart. Then Y noticed that the other attendants were packing away the last of the pavilion and camping equipment. She asked the Prince, who had been standing behind her, running his fingers through her hair, where they were going, and he replied that they were returning to the royal mansion, and that she was coming with them.
“The sun was setting again as they arrived at the mansion. It was a simple, square, stone building of two stories, sitting in the middle of a small, circular island, surrounded by a wide moat. A narrow ribbon of packed clay linked the island with the outer bank. As the servants filed into the building, Y stood by the walls of the mansion, watching the soldiers across the moat dumping the usurper, still soliloquizing, into the water. They tipped the cart up, and he slid slowly under the surface, vanishing altogether. The soldiers disappeared into the forest.
“Y looked up. She was alone on the bank with the Princess. The setting sun dazzled her, creating a flaming corona around the Princess’s head, making her eyes appear to burn like hot coals, and her gleaming, sharp teeth spangle the air with white gleams. She explained that she and her brother looked nothing like what Y now saw, that in fact the two of them never left the mansion at all, being disfigured and not entirely mobile—her brother more than herself—so they resorted to projecting pleasing images of themselves outside the house, and so were able to live their lives vicariously. Now the Princess asks Y if she wants to come inside and see them as they really are, and Y says NO! The black door of the house opens wide and the Princess takes Y forcibly by the arm and pulls her in through the door, or tries to, with Y clinging to the door frame with all her strength, and pleading not to be taken inside.
“Copyright XXXX by Christine Dalman—dedicated to you know who.”
The Golem puts down the magazine and starts instantly out of the chamber, heading up to the fish’s head again. He makes his way through the cold receding galleries as if a magnet was pulling him forward to the fish’a eye—and, once there, he looks out, but he doesn’t see anything. Turning around, he looks about the small cavity behind the eye, and then notices something flashing on the floor as he moves back and forth—an irregularly shaped spot of dim light, which he saw interrupted by his shadow as he passed back and forth before the eye. He drops to the floor and lays his head in the patch to trace the source of the light—it is coming from a very faint wavering expanse overhead, the surface, it’s moonlight.
It’s time to go. He runs back through the gap across the room and up into the braincase. With effort he forces himself down into the crevasse between the two hemispheres, his body buzzing in the low, gray thrumming force that arcs around him. He thrusts a hasty finger down his throat and disgorges a palmful of formaldehyde, smearing it on his hands; he then thrusts them deep into the walls of tissue on either side of him. The formaldehyde sinks down into the brain cells, darkening and spreading threads of embalmed nerves down into the fish’s spine and along its control centers.
Suddenly, the thrumming abates, or no it doesn’t abate at all but it changes character, because now it’s behind him, and supporting him, like a locomotive pushing a train car, and he feels falling away from him on all sides the massive life of the fish in its cavernous organs and huge slow processes of bones and muscles. He can feel himself hanging suspended in a limitless void of icy black water that seems to move around him, not to be a medium to be moved through, as if he were absolutely still. Above all he can feel a kind of cold outside and a different, more active cold inside—a cold in which is nested a torpid will that vectors through the water. With the sense of turning a vast ship, he directs it to vector him up. Slowly, the fish begins angling its barn-sized head upwards, and he can feel its body creaking and protesting against the lightness of the pressure and the proximity of the dry air overhead. He guides it up and over toward the shore, the dim pilings of the deep-sunk piers of the city coming into view, like a forest of iron bars losing itself in the distance. The mucky slope of the shore comes into view now, and he opens his mouth wide and lets go, and water floods in as he flings himself backwards, down out of the skull and further down through into the gullet and a raging black surging of water gushing out, sluicing him from the gaping jaws of the fish as it backs out of the shallows and turns away, shocked and bewildered. Tumbling end over end he disappears in the water and a current that carries him toward the land.
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