The Golum

by Michael Cisco

  She hangs there a moment more. Her face goes slack, placid. Then she flutters her eyelashes. Three tiny fountains of white butterflies sprout from the ground around her hands like gouts of living foam, looping around her in threads until she’s cocooned herself in a cage of flapping wings. She releases the pipe, and then hangs there in her cloud of butterflies. They turn her right side up to the cliffs and carry her inland. Then, what light there is abruptly evaporates, and the butterflies with it. For a moment, she is completely swallowed by a shadow.

  #8.) Graves: She can feel the cool powder of the path like finely sifted flour against her cheek. As she rises and takes a step, graves gape open to either side of the path where she stands, and out of the hazy distance a pair of tombstones come rolling up and plant themselves at the end of each grave. And something besides, hiding behind the stones or in the shadows down in the graves, moving opposite her to keep out of sight, crouched down, but also always aware of her, observing her from only a few feet away. Experimentally, she takes another step. Another pair of graves, another pair of rolling headstones, and possibly two others behind them, hiding. She walks quickly up the path and over the rise ahead, keeping her eyes fixed on the road and ignoring the graves, headstones, and whatever they conceal like a pedestrian storming past a knot of beggars, even as their numbers grow with each step.

  Once over the ridge, she observes her path winding among a vast open landscape of graves, all as alert to her as if she was an actress just appearing after the overture. Nervous, she hesitates a moment before continuing forward, unsure even of what she’s frightened will happen. It is always and only the sense that they’re watching, and hiding. She strains her ears, cocking her head a little forward, thinking perhaps she might be able to hear them shifting about to avoid being seen, but they emit no sound, nor do they ever hide less than perfectly, invisible, but she is positive now that they are there.

  The air is getting oppressively hot and freighted with the smell of fresh dirt from the graves and wisteria, whose vines embrace every stunted tree and every grave marker, growing fat on the fertilized ground. The branches are bloated and luxuriant, waving humid fresh leaves lazily at her and bobbing clusters of purple blossoms overripe with perfume. As she notices the wisteria she can see also a mausoleum sitting on a low hummock. The path brings its front around where she can see—one stacked inside another like Russian dolls, and each made of translucent, rose-colored marble panels that absorb and magnify both the light, turning it a glowing pink, but also concentrating the wisteria aroma into threads of purple smoke, wreathing it around on all sides like ivy, or incense. The doors of all the mausoleums are open, one within the other, and the Golem is hovering in the very center, hanging from the neck. Twisting there, precisely framed by the door, swathed in tissues of pink light, with his grimy coat and dirty, hanging hands, and the team standing to either side of the outer door, holding their plumed heads high and immobile like statues. As he rotates toward her, their eyes meet for a moment. His have been waiting for her with an expression of resignation.

  But he has caught up with her already, she thinks, and has her in the palm of his hand right now. It is only a matter of closing his hand upon her, to capture her, but he hasn’t—and now she realizes he won’t. Even from this great distance he seems to say: “Isn’t that enough? Aren’t you satisfied?” She is tired, and tempted to explain—but then they both would have suffered for nothing. And behind him, the sky is turning pink in a perfect halo behind the mausoleum, causing the whorled, conch-shaped glass ornaments that line its roof to pulse with a violet glow. A sound like hundreds of crickets sawing uniformly back and forth rises all around her from the tombstones, and looking down she can see the graves are all linked together by a network of circular communicating passageways, lit by strings of Christmas lights embedded in the soft walls. She looks up again as the first rays of magenta light patter coldly across her cheeks and brow, dazzling her. The Golem’s face is reduced to a watery gray smear with shining eyes, stretching diagonally as she squints into increasing radiance. Then her heart hardens. When the time comes—soon enough. He is harrowing her; she knew he would.

  When she opens her eyes again, she is standing in a low-ceilinged chamber with cinderblock walls and greasy, oblong windows set high off the stained cement floor. A door covered with rusty sheets of tin hangs open on a concrete courtyard outside. A staircase yawns at her back, and further up—the reports of the Golem’s leg hulking down after her? Without hesitation she strides quickly out the door and starts crossing the courtyard, a building looming up behind her, a brick wall, crumbled to the ground in the far corner, to one side, and cement walls opposite and ahead of her, a staircase leading to street level. Cities full of stairs.

  #9.) Paralysis: Making straight for the stairs, she feels inertia gather numbly in her joints and jacket her limbs in lead. Like a great heavy hand pressing down on her she feels it slowing her, stopping her, freezing her in her tracks, and she is doggedly reaching . . .

  #10.) Darkness: A cold, ruddy darkness closes around her eyes pressing them down into her cheeks, and as it rushes in to meet her Christine reluctantly resorts to an old substitution trick:

  The Golem takes his hands from her eyes and turns her around. Miss Woodwind glares back at him with shining eyes, grinning. Christine is standing at the top of the stairs some distance away.

  He makes to swerve around but Miss Woodwind seizes his arms with a grip like a vice—“Where do you think you’re going?”

  Christine is dwindling back into the shadows.

  The Golem is trying to twist free, but Miss Woodwind matches him move for move.

  ”Go on Christine!” she tosses gaily over her shoulder.

  Christine is gone.

  The Golem takes Miss Woodwind by the arms and tries to wrench her away, but she doesn’t falter, still peering fixedly into his face, grinning gleefully.

  Unable to restrain himself he leans forward and seizes her by her narrow waist. He can hear her throaty chuckle by his right ear, her perfume wafts around his face to his nostrils as he lifts her off the ground and carries her to a corner. Presently, she has him with his head in her lap, sitting in the corner where the wall has crumbled almost to the ground, opening up a view of the park.

  “What a simpleton you are!” she says glaring down at him, running her fingers tenderly across his face, fine copper wires peeling back through the skin at his temples weaving a garland around his head, sprouting tiny brass leaves and clusters of berries—bulbs of glass flickering with minute jets of current. From time to time her fingers brush against the wires and the entire assembly vibrates with a quiet rattle. Oblivious, the Golem merely gazes back up at her with a contented expression, blinking stupidly. She seems to have him.

  Off to one side, he can see a bronze figure standing against the horizon, with his back turned. He lies there, watching it, while she sits warm and dimly visible above him.

  Although she’s been speaking all the time, her voice only now rises to become intelligible. “Where does your power come from?”

  “I don’t have any power.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she tugs one of his forelocks. “I’ve seen you do all sorts of unearthly things.”

  “I never do anything.”

  “You just sail along on your trapeze and your path simply opens before you?”

  “No.”

  “Well then what?”

  “I only make the gestures.”

  “But then who completes them? The Divinity Student?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “He never does anything either—so then, his Divinity?”

  “Our Divinity.”

  “And he passes it along to you?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “And your strength, too?”

  “The papers that fill my body cavity are lighter than your organs.”

  “But your body seems more ponderous, almost too heavy for you to carry.”

  “I
t is denser, for being simpler and more abstract.”

  “So then, when you threw me across the room,” she scrapes a fingernail lightly across his eye, “it was your Divinity reaching down to flick me away, like a fly? Or was it the Divinity Student?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t he tell you anything?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “You’re his agent, he must tell you things!”

  “I’m not an agent like you.”

  Miss Woodwind looks down at him sharply.

  “I know that Griepentrog sent you,” the Golem says.

  “He didn’t—I agreed to go, for reasons of my own, and he offered to help, for reasons of his own!” She is looking dangerously angry.

  “But Griepentrog can’t get down here, while you can. He knew that. He wanted you to come after me, or he wanted you to open the way for him to come down after me, or both.”

  “I’m not an agent because I don’t take orders. He and I have a bargain, with your former employers. And you’ve evaded my question—how do you know what to do?”

  “I’m his machine. I do what I’m supposed to.”

  “How do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

  “I can’t do any different.”

  “How did you get that way?”

  “He made me this way.”

  “Who, the Divinity Student or the Divinity?”

  “Both.”

  “One through the other?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did he make me, too? And everything?” She holds out her hands indicating everything around them. “Everything we can see?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are we all formed according to what we’re supposed to do?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Not the same as you?”

  “No.”

  “Or the Divinity Student—I keep forgetting he made you.”

  “He and I are the same.”

  “Same but different?”

  “Yes.”

  She sneers a little.

  “Only the most trivial difference. We are essentially the same,” he says.

  He can barely see her face. Her mouth is only an irregular darkness; her voice seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  “What makes you different from me, or Christine?”

  “Christine is different from you.” Miss Woodwind ignores him. “Why did he make you different?”

  “He needed a new body.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no reasons.”

  “If his body was falling apart, why didn’t he restore it?—Isn’t it that he can’t restore it? . . . And that he can’t come down here himself?”

  “Everything you say is perfectly true.”

  “You are your Divinity, embodied? He must be a very abject god.”

  “It’s possible—or perhaps he’s abject because I’m abject—he and I—what he and I do affects him as well.”

  “But you do whatever he wants.”

  “Having it done changes things for him.”

  Miss Woodwind is silent a minute. “ . . . But the Divinity Student is all but dead. Why leave him that way? Why not bring him back to life? Why cause you to be made in the first place?”

  “He will be brought back to life again.”

  “Through you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Through this?” She makes a vague gesture, indicating everything.

  “Yes.”

  “Christine is going to be sacrificed to bring him back, isn’t that it?”

  “We will both be sacrificed. We are making our sacrifices right now.”

  “You and she?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “We exhaust ourselves.”

  “And when you are both fully exhausted? You will have sacrificed enough?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “We will be married.”

  “But won’t that be a defeat for her? Isn’t that what she’s trying to avoid?”

  “Christine can’t be defeated.”

  “Then why bother trying?”

  “We will stalemate.”

  “I’ll bet you will!” Miss Woodwind snorts. “—But what would fighting to impasse achieve?”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Why?”

  “Christine is that way, she needs things to be like that.”

  “ . . . Suppose Christine isn’t satisfied? Has it ever occurred to you that she might not want to be sacrificed?”

  “She can’t be defeated, no matter what she does. Whatever sacrifice is asked of her, she’s making it now.”

  “What is she getting in return?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “You mean you don’t know.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But suppose Christine doesn’t help, won’t the Divinity Student be dead forever?”

  “Not forever.”

  Miss Woodwind grumbles for a moment. “Even if he was fully restored to life, won’t he still be mortal? Couldn’t he be killed again?”

  “I suppose he’ll always come back.”

  “And so on and on and nothing more? What good is that?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “Does that mean your Divinity is coming and going like that as well?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Then you’re saying that your Divinity is dying and living all the time.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well what is it that’s killing him—other gods? Nature?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about the Divinity Student, after he is restored, what happens to you, to Christine? Do you die?”

  “No, we will all live.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “That’s hard to say. We will all be in the house he is building for us.”

  “Never mind, that’s far enough. That’s too far.”

  Miss Woodwind pauses a moment and gazes out across the wall to the park. The wind twirls the trees like its petticoats, rushing like waves.

  “ . . . And so he completes your gestures—why don’t you do something for me then?”

  “No, he won’t do it like that. And he doesn’t exactly complete my gestures. The gestures aren’t wholly mine, and the intention is both mine and his. I can’t make anything happen myself, at my whim.”

  She screws up her lips.

  “You’ll get your proof soon enough,” the Golem says.

  “Did he make you say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What proof?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m certain it’s true.”

  “Is your god as ugly as you?” she asks peevishly.

  “Uglier,” he grins back at her.

  Miss Woodwind snorts. “Of course, he would have to be more of everything, wouldn’t he.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” the Golem yawns.

  She sits still peering intently down at him, playing with his hair, caressing his face, murmuring absently to herself with parted lips moist with venom. The Golem continues to return her gaze, dreamily looking around, out over the park. A breeze stirs through his wire wreath, blowing his eyes—Miss Woodwind’s eyes, always probing, follow his gaze—the breeze comes down from the sky and blows his eyes over toward the park. The trees elongate and whirr together like rows of clockworks on stalks ticking down wound springs, so that their branches play out corresponding calligraphies, opening a deeper view. Something is scintillating deep within them, that dapples Miss Woodwind’s face with roving gleams of faint light, blurred by the warmth and softness of her skin, the continual emanation of her perfume. They trickle up and down her face, distracting her, making it difficult for her to concentrate.

  “So . . . ” she says, trying to pull words up out of the stream always wh
ispering between her lips like thin plumes of smoke, “ . . . does your . . . Divinity . . . ever . . . address you?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Does he ever . . . speak to you?” she says more forcibly.

  “Yes and no.”

  “He never gives reasons?”

  “Not what you would call reasons.”

  “Well then—what . . . what does . . . ?” She puts her hand to her head. Tiny lights seep in and out between her fingers and dangle in droplets from her eyelashes.

  “You’re like a horrible machine,” she says, her voice stifled deep in her throat. “The trouble is finding the switch to turn—you—off!” punctuating the last three words by twisting his nose. His eyes are rolling slowly in their sockets, and she peers out into the dark to find what he’s looking at. They circle round to the park again. Caught, she follows his gaze.

  She looks again, against her will, out over the wall. She sees the fountain kaleiding among the trees, and the octopus hovering almost in midair, staring glacially right into her eyes, its own eyes, with their alien, bilobed pupils, icing out continual rays of grainy ocean cold, framed on all sides by clammy boneless flesh, shimmering through delayed colors and patterns, fragments and coagulations along vectors like mirror edges/facets streaking along the planes and curves of her face, like frost-ferns of color and cellular divisions in pattern, dividing and consuming each other, flashing in her flinty eyes and showering sparks down her cheeks to her chin. Her features are going slack she’s muttering, trying to speak to him as he coils upward onto his feet, and she stays seated, unable to follow, her face the axis for a spinning ring of reflected kaleiding. Her eyes flick to gray-gold, mustering her forces, and he knows better than to stay, turning for the last time to face the city and Christine hidden within it.