The mother sighs as he returns to her. He drops to his knees and draws her into a cove he makes of his arms and legs. She leans back, stretching across him, then lifts her breast to his mouth. The taste crushes time.
Tiny interruptions in the gleams of polished brass fittings and the mirrors around the axle are little shades riding the creatures of the merry-go-round, waving matchstick arms.
What frightens her is the absence of any music.
The person is straightening up, from doing what? And now, inside the lulling music that sings
merry going round, merry merry going round,
merry going round, now it’s merry going round
she is just beginning to notice another voice—a man’s—singing in unison with hers, faint but discernible words, inside her song,
very far away, very very far away,
very far away, now she’s very far away
deKlend:
deKlend trots down to breakfast the next morning ravenously hungry and eats with excellent appetite. At the table he makes the acquaintance of a couple of specialists. The slightly yellowed woman with the slate grey hair is Dr. Cheepie, who has perfected the Librarian’s Eye, a special gaze meant to make people self-conscious and that does not work on the mentally inert; her husband, Dr. Paper-Clarke, is a herpetologist who can make rain by squinting. The two of them evidently live here, but nevertheless had to be invited like anyone else.
We were away (Dr. Cheepie explains)
But we don’t strictly speaking live here (Dr. Paper-Clarke says)
We frequent here (Dr. Cheepie says)
But we’re gyrovagues, no less than the others! (he says)
There are places (she says) which are more naturally appealing, I suppose, to strangers. I do like coming back here.
Mmm (he says)
Did you enjoy the party?
deKlend smiles enchantingly. He speaks to them so smoothly they can’t hold on to a single word he says, but the more he speaks, the more thoroughly charmed by him they are.
Why don’t you ask Goose Goes Back? (Dr. Cheepie asks)
What a good idea! (Dr. Paper-Clarke says)
This suggestion is made in reference to deKlend’s expression of disappointment, which his apparent modesty forestalls being mistaken for a thwarted sense of entitlement, at not being able to find Votu.
Goose Goes Back... (Dr. Paper-Clarke turns to deKlend) He’s a sarkoform, you know.
Ah, (deKlend says)
You know what is it a sarkoform?
Well, ehm, a sort of... /well, no.
They’re real curiosities, mm. It seems that—sometimes, (Dr. Cheepie waves her fingers over her eggs) no one knows why, a dead soul, awaiting reincarnation, is precipitated into the future. And, while there, this soul—and the body, for that matter—
Mm, yes (Dr. Paper-Clarke puts in)
—gets sort of... ensconced in a robot kind of thing. Yes. Each one is different.
Like an accident (Dr. Paper-Clarke says)
You mean that the soul absentmindedly weasels into a mechanical—into a machine?
Not just the soul—the dead body is always incorporated, not to make a pun.
Yes and you see, (Dr. Paper-Clarke takes up the explaining) the moment a soul has an active body—
And it needn’t be living, only active (Dr. Cheepie interjects)
Yes, right, (he nods, tonguing some food away from his gums along the lower jaw) it is precipitated at once into the present because that’s the only time that activity happens.
Unless, I suppose, it were to remain inactive in the future (Dr. Cheepie says)
Well then it wouldn’t return, (he says) But they persist in the present even if only after a s-single act, until their proper reincarnation, as it were... comes due.
But I just suppose (she says) it’s just a highly improbable accident. The formation of a sarkoform.
Do you ever encounter sarkoforms in formation? (deKlend asks)
How do you mean?
I mean someone who dies in the past and is precipitated into the present, and gets a body here.
Dr. Paper-Clarke nods his head up and down in long strokes.
Yes, yes, those in present form—this is the future from their point of view, right, but those aren’t called sarkoforms, (he holds up a finger) They’re very difficult to detect because they are still in the process of discovering, or even causing their robotic bodies to be assembled—
And they’re known as rerememberers, (Dr. Cheepie puts in quickly)
Rerememberers, yes, (he says, with a miffed flicker)
Breakfast over, they rise and make their way past quietly conversing mirrors to the road.
He’s this way—
Dr. Paper-Clarke is striding ahead of them, turns, walks a few steps backwards as the wind brushes by him, and he points with his left hand swinging out from the elbow. A few strands of his hair flip over the top of his balding head.
As they walk down the road, lined with naked poplars, a faintly sour note creeps in the chill, entranced air. As they draw near the smells begin to condense: the reek of decay—
They are both smiling at him.
It gets far worse (Dr. Paper-Clarke says)
A strong mustardy odor boils over him and he stops as though he’d run into a wall: rotting meat, a bitter-sour iron-and-sulfur smell his body vehemently rejects. They wave him to follow on.
The stink refracts as they continue, deepening like the onset of an oppressive night, now revolting and sweet, now like a pungent cream and the desiccated, caking bitterness of mold. deKlend finds that it’s better to keep advancing—constant change is more endurable than the polluting double-inundation that comes when he stands still. The smells seem to vary in aerial bands. Now here comes the foetor of stagnant marsh, disgustingly insipid.
The cave exhales foully on them, the movement of air is very soft—a rancid smell of dank stone fulgurating underneath the other smells—tainted air licks at his eyes as they enter. Just within the aperture there are a pair of angels carved from stone like frozen blue static; they gaze sadly down from their pedestals.
The caves are actually more like deep crevasses or chimneys; the roof tapers in toward a seam overhead and there are many gaps admitting daylight, but decomposition hangs undisturbed in the clammy air. deKlend finds himself plunged in a funereal extravaganza of black crepe and tulle, wreaths, garlands, silk palls... in scrupulous disarray there are massive stone urns, heaped up slabs, blocks, distempered green bronzes, mottled grey statuary streaked with black and chancred over with lichens, mourning figures, and petrified drapery, a woman grinding out a torch with long hairy flames drooping from its cone.
Bodies of people and animals rot in creches, stone and metal tubs, baskets, and many are carefully arranged on perfect sand dunes or gravel piles that twine around formations of rock like columns of fire, or mountains seen from far off. Goose Goes Back has not simply collected and arranged these dead beings, deKlend understands, he’s husbanded their decay by introducing particular strains of fungus and bacteria so that the bodies are fantastically smeared, stretched, erupted and sculpted, oozing putrescence. Bones droop, twisting free of the softening flesh which runs down in long tarry strands, flattens in congealed placques, or clabbers on the floor in dense curds, liquefied and dribbling from the bones in streaks of white, yellow, orange, pale green, each with their own sickening fragrance. Cow eyes withered to raisins float in eye sockets full of milky fluid laced with brown. A woman’s face is half preserved, the other half bursts into slender auburn and copper cones of fungus with white, cratered puffballs at their bases like a ring of stones around a campfire. Undersea coral shapes of fungus bulge from a donkey’s body, a woman lies on a bed of rats whose bodies have become a single mass of honeycombed fungus, surrounded by the drooping, snowy necks of dead sea birds. Some parts of the bodies are cauterized or treated somehow, notably with a clear lacquering, to prevent their decay, while others have been painted wit
h cultures or injected.
On all sides everything is melting, settling and pulling gently apart. The body of a little child of no clear gender, completely covered with a fine grey-brown pelt of mold that all but visibly eats its way into the flesh. Emerging into a grand gallery lined with glossy mahogany panelling, and the raw rock above it, there is as a centerpiece a ponderous stone fountain covered with platforms, and rotting bodies on the platforms through the holes and around the edges of which drain long, brightly-colored and transparent ribbons of effluence. Small stone bowls collect the drizzles as they fall, coiling into gradually-settling mounds of syrup that give off an intolerable stench.
Many of the remains in here are mummified and have been sculpted the more leathery and rigid they became. There is a ring of shrivelled cats with blistered faces, whose bellies are swollen with great blackish, transparent sacs. There is not, however, a single fly or other living vermin to be seen, not a single worm, or speck of dust.
In response to a noise Dr. Paper-Clarke makes, muffled by a handkerchief clapped in front of the mouth but plainly meant for him, deKlend follows with his eyes the vague indicating gesture of his hand.
A cloudy luminosity has appeared at the end of a stone passage that opens on the far side of the ‘fountain.’ At first it seems like a very large, naked, excessively white man, but the next instant it is completely in the light and it is something deKlend can’t take in—a disembodied, hovering face, a mummy in a blue mandorla, a machine statue with glistening gemlike skin.
It approaches. It is a headless human form with a disproportionately wide trunk torn open directly down the center line from shoulders to waist. The inner cavity is lined with a pale blue padding and cradles a naked mummy sideways. The right shoulder, polished like old ivory, protrudes outwards. Rough, hairy twine binds the limbs in a foetal position. The elbows and wrists are laced together and the hands bracket the jaw from below, the fingers curling up the face like friable old vines. Long, fine, dull black hair covers the scalp. A snakeskin headband is pressed down about its temples. The lips and cheeks are bare shreds, all the teeth show. The neck has flexed the skull away from the chest and it rests on a cushion just a little below where the head of the mechanical body should have been.
The rest of the torso is like supple marble. The brawny, slablike arms and legs are striped, yellow and dark blue. The feet and hands are a transparent, grey-white like the edge of an incisor. It carries its enormous hands folded in front of its midsection. A long, smooth, erect penis, which is attached to an equally streamlined representation of two more or less spherical testicles, sways to and fro with each step like an admonishing finger. He (the gender being thus made obvious) walks with his legs well apart, because there’s a white barrel thrust into his ass. The bottom of this cylinder barely clears the ground.
This is Goose Goes Back, (Dr. Paper-Clarke says, sputtering slightly with the stink)
The being is smoothly coming toward them, around the fountain.
Goose Goes Back, I’d like to introduce deUh—
deKlend (deKlend says absently)
deKlend (Dr. Paper-Clarke says)
deUhdeKlenddeKlend (Goose Goes Back says) I’m delighted to make your acquaintance deKlend.
Having turned aside to pass around the fountain, Goose Goes Back now turns to face them. He must be over seven feet tall, deKlend thinks, lifting his eyes. A steel rod protrudes from the right breast at about the height of deKlend’s head, ending in a fine loop well out and before the body, and in this lorgnette there is the projection of an immaterial face, as tremulous as a soap bubble. The face is animated, and its nondescript features are composed at present in an expression of dreamy, almost mindless, vacancy.
Do you like my exhibits? (Goose Goes Back asks)
The lips of the projected face do not move when he speaks, momentarily reconfusing deKlend.
I—I notice there are no worms, (deKlend says)
Maggots absolutely ruin the meat, (says Goose Goes Back)
The voice is a synthetic baritone, soft and booming at once, that simply appears in the air.
But where on earth do you get the human ones?
I buy them (Goose Goes Back says)
—Nor is the projected face looking at any of them. The eyes are looking down and to the right.
Dr. Cheepie leans in.
Sarkoforms always have all the money they need—how do you think we afford all this?
He gives you money?
Yes!
Dr. Paper-Clarke leans in too.
Yes—doesn’t give it a thought.
Well, and where does that come from?
Who knows? (Dr. Cheepie says with a flourishing shrug)
But a gift horse you know, (Dr. Paper-Clarke says with a leer. Seeing it is unrewarding.)
We’ll be back at the house (Dr. Cheepie says)
They seem to be going.
—Come back whenever you like (Dr. Paper-Clarke calls, one hand up and the other vaguely before the mouth and nose)
They certainly speak as if they owned the house. And can I (deKlend wonders) find my way back on my own?
He smooths his shawls, allowing his hand to slide down his lapels toward his abdomen. The familiar sensation along his palm is soothing. Looking once again at Goose Goes Back, deKlend irrelevantly realizes that the projected face in the lorgnette is a perfect superfluity. It simply looks about itself, the dewy red rosebud mouth altering its shape slightly from time to time. It’s like a baby’s.
He wonders if Dr. Cheepie and Dr. Paper-Clarke have cast him in the role of Andromeda.
Do you kill the animals? (he asks nervously)
I never kill (Goose Goes Back says) I merely find them, or they are brought to me. Manipulating their decomposition I find endlessly fascinating.
Yes (he chokes) Please forgive me—it’s the smell—perhaps you don’t notice?
The smell is essential (Goose Goes Back says) It’s half the effect.
deKlend remarks that, standing within reach of those long arms, he can detect no bad odor, or any other, coming from Goose Goes Back himself.
Goose Goes Back takes up a chair from among a heap of bones—a plain, wooden chair, from a cafe—and sets it down.
Please sit down, deKlend (he says)
Goose Goes Back seems to radiate benevolence and serenity. He moves to and fro with long, gliding, uniform steps, methodically shifting his weight entirely from one foot to the other, without haste.
A dead beaver dangles in his left hand, its limp arms and legs swinging lightly like saddle ornaments.
We may converse, if you wish (he says) You won’t distract me.
Ah (deKlend says)
Suddenly inhaling a bit of extra-bad smell, like an airborne bit of skin off the top of a congealing cup of cocoa, but ripe with a sour piscine revoltingness, deKlend gags and begins coughing with verve.
Goose Goes Back is arranging the beaver on a stone pedestal, his fondling hands glide through the air as he takes up tools and an atomizer spray with a bulb, touching everything with the same tenderness and uncanny care.
Having recovered from his coughing, deKlend sits down on the chair and relaxes a little. From here, his interlocutor is an expanse of kneaded white back over which the black crown of the mummy’s head can be seen, a deep blue dimple where the spine is, and the pensive buttocks almost horizontally distended around the barrel.
Goose Goes Back—
Yes?
—is a curious name.
Yes.
What sort of... eh, name is it?
It is my bardo name. I saw a goose come out of the water. Of a pond. And return to it immediately. Perhaps ‘Goose Goes Back’ were the first words that occurred to me. They might have been.
Do you remember anything about your past life?
No.
Nothing at all?
I have forgotten it all.
Was your name Goose Goes Back then, do you think?
(silence)
Do you remember... taking this form?
Yes! Yes!
What was it like?
It was light breaking in on vast oceanic darkness, and scattering itself into senses, like the light of daybreak endlessly reproduced in the glinting peaks of an infinite number of small waves.
And before? (avidly)
(silence)
Before?
How did you die?
I remember feeling my blood sluicing over my skin. Sickening cold pooled in my body. Then a relaxation that left no part of me untouched, and which permitted me no place within myself to hide. It was exquisite.
Then nothing?
At the time I felt nothing, but when I remember it I remember both standing still and travelling with unconceivable acceleration.
Where were you travelling?
It was the increasing negation of distances.
But don’t you know how you came to be ensconced in that? (deKlend gestures at his back)
I have no idea. I understand my mechanism only very imperfectly.
He realizes that Goose Goes Back evidently saw him pointing to his body without having to turn toward deKlend.
It follows from that (deKlend thinks) he is always turned toward me. It is true; your mouth is blind, your ears are mute, your eyes don’t smell, and your tongue is deaf.
Say—do you know I think I’ve seen another one like you... It was a body I saw dancing without a head, and then, it stood under a huge black ball, which became its head. I was certain—I can’t say why—that there was a dead body in that ball.
Yes! That’s Lyrical.
You know, er—him?
We used to have such wonderful conversations together.
He came here?
Yes, some time ago now, I think. He stopped talking, as far as I know, quite a while ago. It’s been so long, I suppose I believed he’d gone on.
And have you seen others?
I...
Goose Goes Back stops, for a long time. Then he resumes his activities without seeming to have noticed. His manner suggests to deKlend it would not amount to much if he persisted with his last question.
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