Celebrant

by Cisco, Michael

  Has she been there? (he asks himself)

  Yes! (he answers at once)

  The answer was an experiment, and the rightness he feels in saying it seems to confirm it. If imagining Phryne in Votu seems not simply plausible but emphatically correct, then this alone might be some kind of proof.

  Yearning for her fills deKlend. He longs for her beauty. He runs. Empty space whistles past his ears. Where is she?

  Did she go off? Go off with someone else?

  These are familiar thoughts (deKlend thinks) and I am on familiar ground among them. Instantly, out of dead calm, all the lights go red, the sirens woof and howl, and I brace for loss again. Bracing for another loss seems to be called up like a curse by the power of my longing for her, or any woman.

  Either I’m no good, or I meet only weak women who can’t... (he thinks)

  That might not be the choice (he very faintly thinks)

  That’s the choice (his other voice says in a tone that won’t brook any back talk) Either one or the other or both is the choice and that’s an order.

  (So why do I think it’s not right? (deKlend asks within his other voice))

  Images of her betrayal—betraying what?—pry their way into his mind—he sees her pallid body engulfed in the plumage the cape the rubbery paws the hands the veil of the Bird of Ill Omen, her arms reaching up to encircle the staring, rigid, shrouded head, beneath the unblinking, chilling stare of its dead moon eyes, with punishing close ups of the bliss and abandon on her face. The tip of her tongue licks the edges of black pearl teeth, darkened with ohaguro, she takes her medusa braids in her hands and pulls on them to either side of her head.

  Foolish! (he says to himself) Foolish!

  And I should be thinking of Votu, where they know how to receive pilgrims (he thinks a moment later, hearing these words spoken in his own voice, subdued, in a tone of regret)

  The darkness breathes on him, letting out a long-held breath of bitter cold into his aching eyes, raw lungs, cold air like fumes in his chest and throat—getting inside him until he can feel his frigid skeleton inside him, his muscles shrinking from the touch of the harshly cold bones. Lost to his sight in the darkness ahead, like darkness in darkness, is a head whose grisly jaws gape unhinged and belch the cold—and two dead moon eyes stare above invisible jaws—two black wings with feathers like chips of ice—the veil-wind bitterly caressing deKlend’s living warmth away, to be lost in icy vacancy falling away on all sides.

  She’s not going to warm me up (he thinks)

  Mindlessly pressing on, deKlend, as is his habit while travelling, exhales his sword from his lungs and begins to work it in his hands as he goes, without even looking at it. The air he draws into his lungs to push the sword out is so sharply cold he gasps with pain, it’s like a foretaste of being impaled. The gust snatches at the smoke but his hand finds the blade surely and draws it down into his hands. As he works the metal, the heat from his hands glows up onto his face. He breathes it in, and his lungs seem to hold that heat—his body is so cold the contrast is so intense it’s as if he’d filled his lungs with acid, but there is something fierce and defiant about that sensation. The darkness falters... or something happens. It remains darkness but it doesn’t have the vehement opacity it had a moment ago; now it seems spacious, as though it had relaxed. The sensation of cold relents. The effort to go on is so light deKlend seems to move merely by thought, although this makes it more difficult to know he does move. He has only the sensation in his body to tell him he presses a surface with his feet, transfers his weight from leg to leg, and so presumably goes on.

  No glowing scraps for a while.

  Now there is something to look at and he goes over to it and stops. Looking at it calms him. He blinks away tears.

  It hovers just ahead of him, turning silently in place. A galaxy. The stars are floating in their orbits like fluff on a pond. deKlend finds himself bating his breath—he doesn’t want to breathe on it. A mobile of luminous fog. It turns in silence. In silence?

  Something...

  deKlend cocks his ear toward the galaxy.

  Piano!

  For a few moments he waits, thinking it will open out into something.

  No...

  deKlend looks around. Nothing else to see. No change. He resumes his watch. The galaxy turns. The piano softly plays.

  Maybe I will open out into something (he thinks)

  Yes!

  ...Yes?

  *

  Rain, rain, rain. A pair of portly children eating blue fuzz and drinking pink fizz. A businesslike blonde woman with a bushy ponytail a boney pushytail and wearing from head to toe a tight black suit with a long jacket, like a clergyman, is turning with long strides into the alley between two cubes made of red bricks. The honk of a car horn yanks him gallingly back like a jerk on a leash. Fallen all the way back.

  Groaning with disappointment and homeless fatigue he dashes his hands into his hair, sitting bent over his knees on a bench. A bawling truck clatters past trailing exhaust like stale breath. Exhaust settles on everything in a pasty film. That film seems to interfere with his memory.

  I was going (he thinks unclearly) to Á Un. Toward Á Un.

  To get to Votu. This is not Votu.

  Frenzied emergency vehicles career through the street with incomprehensible impatience. Police car with siren set into the mouth of a baby head, the siren is exactly like the petulant whining of a spoiled child. Is this dignified? If there were as many emergencies as that, the whole town would be nothing but a smoking crater lined with dead criminals.

  Where is she?

  Overhead, the helicopters seem to bear down on him like droning bores.

  She seems to gleam like a phantom planet in a lightless void of her own somewhere. We find each other in the dark (he thinks). The image of her and of her body nearly surfaces in his mind, but, with people rushing past him and the street in front of him like a trough lined with grunting pigs, he doesn’t want to risk dirtying her by mixing her in his mind with all these things he rejects. From somewhere nearby there is a solitary gunshot. No one looks up.

  The blade he pockets in his lungs right away. Its intangible weight inside him makes him feel a little more composed. Relentless noise bashes across his back without ceasing, like the pelting rain.

  Phryne (he says)

  —just as a man passing him brushes deKlend’s mouth with the bulging front pocket of his corduroy trousers, wiping the word from his lips with the sour fabric.

  *

  Later, having taken shelter in a mailbox, deKlend sits staring at his hands. The lid of the box dangles from one hinge, which is fused by rust to the chassis. Rain trickles down on him from the slot. The door to the box lies somewhere nearby, and also admits rain when the wind blows. But the steel at his back and sides makes him feel less exposed to the pedestrians, who are more onerous to him than the rain.

  I just hope none of them hit on this box as a handy receptacle if one of them has to puke (he thinks).

  He can just see the contorted, shadowy face burst into view above him, the mouth opening half-deliberately, the eyes turning round in surprise to see him in there but unable to stop. That’s crediting them with the desire to stop.

  deKlend looks at his hands, glistening with rain.

  Some wizardry this is (he thinks)

  Despite the crazed, incessant whooping of sirens, the continuous stream of low-flying helicopters that rattle the earth, the droning, imbecilic shouts of the huge trucks that choke every street, lane, alley, garden path, he manages to fall fitfully asleep. After his nap in the mailbox, he wakes to find the rain has stopped and it may be nearly sunset. The air is so dingy and brown in any case that it’s hard to tell. Emerging stiffly from the box he is immediately borne along the shoving stream of pedestrians and it takes him some time to extricate himself from it by trying to jump on top of a fire hydrant, missing his footing on the big nut on top and plunging forward, luckily alighting on an open place and then lea
ping onto the top of a low wall and tip-toeing its length, before realizing there is brush and uncultivation on the other side, and jumping down onto that side.

  He is at the outskirts. They seem like only provisional outskirts, in which case you would go through them only to find inskirts again instead of open country. He withdraws his sword and examines it critically. Still a total hash. The outline he had deliberately scalloped in an effort to make a flambeaux just wavers in shallow, excessively thin protrusions like the edges of a potato chip. In places the ends of wire and twig are sticking out of the metal, and there are holes in it.

  I should throw it away (he thinks brokenheartedly)

  In his mind’s eye he watches miserably as his hand tosses it out, the blade landing flat on the waste ground with a muted thump. A chorus of car horns strikes up on the other side of the wall.

  I won’t! (deKlend thinks defiantly, the inner words are harsh and sudden)

  Now, as he looks again through his mind’s eye, he sees how he could fill or smooth the holes, press the twigs and wire ends back in, drop the whole flambeaux idea—fatuous anyway—and rely on strict simplicity. That was the way.

  The horns are still blaring. People are leaning on them, stretching and stretching the noise. A siren abruptly gargles and barks in their midst.

  Shut up! (deKlend cries)

  The words are jerked violently from his lips, and he feels as if he’s made a mistake. One is supposed to suffer in silence, or, judging by the piteous, forced gaiety of the storefront decorations, to be delighted. You should rejoice at being wedged into a passionless poison-breathing cold sardine street-brawl.

  In his mind’s eye, deKlend sees Phryne singing to him, standing very close to him. Her face moves in and out of profile, and a strange light plays only on the park beyond her face as she sings. He longs for her. There really is no one like her. He wants to throw himself on her and feel her Medusa’s coils twining around his head.

  Picking up his feet high, he makes his way through the rubble and away from the fountaining noise. The land opens up in front of him for a short distance and then vanishes under a huge belly of murky brown fog. A wisp of it brushes him and he gets a whiff of it that nearly makes him jackknife at the waist. Tingling shoots up his soft palate into his sinuses and tear ducts, up to his crown, his feet and hands grow numb and his mouth floods with saliva. His nose fills with mucus. He scampers in the other direction, gulping the tepid, porridgey air closer to the town with relish and relief. No going out that way.

  A ruined factory, like a promontory surrounded by scrub land, dwarfs its litter of trampled-looking shacks. Together they resemble a stricken, steel-hulled ocean liner surrounded by its lifeboats. The factory alone looks more like two huge open hands thrust up out of the earth, the smokestacks are its separated fingers.

  The building in between would have been like the cat’s cradle (deKlend thinks)

  A blot of shadow appears in the fog near the roof. It grows in size and opacity, and then a huge black bird cuts its way from the fog with its knife-like wings. Balefully, it gazes about itself. At or near the same moment, there is motion in among the shacks. deKlend watches as the bird, the Bird of Ill Omen, weaves its course in and out among the remaining smokestacks of the factory, as if it had returned, perhaps out of nostalgic feelings, to consult with the site of a past triumph. The building between those two gaunt, handlike walls is broken open. The wall facing the town lies in heaps of tumbled brick, and the roof is torn in half like a sheet of paper, the remaining half canted down at an angle. It’s easy to imagine a massive, gouging claw plunging down through the building, slicing through all its floors, and pulling the wall away.

  Come on my enemy!

  deKlend can see the head of the Bird twitching to and fro, the evil flash of the eye as it turns away. Those eyes seem to find him as the Bird comes around, their touch like a dash of icy seawater. Now the Bird is circling down, settling toward the roof, or perhaps further down, into the building.

  deKlend picks his way through the broad, cluttered street that once led to and from the factory. The shacks to either side are smashed or sagging or both—charred, raw planks, grey and splintery. Rusted metal. And huge blots of tar everywhere, still wet and pungent.

  The factory towers overhead. Most of the wreckage of the fallen wall is gathered in piles now bright green with moss. Entering is only a matter of clambering over a low barricade of tumbled bricks. There’s a penetrating smell of rust and grease, the earthy odor of wetted concrete. Crossing into the dim day confined in the walls, deKlend can feel himself press through a membrane of invisible mesh that quivers stiffly as it seals again behind him.

  His feet scrape the floor, crunching the grit. The air is fresh enough. The space had been split into a great many shops, with rows and rows of small, identical machines in series, most of which still hang like bats from their racks. A glove lies on the ground like a dead mouse. A hat is lying flat on the floor. There’s what’s left of a rifle, rusted to a diseased orange hue, propped against a work table. Now completely beneath the remaining section of the roof, which dangles high above, deKlend wonders if walking on the ocean bottom would feel all that different from this.

  There is (he fancies) the same stillness, and gloom, and oppressive weight, and the fear that something gigantic might explode from out of the darkness like a conjuration of godlike strength and destroy him in a flash.

  Suddenly he is standing exactly where he (unwittingly) wanted to be, immediately before an electrical forge. There is a heap of tools on the steel table to one side, including a stainless hammer and a pair of tongs. These are seized with rust, but with a fierce pincer motion of his hands he breaks the melted joinings and makes them serviceable. The forge is a circular dais made of lustrous blue tinsel, covered in mirror-like scars, attached to a generator. Finding a kerosene can that sloshes when he gives it a shake, deKlend fills the generator tank and turns the key. The generator catches at once. The key leaves a mineral residue on his fingers. The forge sprouts a metal arm with a box on it, and a black knob the shape and size of a rooster’s head on the box. It clicks when turned. A distinct snap comes from the forge, followed by a gratifying hum. The forge looks as though it is standing at attention.

  deKlend waves his hand above the flat top of the forge like someone smoothing a bed sheet, and fine wisps of electricity tremble silently up, and trail in a fringe from his arm. Satisfied, he adjusts the gain and begins heating his blade. It heats smoothly, fizzing with sparks, and he turn aside to work it. The sound of the hammer rings out meditatively through the adamantine darkness of the sea-floor.

  Adrian Slunj:

  Swivelling on his stool, he turns again to face his audience saying

  Now, this song simulates the screams of the tortured.

  His victims are bilious guests, who have overdone it at table and then beached themselves helplessly on the sofas in the parlour. They’re too stupefied and overstuffed to escape, and Adrian is serenading them; far too refined in the art of tormenting others to sing about nauseating things, he chooses instead to sing innocuities in a style carefully calculated to produce gastric distress.

  From his seat at the spinet, Adrian can see the little bureaucrat in the seat nearest the lamp. His eyes keep filming over and snotting at the corners.

  I don’t have those feelings (Adrian thinks smugly) This is my face.

  To his right, what seem like lights behind an egg head with protractor designs etched on it, but only from his eye corners.

  These swiniferous swinifids whose entrails are filled with venomous blonde porridge loll woozily on groaning springs. A pig boasts about his numbness; his idea of heaven is filling the whole landscape with his flabby shapeless entrails, churning with tepid pap.

  Suddenly disgusted—some thought or other is spoiling his satisfaction—Adrian finishes quickly and takes leave of his inert victims. The little bureaucrat is actually still eating. He has small pieces of toast and a butter knife
. With this knife, he is slicing off little slabs of the black gunk that oozes from the corners of the eyes of a sizeable dog sitting beside his chair. The dog’s head dips a little every time the bureaucrat dabs his knife into the pungent stuff. Then he smears a pat of it on the toast and eats it.

  Adrian feels returning upon him again the bitter pessimism of spirit that cuts off expectations, a brown-grey offramp leading to an intersection by the dead grass with a red light that almost never changes. Drifting from room to room at Á Un, he gets into one brief, irritating conversation after another. He has taught himself how to agree with people in a particular tone that makes it seem as though he were only humoring them—it amuses him to watch as they become frustrated without knowing why. But just now his tactics are failing him.

  The feeling of an incipient attack is coming on... a faintly eerie consciousness of his body, his heartbeat, nothing wrong, no, nothing wrong—staring, hushing himself and listening with painstaking attention, breathing through his teeth... his vision is so clear what’s before him seems unreal, the objects, the colors, the light around him, hold their breath and grow more and more vividly intense, refusing to exhale... Every sensation, no matter how fleeting or weak, he seizes on with his complete concentration. He interrogates every impression as it comes over him, indignantly demanding to know how it comes to affect him.

  A feeling now—just now—like a marble, rolling from side to side, in the back of his skull. A bit heavy for a marble. It very slightly depresses a thin layer of soft tissue carpeting the interior of the cranial bones. Now, there’s a disembodied thumb resting against the side of his right foot, just below the ankle—what is the one cause of all these errant symptoms? He listens for the answer as only a devout hypochondriac can listen.

  Adrian does everything with method. The rules are as strict, detailed, copious, and stiff as they are on the assumption that people probably won’t follow them carefully. The excessive scrupulousness of the rules is hyperbolic by design, to insure that people remember that they are bound by rules. It’s like shouting to be understood. The importance of what is shouted won’t be missed, even if its import remains vague. Normally, the only difficulty with this approach arises when people get the regulations which are actually important mixed up with the others, that are essentially all spirit and no letter. However, from time to time someone comes along who, for whatever reason, and at heroically unnecessary cost to himself, upholds the entire body of the rules. How can you hope to explain to such a person that this way of following the rules only puts them in the wrong? For it is vitally important that the existence of phantom rules is never openly acknowledged. Otherwise, the illusion undermined, those rules would vanish, the overall perception of severity would grow weaker, and discipline would correspondingly slacken.