Celebrant

by Cisco, Michael

  There are clearings in the avalanche and once inside one it occurs to him, for the all-too-brief moment before his irresistible momentum propels him out of it again, that his head has reversed and is oscillating drastically through two inflated phases of gravitational and anti-gravitational radiation.

  deKlend raises his eyes to the sun that whirls just in front of him, filling his vision with an ocean of red muscles and gold smoke, vividly creased with black folds. There’s a big, starfish-like scab corkscrewing itself up toward the equator. And it roars like a lion, like a lion’s lion!

  Now what? (he wonders)

  deKlend feels himself being drawn into the corona, toward the blind, colossal bulb of the lightless sun. Initiation power, still too new to have discernible characteristics, is blasting from it. Not heat, not light, not even intensity, nothing but pure awe—wind without pressure, a shout of vacuum. He is all tangled in it without being consumed, while the ruins are going berserk.

  No, the weird motion he can sense going on all around him is the unfolding and resettling of the factory which is opening like a budding sprig of leaves. Massive pipes and hoses rear up like monster lampreys and rivet their mouths to the flanks of enormous collecting tanks, the machines and the walls leap up into place again and, as the space is rebuilding, the sun and deKlend with it are becoming smaller and smaller.

  In another clearing he sees a little vignette, a complete scene, viewed from a high balcony or a window... A strange young girl, maybe eleven years old. It’s so difficult to tell age even under ideal circumstances let alone these antinomial ones. A mop of bushy brown hair, dark brown skin, dirty. Wearing a dress whose skirts are slashed into long tatters. Thick russet fur on the fronts of her legs—dense muscles upholster her bare limbs, contracting as she tries again and again to step from the top of a box onto a high threshold.—Looking up (do you love me too?)—a little fillip of wind from the ground past the threshold, an updraft carries to him a trace of Phryne’s scent—

  Phryne! (one of his party thinks or calls, looking at the girl)

  He dives toward the vignette. He is struggling to get to the day, the street he knows must be in Votu, Phryne. deKlend reaches out with his two-handled sword blade and tries to hook the fringe of the vignette, hand outflung

  In Votu:

  It’s as if a long feather had crossed her bare back, through her dress. A gust of breath escapes from her nose in surprise. Kunty jerks, twisting her waist, and the stabbing pain of a sword wound seems to pierce her for just a moment there at the hinge. It’s like a hand had just brushed her out of a painting she’d happened to be living in just at the moment. The boxes, the wall, the sky, and so on, continue on all sides as before, except they’ve stopped seeming familiar.

  Kunty shakes her head. She can’t hear.

  The sky goes dark.

  The sun is still there, but it isn’t giving off any light. Not itself. Although it’s daylight all around her. The sun is black, glistening, and nearly transparent, like a mare’s eye.

  Now she sees a man’s well-kept hand waving ethereally in space near to her. Kunty snarls and lashes out at it with her nails, trying to wave this apparition away. She connects, and falls headlong.

  —A change of air, a rush of new smells, but the light has to catch up to her eyes, and that is happening, or will.

  Phryne takes from her bosom a tassel from one of deKlend’s shawls, a memento amore he’d presented to her. Holding it firmly she begins to search for his simultaneity wherever it is. The link is firm. She finds him almost at once. The floor jolts like the deck of a grounding ship and nearly throws her off her feet. Before her is the balcony. She steps out. The sun’s light disappears from the sky, though not from the ground. She can see herself, the buildings and landscape no differently, but the sky is full of stars and, at the zenith, a sun with no light. It’s a black, emberlike globe, with crimson fires spinning in its crevices. Throwing off dark flares it seems to snort and plunge like a crazed horse trying to kick its way out of its stall.

  Now horizontal and vertical momentarily change places and the sun seems like an approachable object lying on the floor just ahead of her.

  He must be there (she thinks) What would he be doing there?

  She opens her lips to call to him and then turns, her drawn breath bursting from her mouth in a scream of intense surprise that is also a brilliant coruscation of light in a beam from her jaws. In that light she sees deKlend swoop toward her—they streak from the spot across the landscape under a sun with no light. deKlend runs, carrying Phryne in the form of a radiant image that mantles his shoulders and skates all over his back in dense gleams, like an enchanted shawl made of material cut from every sun.

  deKlend:

  deKlend swims like a frog through the air, making diamonds with his arms and legs, trying to get down toward the floor. He’s not having much success.

  Phryne had been there, in a lightning flash (he thinks) It’s like a bedroom farce, with all this chasing and just-missing.

  The sun rolls so near he could probably touch its lethal fire without putting himself to too much trouble; he watches carefully for the silent whips of its flares. The factory storms with an unavoidable swerve—a flare clips him square in the head.

  In the split second before it touches him, deKlend has time to be disappointed.

  Then, with the increasing crackle of a kindling limelight his brain rings with a sustained, piercing chime and rays of sunlight explode from all the many holes in his head.

  ...Wandering in what is it—a boathouse or something, an estate in the countryside? Late afternoon light. Dusk starts soon.

  She is wearing a light, cotton, summer dress with lace on it, that’s all. And it’s clean.

  And look how tall I am!

  A male voice calls, jolting her.

  Inside me—who is it? (she thinks)

  /Phryn/dri/, (the voice says weirdly) where have you gone?

  Who’s there? (she thinks)

  I’m here! Who are you?! (she thinks)

  Who am I?? (she thinks)

  I’m Kunty! (she says to herself)

  She hates that man. But something else too, she wants—wants—She can’t see him... But her? Is she here, too?

  Kunty! (she thinks, a shock riffling through her) I haven’t been called that since...

  (She trails off)

  I’m Kunty! Just Kunty! (another she thinks)

  She puts her hand to her forehead.

  What’s going on? (she asks herself) It’s like I’m going back to being a child again—

  Who are you? (she thinks, the younger voice) What is it?

  That stubbornness and hardness—I’d forgotten how strong...

  She looks down in astonishment, not at her dress but at the body that fills it. She raises her two hands and glares at them—the nails are still hard and sharp, but they are clean and trimmed. Far too short! She reaches to her head—her ears are still long, though not as long. They had never been all that long, but now they’re less long!

  Rushing to the water’s edge she leans over and sees her shadowy reflection. A grown woman’s face. The same prominent incisors, though less prominent. The same thick, kinky hair, though combed and pulled up. Reaching up she tears out the thing that holds it up so that it collapses around her face and hides it. She rips her dress clean in two, balls it up and furiously throws it far out over the water. Tits! Turning them this way and that, she examines her arms and legs. Still hairy, but less hairy, and hair in between. Her toenails are clean and trimmed. Her body is still strong—she looks sharply and critically at herself, slaps her stomach, her bottom.

  Soft! (she thinks, with fright)

  She crouches and pain lashes across her lower back like a whip. The hinge is stuck!

  Stuck solid!

  She snaps her pelvis trying to loosen it but the pain is so bad it makes her cry out.

  —Did he hear that?

  She starts up, covering herself with her hands
in alarm.

  She’d forgotten about him.

  Completely confused, she dashes into the dim little... what? House. Boat house.

  I’m going back (she thinks). Do I want to? Did I? Why now?

  That voice calls from not too far at all away and her flesh grabs up in goose pimples.

  He’s near!

  /It’s me, /Phryn/dri/ (the voice says)

  The sound is released into the air, like letting a big rock drop from your hand. It’s two-in-one, calling two names in one. One call is smiling and presumes an intimate claim on her. The other is urgent, and filled with longing.

  Who was that woman? Why do I remember her now?

  A blonde Medusa in a white dress. When did she see her? She used to fantasize about being fucked by her.

  Through the hiatus, he enters that day. The day is bound up in the locale and closely identical to it: the park at the country house. The kind of house that has a storied name.

  deKlend stands in a great quiet of light and trees. The air doesn’t stir. It remains, without coming or going. There is a wide earth path in front of him, which curves eerily away from him in an S shape. There’s no obstacle it swerves to avoid by being given that shape. The trees are spatters of dark colors, scattered throughout great depth. If there is any wind, any birdsong, any sound, they repel it. The trees, the path, and now, as he advances, the dull water he sees twinkling in the pond, a small lake, bate their breath.

  A portentous event happened, or will happen, here.

  It is going on, now.

  A fitful, ghostly momentum gathers itself around him, mostly from behind.

  Someone else (he thinks)

  He walks along the path, going in the water’s direction. His steps create minute disruptions in the faint hum of the absence of louder sounds.

  He feels as if he’s been alerted, both sharply and dreamily. A cloud of midges is tumbling over a blot of mire there where the pond’s edge wrinkles, forming a spot of ruby slime.

  Phryne (he suspects) She would be close to this water if she were here.

  —She isn’t here.

  She is here. Aren’t I looking for her?

  He calls to her.

  Light on water. Light on leaves.

  He is not all there, not incomplete.

  And everything else here is the same, down to the leaves, shiny with wax. The sky over the pond is a uniform white haze. The air is tepid. The water is blank.

  His gaze falls on the fragments of a white dress that the water holds. A dimple, like cupped hands, holds them up.

  I sounded like—unlike—unlike myself, I mean of course (he thinks) The air used my voice as an occasion to use its own voice, or something in the air. Something in ‘intheair.’

  There is an envelope, like a hibernating spirit. It is the physical, the somatic experience of following the orders of fate (he thinks)

  That’s plainly the meaning of all this ominousness.

  A woman’s voice.

  A woman’s muffled voice.

  She’s near. Did she call? Did he hear? Calling him?

  Again he dispatches his weird voice, and the stillness absorbs it at once. But then, wasn’t there something in the way it went that wouldn’t have been ‘there’ if it hadn’t been heard? The thought of Phryne now uncorks and gushes back into him. Until now his desire for her had been subdued, almost drugged, and now it throws off its stupor fiercely and springs to life again, pressing him to find her. It unmasks itself as the reason for his investigation. The soupy smell of the pond, the peppery smell of hot bark, the low whine of insects, the incandescence, become instantly exciting. Like revealing garments frame and set her, and hide her. Her wide hips, her flexible waist—her face pressed close. With a jerk he turns his head again toward the fragments of white on the pond.

  He looks at the pier along the water, and the small boathouse. And the acridly-spiced pang of desire, dark heat.

  A woman’s sharp breathing—the hollow boom it makes inside the small house—

  The film she’d known with Gina thickens in her mind, confusing her because why should it be happening now? A woman becoming excited. Is she here? Kunty, who has never seen the ocean, rises on waves. Rabbit girls don’t think about nakedness—how can they, when most have at best only a few rags to cover themselves with? But now she is excited and exposed, standing with nothing but her arms around herself in the shadows of the little house. There are no doors in the doorways, and the small windows are he flashes in the window and she starts—

  —the white elbow of his jacket just there a moment in the window. It’s a game. Hide and seek. The reward is special. In any—

  —!—

  —moment now the world and life will telescope inside themselves to become commensurate with two who are not all then, not waiting then, and anytime but then, the subtle replacement that happens when—

  She doesn’t trip. She deliberately drops straight down onto her knees and flexes her back, and hands seize her waist and slide over her hips, she feels him kneeling behind her, the small hairs, for example, on his thighs against the backs of her own legs. He plunges hugely into her and his body folds over hers, one arm across her chest and the other, the right, pressed along her abdomen using his hand not just to open her up.

  there’s a tiny, pale greenish light winking on and off outside the door, it goes floating by

  alarming laughter—as if she’s gone insane—because she can feel her division, a voice shouts angrily wilder, fiercer, angrier, calling to him to attack her harder.

  At the moment of conception, she claws the floor, throws herself onto her back and pounds the ground with the back of her head and shoulders, raking the air with her claws. Her legs grip the air between them in a vice and she hammers at that air, locked in her frothing sex until the air cracks—

  Stop: crystalline darkness. The clear black outside of light. There’s a backward withdrawal into the vacuum the past draws with it, bearing along an additional spark of disembodied pregnancy that it will be up to time and space to nurture.

  The horizon keeps coming loose and approaching swiftly—

  In her dream, Phryne is in “a palace in the old country” although she’s never been to any, not even to visit. She is a phantom observer actually perched on the shoulders of a statue of Psyche. There are a number of men in the room who have, she “understands,” been gathered here, at this palace outside the city, for a certain purpose, by Y, the lady of the house. They’ve just had an exquisite meal. Y has vanished. The men have tucked cigars beneath their grand, silky moustaches. They are virile in the moustache-tobacco-raki way she imagined her great-grandfather’s generation had been.

  Y’s assistant, A, enters the room. She is a tall, statuesque woman with lustrous dark hair hanging straight to the small of her back. Her dress, which is not quite sheer, and belted around her slender waist, is satin of such a dark purple it seems black. The plain ribbon around her throat is the same color and material.

  “Now it’s time to announce the game,” she says, smiling, and holding her hands out from her waist. “It’s hide and seek.”

  A goes over to a high chair, turned toward the fireplace, in which Y had been sitting earlier. She turns the chair to face them. Y’s black dress is draped carefully over the chair.

  “As some of you may have noticed,” A continues, gesturing to the empty dress, “this is the dress Y was wearing earlier. She has removed it and gone naked into the park.”

  A glances at the clock on the mantle.

  “It has now been time enough for her to take up her hiding place. You, assuming you are willing, shall now all go into the park to find her.”

  She pauses, looking from one face to another until she has acknowledged everyone present.

  “Whoever finds her, may do as he pleases.”

  Taking it from the clip that attaches it to her belt, A raises a small device with a few little buttons on it and, folding her thumb, presses one of these buttons. A gon
g sounds from an upper floor, or perhaps the attic.

  “That gong is audible throughout the park. From the moment I release you to begin your search, you shall have just twenty minutes in which to find your... quarry.”

  She smiles at the word.

  “At precisely the end of the twentieth minute, I again shall sound the gong, and you all must return to the house immediately. Anyone who does not respond at once to the gong will no longer be welcome here. Our demonstration of earlier today should have made it plain to everyone that we will always be aware of whatever you may do in the park, whether or not you believe yourself at that moment to be under observation. So do not fail to turn back at once when you hear the gong.

  “However, there is an exception. Should one of you find Y, you may ignore the gong and return to the house...”

  She spreads her hands.

  “...when you like. I shall now lead you out to the terrace, which is the place from which you must start, but, before I do, Y has instructed me to inform you that, should any one of you find her, she forbids you nothing. She wants you to act without the slightest hesitation, without the slightest reservation. Each of you, by her own instruction, must give me your word that, if you find her, you will not leave her until you are entirely and perfectly satisfied.”

  Phryne somehow mysteriously knows the trick: Y is actually hiding in the house, and has posted her ladies-in-waiting in the park. Each man will find one of them and mistake her for Y as the world is plunged in twilight. The folkloric switch-in-the-dark. The point was—possibly—to eliminate all these troublesome suitors by tying them to pregnant ladies, but really the point was the laughter. When the dawn comes, and the men discover unexpected women in their arms.

  Phryne walks through the rooms. The walls are white and sheeted with a blue luster. The night air—at last it’s night!—is cool. The long hallway of milk candy walls and red bean floors, the arched, deep windows, shielded with awnings, open high over a monochrome, walled garden, and Votu past that. There are still a few lamps moving in the streets. After all it is a large house, no palace, clean and bare. Phryne goes not to the end of the hall but to a door there in the innerouter wall and into the room where suddenly she knows deKlend is. deKlend is just coming in. Into the room.