Celebrant

by Cisco, Michael

  Hallways like passages to dream-tombs, all molded from taffylike lunar plaster.

  It’s not a tomb.

  All this wandering—it must be because it feels good to wander, like dreaming.

  It’s not an asylum.

  Cutting across yards and lanes and gardens, up and down walls, Kunty is on her way to the vegetable plots. Over a blue wall and down into the shadows of the enclosed garden, shadows like chilly, deep spots in a pool.

  They begin with the somnolence of marble statues, as though they’ve been making love for hours. Phryne bares her body without coyness and deftly helps deKlend to undress. He’s in a trance, to see her and see her again and again in exactly overlapping layers, but she can tell he is there, in shadow form inside his trunk. She sees her tiny self reflected in his irises. The two of them combine like two clouds and become colossi.

  In the garden, Kunty’s keen ears have caught the sighs of their lovemaking. She stops to listen as Phryne’s voice climbs the scale.

  Phryne is coming, and as she comes something unfurls from her like a sail expanding up and out, observed by an unclaimed point of view momentarily stationed in the room. The most intense instant of Phryne’s orgasm blossoms in isolation. It levels off there. It stretches. It lifts from her head like a bird casually taking flight, without uncoupling from her. Whatever she is, Phryne is supernal innocence, and pure transparence. The vast, white wall spreads itself there in front of them. Kunty feels her own body wanting to rise, rising on her legs, allowing her head to drop back, her shoulders to pull back. A sympathetic, dark radiance seems to open the back of her head to the free air. Looking through the spreading wall, there is a clearing of marshy soil, black as ink, lined with cypresses and half-melted willows. The climactic note stretches to the clearing from Phryne and shapes itself into a shrine like a nautilus shell. Accreting clear lamina of sound, the shrine becomes more and more solid. Kunty is bending backwards at the waist, her arms hanging down her back, her face turned up to the night sky, eyes open wide and lips slack and parted. Straddling deKlend, Phryne is in the same posture, and all of them are silently braced against Phryne’s high note. The shrine now has slender, flute-like columns, a whorled dome that gleams like porcelain, and a frieze of metal bats that alternate, half of them seemingly in flight, right side up, half appearing to hang, or creep, upside down. The upside down bats keep their heads turned out, the better to show their leering faces.

  That moment takes itself away to somewhere where it can have eternal life, leaving Phryne and deKlend to take the horizontal dive into sleep. Kunty drops backward onto her bottom, so that her chin jostles down onto her chest, and sits there, stunned and blinking. Hair over her face.

  In the shrine, two natural robots are coupling unroariously; it must be anemone, from the booming of the jets, and groper, because there’s no other noise. Groper is silent. And groper is always at it. Perhaps urn and urchin, in some other discreet spot, are have-at-ing each other some more, grinding and boring, and refashioning themselves out of their parts. That leaves troglodyte, always the odd one out, trapped in its cave and bellowing with longing. Kunty woozily rubs her head, then her stomach.

  Burn in broad daylight. All the parts of her body, her arms, legs, floss, trunk, all just happen to be running at the same speed and in the same position down the same street. She jostles the camera, bumping and shoving. It caroms drooling sparks small bubbles and dust-asterisks as she bounds away. The cameraman comes on another camera, furiously dashing his camera to the street, and the image disappears just as he launches himself into the air to trample it under both of his feet.

  Adrian Slunj:

  The coverlet seems to shimmer, as if corpuscles were streaming through it. As if I were seeing atoms or looking through a microscope at the forestry of atoms.

  Adrian lies there, gazing at his hand and forearm. The upraised palm that always reminds him of the smiling face of a little boy or girl. Turn it over, and all the details don’t manage to go together. They just hang in each other’s vicinity. The hand seems like half-melted plastic. The savory pink and peculiar green of so many distinct, overlapping, and half-melted-together tubes. The too-slender forearm he’d always been embarrassed by, the flat wrist with its fletching of dark, coarse hair. From there, what could be more preposterous than a foot that goes on for so long, and so elegantly, only to erupt in unforeseeable disaster? A fringe of visored sausages?!

  He lies with his head hanging backwards off the edge of the bed, trying to get blood up into his brain. We must think! Sleeping in this position would result in a serious crick, a bad compression of the... not lumbar...

  The uppermost vertebrae (he says aloud)

  and feels relief at having come up with an expedient, accurate, if less specific, substitute for the correct anatomical term he should have known, and at having said it without stumbling over his words. He is constantly practicing and repeating phrases. Spending so much time alone, he doesn’t want to lose his skill in speaking. Sometimes, when he stumbles badly or repeatedly over a phrase, he even slaps himself, saying it again and again until it comes out right. He’d rehearsed for weeks before he unveiled that story he’d made up, about giving one of his kidneys to his father. He’d escaped work

  unworthy of me and all my unworth

  His thoughts break apart to form a triangular-with-clouds (of glowing dust rising from the edges) across huge landscape, responding light from the mountains a pattern that can be seen only from a far distance—a naked woman in a dream being molested by an animated suit of grave clothes—cerements, is the beautiful word... I should wear nothing else... I should travel, packed in a casket, pasked in a cacket, and all serenely enamorated in cerements... but these clothes do not hang in space as if they were on an invisible body—this is in the foreground of the enormous pattern

  A woman is talking on a telephone, and says something to someone next to him, who relays it to him:

  “Then Nothing became a pee-nuss.”

  “Oh no,” the woman says, capping the receiver with her hand, “What she said was, ‘Nothing became very nice!’”

  The prodigy has forgotten where he comes from. I am not human or inhuman, only something that should not be found out. I suppose what I should call one of those secrets. If I say, what I am is a secret, I must immediately go on to say that this is a secret kept no less from me than from anyone else, and consequently I can’t say either why this should remain a secret. But I keep that a secret.

  What I conceal is only a sort of way of receiving impressions, and I can’t imagine how the concealment or revelation of something like that could make any difference. Not that that consideration makes any difference. It is plain to me that I become fractionally Martian or Selenite, in a strictly literary way, having nothing to do with generation. Vulgar venereation! There are two varieties of things, those that come into being by generation or mating, and the ones chaos makes. Fear, aversion, and desire with respect to my fellow humans, insofar as I can say with any assurance how human we are. In my case, I must insist that I am entirely without rights. I insist that I must resign myself to everything and defer entirely, but I am not consistent when it comes to insisting on this because I’ve learned how to be an apparition.

  Chaos...! Cerements...! The ones chaos makes would be demons, wouldn’t they be? You can pin them down but you can skip it; other things are self-evident (he thinks) other things announce full bore what they are and blast themselves into the mind seething with reality like crackling immediacy and these are always fakes! But then sometimes the idea comes in, not clearly, but plain just the same, and then you know or give up trying to know.

  Calm, silence, plain, mute, tranquil suspense. Like looking at a painting.

  The command comes as the spell breaks. As if, in returning to myself, I see a few things exposed by that outward extension a moment ago, and then I can see what I was made for. Then the command comes. Like a foretaste of paradise! The command may be arbitrary, but t
hat I and only I would carry it out is not arbitrary. Necessarily, I make it the future. It’s a fate, distinct from duty—even duty for its own sake, although there is a resemblance. But here what has to be done does matter, because it is delivered into the present from the future in this way, by me.

  Adrian rubs his face.

  I live in the antechamber of the palace of my own unhappiness (he moans) I live in an old wreck I can’t believe is mine/me.

  How do you write the autobiography of an illfated life? You’d have to use the “would have been” tense throughout.

  Remember that the so-called ‘goal of life’ is not important at all. Not at all. What matters is a feeling with no name, half smouldering anger and half contentment. I go home to toast their success, not my death. However, since they are no respecters of persons, but only blind strafers...

  In the sun, the back of his hand glistens like snake skin. Exactly like snake skin, and soft veins in relief. White sunlight gradually crosses his shirt, the interlocking threads of which form a pattern that looks just exactly like a different kind of snake skin.

  The Bird of Ill Omen shares out his own luck. It’s luck, plain and simple. It’s only bad luck for those of a contrary nature. Not sharing our nature.

  You see (he says aloud)—he’s generous, that’s all.

  He keeps his teeth shut.

  Getting up, Adrian pauses abruptly, and heads over to the window. He gazes out at clouds sailing over blue steppe. One has a dimple in its side, vaguely resembling an X.

  Adrian points directly at it with a rigid arm.

  He left his stiff, angular mark for me, scratched into the side of that cloud (Adrian thinks) Another sign!

  In Votu:

  Groper is a mechanical textile, woven out of fine, tenacious threads each of which is an independent machine, capable of stiffening or softening, stretching or contracting, expanding or condensing. If it ever were to become inert, groper could be mistaken for a tarpaulin lying crumpled on the ground; but groper never stops moving unless it is confined to a closed room. Its shrine is a collection of microshrines which were in turn assembled into shrinettes, then these into small shrines which combine in the form of a ring to create the complete shrine. A yew maze, built on a grand scale, is inside the ring, and, by closing the outer openings of the maze, the mathetes can keep groper confined indefinitely within its involutions.

  While there are few variables to limit the shapes it can adopt, groper almost always remains the same. It looks like a visible tailored coat being worn by an invisible caterpillar about the size of a pair of rhinos in single file; holding itself in a horseshoe shape, it gathers its many corners into parallel sets of horn-like, conical feet, and perambulates by rippling them. There is no suggestion of a head or tail and no sense organs, but, from a particular, if unmarked, patch on the forward end two huge plumes of cool, incandescent plasma are projected, like an enormous pair of supple, ghostly antlers. These it apparently uses as antennae, to feel its environment. They flit incessantly to and fro, each one in an arc of about 180 degrees on its side of the robot, feeling whatever lies before it and looking a little like two vast piano-playing hands—hence its nickname. These jets are harmless; people who have been brushed by them say they feel like cool, spectral fingers.

  Being, along with anemone, one of the nimbler natural robots, groper gets around. Groper is easy, because it need only engulf its partner in itself, but, owing to its unanatomical properties, the usual exchange of machine parts is not observed. It may happen anyway, without being observed, or it may be that groper is noncommittal as natural robots go, and the consummation is cold.

  For reasons that are not explained, groper is considered by many to be particularly holy, and the practices associated with it more advanced. Groper’s perfect silence may have something to do with it, or it may be that the impression it gives of being blind reminds people of folkloric blind sages.

  In Votu:

  People occasionally make reference to Harbingers of Happiness, folkloric figures who have no story of their own but who consequently are the subjects, at least in part, of a promiscuousity of stories. All of these tales could just as readily have involved someone else with approximately the same characteristics in their place, so the reader or listener comes away with his or her desire to know more about Harbingers unsatisfied. However, they are always described in the same terms and are easily recognized.

  There are two, and there is something about them that makes it impossible not to compare them to a pair of roly-poly bear cubs. They are male, identical twins, dressed in floppy red robes that are not too large for them but just in a very impractical style. White cuffs protrude from the sleeves when these, being extremely long, are grappled up in bunches to expose the stubby hands. They wear black hats that fold back to form a shape like a tall sail, and their bodies and heads are round. One of them is constantly dragging his hand down his face, stretching and mashing the features, while the other drubs the side of his head with the back of his wrist, folding the hand in with his other hand.

  They fly through the air on a spacious couch, whose legs click out like landing gear as they touch down. When people notice—usually as the couch is coming in for a landing—they flock to the spot and gather respectfully in line, coming up one at a time to tell these councillors their problems and concerns. Harbingers of Happiness, perspiring, listen with simpering smiles of encouragement, fanning themselves with enormous heavy red fans and performing their characteristic gestures. Then they dispense advice that sounds convincing enough as they speak, but which always turns out to be completely useless, and fly on.

  That their advice was useless is part of the stories, part of them, and everyone knows it. But people never pass up a chance to see and talk to them when they are heard of again. It may be that their appearance is such an impressive anomaly, and encountering them is such an occasion, portentous and encouraging, if confusing, that, even when it is considered in total isolation from the rest of the celebrant’s life, which is usually a rapid succession of horrible catastrophes, that this caveat about the inutility of their counsel was the one thing about them that proves not to amount to much in practice. Seeing, and, if possible, talking to them, and getting an answer, no matter how bad, is what counts in Votu.

  Pigeon girls, after slaking thirst at one of the many fountains, gather in the shade high off the street. They’re under a sort of free-standing roof, covering a terrace under construction. Burn sits in a corner, her mouth streaked by the water, her light skin striped with soot. While other girls don’t exactly defer to her, she is their leader, and she sits at the extremity of the group. After her victorious fights with Kunty and the Whrounim, and with the addition of Gina, Burn has led pigeon girls into unprecedented prosperity. They are lean, but not hollow-eyed like before, fewer of them go naked, and they seem happier. All of them make a point of touching Burn from time to time, as if to make sure she’s still there. Rabbit girls have come to regard this change of fortune superstitiously, as a sign that favor of some kind has shifted to pigeon girls and given them ascendancy. Burn alternately looks in at the other girls, and then out toward the street.

  Burn is intrigued by mannerisms, the idea that people are distinguished from each other, often from everyone else, by idiosyncrasies in their dress or gestures of speech. Burn often practices this or that affectation, adopting whatever feels natural. It’s important, she learns, that new affectations should not be too obvious or too abruptly adopted. Each should be a touch no one notices, that seems always to have been a part of her, and which would be recognizable as hers at once. Burn actually has almost no mannerisms, but she thinks she has many. Often, when she sees something that looks interesting to her, like a way of gesturing with the hand when trying to persuade someone of something, she will begin to rehearse it, then forget what she’s doing and why but become engrossed in some aspect or other of the movement she’s making. Movement is something it would never occur to her needs ju
stification, or explanation. Not moving seems more weird to Burn.

  A woman is leading a platoon of little children along the street. They are well-fed, well-behaved, well-dressed, well-educated children. The girls wear straw hats with long, broad ribbons, and dark blue smocks.

  Oh, I like those nice hats! (Sandy says)

  Whenever I see them—whenever I see them, they make them sit still (says a tall, pale brown pigeon girl with battered feathers stuck in her black hair) They sit in a class and I look through the window and they’re all sitting still.

  She looks around self-consciously at the girls, looking at her.

  Other pigeon girls have managed to get their hands on a bottle of candy-colored stuff and are passing it around. It’s the thick, strong, honeylike, herb-flavored drink that everyone lays down in autumn to drink in the spring. Burn takes her swig without coughing, making an outraged kind of face though.

  They leave the terrace, walking and drinking.

  The drink makes Burn topheavy. She keeps becoming more levels. It’s bright out but not hot. The relentlessly dazzling sunlight is unbearably intense beauty and seems almost hostile, like a fascinating predator. When she comes across any sizeable shadow, Burn stops and peers into it for a while for relief, like plunging into a pool in the woods. She thinks woods are dotted with dark, still, fresh pools. The day pole-vaults straight up on all sides of her to enormous distances, so she can feel it all around her like a colossal building.

  Burn and Gina are holding hands. Pigeon girls have managed to find her some clothes, and she’s all wrapped up like a mummy in colorful, diaphanous scarves. Now she makes a soft cooing sound that means she wants to sleep. Gina needs a great deal of sleep. As Burn releases her hand, their eyes meet. Gina might always be thinking of something else, or she might be aware only of what is immediately in front of her. She doesn’t come and go.