Celebrant

  Simpering, delicately dipping an elfin spoon into paper-thin cups of gold foil heaped with sugary pink brains, drizzled in clear treacle of aspirin rain. There’s an attitude of sourceless hilarity keeping him awake, a wild giddy feeling that won’t let him sleep. I feel the ghost city creep around me like icy mist... I’m still too sane to go—the ghost planetarium, projecting ghosts into little scenes, rooms, high in the dome. Threads of dead tissue vibrate around from my back to my front, as though I were backing into a web—I stroke one of the discolored stripes—it is puffy and cold.

  The future where all energy is—not waiting, already under way—tremble—a torrent that surges toward you, yet its current draws you forward. Proportionate to your energy, your affectability. No struggling against it. The current draws with its sliding force, and, like an accumulation of sand behind you, draws you up, not with mass, but with momentum. I’d need a special tense, Future-Ancient, to designate what comes from the remote future, meaning it will loyally exist for a long time—as loyal to me as my death. I forgot it again, when I’m not supposed to.

  deKlend spreads his map out on a round table under a hanging lamp and begins filling it in with the places he’s been. Long journeys make for a patchy map. Given the music, which is compelling if not too loud, the jostling and the huge volumes of smoke, the people bumping the lamps, the table, spilling their drinks on the map and staining it, it is extremely difficult to work. But deKlend is seized with the impulse and must work on the map now. The mere thought of delay seems enough to jeopardize the whole thing, whatever it is.

  Why should it be that there would appear to him in the holes in the smoke, where the smoke is thinner, the vision—shockingly clear—of a young girl in dirty leotard running nimbly, foot-before-foot, along the top of a wall? Against the copper of sunset? Who is this little girl anyway? And why her? And why should he feel, immediately on seeing her, if not even a little before he really started seeing her, love for her?

  It’s a sign (he thinks) The girl, and the love, too. Perhaps she is my love, personified. Goddess seems too grand a term to apply to a girl... little girls can’t be goddesses can they? Why does goddess sound grander than god?

  And love what? What do I love? Myself?—Preposterous. But is there sneaking love of myself hidden behind that ‘preposterous’? If I ask myself what I love I want now to say that I love nothing and then to say I love everything.

  Who is this little girl? I’m sure I’ve never seen her before (he thinks) and yet somehow I’m seeing her as if she were familiar.

  deKlend considers rising and crossing over to inspect the smoke more closely, but for one thing he has the feeling that his proximity to it would interfere with it, a little like trying to get up close to an image thrown up on a screen by a projector behind you. For another thing, he can’t see her in the smoke anymore.

  It was far too distinct to have been an illusion (he thinks abstractedly) I might have been there, in the autumn twilight.

  A thrill sizzles through him—

  Was I there? Did I go there, just for a moment?

  There’s no doubt he never ceased to be just where he is.

  The vision was simply so vivid that I was oblivious to everything else (he thinks) Perhaps that little girl is somehow the guide... but I’m forgetting that sensation of love. It was more than just a nice feeling. I specifically loved—there it is again!—loved that particular little girl, as if she were closely related to me. And there was more to it.

  Even if age makes a horrifying wreck out of me, my heart will always be as green a garden for you. What does insistence on the innocence of children say about adulthood? That it is naturally corrupt and wretched, something from which children are protected as long as possible and into which they don’t grow so much as fall. An innocent adult is childish. Finally, you must accept and even embrace corruption. If this makes you feel bad, you redeem yourself by shielding children.

  When I was a child, I did what I already knew was wrong, often just to see what it was like, and what would happen. I wanted to be touched, I wanted to orgasm. I wanted to touch, and to cause orgasm, shape changing in another form. My capering and fidgeting would turn into fits that were neither under nor out of my control. Now I have that ability, traded for those flights of high-vaunting emotion... no, they are less frequent, but they still wrap me in throes of exaltation now and then. Is that luck?

  So was I a corrupt child, or still an innocent one, and what am I now? Namby-pamby half-and-half is no answer at all, adding shadings to everything is just as indiscriminate a way to think as seeing no shade but just the two tones. Neither/nor isn’t better enough—why not just say there’s only innocence? Innocence opening on more innocence on more innocence, on and on like plunging your arms through layers and layers of pink and white tissue paper that rip and dash around you like weightless surf.

  He closes his eyes, and watches it again. The girl expertly slips along the top of the narrow wall, not quite a shadow against the coppery sky. There are high satiny clouds, autumn feeling. No, summer’s end. That other emotion—it was not exactly tragic, there was no foreboding, not sadness. And the girl, like a sunbeam my mind can always make.

  deKlend can still feel it, but it’s elusive, he’s tuning into black radio—

  It felt, perhaps feels, a little like loss, intermingled with a piercing feeling of admiration. I imagine that an old woman might, on her deathbed, have this emotion looking back at herself as a child, or perhaps at a sister she lost at that age. A friend? There is yearning—not exactly for the girl, but for a life.

  To live that way? Lost?

  deKlend looks down again at his map.

  So is all this a waste of time? (his eyes ask the map) All this work? Eh, but it hasn’t been so much work. Certainly, while it has cost me an effort to do it, it wasn’t an effort I much minded making. But if not this, then what?

  No (he thinks decisively)—she appeared to me as I was making this map. That might be a form of warning against relying on a map, but then why not warn me when the map was presented to me?

  Did she? Did I see her then?... No. No, she wasn’t at the party—no children at the party.

  But what warning? And this seems to me to be a matter of showing her to me, not her showing herself.—It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she appeared at this time and no other. I was not in any special frame of mind, to my recollection, just at this moment. Not especially receptive, just now. No, she was confirming for me—that is, she was a confirmation to me, that this approach is the way to her. Because, there can be no doubt about it, she was—is—there.

  deKlend picks up his pen, but, even as he reaches out to join its tip to an interrupted line, he realizes that all this reasoning has drained him. He relaxes his bicep, and his forearm drops onto the table. With a sigh, he caps his pen, elaborately folds up his map and tucks it ruggedly into the inner pocket of his jacket (which bulges with it). Pushing his chair away with the backs of his knees, he stands up and seems enormously tall. He crosses the chamber, the brief flight of steps notwithstanding, in what seem like only a few effortless, wildly elongated strides, and is out under the arcade in no time.

  The arcade snakes along. It’s like walking from one enormous stone pullman car to another.

  As loyal to me as my death (he thinks again) Stupid. I only think I think about death, but those are not really my thoughts. They’re flimsy thoughts. They won’t bear any weight. They don’t have to be convincing, they just have to pass through my head, like the mere word death, and then I can say I’ve thought about it. I mean, that I’ve contemplated it, with fearsome self-discipline.

  I can’t stop dribbling to myself like this. But I’ve known blasts of terror, too, that made me leap up and run for sheer fright at the thought... That’s real, but so what? I wouldn’t call that thinking. What good is thinking—what I would need is to face a death—but then I’d face my own only through grief. I can’t grieve for myself with a straight face!
Is that good, or bad? Isn’t there something bad about that?

  This passage is especially empty, and its remote end seems to dissolve in feathery mist. The barking of a dog somewhere behind him. The shops are all shuttered, most of them for good. He went walking principally to clear his head a little, get his blood moving. While his head does seem to have a renewed interest in paying attention, his body feels a little funny, slightly heavier. Particularly the shoulders. And there’s an odd thing—there’s a band of warmth, like a heated scarf, mantling his shoulders and the back of his neck. He wishes he was out in the open.

  I’d rub my neck (he thinks) but I have to keep a hold on my shawls or they’re liable to spill off my back like moth wings.

  And an odd smell—like fresh perspiration.

  He pats his forehead with his fingertips.

  No, I’m not perspiring. And yet, I’m completely alone (he thinks)

  He turns a little, and there’s a sensation of shifting mass, suspended on two points, resting on his shoulders.

  More barking. deKlend rubs his face again, trying to remember the little girl—how old was she? Ten? I can never tell age. I suppose if I were a father, or had raised younger sisters, I would be better able to estimate by height, or however it’s done.

  Was she a sign, or did love conjure her up to show me what I love? That’s still a sign. Is there any way she could not have been a sign?

  He rolls his shoulders a little, adjusting them. The weight that he surely imagines there, jostles.

  She was a sign—a spirit of Votu! (the idea brightens his face) However far away I may be from its streets and its people, I am not impossibly far away!

  Rounding a corner, he straightens up.

  Ah, that’s better (he thinks parenthetically) That illusion of weight has disappeared as fleetingly as it came on. Face shape, or voice depth, or what—what would be a better index to age than height? I think height must be the most straightforward way to go about estimating age. There is that time, though, when girls become nothing but legs with shoulders attached. Does that make them seem taller, or are they actually taller? Taller than they should be, at that age? But then, if it’s so common as to be remarked by me, a man who has paid almost no attention in his life to children, then it would be, so to speak, factored in to the question of determining height by age—no, age by height. Age by height.

  Tallness.

  Would be a better word. For it.

  In Votu:

  The echoing air of Votu—all sounds in Votu echo, although not always audibly, the level of echo varies. Sometimes it’s so pronounced, like a cloudburst, that it makes it impossible to understand what someone is saying. But heard or unheard, what one says always floats away repeating itself repeating itself repeating itself.

  Burn walks with her hands behind her back—a bird flick against the light like last night’s lightning, just now. Pigeon girls have gone in toward the middle of town, where there are arcades and open streets with market stalls. There are big fragrant pyramids of yuzu and blozu, brown resin, trunks of live sugar eels sloppy with oil, creamy chocolates with opiated centers, quivering platters of sliced sloth nose, stacks of candles made from congealed yak sperm, buckwheat and sorghum in burlap sacks, camphor soap, black beans like smooth river-bottom stones, unbearably foul entelodont cheese in lead foil, the honey-and-maple cakes they sell everywhere, thin flakes of blue tobacco, expensive freshwater fish from the wells beneath the steppe (sold live from sweating brass buckets), morat, ginger nuts, koumiss in clay pots, deep fried cassia scrolls as long as rugs, braided black vine, more morat, brick tea, tubs of pepper specially ground for flavoring wine, rose consommé and jasmine jelly, pillowy blocks of nougat majoun, barrels of yellow-fletched apples and purple pears, a clear liquor distilled from dates called liksketts, all kinds of incense in crumbs and sticks, and bales of throbbing greens. Those greens are so activated they shimmer emerald sheen, like the greenish light deep in spring glades.

  Perched atop seats that have to be scaled with ladders are trumpet and cornet players, wearing all manner of festive and formal dress, who rap out crisp arpeggios to each other in turns, over the heads of the crowd. They help to set the tempo for the people and to register the dignity of the transactions conducted all around them; they also make announcements, when required.

  The market teems with tall angsuigs wrapped in red, jovial borth hamnennoquen selling bolos magic bicycles and spirit duplicators, thivish epenthesists talking clock language, zungon embarrassadors carrying a ten volume set of The History of Rope, ogre angels with teeth filed to points, mnemosems of all descriptions, lascivious free rhombohydracks stalking the thoughtless young teg-hunoags and the severe sfrio girls, stately tripods who wear girdles of glass beads, swaggering bishnoggan, quiet bezemmyaans, harried and efficient hgrumis, wardrobers with their hands taped and hair pulled back, comfortable-looking lightly-dressed soitbeks.

  Pilfery pigeon girls strut out cautiously among the milling people to snatch whatever fragments of life might fall on the ground. Very often they eat what they find on the spot, as this is the best way to put it beyond reach of recovery. Chernu has a bit of something, a little fried bread, and she holds it in her cupped hand, darting her head down at it tugging away bites. Burn is hungry, and almost on cue a blozu rolls irregularly toward her from a turned back, wobbling on its corners. She pounces on it and, with a flutter of her legs, she zips beneath a covered platform to bolt it down in the odd, muted light under there. The day filters in through dull white canvas cover and makes her feel like she’s inside a dim paper lamp. The blozu is a little stiff and underripe, but beautifully juicy and sweet enough. Burn eats it with relish, and hiccups.

  Venturing back out into the open, she spots rabbit girls milling in an elbow of the market. The crowd gives them a wide berth. From here, for some reason, they seem a little larger and brawnier than they should be, and the sun streaks their muscles like gold and silver paint. Sometimes they do this, circling on all fours, more or less in place, raising and lowering their heads. They seem to get into a kind of ecstasy of being overcharged with vitality. Burn is able to find Kunty easily in among them. Her hair is, unusually, pulled back, not hanging over her face. Kunty is not circling but rising and falling with them, crouched majestically at one end of the open space in the midst of them. Burn contemplates her without fear—it’s as if she were seeing Kunty in another world.

  She picks up a trace of halitosis in the air. Then the celestials start whirling down the street, coming from the factory. Something must have dammed them up or unsettled their flow somehow and they’re spilling down the street. On all sides she can hear the quick, quiet bursts of pigeon girls escaping.

  The smell deepens. There’s little reason to be alarmed—the celestials don’t capture people unless ordered to by their minders. But it’s true they aren’t rosebushes in the odor department and they crinkle sinisterly when they brush up against someone. Burn almost idly leaps to the top of a low wall, then down the other side, still wanting to look at Kunty. Struck by something different.

  Instead, she wanders out into a street. Dusty, ablaze with light, and deserted. The buildings are all roughly similar in this part, and they’re either a deep, vibrant crimson, or chalky and blue. They all have sliding steel doors. One of them is ajar.

  Fresh air comes through. The door glides to one side and she has to seize it and hang back with all her weight to keep it from banging.

  Just inside the doorway, there’s a meter machine sealed in thick glass. The light strikes the bottom of its circle in a crescent, then suddenly flops upwards to form an arc, shedding a nimbus of powdered glow that snows down to the bottom again. This is accompanied by a pellety sound.

  Beyond this is a sparkling passage lined with reflections to infinity, where Burn hears a soughing whoosh that surrounds her, shuddering in the fabric of the building. Continuing warily on, she seems to enter a spacious room. There are ranks of long steel wedges lined like crocodile jaws
with small, bright spigots, and from each comes a twirling ribbon of falling water that drops in a straight, unbroken stream past the floor into a deep chute below. The air smells and sounds like falling water. The twinkling blue floor is covered with little tiles. Burn peers in at the water, ranks behind ranks behind ranks, like the threads in a loom, or clear hair skeined and captured by steel combs. These watercombs recede into the glittering depths of the room. Burn watches the elflike play of the water, and nearly yields to the temptation to thrust her arms in between and among its stalks up to her shoulders.

  She goes on. The water makes no mist. For that matter, its freshness is so strong the impression verges on repelling, as if she were too irredeemably dirty. Burn rubs her upper arms.

  Here are tubes, set against the opposite wall. Water drums against the top of the tubes with a harsh, rasping sound, like static. Here a stream of water, arcing down from the mouth of the tube, springs up into the air. It strikes the top of a special chamber with a slap, coils and swings like a rope in a gale, gathering there, upside down.

  Drift into the next room, which is dark from above, like certain rooms in museums. Burn is walking on a mesh of thick silk cables, as smooth as polished ebony, and appearing misleadingly to the eye to be as hard. A silent vortex of water, thousands of liters, majestically rises and falls in a basin sunk level with the floor. It seems to Burn that there is a ball of nothing in the center of the whirlpool, that expands and contracts and trembles with vitality as it wanders through different, similar shapes.

  To the right and some distance from this, there’s a clear glass tank about a foot long with a smooth opening in the bottom. Water swirls up through the hole and fills the tank, not levelly, but in a saddle shape.