Celebrant

  The expression on her face lights it up with such prettiness that deKlend goes over to her.

  What do you need clothes for anyway (she asks softly)

  deKlend wakes with a soft start, as though he’d been nudged. Phryne lies beside him, sleeping.

  A huge black bird clutches the railing and stares at him, more motionless than a statue. He whispers Phryne’s name but she is deeply asleep. The sunlight around the bird looks like smoke from an underwater fire. deKlend gets up. The bird watches him as steadily as if it were painted on the air. deKlend throws on his clothes in a dream and then approaches the balcony.

  He can smell it—something like dust, or incense. The rubbery hands gripping the rail seem almost to throb or rattle without moving. An unwavering, sharklike leer hangs suspended there beneath two lantern eyes as old and mocking as bad luck. The toe of deKlend’s shoe brushes the metal frame of the balcony and it bursts into the air with an explosion of enormous wings that billow around his shoulders. The bird swoops away.

  deKlend follows it with his eyes, still blinking, his hands trembling with adrenaline. Then, quick and nervous, he hurries to the door to the room. He’s half out of it when he stops, brushes his moustache glancing at Phryne, naked and dreaming, he jerks a bit of paper from his pocket, scrawls on it, nightstands it, and then rushes swiftly out and down the stairs.

  *

  Phryne reaches sideways groggily, then sits up. In two blinks, she knows she’s alone. It doesn’t take her long to find this:

  It came here, I go after. Meet me at Á Un think I can find my way back there. Do come—I want to ask you something.—dK

  It’s confusing. There’s a band playing somewhere... in the streets, coming nearer. Phryne pulls on her dress and ambles to the water jug. As she drinks, there, over the rim of the glass, through the window, over the roofs, out on the steppe beyond, she sees him. He is racing nearly directly away from her, and above him... some kind of fluctuation...

  That bird!

  Its shadow sweeps over him as the bird rocks to and fro. deKlend is disappearing, in and out of the bird’s shadow.

  —No...

  When its shadow falls on deKlend, it’s the bird that disappears. Or it feels that way. Phryne looks into time as she looks into space; she lengthens and peers into time. And as those shadows coincide and she sees not two but one figure there she suddenly lights up with realization and bursts out beaming her black smile—

  deKlend! (she shouts, making the walls ring)

  You don’t have to chase it deKlend you idiot!

  She rushes to the window, gaily pitching her voice after him.

  You don’t have to chase it! Don’t you know what you’re going to be?

  She steps out onto the balcony, beaming, and shouting

  Don’t you know you’re going to be the—

  With a sharp crack the balcony gives beneath her weight and breaks loose from the wall. As the water glass spins from her hand the horizon rises up engulfingly like a hood, but it’s being put up over head in the wrong direction, covering her face. There’s nothing around her but the softness of the air. She is stretching out in it like a swimmer.

  Already! (she hears her own half-choked voice)

  She closes her eyes. To shut out the sight of a certain, arbitrary grouping of cobblestones.

  With a crash of cymbals and drums, the band wheels around the corner and into the street. The foremost players jerk back and a ripple goes the length of the procession. Protests and exclamations come up from behind. The leaders set aside their heavy instruments and rush up to the crumpled form, a rush that brings itself up to a walk again, almost a creep, nearly the moment it starts. The raised voices rise and then drop again, just murmuring, wreathing around the figure in the street, smashed and bloody, that sobs once, and then is more motionless than it should be.

  *

  In an embroidered cloth chair at Á Un, deKlend sits idly paging through a magazine. The sky outside is a blank grey screen. He’s waiting for Phryne.

  The house is calm without being quiet. He can hear footsteps, floors creaking, cupboards and doors bumping, little mufflers of speech. From time to time, someone indistinct will cross the room, or pass in the hall. This room is a parlor or something, with a view of the garden.

  Adrian is one of the arrivals. Catching sight of deKlend through the swinging, darkly-lacquered door, he grins fiendishly, slithers into the room, and folds himself into one of the many overstuffed chairs. He sits facing deKlend, who (excellent) does not notice him. Adrian watches his adversary with savory anticipation, rubbing his palms along the arms of the chair until they tingle.

  Aren’t you going to say hello? (he asks, hoping to interrupt and startle)

  deKlend glances up at him without raising his eyelids.

  Hm? Oh, yes. Hello, Adrian.

  Nonchalant, eh? (Adrian thinks, becoming more cinematic every moment) All the better!

  Such a fine day, to stay cooped up indoors (he says, smiling without separating his bottle-colored teeth)... Are you, meeting someone here?

  Hm (deKlend says)

  Perhaps you want to make arrangements? (Adrian asks artfully (he thinks))

  deKlend flips pages, not reading, not listening.

  Adrian quickly surveys everything and decides the moment is sufficiently right to stage his scene.

  Oh hadn’t you heard?

  deKlend is in the act of getting up and he doesn’t seem to hear.

  Phryne fell off her balcony (Adrian rushes) It—

  deKlend is crossing the room, walking toward the hall.

  —was such a shock!

  Adrian gets up. He won’t let this moment go. Taking deKlend gently by the elbow, making deKlend’s head turn, he says

  Old man can’t you understand I’m telling you the woman is dead?

  deKlend waves him off, disentangling his elbow.

  Yes, yes, go on talking (deKlend says, betraying at most a passing irritation, like a man who has gotten up the initiative to do something and hits a snag that, while it detains him only for an instant, less than an instant, irksomely deflates him just a little)

  deKlend pulls away and heads for the outer door.

  I’m telling you (Adrian whines) Phryne is dead!

  deKlend sighs, without a glance back. There isn’t much of the hall left between him and the door, and his sigh resounds in that space like the low boom of a wooden lung. He reaches the door and opens it. Going through, he pauses in a gush of pale sunlight, looking back.

  That was in rather bad taste Adrian (he says flatly)

  The door shuts.

  deKlend leaves the brick path and sits on the bench beneath the oak tree. Wind frails the leaves around him. Cold air, a little wood smoke, the bitter odor of dead leaves.

  Why do they always quit? (he thinks) I may go, but they are the ones who quit. I always mean to come back.

  I knew she wouldn’t come. Even as I scribbled my note, I knew she wouldn’t come. She might not have come simply because she would think it was more beautiful to leave things hanging. That suspense was more... beautiful, or calculated to preserve the intrigue? I was making a gesture. It meant, if we don’t see each other again, it will be by your decision, and as you want it. Because I don’t want it, don’t want to don’t-see-again. I admit, I tried to lure her with that asking. It was a ruse I was going to play on myself—a bluff, I mean, or a dare. To go through with it if she came. I would have, too. Even if meeting her again would wildly dislocate me.

  He looks around for her, on the off chance. If she were suddenly to appear, he would fling herself joyously at her feet. He would bask in her presence. It would be shameful.

  Maybe she had already made up her mind that was going to be our last night together. Maybe she—was that her?—already has someone else. Or always did.

  He thinks sadly of how she smiled at him last night.

  Now she’s somewhere out in the world (he thinks) I hope she’s happy, wherever she
’s gone.

  (This altruistic thought is a kind of consolation, and it doesn’t seem to cost anyone anything. Finding no kindness in the world, you produce a little, and in certain lights this satisfies.)

  Her happiness is a beautiful thing. The world would be less without her happiness in it. It’s a crime even to imagine doing without something as indispensable as that. What idiocy.

  He falls asleep, and dreams.

  Adrian keeps going back to the window, not quite fuming. It takes some time before he realizes the black spot there under the oak tree is deKlend, but then his form is clear. Sleeping, with his head propped on one hand.

  Adrian turns and a shock rivets him in place, as if he’d brushed a live wire, because deKlend is coming into the room. With a whirr, the grandfather clock on the wall begins to unwind, and the chimes ripple from behind the face. Adrian wrenches his head toward the window. deKlend is sleeping in the garden. Snap it back—deKlend is coolly walking toward him holding it, his face not quite blank.

  He can do it! (Adrian thinks, his body breaking out in splashes of cold)

  deKlend takes a swift step forward raising the sword sideways in both his hands, as if to bar Adrian’s way, right hand high, left hand low. There’s some kind of marker in the fingers of the right hand, and deKlend, virtually in the same instant, marks the air up by Adrian’s head, with a figure resembling a number. The moment he writes it, deKlend pivots the sword downward and to the side, moving like a fencer but without the slightest indication of any attack, and writes a similar thing in the air down by Adrian’s left calf. This one incorporates what could be a quick sketch of an arc with an indicated length. There’s a tiny circle next to one of the numerical inscribings.

  Adrian stares at the thing up by his head. It’s red, and looks like it was made with a lipstick or grease pencil. There’s a terrible flatness to space just there, where it is, and where the other is.

  Sweat bursts out all over him and his skin is grabbed up in gooseflesh—the little red marks seem to pucker space in a way he can’t see, but he can feel, like a weird little pulling feeling. His tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth and his mind is blank, won’t start. The chimes of the clock are going on—they haven’t even started to toll the hour yet, it’s still nattering on that monotonous, never-ending, never-resolving melody, false melody. A melody needs method if it’s going to be recognized as one, as one what, as a melody old man—deKlend swings his sword and moves all around Adrian like a tailor marking a suit with chalk; his face has no more particular an expression on it than if he were closing up a packing crate.

  Now Adrian’s fear erupts, and he recoils from deKlend with a yipe of fright. His shoulder and hip bang hard against what ought to be empty air, and hum with pain. Hard as a diamond wall, and yet it felt like hitting the ram in front of the wind. Adrian starts to run, but he’s running in place—he can only run in place—in the invisible nautilus shell that deKlend is writing in the air around him, and as he runs, he shrinks. When he has to look up to the see the arm of the chair he had been sitting in, when he sees deKlend towering over him—towering, but also so far away—he panics and tries to retrace his steps. The nautilus doesn’t allow it. Every step takes him away. He can’t stop running. The world is soaring all around him—he recognizes these new surroundings but only after a while, and what seem like hours of running, while the chimes of the clock just will not stop, another, and another, and another... the corridors of the sky—that’s where he is.

  deKlend’s head lifts again like the prow of a ship roll out of a sleepwave

  —what color is that?

  He’s looking at a plant with fresh, red leaves. A lance of sun through the clouds, which have crumpled in the meantime, is lighting those leaves and they glow like—

  I can’t think of the name... is it vermillion? Violet no. Vermillion? Just purple? I need a softer word. Those leaves are like baby’s hair.

  Back to myself (he rubs the middle of his forehead with the tips of his fingers) so if my self is a necessary illusion, and I can’t say with assurance that it is necessary, but if it is, then how is it an illusion? What’s necessary is real, or?

  And? (he thinks dully)

  Get up?

  And then she could have been anyone, I keep forgetting that.

  Come while I was sleeping?

  The thought breaks him out of the drowsy mist and his surroundings sharpen.

  She isn’t here. I can feel that (he thinks) I would know that. She wouldn’t have put on Adrian. It wouldn’t have been like her, she wouldn’t even be seen in the same place with him. But how be seen? Or do they put one over on me, and are they frolicking together in one of those high rooms? For all I know (he thinks morosely) she could be this bench here. I don’t believe that. I just said—thought—it to feel poor devilish. She would have left me some sign, to tease me. If she’d seen me. Did she really come and go—there’s that other sarkoform!

  He sits up.

  She would—or could she? Even with no head?

  It’s frolicking along the other side of the hedge now, off to his right. He can see its headless neck, the collar, shoulders, jostling up and down, now and then an upflung hand.

  It sails clear over the garden in a single vault. deKlend leaps after it as easily without a thought.

  The headless thing is gambolling down the tree-lined road. deKlend is only barely keeping up with it, although it isn’t so much its speed as its stride that he can’t match. If he ran all out, he’d leave it behind. Instead he has to keep it carefully in front of him as it crashes through the flashes under the trees to and fro criss-crossing the road and gesturing too snappily for the eye to follow. Shimmying its shoulders and rocking its neck, which ends in something like a wall socket. There are slots dimpled into cream-colored, smoothly-polished material—

  now, looking at the neck—and the more closely he looks at the figure alone the more the scene beyond it throbs with black pulsations of gravity—the sarkoform—what did Goose Goes Back call this one?—there’s a familiar-looking constellation hovering steadily just above the neck, very small—the stars are the gentle carmine color of those feathery leaves back in the garden, or close enough—I can’t remember the name of the constellation either—nearly transparent, small enough to hold in my hand. What would happen if I tried to grab it? Would it burn a constellation pattern indelibly into my hand? Burn through my hand and leave permanent holes? I could hold up my hand to the light and see the constellation any time I wanted—

  Lyrical—that’s the name—is modifying gravity from one moment to the next in complicated improvisations weaving it just masterfully into aleatory patterns. That constellation. Damn what was it called? Who called it?

  There’s the city, steaming off bruisecolored clouds! It could be Votu, city streets free to the wind, from here—the smoke or steam or smoke is transparent when it emerges. I see indigo clots, bloodclots of dusk, gorgeous blue twilight on graffiti flour brick walls; they show their orange teeth incandescently grinning out of the sky like jack o lanterns!

  —a harsh, nasal voice on the loudspeaker and gobs and viscous strands of ink rise on an invisible, gelatinous updraft coming out of some dark, flat, tapering shape, while I tell myself I have to escape the assistant. That rattling voice seems to accompany the headless dancer I follow.

  This is not a corridor of a mental institution. How could I be running as swiftly as this in the confines of a corridor in a mental institution? The institutions are illusory. And such bad, sloven illusions at that.

  Now look at this dancing, headless body, that leaps so gracefully, back and forth across the road like a gazelle. Where would an institution come up with something like that, precise and elegant? Would the streets rise up so gradually around me, like a gathering fog? Would I be smelling freshly-washed trees, the pure wind, the little seasoning of smoke mixed into it, the moist earth? Would I be hearing those reed horns and drums?

  There is a hallucination here,
belonging to deKlend but not at all perceived by him. That would be me. Re-mem-ber.

  A big woman is rolling majestically down the street eating candies from a white paper bag. I’m held hostage even inside my own outlines, so bound up in them that I can’t even begin to call upon her for help. Instead I am going down like down to sleep.

  Watch swirling colored threads. They will begin to flicker to the music, rapidly, in patches with irregular shapes. There’s a low piano like gongs forming a T of colorless beams (could be a little blue, like water) and there, just past the intersection where the blue starts to come in, is a kiss from long ago. Your lips are soft and slick like ice. A tender kiss, just a little on the cool side, bland lips, smooth as this grey is bland, and even this intersection.

  It was a dream, but, if you look on the back cover of this book, you won’t see anything like “so-and-so discovered another world and now he is no longer so sure which one is real dot dot dot”—we are so HO far beyond that—

  Looking a little closer at the question (is it real?) I begin to notice the dingy, washed-out coloring, dust clots mouse turds and cobwebs and the general atmosphere of rundownism—what if anything has it got to do with real magic powers? Oh yes say more; why should saying speeches editorials my words to myself make any difference one way or another? Not expressing something unknown to me but playing an instrument, a scintillating brain that is chemically changing colors and my choice of words transforms so that my physiology is modified through an infinity of attributes.

  Here’s the thing: the man who spoke to me will be me—that is, while I am never, in the dream, conscious of recognizing him as myself, like it’s me but with these little alterations of dream age-makeup—I feel, in the dream, neither alone nor confronted, but I sense myself in company, with a familial something, or an old boon companion. Anyway he wasn’t me, but I will be him—not a ‘future self’—how can one in the present know what the first number will look like the next time? I can’t show you the difference between the flame of today and the flame of tomorrow... futuristic flames, with all-new styles, all-new fashions. Like the house of tomorrow or the shoe of tomorrow? This isn’t a film. I don’t get the feeling he acts according to a plan. I see no reason to doubt that his surprise and disappointment at my response was unfeigned. He forgot, maybe? Maybe he never remembered it to forget it?—Ah I think I have it again: I will be him, but he, in the dream, is not going to be me. He has already been me, prior to the dream, and is no longer me when the dream begins. So there is no connection. My dream depends on his having ceased to be me, so that my independence depends on him. Depends on his becoming a him and ceasing to be a me. He wouldn’t have recognized me any more than I did him, but he showed me what he did because he felt the same ambivalent familiarity with me. I wonder if he is running through this now in his mind, if he has one? Or is this now in his past, so he did run it through his mind, one of them—does that matter? Why run through it again, when he is doing it now, as me?