The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  Praise for The Narrator

  “Michael Cisco is of a different kind and league from almost anyone writing today, and The Narrator is Cisco at his startling best.”

  —China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station

  “An extraordinary story of war and the supernatural that combines the creepiness of Alien with the clear-eyed gaze of Full Metal Jacket. Like The Other Side if it included soldiers who could glide over the water, a mysterious tower right out of early David Lynch, and infused with Kafka’s sense of the bizarre. Destined to be a classic.”

  —Jeff VanderMeer, author of the

  Southern Reach trilogy

  “The Narrator is not a subversive fantasy novel. It eliminates all other fantasy novels and starts the genre anew. You must begin your journey here.”

  —Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground

  and Love is the Law

  Lazy Fascist Press

  PO Box 10065

  Portland, OR 97296

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-185-5

  Copyright © 2004, 2015 by Michael Cisco

  Cover Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Revert

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  Printed in the USA.

  Few writers within the realm of nonrealist or “weird” fiction have created more original work than Michael Cisco, who over the course of two decades and several novels, including his critically acclaimed debut, The Divinity Student, has forged a singular path in creating visionary, phantasmagorical settings, uniquely alienated anti-heroes, and genuinely creepy happenings—while also exhibiting a healthy absurdism and dark sense of humor. The work he has created sits comfortably between that of Thomas Ligotti and Caitlin R. Kiernan, compares favorably to that of Thomas Bernhard and, yes, Kafka. In short, he is one of the most interesting writers I’ve encountered in the past 30 years.

  In Michael Cisco’s, the narrator Low is conscripted into an army to fight against the “blackbirds,” who possess lighter-than-air armor. But first, our hero must play a waiting game in a city of cannibal queens and uncanny dead things, with priests for both the living and the dead. The Edak, strange remnants of a mighty imperial power, must be avoided at all costs. Once his unit is mobilized, Low sets off on a journey that is by turns absurd, surreal, deadly, and one of the great feats of the imagination thus far in this century.

  I’ve rarely come across so many instances where I was simultaneously in the moment of the novel but also recognizing that I was encountering images and situations unlike any I’d ever read before. Sleepwalkers that bruise the skin of reality, assailants who skim the surface of the water in armor that’s lighter than air, guns that are not guns, conjurings with unexpected consequences, a huge ship “like a black egg,” refugees from an insane asylum who assemble as soldiers. There are many battle sequences in The Narrator, and they all translate as action without meaning, sometimes so chaotic that even individual action is hard to discern within the movements. As near as is possible in text, Cisco conveys the jerky, roving, incomprehensible experience of men on foot shooting at each other across broken, often hilly ground. The individual meaninglessness of it and the group rationalization of it. The result is to come close to conveying the derangement required to wage war. “An army is a horror. It’s a horrible thing.”

  But the uncanny and the hook of a powerful theme are rarely enough to sustain any novel. The next element at which Cisco excels is in creating characters like Saskia, a woman “all in armor” who “has a short sword with a basket hilt on her right side and a flapped holster on her left hip.” If there’s a hero of The Narrator besides Low, it is this battle-tested woman who never falters in her bravery under fire. She’s a deliberate counterpoint to the senselessness of war—an entity with a tactical purpose who brings order by simple focus. Saskia is also perhaps the only character who remains consistent from beginning to end, and in a sense she gains her own agency as narrator because of it. (But she’s not alone: Makemin, Nardac, Punkinflake, Thrushchurl. You’ll remember all of them. By the end, the book will be buried in your skull.

  What does Cisco layer on top of searing scenes of the uncanny and of war, in the context of unforgettable characters? AThe narrator of The Narrator may not be the narrator of the entire novel. Where does his narration really begin and end? What to make of the asides between chapters? Of meeting another narrator, who in a sense begins to narrate the tale in a different way? What of the accounts of others, which the narrator narrates by adding notes like “an unhurried, slow inhalation” and “Her voice dropped there.” And “She caressed the air by her knees with stiff old hands, seeming to coax the guillotine blade out of the sparkling air so that I for a moment saw it.”

  Should we be worried? I think instead we should relax into reading a work of true originality, verve, and intellectual rigor.

  An army is a horror. It’s a horrible thing. They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.

  It’s through rags of fast-moving smoke that I first catch sight of Tref. I’m standing in the pass, to one side of the pumice road, looking down from my perch on the massed roots of some dusty old cork oaks. The city below me is like a shining, smoking lake, thrusting its troubled glints into my eyes and making them smart. Overhead, the sun is lost in a white sky without circumference, above the flashing waters of the city.

  One flash of the sun and I am down in its streets. Why is the station so far out of the city limits anyway? Most likely a collusion between the builders of stations and the builders of long roads. I walk into Tref unremarked as a ghost, and now this is me, here, in its bare broad avenues. The sky showers the street in volleys of sharp light. I take step after step, feeling the street and the city existing all around me, like figuring out all the parts of an unfamiliar flavor. My mind is too tired and weak from travel to do much of it. The city washes by me and its outlines dance and glitter as they will, playing their fairy games with me. I stumble along in a boulevard so wide the opposite side seems to sit on the horizon and the whole world bulging in between me and there. Out from my pocket I pull again to look at the implacable pink lot that tells me that I am drafted ...

  drafted ...

  I put in for an exemption

  and I got drafted ...

  I look up just as the sun quits the sky. I am sprawling in a white wrought-iron chair in the paved court of cafes, the iron finery is biting into my back a little, the table is streaked with sunset bands on the glass top. Heavy and tippy at once. Bands of gold and rust light cut across my coffee ring. The ticket is still there in my right hand on my right thigh. A little wind toys with it there, the battered paper is soft and tough as a piece of linen. Why can’t I awake from this dream? This is an ugly dream. These words seem to come from an old song. I came from the village ... the village named for the sheep fold that was the first thing probably built there, where the high way broadens on the mountain of the heavens/constellations of the spring. When I was in my third year at the College of Narrators, Twisse, who was our ward resident, passed word of the draft around and told us to get in our exemption forms early. Next thing I know I pull a pink lot from an envelope in the mail room and stand staring at it, welded to the spot.

  “How did that happ
en?” Twisse asked, peering over my shoulder. He took the paper gingerly in his hands. “No,” his head shaking, “you should go to see the Uz about this.”

  Twisse walked away with his sharp, upturned nose in the air. My friend Spiena was with me and rested a hand on my shoulder.

  “Run away,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “Stay with Blue Loom Pigsty, or—your other uncle, whatever his name was.”

  “Lard Loom Blossom.”

  “If you can keep out of sight for a few months, you’ll probably be forgotten.”

  “I’d be killed.”

  “You might,” he says sadly. “But you take the same chance in the war.”

  “What about my degree?”

  “You can forget your degree. Everyone here would certainly sympathize with you.”

  “I should try at least to clear this up with the Uz,” I say. My mind is like a motionless reflection in a piece of glass. My thoughts are frozen in place, too frightened to move.

  “Oh he won’t do anything!” Spiena said with a look of disgust. “You might as well tell your troubles to these chairs.”

  “I have my copies of the documents. I have my dated registration. I kept everything just in case.”

  “Eh. I suppose he might listen, but, that’s only because anything is possible with these administrators. He’s white.”

  Spiena shrugged his meaty shoulders.

  “I honestly don’t believe they really think at all.”

  “—Where would I go, if I had to run?”

  “Back into the mountains ...?” Spiena said unhelpfully.

  Winter comes so swiftly in the mountains that the leaves are frozen green on the trees, the grass in the meadows. The foliage never turns color or falls, but hibernates in clear ice casings until the spring thaw restores their interrupted life again. So the winter landscape is tinkling green, dazzling with flakes of light, crisp through the snow. The many rock-lipped streams freeze clear as well, and the fish are suspended in place like spangles of precious metal until spring. I walked to the small cluster of administrative buildings, a clutch of cottages and shops connected by a tangle of gravel paths and baffled from sight like an embarrassment by several echelons of yew hedges. I passed through these under boughs of cherry trees, the scarlet cherries still on the branches, glowing like embers through the ice that outlined every leaf and twig in shining white thread, and I saw myself endlessly multiplied in all that pure ice, even on the yew branches, their deep green almost black, and webs of gossamer ice in the recesses of the hedges. A dark, bulbous, top-heavy figure loomed in and out of them as I passed, arms anxiously swinging.

  I never have been able to find out how the administrators get their posts, or why they all seem so unqualified and unhelpful. I walked in among the dozen or so buildings with smoke in my face, blown down toward the ground from the chimneys of the cottages to my left. One of the administrators, a white old woman in a shawl, was spinning in a doorway, muttering around a short clay pipe to a sharply-dressed aide who avidly took down her dictation. The woman eyed me as I passed, without slowing her spinning or her smoky speaking. I glanced at her, then at once dropped my eyes to the thick ankles slotted into shoes so tight they seemed painted on. While her look was cryptic, her aide, who was red, shot me a glance of unmistakable disapproval. I was tempted to fling a handful of snow at them, but after all I might need to persuade them of my good will later, so I belatedly turned, as I had already passed nearly altogether out of sight of them, and made a sort of half wave half salute, along with what I felt was a strained and unappealing smile. Some smiles break a face and some smiles tear across.

  Stark white and clean as a surgery, Uz Leimme’s office was like an ice cave all year. A small white box of a building, with two nearly wall-sized windows in the front, square door in the middle that swings back silently on big hinges. His secretary, absent when I came, would sit behind a high marble-topped counter. Bright sunlight from the windows was reflected and re-reflected all throughout the open office, and I could see Leimme back there in the rearmost recesses. His desk was steel with a marble top, and there were chrome and marble counters and frigid glass-fronted cabinets on the walls. Some had files in them and some had bright steel implements, most of which looked medical but some were clerical—staplers and hole punchers.

  When he saw me, Leimme crossed to the sink and, humming, began soaping his hands wildly, flipping gobs of foam in all directions. He then undulated forward up to his desk, his gait deformed by a wooden right leg. He was a large, round-headed man, with white hair parted on the left. Like most administrators, and this was always attributed to chance, he was a white person from the valleys on the other side of the mountains. His shirt and satin cravat, his long waistcoat and longer jacket were white, his trousers were black and white checked, his leg was white wood. He dropped with one loud crack into his seat and waved me forward with a rather inane grin.

  I sat stupidly before his desk and concisely explained my problem, laying out my paperwork with ostentatious care in the desolation in front of him.

  “I have just received this draft notice.” I placed my finger straight up and down on it, on the desk. “Even though I submitted a valid application for exemption as a student at the College of Narrators, well in advance of the application deadline.”

  Uz Leimme’s expression hadn’t changed. “So?” he grinned at me.

  “So there’s been a mistake.”

  “And?”

  “And I’d like you to fix it.”

  “Don’t be an ass!” he said unctuously.

  “Who’s an ass?” I cried. “I applied for an exemption and I got a draft notice. Now is this application in order and on time or isn’t it?”

  He looked at me, and the light was very bright all around. He didn’t answer. I might not even be there anymore, from his point of view.

  “This is idiotic,” I said helplessly. “I have to matriculate!”

  His fingertips rebounded cheerily off each other like rubber bladders. I could hear his cheeks creaking as his smile winched itself up his face. His smile would handle me; now that it had put in its appearance, he could abscond from behind it. The smile shook at me, as though this were an excellently thorough explanation. And then it was the train, smiling at me through clouds of steam and grunts of smoke. No family there, not much family to speak of, and Spiena had already said goodbye to me the night before. I hear a voice call my name, turn to see a reed-thin old man in a sort of cassock advancing on me with an envelope in his hand. The letter:

  My Dear Loulle!

  How foolish of you, you know it was foolish, not to register with the Documents Registrar! They have, at this moment, three excellent positions open for persons fluid in Lashlache, and you, with the sole exception of professor Tmendo himself, would have been the only candidate locally available. There naturally is nothing now to be done, poor thing, about it, because your draught notice establishes prior government service in the military which obviously invalidates a Documents Registry exemption.

  Don’t imagine, however, that the question of your military service is in any way settled, however. I have composed a letter to the regional advocate etc., explaining your case in detail, and we believe a response is pending. I have also informed a friend of mine in the military administration of your predicament, and he has seen to it you will be given an interpreter’s assignment, which official recognition of yourself as an interpreter will represent a distinct advantage in putting forward your case for transfer to the Documentary Board, which case I am taking personally in hand.

  Uz Leimme

  My name is Low, not “Loulle,” he wrote “fluid” for “fluent” “draught” for “draft” and repeated “however” inappropriately at the end of the first sentence of the second paragraph. Furthermore, I had registered with Documents Registry through professor Tmendo, who was my Lashlache instructor, two years ago. Had he forgotten to file it?

  The messenger s
tood waiting with his hand out. I dropped a coin in it, and he angrily dashed it to the ground and reopened his palm. I looked at him interrogatively.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I need your original draft notice,” he snapped, and pointed violently to the new pink lot that remained in the envelope. I pulled from my pocket my original, yellow, lot and gave it to him, whereupon he whipped around on his heel and stormed off the platform. I picked up my coin and then looked at the new lot. I looked a long time without understanding.

  My original lot had me joining the local battalion, the so-called “Fifteen Milers,” whose rallying point was in Qul Elboe, about three miles down into the river valley on this side of the mountains. The lot I was then holding assigned me to an entirely other army, “Red Expedition Chapter,” rallying three hundred miles away in Tref. I was dealing with agents of an offended spirit or capricious god.

  I eat, and step out onto the streets, nearly colliding with a pale man. He is lean and tall with a small head and blazing round blue pinpoint eyes, staring up at the sun in amazed ecstasy, and oblivious to me. His thin red hair hangs lifelessly down in ragged locks, his arms hang down at his sides, and his smocked outline seems to wobble in the intense, chilled light. Behind the man, an Edek emerges from her underground den. The Edek is taller than this tall man who is her helper, and like all Edeks she wears a close hood of dun cloth with two holes for her eyes, fitted into a bandage of thin gauze tape wound many times around the long neck. This one is dressed in a uniform of velvety brown corduroy, with the straps of her binoculars criss-crossing the narrow chest, and knee-high boots of soft laced pigskin. The rooty, gloved hands glow a little, one reaches to pinch a bit of material at the back of her helper’s smock, and her helper, whose eyes are the Edek’s to use, leads her past me. The Edek’s head swivels in my direction as she goes by, and the fierce thrust of her gaze nearly knocks me against the wall. I rub the sparks from my eyes, and when I look again, the two are gone. Too late—she saw me!