The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  Jil Punkinflake hops up on a sawhorse, and leaning forward looking into my eyes he tells me the story of a prodigy who sat in the grass by the wayside of the capital road in a shapeless black garment of many different materials and dashed off in the dust of the road immaculate alphabets on the spot, even sometimes for every single passer by. People looked down at the rows of letters and saw so much of themselves they broke down then and there, or instantly decorporated. One is better advised to be alone when one first looks on one’s own alphabet, even those specifically designed to conceal the nature of the buyer from himself always show too much in showing too frankly this desire to hide in the letters.

  Suddenly a look of detestation, such as I’d never imagined he could be capable of, let alone see myself, creases his face; his eyes darken and he hops down from the sawhorse. It’s as if his expression were being corrupted by the effect of a corrosive poison.

  He is looking past me—I follow his eyes, I see the crowd, the stalls, the buildings, but I don’t know what, among these things, he is glaring at so fixedly. He touches my arm, and pulls me a little way aside, into the mouth of a narrow alley, still looking beyond me.

  “What is it?” I ask. I must have been asking that for a while already.

  Jil Punkinflake is actually panting with emotion, and his grip on my arm is uncomfortably firm. I begin to get alarmed, and try again to align my gaze with his. Now I’m sure—a young woman, or a girl, maybe twelve years old, oblivious, composed, her head flowing with dense, long dark hair, is walking past us. She looks neither right nor left, but down toward the street, and people seem unconsciously to recoil from her. Some glower, but most simply move out of her way without apparently being aware of her at all. She is dressed in a white nightgown, and, though it hangs still and straight from her shoulders, it seems to undulate, and now she seems older than she had at first.

  “A sleepwalker?” I ask, but I get no answer.

  As she passes nearest to us, I feel something hit me, like the blow of a loud sound, that seems to fracture something in my chest. I feel the fracture’s sick edges, and I want to gasp. The feeling dims as she passes, dwindling away down the street. I feel as though my life somehow adheres to her, and that it dwindles with her as she goes, and that I am helpless ...

  Now I improve.

  Jil Punkinflake watches her pass with an ugly and uncharacteristic look of loathing.

  “Who was that? You seemed to know her ...”

  “That,” he says as though it cost him pain, “was a dreamer.”

  “A sleepwalker?”

  His eyes close like lowering blinds; his face is rigid. His teeth are almost chattering.

  “We all hate them here, and soon you’ll learn to as well.”

  “Why should I hate someone for dreaming?”

  “This is their dream,” he says pointing vehemently at the earth, and then adds in a bitter, wounded tone, “and we are their creatures. They disguise themselves and trick us, toy with us, draw us into their empty themes, leave us stuck in their follies ... trifling with us and then, when we need them—where are they? They’re gone!”

  And then he turns away from me and plunges his face into his hands.

  Later, he looks up again, to the sky, the street, and murmurs, “Now we forget, now is the time.”

  *

  I want to browse the stores. Jil Punkinflake, same again as ever, shrugs at them.

  “Be around tonight and I’ll show you something better.”

  ... and he’s gone in a twinkling like a fairy man.

  I look at fine calfskin notebooks, bales of foolscap, ranks of somber iron type, casks of ink. This purplish-skinned man sells pencils so soft you can sharpen them with your breath. A stunning woman in a low-cut blouse sells fountain pens, and I stand there for I don’t know how long transfixedly turning back and forth in my fingers a pen all made of an intermittently translucent, hard yet elastic substance. There is powdery smoke in it forming a minutely-worked interlocking pattern of silky tongues and smart hooks, the nib is gold, laced in a sinuous engraved line narrower than a hair. The pattern is engulfing, and I wander through it like a garden maze.

  For all my looking, I haven’t been able to find much of anything in the way of stories. I found only one storier, and it seemed to be closed, or perhaps sealed for a private party, behind its boxy wooden gates. I cross the commercial area, heading back toward the Embalmer’s College. Hoofbeats bang in the street and I hang back to let the carriage pass. It’s the hearse I’d seen earlier, which had wrung words of rapturous praise from the mortuary students. The horses are massive up close, and pass me with weightless power. I watch the carriage sail along the road and note the coffin hatch up above the wreath on the back. The hearse slows as it passes away; the window opens, and a well-shaped, woman’s arm, in a tiny-flowered grey sleeve, unfolds from the passenger compartment. The laced hand drops a handkerchief in the street, and vanishes; the carriage turns the corner with weird sharpness and is gone.

  I am alone in the street. The handkerchief retains the pinched point where her fingers held it a moment, and is faithfully embroidered with a beautiful character I don’t recognize. The smell is like grape lees, wind chimes, rotting roses. When I raise my eyes from it, I notice a maybe four-year-old girl walking along the pavement opposite me, one hand in her mother’s hand and the other pointing at me; and she does a funny thing. Grinning, her chubby face lit up with an expression of incandescent surprise, she peels her lips back from her little white teeth and red gums, and bites the air three or four times, looking me in the eye and pointing.

  *

  My route back to the College strays through an administrations corridor. There are few businesses here, all down at heel, customers and proprietors alike in ragged clothes. Deputies in short, belted leather jackets creak superciliously through the often thickly packed warrens with menacing ease.

  The Succentor’s subalterns are selected for their uncommon knack with emotion weapons, although most of these are never used and may not even be taught any more. It is not usual for persons who have had any dealings with the deputies, in their official capacity—and most of these deputies are fantastically devoted to their work and seldom allow themselves any respite in its pursuit even when invited, even when ordered to, by their superiors—to bear away with them any clear impression or recollection of them. A surprisingly dense mass of unshiftable complacency or satisfaction seems to set in, and it takes unpleasant, determined effort to claw through it to the real memories. The deputies move through the city at will, for the most part safe behind an indifference repulsion, and no one is the wiser who does not recognize the equivocal signs of the procedure. The deputy is brisk, smiling quietly to himself and going about his business. Citizens are pushed back and aside without taking offense; they are unwittingly darted with a infusion of obliging helpfulness, and it would seem to them a shame or even an outrage that anyone should mar this picture of happy efficiency, represented by the deputy in the flesh. Nothing is more important than that things should operate smoothly, with cheery smiles; anyone who disrupts this smooth operation in any one place threatens to send out friction ripples that will ...?

  Emotion weapons are precisely aimed with focussing ways, like artillery; heavy guns are aimed by calculating the arc of trajectory required to hit the target and then carving away all remaining space in excess of that arc so that it, the ball, may only go along that arc: just so, the emotion weapon will have no effect unless certain questions are, and even the occasion of questioning is, carved away, so no one asks what it really is that the disruptive individual disrupts, or why friction is so wholly to be avoided, and smoothness elevated to holiness. Of all considerations in the use of emotion weapons the principal is to cause inversion, or the transferral of hostility to the victim, so that he or she is rebuffed for causing trouble. Uniformed in their repulsion, the deputies glide through the city without the slightest effort, leaving behind them smooth wakes of assiduously b
usy citizens.

  I need to find my unit, to get some sort of documentation renewed or acknowledged, not that I can recall now ... I gather my courage and duck into one of the many small offices on the lane. The officer is brisk, smartly filing and typing, with a funny little smile on her face. The need I fling out to her like an open hand slides back and falls to my hip, as though she were on the other side of a pane of glass, too thick to shatter. She is humming away to herself inside her glass barrier, asleep even as she politely answers my questions. The barrier answers me: give up, give up. “Happiness is the intensest sort of prosperity and all Prosperity, I find, hardens the Heart—and happy people become so very prudent and far-sighted ...” She sees far past me.

  The light seems to change (where did that voice come from?) its place of origin, shining now from down low, as if the world had flipped, and the deputy’s face has become a mask, not a lineament changed. It is the face of a corpse exhumed from permafrost ground I saw when I was a boy. The eyes stare at me, and a voice inside them says, directly to me, “It won’t be hard to break you, either.”

  I leave the office without a word, and without taking my eyes from the sidewalk I feel a burden in the air, like a boulder rolling down the street behind me. I turn into a narrow alley, take two or three steps and a cold fist lodges in my stomach and dissolves there. This is the wrong way. I turn slowly, without wanting to, and face four deputies who are striding toward me down the alley like a human wall. I know they are supposed to seem solicitous and concerned but I can see black crumbling leers rending their dead soap faces, and I smell their breath of decaying bogs thick with frigid scum. Chuckling thickly in putrid scum they are coming for me. I try to turn with a body of lead, pushing out my heavy hand for a door standing ajar in the opposite wall, and I know I will grind to a stop and be caught and lost there forever in that hopeless moment turning to run from these deputies. It’s royal power, flowing from the capital through them. What do they want? Unbuckling their belts. Dry finger tips brush the wrinkles standing across the back of my shirt.

  The handle of the door is rebounding from my hand, the hallway flies around me as though I were falling headlong. Out of control I burst through a flimsy door and nearly tangle myself in low washing lines. But I manage to bend and avoid them, the shapeless woman hanging these clothes stares at me too shocked to curse, stares after me, I can feel it, as I run away.

  *

  They were talking about fortune telling, and I said I wanted to know my fortune—

  “Come on, narrator, you can write down what we do.”

  I fall in with Jil Punkinflake, Nectar, a pair of women named Dusty and Lilly, and a puppyalonging freshman named Keen. It’s an hour after sunset, and the country road is a livid silver scar in dark blue earth. Our hands and faces all seem to glow in the blue dark, swinging and streaking through the air. Giddy, sick-looking stars are tumbling around above us, through the empty branches. The road is gauntly lined with trees, and fallow fields striped blue silver and black behind them.

  They are taking me to see one of their teachers, an immigrant or refugee who teaches at the college under an assumed name, Dr. Mellaart. They speak of him with a combination of reverent enthusiasm and a more childish excitement, as though he were only an entertainer. His group meets in a suburb outside the city, abandoned now the tributary dried. Many grand old houses there are gradually blowing away. The water never came back.

  I like Lilly. She has a long jaunty stride and a face lit inside like a paper lantern. She shows me her side by side ten gauge with a garland of lacy bowels carved into the butt; entelodonts are still seen here occasionally, and respond with interest to the carrion smell of the mortuary students. Lilly looks very sporting with her gun and her little hat. Jil Punkinflake feeds his death’s-head from a glass dropper as we walk.

  The house comes into view on the right, through a break in the trees. A residual violet light stands in smears of thick water on pale clay soil, trees feebly claw the air in a copse off one wing, and the bare, scattered land beyond the house is creased with a shallow, oozing stream, little more than an inky scrape in the ground. An eerie, resonant stillness pours down in an avalanche from the sky, settling about the house like an invisible plume of dust. Lilly glances up at me with iodine whited eyes.

  “It used to belong to a big camphor man,” she says. “Once, his detectives caught up with a man who’d hijacked one of his cargos. They brought him here, and camphor man cut both his legs off him in one of the upstairs rooms.”

  She sidles up to me and takes my arm with her free hand.

  “The man broke loose somehow and got as far as the front door before they shot him dead. From that time, now and then, people have heard him thumping down the stairs without his legs.”

  She gives my arm a playful squeeze. As we approach, I can see a shadow emerge from the high grass to one side of the house and pull itself instantly up through one of the windows. It’s a brick house, with acute gables at either end like a cat’s head. The windows are large panes of glass in scalloped stone frames, and as we bunch up to follow the stingy path through high weeds dried to wheezing husks I glance up in time to see a candlelit face recede from one of the sills upstairs. Are they coming in through the roof?

  The veranda is deep but not broad; the steps and planks groan at our every move. Dusty opens the door, which chitters as it swings back. The house closes around me, and I am aware of a vibrant stillness, produced by tensions in something below or behind me. We are pushing back the invisible, ponderous fabric of presence inside the walls; the moulding on the walls shivers, and the doorknobs seem to cringe back into the shadows. A hand takes mine, and I am led a few steps down the hall, with the stairway barely discernible to my left, and through a wide single door of darkly reflective polished wood, into a parlour. I can make out many figures in the gloom, and Jil Punkinflake is already making the rounds with his cheroot in his hand, lighting the gas mantles.

  A single round table in the center of the room, oilskin cloth and a big doily in the middle, tables all round. Dim light from the hollowly breathing mantles, tiled fireplace, mirror above it, fronded wallpaper and ponderous carved ornaments everywhere. The ceiling is bunched and wrinkled in a funereally heavy floral pattern, and a ghoulish rosette in the center. I am directed to a seat at the table with the door not far behind me; Nectar sits on my left and Dusty on my right, Jil Punkinflake beside her and Keen sits opposite me with his back to the window, the curtains nearly brushing his shoulders. I hear the boxed-in ticking of the clock for the first time as Jil Punkinflake says, “Lilly, it’s time to bring him in.”

  Lilly clomps into the obscurity at the far end of the room, where darkness has collected like smoke. I can see her seat herself on a low stool and roll up alongside an enormous object nearly filling the space in that half of the room. Lilly is looking down at something on one side of this object and I can make out her pale hands manipulating what look like organ stops. A granulated light gathers around the base of the object which I now see is a four-poster bed with a beyond-elaborate sculpted frame. Lilly has a pair of earphones clapped to her head, connected to the bed with a length of heavy coiled wire in an embroidered sleeve. She is turning cherub’s-head knobs the size of tomatoes, and sliding gilded wooden flowers, cherries, leaves, and grapes expertly back and forth, peering with bunched eyebrows at the results. Every few moments she flicks her eyes up at a deep curving groove, notched like a ruler, cut into the headboard, where a burnished copper needle sails back and forth along the notches as she turns a heavy cherub bulb with her left hand. Through the window, I can see high black clouds rolling up from the horizon and passing over the house; some of them slip in through the window and slither up the wall and along the ceiling. The big doily begins to flip end over end in place, apparently passing through the substance of the table, faster and faster with a sound like a thick rope being spun in the air. Jil Punkinflake’s death’s-head moth is sprouting long licorice-like tendrils wi
th a liquid crackling sound; they loop and twine along his lapels and up his shoulder.

  I can see a figure on the bed now, a large pale man all shining, wearing what seems to be a rough white linen suit. His hands and feet are wrapped in gauze, as is his fleshy throat up to the heavy chin densely stubbled with white. The high-browed head is pasty and his heavy lids sag over glittering dark eyes.

  The door adjacent the base of the stairs stands blackly open directly before me and a round white head is bowed there, rising and coalescing like a ball of smoke. A leg swings out at the knee and a foot of solid darkness comes down across the threshold—the flesh of half my body is tugged aside in gooseflesh withering in my chest and Jil Punkinflake slams the door shut in my face. “Don’t look in the hall,” he tells me sternly, and then scans the others with vehemence in his eyes, leaving me weakly to drag my seat to the circle again. My back to the door feels alive with creeping cold fire.

  Dr. Mellart is coming into view, propped up on the bed, and Lilly rises and open a shutter above the backboard, revealing a bough-raked sunset sky, although the window opposite me remains bottomless night. The sunken face speaks. His voice is thin and weak, projected from some other narrative, as he is not at home in this one. His speech seems to emit sense directly into my imagination. Linguistic elementals. The séance contacts disembodied narratives and raw images, imperfect memories, and dreams; the medium gives up voice to that idiom-phantom. I see why I was brought here—I am to record what will come through the others, who are all mediums.