The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  In my mind’s eye, a vividly colored green and blue map of the world running off into infinity on all sides—I see myself as I must appear sitting in this chair, from a point of view high in a corner of the room—rows of tattered, torn-open books dribbling leaves to the floor, tables and a stone floor strewn with paragraphs, verses, illustrations, choruses, familiar endings. Ripples in the air like heat waves, that gather in flowing ribbons, ascending and then gradually sinking again.

  The figure on the bed grows dim, and Lilly seems to climb up onto the bed as its unluminous light ebbs out of the air. There in the glow I faintly see the fabric of her dress indented by fingers of gauze. I glance up, as though my attention were a thing hanging in the wind and liable to be tossed this way and that by the least breeze. Without a sound, the silhouette of a leaping naked man interrupts the light of the window opposite me as Keen bolts to his feet screaming with raucous laughter. Keen flies forward springing bounding chalk-faced his arms and legs jerk and snap—the laughter lacerating his throat, the table isn’t there between us—he bites his hands inhumanly his blazing eyes draw streaks in the air. The two students who disappeared earlier lunge from their hiding place within the chimney and in a flash the rope is about him. Keen resists wildly, his laughter is a bellow that will blast the walls down. Now all the students are grappling with him; he veers again and again into the air like a puppet yanked up by a string, a skirt of black-sleeved arms clinging to his waist. His spine whips back and forth flinging his legs this way and that, twisting against their hands as they pin him flat to the floor. Every second, Keen wrenches his entire body a foot into the air against all their arms and slams flat to the floor, roaring with laughter hideous black implacable and bitter as death. The students hold him down with all their weight and strength—Keen’s crackling eyes are smeared with blood and he bleeds from his torn lips. A dark figure flashes around the room near the ceiling gambolling and writhing like a man in an oven. Keen is pinned. He throws his head back eyes staring mouth gaping, laughing without smiling, it is only a fractured howl. As each howl reaches its loudest I become aware there’s another sound inside it, an inhuman drone like a resonating box. He writhes on the ground pale as paper, throws back his head and voids a throat-wracking belch of corpse gas, the retching noise hums through him as it would a plucked harp string.

  The laughter suddenly erupts from him again.

  “The war!” he raves.

  “The warrr! We won!”

  His head snaps up on his neck and he stares into my eyes, hissing—“We won!”

  Keen subsides into idiotic chuckling, his face folded down against his throat. He’s laughed himself out. His laughter trickles around the room, his voice comes from the walls, the furniture, the fireplace. It jumps from the window, runs cackling into the distance. We can hear it go, we can hear it for a long time.

  Jil Punkinflake, catching his breath, holds one of Keen’s arms. He looks into the depraved face, eyes like jellied blood twitch in their sockets with a faint slick sound.

  “Where’s Keen?” Jil Punkinflake asks.

  “In paradise.” The voice chuckles in vomit. It gurgles in his throat and he tosses his head aside spattering the floor with a little.

  “You are there now?” I ask.

  “Now I am there there I now am now I am there.”

  He takes a deep shuddering breath, and grows even more shockingly pale, as though he were suffused with longing for something near. As he speaks, the room fades, and I am there, living the words he says, which have become colorless, toneless, have merged entirely with events and sensations.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the one that balances the flood and the it’s what I can say to you is only that there is a dead one in the choice way, I speak faster than it is in your power to follow. Right now you are speaking not I. Now is the time for I to speak through I.”

  “What is your name?” I ask, not knowing why. “Tell me who you are.”

  “I am trailing along balancing bodies with time. The way you choose is all spattered with peculiar lights and your selection is waiting. You have already waited. By water from his face, by the street stretching past me, by taking time away from me, taking him away from me, taking them away from me. Time without I, without it, is me.”

  “Where is Keen?”

  “Pouring rain spilled down his face. He blows rain in spurts away from his lips. I speak faster. In the rain his young face seems to melt. I have to speak faster. I struggle to record on what I say on a water sheet but the music must allow time enough for whatever it is to come through these streets to me right now. He speak in doorways, am looking at me.”

  “What does he say?” I ask.

  Blobs of rain tremble cold on his face. He shivers. Congealed vomit webs his lips in thick yarns.

  “What are you saying, Keen?” I ask, raising my voice and speaking distinctly. “Keen?”

  His white lips tremble open, letting rain run down onto his teeth.

  “If his own train were wrecked, and this were yet no spur, then it would be she and he. Intimate in the half-light. She was the one who started, who hid, like her kind will. There is always more second wind, hidden or trapped in pockets below the earth, or in the trees, or in each other. You spread more whenever you shall sit down to write. That’s the difference between lives; try it, and there shall be some wind to move the death out of your path. Boneless mummified words sifted through your writing fingers will receive and hold the death there, present before you and even trapped. You turn over death and life, passing them back and forth through something like a window, and drive the death sentences through what you did not know ...”

  *

  I visit the camp again. It’s nearly deserted, and I’m thankful, but presently I come across a soldier who tells me our new orders will be delayed by about a week, according to the latest dispatch. That means there are orders, after all.

  I spend several more days at the college. In vaulted cellars filled with a dense, clammy haze I watch from the visitor’s pew in a corner as ranks of students whisk through timed autopsies. The crews are ranked by speed and neatness on a chalk-smirched board; a grandly-whiskered instructor holds up a stopwatch the size of an apple. His round cheeks are red and shiny in an otherwise waxy, greenish face, and a variety of dissecting tools hang jingling from the front of his apron. Bodies are slung up onto the tables one after another, eviscerated and binned; Jil Punkinflake and his team are highly rated. Red hands pull open the body cavities and a meaty, excremental, liverish perfume is emitted; then he and Keen, their hands flitting here and there like birds hopping in the lane, isolate and remove each organ, handing them to Nectar. He plops them one by one into a produce scale hanging from the ceiling and notes their weights on his smeary clipboard.

  Slack human bodies are bustled and tossed everywhere I look, sliding across the floor in low heaps, pushed along by oilskin-aproned dieners with slick rubber spades. As each fresh cadaver is positioned on the dissecting table, Jil Punkinflake takes the temples gently in his grisly hands and gazes down into the dead face with a look like mother love. That look trembles on every face in the room, their caressing knives part skin, muscle and fat, and the bodies seem to offer up their contents to these hands with blissful abandon like dreamers unhasping their grip on the brink and allowing themselves to drop away into deep, balmy waters.

  Last glimmers of sun blaze in the narrow arch linking two terraced buildings. The sunset is turning the sky to red and orange sherbet, and a few lamps are already lit, swinging under the eaves of the buildings. Amber cones of light fall from the lamps and splash along the walls, wind scuttles in dry weeds, brings me a gust of smoke, dust, oil frying.

  I hear a rattle of wheels and hooves; a hearse—the hearse—pulls up before me and stops. The driver, dim against the half-blue sky, gestures me inside.

  My hand trembles on the latch—I pull the door open and the compartment is empty. I climb in and not quite knowing why
nor why not sit; falling in place not really under control, not used to climbing in and out of carriages. We go a short distance and then stop. Suddenly a hatch opens in the roof opposite me and the driver clambers down, with know-how if not with grace, into the carriage. He shuts the compartment and sits across from me with a piping sigh.

  “Well,” he smiles, enjoying the softness. “Comfortable? How d’ye do?”

  He puts out his hand.

  “Orvar,” he says, “just Orvar, no mister.” As if he wanted to spare me any unnecessary trouble. He repeated my name as I pronounced it, nodding once and sweeping his face down and back, reaching into his jacket for something. His eyes seem alternately drawn and repelled by my face. He pulls out a small metal bottle wrapped in a leather sleeve, undoes the cap and offers it to me—“Tea?”

  It’s brackish and slightly viscous, going down my throat in one cool lump. As he takes a neat swig, without touching his lips to the bottle, as I had done, I feel a sort of inner dislocation, and it’s as though a dirt robe were slid under and around me.

  He gives me a friendly smile. “It’s a bit too strong, but it’s no poison.” Puts the bottle away and thrusts his fingers between each other.

  “Well,” he says, talking down toward my shoes. “Well.”

  I can hear the rasp and unrasp of his fingers against each other as he jams their webs together. I wait. His smile refreshes itself as a thought visibly occurs to him.

  “She normally sits there,” he says, indicating the spot to my right as though she were there now. The seat is draped with a rich silver fur lined in peach satin. With a surprisingly strong pang I recognize its perfume, and it now seems more intimate a smell, as if it were rising still warm from her body. It seems somehow very dear to me. I tenderly imagine a woman’s body, with skin like peach satin, like dunes glowing orange in the sun.

  “That’s her scent.”

  “Oh,” I blink. I feel as though I’d been caught pulling off my clothes in a trance.

  “Yes, she’s something of a fixture here in town. You may have heard of her?”—A guarded note entered in there.

  “No,” I say. It’s true. I suspect he is probing for signs of guile in me.

  “Well, then.” He sits back, pushing his shoulders into the cushions. He seems to have relaxed his suspicion, but his face has taken on a hardness I wouldn’t have expected of it. Cold twinges in my intestines from the tea, but it isn’t an entirely unwholesome sensation. I feel massive and solid, settled heavily in place like an anvil.

  “You seem to have attracted her interest,” he says. There’s no mistaking his meaning, or that he is her go-between in these matters.

  “‘Madame’ means she’s married, isn’t she?” My voice sounds more confused than it should. I think of the grave she visited. Orvar’s head lifts back, and some leavening shadow flits across his serious face.

  “A widow now ... You really haven’t heard anything? No, I wouldn’t suppose you had ... You’re from up north, aren’t you?”

  “I’m from the mountains.”

  “She was very attached to her husband and family.” He waves at all the black, the funereal trappings. “I don’t know how many years it’s been, but she’s still in mourning.”

  I blink and say nothing. This approach seems to work best.

  “It’s no secret. A story most people know something about, if not enough. Not their business, but—” he shrugs and purses his lips, then suddenly fixes me, points. “Now she’s taken an interest in you, it’s liable to become your business. That’s why I have to tell you. You understand—it’s something you should hear first from me, and not from some gossip or other.”

  I can still beg off, just barely—but her perfume wafts over me, holding me there like a giant, gently firm hand.

  “Her husband held an administrative position; I wasn’t associated with the family then, so I can’t say what it was exactly. Evidently he overdid it, worked himself too hard. A trip to Cadassis and back in the snow gave him brain fever and he died in her arms, up at the house.”

  He pauses and glances out the window. Someone seems to be strolling by.

  When the stroller is gone, Orvar says, tonelessly, “Her daughter was away at the time. She was alone in the house with her husband. She was very attached to him. She deeply loved him.”

  The sun goes below the horizon, and darkness closes around the carriage like the wings of a cape. Orvar is looking very dim there across from me.

  “I don’t think she could bear to lose him.”

  I measure with my eyes the distance between my hand and the door latch.

  “Mr. Collumn—her husband’s physician had passed word of his death to the embalmers, as a matter of course.”

  He inhales through his mouth.

  “And they went to the house within three days’ time of his death. They only found his bones, mostly, in the bed ... and her there with them ... and nothing else.”

  After long silence, Orvar coughs quietly and I hear the jostle of fluid in the bottle.

  “Well, there was a scandal, as you can imagine. You see, everyone knew she had lost a baby boy a few years before. Crib death. Happened when she was away. Evidently too much. Too much for her. Her husband was supposed to be looking after the boy when it happened; he fell asleep, it seems, and when he next checked on the child, it was already over. Boy was fine before. The child was buried privately, on the grounds. Grounds of their estate. She refused the embalmers. Very unusual. Everyone remembered that then, you understand? She was very attached to the boy. Couldn’t stand to lose him.”

  I nod, unsure he can see me in the gloom. My mind is not in motion.

  “She blamed her husband. Apparently was cold with him after that. I was not yet in her employ then, but this is what I gather. She still loved him, you understand. When she knew he was dying, she repented it—her coldness—but he was so low by then that she really couldn’t tell if he could know that or not. Forgive her. She’s so sensitive ... and the uncertainty ...”

  He makes a face I can’t quite make out. Now, finally, my mind takes a step or two, and I remember.

  “They called her the Cannibal Queen.”

  He starts at that.

  “Please, sir!” he says sharply. “Honestly!”

  He sits back, disapproval radiating from his invisible face. “She deserves better than that. It made her so ill, she suffered so—and for a woman like that, to be ostracized ... made a pariah ... Or worse, to be slandered. Made a figure of infamy. Of ribaldry—it’s cruel, sir.”

  “No,” he says a moment later, as if I had asked him. “You see there was an inquiry, and certain arrangements were made. The judgement, you understand, was sealed, out of respect for the family—not that there’s anyone but her left, now her daughter’s gone away. After that ... it’s all nothing but vulgar speculation.

  “... She’s free. She could leave the city, if she pleased. But she won’t abandon her graves. There’s no question of punishment, at least ... not exactly, as she was, it was felt, ill at the time.”

  “No one thought to ... if she’s ill ...” I say without really knowing what I mean.

  He looks at me gravely.

  “I mean that, if she’s so ill, as you say ...” Now he is looking forbidding, face thrust forward in the shadows, and I falter, “—well, how is it she’s free to—you’re her keeper,” I realize.

  “I’m her keeper,” he says, and his face goes up and down once, lips moued out.

  “Her daughter disappeared, you know, and she couldn’t help but think it was as a consequence of the rumors, although the girl absolutely refused to countenance them.”

  He leans forward again and looks me in the eye. His voice has become insinuating and confidential, a strange contrast with the man.

  “So, you see, she’s a very lonely woman. It’s been years since anyone came to the house.”

  The fur slides down the seat, volubly sighing out its scent, and that delectable smell just land
slides over me. I see again her cheek outlined in a green flash through the veil, and his voice is an echo the wind carries to me from below the horizon as I stand in the cemetery lane below her, in the past.

  “She saw you in the cemetery, and she has seen you in the street. She asked me about you. She asked me very particularly. She instructed me that, if I were to see you again, I should invite you, in her name, to call at the house.”

  I am on the street beneath windy sky, and Orvar is speaking to me from the roof of the carriage.

  “She receives in the late afternoon, past three.”

  There is a crisp card in my hand, pale lavender with metallic print, an address in the death district not far from here.

  “Come soon, won’t you?” he says almost merrily.

  I hold the card up to my face and that scent unfolds its petals for me again. A rattle of hooves, and then no sound but the rustle of wind against the eaves. A tin can clambers down the street behind me.

  *

  What at a distance I took for rags of hanging moss prove instead to be enormous veils festooning every bough of every tree on the grounds. I have wasted my time wondering how I will get inside the high stone walls, if there will be a bell or if I will have to stand in the street and shout like a fool, because Orvar emerges from the small door in the elephantine wooden gates pimpled over with bronze busses as I approach. He is thumbing his keys in his palm. As I approach, he looks up without surprise and stands away from the door.

  “Go on through. The Girl will show you in.”

  He seems brisk and cheerful as he pulls loose from the house.