“Never,” said Unger, walking on.
So the Doyenne had voiced caution. He supposed he had earned her stepmotherly concern, given his standing as first major violator of the docile civility of the Set. If she feared another act of angst-crazed Poetic Mind on his part, though, so be it. His ravings would appear in a zero-circulation rag, set there by the company woman.
When he stepped to the top of the red sandstone stairs leading down into the covered gardens, his Arctic Review caped romantic waved from a table set far in, at a spot surrounded by circles of polychrome pavers, shading walls, and bends in a slow-moving stream. She again wore decorous gray—simple of lines, but no starving artist’s garb. Other poets before her had clung to soul-damping jobs, for the filthy lucre. Stevens, Eliot, Larkin and others had lived comfortably enough. Not to mention Unger.
When their conversation came around to her hope—“You brought a new poem”—he pursed his lips and shook his head.
“You have written something, though.”
He felt around his hesitancy. Speaking about what he was writing: not the same as about things written and published. Bygones. That was in another country, and besides the poet is dead.
“A few lines,” he said. “By the way, I reacquainted myself with your world in that towering library you have here, and discovered I still have a publisher. It seems people still read books.”
“And some look like this.” Her hand-motion produced a rectangle in the air, faintly aglow and whispery. He had seen and heard similar at the library.
“A page of a book. . .by Diane Dean? A poet?” he said, seeing the name by the page number.
She twisted her hand and pulled back the page. “Another who wishes she were,” she said, not unsmiling. “Shall we?”
As before he found his hesitancies and qualms beating a quick retreat. His tongue and lips then surprised him by decanting liberally of old wine he long ago had forgotten he had cellared. Conversation moved again toward Leota—who had set his heart afire for perhaps its last time. Muse-hungry—had only he admitted that to himself!—and the self-appointed and self-defeated Bard of the Set: Unger had blundered, buffoonlike, in her pursuit. Then Moore, unmoored from time-bound earth, arrived to win her, to lose her, then to. . .
Unger felt new, sharp discomfort: for in speaking to Tina his thoughts circled nearer pivotal points in the untold tale. How to unveil them? If at all? Leota’s pregnancy, her decision to leave the Set. . .and that catastrophic Party that unfolded beneath a brittle-crystal black-as-blood Christmas Eve sky. . .
Tina no longer touched but clutched his hand.
Her eyes: tunnels into which he plunged.
. . .and that image that for so many skipped-over hopscotch-square years had refused to return with the finality of certainty, as anything more than bric-a-brac dusty-shelf surely-not-fact: now it arose like a doomed white owl, shrieking and settling its cold claws into his tongue, poising itself there to fly out his opening, numbing lips: for I see through my vodka-steam breath the ghosts of my hands—there before me in the frosted sleep-chamber—not my own bunker—and why am I here?—in the House of Sleep, the House of the Set: I see my hands clutching white stake and black mallet, the sharpened point downturned to that frozen, frozen. . .
No! he cried within—just as outside a piercing trilling pulled him back outwards, away from himself.
A thumb-sized wren had landed on Tina’s shoulder, instantly bursting into song, note-running throatily in a tonal cascade without cease. She raised a hand to shoo it.
Wings blurred suddenly silent.
“You are—”
He lacked the word.
He thought she nodded, then saw her head sagged with fatigue.
“Forgive me,” she said. “This—faintness. Happens to me. No—no help. Please. I will be—right back—”
She hurried stiffly away.
Unger waited, absorbed in the revelations of his own verbal torrent.
Toward what falling-off cliff had his words pushed?
He had arrived wanting to see her again. And her eyes—of promise, of threat. She created. . .a link. Unger of old turned in his sleep and nearly cracked open an eyelid in her presence. Yet were that inner, old Unger to emerge—would not the world see the wrecked, ruined corpse on the shoals of ice and stone? The walls around the Set—walls of time-flitting sleep, walls of lifeless cold—saved him from exposure. He could hide, unrevealed, in his cold-bunker traveling between far-spread calendar days.
At least he had not torn from his pocket his few penciled lines:
Not for us winds blow, earth rests,
skies turn and fountains flow. . .
Winds were just winds—or winds of chance; earth, the world of the un-Set; skies, the heavens seen in their turnings by the un-Set—
So skies were the Set.
And fountains?
Fountains stopped him. Were he to believe his own words and his sense of their meanings, then he had erred from the beginning in climbing aboard the Somnolence.
Fountains—into which poets dip their daemonic, Orphic toes—flow in a non-place apart from winds, earth or skies.
Yet they flow, all the same—
For the un-Set.
He knew this, having been of them, once.
The Set moved differently through time—granting him a different View. From the beginning he had hoped to emerge from his journey carrying the Lyre whose strings only he, Unger of the Set, could pluck.
But skies turn—and he, with the skies. . .
And fountains flow. . .just not for us. . .
His emptied glass, the night before, had refilled with memories—one of them fortuitous. How nearly had he cribbed! Centuries before dry-lipped Unger, George Herbert had penned:
For us, the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see, but means our good. . .
And nothing we see, with our View from the Parties, means our good.
Unger started from revery. He moved to pocket his lines, then realized he sat alone even yet.
And children run away across the sands.
A wren, perhaps the same, uttered its song now and then nearby, while birch leaves shook beneath the blowers.
Later he received a note of apology with a request for one more meeting. The two of them, she said, had just reached a point. . .
*
He had just reached a point. His mind ajar. . .frozen shut, for so long, and now melting around its hinges and reopening: for in Olden Times. . .in that chamber where his muse, lost to him forever, lay after being drawn bloodless and sucked breathless—freezing down to her lone arctic zone between Parties. . .
There—he, Wayne Unger, went first in departing from Party Set supercilious decorum. He threw aside his grace-under-lyre poise with such force the mere rumors unsettled both Set and un-Set: for he murdered the Lotus Queen of the Parties, Leota Mathilde Mason. Or rather he murdered Leota Mathilde Mason Moore: for she had just married Alvin Moore and taken his name. . .good incitement to brute violence. . .for there, in her chamber, he found himself standing with stake and mallet in hand. Al Moore, distraught, then murdered Unger in a frenzy, with that mallet. Al himself then died, in punishment for his crime—and did so, in fact, before Unger, already dead, could die in punishment for his. The poet needed to be revived before justice—“symbolic death”—could be meted out. Then meted back in. So Leota died, then Wayne died, then Al died—and then Wayne died. They met later to laugh over it. Even so, symbolic death had felt distinctly unpoetic. Ending score: Wayne Unger, one. Al Moore, one. Society, two.
On which side of the Moebius strip of Set-life sat irony? The House of Sleep was infected with it, the proverbial louse of arch Modernity. . .and whatever happened to lice, anyway? Consigned to their own freezer-lockers, saving their genetic codes: for the world might need itching, scabs and disease once again. Just walk away from it all. . .(and where had that notion winged in fr
om, yet again?). . .into the arms of the foe, o thou louse. How tumbling-over-each-other came his thoughts! Another for the glass, o faithful barmatics! To embrace what the “I” is, the Self must embrace the multitude of thoughts within its unkempt mansion. Jumbled learning and stumbling pratfall, sordid Sordido. . .just think of Al’s “Maud” (The red-ribb’d ledges drip with silent horror of blood: Al Tennyson, not Moore) and Mary Maude the impaler. . .and the blanketing solace that words provide—or once did. Might they again? The woman, damn her face—sprouting serpent hair and dripping red at the eyes like a shrieking Erinye on Unger’s Oresteian trail. But I never killed her, my mother-muse. Or did I—?
Leota on her bier, her bed-casket freezer, her catafalque now a barge. . .launched down the tunnel of give-up-all-hope.
And the spike in her heart—driven in by whose hand?
Of the four deaths one fell with finality: that second death, when Moore had murdered most unsymbolically. When Unger handed his penny to the boatman, the boatman smiled, knowingly—and kept smiling after the bribe, too, was paid and dead Unger was rowed back to the warmer of two shores. Unger’s head and body parts, hammer-bruised and shattered and pulped, came back together in the rotund wooly shape of Unger of old, to all outside discerning eyes. Yet Unger, new Unger, knew.
Mary Maude Mullen and her lawyer-minion greeted him when he awakened—she, clucking like a wizened hen at having to quash the furor Unger had raised: all those rumors of mayhem and murder. . .or attempted murder as it might be considered, historically, since the Set would manage to mend and revive dead Leota. Once a Lotus Queen, always.
Blind dead bled drunk I remember nothing nothing nothing at all: Unger pled at the inquest—after which he was sentenced—he, a poet, sentenced to death—and sent, tensed, to be gassed in the chamber with red-ribb’d ledges, that the boatman might take his coin (a second time) and his bribe (ditto).
Yet Unger knew. He who was no more. He blacked out no longer beside the barmat. He no longer stole, drunkenly sleep-walking, into pleasure craft to gain entrance to other festivals of love than his own—festivals of drunken delight, festivals of exclusion. What was the Set but exclusion? Each member raised walls and dug moats to keep out others. For all that the Parties knit them together they froze into solitary silences—to survive, somehow, and not end up subsumed completely into the dancing amoeba made up of identically softly swaying components.
He had set up his barriers. . .for without them everyone would see, surely, how he had gone away, perhaps never to return. Wayne Unger, the frozen man: killed, revived, executed, revived. . .now cold-bunkered, now thawing, now freezing, now waking. . .a man alive; a Poet, dead. . .
In the Set. . .and out. . .and in. . .and out. . .
*
“Have you heard of the Epirrani,” she said with her tone of flat-finality questioning.
“Not that I recall.”
“Not surprising. Keeping up on news is hard, on ice. Paranorms are rare, anyway. And their talent is costly to have.”
“Costly?”
“Its deployment comes with a price.”
“I see. I think.” Unger found himself recalling Tina shakily rising from the table.
“I went on doing your research for you and found it was not completely a lie that Tina Adiatso is a poet, since she does seem to share your leanings—which makes sense, given her extreme sensitivity.”
“Extreme sensitivity. That is the talent you are talking about? You say Tina is like this—Epirrani?”
“Sensitivity is not it. Not exactly. The talent is to stimulate something like that in someone else. To set feelings in motion. Memories, too. To open others. Whom she touches.”
Cold spread inward from his hand.
“I see you begin to see,” said Mary Maude Mullen. “Her name is not real—of course. We traced this Diane Dean all the same and found her real employer is one with an old grudge against the Set. Ever since that affair involving you and Leota and Moore they have been trying to get the real story—looking for something sensational, something to cast us in a worse light than the dim one in which we already appear. Because they would bring us down to their own tawdry level this anti-Set group has sent Diane Dean to you. She felt flattered to be hired, I imagine. She has written about you before, in magazines. For that she was hired—not just because she is Epiranni.
“And so, Unger. What have you said to her?”
“I have small idea, really. Words. . .they just came out. Before I was thinking them, it seemed.”
“As I feared, from what I have read of these Epiranni. What gives us a chance is that the charade may not begin until Dean has recovered and can fully share her information. And even then they may wait until you are in cold sleep again before using your sensational words in their campaign.”
“Until she has recovered?”
“As I said, the Epiranni pay a price. Diane Dean is already in an induced coma. It may last weeks. Her body and mind require it after overextending. She was in coma for a week after your first meeting—and that was brief, was it not?”
He absorbed this. “But about waiting until I am in cold sleep—”
Rarely having seen Mary Maude’s smile, Unger greeted its arrival warily.
“You are writing again,” she said. “Well. Should you write the book they want, before they have the chance, and draw it all from your memories. . .do you see? Your star is ascendent again among the un-Set. You will be heard. And the topic itself will draw readers—for the Leota affair remains one of the great fascinations, one of the great mysteries of the Set.”
You owe us, she was saying without saying.
It startled him that he could express his horrified comprehension with a simple nod.
I cannot stay in this world where my only choices are to wake or to dream. If I do not depart from here, if I do not leave by Sleeping, this moment Now will seize me—and the ice-muse with that stake in her heart will catch up to my clay-footed soul. . .and then all the world will know I am finished. I am dead. I am gone.
He opened his lips to say this. Instead: “Tina, I mean Diane, requested another interview—”
“Good,” said Mary Maude Mullen. “So you have not told all. That gives you even more time. The other matter—as to whether you are leaving the Set for good, or just for now: we can leave that for later.
“And I am so glad, Unger, that we can agree so well.”
*
Days fled like. . .
No: flew at him, buffeting and grasping, taking him up in gray talons and holding him aloft from the slippery earth over which he had glided all this time—holding, then releasing him like a leaf. Attenuated and insubstantial after all his time in the Set, he floated earthward. Not wholly here. Nor there. He worked, dozed, slept, ate, stared at empty pages, scribbled nonsense, shivered, lost weight, read the works of great ancients and gained despair: Yea, o Emerson: I am the dwarf of myself. . .when at last before his eyes appeared, late in a night, not his ice-white staked-heart dead Nemesis but one whose forehead rippled as her scalp gave birth to the snouts of rising auburn serpents and from whose eyes dripped blood-tears. She reached to touch his hand as he struggled to awaken from dream. . .
Whatever else thou art, thou art muse.
For now as the Fates caught up, night by night, with the fallen former Eternal, Unger found at last that his pencil, antique, and paper, antiquated, and writing hand—kept on ice against the ages—trembled together. The fractured hearth within him, set ablaze again, at last could spread its winter-flake ashes to cover all.
The Headless Flute Player
by Jane Lindskold
The rapping was loud and decisive. I opened the front door of my small house to discover a headless torso, clad in water-stained garments, standing on my doorstep. Its right hand was raised, as if about to grasp the Shang bronze serpent that served as a knocker and rap a second time. However, when I pulled the door fully open, the hand fell limply to the torso’s side and the entire g
ave me its expectant attention.
How my visitor knew that I’d opened the door was beyond me, for the head was well and truly gone, not tucked under an arm or carried in a basket or some such. Without a head, the torso could neither see nor hear. I suppose it might have felt a change in the air currents.
Dismissing this minor mystery—for minor it was compared to having a headless body come calling—I wondered what I should do. The torso solved the problem for me. Fumbling in its bedraggled left sleeve, it pulled out a scrap of fabric and presented it to me with due solemnity.
Inscribed upon the fabric in reddish-brown ink was, “I wish to enlist your aid in retrieving my head.”
The message was clear enough. Nonetheless, I read it through several times before grasping my unusual visitor on one shoulder. I let my talons prick through the fabric of his robe, wordless warning as to the consequences of abusing my hospitality. Then I towed him inside. He—I assumed my caller was a “he,” although inspection of his motley attire left gender open to question—permitted himself to be led.
I settled my guest on one side of a low table, then I poured myself a cup of tea, a relatively new indulgence from the world of humans that was taking the demon realm by storm. I considered pouring my visitor a cup, shuddered as I contemplated just how he might drink it, and, instead, placed a writing tablet in front of him and a freshly-inked brush into his right hand. Then I guided his left hand so he could feel the paper.
He immediately began to write. He must have had a good sense of touch because, as soon as the brush began to scrape for lack of ink, he made a dipping gesture. I obliged by putting an inkstone within his reach, tapping it against the tabletop so he could feel the vibrations and by these know where it rested.
I took advantage of his absorption to study him more closely. By reading his aura, I confirmed my first impression that he was indeed human, not a demon shapeshifted into that form. There were several peculiarities within his aura, but I put them aside for later study.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 8