Fear grips me. I feel like my very bones are being pressed by a vice, as if a serpent moved within my stomach. For a moment I want to turn and run, yet as I step back, the shaking man stands up and gestures toward me, calling me on.
Why I move forward, I can’t be sure. Somewhere deep inside I feel that this is a moment of significance. Some hidden meaning will be revealed.
Looking down at the path, I walk—one foot trepidatiously after the other—until the edge of the platform comes into my vision. The platform stands at waist height, and I look up hesitantly. The shaking man looms before me, staring out over the Forum as if I’m not there. He emits an incorporeal radiance; at times he dissolves at the edges, degenerates into tiny fragments of matter, which wisp away, like the fog.
His voice is deep and distorted, as if coming from a long empty hallway. “Even yesterday’s tomorrows are gone,” he says. An instant later he stands half a foot to the right, then half a foot to the left again, each time without moving his legs. Again he flitters to the right and to the left, as if he is blinking out of existence and remerging instantaneously in the other place. From a distance, this movement makes him appear as if he’s shaking.
He breaks into desolate laughter and grasps his head between his hands. “What have we done? We were meant to be playing. Then this. Lomia no! No Lomia! By Panadus Icari! By Lotus Icari!” He starts to cry, unaware that I am there. He is talking to someone I cannot see, though there is no one else here.
His eyes dart around, up, down, from side to side. They are wide and horrifying, cold and filled with despair. Resolving to go, I make to turn back down the path. The shaking man’s head jerks down, his eyes fix me, and I step backward.
“There is a death.” His voice echoes and warps. “A death that shall take your life and break it like everything we’ve known. Has it happened? Will it happen? Time is the same running forward and backward. The equations work just as well.”
Coldness runs through me, straight into my bones. I begin to shake my head.
“Yes you!” the shaking man yells. As he does so, his jaw opens too wide, revealing his teeth, just as shattered as the walls behind me. For a moment I think his mouth will open so wide it will turn itself inside out, but it closes once more under an aquiline nose that reminds me of my father’s. Suddenly his entire face resembles my father’s: the gaunt high cheekbones, the narrow jutting chin. He says, “We too thought we were safe. Now look at us.”
He begins to shake back and forth at unnatural pace, as if his grief drives the movement so rapidly that he becomes just a flicker. The keening sound comes from him now, high like the wail of an engine. Then he squats down and looks out into the distance, his face melting like wax.
The shaking man’s prophesies fill me with unnamable fears, lurking just at the edge of my consciousness. Is he speaking to me, or perhaps to the past or the present themselves? My mind races in new directions like a river that has burst its banks. It is filled with images of House Arbor’s Director Lefebvre, of Olga and the children, of myself and my place in it all.
“See how they cry? See them now, the little ones. Death doesn’t suit them,” the shaking man says. He looks at me momentarily again, speaks this time in soft tones. “It’s only the unknown. Walk into the night.”
Taking this as some kind of instruction, I turn away. The ruins loom over me like ghostly giants. The path turns at unusual angles. On the edge of my vision, I see a little spectral child walking off into the ruins, his hand clasping a tiny wooden rabbit. And then I am back on the street beside the necropolis. Now it is I who is shaking.
* * *
The walk home passes like I am in a trance. I am stunned, unable to think at all. This has happened to me before, in moments of shock, such as when the twins were born. Those hours of facing Olga’s agony with no recourse, then these little purplish creatures covered in white and red, bursting from Olga. For hours afterward, I could not think at all. The horror of it, its unnaturalness, was too much.
When I reach the red double doors, I hesitate once more. The red wood now looks different. I can see the decay, rotting it from inside. I place my forehead against the wood, close my eyes, rest.
When I open the doors, a gust of warmth rushes against my face.
“You’re home?” calls out Olga from the kitchen.
I unbutton my coat, hang it on the rack.
“I’ve made some sweet biscuits, you could have them with coffee.” I can hear the tension in her voice as she waits for me to speak.
The kitchen is light and warm, and Olga hurries around, cleaning the surfaces frantically. “Zara’s gone to bed. The children too. How was your walk?”
Looking at her rosy cheeks, middle-aged yet filled with life, I think of the shaking man’s words. A death that shall take your life and break it like everything we’ve known. Images of the twins come into my mind, of little Delia.
Olga looks up at me from her cleaning. “Well?”
“It was lovely,” I say. “I went to the Thousand Stairs. It was filled with people, sitting in the piazzas, climbing up and down the stairs. The night was filled with the smell of spice breads and meats. It’s full of life.”
Olga smiles. “Oh, the young and energetic. Just wait until they have children.”
Nodding, I step across to her and take her in my arms.
“I don’t mind if you are never promoted, you know,” Olga says. “We’re together, that’s what matters.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”
“What is?” Olga bends back, her hands still clasped to my waist. Her voice is filled with relief when she says, “Don’t be silly. Whatever it is, don’t worry yourself about it. We’re together, that’s what matters.”
With sudden intensity I pull her to me. “You’re my rock, you know.”
She laughs comfortingly, as she does when our children are upset. “Oh dear, oh dear.” High up on a shelf the clockwork bird looks down at us, but it doesn’t move. Perhaps it has exhausted itself. Now it looks like a little metal skeleton, frozen in one pose.
When we retire to bed, I hold on to Olga with a kind of desperation. She lies there, tense and awake next to me. In the morning I will be up early with the children, I tell myself. I’ll play with them. We can pretend that it’s games season and set their mechanical gladiators against each other.
I’ll rush down to the apartment in the Quaedian where Martin will be waiting for me. “Ah, Martin, how was your evening? Tell me about it. Tell me everything.” And he will. Eventually, he will toss the reins, the horse will kick away, and I’ll arrive at the Arbor Palace, where my little office waits, the papers stacked neatly in piles, the stamps ready for the new day. There will be problems to solve, people to talk to, agreements to reach.
Everything will be filled with that sense of possibility it used to have. I’ll be just as I was when I was young, won’t I? Wont I?
Desperately, I clasp Olga a little tighter and, still now half-asleep, she pushes against me with her broad back and big buttocks. The words come back to me again. Has it happened? Will it happen? Time is the same running forward and backward. The equations work just as well. I see him now, the shaking man, and I know that his aquiline nose, his gaunt cheekbones, resemble not my father’s, but mine. As I think of him, I see my own haunted eyes looking out into the Forum. I clamp my eyes shut; I clench my teeth. As I lie in bed, I think of the shaking man on his platform, talking of what has been, and what is to come.
Copyright (C) 2013 by Rjurik Davidson
Art copyright (C) 2013 by Allen Williams
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Nighttime in Caeli-Amur Page 2