Celebrant Page 12

  pigeon girls are following her—

  she can’t glimpse them over her shoulder in the dark rooms, and can barely hear the light flap of their feet, their gentle panting, the faint hum of their anger.

  Phryne:

  Phryne is one of the last scions of an aristocratic Macedonian family, who had for many years enjoyed the high distinction of being General Stulphthakis’ mistress. He was the soul of discretion; his power and influence rested on his unquestioned reputation for keeping secrets and, more importantly, for the quick acuity with which he could discriminate between genuine secrets and false ones. A false secret is kept in the dark for no good purpose. His wife was cast iron—die cast—but her glacial majesty and great wealth made her a good match for him. She may have had her diversions as well, but she seemed too addicted to currency manipulation and usury to give much thought to any such liberal joys as love and her erotics all involved specie.

  The General picked Phryne out at a cotillion and she was his possession within the month—and that was only because he was habitually cautious and did nothing, literally nothing, precipitously. He was tolerably handsome, but above all it was his lordliness that fascinated her. Officially she became his unofficial pastime, although he was careful never to flaunt. She always knew when he was setting her forward like a chess piece, to arouse so many quanta of jealousy, or to throw a rascally light on himself when he felt that would make him seem more approachable, particularly with respect to the other kinds of affairs not openly discussed. Being used like this, she understood abstractly, was somehow unwholesome, but in her heart she liked being his conspiracy, and she loved being a demigod. It was as if a beam of secret glory were trained on her every moment.

  Mrs. General Stulphthakis’ cancer took her life quickly, or so it seemed. Actually she’d had it diagnosed years before, untreatable, and had soldiered on with it in silence nearly until the end. She refused any drastic measures, never complained, never let anyone see how much pain she was in, and turned her face to the wall, but not before she’d disbursed the vast wealth she’d hidden from her husband to various of her own relatives.

  Phryne had been waiting for him in the private home they’d always used, very conveniently just a few dozen yards up the street from the small, discreetly extremely luxurious hotel he preferred, and had happened to step out onto the balcony... drenched in clear, snowy light... wearing the sheer, white dress of thin silk that so flattered her, that clung so lovingly to her form... in time to see him emerge from beneath the canopy of the hotel entrance and speedily usher her young cousin Veronika into his mercedes. Like a lightning bolt the truth broke in on her and she screamed. They were already driving away.

  Foreshortened men looked up.

  Over the epoch that followed that revelation, she oscillated, with throbs that would gather slowly and build implacably, by such measured steps that she was aware of each one, to a crescendo of confused and unbearable suffering. Her anguish would incandesce, like a chemical reaction, at unpredictable moments, turning into bleaching, murderous hate, then lapse again into something more like grief.

  Staring out the window toward the sea—it was a resort town—the thoughts slithering around the inside of her skull like friable old condoms blowing in the wind. They all seem to orbit the same mute center, the obscure shock. Now she thinks she had a presentiment of it, one of the last times they were here, and came down through the long, steep tunnel through the pale orange-tan rock to the concrete pier. The General’s haunted old mercedes was a black, glistening cavern of a car, and his driver seemed to belong to it. The driver might have been killed by it and his ghost condemned to drive it forever. She remembers the way she started once, seeing him returning to the car from the public bathroom in a park. It was that surprising to see him out of the car. The day of her presentiment, at the beach, it chanced that she happened to be struck by his way of being silent, which, up until then, she had assumed he had adopted as the way best calculated to keep him in the General’s service. She tended to understand everyone in terms of calculation, and, in the General’s milieu, this was a sensible and useful tendency. But now, it was as if the haze that usually obscured something, like a mountain in the distance, had blown away, for reasons as inscrutable as changes in the weather, and she saw that he was a silenced man. Standing in a gale of sunlight on the pier, as the General sauntered down its length to meet his so-and-so, she happened to glance back and saw the driver behind the wheel, his features washed out to grey transparency by the reflections in the intervening windshield, and his sad face. He had been reduced to this, nothing but a driver, hurtling through space, ferrying people to and fro, and was nothing more than the sad frictionlessness of perfect operation. To her, he took on portentousness at once, like a harbinger of sorrow, and now it was here.

  Some time later she had gone to find the General. She knew where he was, and with whom, the woman he would now marry instead of her, and she brought along a slender knife which she felt would explain herself to him with the succinctness he liked so much. His bodyguards stopped her in the parking lot. With a composure that was much more alarming than rage she called on them to let her pass, and it was only when they made it clear they were every bit as duty-bound to defend the General against women as men that she exploded in a withering onslaught of insults and challenges, loading them with curses she lashed at them like boiling surf until they grew pale, pressed together their lips, lowered their eyes. They did not, however, move, and, after glowering haughtily at them a moment more, she turned and stepped slowly away, trembling with exhaustion.

  No more will I feel the morning light (she said to herself)

  The elevated language she used wasn’t wrong or right. Plain words weren’t proud enough. She desperately needed pride then, so she expressed herself in the grandest language. It was right for what she needed but it still felt put on, and that seemed to reflect falseness on her pride, making it into a mask.

  She began her travels the following night, which was all the restraint her injury would permit, without a word to anyone. She went to a land of staircases. Time was transformed into an inner maze that turned her around and around in place so that she was always wandering. Light and heat left her with each step. Again and again she noted to herself, (I’m growing cold), but without quite hearing herself. That voice was becoming more and more muffled, like the voice from a grave. She slept during the day, climbed stairs at night, and before her eyes everything was becoming black and cold and gleaming like the polished side of a black mercedes, in which nothing except cold was reflected.

  On a certain night, she stopped to answer an innocent question in the street, a request for directions, and the person she saw before her looked exactly like a black mercedes.

  Then she became seriously frightened for the first time.

  What’s happening to me? (she wondered)

  Everything looked like black mercedes. Walls and walls of black mercedes.

  This wasn’t about the General anymore. The memory of her humiliation and anger had faded. Her attention had been elsewhere for so long, and away from herself. She had become cold, and had been noticing it without noticing for an amount of time she found to her astonishment she couldn’t encompass.

  Had it been that long/that short!?

  She was like an animal dying of hypothermia in the frost, whose very slowly ebbing life abruptly refluxes back on itself and flares up, causing it to renew its struggles to escape. Alarmed, she began to get a sense of how much of life she had allowed herself to let go. A little jolt will eventually send what drifts far off its course; how far out of sight she had gone, and for what? Those days and the General were like the pinhole light of a well mouth seen from deep down in the icy water, and even the moment she’d seen them together and screamed now signified only the moment she’d embarked on the deadening voyage that had brought her here.

  Then, in the interval between two thoughts—another, fleeting type of thought darts by. Strictly
by chance, she snatches it, and with bewildering ease she is suddenly out of the maze. It’s as if a narrow, easily-overlooked doorway had gone racing by on the wall and she just happens to have turned and stepped at precisely the right moment to slip through it, into green fields and hazy sun. Although it still is night, and in the mirror in the front window of a closed shoe store she sees she doesn’t recognize the person in her place. From being a somebody to being a nobody, it turns out there is only a very short step, and that only really a matter of point of view, to divide being nobody from being anybody. She discovered then the mnemosem’s secret of looking unlike yourself, but like anyone.

  It didn’t feel good, doing it. She would blur, like a figure of glowing milk melting into smoke. Then a shadow would appear inside like someone seen through an opaque white shower curtain, and someone else would step out of the fog the next moment. It felt like the confirmation of the worst expectations. A sixty-year old man with a hearing aid, a little boy, a nondescript cafeteria worker, would emerge and there would close around that form a feeling like the collapse, the moment of truth, when one knows for certain that all is lost. It was a terrible feeling, but it seemed to root her strongly in reality in a way that she needed, and in such perfect disguises she could go wherever she wanted without having to be Phryne. She never appeared in public without a disguise, and she insinuated herself back into life in that form of espionage.

  In no time she learned that every shape changer has one feature they cannot change or conceal, and in Phryne’s case this was her sniff—always only on the left side of her nose a sound like ripping stiff tissue paper. Phryne kept her sniffing under control, but no discipline is perfect, and maintaining a disguise is tiring. At times she would hear that sniff ring out with dejection, knowing her concentration was faltering but unable to stop it. Anyone hearing that sniff would think instantly of Phryne.

  When she would return to her lair she resumed her own proper appearance. What does she look like? Her face is shaped like a wide almond. She has an overgenerous body, leaflike hands and feet, heavy, powerful legs, very wide hips, an enormous rump, a heavy bust, broad shoulders—her whole body is surprisingly strong, flexible, and vital. She moves slowly, deliberately and heavily, but with a steadying, balancing force. She is graceful.

  But just then it was becoming apparent that her disguises were bleaching her. Her hair, which had once been luxuriously thick, yet fine, and black, thinned, and turned pale yellow. Parts of her—sensitive parts—were becoming transparent, and she resorted to cosmetics to restore them.

  Does your house have... old plumbing? (a chorus girl asks, glancing at her a little strangely as they sit side by side before the mirror in the dressing room)

  I don’t know. Why?

  Well, you see, my sister is a nurse and...

  She points to Phryne’s reflection in the mirror.

  ...eh, see that blue line there? Above your teeth?

  What is it?

  Phryne gasps, staring incredulously at the livid blue ribbon that runs like a pinstripe along her upper and lower gums.

  It’s a sign of lead poisoning.

  She’d bought those cosmetics at an old out of the way shop, the kind she liked—lead white, lead scarlet for the lips, and lead in the kohl she smears around her eyes. But she can’t stop... the more bizarre her appearance becomes, the better her disguises. One glance, a sort of inner turn, and she can’t be told apart from the person standing beside her, from a toothless old man or even a young boy less than half her size. No one ever sees her as she actually appears, except the mirror in her perennially empty rooms. The tiny white points that float beneath the surface of her skin grow and become blotches, like ragged splatters of white paint. Finally every inch of her skin is white—not pale, but opaque white, as if she’d been painted. The pinks, greens, yellows, dark purple obscurities of her veins, are all invisible. Her eyelids and the skin around them have become clear to the staring eyes and sockets, the beautifully-shaped lips are nearly transparent and her teeth show through. Her once dark brown eyes are bleached so wanly blue they seem almost white, and the irises glisten like satin.

  She discards her lead cosmetics. In less than twelve hours an unbearable tugging has her rummaging in the alley to retrieve them, rushing inside to apply more. The realization that she is addicted comes over her like the terror of an animal caught in a snare. Withdrawal makes her liable to nightmarish attacks of uncertainty about who she is and whether she still exists, while continued use makes her prey to plombotic episodes that rattle her mind to pieces and often incapacitate her with searing, stabbing abdominal pains.

  deKlend:

  The leaves twinkle once and dusk veils the cooling sky. A helicopter is bearing down on the dusk as if bent on its total destruction. There’s a whole convoy of them in a line, just far enough apart to ensure their unbearable noise never entirely fades, carrying precious, impatient cargo.

  To come back from the naked black trees, the chilly black mud matted with filmy autumn leaves, coming in out from rain, night, and solitude like an exiled spirit, seeing people again, looking at them again, like a stranger, looking around him with an almost outraged expression, startled, a little dazzled, at being surrounded again by humanity’s pointless fuss. A body of wind and rain, stillness, cold, and silence, the spirit of the black rain pool. Humanity, or their humanity, comes back to deKlend slowly, against a gradually subsiding inner quiet. Within his mind, that beguiling little chatter gets going again after a bit—

  But (he thinks) I am still—

  Crash! A shapeless creature in colorless pajamas tosses boxes into the back of a truck.

  —I am (he thinks) still—I am a wan reflection, a rustle, the motionless trees, the rain hush, the river in the rain.

  He can feel himself in his hollow in the night like a doll in a dollhouse. There he is, like any other, coming, going, thinking this, thinking something else, wondering, concerning himself, quaintly doing his work, while outside, in the dark strung with sodium lights, the Language passes by unseen, like a huge palm smoothing down the wind.

  deKlend is coming in out of the raining landscape into a bustling boulevard lined with two and three story buildings and opening onto indistinguishable if slimmer streets all braying and howling with traffic.

  deKlend gazes around with displeasure. Why make this? This is an island of brick and metal stores and apartments surrounded by reefs of slums. The slumshacks of plastic sheeting, flattened boxes, and other refuse—bits of wood and metal are precious—aren’t free, the tenants have to pay protection money rent if they want to remain within at least four hours walking distance of belchtalking slobs who odd-job them.

  deKlend elbows his way along aggressively ugly streets of grey slush washed in a sour broth of brown light. What is there to love about here? Where the gurgling rage of intimidators twangs discordantly with the churchbells—the door just below his window goes squeak/blam-squawkblam! squalkbalm!—and then there’s the pewling of relentless quarter notes from that sour churchbell, that whimpers on a timer these saccharine little lullabiesforbrainamphibians with the grinding regularity of a prison drill.

  The slobs recoil enraged at the slippery conspiratorial press and invitation of darkness, but hands on hips survey with gargles of buffoonish pride a crude chandelier of dingy sodium lights that choke the eye with turgid orange muck. Their abhorrence of life’s refreshment is so intense they can’t bear the idea that some creature, some terrible rascal, might imbibe a moment’s pleasure from slipping insouciantly past their houses in the silky, detested night; so to satisfy themselves of the impossibility of this, all over their drab homes they bolt motion-sensing fright lights that explode dozens of times an hour. The curtains or blinds flutter, the dull gleam of a querulous eye appears, surveying for the thousandth time the paved yard, the chain fence, the planters heaped with power tools and luridly colored, odd-shaped pieces of hollow plastic, sizzling in the cold, spiteful blue glare. As always they see noth
ing—must have been a cockroach—but they call the police, or an ambulance, or a fire truck, or the garbage man.

  Between the bawling of the sirens and the blare of heavy equipment opening and closing the street there is no quiet. Thanks to unbridled corruption there are over twenty-five garbage collection companies, and each one fields a fleet of loud stinking trucks which dump on the corners of one block the trash it took them three hours to collect on the previous block.

  A voice speaking into stunned, muffled spluttering—

  When I was young you wouldn’t set a finger on me! Where were you when I needed you? So you come around now, when it’s too late? I learned how to be alone! Now you go learn it! I like my loneliness better than you!

  deKlend charges headlong down the sidewalk steeling himself for a collision rather than give ground, eyes fixed angrily ahead of him and his blankets pulled up almost like armor around his jacket and tie. The cold rain makes the air so malevolently clear, especially transparent to the variably stained cement greys that shimmer with sullen energy, and that makes people livid so their faces almost phosphoresce in the gloom, like bloodless carrion. These people have evolved to survive in a medium of despair and loss.

  I am not one of these swine (he thinks)

  He fixes his mind with a resolve that is constantly dislodged on images of tranquil places, but this only has the effect of seeming to bring about their desecration. They have no power to resist this bulldozing pollution. The feeling transforms into an ever sharpening impulse to escape, if only into a doorway—his mind is becoming increasingly chaotic and he is looking to return the way he came—it’s becoming an attack—

  He stops abruptly, so that the man walking a step too close behind him bumps into him with a low utterance and passes him, turning from the waist like a playing card. Standing on top of a corrugated pipe sticking out of a brick wall, its wide open mouth just a few inches above the pavement, the carving is spring-shaped and seems to be a painted snake, no it’s a little spotted shark with eyes as red as the deep red sea. Crawling frantically into the pipe his nostrils detect a whiff of incense, maybe frankincense, and there’s a fairy glimmer, it seems, at the far end. About halfway along the pipe he stops; there is no draft, but the pipe itself is warm, resting on something warm.