Celebrant Page 15

  Actually they might do better to leave her alone, as she eats almost nothing but the minate placque that accumulates on the inner walls of the viaduct, and occasionally fish or other contaminants. She loves chocolate. She is looking up at them expectantly with her weird eyes.

  Kunty drops the chocolate into the water and Beaula elongates her fingers and snatches it with an elastic motion. She pulls it to her jaws, her eyes riveted on the bar, and avidly begins to eat, the flesh of her face jostling back and forth on her skull, the only really solid bone left in her. Having made short work of the chocolate, she looks up again.

  Where’s Gina? (Kunty asks in a loud voice)

  Beaula is likely to know because she cycles through all of Votu many times a day, and so the city’s murmur reaches her hearing, which is keen—for maneuvering in the dark.

  Gina who?

  Her voice is muffled but the syllabification is distinct. Her voice makes the water thump like the skin of a high-pitched drum, so that the listener hears her with the diaphragm as much as with the ear.

  Gina snake girl!

  Kunty’s fascination with Gina snake girl is inexorable and she never asks Beaula about anyone or anything else. Beaula is preoccupied with the innumerable frustrations of her own life and never bothers to remember things like that. She pauses to think. Characteristic of her, she uses her neck feelers to hold her hair away from her face.

  Kunty hopes she knows. Otherwise she’ll have to send her to find out, and her impatience boils at the mere thought of having to wait.

  Oh! (Beaula says) Near the market, on the far side. (Her pointing gesture is slowed by the water) I think she intends to go cross town today. Tomorrow maybe.

  Today?! (Kunty glances up at the sun which nears the zenith)

  Tomorrow maybe. Maybe tomorrow.

  *

  Her first, short, look at Gina snake girl was enough to inspire an intensely covetous jealousy in Kunty. Kunty wants Gina the way some people suddenly want a malacca cane or a special sort of fancy fountain pen or a particularly pure and distinctive kind of nutmeg from a special place. They want to revel in a useless treasure. Kunty imagines carrying Gina off and keeping her as a trophy and as a mascot and as a good luck charm.

  Gina is about thirteen, or at least her body is beginning to fill out. Somehow she manages entirely on her own, as far as anyone knows. If she turns tricks, no one knows it. Everyone knows she steals, that she is a remarkably good thief, that is, good at getting away. She continually sloughs clothes, but almost always wears the same kind of thing—a wrap simply pulled around her body, just under the armpits. Gina has no hair at all, not even eyelashes, and her skin is the color of butter, darkening across her back along a line that divides her down her sides. The whites of her eyes are astonishingly bright, the irises are deep yellow, and both they and the pupils are ever so slightly pointed—irises side to side, pupil up and down. Gina’s skin has nearly invisible patterns in it, minute beaded triangles that grow livid white points when she’s agitated, and there’s a looped M, like the pince-nez letter U that the cobra wears on its hood, at the base of her neck and in the dimples to either side of the bottom of her spine. She keeps her chin tucked in and her brow a little forward, like a much younger girl would.

  Quick, but able to stay very still. Strong, without bulk. Agile, but not nervous. Resourceful, yet not clever. Gina has a dreamy, patient, docile personality, and it’s this, and perhaps her already obvious beauty, that makes her so intensely attractive to Kunty. Gina is the sort that can be led anywhere by the hand. Initiative comes to her like a possessing demon when the circumstances are right, and she gets away easily because each theft is so simple.

  Gina is hard to find, because she keeps so much to herself and says so little. But everyone in the incessantly clapping, echoing, shoe-scraping, clothing-brushing streets remarks her when they see her. Beaula can know where she is by the susurrus of notice she generates, and can speculate about crossing town because one cannot always cross town, as everyone in Votu knows. The celestials form a barrier of constant motion around the city factory which obstructs passages in a narrowly predictable way, and Votu is fractured in ways that don’t allow all areas of the city to be reached from all others.

  People in the market place thump the air with their fists and hold out fingers in mute haggling. Gina has not crossed from the far side of the market yet. Kunty set out after her only once she’d dunked herself in a fountain, so her hair is still plastered to the sides of her head and hanging like spanish moss. When she sees Gina, who is actually slithering on her stomach along the base of a wall, she yanks her hair brusquely back and knots it at the base of her neck, revealing more of her face than is usually seen.

  Gina notices them at once and freezes, staring at them without any discernible emotion. Kunty is squatting on all fours nearby, baring her teeth in a smile that creases her eyes. She opens her jaws and a glistening snake darts its head from within her teeth; no thicker than a pencil it arcs its back against the bridge of her nose and holds its head stable, its tail still in Kunty’s mouth, staring at Gina like Kunty had sprouted a third eye, out on a stalk. It switches sides of Kunty’s nose, then goes limp, and Kunty takes the tail out of her mouth and sets the snake down on the ground giggling. It’s a toy, worked with the tongue.

  Gina looks gradually up from it to Kunty. Kunty flounces down on the ground suddenly in front of Gina, lying on her back and looking at her up through her eyebrows.

  Rabbit girls drowsing in the shadows of the aqueducts as the razz rings out from the city factory for the night shift. They all stop and look up at once as Kunty comes among them drawing Gina obediently along by the hand.

  Get her something (Kunty creaks, squatting back on her haunches nearly beside herself with ill-contained self-satisfaction)

  Spread out! (Kunty snarls, though with a grin)

  Rabbit girls shrink back from Gina. Who isn’t eating what they’ve presented her.

  Kunty leans forward and peers at Gina. Her face pinches up in thought, then relaxes.

  Snakes eat meat (Kunty says) Go bring her some!

  We’ve got some, somewhere (Kunty says)

  Ester, prompt as always, scampers up with an unopened can of kippers in her mouth. Gina sits on her hip eating them demurely. Kunty eats handfulls of cabbage, her eyes fixed on Gina.

  A secretive impulse, unusual for her, makes Kunty find a shadowy spot to sleep in, and she pushes Gina toward it. She pulls off Gina’s wrap and sets it to one side, then draws Gina down to the ground, causing her to lie flat. She rolls Gina onto her stomach, climbs on top of her, and goes to sleep immediately, with her cheek against Gina’s back.

  Nowhere:

  A country of pillowpeople, fluffy pink dummies and floating television sets hurtling by, squares of blue light flash past in the night sky—blood pours down the screen of the television set and drips from the mouths and the hair of the images. A dummy sitting on a chair in a vacant lot full of burning scraps and discarded tires is getting a television set bolted to his face with a heavy steel truss. Dummies gingerly walk down the street, their faces squashed into the screens of enormous console television sets bolted or strapped to their heads. Without a sound this one drops down an open manhole he didn’t see. In the adjacent laundromat this one, sitting in one of a row of seats against the wall, is leaking sawdust from the side of its split face, and another one, unable to support the weight of his television set, lies collapsed on the floor, pants having fallen down and a huge pink cushiony ass hoisted high in the air, his face flattened against blue static. Pillowpolice wade blindly into a crowd pummeling and crushing soft elastic faces with boots of polished black rock. In institutions they are rolled out like flab with rolling pins on zinc tables, kneaded and punched into shape by fuzzy puppet hands; they decorate each other with tinsel that falls right off and go to parties and dances where they flap around, fold and squeeze each other. A pillowboy with a powder blue prom suit printed on his material g
rabs his pink date by the waist and lifts her up; the stuffing surges to her head, so that its material dimples like cellulite. Pillowpeople sag, drooping from windows like gobs of melting ice cream, flopping from their seats on the bus and bouncing down the aisle as the brakes screech, whole buildings jump up and spin in place or turn cartwheels.

  The pillow family has gathered at their tranquil dinner table. They sit, listing this way and that, before plates of braised sawdust, little heap of white feathers to one side, and a smaller plate of foam granules, glasses of fizzing styrofoam, a plume of smoke rising from the feather’s (as they call the father) cigarette. The house leaps up without warning, somersaulting, and they flip and whirl through the air—the furniture crashes into the center of the room and the whole house subsides and sloughs open like a rotten melon. The family fly in a circle, arms and legs out like parachuting gingerbread men, and are smashed in on top of each other by their heavy furniture.

  Police shoot in near unison guns at waist emptying their magazines without aiming—men in room fling up their arms and dance jerkily, shouting as the furniture around them is blasted to splinters—cut to rhythmic pounding of hand drums cops sidle into the room in unison their fat wide faces blank and start shooting as before, ignored and ineffective. The guy who slumps sideways hasn’t been shot, he’s passed out with boredom. Class of bored kids bored teacher the cops burst in blam blam and kids are suddenly flying around, teacher tearing her clothing to shreds—an old lady fresh from church grabs a police officer by the front of his uniform her eyes glassy and crazed, ‘oh you just don’t know how good it is, that blam blam!’—people clutch at mask-faced cops on the street pleading for a few rounds... the catchy rhythm of the hammers creates toe-tappin’ silence—all street traffic is now police cars, traffic jams of police cars, motionless or barely moving, all screaming sirens and blinding lights flashing and strobing, probing searchlights swivelling, plunging into windows, squawking radios. The cops sit motionless in the front seats, their arms at their sides, gazing fixedly at their uniforms to make sure they still look right.

  The midsummer mail pile: away oh favacation—

  Two thieves burst the door handle with their jimmie. It spins uselessly. They curse.

  Entering the apartment, one of them knocks something over right away, crash!—cackling, he turns and puts his foot through the back of a cabinet—forgetting all about theft and keeping quiet they spasmodically wreck the place, household items, familiar things, furniture all churning around together in a mass of broken fragments thrown into a cement mixer, smashed—nothing of value—she drove a huge cement mixer silently around for a living while swissy just couldn’t keep himself from repeatedly being stabbed it was a curse must have been—never too seriously though.

  The ambassador slides up unctuously and says, overdubbed, “We’d like to welcome you with this rotten, infected food.”

  “Thank you!” someone says, taking the horrifying plate he’s been handed and dropping it in the trash.

  A rickety kickline of cardboard cops all attached to the same metal beam comes crashing in, guns level at their flat waists and blasting.

  “Oh, well!” the ambassador cries tersely, peppered with bullet holes.

  It’s not easy walking down the street drunk

  —So you make it easier by screaming obscenities

  I understand

  The creamy, rain-darkened concrete of the courtyard melted insubstantially into my genitals... they built the city out of car alarms sirens rumbling trucks booming speakers helicopters flying by at hair level and hat level a peaceless scene of mechanized sadness and efficient stupidity fossilizing in archaic circuitry, cheap buildings, disembodied tension unemployed by the community as a hole.

  You got a P-681 over there? (he yells into his phone)... You sittin’ on a P?... Bring it on over.

  ...For export?... Exporting what? Bumps? I think they have enough bumps, man.

  A middle-aged bachelor sits scraping morning oatmeal in his kitchen, tapping at the bowl. His upstairs neighbor explodes through the door eyes starting from their sockets baseball bat held high I’LL TEACH YOU TO KEEP TAPPING YOUR BOWL!

  Warren, this conversation has gone on long enough. I’m afraid you will have to commit ritual suicide.

  Suicide?! But that’s a mortal sin!

  I know, but it’s required of you.

  Suicide is required of me?

  In part yes.

  What’s the other part?

  What do you mean?

  What do you mean? You said ‘in part yes.’... Are you intimating that being eternally damned is also required of me?

  Yes. You must commit suicide and be eternally damned.

  I won’t do it!

  What?! What do you mean you won’t do it?!

  That’s what I said and there’s no point arguing about what I mean I won’t do it no matter what I mean or what you say is required!

  You think you can just change your voice and not do what I tell you?

  That’s exactly what I think!

  You’re wrong! You have to do as I tell you!

  Yeah? Well I have a better idea. It’s called ‘forget it.’

  What’s that!?

  You heard me. I’m not going to do it.

  Is that so? I think you will do it. I think that the torment of your guiltiness at the thought of your offensive failure to fulfill your sworn contractual obligations—that you have sworn to uphold—will drive you to it in the end!

  And I think you’ve gone totally insane! You honestly expect me to bump myself off for some unspecified misdemeanor that I don’t even know what it is let alone can feel guilty about?

  You’ll do it.

  ...I think—maybe—you’ll do it.

  Me?!

  I think you’re the one who’s going to commit ritual suicide. I think you’re talking about yourself. I think the terrible guilt of torment is your problem and you’re just trying to fob it off on me! That’s what I think!

  Oh no you don’t! You’re not turning this thing around on me!

  What thing? I don’t think there’s any thing to turn around except your displaced homicidal tendencies wanting to convince me to commit suicide.

  And what you offer by way of rebuttal is the implication that these chimerical homicidal impulses of mine are actually a form of projected suicide?!

  Exactly.

  Nuts!

  You’ve wanted to kill yourself for a long time.

  I think you’re completely out of your mind.

  No—you want to.

  That’s preposterous! I tell you I have no intenzed—intension to, of—

  See? You can’t even say it!

  Of course I can say it! Everybody splutters once and a while and stop trying to manipulate me!

  I’m not manipulating you. You’re manipulating yourself.

  I’m leaving. It’s obvious to me that you’re completely incapable of rationality.

  *

  Votu is a forest, scaled by the punctual chirps of birds, whose voices scatter in flakes among the branches. Water drips from the leaves.

  deKlend:

  Night time, and back in the dark, slushy streets again. Trucks like bellowing bears leave tunnels of noise and smoke behind them, numbed and impatient people glance fretfully at each other as they pass, mutely imploring each other not to interfere with them. They sway to engine groans, a man reverently kisses a gargling exhaust pipe, bathing his face in its flatulence like a man at an oasis. Before entering the town—why come back here?—deKlend had hesitated a long while, dazed by the sudden idea that someone might try to take from him the crudely-fashioned sword blade he clutches, assuming that anyone would recognize it as a sword blade. It might have been mistaken for all manner of things. Then, between thoughts, he tosses it into the air and breathes it into his lungs, like smoke, and forgets it there.

  Cracked sidewalk and his shadow... he moves his shadow hand over the crack, closes his fingers, and picks the
crack up. It rattles like sheet metal as he moves it. The street puckers and beads around it as he waves it gently to and fro like a wand, a crumbled length of a hollow bolt of lightning—careful don’t let it fall over a person split apart in spray of blood. It’s not in his hand but in his shadow’s hand... If it were to fall on a shadow of a person it would create insanity—so much power in a sidewalk crack. Now he thinks to use it for navigation. He puts it back, leaving his hand there over it, and as he moves his hand, the whole street turns, as if the crack were a handle. It would be so much better (he thinks) if I could lie down in some quiet spot and think, but I can’t let go—this may never happen again. I may never be able to do this again (he thinks). No time to get anything, I have to go as is, into the crack.

  He angles his shadow in sideways. The crack makes a flapping, crinkling sound. Can I (he wonders) leave my shadow holding on? No—shadow of my hand? No—so how do I leave the crack on this other side and find my way back?

  He looks to the pale, starkly white light coming from somewhere to the left. He pulls off one hair from his head and puts it down between the light and the crack, so its shadow falls on the crack, to hold it for him. Then he gingerly lets the crack slip from the fingers of his shadow’s hand. It relaxes a little, but stays in the shadow of the hair. deKlend pins the hair down with a tiny lead ingot he finds lying there, one of many in a large heap, with the hair standing up enough to remain in the light and cast its shadow on the crack.