Celebrant Page 16

  The other side of the crack silently swoops away, forming an edge of the world. Just a motionless chaos of darkness, and this edge. This edge is really almost nothing, just a scrimmy shelf, and something like an institutional basement with shrouded light bulbs and a sour vomitty smell. The motionless chaos of clean darkness is impalpably breathing soft weightless air on him. The shadow of the hair seems a pretty paltry trick now, but he doesn’t act on his sudden impulse to kick it aside because then again little things are often surprisingly... I’ll leave it (he thinks), and this edge and go into the...

  *

  He has to answer the call of nature, and turns aside to pour himself out onto the brown dust here among the shrubs. In the dim evening radiance he can make out the darker calligraphy he left in the dirt. He stops to button up, and that mark begins to move—it gathers together and slithers off in a flash.

  He looks up to dismal, deadpan predawn light and follows a gradually sloped field of pale blue rocks, everywhere birds hopping among the boulders.

  There is my rival. My adversary. I will become his shadow, his vampire (Adrian thinks with glee) I will haunt him in his slumbers like the visitation of madness—

  Oh, it’s Adrian again (deKlend thinks)

  Adrian has doused himself with a whole bottle of cologne and so precedes himself. Dangling from the pinched hook of his fingers, his triangle trembles like water in the dull air.

  We follow the grapefruit in this part (Adrian says softly, falling in alongside deKlend)

  He rings his triangle. A single, pure note is scattered among the rocks. There is a scarlike path among them, and a grapefruit, intense in color owing to the thinning of the last of night’s darkness, rolls, on its own, along it.

  I fail to see... (Adrian trails off)

  Fail to see what?

  Adrian smiles.

  I don’t know, because I fail to see it.

  The grapefruit bounces among some small houses and the two of them become separated trying to follow it.

  Adrian produces his triangle and rings it once. A woman comes timidly from one of the back rooms. She is drawn, and her cheeks blush under the prominent cheekbones though she is so pale. Her filmy nightshirt droops on her body.

  Adrian strides over to her with a smile. She shrinks in place at his approach. He reaches out and very gently takes hold of the open edges of her shirt, and closes them again, pressing the shirt lightly to her with his fingertips before withdrawing his hand. During this operation she is as rigid as stone.

  His hands are now hanging at his sides, as usual, and he seems to loom over her somehow.

  Have you seen the grapefruit? (he asks softly, around his teeth)

  She shakes her head.

  I’ve been following it. It has me all worked up.

  It bounces past outside and he rushes out after it. The woman goes limp a moment then stiffens again—

  It would be just like him to go and then come back at once, to pounce on me and catch me in my relief—

  But instead the footsteps belong to another man, all wrapped in shawls, with a moustache and a sort of quizzical expression.

  Did it come through here, miss?

  In her surprise, all she can do is shake her head.

  No?

  The whrounim went out after it—just there (she points)

  Whrounim? (he says in surprise) You mean Adrian?

  She nods.

  Why, he’s not a whrounim at all (deKlend says) He likes people to think that he is—he took me in too at first, to be honest—but he’s no whrounim.

  Not...

  I’m sorry to disturb you (he says, exiting)

  ...a whrounim at all (she says)

  Her expression darkens.

  deKlend has found the grapefruit again and, always attentive, Adrian joins him a moment later. He is opening his lips to speak when deKlend gives a little cry of surprise.

  Nardac is reclining on a bench with her back to a fencepost. When she sees them, she smiles placidly, and waves. Then she rises and undulates toward them like a boneless undersea creature. She is wearing another of her flowing, tent-like dresses, this one with broad stripes of blue and yellow, and the heavy bangles on her wrists, the huge beads around her slightly crepey throat.

  How good to see you again, deKlend (she says softly, her voice so far away in the dimness) Are you following the grapefruit?

  Yes, we are. Are you mnemosem as well?

  Standing there now, a single ripple seems to undulate through her.

  Well I wasn’t born bald (she says drily)

  They walk along together, in a row. Unnoticed, Adrian shoots glances of nettled frustration at Nardac across deKlend’s bow. He wants so badly to be a cinematic villain, a minatory figure no one can be around without foreboding feelings. Nardac’s presence is making it impossible for him to say oblique, sinister inducements to deKlend, fomenting a presentiment of evil, the way he’d like. And yet she walks along in a trance, maybe oblivious to them both.

  What is that beautiful thing you have? (deKlend asks, pointing to Nardac’s hand)

  She is holding a long wooden pipe with a knob protruding from the side of the bowl. The pipe is made of fiery, almost scarlet wood, richly and closely grained, in places catching the light like a very fine, beaded gold web.

  It’s from Votu (she says simply) One of the natural robots there... they call it troglodyte... no one evidently has ever seen it. It never leaves its cavern below its shrine. Apparently you can hear it moan to itself down there. Anyway, this machine makes a drug they draw up out of the cave in baskets. When they process it a certain way, it comes out in a golden loop that’s lighter than air, and a sort of bubble in the loop, like the skin of a black pool... you unravel the wires at one point carefully and touch them to your heart... they are spun from stellar waves by the natural robot. You can keep them forever, in musty velvet old jewelry cases.

  But this kind (she taps the pipe) is much more affordable and its effects aren’t as drastic.

  She shows him a little purse filled with blue shavings. You put them in here (she points to the bowl) and you put a pellet of aconite salt here (she points to the knob, which has a hole in it) and turn the knob to drop the pellet into the shavings. Then you suck the powder all in at once.

  It sounds tricky (deKlend says)

  I’m not finished (she raises a finger, and her jewelry clicks) Nothing happens until you sit and draw air through the pipe for a while. Then...

  She opens her hand in a gentle, blossoming gesture beside her head.

  A stark, blue shout from the core of the brain! Can you imagine? It’s actually audible from outside. A piercing whistle. And the powder, turned palest blue, jets from the corners of the eyes.

  She points to her eyes, and deKlend sees two faint, airbrushed-looking pale spots on either side of her nose.

  The sensation (she goes on) before this happens is like the tips of two fingers pressing against the inside of the skull, just behind the bridge of the nose, and being drawn up behind the forehead, spreading apart on their way to—the hair line.

  She makes a wry face.

  Then out it shoots, and inside your head beams like a whitewashed courtyard full of cool, mediterranean light.

  She smiles blissfully and raises the amber stem to her lips again. The grapefruit goes tumbling along.

  The sun is so long in coming up (deKlend remarks)

  Adrian continues with them in silence. He feels himself drawing closer to deKlend.

  Yes (he thinks, quietly even to himself) let me enter within the circle of his defenses...

  It’s a strange thing! (he says aloud, baring his teeth)

  After a moment more, he adds,

  You’ve read my work, haven’t you? It’s been most extraordinarily unappreciated in critical circles.

  Is that east, do you think? (deKlend asks, pointing)

  I haven’t a map (Adrian says)

  Wait—(deKlend stops)

  He turns t
o Nardac.

  You say you’ve been in Votu?

  Naturally (she says) We’re in Votu now.

  The outer precincts (Adrian says to his back) The outer precincts of the greater metronome.

  You see (deKlend says to Nardac) I must get there myself.

  But you are in Votu, deKlend.

  He wants to bring his sword to the city, isn’t that right? (Adrian says with mockery in his voice)

  deKlend turns to him.

  That vile, misshapen sword blade he keeps in his lungs? (Adrian says, lowering his chin, hooding his eyes in the sockets)

  But who told you about that? (deKlend asks) Well, it is pretty awful (he adds a moment later, thrusting his hand through his shawls to rub the back of his neck ruefully) I work out a kink here and warp another part in the process.

  It’s a bad job (Adrian says vehemently)

  deKlend looks up at him again.

  Adrian’s eyes widen, his grin slackens an instant, then spreads, expanding larger than ever, and losing all of its sardonic aspect. He lifts his arms straight out from where they hang at his sides and holds them high.

  I am here! (Adrian calls softly, his throat bulging with emotion in his tight collar)

  Totally perplexed, deKlend stares at him and realizes he is actually looking past him. Turning around he sees an enormous black bird spiralling up into the sky.

  What is that? (deKlend asks himself)

  He is holding back the dawn! (Adrian says rapturously, almost singing the words)

  Have I seen—? No, never (deKlend thinks) I believe I must have read about it somewhere, when I—he’s right, the sun should have been up by now, he’s right about that at least—read about Votu?

  Is it a condor or something? (Nardac asks, shading her eyes with her elbow up high)

  Oh, Bird of Ill Omen! (Adrian intones)

  Do you know, I’ve seen that bird before, deKlend? (Nardac asks)... deKlend?

  Yes, just a minute.

  Oh, Master! (Adrian bellows) Black herald of catastrophe!

  What on earth are you doing, deKlend? (Nardac asks, squinting to make him out in a glare only she sees)

  Animatedly springing up on top of a large rock, deKlend stands in an apelike posture with his back and knees bent, his arms hanging down and a bit out. All his attention seems concentrated on an object she can’t see—not the bird, but something else. He seems poised to jump.

  Ah, magnificent forerunner of destruction! (Adrian sighs)

  What is it, deKlend?

  It’s coming (he says tersely)

  He adjusts his angle, quickly takes a step, and flashes away, like a scrap of tissue suddenly whipped aloft by a gust of wind. There is a black speck far off, legs swinging—now it’s gone and the sky is empty. The sun breaks the horizon.

  Oh! (she says, raising the back of her hand to her lips)

  A colorless, icy effulgence... the white sun against a white sky. Something flutters past deKlend in midair, like a pitch-black pigeon, and he could swear

  it tells him to—

  Listen.

  Dart, flash, race over the earth—up mountains—over the sea—through pathways framed in the sky’s sparkling blue leaves and cloud flowers and zoom over the ground boulders beaches gullies through forests and cities just a ribbon of solid fluid land tremble and ripple beneath his feet down through the earth like chocolate cake shoot the breathless emptiness of outer ocean miles from the bottom and the surface alike then up high above the plain a transparent crease of gravity thin as a thread to run on and though he’s got big feet deKlend can stay on that line knees blinking his hands threshing the air before his chest, leant forward his large liquid eyes wide open and receptive above his moustache—

  Despite his frenetic speed a dreamlike trance all spangled with glittering motes and reflected, starlike gleams from the gossamer icicles of the sky seems to billow from his mind and englobe him in a diamond transparency of calm, condensed and solid as unblemished water.

  In complete silence, the Bird of Ill Omen looms before him. From his plumage comes a pungent, chemical fragrance that is sharp and aromatic like the perfume of savage flowers. Half-hidden in the long tailfeathers, deKlend can see its feet aren’t talons but hands, in long shiny black rubber gloves.

  The Bird of Ill Omen is aware of him, deKlend is certain, though it does not turn its chilling gaze on him. The rubber hands squeak as the fingers crumple shut and stretch open.

  I am the Bird of Ill Omen.

  I fly in the dark corridors of the sky.

  I spend my days in heaven.

  I am the Bird of Ill Omen.

  That I live at all is bad news for you.

  deKlend can feel the gathering in of the medium of misfortune and bad luck. The Bird’s funereal domain, throbbing with giddy powers. The circle of power that ineluctably bears the effect back upon the cause.

  This is my nature... I love Votu... but I long to torment it!

  The Bird of Ill Omen flashes into a blot of darkness, emerging miles away on the mountainside in a point of light as the sky goes black.

  The Bird of Ill Omen stands by the mountainside, a veil over his head, another over the top of his silk hat, the hems of both seem delicately to examine the ground at his feet with a fastidious movement like snails. With both his moon eyes fixed on me, deKlend, through the veils, I watch him at the edge of the world stepping over the nightline into darkness.

  Soft globules of light roll over the plain, distorting a little in shape, like water balloons, as they roll. Those are days (deKlend realizes)

  As they roll over the city on the mountain side, streets light up, the people watch from street and rooftop, the flabby ball of light rolls by and the night returns. Standing in night, they watch as the daylight passes down the street away from them or hold their breath as another towering orb approaches.

  The barrier presents a problem and it takes him a while to get through it, by blinking in and out of space at random all over the place and leaving fractions of himself on the other side of the barrier whenever he happens to appear there, reaccumulating around his own shadow takes him twelve minutes and sixteen seconds—that is, he gets through the barrier by moving so quickly he is all over the place including on the far side and so as he crops up more and more on the far side eventually he is entirely over there.

  He is listening for Black Radio signal, trying to follow the Bird of Ill Omen. Black Radio courses from the Bird of Ill Omen, its beams focussed tightly by the absorbing obscurity that surrounds him.

  The radio beam hits him in the face and through his body like a somehow refreshing shock. He grimaces though he feels no pain, only a neutral intensity like nervous anticipation screwed to its apex, or like someone improvising passionately on a musical instrument, and as he dashes through space at fantastic speed his legs whipping beneath him, every breath he draws hisses through a saliva glass harmonica of glass teeth. There is a distinct noise of an unstatic station—mercury sweat trickles from the pores on his face, beads on his forehead and in the creases of his nose, white glue tears ooze from ashen lids, the oracle face gradually encrusts his own, a shocking giggle at the end at odds with its otherwise haggard groaning and defeated look. Cold mercury capsules tingle on his skin like rows of shell casings.

  The literature professor glances up from the page.

  “You see here that the Bird of Ill Omen knows full well the question tacit in this encounter with deKlend. It isn’t necessary for deKlend to speak it, to ask it. His presence alone is sufficient to ask it or is asking it. What does deKlend want to know?...”

  (pause, shuffle in the room, no hands)

  “...‘Why did you make me mnemosem?’... which is to say, ‘What Omen do you bring me?’ He is asking his future self, you see, without realizing it...”

  He scans the class. The students who aren’t obviously lost in their own thoughts or telephone conversations are watching, with a kind of wonder, this curious, unaccountable performance of the
teacher, like tourists being treated to a not-all-that colorful native ritual, solemn and unintelligible, that somebody, somewhere, might have suggested to them they might take in, as long as they were going to be stuck there anyway.

  “To start again,” he says abruptly, flipping pages, with a slight toss of the head as though he were suppressing a little burp, “we must take it up with the cricket.”

  The cricket—more sound than animal—

  We start with the cricket, the night sound—one, two, one, two, breathe in, one, two, one, two, breathe out—

  Napping, and now my teeth feel filmed over (he thinks) and aching. And soft.

  Take ‘the opiate,’ as (he thinks) it is called, and at once the room will fill with icy feelers of mist.

  When the dream is real, there is no more fantasy—

  My left foot intermittently disappearing (he thinks) It goes in and out of being diaphanous, but never numbed—

  I was in (he thinks) the dream, but I keep blundering out of it, having to run to get inside again. Like a slippery... slippery, trolley. Casting spells which are riddles the wizard asks the world to answer, the answer being an effect or set of circumstances of which the whizzer in question is a part, inseparable from the riddling.

  Lying sideways in bed, looking through the slats of a chair at the shadow thrown on the wall beyond by the edge of the curtain in the desklight.

  This must be (he thinks) my hotel room.

  The shadow on the wall flickers in the light, which does not flicker, just there between the slats, and a bubble of transparency appears, fitfully, toward the bottom of the shadow.

  It must be (he thinks) the misalignment of my eyes. They’re out of sync. One eye is angled at the shadow, the other not, and they alternate as each is baffled by the slat, without being able to agree—or is it a tiny aperture? A machine made of light on the wall?