Celebrant Page 18

  With a gasp Kunty recoils backward from beneath Gina’s hand—up on all fours, her whole body stonily rigid, starting to hyperventilate, her eyes huge in her face, her ribs heaving. A look of terror, peering out in shock at Gina. The thick hair on her arms and legs bristles. She bolts away into the dark, leaving Gina lying as she was.

  Gina’s left hand floats down slowly onto her stomach.

  The dancing has begun. The weavers have laid out their carpets in the rainwashed courtyards and are beginning their ponderous, gyrating movements like venerable, spinning meteors. The smoke is magic, transparent ribbons of grey sky stretch from heavy braziers, the sound of flutes horns drums and huldres.

  Burn comes down from her perch when the rain stops. There in an alleyway she sees a peculiar man who reminds her of the mathete she’d met. There is a dead bird lying in the gutter that divots the middle of the street. The man, evidently thinking himself unobserved, does an odd thing; he bends forward at the waist and flexes his back, lifting his shoulders and head, his mouth is open, his tongue stiff in his mouth and his chin directly above the dead bird.

  Ha! Ha! Ha! (he grates)

  Tiny eyes seem to drip from the corners of his eyes, pop from his pupils and trail behind him as he turns to walk away, like strings of floating beads. Burn follows him for a block or two and then loses him among the giant music boxes, musical instruments that are easily mistaken for buildings, and which play by themselves.

  Now the festival is underway in earnest and the whole city vibrates with music and dancing. Burn follows the black culverts of empty city streets, looking for pigeon girls.

  Suddenly the streets are full of people, milling about, panting, some of them, but no one speaks. There is the rustling of clothes and feet, everyone has left their lights at home—the moon is the only light, illuminating like desire the faces of the people who are now thronging every street in silent excitement. Here and there, among the moving figures, Burn catches glimpses of courtyards, weavers dancing majestically on their carpets, the tiny red stars at the end of sticks of incense trailing smoke like anchored microcomets.

  Find where the rhythm laps (she thinks)

  She is listening to the beating of feet, for the moment when the pattern begins and ends at once, the repetition which seems both to prolong one moment forever and to bear her along from one moment to another with assured strength.

  Now she is in a vast courtyard—no, a plaza, densely packed with people who flow together. Among them are people with brushes and other implements who bend regularly and trace backward, bent-over streaks through the crowd. Their writing creeps along the pavements, Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Mayan, Demotic, surely there are more? There are more continents and civilizations than that. The black letters simmer and glow in the moonlight. Burn dissolves into the writing—like a wire that had been laid there beneath the evenly-spread clay being pulled up, where each drop of rain has already printed a letter in the clay, a whole day of rain being a whole day of printing. Chinese neat rows of tumbling houses, Arabic long ribbons of incense smoke, curious sprigs of isolated Greek force, compressive Mayan cartoons still hold the shape of the cans they came in like cranberry sauce, ghostly Beitha Kukju that was too beautiful to use, Demotic like strings of mathematical operators. Burn smuggles herself by dancing right into the writing, words that happen to say:

  our hearts have joined

  you will learn in me

  and in you, he will learn

  Burn stops and listens breaking out in gooseflesh. The city’s alive. It’s changing. The way a person would change.

  Flash—the end of the alley, the edge of the building blue black in the chilly shade, the narrow ramplike street sloping down and the pale upright square of sky above it like a white sheet on a line—the feeling of coming to a stop from running, the last lessening jolts on the feet and ankles, the arms swinging up past the waist—

  Phryne:

  When she realized it, she was sitting alone, in a booth, in a restaurant, in disguise—this time she was a thin, nervous-looking adolescent with wet rubbery hands and glasses so thick they seemed like two clear tunnels boring into the taut and clammy face.

  That’s him! (she’d thought)

  —peering at the man from behind the slender tablets of her menu.

  She recognized him from another moment of her life, after she had ceased to appear as herself. He hadn’t noticed the heavy-set man with the two or three strands of flyaway black hair fluttering from his crown, following him with almost mincing steps for a block or so, with his suspenders showing their pale underbellies as they dangled from his waist, and the dense white shaving foam, with two rectangular notches in it just below the right cheekbone, trembling in the zephyr. This had been her default for some time, it being her conceit that a very conspicuous figure is more readily overlooked in certain circumstances.

  She’d first caught sight of him in conversation with another man whose acquaintance she had made in a different disguise, but who had parted company with the man in question before she could complete her impression of him.

  He simply fascinated her. He was nothing like the General, to the extent of also not being his opposite. The worlds those two men inhabited were so distinct it was immediately obvious, and even to bracket them as “those two men” seemed to exaggerate their similarities. He had a dazzling smile, somehow ghostly, and he moved so lightly, so clumsily. He lingered a long time in her thoughts, which returned to him with innocently thoughtless insistence like a habituated animal. Why get weak over him? But she did, but why, and so on.

  Once again she saw him, this time sitting alone in someplace—she had only flashed by in a cab—dimly, under the thin water of a windowpane, apparently bent over a newspaper on a table, his elbow next to it and his forehead lightly resting on the extended fingers of that elbow’s hand. She noticed, repeating the image to herself, that he was all bundled up in blankets and even a shawl, although his head was bare.

  She would set him aside only with the inner promise to pick him up at the next opportunity, experimenting with different imaginary lights to play on him, and fondly trying out the nickname “Clumsy.”

  She’d been passing a moment ago, but now she sees him out under the chandeliers twirling his partner around in an athletic polka, with explosions of petticoats as they turned, and here at least there was no question of clumsiness. A moment of high intensity comes, he steps away from his partner and Phryne stares incredulously as he does the crane dance—the crane dance that Theseus brought back with him from the Cretan maze, that Theseus the king first danced at Delos with his men, and that had been patrimony of the General, who never danced, through his wife, who also never danced. “Clumsy” was spontaneously doing the crane dance, more or less, so she weakened again.

  Now, it is certainly him, in the restaurant. He eats fish, and wipes the tiny droplets of white sauce from his moustache. Phryne wracks her brains for a pretext to look at him again, glaring at her menu and the meaningless adjacency of gratin au poivre in the columnar arrangement of dishes when there is an alarm, a crash, and she has her pretext. Clumsy has flung his arms outspread and is half out of his seat, leaning over the table, eyes fluorescing like full moons—he stiffens and shoots backwards sending table and chair tumbling. Completely shocked, Phryne, forgetting herself, sniffs. Clumsy is bent like a drawn bow on the floor, a harsh, coughing chuckle forces itself out through his gnashing teeth.

  He’s magnificent! (she thinks, inflamed)

  He thrashes once and a leg kicks out, smashing a heavy chair to kindling at a blow. Phryne stares transfixed and shivering with excitement.

  The fit passes. A waiter pours water into one of his large, burgundy-colored napkins, turning it to black, and drapes it warily over Clumsy’s head. Pandaemonium of coughing. The waiter dithers, then scurries backward when Clumsy begins to drag himself from the floor. The napkin slips from his head as he sits up. Phryne gets a good look at his haggard face as he raises his hands to
his head. A moment later he has rushed outside. She hurries to a window and sees him vomiting out there on all fours.

  Watching him tonight... she is overcome again with a familiar, exhilarating consciousness of her own bitter sadness, and wild vengefulness, that can turn at times into an astringent kind of joy verging on delirium.

  “I’ll see to him,” she says, in a firmer voice than should belong to such a frail-seeming young man. The major domo is noncommittal and she steps outside in time to see Clumsy leap to his feet and dash off into the night. She rushes to the road—it’s empty.

  He vanished (she thinks)

  A huge black bird wheels across the road. As it passes the very middle of the road in which she stands, it turns its face to her for one moment two gently piercing lights like a pair of blazing coins stare at her. The bird soars into the darkness and pale wisps of smoke rise right before her face as her disguise evaporates and a heavy footfall thuds into the dirt road behind her—a veiled man his eyes and teeth glittering through the veil—a hearse with dim, cataracted headlamps, and a black wreath around the Mercedes hood ornament and the grill——but really, none of those things. Without road, without night. Sardonic, now, if only to her, those fresh wisps of smoke, as another disguise evaporates. Without dress, without make up. Without body, without mind.

  *

  Now she will know how to track him down, because she can follow the bird he’s following. Bird is as good as anything to call it, although it is certainly not a bird it is just for that reason as much a bird as anything else, which is not unlike her disguise. She suspects this bird is another mnemosem secret, and that her discovery of the one leads to the other. Will it throw Clum back across her path again? She thinks of his sulky looks that stimulate her curiosity. The General’s dark looks had always been forbidding, his eyelids and thick, acrid eyebrows were scorched. The General was never sour or acid, he was alkali if he was anything, neutralizing, spreading uneasy wariness. El Desmanado—

  —There he is! In the garden of the Madrasa, deep in conversation with a bald older woman in a fashionably shapeless blue caftan. The older woman sniffs and then sneezes violently, and Phryne finds the sympathy too strong to resist. Her sniff breaks from her again, but as before, no one notices. She is disguised as a long island girl with a rustling slick of shimmering russet hair sweeping down over her head like a heavy pall.

  He looks at the woman like a bird. And he’s always looking around. She is inclined to see value in his ways. When he looks thoughtful and grave, she wants to tease him until his little boy comes out. But most of all she likes the flashes of whimsy that blink up in his face from time to time and make her nearly shiver with anticipated understanding. She is there when he leaps into the void and disappears, and the bird is there again, coiling itself in that part of the sky where he had been, but seeming to take no notice, or at least to send to her no sign. Are there really two there?

  *

  She paces the rug stopping at the threshold of the doorway which opens on one end of a short hall—bathroom standing open on the other end—mosaic of white and pale blue and white mottled tiles on the floor of the bathroom. As she paces, the tiles start spinning in groups like turning gears. Then individual tiles rise from the floor on long shafts to varying heights, rise and fall, like a series of model cities.

  She is hovering, face up with her head just above the floor and feet up high, reaches across her chest as if she were pulling a blanket over herself and, as the mass of her arm travels, it pulls her sideways in the air. By repeating this movement she keeps herself turning in place, careful to keep her eyes fixed in front of her. The tiles drop flush to the floor. The tiles then pop off, and rise slowly in the air. She seems to be glued to the ceiling, one side of her face pressed against the white plaster which is fraying into fine white mist—she sees in his mind, without imagining it, the blue sky on the other side of the ceiling.

  Phryne is a dancer, so when she moves her legs she travels as much in space as in time. As she dances, her present tense becomes aroused watching her and engorges, expanding to include in its exquisitely disembodied tumescence adjacent regions of the past and future. This she registers as the sensation of growing taller. The past appears gradually more or less behind her calves, and the future at chest level but far off, like the horizon viewed from a high place. Officially one brings only one’s body through time travel, but in practice she keeps the cosmetics on her face, the ribbons in her hair when present, her jewelry if she had any, but no matter how slowly she may do it, she must go on dancing. The spell is the dancing, and dancing is the only way she can alter her point of view on the new vistas opening to her through her elongations.

  The glittering bathroom tiles click together making mosaics above the floor. By degrees she clicks through the solid plaster of the ceiling, face first, seeing only dark all around. As her toes squeeze through, she is corkscrewing up through the dense branches of a vast tree, her body brushing and bending aside its rubbery stems and leaves—she is in the tree for too long, the branches are becoming brittle and scratch at her, and she lunges sideways with a feeling like kicking off the side of a swimming pool and launching herself backward. Radiance bursts in on her from all directions, of bottomless blue sky and white, swelling thunderheads—not a hair on her head is stirred, there’s no wind. She glances down and sees her naked body is a transparent white relief on the blue, she is the phantom half moon of the daytime, and suddenly the earth is far away, hanging above her in a lustrous blackness.

  She takes a few steps in the soft powdery surface of the moon, leaving the prints of bare feet in a dust finer than flour. The tiled surface of the moon scintillates in earthlight, the black sky is a ring wall dotted with thin, watery stars that seem like minor flaws in the surface, and the black ring starts turning inside out again and again with a spastic, nervous tremor, like the curving distortion of something seen through a distorting lens, but as if the distorted black were resisting the distortion. The silvery desert of the moon is hanging over her head, and the craters, bulging, become the irregular, woolly undersides of clouds. Rain streaks her body, the droplets forming not an arm’s length just above her. She could reach up and stick her hand beyond the rain, passing her or dripping from her feet to plunge into a densely clotted, stunningly green forest below. The warm water sluices in thick rivulets from her face, her hair hangs down in a clumsy fringe before her eyes. When she pushes it back, she is looking up into the showerhead and the dull blue tile of the shower stall.

  Stepping out of the tub, there is no towel nor bathmat. She doesn’t know the room. Opening the door she enters a typical hotel room. Dim yellow light outside screened by heavy curtains. The uniforms of ambulance drivers thrown over a chair. Obscurely, two people lie tangled in the bed, two men. One looks up at her, his eyes glint once as he coolly says,

  You’ve come to the wrong room, lady.

  He’s still dreaming (she thinks)

  Already he is sinking back down in and she turns and goes back into the bathroom which has a window she doesn’t recall was there before, out of it she sees the full moon blue in the sky high over dark tropical trees to the horizon. The window is open admitting heady air, and she can hear singing out there. The moon bends its semeny ear. This bathroom is in many buildings, she turns and there are the towels and gauzes she had left behind. With sudden excitement she steps as she is back into the hotel room, which is empty now, and crosses to the window, drawing the curtain back with a yank. She sees herself, reflected clearly—she is so pale—in the perfect black outside. She had feared there would have been someone there to have seen her. There’s nothing to see but a few fireflies on stalks down below, their lights opening and closing little powdery apertures in the shadow.

  She hadn’t been afraid or not only afraid (Phryne thinks), she had also been boldly seized by a longing to be seen. That was only the leading edge of what she longed for. She goes out into the hall with a cold burst of fright and excitement—th
e hall is empty from end to end. Not knowing whether she is content with that or not, Phryne shuts the door and goes back into the bathroom. Her body becomes blue pepperminted moonlight, her great curves and brawn in peppermint flesh, white pepper breath that spills from her lips, her ebony teeth, in tiny jets of white mist. The moonlight peruses her delectably and she turns blue and sparks fizz from her teeth.

  The angel sleeps on a balcony against the wall with a strainer over his face, smiling in his sleep. He says something about horses being crushed in a number. There is a colossal archway looming above the jungle outside, like the arc de triomphe—where are you? I need you! (she thinks)—she is exhilarated to see small figures on top of the arch, some evidently are peering in her direction with telescopes, pointing and waving. She steps out onto the balcony and waves back, hearing the solid stone balcony creak under her enormous weight. Her body, while the same size, is denser and denser, like iron. There is commotion on the arch, saluting her with a ferocity that seems almost threatening, or (she thinks) as the sound of the bathroom door splitting from its jam erupts behind her—trying to warn her. The answer is too obvious—she tranquilly goes into the bathroom in another building, to find her clothes and gauzes, although she does not put them on, while the moon lathers her from behind.

  deKlend:

  That morning he finds an envelope slid under the door. It’s square, with a medallion of sealing wax on it, so it manages to look important without being as official as a long slender envelope would have been.

  First ensuring that it is actually addressed to him, deKlend breaks the seal and withdraws a piece of card. He reads: