Celebrant (30 page)

It’s what you do when what you do can’t be explained, it is the art of doing something you can’t explain and if it were something that people could learn or understand merely by having it explained to them then we would all be Merlins and actually (he thinks) magic is still magic even when ‘explained’ because the explanation won’t take, won’t work, isn’t afraid of explanations, without resisting, so you still don’t believe it.
Believe which?
Never mind, what is true is that training is paying court to chance, like knowing something about luck, but only
like
that, since there’s nothing actually to know.

Now (he thinks),

taking his sword abruptly back into his lungs.
deKlend gets up and begins piling the furniture on the bed, including the heavy bureau and the desk, and pulling up the carpet to reveal the naked floorboards,

the purpose of the ritual is not to minimize chance, take care of every little thing.
To minimize chance in the archery ritual (huff) you need only walk up to within a foot of the target (puff) shoot, and leave.
By adding ritual measures, one is actually working to increase to the maximum the number of things that can go wrong.
A step out of time, or the wrong (huff) length, or too many or too few, or one of the archers, (puff) in baring his right arm, gets it tangled in his sleeve, or someone sneezes during the one and only shot he is permitted.
With all these additional opportunities for things to go wrong, the final success which caps the (no, put it there) ritual must be an act of fate, not of human skill or at least not as ordinarily understood, it must be a kind of blessing, an image of order
—
one watches the ritual breathlessly because one is carefully looking for any mistakes
—
status is idiot magic
—
if you would be happier not being an idiot,
follow
me, now who said that?

He turns on the radio and writes the letters on the floor to the rhythm, a small paint can in his left hand against his chest, brush in his right.
Standing upright, he bows to write a letter, comes up, and bows again, writing the next.
The letters are hastily formed, thready and spotty.
He has only time enough to dip his brush once, without looking, between beats, and it comes out dripping from the can.
He sneaks into a tall paper tube in the middle of the floor and, after a momentary pause to recover the beat, he begins covering the interior of the tube with letters.
Loud speech in the next room coincides exactly with his writing.
The tube wobbles as his brush taps it.
A draught strong as a gust of wind blows across the room, the cracked and peeling letters on the floor split apart and scatter in flakes from letters of trembling fluid gold.
Inside the tube, there is a throne-like chair with waffled cushions of coral-red velvet, the back is tall, narrow, and stiff, with two carved tufts sticking up, and the arms are thick whorled rods like drill bits worn smooth.
My shadow sits in the chair with its head dropped forward and its arms on the chair’s arms, and I wake up in the futuristic cafe car of a bullet train.
Brilliant white, the windows are huge, dimmed with blue-grey pigment, with rounded corners and thick white rubber collars.
Through the window I can see the city lying on the water and, on this bank, we are so high in the air that I can see the skyscrapers on this side only by standing right in front of the window looking down.
The daylight outside is dazzling and suddenly vanishes;
the sky turns black ablaze with stars.
But the city the water the skyscrapers glare brighter than ever in sunlight that seems trapped beneath the sky
—
daylight returns the next moment still brighter
—
then again the sky turns
black
, while the land flares so that even through the tinted glass my smarting, tearing eyes can actually see the broad flat beams of diaphanous light rebound from the buildings.
The sky
blackens
, and bursts back into full illumination again and again each time that blackness comes with a silent but palpable sensation of a rolling thud, and it seems to me that the dark sky is a limpid black jewel that crashes down, malloting the city and the land beneath it, flattening them, and it’s these blows that compress and intensify the tenacious daylight.

The city is gone, the sky is a dim even bleached blue, I am looking out from a stationary train window at heaps of mid-sized dark stones the size of human heads, seamy and nuggety like lumps of scrap iron, and the ocean, flat and sheeted to the horizon with foam, knocking at the door.
There is knocking at the door again.

Come in (he calls)

A lovely young lady comes into the room looking irritable and a little fatigued.
She is wearing what resembles a conductor’s uniform of smart dark grey twill, a snug skirt down past her knees, high socks of thick black wool, and shiny, durable-looking walking shoes.
Her tunic has metal buttons like steel mushrooms, and a boxy leather satchel hangs from a slender band across her body.
Her collar stands up like a cadet’s, and, from her kepi, with its short, polished visor, blue-black hair cascades down to the small of her back and over her shoulders to the elbow.
She comes up to the bed, where deKlend lies at full length on top of the covers with his hands folded over his abdomen.
A trace or two of make-up still remains on her face.

In a beautifully accented voice, she asks him his name and he answers.

She briskly nods once, exhaling audibly through her nose, and, putting out her hand, demands his invitation.

Invitation?
(he asks)
Just a moment
...

He lies there without moving.
Her hand remains in the air where it is.

Paper?
(he asks)

She compresses her lips and, drawing up a little straighter, opens her satchel, pulls out a blank piece of white card and hands it to him.

deKlend takes it and flips it over in front of his face, still lying down.

Perfect!
(he says with a smile)

After a moment or two he selects the better of the two sides, stroking it once gently with his fingertips.

Have you got a pen on you?
(he asks, without looking up)

He hears a sigh, and now a pen is thrust before his face.
He takes it and, resting it against his drawn-up knee, begins to fill it out.
He draws a margin all around the interior of the card, both to fill up space and to buy himself a little composition time.
The line is very thin.
The attendance of deKlend (he writes
—
no forgetting to write his name
this
time!) at the Belvedere (it is the name on the label of his jacket) on the evening of the thirteenth of this month (yesterday, a bad choice made in haste but a crossing-out looks worse) is civilly requested for symposium.
Refreshments will be served (can’t be too careful about
that
).
No RSVP expected.
Flowers appreciated.
Sincerely, Mnemosems.

deKlend waves the card to dry the ink, but her hand snatches it impatiently from him after a moment.
She tells him the envelope will be provided.
The hand reappears before his eyes.

He looks up at her face, foreshortened above her chin, and awe steals over him.
She opens and closes her extended hand rapidly, with a dry brushing sound.
Abruptly recalled to himself, deKlend remembers her pen, which is a fountain pen.
Hurrying to oblige her
—
with a fear of her displeasure that swiftly grows more acute
—
deKlend tries to close the pen.
Holding it in his right hand, he aims its tip at the cap he holds in the fingers of his left hand, and misses.
The sharp nib jabs his finger, and a bead of dark blood wells out as he withdraws it suddenly the nib is inside the cap and he is twirling it shut.
His finger is not injured.
This was no trick of the eye.
It happens in an instant.
Just before it would have touched his skin, the pen blinked sideways, passing clear through the side of the cap, and magically into place.

In Votu:

In Votu, people believe that there are two moons, one light and one dark, and the regular changes observed from earth are the phases of the sexual intercourse of these two satellites.
The new moon is the time of the most perfect satisfaction, the complete and thankfully temporary evacuation of all desire.
The full moon brings on insanity because it is just the opposite, desire heated to blue-white heat, for which there is no relief.
When the moon is full, lovers can’t get enough of each other, no matter how long they love each other it’s never enough.
The howling of single people rises into the sky from every quarter.
And those whose love goes unrequited go into convulsions
—
there’s no question of masturbation or of seeking out substitutes.
The frail unrequited must drug themselves into insensibility or risk death on these nights, and some men have been known to castrate themselves in the desperation of acutest despair
—
especially when they know the one they love sports in that same night in the arms of someone else.

The sun rises in the rain, and the rain goes on all day.
Pigeon girls with no place to shelter huddle on roof tops with their heads down and arms around knees, cold rain spattering from their saturated hair and clothes.
Here they have taken shelter
—
thankfully there is no wind
—
each in a different window of a five story brick building.
The people working inside tolerate them there, and they fill the wall, with its bright awnings, like saints in niches.
Bedraggled rabbit girls creep into basements, barrels and boxes, unable to use their now-flooded drainpipes, or scoot hastily from cover to cover, teeth first.
Even under these demoralizing circumstances desire, not sexual, not unsexual, something nearly but not yet sexual, frisks in their bodies, just growing body desire.

Burn had wandered out by the tumbling houses, which turn continuously like huge dice.
She walks with her hands behind her back.

A boy looks up from his howdah-like stroller, his mother under a domed umbrella, and asks

Who’s that?

—
as if he were entitled to know who she is, and as if his mother would recognize her.
His mother takes no notice and wheels him away, but he goes on staring at this pigeon girl in her soaking wet, icy tardoleo, her hair lank and dripping.
Burn flicks up a wall to perch in the inner corner of an awning, where she can keep herself precariously balanced.

Below her, through a shop window, she can see a row of seats, and there’s a little girl, slightly younger than herself, and plainly not an orphan wastrel, sitting in one.
The little girl is slapping the arm rest of her seat and singing out an improvisation on the word outch, playing with the pain in ascending notes.

Outch, outch, outch, outch
...

By the time night falls, the sky is clear and the city is fresh, all the colors deepened and vivified by the rain.
The sunset and twilight are rapturously beautiful, clouds bounding away like violet gazelles and the sky singing out its changes.