Celebrant (21 page)

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 nothing
—
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!