Celebrant (24 page)

Black night glides across the sky, ablaze with stars, then the next instant the sun bursts directly before him in a dazzling eruption of light, the next instant is night
—
an icy splash in the face
—
then day
—
stunning conflagration
—
night and day pivot across the sky in alternation faster and faster until he sees both the sun and the stars at once, the earth far below his feet firmly planted on void, and stars like half-melted snowflakes hovering motionless in between
—
day and night at once, seen from the right distance.
Getting up, now in the daylight only, from where he had been lying on his back, deKlend looks numbly at his outline in the long wet grass, the dull, lead-colored, bulging and misshapen sword blade still clutched painfully in his hands, stiff with cold.

Adrian Slunj:

Everything seems too vivid
—
the flowers
—
my celibacy
—
the brilliant spring day
—
heavy interference.
Brilliant interference
—
traffic and street sounds rage and claw at the air.
Pungent, unaccountable smell of turpentine, must keep windows open thus admitting noise.
Loud shrill conversation under window.
Look at a solitary, small cloud in the bare sky, brilliant and soft
—
defilement energy needs purity, like a brilliant spring day, this cloud, the songs of birds, soft air in dark green branches, to profane.

Stepped out to get a little milk, people laughing like maniacs near me but not at me, at least not apparently.
Their gestures are abrupt big and invasive;
yes he’s too expanded by the exaltation of the day and his own thoughts and from their point of view this is only a vulnerability.
Their words and gestures slash at a spirit balloon inflated around him.
The store I plunge precipitately into is wrong and I know at once I shouldn’t have come in.
I’m too exposed to something tainting coming from the air conditioning, the music, the writing and drawing on the cellophane packages.
Return to the room.
The gust of wind billows curtains across the room, but I can feel nothing.
The air in the back of the room is too dense to be moved.
Noise raging on the wind, claws at the spell of the book he is trying to read, so that I experience the sirens in the street in the style of the book.
I notice his moment to moment experience is styling itself after the book in his hands
—
a hypnosis, the voice, that which the noise outside is doing all it can to drown out and destroy
—
IT can’t tolerate that hypnosis.

What is IT?
IT is what wants him in ITS hypnotic sirens
—
preoccupied, nervous, worried, afraid, alarmed, rushing, enumerating, frustrated, stupid, excited about a sale, the siren has no use for solitary small cloud.

Adrian is cutting little people out of paper.
The paper is thick, and makes a loud harsh noise as he cuts it.
He paints each one from a watercolor set, all in cadet jackets and cloth caps.

*

Adrian surveys the wall, which extends a considerable distance without any gateway in either direction.
Then he produces his triangle, holds it up by the cord, and strikes it once at the midpoint of the base.

Students!
(he cries through teeth locked in a ghastly smile)

At once a platoon of students comes stamping out of the fog and gathers at attention around him.
They all wear cadet jackets and cloth caps.

Adrian gestures toward the wall.
The students bustle over to the wall with a sound like barrel-fulls of old shoes being emptied down a long staircase.
With hup! hup! they form a human step ladder, and Adrian strides up their bent backs to the top of the wall.
Here he stands, erect against the sky, waiting.
The uppermost students climb onto the wall and help the others up in waves, spilling down the other side, climbing up or down their hanging bodies.

As the pyramid reforms on the opposite side of the wall, Adrian waits, arms folded pensively behind his back.

One must maintain purity in body (he thinks)

The tickle in the throat
—
that is not what causes the cough.
Coughing is a spasm of the diaphragm, which can be controlled.
When I have the impulse to cough, I redirect my attention from my throat to my diaphragm, and compel it to relax.

And hiccoughs?

He is about to ask himself that, even to the point of self-consciously selecting the old-fashioned spelling, but stops himself.
It seems the right form of control, to control the question.

He has a way of singing with the mouth firmly closed, and suddenly says, in an unctuous tone, “every impediment under the sun,” as if he were bragging about the selection in his store.

As he waits for the pyramid to form, he sees in the distance a few poisonous birds, dancing albatrosses billing on the rocks even though the ocean is nowhere near.
And above the meadows, in the gloom under blackening clouds, dangerous, locustlike flocks seethe.
The split tail and wings of the raven like fountain pens, feed on dead soldiers.
It is clear the street was putrid, the impasse drives all things.

And if it weren’t for
him
(he thinks) for his terrible avian charisma, I would still be back there, helplessly watching the future come.
All the poetry going out of my desire, starting even to avoid it assiduously.

His words come back now, as if someone stands behind him and speaks them
—

Life can take any shape, death included, my non-son (it says)

Slunj:
Oh, what an earnest slave and noble master am I.
My running over is cupped.
Sniffs dart to and fro across the theatre.
The quality of straining is not merciful, the mercifulness of strain is not quality.
The stinking narcissus
—

The pyramid is ready, and he descends it majestically, holding himself as straight as a puppet on a string, as always.

—
the stink hour of the narcissus (he thinks)

*

As a young boy he began,
of his
own volition
, to keep notebooks for the purpose of
self-improvement
, and around this time he began to distinguish himself from other children by a preference for uncomfortably formal dress.
He was airily censorious, holy, a solemn liar and full of bad conscience.
His English tutor described him:

Adrian is a kind of half-born soul whose life is an escrow of axiomatic reasoning about life and the drawing up of plans which will be carried all the way through by the impetus of sheer severity with himself.
So his every encounter must negotiate its way to him through a maze of absolute ideas that is undergoing perennial refinement.
Nothing reaches him without adopting the protocol, and so he is always too early and too late, and there is nothing necessarily relating him, in his deliberating spot, to life, apart from his own relentless insistence on having his way.
..
Even ordinary tasks represent for Adrian a series of trials and sacrifices which, I believe, give him pain he forbids himself to display.
It seems to me he does this in order not to make inappropriate claims to the sympathy of others, and to avoid any effort to appear special
...
He has a talent for comprehensive planning that he brings to bear on petty thefts.

Adrian had been afflicted with tongue thrush when he was a baby and never outgrew it, so concealing it is second nature to him.
Early on he learned to speak without separating his teeth, opening his jaws only to set them edge to edge;
his lips, which are beautifully shaped, writhe across his perfect teeth, bottle green in their transparent parts, like skaters over the ice.
He shrinks from the faintest trace of sourness or astringency;
he likes insipid food served cold, and thinks of himself as naturally abstemious.
Since tongue thrush thrives in alkali conditions, his diet encourages it.
His breath is so yeasty and malty it has you looking around wondering if there’s a brewery somewhere nearby.

Still young, his sharp, pointilistically-colored goblin face is presentable and would be appealing if it weren’t for the expression of gloating, secret superiority it habitually wears.
He ambushes women he barely knows with abrupt declarations of weird, idolatrous love, often accompanied by poetry in English, as he has decided to distinguish himself
—
in letters
—
as he puts it.
He keeps count of every one that rejected him and thinks of them by number.

Four was like death (he thinks)
The viciousness of Four will not be forgotten.
It will be
remembered
.

There were times he thought he would go mad with sheer misery, looking on to his impossibly distant idol, and fling himself down on the floor feeling like a damned soul.
The idea that rejection and isolation should descend with such injustice on a soul that had so distinguished itself above the level of the common herd by an exhaustively-sustained awareness of its own unworthiness sharpened his anguish until he cried passages from the Old Testament aloud.

An affair of the heart
—
number Eight
—
was the cause of his wayfaring.
In her case, he had been under the impression that she had set him a few qualifying trials, which he undertook and overcame with perfect obedience, great difficulties, and without a word to her, since he was required to prove also that he could respond to her unspoken commands and could uphold the entirely tacit regulations which forbade him to draw any attention to his successes prematurely
—
before all was finished.

When at last he found himself alone with her, in the small drawing room, by the windows, he started making astonishing announcements.
Presently she overcomes her incredulity, sees his arduously far-fetched mistakes, and, repeating and rephrasing herself, eventually sets things in their proper light.

But you said
...

His face is changing, and what for a split second she took for a sob, is giggling.

...
But
you
said!
(he shrieks)

Aghast, she freezes.

The room around her grows dark, but he brightens.
For the first time his mouth opens wide, cackling.
His eyes go round and glassy, his hair stands on end, his smile widens, cackling devours his face, his smile widens and distorts, spreading and distorting in freakish gaiety, his cackling increases and in the darkness his face seems to flash all over the room like firecrackers
—
but
you
said!
but
you
said!
—
he is the room, the dark, the cackling.