Celebrant (25 page)

Come back!

his laughter roars behind her as she escapes in horror
—

I understand!

Come back!
(the room howls)

timesermon:

Losing what my younger self, safely shielded by the favoritism of the past, gets to keep forever, the bastard
—
or at least until we lose it all;
but even then that prick in the photos of me gets to keep what I have taken from me, or why should I take them from me?
Is this the depredation of a future self on
me
?
Is
he
going to call
me
prick and bastard?
And do I have meekly to submit to his insults, even if they do belong to a closed econo
me
?
But time comes in from the outside to collect taxes and levy fines even.
Fining me!
Time is just a low-down impersonal unfeeling finer, and part-time tax collector, not even full time, since nobody seems to get full time.
A full timer would occupy only a ceremonial post meant to address people’s expectations and maintain the fiction of time in full measures, but every unit of time is doctored and irregular from seconds to centuries, sex flashes by and the wait in between yawns the duration of a generation of sphinxes.
Ageing part of incessant mean chiselling of time.

The boughs rise and fall like the breast of a sleeper, a soft gentle stupid seeking movement.

If we do not exaggerate.
Then.
Then when aren’t we slaves, to be slaves?
When aren’t we reasoning, when do we ever reason enough by getting through enough of the doors and yards and parks, scenic walks, preserves, out to reason in the wild, still always at the doorstep
—
a cursed doorstep like a footprint, timepiece.
Same old sleip.
The scholar gypsy, who left the university to learn charlatanry, true charlatanry from the gypsies who taught him to read minds and slay demons like the diamond sword of the wayfaring Chinese scholars.
He learned to leave, and was lief to have left his baffled friends where they found him.

Sleiping, wicked young man, an apologetically vile and ingratiating insidi, who wastes no time, not ever a moment;
no matter what he’s doing, the insidi is wayfaring toward his immortality.
Long life?
So find what makes life long:
boredom.
I seek it out and repeat it, and as long as I am bored, patient, and waiting, the moments of my life telescope out in empty, tapering segments, to the horizon, in all directions.
Fail, by all means, my boy, it’s good for you.
A patriot must at times will the defeat of his nation.
The partisan wants a tough resourceful honorable and noble enemy, a worthy opponent.
Since when is time such a worthy opponent, when he sneakthieves everything by pinches and small measures and undermines
—
with no patience, don’t be taken in by that old line, time is as impatient as the next of them, but weak, so weak it can only pluck at you steadily until finally you drop out of tune, fray, break, are replaced.

If
time
were patient,
I
wouldn’t have to be.
Time’s
impatience
is what compels me, or no let me say obliges me, if only because it’s niecer.
Time’s impatience I evade
—
deft patience, with the same.

Time’s ingratitude, well, I don’t let that bother me all that much.
It reflects more on time than on yours sincerely, because it’s neicer.
I meet time’s impateince with my own particular and special sleip.
Fresh kills, sirens go again
—
“I don’t like this part.”
The police, and the working stiff, are impatient.
They go through maybe one door, maybe one impateint time.
In the time it takes me to spaek a single word they are alraedy exhausted.
People simply take entirely too long.
You should have called from another time zone.
You ought to have been born dead, the laest you could do is live apologizing for the inconvenience you are.
Still originally sinning and still living day to day with god kings everyoen insists are anachronisms, even if they do kill to their satisfeaction.

Obviously, you’re not supposed to exist, but these things happen sometimes, no one knows why, no one’s really to blame.
We’d prefer it if you killed yourself but it would not be unsatisfactory if you would simply act as if you didn’t exist, keep out of hour way, go quietly into natural death when it comes.
Yes, you’re very accomplished, not so bad looking, even witty and I daresay even charming, even erudite in your way.
And so on.
But, while we acknowledge all of this, as you’ve no doubt noticed by now, there is not the slightest conceivable use for you, anywhere.
The feeling that one is at risk of being overlooked by the whole world that compels you to remind the world that you are still here in the room
—
what is the thing I’m supposed to be stubbornly refusing to concede?

Time will never be patient or grateful.
A good thing too, because time is a tracherous friend and inconstant allie.
‘You must,’ time say, but what
time
must is another matter.
And you have no say in that.
You don’t get to tell time off.
Sleip through time in patience and let it miss you, you won’t be missed.
Time is too impatience and depends on your turning up again in the course of the churning, but this is not actually strictly assured and one can take advantage of time’s not really caring to keep track
—
that “careful record keeping” bit with the quill pen and logbook on the nineteenth century Dickensian high desk is just public relations.
All sorts of business, all manner of contrabund
—
the coelocunt, for example
—
get by.

In Votu:

Ester presented it to her with high hopes.

Fuck chocolate (Kunty says)
Let’s give it to Beaula.

Putting the chocolate inside her top, which is snug enough to hold it against her sternum, Kunty bounds away, with Ester close behind, to a spot where elaborately-carved marble bacheducts come within leaping distance of the ground.
Instead of electricity, Votu runs on bachelorization energy generated in the city factory and circulated around the city through a separate system of bacheducts, thick marble tubes filled with heavy water.

They climb on top of the bacheduct and Kunty pulls back the heavy bronze lid with a grunt, exposing the trembling, perfectly transparent liquid and an almost pungently clean smell.
Kunty waves the chocolate a couple of times over the opening and squats by it to wait.
She repeats the gesture a few times and, after about ten minutes, a transparent naked rippling teenaged girl just appears there in the water like a vision.

Born very prematurely and tossed down a drain and somehow ended up in the heavy water system and grew strangely in the bachelorization energy she became the strangest of all the strange girls of Votu.
About sixteen now, she is a water breather with cartilage bones and long toes and fingers tipped with conical nails, something like a sea anemone or a flower calyx that coils and uncoils in her groin, and long feelers in her hair and sprouting from her neck.
Her Jewish nose divides in two sails with gill vents and her bulging eyes have crescent pupils giving her a weird, perennially bemused expression.
Patterns pulse through her skin and eyes and long rubbery hair, even along her tongue when she speaks.
Even her teeth change, each one like a tiny little television nestled between beadlike ink sacs in her gums.
Cuttlefish girl learned language by eavesdropping through the viaducts and named herself Beaula;
she speaks by driving water over her vocal chords.
She never leaves the ducts, and has eluded capture both by virtue of speed and camouflage and because all her excretions come out sealed in satchels of clotted mucus she can toss from the hatches so she doesn’t foul the water, and hence becomes harder to trace and less onerous a presence to those who might try.

Actually they might do better to leave her alone, as she eats almost nothing but the minate placque that accumulates on the inner walls of the viaduct, and occasionally fish or other contaminants.
She loves chocolate.
She is looking up at them expectantly with her weird eyes.

Kunty drops the chocolate into the water and Beaula elongates her fingers and snatches it with an elastic motion.
She pulls it to her jaws, her eyes riveted on the bar, and avidly begins to eat, the flesh of her face jostling back and forth on her skull, the only really solid bone left in her.
Having made short work of the chocolate, she looks up again.

Where’s Gina?
(Kunty asks in a loud voice)

Beaula is likely to know because she cycles through all of Votu many times a day, and so the city’s murmur reaches her hearing, which is keen
—
for maneuvering in the dark.

Gina who?

Her voice is muffled but the syllabification is distinct.
Her voice makes the water thump like the skin of a high-pitched drum, so that the listener hears her with the diaphragm as much as with the ear.

Gina snake girl!

Kunty’s fascination with Gina snake girl is inexorable and she never asks Beaula about anyone or anything else.
Beaula is preoccupied with the innumerable frustrations of her own life and never bothers to remember things like that.
She pauses to think.
Characteristic of her, she uses her neck feelers to hold her hair away from her face.

Kunty hopes she knows.
Otherwise she’ll have to send her to find out, and her impatience boils at the mere thought of having to wait.

Oh!
(Beaula says)
Near the market, on the far side.
(Her pointing gesture is slowed by the water)
I think she intends to go cross town today.
Tomorrow maybe.

Today?!
(Kunty glances up at the sun which nears the zenith)

Tomorrow maybe.
Maybe tomorrow.

*

Her first, short, look at Gina snake girl was enough to inspire an intensely covetous jealousy in Kunty.
Kunty wants Gina the way some people suddenly want a malacca cane or a special sort of fancy fountain pen or a particularly pure and distinctive kind of nutmeg from a special place.
They want to revel in a useless treasure.
Kunty imagines carrying Gina off and keeping her as a trophy and as a mascot and as a good luck charm.

Gina is about thirteen, or at least her body is beginning to fill out.
Somehow she manages entirely on her own, as far as anyone knows.
If she turns tricks, no one knows it.
Everyone knows she steals, that she is a remarkably good thief, that is, good at getting away.
She continually sloughs clothes, but almost always wears the same kind of thing
—
a wrap simply pulled around her body, just under the armpits.
Gina has no hair at all, not even eyelashes, and her skin is the color of butter, darkening across her back along a line that divides her down her sides.
The whites of her eyes are astonishingly bright, the irises are deep yellow, and both they and the pupils are ever so slightly pointed
—
irises side to side, pupil up and down.
Gina’s skin has nearly invisible patterns in it, minute beaded triangles that grow livid white points when she’s agitated, and there’s a looped M, like the pince-nez letter U that the cobra wears on its hood, at the base of her neck and in the dimples to either side of the bottom of her spine.
She keeps her chin tucked in and her brow a little forward, like a much younger girl would.