Celebrant (29 page)

As they roll over the city on the mountain side, streets light up, the people watch from street and rooftop, the flabby ball of light rolls by and the night returns.
Standing in night, they watch as the daylight passes down the street away from them or hold their breath as another towering orb approaches.

The barrier presents a problem and it takes him a while to get through it, by blinking in and out of space at random all over the place and leaving fractions of himself on the other side of the barrier whenever he happens to appear there, reaccumulating around his own shadow takes him twelve minutes and sixteen seconds
—
that is, he gets through the barrier by moving so quickly he is all over the place including on the far side and so as he crops up more and more on the far side eventually he is entirely over there.

He is listening for Black Radio signal, trying to follow the Bird of Ill Omen.
Black Radio courses from the Bird of Ill Omen, its beams focussed tightly by the absorbing obscurity that surrounds him.

The radio beam hits him in the face and through his body like a somehow refreshing shock.
He grimaces though he feels no pain, only a neutral intensity like nervous anticipation screwed to its apex, or like someone improvising passionately on a musical instrument, and as he dashes through space at fantastic speed his legs whipping beneath him, every breath he draws hisses through a saliva glass harmonica of glass teeth.
There is a distinct noise of an unstatic station
—
mercury sweat trickles from the pores on his face, beads on his forehead and in the creases of his nose, white glue tears ooze from ashen lids, the oracle face gradually encrusts his own, a shocking giggle at the end at odds with its otherwise haggard groaning and defeated look.
Cold mercury capsules tingle on his skin like rows of shell casings.

The literature professor glances up from the page.

“You see here that the Bird of Ill Omen knows full well the
question tacit in this encounter with deKlend.
It isn’t necessary for deKlend to speak it, to ask it.
His presence alone is sufficient to ask it or is asking it.
What does deKlend want to know?
...
”

(pause, shuffle in the room, no hands)

“...
‘Why did you make me mnemosem?’
...
which is to say, ‘What Omen do you bring me?’
He is asking his future self, you see, without realizing it
...
”

He scans the class.
The students who aren’t obviously lost in their own thoughts or telephone conversations are watching, with a kind of wonder, this curious, unaccountable performance of the teacher, like tourists being treated to a not-all-that colorful native ritual, solemn and unintelligible, that somebody, somewhere, might have suggested to them they might take in, as long as they were going to be stuck there anyway.

“To start again,” he says abruptly, flipping pages, with a slight toss of the head as though he were suppressing a little burp, “we must take it up with the cricket.”

The cricket
—
more sound than animal
—

We start with the cricket, the night sound
—
one, two, one, two, breathe in, one, two, one, two, breathe out
—

Napping, and now my teeth feel filmed over (he thinks) and aching.
And soft.

Take ‘the opiate,’ as (he thinks) it is called, and at once the room will fill with icy feelers of mist.

When the dream is real, there is no more fantasy
—

My left foot intermittently disappearing (he thinks)
It goes in and out of being diaphanous, but never numbed
—

I was in (he thinks) the dream, but I keep blundering out of it, having to run to get inside again.
Like a slippery
...
slippery, trolley.
Casting spells which are riddles the wizard asks the world to answer, the answer being an effect or set of circumstances of which the whizzer in question is a part, inseparable from the riddling.

Lying sideways in bed, looking through the slats of a chair at the shadow thrown on the wall beyond by the edge of the curtain in the desklight.

This must be (he thinks) my hotel room.

The shadow on the wall flickers in the light, which does not flicker, just there between the slats, and a bubble of transparency appears, fitfully, toward the bottom of the shadow.

It must be (he thinks) the misalignment of my eyes.
They’re out of sync.
One eye is angled at the shadow, the other not, and they alternate as each is baffled by the slat, without being able to agree
—
or is it a tiny aperture?
A machine made of light on the wall?

Out a window, the moon half-rubbed from the void by a smoky cloud.
The sky still blue even at this late hour.
A red ambulance from the fire department idling in the street below.
Its yellowish headlights are weak as if the battery were going.

I have (deKlend thinks) a familiar feeling of unreal
—
unreal something, unrealness.
I’m sleepy and a little disoriented.
Just the combination of the moon, the close, feverish air of the day.
Good (he thinks), I think
—
smoking moon
...
gelatinousnight, the remote factory and railyard sounds, and muttering, like a huge crowd somewhere.
A radio playing the official broken record.

This is not a moment that’s going to lead to anything;
it’s just a moment aside.

The word ‘restaur’ can be seen, on a bulge in a loosely-rebundled newspaper there on the nightstand.

When I was a boy (he thinks irrelevantly) I would assume that ‘opening a restaurant’ meant you started from nothing.
A stereotypical children’s drawing of green grass, which I expect children draw because they know they’re expected to, a tree, the blue sky and sun, building the restaurant all by yourself, building the building, installing the stove and equipment.
If something went wrong, say, with the
boiler
, the waiter or the chefs, who live in the restaurant like sailors on a ship, would be there to deal with this problem.
And even if my mistake is explained to me, I would (he thinks) go on sulkily insisting that a restaurant of any other kind than the sort I’d imagined, built from the ground up by the proprietor, would be somehow inferior or false to the one I imagined.

Had that been his initiation?
When, as a boy, he had been suddenly overwhelmed by the luminosity of the air, the distant town trailing the road like a dropped tether, the equally distant ocean, the grassy undulation of the land falling away on all sides, seething and whispering, so that he collapsed at the roadside in tears, in a posture of abjection, staring ahead bewildered, adoring, distressed, so that, to turn his head and see and hear a bird clinging to the branch of a shrub, and then to turn his head the other way and see the blaze of sunshine on the nodding, plain little flowers was to heap enormities on enormities, like world-sized crescendos upwelling from some implacability somewhere of ordinary beauty, awful, dignified, real.

But then I wasn’t a still boy (he thinks in surprise)
—
still a boy I mean
—
I was fourteen!
Imagine being capable of that at fourteen, when I had already assumed my masculine temper!

Ah, but then isn’t it that way (he thinks he thinks philosophically) generally?
Perhaps the very effort with which I laid into the task of steeling myself to manhood had overtaxed me, and I snapped, falling back into childish weakness.

When he saw Votu, though the buildings were very beautiful they didn’t strike him half so forcefully as the people, who seemed ordinary and yet were extraordinarily beautiful
—
was there something different about them or about him when he saw them?
Were they special people, or was it that his way of seeing them was special, just then?

deKlend draws air deep into his lungs through his moustache and billows out his misshapen sword blade, taking it gently in his hands he sits up on the edge of the bed and turns the blade over and over.

This is the misbegotten image of my self-discipline (he thinks, with a not unpleasant ruefulness).
Flawed by overworking.
Yes, each flaw worked carefully in.
I started work on it entirely too early.
But (he sighs) I can’t dispense with it now, any more than I can with myself now.
It’s all too late.
And I have to redeem all that effort somehow.

With heated fingers he begins to smooth the edges of the blade carefully.
Gradually the warps begin to dwindle.

A flambeaux (he thinks with excitement)
I’ll
accentuate
the waves, and make them regular!

As loyal to me (he thinks as he works) as my death
—
there is nothing so faithful to me.
All my long life long, my death will never betray me, my death will never abandon me, it will keep its promise to me.
People can’t keep their promises;
it doesn’t seem as if they can.
This realization makes me feel compassion (he thinks) or maybe it’s affection, for them.
They can’t help it, I can’t, breaking promises.
Death is a hero (he thinks) because it couldn’t keep its promises any more perfectly, but knowing that doesn’t amount to knowing what death is
—
death’s loyalty is never a feeling:
if death could feel the faith it keeps, it couldn’t keep it so perfectly.
Death just says, voicelessly:
you can count on me.
What more reliance do I need?

Shaman relies on death, rightly or wrongly.
But there’s more to it than that.
Shaman may also make promises
to
death.
What about that?

I make promises to my own death.
Always only parts of the answer, or you want (deKlend thinks) to say that, but what you mean is no complete answers, only partial ones.
You don’t (he thinks) want to claim, I don’t think, that there is some total answer coming together somewhere.
You can produce wisdom, and speak like a prophet, but you should understand when you do this that you’re improvising in a moment and that these words may turn out to be the least portable, and can’t leave their very special moment without instantly being pulled inside out.
Like the so-called student of magic?
No such thing.

There’s no conscious plan against magic (he thinks)
It simply can’t abide where mediocrity is.
And ‘the whole world’ is a mediocrity, and more and more so all the time.

And there’s no way to study it?

Remember library books, when you were young?
Mysteries of the Occult
?
True Magic
?
Do you remember walking down Waltonia Street, reading that book about talismans, and a bird in a tree shat on the page as you went below?
That bird had the right idea.
Read a book about magic and you will learn
about
magic.
You will learn what people thought it was, what people (he thinks) historically had to say about it.
A historian of magic is not for that reason magical.
So magic is another word for excellence no, it’s just another word, period.
I don’t know what that means (he thinks).