Celebrant (3 page)

*

deKlend also has the dream
—
the kitchen, the snow, the fire, the heavy-footed man, wakes with a bleat of alarm and sits up, swinging his feet down from the bench.
What are they saying?
Some broken thoughts
—
Rubbing his face, he tries to draw the dream out.

Is it the dream, or is it a story that all too quickly takes up the images of the dream and makes sense where none had been?
Meteors fall in the wood.

A fierce black bird with long ears and a snout, with hands instead of talons;
a sardonic wild man in a veil.
“Mnemosem,” a misread word, that might have come from the book
—
it might have been a heading at the top of a page, and not a complete word.
It follows him like a leitmotif repeating in his mind and not distinct;
whenever he stops, his attention settles decisively on it, yet does not firmly grasp it.
It’s a word, he thinks, that almost means something else, like an approximate synonym or a modification.
He believes it has nothing to do really with memory.
It doesn’t mean a rememberer, or a rerememberer, but it might mean someone who memorizes but never remembers or reremembers what is memorized.
Memorizing to forget.
An equivalent discipline of forgetting.
Do these make sense or are they just waves, like a wave of the branches, passing over and making a stir but without changing anything?

deKlend begins walking.

It had the vividness of the presentiment (deKlend thinks) the arbitrary quality, but then I’ve only read about presentiments, haven’t I?
There was the time I dreamt of her together with
—
no, not him, but with someone I didn’t know but who might have been him, as well as anyone.
It’s a summons
—
or no, it’s not.
Yes it is!
It’s the call I must have been waiting for, at last!

deKlend draws out the book again and begins to flip through it.
Here’s a photograph of a sizeable black bird standing in stubbly ground, taken from a distance.
Nothing else to see in it.
“Bird of Ill Omen,” the caption reads.

He’s always believed that he thought that he was going to be called to deliver something, a confidential message, important communique, a gift or prize, answer, or something of the kind, and it would begin with a call particularly addressed to him.
Only he would, only he
could
, recognize it as the call.
Who would call, he had assumed he would have known, but that the call should come like this was never ruled out, since nothing at all had been ruled one way or the other about it.
The call was supposed to leave no relevant question unanswered, which means that, if this is a call, then therefore in its bareness, and in the riddling baroque imagery that attended it, it must have answered all relevant questions.

After all, what questions would I ask?
Do any questions matter?
That the dream should appear in my head indicates that I and not someone else is chosen.
It is plainly from outside my head that it comes, because I can’t account for the apparition of such intense and bizarre experiences by the usual means.
Could it originate in some quarter inimical to me and bent on luring me to my destruction?
Come now!
Anyone capable of projecting dreams could have found a more alluring one than that, but what if an alluring dream was ruled out as obvious entrapment?

I repeat that anyone capable of projecting dreams is capable of destroying me at a distance already.
And if this is a game, then I should rise to the bait and outsmart my enemy.
How do I know that this supposed enemy did not count, for that matter, on my thinking myself cagey, so that I would trap myself in not rising to the bait?

But there is no enemy (he thinks)
Who would want to hurt me, or I should say, who would bother to go to such lengths to hurt me, when I have done nothing nearly as elaborate to anyone dead or alive?
As I reason on the subject, I find myself more and more confirmed in my suspicion that it was a call
—
the
call.

He picks up the book again and peers at the waxy photographs, still headily perfumed with developer.
To go
there
, no doubt (he thinks)
I should find myself
—

In Votu:

In Votu, time is commonly supposed to run backward.
It is insisted, however vaguely, that, everywhere else, what exists is understood to protrude from the past into the present.
In Votu, what exists is understood to protrude from the future into the present.
Time pours out in a stream whose current goes toward the past, although their preferred metaphor for this is a burning incense stick:
the past is ashes, still retaining the shape of the stick for a time, then dispersing to dust, while the future is unground leaves, and the present is the ring of fire.

Votu is reached by crossing a high steppe plateau of long green grass.
Like a glacier, the city flows from an inaccessible source high in the mountains, and extends down onto the plain.
A boundary separates the piedmont zone from the upper city, and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, nobody lives above the boundary.
Looking up, the people of Votu watch as the future city arrives, having already existed from time immemorial and thus being older than the city they’ve come to know, sliding inexorably down the slope and piling up on top of them.
People move into the new
buildings and adapt to the new streets as they cross the boundary into the habitable zone, while the older structures opposite are driven down and crushed together, collapsing to form a sort of rubbery scrim at the city’s lowest extremity.
The compacted past city forms a dense integument, not unlike a callous, that makes the erection of an outer wall unnecessary along that side.

Those who, crossing the boundary, ascend into the future city find empty, still, expectant streets and houses, over which huge sculpted heads preside.
These are expertly carved in stone, with such subtle command of expression that there can be no mistake the faces are meant to be seen as sleeping, not dead.
They are all different.
Some faces are composed, others sprawl.
The air there is tense, and the buildings are much overgrown, but there is very little animal life.
The populated area of Votu echoes with birdsong from end to end, and the birds are always first into the new sections, but they don’t go far into the future.

People don’t venture over the boundary into the future area because it, like the rest of the higher mountains, belongs to what the natives call forgetting-country.
Forgetting-country is under a natural spell that makes certain forms of remembering fatal.
No one who goes there dies for having remembered how to tie a shoelace;
that kind of memory is as harmless there as anywhere.
Likewise, familiarity, as someone eats breakfast, as someone catches a glimpse of the view from bed
—
that variety of memory does not trigger the spell.
But memories of events, parents, names, specifics, can’t be safely brought to mind beyond the boundary.
Every recollection of such things contributes to a morbid condition resembling chronic arsenic poisoning.
Unfortunately, the killing influence also comes into play whenever one remembers that it is unsafe to remember things, building up in the softening brain of the victim until paralysis, coma, and melting.
Remembering others who have died in this way is the most toxic of all forms of memory.
Anyone who remembers a victim is virtually certain to become a victim himself.

The boundary is part of a prophylactic scheme laboriously put together over many years by specialists, forgotten and written down.
There are no barriers, just signs that are visible only from the lower side, so as not to remind anyone who dares venture above the boundary.
The cordon is lined with lodges occupied by municipal hypnotists who are sworn to entrance and de-memorize all who seek to pass beyond.

deKlend:

deKlend is sitting in a restaurant when the colors suddenly become more distinct as if someone had adjusted the lighting
—

—
oh no
—

They become more distinct and his lips grow cold
—

—
oh no not here
—

The food he’s chewing loses all its flavor and he shudders and becomes sick
—

—
someone is listening in on me, is anyone attending to me, is someone paying attention to me?
Someone is reading me!

Starting, his arms jerk stiffly and his plate cascades to the floor.
Attention picks him out like an unseen spotlight
—
swallowing his half-chewed food is like forcing down a handful of nails.
A diamond-shaped crack of light twists shut around the flowers in a plain, trembling little white carafe
—

Someone is writing about me!
Someone is reading me!
Who?
Who?

In the night outside an owl answers him, the flowers bounce after the plate, and if it wasnt’ for thei for that pety paesky hammer knoickiong his thoughts apar t the rain has stopped outside like it never happened
—
sick clammy white page which one who’s reading me gleatinous sickly cold black ink
—
the lon graggedd sniff like tearing paper, the waiter looking odwn at him
—
flares up like guttters like a canalde then flares up again gutters flares guuterres flares sof ic andtyjt ek ci tn the darkjnd disgutsing sight of the food half smeared on the palte I mean the clioth the water in the glass
vile water
—
too close I’m being fascinated
—
soesome’s attention ois throwing off my delciate machinery
—
I’ve fall into favor
—
no
—
I’m bein favord
—
I’m being favored/faxinated
—

deKlend keels over backwards kicking out his legs and hits the floor rigid as a plank, his moustache bristling around his bared teeth, the features seem to melt and alter, his eyes turn to moons, a grating, hawking sound in his throat, like harsh laughter.
He’s having the dream again
—

...
When the attack passes he clambers up from the floor holding his pounding head.
The fits usually allow for these deceptive returns, and he knows he is liable to fall again at any moment.

His body feels light and empty like a ghostly afterbirth trailing from his thousand-pound head.
A second skull is trying to break its way out of his own smaller head.
His clothes are twisted;
they bind his legs and arms.
The table is on its side.
The diners are quiet and many have actually pressed themselves against the walls, murmuring, staring.
Someone is shouting something in the back.
He hurries outside, half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, into unrefreshing night air that buzzes intolerably in his jaw
—
a punch knots and spreads in his gut and his mouth floods with brine.
He pitches helplessly onto the gravel on all fours vomiting, with brutally long pauses between each spasm.