Celebrant (4 page)

Staring with stupefied eyes at the gravel just ahead of the gradually augmenting splatter, where a circle of light cast by the restaurant shines past him, touching the short fringe of colorless grass.

The grass is the dawn rim of the world.
Many miles below him is the dark velvety basin of the earth.
Above him is the deeper, clarified darkness of space, and distance is the only thing between the stars and him.
Soaring in this thin, air-like medium his wings hang suspended without adjustment.

deKlend is a bright, cold mist.

He looks out into space, into a weirdly nonuniform darkness made of overlaid meniscuses of blue that soften and blur together in a broad crescent in front of him.
Into that blue-black space erupt the sun and horizon at once, crashing into space in a single spinning wave.
He gasps.
Tears roll down his cheeks.
Sweat bursts from his skin.
He lists forward as though he were praying.
The unbearable intensity of the vision increases.

He is buoyantly tossing on the wind, so high above the surface of the earth that even with the sun’s full effulgence beneath him the sky above him is luminous black.
Now he plunges steeply from that immense height into the earth screwing his fingers into the soil, knitting them into the crabgrass he forces his brow hard into the dirt and his whole body trembles even as he plummets from on high like a javelin.
Below him, black and white mountains raise their spines above a green steppe that ripples in bands of reflected scintillation like ribbons of sea froth.
The mountains are blackened teeth in a dead, livid jaw.
The back of deKlend’s neck contracts violently snapping up his glassy-eyed face.
Shivering uncontrollably he streaks like a meteor just above the tops of the long grass, the insanely distinct peaks of the mountains gnaw the horizon ahead and before them rises the outline of a city, surrounded by a foaming surf of trees.
deKlend leaps up and takes off, running down the dirt road that leads away from the restaurant into the luminous country of night, the road lined with flame-like trees that imperfectly screen the shimmering, clabbered fields of pleached blue paste.
Sluicing gusts of air cross his wings carrying him on to the city like a shot.
Unable really to turn his head he can only crane his eyes upward toward a silhouette melting against the sun now high above him.
It’s a bird, and he is its shadow.
Streets and buildings suddenly rush up and engulf him.
His shadow form folds, stretches and contracts over irregular surfaces of streets and buildings, not seeing the buildings except as frail transparencies
—
but vividly seeing the
people
.

Like fish in a reef, they zip in and out of doors, criss-crossing the streets, making way for each other, they clasp hands coming together or apart, they speak to each other, they meet, they welcome each other.
They welcome in a threatening, endearing I’m more secure in not being understood than in being understood, in not understanding or needing to understand what makes people tick what am I a cop?
In Votu dignity isn’t a luxury the crowds aren’t just faceless human porridge, each face here is specified, each face is dignified with a special activity, special to it.

The towers and domes of the city shout rapturously against the sky.
Men and women and children built this choiring self-monumenting life-form, present all around him, called
Votu
who knows why?
His mouth frets out the syllables of the name in another body.
He whips forward over scalps and hats in avenues thronged with people, passing over palpitating fountains of brilliant water effulgent with reflected glare.
Then, in the cool side lanes, where a fine grey-blue shade is sifted like ashes to the earth, there is an eddying stream, just here, of little girls in rags.
His speed increases, his legs are wings.
He is hurtling down the bird’s road.
The girls jet into the crowds and lace themselves in among the other people as fast as little fish schooling.
These quick, homeless little girls shine like silver, flashing in the daylight.
deKlend leaps.
He jumps.
He leaps again.
deKlend disappears
—
the night road is empty.

The bus is enormous and might be a train car.
It plunges through the night, and deKlend half-deflatedly sits against one of the huge windows on the right side, in a corner.
Outside, whirling by barely a few feet away from his face, are gnarled, sawtoothed black rocks jumbled in heaving surf
—
the water glows deeply cobalt blue vividly contrasted with incandescent white foam that flips and spurts webs of hissing lace over the rocks.
Washed with spray, the track is canted toward the water so that deKlend is nearly looking down into it.
Although he never takes his eyes away, he knows that, through the windows across the aisle, he would be able to see a similarly jagged blue-black collar of shrubs against a weirdly brilliant overcast sky, and beyond that, the yawn of a vast blackened continent dotted with ancient settlements and alien cities.

The car is lit pell mell and people from all nations sit mostly by themselves.
A woman with skin the ashy color of undyed linen, and long slender eyes, is sitting across the aisle in a seat facing the other way.
Her black hair is cropped very short, salted with grey, and she nestles her drawn, tapering face into an ebullient, shaggy wool collar.
deKlend is neither talking to her nor remembering an earlier conversation, but it’s as though simply imagining her, and attributing to her in imagination a few aspects of speaking, like a certain limp way of gesturing with her skinny hand, were enough to connect the two of them.

Now they’ve stalled
—
or rather a bus has stalled and all the traffic is stopped and has been for a while.
People have gotten out of their cars and are walking unhurriedly forward.
Some of them gather to jump, fists in the air, from the overpass down onto the road below.
Someone must have told him about the stalled bus.
He can’t see it from here.

deKlend feels eager anticipation and a kind of predisposition to find things profound, as though he were about to meet the love of his life.
These others have, like him, decoded something distributed to the world in some unremarkable disguise, a crossword puzzle or a contest or something, and, following the directions they decoded, have thus found themselves all together this way.
At the great house, gathered quietly, like old friends and even more like former lovers who meet again for the first time after years and years, they’re talking quietly with each other.
He’s talking with that woman, who reclines on a sofa, her eyes watch the nearly colorless flames rushing silently on the hearth.
She calls the purpose of their search “alchemical” and he wonders what she means.
All this mulling over of clues and possible meanings isn’t as irritating as he would have expected, because it’s a game.

But don’t you think (the woman says) that the point was to bring certain people together like this, and that the destination or discovery waiting for us (is thought or said) is secondary in importance to our being collected, or to what we do together?

She asks him about himself.
He tells her, but his story seems unreal, as if he were inventing it all.
Being a boy, going to school, his father and mother
—
he remembers it all, minutely, and none of those abundant particulars are decisive.
They all could just as readily be something else.
His father might have been boisterous and brawling.
His mother might have been mournful and wailing.
He might mistake her story for his, and listening for telling, although that’s a drastic mistake to suspect yourself of making.
The important thing is that he is an unmoored, homeless man.
Does that mean he can set forth on his journey easily, without preliminaries?
It’s closer to the truth to say that he is completely within his limitations and travelling constantly.
To have reached such an age without successfully putting down a single root could almost be considered an accomplishment;
and there are seeds discovered in ancient tombs that are just as prone to sprout as any others.
A seed is neither alive nor dead, it waits to live.

Looking out into the complete dark, putting out a hand to feel his way along, in that dark it’s not unlike the pale shoot that breaks from the seed and reaches out homelessly for sustaining dirt.
That is, for night soil.
The usefulness brings it around again.
There is a particular bit of ground that deKlend wants
—

In Votu:

In Votu, the people circulate constantly in areas, even at night.
People in Votu are often hard to see, they blend in with the buildings so well that they seem to appear out of walls.
You see the exaggerated speed of the walkers near you flashing by, and the equally exaggerated slowness with which distant people float along.
Nevertheless the people are by far more conspicuous than the architecture.
The people, not the buildings, are the city.
The buildings would simply rise up around them as they circulated in place, almost as automatically as the heaps of sand feet push up walking on a beach.

Coming into Votu during the day there is an odd sound, part of the general whirr of the city, a unique sound with a familiar quality that inevitably makes the hearer think of an audience of applauding giants.
The people you see in the street rarely follow the pavement, most of them are darting to and fro across the street in short trips from one door to another, and the sound of applause is really only this incessant clapping of doors, shutters, manholes and hatchways.
A city of doors and brush-bys where the streets are so crowded in places that people are noodling in and out among each other brushing by with breathless, soft expressions of excuse, pardon, and apology.

It’s a city for walkers;
one only occasionally sees bicycles or horses pulling carts.
The pedestrians of Votu are quiet, polite, and don’t smell bad, and walking like this is sort of fun.
After a few dozen minutes of jaunty bumping I find I can’t take myself entirely seriously.
I look up a sloping street at a kaleidoscope of heads flashing against a white square of sky.
Door open, emerge, close.
Rush to the next door.
Open, disappear, close.
It’s the fussiness of bothering with the doors, rather than just leaving them off, that seems so funny.
Doormakers do serious business in Votu;
the typical wooden door has a lifespan of perhaps a half a year.
The doors I see are thin, curling at the edges and semitransparent with wear in the middle.
Knobs and latches are usually dangling loose or falling off, if there is anything but a round hole there.
The doormakers keep coming up with new, more durable designs, which are received with minimal enthusiasm.
You constantly see cheery doormen screwing new doors in place or removing old ones, and special angular wheelbarrows for conveying doors.

There are no streetlights.
At night, everyone carries a little lamp or phosphorescent object.
Looking out from my balcony at dusk, after a long and exhausting journey, the city is like a firefly hive.
Glide along lights, stop and start lights, bounce up and down lights, zip in and out lights, stately slow lights, groups of laughing face lights, two shadow heads together and the lights held well out at arms’ length, lights held up to faces with livid eyes shouting at each other.