Celebrant (41 page)

Someone’s washing has blown off the line and fallen here, sheeting some of the plants, curtaining off the shade into chance privacies.
Monkeys scurry overhead without coming down to earth.

Burn lifts aside a smooth, flexible bough all garish with pale new foliage
—
a slender ankle there, from behind a sheet caught in the branches of a sycamore
—
a sigh
—
she pulls the sheet a little and steps around it.
Gina glances up sharply at Burn and then her eyes flick uncertainly from this to that to that, her hands where they had been, one spread over her ribs and the other between her legs.
Burn can hear her breathing fitfully, very light and swift.
Gina seems confused and strangely full of yearning.
She looks away from Burn now, weakly, discomposed, firmly in the grip of a chaotic sensation, while every now and then move the fingers of the hand between her legs.
Burn squats beside her.
Gina turns her head back, facing down her body, with a weak will of its own her hand moves more vigorously and she makes two very soft, muffled cries without opening her mouth.
Burn puts her hand on Gina’s shoulder, making Gina shiver;
Burn sees Gina’s eyes shine under the half-lowered lids.
Burn’s curiosity gives a stern look to her own face.
Gina seems frightened of something, and confused.
She gives a little call of fear, and Burn can feel her body hum under her hand.
Like a bowed string.

Burn sits on her side next to Gina, resting her weight against root banisters, looking Gina steadily in the face, and sets her other hand down on top of Gina’s, who looks at her in bewilderment, eventually saying something, a plea in the form of a non-word.
The hand under Burn’s hand moves from time to time in little spasms.
Each motion seems to pull the mind from behind Gina’s eyes down slightly further into her body, pulled in like falling asleep, then bobbing back up into the eyes again.
Burn’s hand moves persistently, while she peers intently into Gina’s face.
From under this steadily prolonged investigation of her hand Gina suddenly is trying to escape, but utterly without strength
—
then her body bucks wildly and cries out.
Burn leaps to her feet and stares at Gina, who lies at her feet, wriggling like a little snake.

Burn is gone, and Gina lies at the foot of the tree, slack and empty.
She bathes there in the sluggish warmth by the ground, looking out at the leopardy floor of the wood, letting it pour into the still, light-filled pool of her mind.

Burn sits with the others in a breeze that carries the smell of the light on the rose garden.
Chernu, one of the most pigeonlike of them, is playing nearby with Sandy.
The skin of Chernu’s face and the front and sides of her body is velvetty bruisy sfumato, while the skin of her back, the back of her neck, the backs of her gangly upper arms and legs, is caramel brown, and her Asian eyes are two perfect rings of brilliant orange set in black.
Her sleek, oniony hair is black, too.

Sandy’s is light brown and hangs in thick curls around her boyish, sweet-hearted face.
She’s younger than Chernu, and more compact;
her hands and feet are vermillion as pigeon feet.
She has creamy pink irises and complexion;
she has no finger nails.

Desso, short for Dessomoya, has a sharp nose that points down toward her lips like an arrow.
Her green eyes glitter and resemble a cat’s more than a pigeon’s.
The skin around her face, and down her sides, has a dividing band of pearly grey with a white margin toward the back and minute, streak-like flecks of black toward the front.
Only Burn has fewer pigeon characteristics, but Desso is the most pigeonlike in behavior.
She tilts the top of her head to the left and right as she looks at something, and coos down deep in her chest as if she were clearing her throat.

Dusk seems to contract the sky into a flame-like cone, binding the horizon while the summit plunges out into space.
There is open sky behind Burn’s head, from Gina’s point of view.
She looks at the weird light of dusk on Burn’s decisive face, the blues and purples of its planes, and the lifting and settling blonde hair streaked with dirt.
Burn’s delicate, precise way of moving, her shoulders that reach across to join beneath her throat like the flexed steel laths beneath a carriage.
Gina comes up without looking at anyone else and meekly sits beside Burn, lays her head on Burn’s shoulder, the smell of Burn’s not clean not dirty body, letting her gaze spill from her eyes into the stirring grass in the center of all the crossed and folded legs.

(Kunty is lying half spilled out of the rug.
It’s more than half-shredded from all her clawing and thrashing.
Ester and the others timidly bring her food.
Kunty’s eyes flash and seem to crack out gleeds of light. She snarls and froths with impatience, thrashes from time to time like a stricken shark.
And she is healing, swiftly.
The whrounim might have broken her back and left her paralyzed, but the spines of rabbit girls are hinged at the lumbar vertebrae, which makes running on all fours convenient for them.
That hinge was wrenched by the whrounim, Kunty felt it, but it is healing, and she is already beginning to crawl on her belly.
It takes all her strength of will to keep herself from moving too much
—
all she can think about is running, dancing, leaping
—
)

blue night, red smoke

blue and yellow fires wheel

the trembling light on the plains

the blues and the purples on the planes

Around dusk, the ghosts come out of the city, or from somewhere, and infest the green boundary that surrounds Votu’s walls.
They insinuate themselves into the foliage, like trapped beads of air.
They roll magically along the undersurfaces of things and then pop up.
They stretch themselves in ribbons and festoons, slinking just above the path, and flutter down on anyone who passes.
Stretching out an invisible arm that palpates its way toward you like a leprous white anaconda
...
They’re not dangerous, but you don’t want to see them, you don’t ever want to see them.
Apart from going back into the city, the only way to avoid seeing ghosts at dusk is to hallucinate.
Fortunately there are enough pigeon girls here for that to be possible.

Burn and the other girls begin hallucinating.
A harsh chime merrygorounds in a loop around her temples, and the leaves, twigs, grass, the clouds and other girls all begin to melt and seep invisible smoke.
Everything she sees is eating its way into the “background” like encaustic, that background is like a canvas, but it’s not two dimensional, it goes far back into dim transparence like gelatin or darkened glass.
It can’t really be seen, only these brilliantly colored leaves and twigs, blades of grass, these riotous girls, eating into vision, their pigmentations separating into hued layers, hundreds of distinct, vividly different colors.
The chime is also dividing into particular tones, coarse fibers of sound roughly braided into a drone pulsating between a centrifugal movement, tearing the noises open, and another that brings them back into stricter harmony again.

A breeze riffles the grass, sparkling in the black air.
The dark smokes from the ground, and the twilight is a shaft that goes straight up from the under crust of the sky to infinity like an irregular mesa.
Seeing all this prevents seeing ghosts.

Burn doesn’t exactly see herself
—
she sees a brief flash as if she’d momentarily glimpsed herself in the peripheral vision of the girl sitting off to her left.
There is a gentle, starburst halo there with an empty center, on her chest just below the right shoulder.
That’s where Gina’s bare head rests.
And Burn can feel the side of Gina’s long throat laid along the skin of her chest, too.
Gina has sleepily arrayed herself nearly in Burn’s lap, although she is not as large as Gina.
The diamond-shaped patterns in Gina’s skin suddenly become conspicuous and seem to slide opposite each other, then disappear, come back and vanish and come back again.

Other pigeon girls are shadowy around her.
The smoke from the plants, the air they give off, fills the meadow.
Each plume of air from a leaf or a blade becomes an air-stem to be forced aside if one is to get through.
They press on all sides, and she feels the air trickle up from the crushed grass she sits on.
Inside the chiming sound, which has a lulling rhythm, she hears her own voice singing faintly

merry going round, merry merry going round,

merry going round, now it’s merry going round

over and over.
The years wander by;
there it is, a smooth breast of even snow like frosting on a cake, so white it’s almost blue, like the white of an eye.
Looking more closely, she sees the snow really is laced with fine, threadlike red veins.
As she breathes on them, her warm, damp breath, drawn in summery meadows, makes the veins throb perceptibly.
The rich carnation color of the blood, glowing like embers glow, more vivid the darker the color, laced in those minute threads, so fine she can see them draped across the gaps between individual crumbs of snow, is confiding itself to her like a secret message.
She has an impulse to swat snow over and cover them, to
preserve the sight of them for herself only, but she doesn’t want to gouge up and disrupt the weird perfection of the snow.
Eventually it will be the moon, blown like tinsel this way and that by an autumn wind.
The thin crescent moon she sees is plainly in front of the clouds.

The white plaster walls, a hall door, there in the hall a person with a merry-go-round for a head.
The merry-go-round revolves, the horses and hippocampi and griffons on it rise and fall on their poles.

Down toward one end of the hall, where a number of doors open onto darkened rooms, two naked figures are kneeling, curled together.
Mother and daughter.
Mother is breastfeeding the girl, who looks ten years old and nearly swoons with sleep.
Neither of them acknowledge the man.
He kneels behind the young woman, and, reaching around her, takes the girl in his arms.
The woman, nearly swooning with sleep, allows her hands to fall away and her neck to go slack, so that her head comes to rest against his shoulder.
With one hand, very tenderly, he hold the girl’s head to her mother’s breast, which he lifts and holds out to her with his other hand.
There is no sound but the soft, measured rush of air in the girl’s nostrils, and her mother’s breath feathering against the man’s jacket.
The man is not breathing.
With a little turn of the head, the girl releases the nipple and sinks into complete sleep.
The man gathers her up in his arms, rises slowly, allowing the woman to slide gently back against the wall, and carries the girl into one of the dark rooms.
Very carefully he puts her to bed and draws the covers up to her chin.

The mother sighs as he returns to her.
He drops to his knees and draws her into a cove he makes of his arms and legs.
She leans back, stretching across him, then lifts her breast to his mouth.
The taste crushes time.

Tiny interruptions in the gleams of polished brass fittings and the mirrors around the axle are little shades riding the creatures of the merry-go-round, waving matchstick arms.