Celebrant (49 page)

Suddenly disgusted
—
some thought or other is spoiling his satisfaction
—
Adrian finishes quickly and takes leave of his inert victims.
The little bureaucrat is actually still eating.
He has small pieces of toast and a butter knife.
With this knife, he is slicing off little slabs of the black gunk that oozes from the corners of the eyes of a sizeable dog sitting beside his chair.
The dog’s head dips a little every time the bureaucrat dabs his knife into the pungent stuff.
Then he smears a pat of it on the toast and eats it.

Adrian feels returning upon him again the bitter pessimism of spirit that cuts off expectations, a brown-grey offramp leading to an intersection by the dead grass with a red light that almost never changes.
Drifting from room to room at Á Un, he gets into one brief, irritating conversation after another.
He has taught himself how to agree with people in a particular tone that makes it seem as though he were only humoring them
—
it amuses him to watch as they become frustrated without knowing why.
But just now his tactics are failing him.

The feeling of an incipient attack is coming on
...
a faintly eerie consciousness of his body, his heartbeat, nothing wrong, no, nothing wrong
—
staring, hushing himself and listening with painstaking attention, breathing through his teeth
...
his vision is so clear what’s before him seems unreal, the objects, the colors, the light around him, hold their breath and grow more and more vividly intense, refusing to exhale
...
Every sensation, no matter how fleeting or weak, he seizes on with his complete concentration.
He interrogates every impression as it comes over him, indignantly demanding to know how it comes to affect him.

A feeling now
—
just now
—
like a marble, rolling from side to side, in the back of his skull.
A bit heavy for a marble.
It very slightly depresses a thin layer of soft tissue carpeting the interior of the cranial bones.
Now, there’s a disembodied thumb resting against the side of his right foot, just below the ankle
—
what is the one cause of all these errant symptoms?
He listens for the answer as only a devout hypochondriac can listen.

Adrian does everything with method.
The rules are as strict, detailed, copious, and stiff as they are on the assumption that people probably won’t follow them carefully.
The excessive scrupulousness of the rules is hyperbolic by design, to insure that people remember that they are bound by rules.
It’s like shouting to be understood.
The importance of what is shouted won’t be missed, even if its import remains vague.
Normally, the only difficulty with this approach arises when people get the regulations which are actually important mixed up with the others, that are essentially all spirit and no letter.
However, from time to time someone comes along who, for whatever reason, and at heroically unnecessary cost to himself, upholds the entire body of the rules.
How can you hope to explain to such a person that this way of following the rules only puts them in the wrong?
For it is vitally important that the existence of phantom rules is never openly acknowledged.
Otherwise, the illusion undermined, those rules would vanish, the overall perception of severity would grow weaker, and discipline would correspondingly slacken.

It makes far more sense judiciously to make use of the sticklers.
Adrian’s punctilio, he hopes, acts to dissipate the air of license that allows people to overlook the rules.
If he goes through with it, then they will also have to go through with it.
All the way through with it.

He had slept badly, and his hair was still wet from the night before.

Why?
(he had asked himself then)
He bathes before bed but why put himself through it?
Feeling feverish and detestably weak he had nearly burst into tears as the hard points of the cold taps sank into his water-softened fingers.
The feeling of even hot water on his skin was weird, and seemed to trickle over numb and ultrasensitive zones on his surface, so that he trembled.
He brushed the cold tile with his skin and nearly cried out in despair, drowning in a torrent of overpowering sensations.

Who am I?
Am I going insane?
Is this how it starts?

No
—
I have a great destiny (he tells himself)
Most of what you feel is understandable, is that the problem, no cause for any special concern.
The water’s backing up a little.
A dim altercation of soap and hands and blue tile, the chilling basin, his loveless body, and the light of the room.
Feeling weak, old, wretched, tired, and disgusted.
Days had passed in those rooms, and all the same he felt nakedly exposed and disembodied, unreal, with nothing to do, nothing to be.

He can’t concentrate.
He can’t sleep properly.
He is haunted by a nebulous fear of failure, the idea of his own work is unintelligible to him in a special way, as if something crucial in each sentence were obscured from a point of view he can’t avoid taking.
Is the moment passing now?
How can it not be?
Is the great destiny slipping away?
But how does it make sense to miss your destiny?

Paragraphs smoothly glide away from each other on magnetic waves of repulsion, grey and brown, shaped like cut stone slabs with bezeled edges, paragraphs of me.
They don’t link up.
No chain
—
so what is the chain?
Chain is direction of current.
Respect.
Keep going.
Look for landmarks in the ocean until siren voices hypnotize you and you spring reborn from the wreck of the Hesperus, the tragedy, the captain lashed to the wheel, Dracula emerging from below decks, the captain’s daughter washed ashore, frozen solid.

Where is
he?
Somewhere in the black, out in the world.
How I wish I were, had his perpetual errand.

The people in the street?
—
their fate?
I don’t care.
My ministry is to the dead, citizens.
You don’t just become a ghost, you know.
You have to construct your future ghost, as I do via my griffonage, and then hurl yourself, at the right time, just so.
Of course, it used to be done instinctively, but we of the lesser generations have lost this instinct, and so must rely in its stead on technique.

And look at them
...
(Adrian thinks now, resuming his train of thought at the party)

He actually does look around, as if his head were the swivelling lamp of a lighthouse and he were inside, gazing out through his own eyes.
This way of looking seems to stretch him out loftily, the disdain brings him breathable air.

...
what do
they
know of technique?
Of discipline?

Now he feels affectedness comes over him, not false, and not natural either.
Gloating, quiet, very floating and deliberate in even his smallest movements, economical.
A morbid serenity and knowingness, a crazy staring look that would crop up from time to time.
Now
he feels like himself again!

A younger man, tall, blonde, rubbery-looking, is talking animatedly with someone.
He bangs his cigarette end into a bronze ashtray adorned with a tiny naked woman bent demurely forward.
Without a glance in the man’s direction, Adrian picks up the wobbling ashtray and sets it down toward the center of the table, in a more suitable place, with reproachful care.

Here’s a group gathered to look at a painting, the painter himself is regaling them with it, his wife beside him.
The painting is a portrait of an attractive young woman.

Has he ever done your portrait, madame?
(Adrian asks the painter’s wife)

No, actually!
(she says with a slight exaggeration of the eyes, the sort of inflation that happens at parties)

Curious he should do one of her, and not of you
...
(Adrian says)

He drifts away.
The idea that he has just sown the seed of future disharmony, perhaps even an outright argument, he savors like a sweet.
Just one seed, that’s all that was needed
—
that’s all a deft practitioner would need.
He has a disagreeable, pursed, relishing expression on his lips.

The shimmering light in the sockets makes fluttering rings around his eyes like two little cyclones.
The figure seems to boil up from the darkness at the end of the hall, into which Adrian has just plunged.

Come on weakling! (a voice chuckles)

and slugs me in the gut
—
a blow I swear was real

Eyes ablaze in the clear blackness of the alley like two windows opening onto a snowstorm.
Pale, clear, pure light in the sockets maniacally white.

Yes, we’ll send them all up, all lit on one rotting match!

Like a sinister jellyfish made of old umbrellas, Adrian is floating, on an evil errand, through the empty stone arcades and trash-strewn lots.
He reviews again, with an intense thrill of admiration,
the stories he’d read of the terrifying ecstatics, who destroyed so totally that no part of their victims endured it, not even in memories.

Waiting patiently in line to buy himself a pair of socks he replays in his mind the events of one of his rejected stories of vengeance from beyond the grave
—

The dead man’s widow, awakened in the night by the sound of a baby bawling in the nursery
...
she investigates
...
the darkened nursery
...
the heartbreaking cries
...
the crib
...
the strange infant
...
as she picks up the child two metal barrels slide from between its closed eyelids and discharge fatal bullets
...

Next night, the dead man’s brother, who had made certain preparations for him unaware that they were to abet his revenge on his wife, gazes from his window
...
a glimpse of something pale and faintly luminous there in the gallery opposite his study
...
he investigates
...
the bent figure glowing like a cloud
...
her great mane of dishevelled hair
...
drawing near he recognizes the dead woman
...
the locks of her hair whip around his neck
...
he sinks to the floor, his tongue sticking out, eyes bulging like ping-pong balls
...