Celebrant (52 page)

Rushing to the water’s edge she leans over and sees her shadowy reflection.
A grown woman’s face.
The same prominent incisors, though less prominent.
The same thick, kinky hair, though combed and pulled up.
Reaching up she tears out the thing that holds it up so that it collapses around her face and hides it.
She rips her dress clean in two, balls it up and furiously throws it far out over the water.
Tits!
Turning them this way and that, she examines her arms and legs.
Still hairy, but less hairy, and hair in between.
Her toenails are clean and trimmed.
Her body is still strong
—
she looks sharply and critically at herself, slaps her stomach, her bottom.

Soft!
(she thinks, with fright)

She crouches and pain lashes across her lower back like a whip.
The hinge is stuck!

Stuck solid!

She snaps her pelvis trying to loosen it but the pain is so bad it makes her cry out.

—
Did
he
hear that?

She starts up, covering herself with her hands in alarm.

She’d forgotten about him.

Completely confused, she dashes into the dim little
...
what?
House.
Boat house.

I’m going back (she thinks).
Do I want to?
Did I?
Why now?

That voice calls from not too far at all away and her flesh grabs up in goose pimples.

He’s near!

/It’s me, /Phryn/dri/ (the voice says)

The sound is released into the air, like letting a big rock drop from your hand.
It’s two-in-one, calling two names in one.
One call is smiling and presumes an intimate claim on her.
The other is urgent, and filled with longing.

Who was that woman?
Why do I remember her now?

A blonde Medusa in a white dress.
When did she see her?
She used to fantasize about being fucked by her.

Through the hiatus, he enters that day.
The day is bound up in the locale and closely identical to it:
the park at the country house.
The kind of house that has a storied name.

deKlend stands in a great quiet of light and trees.
The air doesn’t stir.
It remains, without coming or going.
There is a wide earth path in front of him, which curves eerily away from him in an S shape.
There’s no obstacle it swerves to avoid by being given that shape.
The trees are spatters of dark colors, scattered throughout great depth.
If there is any wind, any birdsong, any sound, they repel it.
The trees, the path, and now, as he advances, the dull water he sees twinkling in the pond, a small lake, bate their breath.

A portentous event happened, or will happen, here.

It is going on, now.

A fitful, ghostly momentum gathers itself around him, mostly from behind.

Someone else (he thinks)

He walks along the path, going in the water’s direction.
His steps create minute disruptions in the faint hum of the absence of louder sounds.

He feels as if he’s been alerted, both sharply and dreamily.
A cloud of midges is tumbling over a blot of mire there where the pond’s edge wrinkles, forming a spot of ruby slime.

Phryne (he suspects)
She would be close to this water if she were here.

—
She isn’t here.

She
is
here.
Aren’t I looking for her?

He calls to her.

Light on water.
Light on leaves.

He is not all there, not incomplete.

And everything else here is the same, down to the leaves, shiny with wax.
The sky over the pond is a uniform white haze.
The air is tepid.
The water is blank.

His gaze falls on the fragments of a white dress that the water holds.
A dimple, like cupped hands, holds them up.

I sounded like
—
unlike
—
unlike myself, I mean of course (he thinks)
The air used my voice as an occasion to use its own voice, or something in the air.
Something in ‘intheair.’

There
is
an envelope, like a hibernating spirit.
It is the physical, the somatic experience of following the orders of fate (he thinks)

That’s plainly the meaning of all this ominousness.

A woman’s voice.

A woman’s muffled voice.

She’s near.
Did she call?
Did he hear?
Calling him?

Again he dispatches his weird voice, and the stillness absorbs it at once.
But then, wasn’t there something in the way it went that wouldn’t have been ‘there’ if it hadn’t been heard?
The thought of Phryne now uncorks and gushes back into him.
Until now his desire for her had been subdued, almost drugged, and now it throws off its stupor fiercely and springs to life again, pressing him to find her.
It unmasks itself as the reason for his investigation.
The soupy smell of the pond, the peppery smell of hot bark, the low whine of insects, the incandescence, become instantly exciting.
Like revealing garments frame and set her, and hide her.
Her wide hips, her flexible waist
—
her face pressed close.
With a jerk he turns his head again toward the fragments of white on the pond.

He looks at the pier along the water, and the small boathouse.
And the acridly-spiced pang of desire, dark heat.

A woman’s sharp breathing
—
the hollow boom it makes inside the small house
—

The film she’d known with Gina thickens in her mind, confusing her because why should it be happening now?
A woman becoming excited.
Is she here?
Kunty, who has never seen the ocean, rises on waves.
Rabbit girls don’t think about nakedness
—
how can they, when most have at best only a few rags to cover themselves with?
But now she is excited and exposed, standing with nothing but her arms around herself in the shadows of the little house.
There are no doors in the doorways, and the small windows are he flashes in the window and she starts
—

—
the white elbow of his jacket just there a moment in the window.
It’s a game.
Hide and seek.
The reward is special.
In any
—

—
!
—

—
moment now the world and life will telescope inside themselves to become commensurate with two who are not all then, not waiting then, and anytime but then, the subtle replacement that happens when
—

She doesn’t trip.
She deliberately drops straight down onto her knees and flexes her back, and hands seize her waist and slide over her hips, she feels him kneeling behind her, the small hairs, for example, on his thighs against the backs of her own legs.
He plunges hugely into her and his body folds over hers, one arm across her chest and the other, the right, pressed along her abdomen using his hand not just to open her up.

there’s a tiny, pale greenish light winking on and off outside the door, it goes floating by

alarming laughter
—
as if she’s gone insane
—
because she can feel her division, a voice shouts angrily wilder, fiercer, angrier, calling to him to attack her harder.

At the moment of conception, she claws the floor, throws herself onto her back and pounds the ground with the back of her head and shoulders, raking the air with her claws.
Her legs grip the air between them in a vice and she hammers at that air, locked in her frothing sex until the air cracks
—

Stop:
crystalline darkness.
The clear black outside of light.
There’s a backward withdrawal into the vacuum the past draws with it, bearing along an additional spark of disembodied pregnancy that it will be up to time and space to nurture.

The horizon keeps coming loose and approaching swiftly
—

In her dream, Phryne is in “a palace in the old country” although she’s never been to any, not even to visit.
She is a phantom observer actually perched on the shoulders of a statue of Psyche.
There are a number of men in the room who have, she “understands,” been gathered here, at this palace outside the city, for a certain purpose, by Y, the lady of the house.
They’ve just had an exquisite meal.
Y has vanished.
The men have tucked cigars beneath their grand, silky moustaches.
They are virile in the moustache-tobacco-raki way she imagined her great-grandfather’s generation had been.

Y’s assistant, A, enters the room.
She is a tall, statuesque woman with lustrous dark hair hanging straight to the small of her back.
Her dress, which is not quite sheer, and belted around her slender waist, is satin of such a dark purple it seems black.
The plain ribbon around her throat is the same color and material.

“Now it’s time to announce the game,” she says, smiling, and holding her hands out from her waist.
“It’s hide and seek.”

A goes over to a high chair, turned toward the fireplace, in which Y had been sitting earlier.
She turns the chair to face them.
Y’s black dress is draped carefully over the chair.

“As some of you may have noticed,” A continues, gesturing to the empty dress, “this is the dress Y was wearing earlier.
She has removed it and gone naked into the park.”

A glances at the clock on the mantle.

“It has now been time enough for her to take up her hiding place.
You, assuming you are willing, shall now all go into the park to find her.”

She pauses, looking from one face to another until she has acknowledged everyone present.

“Whoever finds her, may do as he pleases.”

Taking it from the clip that attaches it to her belt, A raises a small device with a few little buttons on it and, folding her thumb, presses one of these buttons.
A gong sounds from an upper floor, or perhaps the attic.

“That gong is audible throughout the park.
From the moment I release you to begin your search, you shall have just twenty minutes in which to find your
...
quarry.”