Noctuary (13 page)

But of course you know, ladies and gentlemen, what it was that happened. I can see by the glitter in your eyes, the flush on your waxen faces, that you remember well how the colors appeared in the sky that night, a fabulous aurora sent by the sun and reflected by the moon, so that all the world would be baptized at once by the spectral light of truth. Willing or not, your hearts had heard the voice of the creature you thought mad. But they would not listen; they never have. Why did you force this transgression of divine law? And why do you still gaze with your wooden hate from the ends of the earth? It was for you that I committed this last and greatest sin, all for you. When have you ever appreciated these gestures from on high! And for this act I must now exist in eternal banishment from the paradise in which you exalt. How beautiful is your everlasting ruin.

Oh, blessed puppets, receive My prayer, and teach Me to make Myself in
thy
image.

It was well into evening and for some time Nolon had been been seated at a small table in a kind of park. This was a long, thin stretch of land - vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass - bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth below. From the far end of the park a figure in a dark overcoat was approaching Nolon's table, and it appeared there was going to be a meeting of some sort.

There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf. In the moonlight this densely woven pile of vegetation turned a soft shade of aquamarine, almost radiant. Beyond the thinning trees, stars were bright but without luster, as if they were made of luminous paper. Around the park, a jagged line of high roofs, black and featureless, crossed the sky like the uneven teeth of an old saw.

Nolon was resting his hands at the edge of the small, nearly circular table. In the middle of the table a piece of candle flickered inside a misshapen bubble of green glass, and Nolon's face was bathed in a restless green glare. He too was wearing a dark overcoat, unbuttoned at the top to reveal a scarf of lighter shade stuffed inside it. The scarf was wrapped about Nolon's neck right to the base of his chin. Every so often Nolon glanced up, not to look at Grissul as he proceeded across the park, but to try and catch sight of something in that lighted window across the street: a silhouette which at irregular intervals slipped in and out of view. Above the window was a long, low roof surmounted by a board which appeared to be a sign or marquee. The lettering on this board was entirely unreadable, perhaps corroded by the elements or even deliberately effaced. But the image of two tall, thin bottles could still be seen, their slender necks angled festively this way and that.

Grissul sat down, facing Nolon at eye level.

"Have you been here long?" he asked.

Nolon calmly pulled out a watch from deep inside his coat. He stared at it for a few moments, tapped the glass once or twice, then gently pushed it back inside his coat.

"Someone must have known I was thinking about seeing you," Grissul continued, "because I've got a little story I could tell."

Nolon again glanced toward the lighted window across the street. Grissul noticed this and twisted his head around, saying, "Well, someone's there after all. Do you think tonight we could get, you know, a little service of some kind?"

"Maybe you could go over there yourself and see what our chances are," Nolon replied.

"All the same to me," Grissul insisted, twisting his head back to face Nolon. "I've still got my news."

"Is that specifically why this meeting is taking place?"

To this query Grissul returned a blank expression. "Not that I know of," he asserted. "As far as I'm concerned, we just met by chance."

"Of course," Nolon agreed, smiling a little. Grissul smiled back but with much less subtlety.

"So I was going to tell you," Grissul began, "that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?"

"I now have a good idea," Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.

"This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn't planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don't know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. I'm telling you, Mr Nolon, it was right
in
the ground. It appeared to be a part of it, like - "

"Mr Grissul,
what
appeared?"

Grissul remembered himself and found a tone of voice not so exhausting of his own strength, nor so wearing on his listener's patience.

"The face," he said, leaning back in his chair. "It was right there, about the size of, I don't know, a window or a picture hanging on a wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant's
mask.
Only the edges of the face seemed not so much buried as, well,
woven
I guess you would say, right into the ground. The eyes were closed, not
shut
closed - it didn't seem to be dead - but relaxed. The same with the lips, very heavy lips rubbing up against each other. Even complexion, ashy gray, and soft cheeks. They
looked
soft, I mean, because I didn't actually touch them in any way. I think it was asleep."

Nolon shifted slightly in his chair and looked straight into Grissul's eyes.

"Then come and see for yourself," Grissul insisted. "The moon's bright enough."

"That's not the problem. I'm perfectly willing to go along with you, whatever might be there. But for once I have other plans."

"Oh, other plans," repeated Grissul as if some deeply hidden secret had been revealed. "And what other plans would those be, Mr Nolon?"

"Plans of relatively long standing and not altered since made, if you can conceive of such a thing these days. Are you listening? Oh, I thought you nodded off. Well, Rignolo, that mysterious little creature, has made a rare move. He's asked if I would like to have a look around his studio. No one's ever been there that I know of. And no one's actually seen what he paints."

"No one that you know of," added Grissul.

"Of course. Until tonight, that is, a little while from now unless a change of plans is necessary. Otherwise I shall be the first to see what all that talk of his is about. It should really be worth the trouble, and I could invite you to come along."

Grissul's lower lip pushed forward a little. "Thank you, Mr Nolon," he said, "but that's more in your line. I thought when I told you about my observation this evening - "

"Of course, your observation is very interesting, extraordinary, Mr Grissul. But I think that that sort of thing can wait, don't you? Besides, I haven't told you anything of Rignolo's work."

"You can tell me."

"Landscapes, Mr Grissul. Nothing but landscapes. Exclusively his subject, a point he even brags about."

"That's very interesting, too."

"I thought you would say something like that. And you might be even more interested if you had ever heard Rignolo discourse on his canvasses. But... well, you can see and hear for yourself. What do you say, then? First Rignolo's studio and then straight out to see if we can find that old field again?"

They agreed that these activities, in this sequence, would not be the worst way to fill an evening.

As they got up from the table, Nolon had a last look at the window across the street. The light that once brightened it must have been put out during his conversation with Grissul. So there was no way of knowing whether or not someone was now observing them. Buttoning their overcoats as far as their scarfed necks, the two men walked in silence across the park upon which countless stars stared down like the dead eyes of sculptured faces.

"Don't just walk stepping everywhere," Rignolo told his visitors as they all entered the studio. He was a little out of breath from the climb up the stairs, wheezing his words, quietly muttering to himself, "This place, oh, this place." There was hardly a patch of floor that was not in some way cluttered over, so he need not have warned Nolon, or even Grissul. Rignolo was of lesser stature than his guests, virtually a dwarf, and so moved with greater freedom through that cramped space. "You see," he said, "how this isn't really a room up here, just a little closet that tried to grow into one, bulging out every which way and making all these odd niches and alcoves surrounding us, this shapeless gallery of
nooks.
There's a window around here, I suppose, under some of these canvasses. But those are what you're here for, not to look out some window that who knows where it is. Nothing to see out there, even so."

Rignolo then ushered his visitors through the shrunken maze composed of recesses of one sort or another, indicating to them a canvass here or there. Each somehow held itself to a wall or was leaning against one, as if with exhaustion. Having brought their attention to this or that picture, he would step a little to the side and allow them to admire his work, standing there like a polite but slightly bored curator of some seldom-visited museum, a pathetic figure attired in over-sized clothes of woven... dust. His small ovoid face was as lifeless as a mask: his skin had the same faded complexion as his clothes and was just as slack, flabby; his lips were the same color as his skin but more full and taut; his hair shot out in tufts from his head, uncontrolled, weedy; and his eyes showed too much white, having to all appearances rolled up halfway into his forehead, as if they were trying to peek under it.

While Nolon was gazing at one of Rignolo's landscapes, Grissul seemed unable to shake off a preoccupation with the artist himself, though he was obviously making the effort. But the mote he tried to turn his attention away from Rignolo, the more easily it was drawn back to the flabby skin, the faded complexion, the undisciplined shocks of hair. Finally, Grissul gave a little nudge to Nolon and began to whisper something. Nolon looked at Grissul in a way that might have said, "Yes, I know, but have some sense of decorum in any case," then resumed his contemplation of Rignolo's excellent landscapes.

They were all very similar to one another. Given such titles as
"Glistening Marsh,” "The Tract of Three Shadows,"
and
"The Stars, the Hills,"
they were not intended to resemble as much as
suggest
the promised scenes. A vague hint of material forms might emerge here and there, some familiar effect of color or outline, but for the most part they could be described as extremely remote in their perspective on tangible reality. Grissul, who was no stranger to some of the locales purportedly depicted in these canvasses, could very well have expressed the objection that these conglomerations of fractured mass, these whirlpools of distorted light, simply did not achieve their purpose, did not in fact deserve connection with the geographical subjects from which they took their titles. Perhaps it was Rignolo's intuition that just such a protest might be forthcoming that inspired - in the rapid, frantic voice of a startled sleeper - the following outburst.

"Think anything you like about these scenes, it's all the same to me. Whisper to each other, my hearing is wonderfully bad. Say that my landscapes do not invite one's eyes to pass into them and wander, let alone linger for the briefest moment. Nevertheless, that is exactly their purpose, and as far as I am concerned they are quite adequate to it, meticulously efficient.

I have spent extraordinary lengths of
time
within the borders of each canvass, both as maker and as casual inhabitant, until the borders no longer exist for me and neither does... that other thing. Understand that when I say
inhabitant,
I do not in any way mean that I take my clumsy feet tromping up and down staircases of color, or that I stand this stunted body of mine upon some lofty ledge where I can play the master of all I see. There are no masters of these scenes and no seers, because bodies and their organs cannot function there - no place for them to go, nothing to survey with ordinary eyes, no thoughts to think for the mighty brain. And my thoroughfares will not take you from the doorstep of one weariness to the backdoor of another, and they cannot crumble, because they are burdened with nothing to convey — their travelers are already there, continuously arriving at infinite sites of the perpetually astonishing. Yet these sites are also a homeland, and nothing there will ever threaten to become strange. What I mean to say is that to
inhabit
my landscapes one must, in no figurative sense, grow into them. At best they are a paradise for sleepwalkers, but only those sleepwalkers who never rise to their feet, who forget their destination, and who may thus never reach that ultimate darkness beyond dreams, but may loiter in perpetuity in these lands of mine, which neighbor on nothingness and stand next door to endlessness. So you see, my critics, what we have in these little pictures is a
living
communion with the void, a vital annihilation and a thoroughly decorative eternity of — "

"All the same," Grissul interjected, "it does sound unpleasant."

"You're interfering," Nolon said under his breath.

"The old bag of wind," Grissul said under his.

"And just where do you see the unpleasantness? Where, show me. Nowhere, in my view. One cannot be unpleasant to one's self, one cannot be
strange
to oneself. I claim that all will be different when one is joined with the landscape. We need not go the way of doom when such a hideaway is so near at hand — a land of escape. For the initiated, each of those little swirls is a cove which one may enter into and become; each line — jagged or merely jittery — is a cartographer's shoreline which may be explored at all points at once; each crinkled wad of radiance is a star basking in its own light, and in yours. This, gentlemen, is a case of making the most of one's talent for pro-jec-tion. There indeed exist
actual
locales on which my pictures are based, I admit that. But these places keep their distance from the spectator: whereas my new landscapes make you feel at home, those old ones put you off, hold you at arm's length, and in the end throw you right out of the picture. That's the way it is out there — everything looks at you with strange eyes. But you can get around this intolerable situation, jump the fence, so to speak, and trespass into a world where you
belong
for a change. If my landscapes look unfamiliar to you, it is only because everything looks different from the other side. All this will be understood much more clearly when you have seen my masterwork. Step this way, please."