Celebrant (14 page)

If you watch pigeons (she says)
The way they move their wings.
They move their wings like.

She brings her raised hands down and together
—
pop!
Looks at them for signs of understanding.

They look at her.
All of them are looking at her.
In the distance, she sees a huge black bird turning circles over the city, between her and the mountains, collapsing into a virtually invisible black line as it comes toward her, then tipping to the side and huge again, like a pair of black swords, toward her, away, toward her again.

deKlend:

On his third day at the Daubeb Xafif Madrasa, deKlend awakens to the sight of an enormous man looming over him.
His seamed face is hard to read from this position;
he gives the impression of being at once severe and impassive.
deKlend starts violently, both in surprise and with a spasm of the leg caused by a weird feeling, like the muscles had just been given a speculative squeeze by a ghostly hand.

Who are you supposed to be?
(the security guard asks him flatly, as if deKlend were in costume)

I’m faculty (deKlend lies)
New faculty, actually.

The security guard looks very displeased.

Well I’m on the faculty myself,
actually
, and I’m not aware of our having the use or money for anyone else here just now.
What are you doing
here
in the first place?

For someone as dismally real as the security guard, his questions, his voice, are like a prolongation of deKlend’s unrelated dreams.

That’s a good question (he says yawning and thrusting his head back deeper into the seat cushion)

Isn’t it, though?
(the guard says, leaning forward irritated)
How about an answer?

deKlend blinks at him innocently.

Well?

...
I suppose it started with that
dream
I had
...

deKlend describes his dream, taking special pains to detail the characteristics of the strange figure he had seen, hoping perhaps that this guard might, if he knows anything on the subject, condescend to enlighten him.
He knew that it was Friday, and yet he felt as though it were Sunday.

What are you talking about?
Explain yourself.

I
am
explaining (deKlend says patiently)
You asked me the cause of, or reason for, my being here, and I say that it was the veiled man who sent me, more or less.

The security guard recoils.

Veiled man?
(he asks sharply)
Describe him.

As he does so, the security guard begins shaking his head slowly, interrupting him to ask,

Did he ever change into a bird?

Oh yes.
Funny sort of bird, too.

With long ears?

Yes that’s right!
But it wasn’t an owl
—
(deKlend yawns)

When he reopens his eyes
—
and he can’t say for certain that his eyes had been open before
—
there’s nothing above him but air and ceiling.
The room is vacant, except for him.
The dawn within the window is brown, and deKlend sits up miserably, rubbing his head.
His jaws ache;
he’d slept with them clenched.

Ah, how stupid I was, (he thinks) to think I could get to Votu from here!
All this while I’ve believed this was a part of
—
part of what?

He blunders into an ordinary room and finds there a sort of packaged meal with complicated instructions printed on it.
Ignoring them, he begins manipulating and damaging the package, eventually mashing it completely out of shape.
It bursts open, scattering dry, long-spoiled food on the floor.
Not a crumb remains in the package, on inspection.

Two men pass the door.

They were just a buncha fakers (the first one says)

They
always
are (the other interjects)

That’s okay (the first replies)

Thinking duelling thoughts to and fro like jammed logs piling up against the rocks
—
pound, crash, the logs fly like thunderbolts, bars not of light but soundrod batonning the ground of the banks of the river, logs batonning the drumheaded earthbanks rockslimed bankrocks slimheaded fish bolt weave a little light in logbath morass or flip sunengaged in reeking mud soft as slime banks waterlogged earth tails of silver drum in final batonspasms alternating with the head against the logs, fish in slim bark grooves by banks all smiling with woven slime glistening in the sun, gills hard on grooved bark and fins grappling among blonde splinters silver dappled in beaded plaits of water rill down log flanks to the flickering stream’s groin where the batonbrooks defile rocks, the log sleeps in creamy slime mired in silver from splintered clouds, a blonde halo of white bark suffuses the bank, where the logs rot, crumbling in phosphorescent decay that decals the fish scales, logs soften on the banks and become witty gleaming fish, escape me like girls into the curling glass of the stream.

Overcome by the feeling that I don’t want to do anything, only lie back and dissolve into the homeless clouds and rain I came from.
I was put out (he thinks).
Out of sorts.
Everything I had to do seemed to be an inexplicable formality, although I can’t say who expected it of me or why.
I wracked my brains and couldn’t imagine, even imagine, a future that could connect with the stagnativeness of my circumstances.

Was that really true, or did it only seem true?
I felt as if something in me had jammed, so that whatever happened, good or bad, came to me in the same defeated way, overcasting even my pleasant thoughts
—
without anticipation, they seemed like things that had already happened
—
life just happened.

For as long as I choose to remember, I have been called intelligent (he thinks).
What’s intelligence?
A stupid idea.
And what meaning were they giving it, in applying it to me?
Naturally I didn’t disagree with them, and found myself meanwhile time and again doing stupid things, knowing all along and often even beforehand that they were stupid and yet blithely proceeding to do them anyway, even knowing all along that I
did
care whether or not I was doing something stupid, or at least, cared whether anyone whose opinion mattered observed me doing it.
I knew all along that what I was doing was stupid, and did it anyway, so what use was it to me to
know
that when
knowing
it didn’t stop me?
How “intelligent” is that?
And what do I make now of all the smart things that I didn’t do, knowing they were smart?
Or of those occasions when I did refrain from doing something because I thought it was stupid, and then turned back and back again afterwards in pure befuddlement, or trepidation, so that, even when I received word that some other imbecile had blundered headlong into the pitfall I’d managed to avoid, I could take from my indecisive decision no satisfaction.

There can be no mistake (deKlend thinks)
I am an idiot
.

Assured of this, he believes he has just established himself more firmly on solid ground than before.

But certain thoughts, I mean certain kinds of thoughts, come in clearly (he thinks), even too closely, and this is precisely because I don’t invent them.
They come from beyond.
Without reservation, I put my trust in dreams, and what I call visions, although the word seems pompous, and other thoughts that seem arbitrarily solid.
Like anything you would encounter, solid first, reasons, if any, attached later, like balloons or sprigs of flowers.
But it’s thinking that makes solid things arbitrary
—
a persistent habit of mind that spontaneously, instantly proliferates anything that has the misfortune to come under its consideration, multiplying that thing by all the things that it is not but might as well be, flocking it, making it dubious, draining it of any decisiveness.
Seethingly real thoughts blast themselves into my mind with crackling immediacy;
these are always fakes.

Sometimes the idea comes in
...
not even clear (he thinks), but plain.
Abiding just on the far boundary of calm, of silence.
A tranquil, mute suspense, like looking at a painting.
The command comes as the spell breaks, and, snapping back glimpsing something in my own complexion that had been drawn out with my elongation, and that shows me what I might do.
That I should do what I might is obvious.
What will you do?
You will do something, that much is sure, and dignity has its being in that.
The command may be arbitrary, but only from an outside point of view;
from my point of view, as its homeless recipient, it is not arbitrary, because it is for
me
necessarily to make it the future, like a fate distinct from duty, even from duty for its own sake;
although there is a resemblance, in this case the content of the command matters, because it is delivered into the present from the future by me.

The momentum added to me by the dream of the dark figure in the snow seems to have dissipated, and now I am marooned in this run down school.
What now?

I look up and see motes in the beacon of muddy daylight that sweeps across the narrow hall, through the open doorway.
I sit on a cracked leather seat with splayed metal arms, in a sort of glorified closet.
The motes begin to exhibit an unmistakeable significance, portending what I don’t know
—
they seem to describe tiny vortices
...
They don’t actually spin, but they rise and fall, and some, the longer ones, which are like fibres in among the motes, I can see will sometimes make a single, abrupt rotation, like the acceleration of a leaf floating downstream as it slips over a hump of water bulging over a barely submerged stone.
Pacific feeling.
I watch expectantly, to see the greater order emerge.
Resist the temptation to make metaphors.
Just watch.

deKlend leaves his seat and enters the hall, going to stand beside the hay-colored beam.
He gazes down across it, his face aglow in its secondary light.
The bright motes are reflected in his black eyes.
Inside and out, the silence is total.
The motes rise and fall.
His breathing is shallow, so as not to disturb them.

Hours pass.
The beam does not leave its place.
The unwaned light glints on the motes, tepid sparks.
There are bright filaments mixed in with the flickering soil.