Celebrant (26 page)

Quick, but able to stay very still.
Strong, without bulk.
Agile, but not nervous.
Resourceful, yet not clever.
Gina has a dreamy, patient, docile personality, and it’s this, and perhaps her already obvious beauty, that makes her so intensely attractive to Kunty.
Gina is the sort that can be led anywhere by the hand.
Initiative comes to her like a possessing demon when the circumstances are right, and she gets away easily because each theft is so simple.

Gina is hard to find, because she keeps so much to herself and says so little.
But everyone in the incessantly clapping, echoing, shoe-scraping, clothing-brushing streets remarks her when they see her.
Beaula can know where she is by the susurrus of notice she generates, and can speculate about crossing town because one cannot always cross town, as everyone in Votu knows.
The celestials form a barrier of constant motion around the city factory which obstructs passages in a narrowly predictable way, and Votu is fractured in ways that don’t allow all areas of the city to be reached from all others.

People in the market place thump the air with their fists and hold out fingers in mute haggling.
Gina has not crossed from the far side of the market yet.
Kunty set out after her only once she’d dunked herself in a fountain, so her hair is still plastered to the sides of her head and hanging like spanish moss.
When she sees Gina, who is actually slithering on her stomach along the base of a wall, she yanks her hair brusquely back and knots it at the base of her neck, revealing more of her face than is usually seen.

Gina notices them at once and freezes, staring at them without any
discernible
emotion.
Kunty is squatting on all fours nearby, baring her teeth in a smile that creases her eyes.
She opens her jaws and a glistening snake darts its head from within her teeth;
no thicker than a pencil it arcs its back against the bridge of her nose and holds its head stable, its tail still in Kunty’s mouth, staring at Gina like Kunty had sprouted a third eye, out on a stalk.
It switches sides of Kunty’s nose, then goes limp, and Kunty takes the tail out of her mouth and sets the snake down on the ground giggling.
It’s a toy, worked with the tongue.

Gina looks gradually up from it to Kunty.
Kunty flounces down on the ground suddenly in front of Gina, lying on her back and looking at her up through her eyebrows.

Rabbit girls drowsing in the shadows of the aqu
e
ducts as the razz rings out from the city factory for the night shift.
They all stop and look up at once as Kunty comes among them drawing Gina obediently along by the hand.

Get her something (Kunty creaks, squatting back on her haunches nearly beside herself with ill-contained self-satisfaction)

Spread out!
(Kunty snarls, though with a grin)

Rabbit girls shrink back from Gina.
Who isn’t eating what they’ve presented her.

Kunty leans forward and peers at Gina.
Her face pinches up in thought, then relaxes.

Snakes eat meat (Kunty says)
Go bring her some!

We’ve got some, somewhere (Kunty says)

Ester, prompt as always, scampers up with an unopened can of kippers in her mouth.
Gina sits on her hip eating them demurely.
Kunty eats handfulls of cabbage, her eyes fixed on Gina.

A secretive impulse, unusual for her, makes Kunty find a shadowy spot to sleep in, and she pushes Gina toward it.
She pulls off Gina’s wrap and sets it to one side, then draws Gina down to the ground, causing her to lie flat.
She rolls Gina onto her stomach, climbs on top of her, and goes to sleep immediately, with her cheek against Gina’s back.

Nowhere:

A country of pillowpeople, fluffy pink dummies and floating television sets hurtling by, squares of blue light flash past in the night sky
—
blood pours down the screen of the television set and drips from the mouths and the hair of the images.
A dummy sitting on a chair in a vacant lot full of burning scraps and discarded tires is getting a television set bolted to his face with a heavy steel truss.
Dummies gingerly walk down the street, their faces squashed into the screens of enormous console television sets bolted or strapped to their heads.
Without a sound this one drops down an open manhole he didn’t see.
In the adjacent laundromat this one, sitting in one of a row of seats against the wall, is leaking sawdust from the side of its split face, and another one, unable to support the weight of his television set, lies collapsed on the floor, pants having fallen down and a huge pink cushiony ass hoisted high in the air, his face flattened against blue static.
Pillowpolice wade blindly into a crowd pummeling and crushing soft elastic faces with boots of polished black rock.
In institutions they are rolled out like flab with rolling pins on zinc tables, kneaded and punched into shape by fuzzy puppet hands;
they decorate each other with tinsel that falls right off and go to parties and dances where they flap around, fold and squeeze each other.
A pillowboy with a powder blue prom suit printed on his material grabs his pink date by the waist and lifts her up;
the stuffing surges to her head, so that its material dimples like cellulite.
Pillowpeople sag, drooping from windows like gobs of melting ice cream, flopping from their seats on the bus and bouncing down the aisle as the brakes screech, whole buildings jump up and spin in place or turn cartwheels.

The pillow family has gathered at their tranquil dinner table.
They sit, listing this way and that, before plates of braised sawdust, little heap of white feathers to one side, and a smaller plate of foam granules, glasses of fizzing styrofoam, a plume of smoke rising from the feather’s (as they call the father) cigarette.
The house leaps up without warning, somersaulting, and they flip and whirl through the air
—
the furniture crashes into the center of the room and the whole house subsides and sloughs open like a rotten melon.
The family fly in a circle, arms and legs out like parachuting gingerbread men, and are smashed in on top of each other by their heavy furniture.

Police shoot in near unison guns at waist emptying their magazines without aiming
—
men in room fling up their arms and dance jerkily, shouting as the furniture around them is blasted to splinters
—
cut to rhythmic pounding of hand drums cops sidle into the room in unison their fat wide faces blank and start shooting as before, ignored and ineffective.
The guy who slumps sideways hasn’t been shot, he’s passed out with boredom.
Class of bored kids bored teacher the cops burst in blam blam and kids are suddenly flying around, teacher tearing her clothing to shreds
—
an old lady fresh from church grabs a police officer by the front of his uniform her eyes glassy and crazed, ‘oh you just don’t
know
how good it is, that blam blam!’
—
people clutch at mask-faced cops on the street pleading for a few rounds
...
the catchy rhythm of the hammers creates toe-tappin’ silence
—
all street traffic is now police cars, traffic jams of police cars, motionless or barely moving, all screaming sirens and blinding lights flashing and strobing, probing searchlights swivelling, plunging into windows, squawking radios.
The cops sit motionless in the front seats, their arms at their sides, gazing fixedly at their uniforms to make sure they still look right.

The midsummer mail pile:
away oh favacation
—

Two thieves burst the door handle with their jimmie.
It spins uselessly.
They curse.

Entering the apartment, one of them knocks something over right away, crash!
—
cackling, he turns and puts his foot through the back of a cabinet
—
forgetting all about theft and keeping quiet they spasmodically wreck the place, household items, familiar things, furniture all churning around together in a mass of broken fragments thrown into a cement mixer, smashed
—
nothing of value
—
she drove a huge cement mixer silently around for a living while swissy just couldn’t keep himself from repeatedly being stabbed it was a curse must have been
—
never too seriously though.

The ambassador slides up unctuously and says, overdubbed, “We’d like to welcome you with this rotten, infected food.”

“Thank you!” someone says, taking the horrifying plate he’s been handed and dropping it in the trash.

A rickety kickline of cardboard cops all attached to the same metal beam comes crashing in, guns level at their flat waists and blasting.

“Oh, well!” the ambassador cries tersely, peppered with bullet holes.

It’s not easy walking down the street drunk

—
So you make it easier by screaming obscenities

I understand

The creamy, rain-darkened concrete of the courtyard melted insubstantially into my genitals
...
they built the city out of car alarms sirens rumbling trucks booming speakers helicopters flying by at hair level and hat level a peaceless scene of mechanized sadness and efficient stupidity fossilizing in archaic circuitry, cheap buildings, disembodied tension unemployed by the community as a hole.

You got a P-681 over there?
(he yells into his phone)
...
You sittin’ on a P?
...
Bring it on over.

...
For export?
...
Exporting
what?
Bumps?
I think they
have
enough
bumps
, man.

A middle-aged bachelor sits scraping morning oatmeal in his kitchen, tapping at the bowl.
His upstairs neighbor explodes through the door eyes starting from their sockets baseball bat held high I’LL TEACH YOU TO KEEP TAPPING YOUR BOWL!

Warren, this conversation has gone on long enough.
I’m afraid you will have to commit ritual suicide.

Suicide?!
But that’s a mortal sin!

I know, but it’s required of you.

Suicide
is required of me?

In part yes.

What’s the other part?

What do you mean?

What do
you
mean?
You said ‘in part yes.’
...
Are you intimating that being eternally damned is also
required
of me?

Yes.
You must commit suicide
and
be eternally damned.

I won’t do it!

What?!
What do you mean you won’t do it?!

That’s what I said and there’s no point arguing about what I mean I won’t do it no matter what I mean or what you say is required!