Celebrant (27 page)

You think you can just change your voice and not do what I tell you?

That’s exactly what I think!

You’re wrong!
You have to do as I tell you!

Yeah?
Well I have a better idea.
It’s called ‘forget it.’

What’s that!?

You heard me.
I’m not going to do it.

Is that so?
I think you will do it.
I think that the torment of your guiltiness at the thought of your offensive failure to fulfill your sworn contractual obligations
—
that you have
sworn to uphold
—
will drive you to it in the end!

And I think you’ve gone totally insane!
You honestly expect me to bump myself off for some unspecified misdemeanor that I don’t even know what it is let alone can feel guilty about?

You’ll do it.

...
I think
—
maybe
—
you’ll
do it.

Me?!

I think you’re the one who’s going to commit ritual suicide.
I think you’re talking about yourself.
I think the terrible guilt of torment is your problem and you’re just trying to fob it off on me!
That’s what I think!

Oh no you don’t!
You’re not turning this thing around on me!

What thing?
I don’t think there’s any thing to turn around except your displaced homicidal tendencies wanting to convince me to commit suicide.

And what you offer by way of rebuttal is the implication that these chimerical homicidal impulses of mine are actually a form of projected suicide?!

Exactly.

Nuts!

You’ve wanted to kill yourself for a long time.

I think you’re completely out of your mind.

No
—
you want to.

That’s preposterous!
I tell you I have no intenzed
—
intension to, of
—

See?
You can’t even say it!

Of course I can say it!
Everybody splutters once and a while and stop trying to manipulate me!

I’m not manipulating you.
You’re manipulating yourself.

I’m leaving.
It’s obvious to me that you’re completely incapable of rationality.

*

Votu is a forest, scaled by the punctual chirps of birds, whose voices scatter in flakes among the branches.
Water drips from the leaves.

deKlend:

Night time, and back in the dark, slushy streets again.
Trucks like bellowing bears leave tunnels of noise and smoke behind them, numbed and impatient people glance fretfully at each other as they pass, mutely imploring each other not to interfere with them.
They sway to engine groans, a man reverently kisses a gargling exhaust pipe, bathing his face in its flatulence like a man at an oasis.
Before entering the town
—
why come back here?
—
deKlend had hesitated a long while, dazed by the sudden idea that someone might try to take from him the crudely-fashioned sword blade he clutches, assuming that anyone would recognize it as a sword blade.
It might have been mistaken for all manner of things.
Then, between thoughts, he tosses it into the air and breathes it into his lungs, like smoke, and forgets it there.

Cracked sidewalk and his shadow
...
he moves his shadow hand over the crack, closes his fingers, and picks the crack up.
It rattles like sheet metal as he moves it.
The street puckers and beads around it as he waves it gently to and fro like a wand, a crumbled length of a hollow bolt of lightning
—
careful don’t let it fall over a person split apart in spray of blood.
It’s not in his hand but in his shadow’s hand
...
If it were to fall on a shadow of a person it would create insanity
—
so much power in a sidewalk crack.
Now he thinks to use it for navigation.
He puts it back, leaving his hand there over it, and as he moves his hand, the whole street turns, as if the crack were a handle.
It would be so much better (he thinks) if I could lie down in some quiet spot and think, but I can’t let go
—
this may never happen again.
I may never be able to do this again (he thinks).
No time to get anything, I have to go as is, into the crack.

He angles his shadow in sideways.
The crack makes a flapping,
crinkling sound.
Can I (he wonders) leave my shadow holding on?
No
—
shadow of my hand?
No
—
so how do I leave the crack on this other side and find my way back?

He looks to the pale, starkly white light coming from somewhere to the left.
He pulls off one hair from his head and puts it down between the light and the crack, so its shadow falls on the crack, to hold it for him.
Then he gingerly lets the crack slip from the fingers of his shadow’s hand.
It relaxes a little, but stays in the shadow of the hair.
deKlend pins the hair down with a tiny lead ingot he finds lying there, one of many in a large heap, with the hair standing up enough to remain in the light and cast its shadow on the crack.

The other side of the crack silently swoops away, forming an edge of the world.
Just a motionless chaos of darkness, and this edge.
This edge is really almost nothing, just a scrimmy shelf, and something like an institutional basement with shrouded light bulbs and a sour vomitty smell.
The motionless chaos of clean darkness is impalpably breathing soft weightless air on him.
The shadow of the hair seems a pretty paltry trick now, but he doesn’t act on his sudden impulse to kick it aside because then again little things are often surprisingly
...
I’ll leave it (he thinks), and this edge and go into the
...

*

He has to answer the call of nature, and turns aside to pour himself out onto the brown dust here among the shrubs.
In the dim evening radiance he can make out the darker calligraphy he left in the dirt.
He stops to button up, and that mark begins to move
—
it gathers together and slithers off in a flash.

He looks up to dismal, deadpan predawn light and follows a gradually sloped field of pale blue rocks, everywhere birds hopping among the boulders.

There is my rival.
My adversary.
I will become his shadow, his vampire (Adrian thinks with glee) I will haunt him in his slumbers like the visitation of madness
—

Oh, it’s Adrian again (deKlend thinks)

Adrian has doused himself with a whole bottle of cologne and so precedes himself.
Dangling from the pinched hook of his fingers, his triangle trembles like water in the dull air.

We follow the grapefruit in this part (Adrian says softly, falling in alongside deKlend)

He rings his triangle.
A single, pure note is scattered among the rocks.
There is a scarlike path among them, and a grapefruit, intense in color owing to the thinning of the last of night’s darkness, rolls, on its own, along it.

I fail to see
...
(Adrian trails off)

Fail to see what?

Adrian smiles.

I don’t know, because I fail to see it.

The grapefruit bounces among some small houses and the two of them become separated trying to follow it.

Adrian produces his triangle and rings it once.
A woman comes timidly from one of the back rooms.
She is drawn, and her cheeks blush under the prominent cheekbones though she is so pale.
Her filmy nightshirt droops on her body.

Adrian strides over to her with a smile.
She shrinks in place at his approach.
He reaches out and very gently takes hold of the open edges of her shirt, and closes them again, pressing the shirt lightly to her with his fingertips before withdrawing his hand.
During this operation she is as rigid as stone.

His hands are now hanging at his sides, as usual, and he seems to loom over her somehow.

Have you seen the grapefruit?
(he asks softly, around his teeth)

She shakes her head.

I’ve been following it.
It has me all worked up.

It bounces past outside and he rushes out after it.
The woman goes limp a moment then stiffens again
—

It would be just like him to go and then come back at once, to pounce on me and catch me in my relief
—

But instead the footsteps belong to another man, all wrapped in shawls, with a moustache and a sort of quizzical expression.

Did it come through here, miss?

In her surprise, all she can do is shake her head.

No?

The whrounim went out after it
—
just there (she points)

Whrounim?
(he says in surprise)
You mean Adrian?

She nods.

Why, he’s not a whrounim at all (deKlend says)
He likes people to think that he is
—
he took me in too at first, to be honest
—
but he’s no whrounim.

Not
...

I’m sorry to disturb you (he says, exiting)

...
a whrounim at all (she says)

Her expression darkens.

deKlend has found the grapefruit again and, always attentive, Adrian joins him a moment later.
He is opening his lips to speak when deKlend gives a little cry of surprise.

Nardac is reclining on a bench with her back to a fencepost.
When she sees them, she smiles placidly, and waves.
Then she rises and undulates toward them like a boneless undersea creature.
She is wearing another of her flowing, tent-like dresses, this one with broad stripes of blue and yellow, and the heavy bangles on her wrists, the huge beads around her slightly crepey throat.

How good to see you again, deKlend (she says softly, her voice so far away in the dimness)
Are you following the grapefruit?

Yes, we are.
Are you mnemosem as well?

Standing there now, a single ripple seems to undulate through her.