Celebrant (37 page)

Is this the Belvedere?

Although he isn’t sure he ought to, deKlend doesn’t wait for the rooms to come to definite coalescence around him, but goes on walking.
Now here’s a dark room filled with dancing people.
He skirts around the margins, trying to find a vantage point from which to see them, and finds an illuminated niche containing a statue of a fancifully-dressed youth with a crafty expression of intelligence on his vaguely sambo-like face, labelled “the homeless scholar.”
deKlend remembers the story, although not from where, because he liked it profoundly the first time he heard it
—
a student abandons a prestigious school to join a band of wanderers who have no home countries and hence belong nowhere, and later some former classmates meet him again in a little restaurant with red vinyl booths.
In response to their easily-imagined questions he tells them, more or less, that he made his choice after an encounter with the wanderers showed him the difference between the study of chicanery masquerading as truth and the study of true chicanery, then went on to read their minds and tell them about it, stood up, walked into the shadows and vanished forever.

It doesn’t seem to matter, it is and it isn’t.
The name of this hotelhouse is “Á Un,” with awkward glottal stop.

The light from the niche casts a glow over the dancers.
Here are twins, middle-aged men with little pot bellies, with round heads and short black hair, who have linked arms and are gaily whirling each other in circles like overgrown kids.
deKlend keeps turning his head, thinking he is catching a scrap of music, and he begins to hear that the intermittence of the sound is the rhythm.
These are mnemosems dancing to Black Radio.
A soft pressure on his elbow, and a figure guides him into a little office or parlour.
Watery November daylight comes from the windows, the walls are very high, deKlend is placed in a chair at a desk against the wall, and must push the chair back and twist uncomfortably to speak to the man in his pyjamas who stands in a part of the room like an alcove with a lowered, diagonal ceiling that must be the underside of a staircase.
deKlend is speaking disjointedly, numbly gazing at nothing
...

...
providentially cool July day
...
to think I first began to see things pertaining to this in my dreams

the past present and future, time and space, the journey I became persuaded I was being expressed to take

celebrating the rite of a lifetime, the whole of a life?
when I’m only already halfway through mine?
but the whole of a life can also be the whole of everything me
—
even a genius doesn’t contain all or most or perhaps any of the things he does or will do, he causes them in a flash, just exactly like a dream

he finds the time and place for the write, which is possible only because life as a whole is a write, and, in an instant only he can select, only he is selected, and he dreams the whole of life and launches that dream entire, with himself, into whatever surpasses it and breaks it
—

the skull criss-crossed with fractures, so that blinding sunlight pours in and the shivered mind is like three or four voices all speaking at once, each hearing the other without understanding and all seeing what each other sees
—
the rest of the body light as air floats along moving like a puppet

the ritual is actually performed by celebrants countless times, and it’s a never-impressive, dreamlike jumble of acts and words, and it’s an everyday task the way taking the trash out is a task
—
like a shoemaker or an undertaker.
The write may be done automatically, without being at all touched by thoughts that remain stubbornly far away, effortlessly fixed on some other preoccupation.
It may be done in a spirit of desperate boredom that urges obedience to collapse straight to the floor and lie there for hours, awake, stunned by its own failure, wondering if it will be able to pick up where he left off tomorrow as if nothing had happened today, or if it will never be able to bring itself to performance again
—
did he even remember how?

This actually is all part of the write.
taken at face value, the rite is fixed and very ancient, but it can only be compared with someone’s recollection of the last time it was done, so the continuity of the rite is not as certain as it might seem even when compared with the writings.

there are a number of scriptural sources, all of which agree with each other in terms and in particulars, but this is not remarkable, because none of the scriptures provides any really detailed description for or description of the rite.
Celebrants are trained, which involves a curriculum, more or less, with some stretching.
Many who receive this training never realize it, either at the time, or later.
They are immersed in the relevant passages with the idea that this will make it possible for them to improve and improvise the rite correctly in the standard way.

(The man, who is large and middle-aged, paces back and forth, rubbing his face with both his hands as though he were washing it, and yawning from time to time, with a noise like surf.)

the journey
—
to go perform the write in a pilgrimage destination, and he’s one of many.
The others will know him and he them, that’s for certain although he can’t bring any particular sign to mind any more than he can clearly recall being set the task in the first place.
(There should be a memory)
—
In part to prove that the world, while it is a globe, is nevertheless infinite, and geographers and map makers have made a mistake.
Travelling beyond the horizon, you will never come back again
—
you will go on and on, the world forever accompanying you
—
in companyless company.
There is a mystery in back of it, having to do with other dimensions, that is not troubled by any of the contradictions in these ideas.

The write is an indispensible operation of opening and connecting
—
it was an admission of something, like opening a window to let in the wind
—

deKlend makes an abrupt, violent effort to grasp it firmly and is stricken by an overpowering need to sleep.
His head sinks
...
drops onto his neck and his mind melts in black fog and a snatch of music keeps playing in his memory
—
suddenly he seizes hold of a thought and wakes up, as if he’d just stolen something from a jealous guardian he’d caught napping, and he must to escape at once with his prize
—

The write has something to do with other dimensions
...
the world goes
...
um
...
—
on
...
in them, so that it is infinite even though it has particular boundaries, just like a human life can be, and the world, and the
...
world is
...
is also repeated in them with variations, like a theme
—

When deKlend next looks up, the man has gotten dressed, with a maroon bow tie around his neck and a double-breasted blazer made of pink vinyl.
His hair is neatly brushed.
He crosses the room from the alcove, going around the far end of the intervening sofa and decisively up to the desk right next to deKlend, letting his hand drop onto the telephone.
deKlend feels so fatigued that he can’t raise his hand to stop him, and suddenly indifference and neutralizing resignation wash him down.
The man lifts the receiver and dials a number.
But he is not calling for help, or sending a warning.
He is saying “He’s one of us.”
For the first time, deKlend notices a man he now remembers had been introduced to him on the silent dance floor as Dr. C_____, who was sitting on the sofa, with one leg over the other, taking notes on money.
deKlend remembers a woman leaning over to tell him Dr. C_____ took all his notes on money, as though this were the height of refinement.
The woman, who wears a red dress, is also present, crossing the room she says something to the effect that she dislikes speaking Swedish because “Swedish is so tentative.”

deKlend gets up and goes to the window.
Somehow he knows that this carious light is just a thin, sheer breath of the unbroken night outside, and wonders if it isn’t bad for him.
He moves to another window and sees darkness outside with a feeling of delicious relief and invigoration.

There are dozens of garbage cans in the alley.
Pigeon girls begin going through them systematically, quietly removing and replacing lids, expertly and rapidly sifting the contents of each can, setting aside anything edible to them.
A shadow breaks the windowlight and the girls freeze.
When Burn looks up, she glimpses a man in the window looking out not at them but at the night.
He’s a striking man, with large dark eyes and a black moustache, and his bearing, the blanket he has regally cast about his shoulders, the large and gentle hand he is using as a broach, all impress her.
She thinks she would like to hear him speak, to be smiled at indulgently by him, to be able to ask him for explanations, to be instructed by him in his pastimes, to see what sort of possessions he has.
He turns, still obviously lost in thought, and leaves the window.
Burn resumes her foraging, wondering how she could position herself to catch another view of him.

I must find Votu (he is thinking)
What is the next step?

The next room is roughly circular, with little round sections radiating from it like petals.
A rich carpet on the floor, littered with bottles, a man’s watch with a chain, an exploded newspaper.
Divans and ashtrays and cushions are everywhere.
A man dressed as a maitre d’ rests on the floor looking at a cardboard box filled with pocket-junk wearily.
deKlend intuits at once that this man is burdened with the impossible task of restoring each of these castaways to their proper owners.
All around him, the house resounds with laughter, cries, hoots, shouts, incessant chanting.
The paintings hung over the busy black and gold wallpaper are all of robins, except this black and white photograph, carefully framed, of a clock made of black gum.
Turning from the photo, deKlend sees a flash of movement by the floor, and finds the mouse is already an egg, which becomes a cup as he walks over to it
—
or rather, it’s that antique bowl I’ve been looking for.
Is Phryne here yet?

She would like this bowl (he thinks)

A boy in a field smiling, then zoom past him and loop around a cloud
—
see the film projected on the floor, with tiny airplanes like ants circling it down here?
How simple stories are, finally
—
a dark stone stairway
...
leave the rest
...
Here are the adults, with all their sexual and aggressive powers, social powers, drugs powers.
The seediness of adults.

Is Phryne here yet?

The twins sit side by side on a divan, smiling and lunging forward again and again to scoop up their highball glasses and toss a bit more of the contents into their mouths, before setting them down again.
They drop the glasses like children releasing pebbles into a pond and it’s obvious the drink is only a seasoning to the primary pleasure they take in these motions.
In between drinks they chat with each other, constantly stroking and rubbing their own hands.
One keeps scraping his open hand down his face.
The other folds his hand back with his other hand and repeatedly knocks the back of his wrist against the side of his head.