Celebrant (5 page)

The houses, though, blaze with an especially clear light that is generously allowed to escape through open shutters onto the street.
Some streets make me think of wandering around the outside of a brilliantly-lit mansion, although in this case the “mansion” is just a collection of individual houses.

Going down a sloping side street, a door flips open in front of me and a man steps out, lifting his hand and quietly asking my pardon.
I’ve dropped my light and lose it.
It went out.
As I turn round and round looking for it, in the street behind me I hear a ringing sound.
There is a shadow there, at the corner below me.
A hooded figure, or it might be a veil.
A shade half-congealed from the night, it sways, and takes a step, scraping along the wall.
Then stops.
I hear it breathing hoarsely.
The head seems to be looking without moving much, like a drunk’s.
I hear the faint tinkling sound of a bell.
The bell is attached to the ankle of this sleepwalker, to warn people to stay out of his way.

*

Ontacagan, a building in the middle of a short lane that connects two other streets like the crossbar of capital A, is the focal point of current religious practices in Votu.
The facade opposite it towers overhead, while the adjacent buildings are only slightly taller than it is.
The one to the left is a hollow shell filled with its own rubble, the one to the right is an ordinary shuttered house, a two-storey box, where the caretaker customarily lives.
Ontacagan itself has a red tile roof and immaculately scrubbed white front.
Black Radio stands on a dais inside it, against the rear wall.
It is a primevally large bakelite console with one round speaker, two scalloped knobs, and a crystal panel like a wafer of pure, frigid blackness of interstellar space.
It’s so black that no one can see the numbers, the fine ruling of the spectrum, the tuning wand.
The operator finds the signal by listening, and dead reckoning.
It both receives and sends signal, so it is possible to tune into it with other radios if one knows where to look.
Its signal, they say, is omnipresent.

Black Radio is always on, and its static can be heard all along the length of the lane and, in the quiet of the night, through the walls, along the plumbings.
It sounds like insects, hissing and rustling somewhere, and at times it becomes a more continuous whooshing noise, like a tide shifting on a shoreless ocean.
On auspicious days, Black Radio utters something
—
a low, flat, faint, crackling, warped voice that barely emerges from the static can sometimes be heard.
The voices sometimes speak in chords that swell and ebb.
It usually mutters unintelligibly to itself for some time, and it may be that there are continuous transmissions too faint to hear.
The decipherable content often takes the imperative mood.
Black Radio has been heard to scream, in a woman’s voice, or to shout with stunning power and annihilating authority.

The caretakers use water calculators to come up with increasingly precise tuning schedules.
Votu is like a colossal ear, and, in this metaphor, Black Radio is the auditory canal drawing signal down to the drum, the earth.
This is why, from the self-centered point of view of the citizens, Votu produces the best leaders and musicians, who really know how to listen.
Speculating about Black Radio and the origins of the broadcasts only it can receive is a pretty common pastime.
They are said to come from the legendary Land of Hybrid Emotions
—
hove and late, pear and fride, jealleity, despage.

One of its first officially-registered messages was:
no the
...
no a
.
This was interpreted by the listeners to mean that articles, definite or indefinite, should not to be applied to holy things, which is why no one ever refers to it as
the
[etc], but only
...
Black Radio.
One speaks of
the
natural robots, but the article is never attached to their nicknames.
Was it a commandment, with implicit penalties?
Opinions vary, but most take it only as a suggestion, or more accurately as an experiment in tact, to see what sort of effect the elision of the articles might have.

Types of messages from Black Radio:

(listing)

person knife power again mouth enclose earth sunset big female son inch young work tiny bow heart dagger hand sun moon wood water fire field eye show fine-silk ear clothing speech cowry-shell walk foot metal door short-tailed-bird show eat horse one two three four five

(recitating)

to no sound but birdsong

to no sound but birdsong

(eavesdropping)

b-but we need a new cetagovy, a whole other axe (?)

tue many minicos around her
...

the dragging outline like a steel mosaiche,

I don’t like anything
...

(singing)

spirits of the night and day

come flit away this mel-o-dy

(children’s voices)

Your hair is
cold!

Must be special water.

Your hair is cold!
Your hair is cold!

I want my hair sprayed!

I bet you did it backwards.

I’m not talking about it!
It’s kinda
...
It’s kinda
...

Put your head in there.

No, because you’re going to turn it on!

Does this thing work?
I don’t think this thing works.

I wish I never split my lip because I don’t want that scar.

Scars are permanent.

deKlend:

They’re petals.
They’re flames.
They’re solitary fingers.
They’re shining coins.
They’re white candies.
In a whirlpool, too close to the blackness of space.
Creation unrestrained by any scheme and unchanneled to any profit, making into something else every thing he sees.

A solitary farm house, two storeys tall, remains of a small barn behind it.
The barn has collapsed, timbers still half-webbed with shingles sticking out, a crushed straw hat.
One dead tree by the house.
The air is still here, and as deKlend approaches, stillness thickens, a pool of silence around the house.
His feet make a hollow scraping noise on the porch;
his knock is dull and faint.
He’s travelled a long way already.

The windows have no curtains, permitting him to see the plain room inside.
His breathing echoes against the front of the house.
The little cold brass
knob, which would have been less out of place on an interior door, turns and the door flies open crashing against the wall with an explosive clatter as the lock and bolt fall out and apart, leaving him with the knob in his hand.

The ruptured silence seals over again instantly, swallowing the racket so quickly and completely it already seems unreal.
Setting the knob down, deKlend enters the house and gently draws the door to behind him.
The floorboards give a few sharp pops and he unconsciously shifts to the carpets.
An impulse to call out arises and vanishes.
With an abrupt sigh he touches his brow and sways.
Wearily he begins to climb the stairs as though he were home, thinking only of a bed.
Cold, still air, dust, varnish, meaty wallpaper, glue.

Thin, colorless light at the upper landing, branches cross the window.
Like a hand, a sound stops him
—
an even hum, steady as a note played on an organ, not low not high
...
He opens a door and the hum is greater there, not louder just greater.
Bedstead in the corner, bureau with mirror over it, a few other sticks of furniture;
the hum is coming from a bottle of amber fluid standing by itself on the bureau.
It is the only living thing in the house, vibrating with that hum.

Half-raising his hand to it, deKlend hesitates;
then he lowers his hand and goes back down the stairs, and out of the house.
He shambles back toward the road, blinking back tears of frustration but he couldn’t just go to sleep in there, not with that hum.

He comes to a stop ten feet before the side of the road.
Head down, arms at sides.

He turns around and goes back to the house, up into it and up the stairs.
But now there are
two
bottles.

Like a huge piece of snowy lard, mottled with disease, dry suffocating heat
—
a terrifying red color
—
every now and then the pattern stirs deliberately
—
and then he begins to glimpse the nerve animals
—
a little sloth the size of a house cat, woven out of brittle, strawlike nerves, pawing lightly at the fronds in the wallpaper
—

In the dark room with the humming bottles, the gleam in his eye remains when he vanishes without leaving.
Sitting there, the spell gathers around him in curling waves of white petals, snow, but that’s somewhere else, not in the room.
The flakes of light are the two windows with the curtains drawn aside like hips, revealing nothing, just two silver panes like mirrors with nothing to reflect.
The hum stops.

He listens.

Silence.

For a long while, silence.

deKlend listens.

Then she bursts in on him, her silhouette in the dark room, spins into a blur, transparent grey spindle, a sinuous waterspout, permeating the whole room with a low sound of her breathing.
The breath of a girl is always pure.
She spins slowly.
Ballet practice.
A forbidden body my body made.
Her hair the flying anemone, sinking, now so fast pressure
—
I did not invent my body
—
too close, the crushing pressure flying out from her spins.

*

A vast ruined face, just on the horizon like the sun.
He is cutting across a camp of construction workers that ascends wooden scaffolding and continues on the roof adjacent to the site.
There are tents in little dishes of snow, little more than rags and tarps propped up on pieces of lumber
—
a cooker
—
trash
—
empty, except for a man with a scarf over his head, rocking.