Celebrant (53 page)

She smiles at the word.

“At precisely the end of the twentieth minute, I again shall sound the gong, and you all must return to the house immediately.
Anyone who does not respond at once to the gong will no longer be welcome here.
Our demonstration of earlier today should have made it plain to everyone that we will always be aware of whatever you may do in the park, whether or not you believe yourself at that moment to be under observation.
So do not fail to turn back
at once
when you hear the gong.

“However, there is an exception.
Should one of you find Y, you may ignore the gong and return to the house
...
”

She spreads her hands.

“...
when you like.
I shall now lead you out to the terrace, which is the place from which you must start, but, before I do, Y has instructed me to inform you that, should any one of you find her, she forbids you nothing.
She wants you to act without the slightest hesitation, without the slightest reservation.
Each of you, by her own instruction, must give me your word that, if you find her, you will not leave her until you are entirely and perfectly satisfied.”

Phryne somehow mysteriously knows the trick:
Y is actually hiding in the house, and has posted her ladies-in-waiting in the park.
Each man will find one of them and mistake her for Y as the world is plunged in twilight.
The folkloric switch-in-the-dark.
The point was
—
possibly
—
to eliminate all these troublesome suitors by tying them to pregnant ladies, but really the point was the laughter.
When the dawn comes, and the men discover unexpected women in their arms.

Phryne walks through the rooms.
The walls are white and sheeted with a blue luster.
The night air
—
at last it’s night!
—
is cool.
The long hallway of milk candy walls and red bean floors, the arched, deep windows, shielded with awnings, open high over a monochrome, walled garden, and Votu past that.
There are still a few lamps moving in the streets.
After all it is a large house, no palace, clean and bare.
Phryne goes not to the end of the hall but to a door there in the innerouter wall and into the room where suddenly she knows deKlend is.
deKlend is just coming in.
Into the room.

Hallways like passages to dream-tombs, all molded from taffylike lunar plaster.

It’s not a tomb.

All this wandering
—
it must be because it feels good to wander, like dreaming.

It’s not an asylum.

Cutting across yards and lanes and gardens, up and down walls, Kunty is on her way to the vegetable plots.
Over a blue wall and down into the shadows of the enclosed garden, shadows like chilly, deep spots in a pool.

They begin with the somnolence of marble statues, as though they’ve been making love for hours.
Phryne bares her body without coyness and deftly helps deKlend to undress.
He’s in a trance, to see her and see her again and again in exactly overlapping layers, but she can tell he is there, in shadow form inside his trunk.
She sees her tiny self reflected in his irises.
The two of them combine like two clouds and become colossi.

In the garden, Kunty’s keen ears have caught the sighs of their lovemaking.
She stops to listen as Phryne’s voice climbs the scale.

Phryne is coming, and as she comes something unfurls from her like a sail expanding up and out, observed by an unclaimed point of view momentarily stationed in the room.
The most intense instant of Phryne’s orgasm blossoms in isolation.
It levels off there.
It stretches.
It lifts from her head like a bird casually taking flight, without uncoupling from her.
Whatever she is, Phryne is supernal innocence, and pure transparence.
The vast, white wall spreads itself there in front of them.
Kunty feels her own body wanting to rise, rising on her legs, allowing her head to drop back, her shoulders to pull back.
A sympathetic, dark radiance seems to open the back of her head to the free air.
Looking through the spreading wall, there is a clearing of marshy soil, black as ink, lined with cypresses and half-melted willows.
The climactic note stretches to the clearing from Phryne and shapes itself into a shrine like a nautilus shell.
Accreting clear lamina of sound, the shrine becomes more and more solid.
Kunty is bending backwards at the waist, her arms hanging down her back, her face turned up to the night sky, eyes open wide and lips slack and parted.
Straddling deKlend, Phryne is in the same posture, and all of them are silently braced against Phryne’s high note.
The shrine now has slender, flute-like columns, a whorled dome that gleams like porcelain, and a frieze of metal bats that alternate, half of them seemingly in flight, right side up, half appearing to hang, or creep, upside down.
The upside down bats keep their heads turned out, the better to show their leering faces.

That moment takes itself away to somewhere where it can have eternal life, leaving Phryne and deKlend to take the horizontal dive into sleep.
Kunty drops backward onto her bottom, so that her chin jostles down onto her chest, and sits there, stunned and blinking.
Hair over her face.

In the shrine, two natural robots are coupling unroariously;
it must be anemone, from the booming of the jets, and groper, because there’s no other noise.
Groper is silent.
And groper is always at it.
Perhaps urn and urchin, in some other discreet spot, are have-at-ing each other some more, grinding and boring, and refashioning themselves out of their parts.
That leaves troglodyte, always the odd one out, trapped in its cave and bellowing with longing.
Kunty woozily rubs her head, then her stomach.

Burn in broad daylight.
All the parts of her body, her arms, legs, floss, trunk, all just happen to be running at the same speed and in the same position down the same street.
She jostles the camera, bumping and shovin
g
.
It caroms drooling sparks small bubbles and dust-asterisks as she bounds away.
The cameraman comes on another camera, furiously dashing his camera to the street, and the image disappears just as he launches himself into the air to trample it under both of his feet.

Adrian Slunj:

The coverlet seems to shimmer, as if corpuscles were streaming through it.
As if I were seeing atoms or looking through a microscope at the forestry of atoms.

Adrian lies there, gazing at his hand and forearm.
The upraised palm that always reminds him of the smiling face of a little boy or girl.
Turn it over, and all the details don’t manage to go together.
They just hang in each other’s vicinity.
The hand seems like half-melted plastic.
The savory pink and peculiar green of so many distinct, overlapping, and half-melted-together tubes.
The too-slender forearm he’d always been embarrassed by, the flat wrist with its fletching of dark, coarse hair.
From there, what could be more preposterous than a foot that goes on for so long, and so elegantly, only to erupt in unforeseeable disaster?
A fringe of visored sausages?!

He lies with his head hanging backwards off the edge of the bed, trying to get blood up into his brain.
We must think!
Sleeping in this position would result in a serious crick, a bad compression of the
...
not lumbar
...

The uppermost vertebrae (he says aloud)

and feels relief at having come up with an expedient, accurate, if less specific, substitute for the correct anatomical term he should have known, and at having said it without stumbling over his words.
He is constantly practicing and repeating phrases.
Spending so much time alone, he doesn’t want to lose his skill in speaking.
Sometimes, when he stumbles badly or repeatedly over a phrase, he even slaps himself, saying it again and again until it comes out right.
He’d rehearsed for weeks before he unveiled that story he’d made up, about giving one of his kidneys to his father.
He’d escaped work

unworthy of me and all my unworth

His thoughts break apart to form a triangular-with-clouds (of glowing dust rising from the edges) across huge landscape, responding light from the mountains a pattern that can be seen only from a far distance
—
a naked woman in a dream being molested by an animated suit of grave clothes
—
cerements, is the beautiful word
...
I should wear nothing else
...
I should travel, packed in a casket, pasked in a cacket, and all serenely enamorated in cerements
...
but these clothes do not hang in space as if they were on an invisible body
—
this is in the foreground of the enormous pattern

A woman is talking on a telephone, and says something to someone next to him, who relays it to him:

“Then Nothing became a pee-nuss.”

“Oh no,” the woman says, capping the receiver with her hand, “What she said was, ‘Nothing became very nice!’”

The prodigy has forgotten where he comes from.
I am not human or inhuman, only something that should not be found out.
I suppose what I should call one of those secrets.
If I say, what I am is a secret, I must immediately go on to say that this is a secret kept no less from me than from anyone else, and consequently I can’t say either why this should remain a secret.
But I keep that a secret.

What I conceal is only a sort of way of receiving impressions, and I can’t imagine how the concealment or revelation of something like that could make any difference.
Not that that consideration makes any difference.
It is plain to me that I become fractionally Martian or Selenite, in a strictly literary way, having nothing to do with generation.
Vulgar venereation!
There are two varieties of things, those that come into being by generation or mating, and the ones chaos makes.
Fear, aversion, and desire with respect to my fellow humans, insofar as I can say with any assurance how human we are.
In my case, I must insist that I am entirely without rights.
I insist that I must resign myself to everything and defer entirely, but I am not consistent when it comes to insisting on this because I’ve learned how to be an apparition.

Chaos
...
!
Cerements
...
!
The ones chaos makes would be demons, wouldn’t they be?
You can pin them down but you can skip it;
other things are self-evident (he thinks) other things announce full bore what they are and blast themselves into the mind seething with reality like crackling immediacy and these are
always fakes!
But then sometimes the idea comes in, not clearly, but plain just the same, and then you know or give up trying to know.