Celebrant (61 page)

Already!
(she hears her own half-choked voice)

She closes her eyes.
To shut out the sight of a certain, arbitrary grouping of cobblestones.

With a crash of cymbals and drums, the band wheels around the corner and into the street.
The foremost players jerk back and a ripple goes the length of the procession.
Protests and exclamations come up from behind.
The leaders set aside their heavy instruments and rush up to the crumpled form, a rush that brings itself up to a walk again, almost a creep, nearly the moment it starts.
The raised voices rise and then drop again, just murmuring, wreathing around the figure in the street, smashed and bloody, that sobs once, and then is more motionless than it should be.

*

In an embroidered cloth chair at Á Un, deKlend sits idly paging through a magazine.
The sky outside is a blank grey screen.
He’s waiting for Phryne.

The house is calm without being quiet.
He can hear footsteps, floors creaking, cupboards and doors bumping, little mufflers of speech.
From time to time, someone indistinct will cross the room, or pass in the hall.
This room is a parlor or something, with a view of the garden.

Adrian is one of the arrivals.
Catching sight of deKlend through the swinging, darkly-lacquered door, he grins fiendishly, slithers into the room, and folds himself into one of the many overstuffed chairs.
He sits facing deKlend, who (excellent) does not notice him.
Adrian watches his adversary with savory anticipation, rubbing his palms along the arms of the chair until they tingle.

Aren’t you going to say hello?
(he asks, hoping to interrupt and startle)

deKlend glances up at him without raising his eyelids.

Hm?
Oh, yes.
Hello, Adrian.

Nonchalant, eh?
(Adrian thinks, becoming more cinematic every moment)
All the better!

Such a fine day, to stay cooped up indoors (he says, smiling without separating his bottle-colored teeth)
...
Are you, meeting someone here?

Hm (deKlend says)

Perhaps you want to make arrangements?
(Adrian asks artfully (he thinks))

deKlend flips pages, not reading, not listening.

Adrian quickly surveys everything and decides the moment is sufficiently right to stage his scene.

Oh hadn’t you heard?

deKlend is in the act of getting up and he doesn’t seem to hear.

Phryne fell off her balcony (Adrian rushes)
It
—

deKlend is crossing the room, walking toward the hall.

—
was such a shock!

Adrian gets up.
He won’t let this moment go.
Taking deKlend gently by the elbow, making deKlend’s head turn, he says

Old man can’t you understand I’m telling you the woman is dead?

deKlend waves him off, disentangling his elbow.

Yes, yes, go on talking (deKlend says, betraying at most a passing irritation, like a man who has gotten up the initiative to do something and hits a snag that, while it detains him only for an instant, less than an instant, irksomely deflates him just a little)

deKlend pulls away and heads for the outer door.

I’m telling you (Adrian whines) Phryne is dead!

deKlend sighs, without a glance back.
There isn’t much of the hall left between him and the door, and his sigh resounds in that space like the low boom of a wooden lung.
He reaches the door and opens it.
Going through, he pauses in a gush of pale sunlight, looking back.

That was in rather bad taste Adrian (he says flatly)

The door shuts.

deKlend leaves the brick path and sits on the bench beneath the oak tree.
Wind frails the leaves around him.
Cold air, a little wood smoke, the bitter odor of dead leaves.

Why do they always quit?
(he thinks)
I may go, but they are the ones who quit.
I always mean to come back.

I knew she wouldn’t come.
Even as I scribbled my note, I knew she wouldn’t come.
She might not have come simply because she would think it was more beautiful to leave things hanging.
That suspense was more
...
beautiful, or calculated to preserve the intrigue?
I was making a gesture.
It meant, if we don’t see each other again, it will be by your decision, and as you want it.
Because I don’t want it, don’t want to don’t-see-again.
I admit, I tried to lure her with that asking.
It was a ruse I was going to play on myself
—
a bluff, I mean, or a dare.
To go through with it if she came.
I would have, too.
Even if meeting her again would wildly dislocate me.

He looks around for her, on the off chance.
If she were suddenly to appear, he would fling herself joyously at her feet.
He would bask in her presence.
It would be shameful.

Maybe she had already made up her mind that was going to be our last night together.
Maybe she
—
was that her?
—
already has someone else.
Or always did.

He thinks sadly of how she smiled at him last night.

Now she’s somewhere out in the world (he thinks)
I hope she’s happy, wherever she’s gone.

(This altruistic thought is a kind of consolation, and it doesn’t seem to cost anyone anything.
Finding no kindness in the world, you produce a little, and in certain lights this satisfies.)

Her happiness is a beautiful thing.
The world would be less without her happiness in it.
It’s a crime even to imagine doing without something as indispensable as that.
What idiocy.

He falls asleep, and dreams.

Adrian keeps going back to the window, not quite fuming.
It takes some time before he realizes the black spot there under the oak tree is deKlend, but then his form is clear.
Sleeping, with his head propped on one hand.

Adrian turns and a shock rivets him in place, as if he’d brushed a live wire, because deKlend is coming into the room.
With a whirr, the grandfather clock on the wall begins to unwind, and the chimes ripple from behind the face.
Adrian wrenches his head toward the window.
deKlend is sleeping in the garden.
Snap it back
—
deKlend is coolly walking toward him holding it, his face not quite blank.

He can do it!
(Adrian thinks, his body breaking out in splashes of cold)

deKlend takes a swift step forward raising the sword sideways in both his hands, as if to bar Adrian’s way, right hand high, left hand low.
There’s some kind of marker in the fingers of the right hand, and deKlend, virtually in the same instant, marks the air up by Adrian’s head, with a figure resembling a number.
The moment he writes it, deKlend pivots the sword downward and to the side, moving like a fencer but without the slightest indication of any attack, and writes a similar thing in the air down by Adrian’s left calf.
This one incorporates what could be a quick sketch of an arc with an indicated length.
There’s a tiny circle next to one of the numerical inscribings.

Adrian stares at the thing up by his head.
It’s red, and looks like it was made with a lipstick or grease pencil.
There’s a terrible flatness to space just there, where it is, and where the other is.

Sweat bursts out all over him and his skin is grabbed up in gooseflesh
—
the little red marks seem to pucker space in a way he can’t see, but he can feel, like a weird little pulling feeling.
His tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth and his mind is blank, won’t start.
The chimes of the clock are going on
—
they haven’t even started to toll the hour yet, it’s still nattering on that monotonous, never-ending, never-resolving melody, false melody.
A melody needs method if it’s going to be recognized as one, as one what, as a melody old man
—
deKlend swings his sword and moves all around Adrian like a tailor marking a suit with chalk;
his face has no more particular an expression on it than if he were closing up a packing crate.

Now Adrian’s fear erupts, and he recoils from deKlend with a yipe of fright.
His shoulder and hip bang hard against what ought to be empty air, and hum with pain.
Hard as a diamond wall, and yet it felt like hitting the ram in front of the wind.
Adrian starts to run, but he’s running in place
—
he can only run in place
—
in the invisible nautilus shell that deKlend is writing in the air around him, and as he runs, he shrinks.
When he has to look up to the see the arm of the chair he had been sitting in, when he sees deKlend towering over him
—
towering, but also so far away
—
he panics and tries to retrace his steps.
The nautilus doesn’t allow it.
Every step takes him away.
He can’t stop running.
The world is soaring all around him
—
he recognizes these new surroundings but only after a while, and what seem like hours of running, while the chimes of the clock just will not stop, another, and another, and another
...
the corridors of the sky
—
that’s where he is.

deKlend’s head lifts again like the prow of a ship roll out of a sleepwave

—
what color is that?

He’s looking at a plant with fresh, red leaves.
A lance of sun through the clouds, which have crumpled in the meantime, is lighting those leaves and they glow like
—

I can’t think of the name
...
is it vermillion?
Violet no.
Vermillion?
Just purple?
I need a softer word.
Those leaves are like baby’s hair.

Back to myself (he rubs the middle of his forehead with the tips of his fingers) so if my self is a necessary illusion, and I can’t say with assurance that it is necessary, but if it is, then how is it an illusion?
What’s necessary is real, or?

And?
(he thinks dully)

Get up?

And then she could have been anyone, I keep forgetting that.

Come while I was sleeping?

The thought breaks him out of the drowsy mist and his surroundings sharpen.