Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes (10 page)

Anew Day

The woman grows aware that she is hearing voices. She looks at her surroundings. Shafts of moonlight, straying in between the crooked planks of wood, intrude upon the darkness. The shack – little more than a roof over her head – has no windows, and the door is a slab of wood covering the entrance. There’s no furniture, not even a bed – only a bucket for peeing and shitting. The bucket has been regularly emptied and cleaned by demons, who feed on its contents.

She is startled by this knowledge and struggles to remember what else she knows.

But the confinement rattles her concentration. The walls close in on her with every heartbeat. She’s afraid to leave her confines, but she doesn’t understand why.

Despite her reservations, she shoves the door aside and steps out.

The moon, low on the horizon, is nearly full. The colour of the clear sky – a dark blue radiating a subtle aura of amber – hints at dawn’s slow approach. Uncommonly for the time of day, there are people everywhere on the streets of Urrago.

Urrago
. She struggles to remember other names.

She notes that her shack rests near the edge of town, near the mouth of a large boulevard. Just as she begins to wonder at the absence of demons – usually zipping back and forth at great speed through the city streets, so fast they are nearly imperceptible – she is swept along by the movement of the crowd, heading out of Urrago, towards the desert.

No-one pays any attention to her, but she overhears snippets of conversation. She is not so debilitated as to fail to recognize the irony of the circumstance. She has regained consciousness on the early morning of Winter Festival. The day of death.

And then she remembers.

She remembers three boys, from a time before the shack. Her sons? Their faces vanish too quickly, and then the memory of them also vanishes completely, as other memories flood her consciousness.

As she follows the crowd toward Winter Festival, she remembers everything about life in Urrago: the commerce, the festivals, the demons, the river, the wildlife, the food ... But not herself in it, no names, no more faces.

She stares at the faces around her. None look familiar. The people of Urrago are all walking to Winter Festival. Death fascinates everyone. They will see their neighbours die: the old, the unbearably sick, and any who yearn for the oblivion of demonfire. And those the demons choose to offer to their god. The Festival is a long event, starting at sun-up and going well into the night.

There are no demons in Urrago because they are at the arena, preparing.

She thinks about the stench of the demons, and she gets a whiff of her own odour. She doesn’t know how long she was holed up in that shack, but she recalls that the rebirth ritual habitually lasts a whole season, sometimes even up to three. Not having washed that whole time, she’s as smelly as a demon herself. She wonders how people can stand being so close to her.

The crowd slows. She looks ahead and sees people entering the arena, including people coming from other directions, from other towns – from Vodel and Rypole and Burlee.

And then she stops, frightened. She can’t bear the thought of attending, of having to witness a day full of death.

She tries to escape the flow of the crowd, but, this close to the arena, people are packed densely together. She feels the urge to scream, but the last thing she wants is to draw attention to herself.

She plants her feet firmly in the sand and resists the push of the crowd. Then, when she feels strong enough, she slowly winds her way out of this mess of moving bodies.

When the crowd gets thin enough, she orients herself and walks back, ignoring the stares of those who are no doubt wondering why she’s heading away from the arena.

By the time she makes it back to Urrago, it is fully morning. She stops in front of her shack.

Her memories of her time in there are blurry. She concentrates and tries to remember anything and to hold on to what emerges. She has vague recollections of waking up, of hugging herself, of singing to herself, of furtively pulling inside food that was left outside by the door. She can’t be sure. How can she tell facts from dreams and delusions?

Then she remembers erecting this shack, preparing to withdraw from the world; although the structure she remembers building was not as shoddy as what she now sees.

She had been determined and driven when she built this shack. She’d salvaged and carted stones, tools, wood, and straw from wherever she could find them. She built the thing in only two days. She’d enjoyed the work. It had strained her muscles. It had made her sweat. Her work completed, she had entered the shack, pulled the door shut, curled up on the ground with her knees pressed against her stomach, and fallen asleep.

Yes, she remembers all that. And she thinks,
And I am
—

It confuses her that she can’t finish that sentence. She remembers no- one, not even herself. How long did she hide in here?

Judging from the state of her hair and nails, she estimates that she spent perhaps two seasons in that shack. She sniffs – and smells herself.
Time for a bath
, she thinks. She walks away from the shack and deeper into the city, heading towards the Vysang river.

Urrago is quiet, deserted. No people. No demons. There aren’t even any animals around.

She is comforted by the familiarity of Urrago. There is the tavern. Here is an inn. There is the clown guild. And this big house is a commune where children and mothers live as one big family, regardless of kinship. She can visualize all of these places, their interiors, their moods. But details such as people’s names or specific events she took part in – she can’t call up any of that.

When she hears the young boy’s anxious shouts, it comes to her that, for some time now, a woman’s screams have been prodding the edge of her awareness.

In the distance, on the city’s periphery, where the boulevard opens wide into the desert, she sees a woman, wavy hair down to her waist, running and stumbling on her long dress, her arms flailing in the air. She can’t distinguish the woman’s features, but she can hear her loud screams and imagines the grimace on her face.

The boy, too young and short-legged to be able to catch up to the woman despite her stumblings, is yelling repeatedly in a tearful, frightened voice: “Mother!”

She stands motionless as the woman’s flight takes the pair of them away from the range of her vision. The sound of them recedes a short time later. They’d come from Winter Festival. Whose death are they fleeing?

She is surprised to hear herself whisper, “I need...” She has no idea what comes after these two simple words, beyond her obvious need for a bath – but she yearns for something not quite so simple. She runs her hands through her hair. Sighing at the oily tangles, she figures that a bath will have to do for now.

Finally nearing the Vysang, she admires the intricate structure of the bridge. She finds the doorway that leads to the baths, which are housed underneath the bridge. The doorframe is decorated with carvings depicting the whale dragons who roam the oceans and the demon god Yamesh-Lot, who lurks in the bowels of the world.

The staircase is dim, almost frighteningly so. Groping the walls, the woman goes down the short flight of stairs.

She reaches the baths. The only light is provided by occasional openings in the ceiling. The fires that usually keep the air inside the baths’ walls warm regardless of season or weather have been doused. It is one of the demons’ duties to tend them.

She is startled, though not alarmed, to find that she is not alone. A tall and gaunt old man sits naked on a large rock, his feet resting in shallow water. With his long white hair and whiskers, he looks like a disproportionate and hirsute skeleton. He acknowledges her presence with a subtle nod.

She takes off her filthy robe and lowers herself into the water. The extreme cold is a welcome shock. The current filters through her tangled hair, kneads her limbs, teasingly brushes her vulva. She delights in reacquainting herself with these simple sensations. With her teeth, she trims her water-softened nails and luxuriates in the feeling of relief with which that simple act fills her. She stays in the water a long time, until she feels refreshed, cleansed.

She climbs out of the river. She stretches, relearning her muscles and joints, when the old man speaks. “You’re quite young to feel so blasé about death.”

She laughs. “I’ve just spent a long time dying. I think I’ve had enough of it for a while. There’ll be other Festivals.”

He grunts. They both sit in silence for a while.

She asks him, “Do you know who I am?”

“I know who you were.”

She nods. “That’s more than I know. I don’t even know my name.”

“For you, the past is irrelevant. You shouldn’t dwell on its absence. You’re not that old yet; enjoy the new future you’ve given yourself.”

Again, she nods, accepting that he’s right. Or else she would not have undergone rebirth. It’s never a decision taken lightly. There’s a taboo against divulging a reborn’s past, against compromising their new identity. There’s so much she wants to ask this man. She breathes out, trying to let the questions seep out of her, trying to let go of the need for them.

Again, the reborn woman and the old man sit in silence, until he says, “Do you like ‘Medra’?”

“What do you mean?”

He says, “As a name. Medra. I like that name. Someone I loved very much was called that.”

“Was that my name?”

He looks at her when he answers, holding his face steady with a visible effort. “No.”

Inwardly, she chides herself for asking such a question. “It’s a beautiful name,” she says, closing her eyes.

“It’s yours now, if you want.”

She replies, almost too quickly, “Thank you.”

He shivers and coughs, looking weak and tired.

Again, a long silence.

Eventually she asks, “Why aren’t you at the Festival?”

“I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place to escape death. That’s what I’m doing. Dying. I don’t like the crowds.”

She clears her throat. “Should I leave?”

“You’re not a crowd.” He smiles. She smiles back. They both burst out laughing. His laughter changes abruptly into deep, hoarse coughs. He slips and loses his balance. With difficulty, he pushes himself back into a sitting position. His eyes are closed. His breathing is wheezy and erratic.

She stands up, goes to sit next to him, and nuzzles her face against his chest, not quite crying. He puts a shaking arm around her shoulder. His chest hair tickles her nose, but she suppresses the urge to giggle; instead, she hugs him tighter.

Before long, the man wets himself and dies. She disentangles herself. She takes the corpse in her arms and holds it.

She sits like that for a long while, shedding no more than a few tears, until finally her limbs grow numb.

She washes the corpse. And then bathes again, briefly. Only scant illumination filters in through the ceiling when she steps out of the water. She doesn’t bother dressing; not only is her robe too filthy, but it represents a period of her life that is now over. Instead, she wraps it around the corpse.

She carries the dead man in her arms. More than once, she scrapes her skin against stone as she climbs the unlit staircase to the outside. The pain makes her feel strong.

It is already dusk. The days are short at this time of year. Goosebumps cover the skin of her legs and arms. The briskness of the air makes her vividly aware of the heat of her own body, and she relishes that sensation: the warmth of her blood, of her chest, of her gut, of her cunt, of her hands and feet.

The city is still deserted and will stay so until Festival’s end. There are now dogs and cats in the streets. She even sees some rodents scurrying, trying not to attract the attention of their predators. When she reaches the shack, she steps inside. She lays the corpse down on the floor, in the corner where she remembers sleeping. She loosens the robe, so as to look a the body one last time.

Then, after foraging through a few nearby shops to find matches, she sets fire to the shack.

The old man escaped the crowds, his flesh consumed not by demonic flame but by a more private conflagration.

She stands outside, listening to the crackles of the burning shack, smelling the fire, staring into the flames, letting the heat caress her naked skin. Medra thinks,
Soon people will return
.