The Narrator (11 page)
*
I go to her door that morning, but it is dusty, and no one comes when I knock. There is no motion, nothing but the sopping hiss of the trees. So I take the bottle, which I have adorned with a silly pink satin bow I found in the street, and leave it, with a card, in the lee of the stone doorway.
Hands in pockets I trudge through the streets and there at my back I have the weight of my uniform, my medic’s pack, waiting to take me over and make a soldier out of me. What will I do with my school uniform? Perhaps I ought to bury it with a brief service. I don’t want to change.
The gates of the college are barred, the windows are broken and empty. The district is empty. I turn and see only the distempered movements of trash, leaves. Not even a rat stirs in the gutters, nothing.
I sit by the wayside and watch the high, emaciated clouds drift. The days are shorter and shorter, and the sky is already becoming funereally ornate with another sunset. No lights come out, anywhere. The city and the landscape sing to themselves, and from the cave of the saint far above something reflective turns and flashes occasionally. If I wait long enough, I will calmly disappear too. Death is what I feel.
Has the camp disappeared? Somehow it’s more difficult to find my way there in the empty streets. Numbed branches tap with vacant insistence on the glass of a caved-in store. Hooves beat sharply behind me coming fast and I am seized up bodily by the shoulders—she lifts me with her fingertips as though I were a paper doll and flips me into the carriage, into her arms. She kisses me through the veil, her ardent mouth now soft now hard through the crepe. Her fingers sharp as daggers rake me up and down; I will sigh with bliss when they cut me open and plunge deep into me, greedily seizing and fondling my organs, won’t I?
—Now she crumples against the cushions. I see the soft open outline of her lips, where the veil clings to them. They speak.
“Don’t go __________ ...” she says quietly, calling me by her husband’s name. “Let me hide you.”
I look at her, whose first name I don’t even know, and I love her. I want to worship her. But when she speaks with her lips glued to her veil, calling me by the name of the husband whose body she devoured, I shrink. I think of soldiers on the road, and I think of hiding in her house, watching helplessly from the windows as the Edeks pass again and again in the street, closing in, loitering longer and more intently each time they return.
“I was seen by an Edek.”
“I can hide you ... from them ...” she’s falling asleep, cooing and smiling.
A light flickers by me and I seem to see the Girl climbing hastily into the carriage, but it may be I am confused again.
Orvar coughs up on the box. Are we alone again? Have we been? She sits bolt upright and she turns this way and that from the waist, her hands in the air.
“There’s a festival tonight! We should stay out of the streets.”
She lunges forward to rap on the hatch, but I take her in my arms. I feel the delectable firmness of her flesh under my grip, and her fragrance, and it’s as though I’d only just learned to love her.
“What are you worried about? They won’t hurt you—and I want to see if I can find Jil Punkinflake.”
“No—they want
me
.” Her eyes are alarmed, I can see them grow wide. “They want to put me up in a sedan chair and parade me up and down like a pagan idol. They want me to stand there in the midst of them high on a dais, head to foot wearing only my veil and the garlands of flowers they grow for me.”
She thrusts her head hard against my chest and drives her fists against me, shuddering and almost sobbing.
“They want me to
bless them
,” she says bitterly. “You have no idea how they talk about me, what it’s like to be talked about and written about and to be the object of speculation.”
I catch sight of Jil Punkinflake slipping into an alley, accompanied by Nectar. I cry out to them, and lunge without thinking from the carriage. Her hands brush my back as she tries to draw me in, but now another group of mortuary students cries, “The Cannibal Queen! The Cannibal!” and immediately converges on the carriage. With a whipsnap Orvar drives the carriage away—and now I am trying to get back to it, waving frenziedly to her, but I am only one of many doing that now.
I watch in horror as a brazen hand snatches the veil from her face—she covers her face with her hands, crying out in anguish, and recoils into the carriage. She escapes as one of the mortuary students, a woman, brandishes the veil overhead howling in triumph. Furious, I shove my way through the crowd to her, as many others are trying to get hold of the veil or tear a piece of it off for themselves. The student is as yet keeping it from them, laughing and bounding up onto any elevating thing, the base of a lamp post, a stone block, a post box. I get around behind her while she crows from atop the post box and give her a shove. She reels into the air and throws out her arms to break her fall loses her grip on the veil and before it can strike the earth I have it, and I run like a madman up the street as they pursue me.
*
They emerge slowly from cellars, sewer grates, tunnels and culverts, panting and grinning, like dead men drawn from their graves by the pull of a magic song. I can hear a sound coming up all around me, like chuckling, muffled and reverberating in burrows and caves. Catching sight of each other they begin to draw together at crossroads, walking with swift little steps, like a trot-walk, with their heads down, smiling bizarrely to themselves, passing and repassing each other in back-and-forth walking, and when they pass they touch each other lightly on the chest or shoulder, or on the back. That muttering chuckle rolls around them like smoke; I feel my throat tighten as if these chuckles were being forced down into it.
I can see some of them tremble. They fidget as they walk back and forth, they are becoming weightless, they are overflowing with energy. Now at no signal their walking becomes dancing, they link arms and spin in a crouch counterbalanced, they break ranks and radiate outward clapping their hands and stomping in unison. Two white shapeless flapping things batter against the chest of the one nearest to me, like moths ramming a lamp. I can feel the bow wave of their force roll me back from the inside and then I see those two white things are severed human hands hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Many of them are so adorned, with hands, feet, and dried hearts.
They all crack a riotous human whip in the streets. They brandish riding crops and woolly flails of human hair, thongs of pale curious leather—they charge through the streets shrieking like banshees lashing out at each other and everyone they see with their crops thongs and flails. The lifers recoil and dodge away laughing as they are struck. I see a streaked stark-eyed face whiz by flapping its arms, a soft blow flutters down my face and breast and power crackles down my body, I catch my breath and my legs and arms shiver with a mindless desire to leap and flail.
I’m in a group of lifers following the students now, panting and shivering. The students are clashing in the crossroads; some have picked up heavy steel garbage cans and bang them one-handed on the ground in a swift driving rhythm while others whirl with locked arms and stamp their feet. Rushing together in pairs, they take each other by the waist, and butt heads with a sound like wood mallets striking wood. They bash their skulls against each other, and their top hats seem riveted in place never budging, seize each other and hurl each other up ten feet in the air—now they have pulled searing-white knives from their coats and slash each other across the face, knife arms swinging regularly backhand and forehand. I can hear the thud of the knives as they hit, but there is no blood, their faces are unmarred, even when the knives hack at their eyes.
They stop and dance, then run again through the streets, belaboring crowds that shout with glee and alarm, wildly trampling the flowers that are strewn down for them from the windows. Now they have come to a dilapidated square on the river, the faces of the buildings here are tall and blank, with blasted windows and rent masonry. Beside a listing stone fountain a few students are waiting for the others, with a rough wooden wagon piled high with human heads. The sight stops me in my tracks and that moment I am set to one side by a pair of decisive hands under my armpits. Some invisible companion, perhaps every follower of the students has one, has put me out of the stream, but that current of blazing excitement is crazing me again and I fling myself back in, rush along with the others and take my place among them by the maimed, outflung arm of a collapsed bridge.
The boulevards belch students into the square. They form a jostling rampart around the fountain and heads are distributed rapidly from the cart. Two men stand atop the pile and fling heads down to upraised arms. A bad smell trickles in my nose and screws itself in behind my face—then it softens, dissolves in other odors like a buttery perfume, and cold autumn wood smoke. Some heads are mounted on wooden poles draped with black shrouds and strapped to the student’s backs. The other two corners are attached to rods with human hands at the ends, making the dancers into crude carnival giants with real human heads and hands flapping as they gambol around the square. Even through the shouts and howls, the pounding of impossibly coordinated stamping feet, the clapping hands and ecstatic shouts, I can hear that chuckle scattered everywhere, and perhaps even from the heads.
I am watching them take up heads and at first I think they kiss them—but they sink their teeth into the dead lips, and a helper ties a black band around the crowns of both dead and living heads so that they are clamped eye-to-eye together, noses side by side. The students dance with heads bound to their faces—I see one with a woman’s head shaking his whole torso so that her long black hair is a cloud around his shoulders. They brandish their rods and flails, one in each hand, and begin striking these together in frightening precise patterns like a vast duel with interchanging partners. These dancers form a ring within the ranks of the shroud dancers, and another group comes forward—they take a head in each hand, by the hair, by the nose, by the lips or ears, by the shreds of skin hanging from the neck. Two rush forward with a slopping, heavy basin, and I smell something like creosote. The heads are dipped in a two-part fluid unmixed clear and brackish like oil and water, and touched to the green flames of long corpse candles in the hands of giggling little boys and girls. Then the dancers spin around the fountain tracing green and blue comet streaks with faces that are only shadow blots in gobs of fire, whirl until they are only underlit smudges in hoops of fire. I can hear the hollow rustle of the flames as they whip grunting through the air. The dancers spin faster and faster and some of them smash their heads against the stone of the fountain or on the ground, and the crowd seems to want to be spattered with the sparks and dead matter that splash out from among the students. The lifers, with nervous smiles, edge closer and then scamper back into the crowd like someone playing tag with the surf. They seem to want to feel the sparks hit them.
The dancers slam the ground, they pound the stones with their feet and flail heads and hands, fire and cries in the air—cobblestones and severed heads fly crashing into the windows and crazed celebrants fling themselves on the buildings, the street, the fountain, ripping the stone with bare hands, snapping off teeth biting the stones, everywhere
a sound of flesh beating stone. Now they take their burning heads and running off down all the boulevards of the city, where all other lights, I see, have been extinguished. The only light until dawn will be the streaking fire of burning heads in runners’ hands, racing up and down the streets of the life precinct at random. Even when dawn begins to well up in the sky, I will catch sight of a few last funereal rioters, bounding along the streets with long, graceful ten-foot strides, bundles of orange fire spilling from their upraised hands.
You first drew breath as you were then in a den of ruined shelves, where the bindings had grown to drown the structures of the shelves like skin grown over a skeleton, the skeleton being the shelves, the wood, and as well over the flesh, of wood pulp, that is the paper pages. You were, prior to that first breath, slashed and rifled, as gravity had been permitted by some agency to draw your pages to earth. You were always remote from earth but all the same still as connected to it as breath, for example, is to earth.
That was you then, that emerged the night of the death’s heads ritual games. Those cuts in the skin widened themselves somehow, with a steady crackling like a fire smouldering, the fibers popping apart one by one, and then you sluiced out with a motion that would require many pages to describe; you were quiring up papers as they tumbled down, all to your white body runnelled with creases. A ragged, ribbony
body dripping with thick water, you abided there under the hood of ruptured leather like a saint in a wall sconce. Your angular head was slipcovered with thin and drooping white locks, and you were all over just as white and wrinkled as the head of a molar, except for the black ribbons beneath your fingernails.
Your eyes were running pits of ink, black and sparkling, and glue trickled from your nostrils and filled the pleats to either side of your lipless mouth, fringed with hairline wrinkles. You drew breath at once, not to breathe, but to began to speak, and since speaking and vomiting always go together with you, so that to speak for you is also to vomit if to vomit is not always to speak, as you always vomit whenever you speak, the fragrant black ink ran in curds down your chin and spattered down your front, where your body folds like lapels and like clothes. You spoke clotted words in a
ripely decayed tone, like a voice out of a hive. Your lips flinging out a froth of black spray, your lips writhed around long white needles in black gums between which your succulent vomit slid and behind which your tongue, like a larva, slopped and coiled.