The Narrator (20 page)
When that door opens, there is only the empty space between him and the gallows. All there is is that. The yard is empty. The gallows, spattered. The chill basket. It must be shattering cold. His knees buckle and his helpers hold him up. When that board indents the fabric of his trouser knees he recoils again without a sound. Or with not more than that strangled sound. They lay him down. They strap him there and stand away. He lies there on that board, his head turned on his cheek.
And now she glides across his path. She’s tall and willowy, wears that loose, rough black thing. She’s stately and calm, and he watches her shadow loom past him and he convulses, makes sounds. He struggles on that thirsty plank. She leans over him with the dreamy eyes and lightly checks his bonds with lean fingers. He won’t hear the breath that darts swiftly in and out of her nose.
With a slam he is rammed forward, his head between the rails. His scream is all but lost in his mask. He is looking down through the mask into the sop basket. A balance is tipped—this is the part no one is ever told about—and the board spins him around face up and he sees at once that livid line and her, looming over with that well-eyed look. He sees her pull that lever. He sees the line streak down with a loud rattle.
A searing jolt. A blur. No sensation. One event. Frayed holes in the hood. The rim of the basket. That smell. Taste of blood. The light all seeps away.
She would always fling her arm around his shoulders the moment after it happened, pull that body back to keep the blade from spraying blood everywhere. Always listened eagerly then for that last exhalation of breath from the viscous stump. Then she stands back, and those two who brought him take the parts away quickly. Stuff blubbers out the cut neck, that always looked like a stuck pigskin, or wine skin, is that what I mean? The head is heavier than it looks. She takes it by the bottom of the hood, that’s a bag now. It doesn’t occur to her that she has blood on her gown until it cools; that’s body temperature when that gets on. As you would expect.
And that’s how they got her, during the fighting, when many were brought there to be executed. She was at it all day. At night she sharpened. On and on. She started to tell them to hurry up, and crowded them together. All decorum went. For the first time, she became sloppy. She stayed, panting, by the lever. Then she climbs on that slick plank and reaches for the lever. Giggling. She was stretching her neck across that groove and groping for the lever. Stretching it out and stretching and stretching, giggling inanely. That’s when they replaced her. She went to the madhouse that day, or soon.
After that, she wandered. Where is she now? (She shrugged.)
I go on eavesdropping after that, but my heart isn’t in it. I don’t like to listen to her any more. But, inside me, my heart is calm. Unaccountably calm. Wrongly calm. I’m remembering the fruit frozen on the trees back home; maybe there will be a thaw for me, but what will thaw me? I’m afraid of what it will take.
*
The loonies are beaming down at me from the upper deck as I stagger mindlessly to the rail in unsettling morning light. Not seasick, but I had a bad night.
“Did you enjoy the night air?”
“Refreshing, wasn’t it?”
Last night, after I’d spent a full day of copying his damned papers, Makemin kept me up late telling me all about the exact nature of the enemy and their tactics and whatnot, all for the record he presumes to use me for, until my head spun. Despite my fatigue, I had a headache coming on and I thought a wash might make me refreshed enough to sleep.
I remember starting ... dimmer and dimmer in a delirious fatigue ... and then nothing.
My throat now being completely closed, I can only make my way forward again in ignominy, with mockery at my back.
...
I see myself standing in the two hoops of my trousers on the floor, the top of my head foremost in my sight. I sink down into the boat like a ghost, until I’m through the hull and down in the water. I can feel a trivial bump as I penetrate the wood, and now I’m wafting with the errant, sluggish movements of the current, looking out into the dark fathoms. There are breasts beneath the waves, and ribbons of milk slipped in the brine, or so I think—I don’t see them. Maybe a web of milk, so thin I miss it in the gloom, breaks over my face; I scent milk, and the taste appears on my palate anyway, not strong. She and I are walking down the hall.
The cloister is one section copied again and again. At the block, which overlooks a starry atrium, she is leaning thoughtfully on her elbow. I see her from a distance, and approach her reluctantly. I’d rather be alone, but the block is the only place I can go, even the spot I occupy right now is impossible, so I join her and she either doesn’t notice me or accepts my presence there without any expression.
The fountain in the atrium is dry. The light in the hall is banded by strips of shadow from the stone lintels over our heads, and so her face pulses in and out of the dark, both soft in the depths. That and her hair drifts in the current and keeps falling past her face, interrupting my view. I hang on her every word, my attention riveted to her unfamiliar features. She avoids my gaze. The hall goes on and on without turning, like the same pair of doors, strictly opposite each other and both shut firm, copied over and over. There’s no current, but I have to force my way through heavy water. I’m not getting tired, because I don’t much feel my body, or perhaps because my attention is so entirely devoted to her, even though I am not able to follow what she says. I’m not following what she says. Her breasts brush the stone block as she turns to walk away, but the motion includes me and I know we are to walk together. The cloister has no end or turning that I can see. Only the same arches, striped dark and light, more dark than light, the same, one after another. She and I start walking down the flooded cloister, and while she talks talk I can’t follow, her voice is so muffled anyway, I wait and watch as her body walks in and out of the shade. I’m trying to get a glimpse of her nakedness entire, or nearly, which is hard to do. I slip my hand around a supple waist as smooth as air, but she doesn’t notice, or nothing changes, and this discourages me, so I’m no longer holding her waist anymore.
Following the ship’s wake, now something in your mind bursts upward like a bird startled from its cover, to where thick clots of vapor batter the glowing and heatless moon. Now you are dragging yourself painfully, but with the weird strength of your emaciated arms and clawlike hands, across a broken crust of chalk, perforated everywhere with little cones that emit plumes of acrid steam. The landscape is like a fractured mirror, and dusty fires shake out their rags from its crevasses, scattering dust and cinders like beaten rugs. You pass a number of boiling clay bogs, and a place where scalding tar gulps in a long gouge in the ground.
We drift hand in hand down from the balcony to the floor. The ceiling here is immensely high, and that and the walls are utterly dark. In the far distance ahead there is dim moonlight, falling from high above on to a jumble of big furniture, like pews and upended wardrobes. There are windows around here somewhere as well, above and just behind me I think, that shed a blue glow with strict edges on the floor, the muted and worn scarlet carpet, plain and paper thin, beneath our bare feet.
My eyes travel up her legs. Her head is silhouetted against a window with a sill higher off the ground than I am tall. We’re floating down to the floor. The water is dry and clear, with only a few grains hanging here and there. She leads me on to a suspended atrium where enormous halls converge. I think she speaks, without interruption; I hear her voice, but her words don’t occur in my ear, rather I quote them back to myself as though she were reciting something I once had memorized. All the halls are dark, except the one from which we emerge, where there is a little light, and the one we face, which, after a dark interval, is illuminated with a glowing mist like the light of the full moon, shining down from what I imagine is an opening in the roof. There is a round window above us, or nearly, and off to one side, and this spreads a milky blue fluorescence around the floor here. There’s a paper and glue smell, of bindings and dust, not much. The place is not in ruins.
She leads me, not especially urgently, to one of the capacitous tables, to set her bottom on the soft, brown wood. She has never once stopped her murmuring. The table is near one of this atrium’s corners, which seems like the corner of a smaller, more intimate room, grafted onto this austerely magnificent one. Bars of shadow seem to hide the incongruity, the actual seams, and in the obscurity I can dimly make out a conical dung pile there. It all seems very domestic; I do detect a faint, barnyard smell coming from it. She walks a few paces ahead of me, heading for one of the tables. Now she goes around the other side of the table, and, as she turns her back to me for the first time, I notice a letter printed near the base of her spine. What’s that doing there? She has another, by her shoulderblade.
From across the table, she talks to me with a businesslike, with a serious, look on her face. For a moment she seems to be spreading out a map on the table, but there is no map, and she has not leant over the table, or smoothed her hand across the thickly varnished wood. But her hand is all smeared with the brown varnish of the table. She’s just talking to me, and as she turns to something behind her, some piece of furniture I can’t really see except as a dark indistinctness, I notice a letter on one of her shoulderblades. It’s too small for me to identify which one it is, but that it’s a letter is completely obvious. Now I see she has letters all over, as neat as printing. They’re small cerifed letters. As I wonder a bit about this, she is retrieving something from the tall cabinet or lectern behind her, lifting her arms and arching her back for it as the water teases her hair around her shoulders. I think about getting closer, to have a look at the printing, but I don’t do it.
Just as you arrive at the lip of a crater you see a figure emerge from the pool of molten rock that fills it. The lava is hidden under a thick layer of fine grey ash, like the kind you knead in your palms here at its edge; the figure who emerges is someone you know, and who has already been speaking. You observe this figure walking along the brink, detestably talking without the slightest motion in his face; you know his whole body is a charred and brittle black mannikin. You are repelled by the heat of the melted rock, and by the stink of burning flesh this mannikin gives off; you must not be seen by this thing. You move carefully, but for all your strength you are awkward, and cannot move it seems at all without displacing tell-tale puffs of fine ash. Can it see? You were asked a question. You don’t know, but it, he, just barely a he, is coming for you now. He has
seen
you. You are struggling to escape—he has you in his arms—
She looks at me haughtily, a sabre in her left hand. The opal, the size of a hen’s egg, hanging from her throat, disappears in her bosom as she, having raised the weapon to shoulder height, sweeps her arm level, slowly across her body, until the tip of the blade points off to my right. I study the blade carefully, bending over the table so that its thick edge is like a bar across my thighs. I think she expects me to appraise it, and I find all sorts of information about it is coming up in my mind. I’m gauging its value; it’s old, and well-made.
She is asking me something, if I know her name. I tell her I don’t know it. She says tell me my name. Well, narrator? Give me a name.
I look up, and for a moment I can’t find her. I hear the scrape of her bare feet on the dry stone flags, my eyes follow the sound, and I see the silhouette of a lock or two of her hair drift across a shadow boundary into the light. She’s crouched in a corner, not far from me, facing me, and totally invisible in the dark. The corner is intimate, and seems too small to be the point of convergence for such massive walls and floors. It’s like the corner of someone’s parlour, or bed chamber, wedged into this larger structure. I can hear her catch her breath. She draws air in deeply, and then, after a long moment, lets it out again in a barely audible gush. Then another held breath, and another. I can hear a liquid, crinkling sound as well. There’s a protracted, trembling, faint, fluid sort of noise, like a foot being extracted exquisitely slowly from thick mud.
I draw aside the heavy arras and enter the corner. She is standing in a windowed alcove lined with a tapestry. A woven man with tan eyes behind her seems ready to lean forward out of the fabric and drag her back into it. One of the windows is ajar, and the wind it admits lightly brushes her hair and the lace at her neck. She turns as I come in, locking me down with a glare of astonishment, and disrecognition.
You’re the third person voice of fate, I tell her with certainty. She shakes her head, staring.
You struggle, and his body is tearing open, the brittle char is breaking up like densely packed snow, and the cooked and steaming entrails are dripping from his side, in fat, glistening white loops. You are shouting “Louce!” “Lou!” “Lulom!”—he is pressing his muttering lips to yours, and you burn and strangle, clawing wildly at him. He’s trying to put words in your mouth.
Low stands naked at the rear of the boat, soap suds clinging to his skin, his right arm raised but not rigid. It’s as though he were leaning it on an invisible bannister. Wind tousles his hair. The ship’s wake smoothes out to nothing.
In the distance, a white something bobs on the water asleep. It slobbers and mutters as it bobs up and down. Its slobberings wriggle through the water like black eels. In a vision no one present can see, the ocean turns to fluid mirror, like mirage, where it crashes over the white figure, the mirror froth rolls away across the surface of the water like mercury and Low’s outstretched hand draws the black saliva from the glistening antiseptic mouth of the sleeper to form elegant, calligraphic loops and ornate signatures of unreal sharpness on the reflecting surface. A down of phosphorescent ash spins from them as they move, forming glowing coils that sink into the black below the silver, whirring and snapping like whips. They seem to drag Low’s arm to and fro.