The Narrator (5 page)

“It’s built low,” the one who took my arm says, “because the coffin rides in a compartment
above
the passengers.
Isn’t that dreamy?”

We go on. Now, here and there, I see a few faltering lanterns. Most of the people of the district seem either to be old or ill, but not for that reason lacking in street vigor. There are no doctors in the death precinct, only morticians; if you get sick they’ll be happy to embalm you. We stop on the way before one of the many haunted houses that line this route. I am told of strangled voices from mouths clotted with earth, bellowing curses and prophesies from the basements and stairways; a stirring of the embroidered hem of the arras, and a certain object no one has ever seen because it is shrouded in darkness even in the noonday sun. The students hang on the gate, looking eagerly from one black window to the next. Finally, having evidently seen nothing, they straggle back into the street, ragged yellow smiles kneading faces that glow blue as though dusted with lead powder.

“You’ve seen ghosts in there?” I ask.

“Naturally. There are ghosts all over the district.” Jil Punkinflake turns one of these hyena grins on me, his eyes like luminous toadstools in the fluorescent dusk. He waves his hand at his three dice-playing companions. “There were five of us, you know.”

We spin through brilliant salons of butter-colored candle light and twinkling crystal, straight-backed lady plays remote music on the spinet as the room darkens with burgundy shadow, and a breath stirs webs in the empty hallway. As we pass the mouth of a sunken arcade lined with heavy wooden doors, a crazed pounding breaks on the air, resounding down the long arcade from somewhere out of sight. One of Jil Punkinflake’s friends, a plummy-voiced boy named Nectar, explains adipocere to me. “It’s an entirely distinct variety of decay, and quite ubiquitous, but you seldom see it expressed because the other, more common variety seems to drive it out. In those rare circumstances in which it does gain the ascendancy, it transforms the flesh into a kind of wax. We have a little girl at the school who’s all adipocere; eighty years ago, or more now, she died—and hasn’t changed a hair since.”

“She’s gone the color of weak tea,” Jil Punkinflake adds.

Nectar points to a sunken burying ground about the area of a modest house. The grave markers are tumbled in disarray and half buried in firm mud, marbled throughout with a thick pale substance that in places has oozed onto the surface in smooth, flat wads.

“There’s a real welter of the stuff down there,” says Jil Punkinflake. “Water main broke a few years back, when all of those—” he flips his hand at the stones, and now I see fragments of coffin, a dull bronze handle “—were just in.” And we pass by. “Wouldn’t you love to have a cake of
that
?” They grin at each other. “Fine
laaadyyyy soooaaap
.” “Or make candles, for a slow steady cremation.” “Remember Cinto’s—with the flower candles?” “We haven’t had one as good as that this year. Did you go to Tehute’s? Wasn’t very good. Just two mutes at Tehute’s.” Drain pipes, slimy soot-blackened brick, clouds hurtling past far overhead. I feel as though I’m all muffled up, stifling warm but not sweating, not hot. Why am I so warm? Jil Punkinflake and the others all seem warm too, in fact they give off a palpable, febrile heat. They lead me back through streets and derelict houses, over a broken mausoleum, its marble dimly radiant in the starlight, to the Embalmer’s College. A bearded man in a black skull cap or is it a toque is waving in a cart laden with bodies, puffing a blunt black cigar. Students dash excitedly from cellar doors and collect the bodies, carrying them inside. My companions saunter toward one of the wings, full under the gaze of one of the gaunter deans, who sits on horseback veiled from the crown of his silk hat down past his knees in nearly opaque black gauze.

I follow through dingy halls lined with matted dust, grimy wallpaper whose pattern is nearly browned out by years of smoke. The whole place is impregnated with an oppressive odor of stale smoke, rotting meat, embalmer’s preparations, clashing with my hunger so that my head spins and I don’t know whether or not to be disgusted. Banging lockers—the halls are thronged with students. Jil Punkinflake takes my hand in his hot dry fingers and leads me to the refectory, yellowed tiles over every surface in the room, over the elaborate groined vaults and niches, even the cenotaphs are tiled. I am shown to a bench at one of many long steel tables whiskered with tiny scratches, and presently Jil Punkinflake brings me a steel tray of food. Black bread, a bowl of brine to season it with, hard dry cheese that thankfully is not too ripe and the mold is all on the outside and easily cut away, leathery preserved meat dished with stewed prunes, a beaker of thick porter so bitter my eyes tear up drinking it. Jil Punkinflake bangs his beaker against mine and toasts, “To the Cannibal Queen!” A few of the masters enter veiled, glide past us, receive their trays of food and set them in niches hewn like dictionary tabs into the sides of the cenotaphs. They pull up their chairs and raise their veils, eat soberly with their heads thrust into those niches. Now my head really is spinning, and Jil Punkinflake leads me by the hand to the dormitory room he shares with Nectar and a few others. I am guided into a nearly invisible bed and I can barely see Jil Punkinflake’s broadcloth back lying down beside me.

There was a remote time when long darkness fell, when I fell—I saw snow, and the snow glare dimmed ... some first darkness came over me in something like a fit—it lifted, and soon I was enrolled in the College of Narrators—I don’t trust these words ... A vibrating metal grate in falling asleep behind my eyes behind my face, a vibrating or a shuddering, in and out through fixed stations, blurring or accordioning back into sleep in the dark. Still the weird feeling of being just slightly too warm, not enough to perspire, and my throat is parched.

The next morning I rise and somehow get out of bed without waking my companions. I climb onto a chair and peer out the high window, watch a speckled black and white pigeon fly along the ground with a twig in its beak. A puff of air as I open the window; I try to smell some fresh air but the breeze misses my nose and taps my bare shoulder to say time to go.

*

The rally point, according to my ticket, is supposed to be on the fringe of the commercial area, on the death district side of the river. I’ve looked there repeatedly and found nothing, now I widen my search area. If I don’t report, the Edek will know. They don’t need to find out. They simply know. Once I’ve reported, though—perhaps then.

The day is blinding. I walk through one chimney of light after another. No sign of any rallying. The small oblong square is nearly deserted and the buildings dwindle in number like scattered wooden blocks here, as though they were marching down into the wheat-colored dust and white weeds. A portable office stands at one end of the square, hauled here by aurochs—I can still see their dried-out droppings there underneath. The office is a long narrow box on heavy wooden wheels, the axles at least three feet from the ground. A flimsy wooden stairway leads up to a two-piece door, and there’s a glassless window beside it as well. Under the window, a limp, haphazardly hung army banner slouches from two nails. I collect my breath, walk up to the window and call to the sergeant.

Hollow footsteps sound unhurriedly in the box. A man with a face like crumpled suede and stiff backswept boar bristle black and grey hair appears at the window, then opens the upper half of the door and holds out a hand like a faded old garden glove, looking at something inside the door jam in a manner highly expressive of utter boredom. I put my ticket in his hand and he clumps back into the office. I see the back of his head lower just as he drops out of sight, only then actually looking at my ticket. The time that follows is so empty I can hear the sunlight sprinkling down on me and this square, time ground down to a halt like a clock worn out its spring.

Feet scrape on dry boards. He leans out with a flat packet wrapped in red paper and tied up with string level on his left palm right hand on the upright jamb, my ticket slid in under the string, looks me in the face and says—

“Douche.”

I stare at him.

“Douche,” he says again in the same tone a little louder and pumps the packet once in the air.

I point at my chest.

“
Low
.”

“Hanh?” He looks at me now.

“
Low
is my name.”

The tip of his tongue flicks in and out once.

“That’s not my name,” I say measuredly.

He is visibly thinking, but not the right way. He half-thrusts the pack at my hand with a look that as much as says all this were a bit much coming from me. “Look, I don’t—... It’s not—” he says.

“I want
my
pack.”

“There’s no
Loo
.”

He shakes his head at there’s no and then pushes it a little forward at what he takes for my name, all very expressive.

“Well I’m here aren’t I? Here’s my name, here’s my regiment, same as your flag.”

I take and flap the ticket at him and he fans his fingers at it like a man declining to give to a tramp. He stands upright and turns a little away from me, resting his eyes on the familiar entrails of his store. His mouth is open and he has a nonplussed look, like why don’t I just melt into the rest of this dream.

“Loo—Douche ...” he says bobbing his head to the left and to the right and follows the words with an uncouth sound like “egkhhh,” flipping his free hand. He looks back at me and tosses me the pack.

“Here.”

I catch it to my chest.

“I don’t want this.”

The sergeant just mashes his mouth tighter closed and shakes his head, strides into the back of the store lifting his feet over bundles.

Should I toss it back? It’s not really an idea. I’m already walking away, turning this pack over—no name, Douche or otherwise, no number, no marking. It must have had its own labelled cubbyhole.

I sit on a white rock by the road, set the packet across my knees, and open it. The first thing I see as the stiff wine-colored paper opens its folds are the arm bands marked with antique scarlet plusses—so this is a medic’s kit, anyway. I open the oilskin wallet underneath them, and rock back a bit on my rock. A passing man in a white canvas uniform sees me, first soldier I’ve set eyes on here, nods his head back as he comes up without at all going over to me.

“It’s good?” he asks, tilting his upper lip. He’s leaning forward, holds the base of his rucksack with both his hands.

“I’m in authority, it says here.”

As a member of the medical corps with incomplete commission I am to be assigned the rank of
second lieutenant
, and, in what is called “concurrent conferral,” I am designated on the NCO index as a
warrant officer third class
, followed by the word
interpreter
capitalized and in parentheses.

The soldier nods and his gaze wanders. He goes by me, saying to the air in front of him, “Should be good. Interpreters are paid a little more.”

Here’s a dull bit of bronze with a quill heavily embossed on it, and rays. Attached are a pair of cerulean blue ribbons to put on my shoulder straps, which will make my double role clear to anyone who cares to know. There’s even a small blue star embroidered under the red Xs on my arm bands, in fresh thread. Another scrap of print informs me my medical kit, helmet, sidearm, and other gear will be presented to me when I report to Captain-Adjutant A. Makemin.

I put the packet in my satchel and wander over to the river. The light and the dryness give me a disembodied feeling like being high in the mountains where the air is thin, and your vision distorts as though the world were a convex mirror. I sit under a tree and look at the sparkling until I feel better, then paw open my pack again. After some travail I locate in its folds a simple envelope of brown parchment, and saints be praised there’s a chaw of soldier’s scrip in it. The cellulite paper is shiny and a little transparent, so that the brown yellow and charcoal dyes are like tiny grains floating in it; there’s a finely engraved portrait of some general or other, the relevant numbers in their swirling ornamental foliage, and unwholesomely frenetic webbing underlying it all. Glancing up, I see the rally point.

Resignedly I make my way back past the office and into the camp, which spills out of the city limits onto the fringes of the foothills and scabland. There are rows of packing crates here, like a warehouse. A droop-faced man in a floppy turban and dingy tweed leans his elbows on one of the crates at the end of a row tracing circles with his knuckle on the wood. I ask him about Makemin. He rubs his nose on the side of his finger.

“MAH-keh-min, you mean?”

(I’d said “MAKE-min.”)

“Is that how you say it?”

He looks bored.

“... Yes, unless there’s another,” I say.

“Not in, bub.”

“Do you know where he is? I’m supposed to report.”

The man is turning, hobbling off, the level of his shoulders seesaws as he goes back between the freight.

“He’s off griping up a storm with the dispatcher. Come back again later—nobody’s going anywhere.”

The camp is mostly deserted; I see dun tents, bales of mosquito netting, churns of benzoin, all manner of things I can’t readily identify, but that I somehow know have been sitting here a long time, dust duning up against the crates.