Celebrant (22 page)

deKlend charges headlong down the sidewalk steeling himself for a collision rather than give ground, eyes fixed angrily ahead of him and his blankets pulled up almost like armor around his jacket and tie.
The cold rain makes the air so malevolently clear, especially transparent to the variably stained cement greys that shimmer with sullen energy, and that makes people livid so their faces almost phosphoresce in the gloom, like bloodless carrion.
These people have evolved to survive in a medium of despair and loss.

I am not one of these swine (he thinks)

He fixes his mind with a resolve that is constantly dislodged on images of tranquil places, but this only has the effect of seeming to bring about their desecration.
They have no power to resist this bulldozing pollution.
The feeling transforms into an ever sharpening impulse to escape, if only into a doorway
—
his mind is becoming increasingly chaotic and he is looking to return the way he came
—
it’s becoming an attack
—

He stops abruptly, so that the man walking a step too close behind him bumps into him with a low utterance and passes him, turning from the waist like a playing card.
Standing on top of a corrugated pipe sticking out of a brick wall, its wide open mouth just a few inches above the pavement, the carving is spring-shaped and seems to be a painted snake, no it’s a little spotted shark with eyes as red as the deep red sea.
Crawling frantically into the pipe his nostrils detect a whiff of incense, maybe frankincense, and there’s a fairy glimmer, it seems, at the far end.
About halfway along the pipe he stops;
there is no draft, but the pipe itself is warm, resting on something warm.

He creeps forward, even though the pipe is warm, while the room ahead seems if anything to be colder and less welcoming.
The pipe end protrudes high above the floor of a basement all hung with heavy black dropcloths.

The floor is just too far to get down to, but there is a door to the left, with a cloudy, wire-reinforced glass window and a high threshold scuffed with snow.
Unable to turn around, deKlend backs himself laboriously out of the pipe, waving his leg around in the air to make sure he doesn’t collide with someone passing by and in fact there is a rough jolt as his leg knocks against someone well muffled in a coat.
He hears a long, ragged sniff, like the sound of tearing in half a sheet of paper, but there is no one when he finally extracts himself.

Around the corner, down the alley, and there, almost invisible in the dark, a deep-sunk
stairway
.
The door is locked.
Peering through the cloudy glass pane, deKlend gets no better sense of the contents of the room;
he can however see the pipe, and below it there is a board fixed to the wall with a few pegs in it, and keys hanging from a ball bearing chain on one of them.
He hurries back up the stairs and down the length of the pipe.
He has to lean a far distance out and bend at the waist, because the pipe end is well out from the wall, and even then he can’t quite reach the keys.
Pulling himself back in, hands drooping from the end of the pipe, he stops to think.
Then he abruptly backs out of the pipe and takes up the spiral shark from where it simply rests on top of the pipe.
It is evidently a real stuffed shark, still a little flexible, like stiff rubber, and the skin is loose
—
it moves slightly on the flesh, like a glove.
People are staring;
well, let them, what matters now is figuring out how to carry the thing
—
bundled into his blanket in front.
Again he crawls the length of the pipe, the shark falling out and being replaced, and, leaning out as before, extends his reach with the spiral shark and hooks the key chain with the tip of its stiff tail.
Carefully he raises it to his hand and then pulls back, so as to avoid any danger of dropping it into the room.

Retreating backward down the pipe, emerging again from it and bumping into someone who curses him without missing a step, deKlend sets the shark back where it was, and goes back to the door in the alley with a feeling of glory
—

This is what I’m supposed to be doing (he thinks) this is a test laid down just for me, the one, the only one perhaps, who would come like I did.

None of the keys work, and, peering through the window in the door again, deKlend observes that there is another set of keys on a chain hanging from a peg on a second board affixed to the wall just below the other board.
After making as sure as he can that there aren’t any additional boards, below or in the vicinity of those two, and perplexed because he is certain, strictly certain, that there was only one board when he’d first looked through the window in the door, deKlend returns to the mouth of the pipe.

It is now late at night.
The black streets are foamed with slush, and the din is still incredible, like an engine room.
He ducks into the pipe, but re-emerges an instant later, takes the shark again from where he had replaced it atop the mouth of the pipe, situates it on his person as before, then goes back down the pipe, dropping the shark several times again on the way.
To reach the lower board, when the keys on the first had been at the very limit of his reach, he will have to cling to the edge of the pipe with one hand and hang down like a monkey, but instead his hand slips and he flops straight down onto his back.

After an uneventful hiatus he searches the floor by the wall, and then further out, realizes with alarm he can’t seem to find the keys, and concludes he is locked in.

Inside the black dropcloths there is a section of landscape
preserved in gold;
gold leaf on real leaves, adhering to every serration and dimple, with moving care.
There is fragrant black loam in heaps, and silver grass without a trace of tarnish, silver trunks and leaves of gold, golden ornaments on silver wires.

He sits down on the floor to rest a moment, slouching and letting his painful neck droop so that his head is only just held up.
He does not notice the naked, bald, crazily-grinning department store mannikin as it leans out from behind one of the trees.
Its painted eyes seem to look at him.

Remember
...
(it croons faintly, fading back into the dark)

Remember what?
(deKlend asks himself dully)
A woman’s voice?
No, that’s what one is usually expected to remember.

—
I am to remember
this
(he concludes)
But is this so especially memorable?
And how and with what is the comparison to be made?
With my mind?

Exploring a bit further, deKlend observes that the gleams from the precious metals and stones, their arrangement, have the arbitrariness of a melody, exactingly arranged, and that, although every element in the arrangement is static in its place, they create, as he moves among them, a continuous flow.
After only a moment’s exposure, he is recognizing new things as they first appear.
There is a repetition, to select one of the more salient, of an arch consisting in five regular, fixed scintillations that flicker up three times, the third time with a coruscating, starlike point in the center darting swift jets of clear color.

There’s that hay smell (he thinks)
I never know what makes it, a flower that smells like hay.
That smell always takes me back to childhood.

The trees give out.
There is nothing left.

No, the pattern continues, either in this crystalline darkness or in me, like an echo remaining after the
...
(deKlend can’t think of a good word)
...
articulation.
The articulation persists, like an echo.
And this is accentuated, far more accentuated, in darkness, where time becomes a tangible, occupying force.
This dark is not simple, more than an impediment, not uniform or empty or unpatterned;
and allyetwhilethesame it is still the same dark (deKlend thinks), self-same, copious, waiting, familiar and close.

Wading into the dark, deKlend puts up his hands in front of him, without using any strength, to part the darkness, press it and feel his way through it.
Turning around, he wonders at the perfection of even, luminous blackness that has absorbed him, although he still imagines himself as a visible being, unblended with the dark.
He sees himself with his mind’s eye still with his few familiar colors, and not as a contour of dark in dark, as he now is.

Listening, he can hear the sound of his own breathing, and the dull report of his footsteps that have nothing to impart to him, no click, no creak, no scrape of grit, no sighing rug, no grass whisper.
There is a rush in his ears, his own pulse, the faint tinnitus whistle.
He’s not alone.
No.
Far from it.

Lively, flamelike darkness, like being in a furnace of darkness, that seems so clever and so impassive like the weather and that deceives and conceals without deceit, but it’s the sound that it shows, if only (he thinks) I could make it out.

Suddenly it occurs to him that there might be hazards, infinite hazards, there, and he deliberately stops his drifting, thoughtless walk.

So now he listens, his eyes ticking in their sockets like two shivering mice peeping out from their holes.
There is a rushing like far off wind, but the air around him is completely still.
In that sound, there’s what is almost the soft call of a mourning dove, like a cuck-koo.
It spreads from its source, off to the left, and hangs hollowly in the air.
Is it like a bird?
The call propagates, spreading like a smoke ring, and there is a sound involved in it like the mute agitation of air from the pedal notes of a pipe organ.
It has a seeking, errant intention, that makes it sound as if it comes
from
someone or
goes to
something
...
a low whistle.
What is that sound?

deKlend wanders.
The streets are deserted.
From time to time he hears it, always from a definite direction, but from any side.

It’s possible (he thinks) these streets, which show no sign of decay but quite the opposite, are not deserted, but have never yet been inhabited.

He freezes stock still.
There’s a soft commotion on the pavement of feet but not of footfalls
—
scrapes and taps, thuds, whisks.
Coming around a corner he catches a glimpse of a figure just bounding out of sight.
But
did
he see it?

From just ahead, the sound of leaping and frisking.

Rushing after it, the dancer arches through the lamp light, arms and legs outspread, and disappears frolicking into the gloom.

But what can it mean that he had no head?

deKlend hastens after it and the being is suddenly there, not six feet from him.
There is nothing in its white collar.
After pausing only an instant the dancer spins gently toward him with arms like two parentheses.
It stops directly before him.
deKlend can hear the rustle of its garments.
The figure straightens, hands up before its chest, and then prances to the center of the little courtyard.
It seems as though the dark, fog-choked sky bellies down low there, like a tarpaulin sagging with rainwater, but now deKlend sees there is a black globe, a yard across, hanging in space like an egg being laid by the cloud.
The figure rushes toward the egg and stands beneath it.
The globe is its head.