Celebrant (31 page)

The full moon festival begins tonight.
There is a festival for the new moon as well
—
three meditative nights of quiet drone music, the slowest and smallest dancing, of the most refined and simple enjoyments.
The full moon festival is just the opposite.

The music begins to break forth as the moon soars clear of the mountains.
It has mountains of its own, and they can be distinctly seen, the rain has scrubbed the air.
An exaltation of passion begins to churn around the city.

Kunty has found Gina, resting quietly in a warm corner of the back of a gardening shed no one uses.
Gina, who is naked, hears Kunty’s claws on the wooden planks of the floor and sits up calmly, resting on a big burlap sack of potting soil.
Kunty, still saturated with rain, comes toward her, breathing hoarsely, the full moon at the window in both of her eyes.
She is standing upright.
Now she yanks her dress up over her head and throws it angrily into a corner, dropping as she does so onto all fours and returning her glowing stare to Gina’s face.
Gina observes all this with her usual serenity, perhaps a modicum of curiosity.

Kunty is scraping up splinters with her claws, staring at Gina and panting.
Gina can see well in the dark, and can make out easily the two bare legs folded to either side of the body, each thigh crossed with a deep trough along the muscle, each rib, the groove along the shoulder.
Also the slack, fascinated mouth.
Her hearing isn’t so sharp, so she can only just make out the very faint sounds, like the faint creaks and whistles that come from an unoiled hinge as the door is tugged to and fro by an imperceptible draft, that escape Kunty’s throat.

Suddenly Kunty stands up again, takes two steps, and throws herself down onto Gina, writhing against her, whining, gibbering, rubbing her face over Gina’s cool skin.
Using the tips of her fingers, not the nails, she runs her hands all over Gina’s back.
Kunty stops, her attention riveted on Gina’s left breast.
She latches onto it with her lips, breath in her nostrils and her eyes shut hard.
Gina passively lies where Kunty pushed her.
Absently, she raises her left hand and rests it very gently on the back of Kunty’s head.

With a gasp Kunty recoils backward from beneath Gina’s hand
—
up on all fours, her whole body stonily rigid, starting to hyperventilate, her eyes huge in her face, her ribs heaving.
A look of terror, peering out in shock at Gina.
The thick hair on her arms and legs bristles.
She bolts away into the dark, leaving Gina lying as she was.

Gina’s left hand floats down slowly onto her stomach.

The dancing has begun.
The weavers have laid out their carpets in the rainwashed courtyards and are beginning their ponderous, gyrating movements like venerable, spinning meteors.
The smoke is magic, transparent ribbons of grey sky stretch from heavy braziers, the sound of flutes horns drums and huldres.

Burn comes down from her perch when the rain stops.
There in an alleyway she sees a peculiar man who reminds her of the mathete she’d met.
There is a dead bird lying in the gutter that divots the middle of the street.
The man, evidently thinking himself unobserved, does an odd thing;
he bends forward at the waist and flexes his back, lifting his shoulders and head, his mouth is open, his tongue stiff in his mouth and his chin directly above the dead bird.

Ha!
Ha!
Ha!
(he grates)

Tiny eyes seem to drip from the corners of his eyes, pop from his pupils and trail behind him as he turns to walk away, like strings of floating beads.
Burn follows him for a block or two and then loses him among the giant music boxes, musical instruments that are easily mistaken for buildings, and which play by themselves.

Now the festival is underway in earnest and the whole city vibrates with music and dancing.
Burn follows the black culverts of empty city streets, looking for pigeon girls.

Suddenly the streets are full of people, milling about, panting, some of them, but no one speaks.
There is the rustling of clothes and feet, everyone has left their lights at home
—
the moon is the only light, illuminating like desire the faces of the people who are now thronging every street in silent excitement.
Here and there, among the moving figures, Burn catches glimpses of courtyards, weavers dancing majestically on their carpets, the tiny red stars at the end of sticks of incense trailing smoke like anchored microcomets.

Find where the rhythm laps (she thinks)

She is listening to the beating of feet, for the moment when the pattern begins and ends at once, the repetition which seems both to prolong one moment forever and to bear her along from one moment to another with assured strength.

Now she is in a vast courtyard
—
no, a plaza, densely packed with people who flow together.
Among them are people with brushes and other implements who bend regularly and trace backward, bent-over streaks through the crowd.
Their writing creeps along the pavements, Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Mayan, Demotic, surely there are more?
There are more continents and civilizations than that.
The black letters simmer and glow in the moonlight.
Burn dissolves into the writing
—
like a wire that had been laid there beneath the evenly-spread clay being pulled up, where each drop of rain has already printed a letter in the clay, a whole day of rain being a whole day of printing.
Chinese neat rows of tumbling houses, Arabic long ribbons of incense smoke, curious sprigs of isolated Greek force, compressive Mayan cartoons still hold the shape of the cans they came in like cranberry sauce, ghostly Beitha Kukju that was too beautiful to use, Demotic like strings of mathematical operators.
Burn smuggles herself by dancing right into the writing, words that happen to say:

our hearts have joined

you will learn in me

and in you, he will learn

Burn stops and listens breaking out in gooseflesh.
The city’s alive.
It’s changing.
The way a person would change.

Flash
—
the end of the alley, the edge of the building blue black in the chilly shade, the narrow ramplike street sloping down and the pale upright square of sky above it like a white sheet on a line
—
the feeling of coming to a stop from running, the last lessening jolts on the feet and ankles, the arms swinging up past the waist
—

Phryne:

When she realized it, she was sitting alone, in a booth, in a restaurant, in disguise
—
this time she was a thin, nervous-looking adolescent with wet rubbery hands and glasses so thick they seemed like two clear tunnels boring into the taut and clammy face.

That’s him! (she’d thought)

—
peering at the man from behind the slender tablets of her menu.

She recognized him from another moment of her life, after she had ceased to appear as herself.
He hadn’t noticed the heavy-set man with the two or three strands of flyaway black hair fluttering from his crown, following him with almost mincing steps for a block or so, with his suspenders showing their pale underbellies as they dangled from his waist, and the dense white shaving foam, with two rectangular notches in it just below the right cheekbone, trembling in the zephyr.
This had been her default for some time, it being her conceit that a very conspicuous figure is more readily overlooked in certain circumstances.

She’d first caught sight of him in conversation with another man whose acquaintance she had made in a different disguise, but who had parted company with the man in question before she could complete her impression of him.

He simply fascinated her.
He was nothing like the General, to the extent of also not being his opposite.
The worlds those two men inhabited were so distinct it was immediately obvious, and even to bracket them as “those two men” seemed to exaggerate their similarities.
He had a dazzling smile, somehow ghostly, and he moved so lightly, so clumsily.
He lingered a long time in her thoughts, which returned to him with innocently thoughtless insistence like a habituated animal.
Why get weak over him?
But she did, but why, and so on.

Once again she saw him, this time sitting alone in someplace
—
she had only flashed by in a cab
—
dimly, under the thin water of a windowpane, apparently bent over a newspaper on a table, his elbow next to it and his forehead lightly resting on the extended fingers of that elbow’s hand.
She noticed, repeating the image to herself, that he was all bundled up in blankets and even a shawl, although his head was bare.

She would set him aside only with the inner promise to pick him up at the next opportunity, experimenting with different imaginary lights to play on him, and fondly trying out the nickname “Clumsy.”

She’d been passing a moment ago, but now she sees him out under the chandeliers twirling his partner around in an athletic polka, with explosions of petticoats as they turned, and here at least there was no question of clumsiness.
A moment of high intensity comes, he steps away from his partner and Phryne stares incredulously as he does the crane dance
—
the crane dance that Theseus brought back with him from the Cretan maze, that
Theseus the king
first danced at Delos with his men, and that had been patrimony of the General, who never danced, through his wife, who also never danced.
“Clumsy” was spontaneously doing the crane dance, more or less, so she weakened again.

Now, it is certainly him, in the restaurant.
He eats fish, and wipes the tiny droplets of white sauce from his moustache.
Phryne wracks her brains for a pretext to look at him again, glaring at her menu and the meaningless adjacency of gratin au poivre in the columnar arrangement of dishes when there is an alarm, a crash, and she has her pretext.
Clumsy has flung his arms outspread and is half out of his seat, leaning over the table, eyes fluorescing like full moons
—
he stiffens and shoots backwards sending table and chair tumbling.
Completely shocked, Phryne, forgetting herself, sniffs.
Clumsy is bent like a drawn bow on the floor, a harsh, coughing chuckle forces itself out through his gnashing teeth.

He’s magnificent!
(she thinks, inflamed)

He thrashes once and a leg kicks out, smashing a heavy chair to kindling at a blow.
Phryne stares transfixed and shivering with excitement.

The fit passes.
A waiter pours water into one of his large, burgundy-colored napkins, turning it to black, and drapes it warily over Clumsy’s head.
Pandaemonium of coughing.
The waiter dithers, then scurries backward when Clumsy begins to drag himself from the floor.
The napkin slips from his head as he sits up.
Phryne gets a good look at his haggard face as he raises his hands to his head.
A moment later he has rushed outside.
She hurries to a window and sees him vomiting out there on all fours.

Watching him tonight
...
she is overcome again with a familiar, exhilarating consciousness of her own bitter sadness, and wild vengefulness, that can turn at times into an astringent kind of joy verging on delirium.