Celebrant (36 page)

Gina smiles at her.

Burn feels love.

deKlend and Phryne:

Don’t look at me (Phryne says)

He sits up crosslegged, rubbing a sore ankle thoughtfully.

When she next appears, she has made herself up completely, and comes back to him wrapped in a sheet.
She has long gauze tapes around her forearms and calves.

She sees him looking at the tapes.

I’ll take them off in a moment.

He raises his hands from his ankle to take her face in them.
She pulls back and clasps his wrists, lowering his hands to her body, so they part the sheet.

He says he wants to kiss her.
She sits next to him, his hands slipping from her a little reluctantly, and she won’t meet his eyes.

If you kiss me too much, anywhere (she quickly gestures at her body) you’ll slowly be poisoned.
I’m
...
saturated
...
with lead.

deKlend makes a contemptuous noise in his nose that causes her to raise her head in alarm.
He inhales deeply through his nostrils.
He breathes in for a long time, his eyelids fluttering, as Phryne looks at him, wanting to understand.
Then he opens a corner of his mouth and spits out a volume of smoke in one puff, his eyes open and his eyebrows lift.
He shifts his attention to rubbing his sore ankle some more.

So don’t worry (he says)

Phryne stares at the smoke.
There are tiny specks of lead in it that glint dully as they turn in the light and sink.
He can just puff it back out in a cloud of smoke.
She pounces on him and devours his face with kisses.
(Then!
Then-THEN!
Then kiss me
everywhere!
)
The dark divinity of their love appears again, like a figment of outer space unfurling, tying itself up in knots over them, they’re its pets, and it is radiating
...
bathing the rib cage from the inside
...
with a sensation sometimes like heat, lightness, fear
...
my hips cradled in her muscular bottom, squeezing it.
She lies on her stomach and I lie among her completely, taken into the floating feeling, along the deep curve of her spine.
I grip her by the shoulders.
I have her pinned, a quiet equivocal call from her, from the distance, travelling across a landscape that surrounds me like a kind of rain, by driving my head down, keeps me from seeing.
A stir of orgasm in the wind like a different rain coming slowly in off the sea, off the wilderness, then the wave lifts, and I spear down
—
a warm gust washes over me and our whole body clutches each other.
The moment they form, I send every particle of my hardness into her, eagerly making myself empty and hardening her, hardening and hardening, sending her my hardening, silvering her.
It goes on, it hovers nearby, the haunting wafts up at the crest without breaking it while I keep on going to pieces and finally it collapses.
We brim, we silver, we churn, we brim, I am silvering, I kiss her shoulders, the back of her neck, get her firm body to harden my lips and teeth, smear them with her aliveness and try to crush from her flesh some green elixir of just her, I want to feel that, and I want to listen to it fizz and dissolve in me.

*

You’re mnemosem?

Of course!
(she says)

He really doesn’t know anything (she thinks)

In her years as the mistress of a successful political adept, she had seen many people give themselves away to the General in casual conversation.
She had watched as he set out his snares, and this, as well as the secrecy enjoined on her by the nature of her relations with him, made her habitually circumspect.
Now disclosing or explaining things seems to her like a return to something she’s outgrown; it was so much better when she was Medusa, everything was already understood at a glance.

Every mnemosem is marked.
Uniquely marked.
Lead, in my case.
In your case, it’s the epilepsy.
You were invited to the party weren’t you?

He was, and it is the same party.

Are you on the way to Votu as well?

She just looks at him.

He really doesn’t know!
(she thinks)

We are in Votu (she says)

Ah, hm (he says)

Always a metaphor (he thinks) Like saying we’re in paradise, this is nirvana.
Everywhere is nirvana.
Everyone makes the same mistake, and there’s no point trying to make them understand you mean the real place, the
actual physical spot
.
They’re just lost in metaphors.

He looks at her lingeringly.

You are so wise (he says)

That hit the mark (he thinks) She likes that.

You don’t know
how
wise (she thinks, smiling)

After a moment she asks him what he wants to do in Votu, and he explains he intends to bring a sword there.

Ah (she says) Yes there are many swords stuck into the walls and buildings.

He exhales a cloud of smoke and produces his sword, causing her to sit up in amazement.
The blade is warped, even half twisted in one spot, the edge is scalloped with irregularities.
deKlend holds it up in both hands and sighs ruefully.

Look at that (he says) Months of work
—
who knows how much time?
And it’s still a hash.

There’s no handle?
(she asks, bending forward to look at it)

I won’t put a hilt on it
—

Hilt
(she says
—
the word has exotic, liquid sexiness in her mouth)

—
hilt, yes, I won’t put a hilt on it until it’s finished.

And where do you work on it?

Phryne is sitting back now, propped up on her hands behind her back.

deKlend makes a fist with his right hand.

Oh, anywhere.
First, I make my hands as hot as possible.

His fist radiates heat, like the mouth of an oven billowing over her skin.

And then I simply work it with my fingers.

deKlend begins to pinch up and down the blade, plucking, and making little circles.
Where he touches the metal, it acquires a dull, matte sheen and then turns pale as it cools again.
She can see the metal changing as he works it;
deKlend looks like a man playing a long thin stringed instrument.
The blade makes faint noises, like flexing metal.

Around them both is growing a somatism of ardent love
—
trees, rolling and fragrant grass, new blossoms, birdsong, are indispensable to love.
Possibly twilight;
that might belong on the list
—
that’s the love spell
—
can they fall in love without it?

I know I love her (he thinks) if her presence produces a delirium in me of green blossoming dusk, the garden and the memory of the garden at once.
The park of death spring reverence and love.
Love I let off in blasts of phosphoprophetic.

She sneezes abruptly and it’s like a flashbulb goes off by her face.

I have photic sneezing (she says, sniffing raggedly and rubbing her hands with her shoulders)

Don’t look at me, she had said.
But I had already seen, as she slept, that her lips, the skin over her eyes, the flesh around the rims of her ears, the tip of her nose, like the other sensitive parts of her
—
her most sensitive part in fact
—
are all partially transparent.
Her teeth, and the boney eye sockets, are dimly visible through the tissue she keeps thickly covered with kohl and powder and dye.
She’ll learn in time that it doesn’t matter to me (he thinks)

He glances over to her, where she rests, her eyes barely open.
She smiles blackly at him.

She catches a glimpse of herself and him together in the window as they pass
—
in it they are smiling, they are happy.

To hear music and to experience memory, down in the body, and to be confused because
this is no fantasy
—
this memory of love, unaccountable to you, who only daydream about love.
To find, persistently, and present of its own accord, a memory, one day old, of
love
.
That’s a shock.
Sad to think it is a shock.
The hypocrite assumes the eye of the other is censorious and puts himself beyond the reach of love.
Don’t let that happen.
Make sure you handle that.

The new rail cars going by on flatbeds, a gliding steel ribbon, toylike from here and indued abstractly with enormous mass.
On the train now, with the lights switched off and the sun already down, nothing to see by but the luminous sky.
Between one woman sitting on one side, to the other woman sitting on the other side, the nose and lips of the one, on the one side, and the nose and lips of the other, on the other side, there are two entirely distinct universes.
In that space a man sits who is nearly formless, and might be retarded.
We sit watching tiny planets orbit his head as though it were the sun there between his ears, and solar wind breath.
He smokes
—
it’s a flare.
If he goes out in the rain it’s the deluge for those little worlds.
Look carefully at one of them, with a jeweler’s loupe in your eye, and see little flashes of motion there on the surface.
And, as you loom in with the loupe, the man/defender God of this solar system flicks your hand away with the backs of his fingers saying “you’ll burn them.”

Phryne and deKlend had sent themselves invitations for different times.
They will have to wait to arrive together, and right now they don’t want to be apart.
They hold hands.
She has a scarf around her head that flattens her wiry braids, and covers her kohl with big tortoise-shell sunglasses.
She refreshes herself with sherbets sweetened with lead sugar, while he goes on ahead, not wanting to.
Now she’s all dressed up and looking so appetizing he wants only to undress her again.
They both sent themselves invitations for different times, and his is the earlier.

A low chord on a music box and here comes the house sweeping in like jetsam assembling itself a piece at a time in swells of night sky, and there are gobbets of night sky all over the place.
They are large, gelatinous, faceted fragments each with one pebbly side where it tore free of the night mass, in which all the sections of the house are lodged.
Slip into one of the unused rooms and find night mass crinkling in through the window, sucking vacantly at the outer edges of the room, partially dissolving them, slickening them and rounding their edges, reducing impressive or charming rooms to lozenges for soothing the night’s sore throat.
Tiny rivulets of melted night trickle down the walls like glittering hair.