Celebrant (62 page)

She isn’t here.
I can feel that (he thinks)
I would know that.
She wouldn’t have put on Adrian.
It wouldn’t have been like her, she wouldn’t even be seen in the same place with him.
But how be seen?
Or do they put one over on me, and are they frolicking together in one of those high rooms?
For all I know (he thinks morosely) she could be this bench here.
I don’t believe that.
I just said
—
thought
—
it to feel poor devilish.
She would have left me some sign, to tease me.
If she’d seen me.
Did she really come and go
—
there’s that other sarkoform!

He sits up.

She would
—
or could she?
Even with no head?

It’s frolicking along the other side of the hedge now, off to his right.
He can see its headless neck, the collar, shoulders, jostling up and down, now and then an upflung hand.

It sails clear over the garden in a single vault.
deKlend leaps after it as easily without a thought.

The headless thing is gambolling down the tree-lined road.
deKlend is only barely keeping up with it, although it isn’t so much its speed as its stride that he can’t match.
If he ran all out, he’d leave it behind.
Instead he has to keep it carefully in front of him as it crashes through the flashes under the trees to and fro criss-crossing the road and gesturing too snappily for the eye to follow.
Shimmying its shoulders and rocking its neck, which ends in something like a wall socket.
There are slots dimpled into cream-colored, smoothly-polished material
—

now, looking at the neck
—
and the more closely he looks at the figure alone the more the scene beyond it throbs with black pulsations of gravity
—
the sarkoform
—
what did Goose Goes Back call this one?
—
there’s a familiar-looking constellation hovering steadily just above the neck, very small
—
the stars are the gentle carmine color of those feathery leaves back in the garden, or close enough
—
I can’t remember the name of the constellation either
—
nearly transparent, small enough to hold in my hand.
What would happen if I tried to grab it?
Would it burn a constellation pattern indelibly into my hand?
Burn through my hand and leave permanent holes?
I could hold up my hand to the light and see the constellation any time I wanted
—

Lyrical
—
that’s the name
—
is modifying gravity from one moment to the next in complicated improvisations weaving it just masterfully into aleatory patterns.
That constellation.
Damn what was it called?
Who called it?

There’s the city, steaming off bruisecolored clouds!
It could be Votu, city streets free to the wind, from here
—
the smoke or steam or smoke is transparent when it emerges.
I see indigo clots, bloodclots of dusk, gorgeous blue twilight on graffiti flour brick walls;
they show their orange teeth incandescently grinning out of the sky like jack o lanterns!

—
a harsh, nasal voice on the loudspeaker and gobs and viscous strands of ink rise on an invisible, gelatinous updraft coming out of some dark, flat, tapering shape, while I tell myself I have to escape the assistant.
That rattling voice seems to accompany the headless dancer I follow.

This is
not
a corridor of a mental institution.
How could I be running as swiftly as this in the confines of a corridor in a mental institution?
The institutions are illusory.
And such bad, sloven illusions at that.

Now look at this dancing, headless body, that leaps so gracefully, back and forth across the road like a gazelle.
Where would an institution come up with something like that, precise and elegant?
Would the streets rise up so gradually around me, like a gathering fog?
Would I be smelling freshly-washed trees, the pure wind, the little seasoning of smoke mixed into it, the moist earth?
Would I be hearing those reed horns and drums?

There is a hallucination here, belonging to deKlend but not at all perceived by him.
That would be me.
Re-mem-ber.

A big woman is rolling majestically down the street eating candies from a white paper bag.
I’m held hostage even inside my own outlines, so bound up in them that I can’t even begin to call upon her for help.
Instead I am going down like down to sleep.

Watch swirling colored threads.
They will begin to flicker to the music, rapidly, in patches with irregular shapes.
There’s a low piano like gongs forming a T of colorless beams (could be a little blue, like water) and there, just past the intersection where the blue starts to come in, is a kiss from long ago.
Your lips are soft and slick like ice.
A tender kiss, just a little on the cool side, bland lips, smooth as this grey is bland, and even this intersection.

It was a dream, but, if you look on the back cover of this book, you won’t see anything like “so-and-so discovered another world and now he is no longer so sure which one is real dot dot dot”
—
we are so HO far beyond that
—

Looking a little closer at the question (is it real?) I begin to notice the dingy, washed-out coloring, dust clots mouse turds and cobwebs and the general atmosphere of rundownism
—
what if anything has it got to do with real magic powers?
Oh yes say more;
why should saying speeches editorials my words to myself make any difference one way or another?
Not expressing something unknown to me but playing an instrument, a scintillating brain that is chemically changing colors and my choice of words transforms so that my physiology is modified through an infinity of attributes.

Here’s the thing:
the man who spoke to me will be me
—
that is, while I am never, in the dream, conscious of recognizing him as myself, like it’s me but with these little alterations of dream age-makeup
—
I feel, in the dream, neither alone nor confronted, but I sense myself in company, with a familial something, or an old boon companion.
Anyway he
wasn’t
me, but I
will be
him
—
not a ‘future self’
—
how can one in the present know what the first number will look like the next time?
I can’t
show
you the difference between the flame of today and the flame of tomorrow
...
futuristic flames, with all-new styles, all-new fashions.
Like the house of tomorrow or the shoe of tomorrow?
This isn’t a film.
I don’t get the feeling he acts according to a plan.
I see no reason to doubt that his surprise and disappointment at my response was unfeigned.
He forgot, maybe?
Maybe he never remembered it to forget it?
—
Ah I think I have it again:
I will be him, but he, in the dream, is not
going
to be me.
He has
already been
me, prior to the dream, and is no longer me when the dream begins.
So there is no connection.
My dream depends on his having ceased to be me, so that my independence depends on him.
Depends on his becoming a him and ceasing to be a me.
He wouldn’t have recognized me any more than I did him, but he showed me what he did because he felt the same ambivalent familiarity with me.
I wonder if he is running through this now in
his
mind, if he has one?
Or is this now in his past, so he did run it through his mind, one of them
—
does that matter?
Why run through it again, when he is doing it now, as me?

The Bird of Ill Omen:

There’s a landscape, there are buildings.
It’s not rural, it’s
not a city or a suburb.
It’s night time.
Mild weather.
People colored like precious stones are congregated together there.
They’re spending their energies on something other than work, for a change, and to show it hasn’t got them licked.
Musicians are playing, everyone who can is dancing.
Constellations play over the facets of their bodies and run like combs through their hair.
Certain night birds are attracted by the music and stimulated to song by it.
They form a dense, jagged wreath around the square, just outside the light.
One can see the glint of their eyes and beaks, their seething movement.

The birds stir en masse as someone homeless approaches, and seem to part for him as he goes toward the dancers.
He selects one and draws near.
Too close.

This one makes the mouth smile.
Then makes the body shiver.
Trying to steer it against its own current.

He doesn’t feel himself doing these things.
That mouth’s smile isn’t his smile, although he may be smiling, if that means anything in his rarefied condition.
Each smile reflects the other, but in mirrors that are alive and trying to reflect, not just passively reflecting.
The same with the movements.

Horror at what he’s doing comes over him, and he stops making these trials.
At once, the body springs up lighter and lighter.
Now this one realizes it’s a kind of game.
Gross manipulation is his cruel prerogative but it comes with horror in equal measure with the haughteur, while the released body only springs up more and more lightly the more firmly down it is pressed.

This mnemosem is not animating the body or occupying it.
They’re held together by the rhythm;
the emphasis falls on the fifth beat of an eight beat meter and the gap preceding and that’s what holds the two of them.
Arms outstretched, the dancer begins to swoop in and out among the others, eyes round and blank as two full moons, all the teeth bared in a baleful grin.
The other dancers scamper out of the way, to avoid the touch of bad luck;
those who are similarly affected ward off the sweep of the arms with supercilious gestures of repudiation, disdain, warning.
This mnemosem feels the distance between himself and the dancer filling up rapidly with invisible force, a whirling globe covered in wisps, like the planet Jupiter, a steady tug in his phantom entrails of its telepathic gravity wan and blue, siphoning out of its great rotational momentum and nearly sweeping him along.
The dancer feels it, too.
The nostrils expand, the eyes open wide, the spinal cord takes over and leaves the mind wailing with a clear transparent light and delicate stationary rushing.
This mnemosem can see that any attempt to control this, by either of them, would be to force something, crudely to jam something, and disrupt a fragile, entirely adequate, fresh something.
Crush and slash, ruinate.
The rhythm can’t be so stiff, constipated, choked off, it has to flex within a range it sets for itself.