The Divinity Student (12 page)

Chan’s grave is marked and shaded from the street by an old oak. Desden points to the tree.

“I hope its roots haven’t gotten into the coffin.”

The Divinity Student cuts into gray dirt just in front of the tombstone, sending lizards hissing through the high blonde grass. The soil is loose and dry, crumbling to dust and clods, insects, smells like smoke. He’s moving fast—his form smears, hard to see in the failing light—tearing up the soil like a machine. Teo looks around, but they can’t be seen from the street, then he takes up his shovel and starts in behind the Divinity Student, pausing every few moments to catch his breath and scan the windows overhead, waiting to be caught. Twenty minutes later, in a rain of dirt, a spade grates hollow on termite pine. The Divinity Student scrapes the lid clean and motions Desden up onto the grass, gives a single heave and throws the coffin out of the grave. He follows it out a moment later and wedges his shovel blade under the lid. One ratchet of his arms and it slides off, splintering desiccated nails.

Mothball smell and sweet stench, Chan’s suit is too small, deflated in the box but still a little damp, a white gecko stares up at them—he’s been licking Chan’s ear. The Divinity Student shoos him away. Reaching down, he embraces Chan’s waist, hears a gurgling sound beneath his closing arms.

Desden hisses, “there’s someone here!” and presses himself against the oak.

The Divinity Student dumps the coffin back into the ground and leaps down with it. A light blazes in the twilight building looming by the gate, two people alternate passing by the window—two men, pulling on jackets, one packing his briefcase at a desk.

“The bag!”

Desden tosses the bag down.

“Get down here now!”

Desden casts a fearful glance at the window. One of the men is laughing. The butcher slips quietly into the grave and helps bag the corpse.

“Just do it fast!” the Divinity Student says.

They toss the body back up out of the grave and leap out themselves. Teo dusts his apron but the Divinity Student seizes hold of the bag and drags it onto the cart, tossing the tools in beside. Above, the light goes out, stairwell lights flare in a column down one side of the building.

“Any other exits?”

“That gate is the only one!” the Divinity Student is spitting with anger. He kicks most of the dirt back into the grave and then tackles the cart, flying across the yard, with Desden running to keep up. Ramshackle, he tears up the earth over the graves, overturning tombstones and crosses, kicks a wreath out of the way, making for the gate. He bashes it open with the front of the cart, tearing the metal rod off in passing, and Desden shuts it behind him, the lock snaps. The Divinity Student is already halfway to the corner, Teo can hear voices ringing hollow, and nearby a door rattling—he sprints up the street and slams into the cart, together they send it hurtling up around the corner and down Rat Street.

Turning, they run down a service passage along the train tracks, their faces flashing messages to each other in passing orange work lights. Low thrumming sound, and the earth hums beneath their feet, the Divinity Student points, they duck into an alcove with benches for maintenance men as a train hurtles by like a thunderbolt only a yard away, earsplitting and spitting flying windows. Once it’s gone, they pull out and make fast for the nearest access tunnel disgorging them into night streets.

“Too many people here,” the butcher says.

“I’ll get in the cart, they won’t bother us.”

The Divinity Student leaps up onto the cart and sits beside the bagged Chan, putting his feet up on the corpse.

“You said you’d do anything, so push.”

Desden squares his shoulders and pushes the cart through the crowds. Finally, as the moon rises over the level of the rooftops, they draw up to Teo’s street. The Divinity Student jumps out and together they rush their baggage up the pavement and around to the back. Teo practically dismembers himself flailing with the keys, he finds the right one, shoves it home, opens up, and the Divinity Student rushes Chan into the shop. Teo runs past him, draws the blinds and pulls a heavy flat across the front of the store—even peering through the cracks, it’s impossible to see anything. He clears off the cutting board and heads back into the locker. The Divinity Student already has Chan out of the bag, stripped and ready, together they carry him out under the fluorescents and slap him down on the board. Teo puts on a fresh apron and starts rinsing the corpse, the Divinity Student runs out, comes back with a heavy jar filled with formaldehyde, mingling that sour smell with Chan’s new wet sweet smell.

“Just the brain—the less tissue, the faster the fermentation.”

Desden nods, yanks a cleaver out of his knife rack. With a few deft moves he shaves the front of Chan’s head, then swings up at arm’s length over his head and brings it down right on target shearing off the top of Chan’s skull with one stroke. A muddy, metallic odor is decanted, curling sluggishly in their nostrils. His sense of smell already powerfully sharpened, the Divinity Student quickens and leans forward, takes a good long whiff almost getting it right then and there, the whole thing, but no no it’s not enough, the formaldehyde is needed.

With the a genius of natural grace Desden whips out a small, wickedly sharp blade and stabs in through the back of Chan’s neck, putting his weight on it, driving between the vertebrae and then shifting his weight bringing the knife up—a sound of dry fibers severing like old corn husks. The spinal chord is cut. A few more dextrous disconnections and he puts away his knife. His cutting board and apron are stained with black tarry stuff, rancid bad-milk stink from the body. With care, Teo slides both his hands into the aperture at the top of Chan’s skull, feeling with his fingers for the base of the brain. Then, easy as bobbing for apples he draws the dripping, only slightly shriveled organ out of its case, complete and undamaged, with a thin queue of neatly cropped spinal cord at the bottom. With all the gentle concern of a doctor birthing a newborn he slips it into the jar. The liquid takes its charge in silence without a single plip, closing solemnly over Chan. Gratified, the Divinity Student nods wordlessly to the butcher and steals upstairs to Teo’s rooms. With grim pride, and a secret delight, Teo turns to watch himself in his mirrors. He starts hacking the body to pieces. This hand to his hand, this arm to his arm.

Desden has a few small rooms just past the uppermost landing, clean and bare, an odor of metal desks and office supplies. The Divinity Student sets the jar on the desk, turns on the desk lamp and sits in a cone of harsh blue light. He pulls his pen and notebook from his pocket, and uses the pen to stir the formaldehyde. Eyes locked on Chan, he can see thin filaments of yellow essence swirling out of the tissue, mixing—the smell is strong enough now to disjoint his body, intensify a feeling of being stitched together and soft in the head, of half-emerging from his own head. Shaking badly, he dries the pen and sets it aside for fear of dropping it in, staining Chan with ink. Clammy in the pit of his stomach and cobwebs threading down his arms and legs, he sits, barely contained, waiting for the fermentation to hold. Not much time but forever, thankfully the last memories are all that’s needed, and he dips his hands into the blend—cold puckering his fingertips and boiling vapor off the nails; breathing hard now, he raises dripping palms and sprays sour fluid into his eyes, bedews his face—coming at him it’s coming at him, blue light flickering out and it’s got him, he’s going into it, wrench and pull and for a moment hanging over the grass suspended between sky and ground tied to a cloud by a shining line flooding body taut and crushing the back of his skull cracking him open shrieking and nothing pulling at him to go into nothing passing through the nothing and he’s nothing—and comes out the other end in a cheap hotel room, floor and carpet stretched on his face, his insides being hammered with a tapeworm thrashing in his stuffing, or Chan’s, bones turn to white-hot glass and bend in ropes twisting arms and legs and ribs collapsing, re-expanding to collapse again. The Divinity Student pushes back in time, now Chan is breathing and he can feel something like hard bubbles drifting up through the floorboards, passing through him with cold angry pressure, and there in his arms and legs coming up through his abdomen, all of him going glass then marble then wood and carpet then back to glass going brittle and aching and acid searing in bone filaments and bubbles bursting out his back and through his head rolling like a ball clearing columns through his body. The Divinity Student screaming and pushing, he’s got the tearing at his throat, the air channel collapsing and shredding like tissue paper, trying to push further back, and as he rises free and watching Chan slobbering out his last breath beneath him, face all eyes and gaping mouth, as he’s getting out, he latches on to one tiny part, he draws back just a little, only just a small bit, to Chan at the desk, Chan writing his notes, and the Divinity Student copies these notes, and watches a dark-haired lady drift in and leave many times, an empty thing day and night, all of life on the page, in the pen, sad writing at the borrowed desk, pause and stare at the bricks in the wall across the street, then turn and spread ink again, and sad, and write, and dark-haired lady, and eat, and sleep, and sad, and write—and Desden’s room.

Back: returned, the Divinity Student sitting and staring, brought up short just blown in and spinning from the headlong rush of the Eclogue, new magic words humming on the pages of his notebook, and sad Chan’s dead memories rest again on the desk in front of him, in a cone of harsh blue light.

The Divinity Student scowls through the window at a metallic sky turning

cobalt-colored at the end of the day, strange high clouds moving fast. Behind him, Miss Woodwind is measuring his notebook on the scale, her neat hands setting weights with care on the balance. She comes out from behind her card table, moving toward him, holding the book in front of her and stabbing at him with it.

“You’ve torn pages out, I can’t get its proper weight.”

The missing pages, covered with Chan’s words, are wedged in the Divinity Student’s inside right upper coat pocket. Their typed duplicates were delivered this morning to Fasvergil, who received him sitting on a plywood tombstone, mending costumes.

He had extended his hand and let the sheets drift to his palm. They had seemed to catch and spin in the air as they dropped. Fasvergil had settled his needles and deposited them on the small shelf of a lectern behind him. He had said nothing, looking candidly at the Divinity Student, and then turned his eyes down to the costumes again.

“Sometimes the words get mixed in with gibberish. I thought you wouldn’t want them.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Whatever it was you collected last night weighed more than this notebook and everything in it. Gibberish or not, we need those entries.”

“I threw them away.”

“You’re working for someone else.”

“I’m working for myself.”

Her face distorts. “I say you’re working for someone else!”

“Think twice before you accuse me of anything,” he says quietly.

For a moment Miss Woodwind returns his gaze, muttering under her breath. Air hisses through her nose as she hands him back his notebook.

“I suppose next time you’ll at least have the decency to keep separate notebooks for your separate jobs.” The corners of her mouth turn up, the air around her is getting warm.

“Next time I’ll bring you everything,” he lies, “I’ll bring you my old exercise books from the Seminary.”

“Really?”

“Some of them.”

“Oh.” It’s not what she wanted. She looks off into a corner, listening to the office buzzing around them, the rustling of the wallpaper and the rattling of the windowpanes. Dust rains down on paper reams and book spines. Outside, he can hear cars roaring up and down the street and squealing across the plaza, swarming across the city like rats on a corpse, looking for him. He follows her eyes. They drift back towards him, then lock on his. He drinks her fragrance in, and the warm column of air in which she stands.

“No,” she says, “not when you ask me. Never when
you
want, only when
I
want, that’s the way it works.”

She raises a finger, looking like a schoolteacher admonishing. “Only when I want. You’re always working for me.”

And she turns to go, when he asks her to go walking with him. She rubs her hands a little. “I’ll finish a few things here, and join you on the corner.”

Later, she meets him, and together they march down through the plaza and into a part of San Veneficio he’d never seen before. Until now, it had seemed to be exclusively composed of hallways and lighted porches, low buildings. Now he is surrounded by towers, lights kaleidoscope as he passes, leashed to Miss Woodwind. The avenues are broad and black, fewer people, trains howl by on creaking trellises over their heads. She’s got him; he’s just realized the emptiness she makes him feel, as if a space with shimmering edges is yawning in his chest. It’s filled with vapor that emanates from her in thick gouts, pulling him along with her. Her breath, and the moist corners of her mouth, small, shining in the streetlights, rolling out silent words, and parting over her even, white, filmy teeth. Her fragrances, particularly from her hair, the close parts about her ears where her skin is especially delicate, where the scent goes dark and rich.

“Tell me about the Seminary.”

“It’s old. It was commissioned by a king . . . the last one to be canonized, I think . . . There’s a marble statue of him in the hall. Every year, we had to pay our respects on his birthday.”

“What classes did you take?”

“Languages, literature, history, what you’d expect.”

“Theology?”

“Of course.”

“ . . . Many different kinds?”

“There are thirteen disciplines.”

“How many did you take?”

“All of them.”

“What disciplines were they?”

The street passes, they turn a corner, no reply.

“I would have thought you could tell me.”

No answer. The Divinity Student lays his hand upon the Holy Book, holstered just below his shoulder, under his coat.