The Divinity Student (16 page)

The Divinity Student stands mute, disheveled, his face has gone soft and pale as wax, his flesh is turning translucent, he stands in the middle of the room as if he were hung there, twisting slightly on his feet.

“I can only conclude that you have decided to pursue this entirely on your own, and that you are keeping your discoveries to yourself.”

The Divinity Student crosses to the desk with a single step, surprisingly strong and decisive for all his weak looks. He seizes a handful of paper and hurls it in Fasvergil’s face.

“Now leave,” he says.

“This house belongs to the Seminary. If you withhold information from us we will be compelled to evict you.”

“Leave,” the Divinity Student says.

Fasvergil opens his mouth to speak again, but the Divinity Student is already by his side, seizing him, his breath clouding in Fasvergil’s dry face.

A single dry gasp of formaldehyde unfurls from between the Divinity Student’s lips, and in it boil a hundred gaping blue faces, and infinitely silent watching things, and many other ones stirring along the ragged edges of the Divinity Student’s breath, and more—a deep empty nothing, spreading behind the walls and surging through the floorboards and shimmering inside him. Fasvergil is stunned. The Divinity Student has a stronger claim on the house than he does.

That dead hand falls from the back of his neck, the Divinity Student retreats into the shadows. Faltering, Fasvergil is consumed with a new feeling. He struggles to address the Divinity Student, but his words crowd and trample each other, muddling in his mind until all intending is consumed.

Then the Divinity Student’s face turns back upon him, fixing him with a gaze as steady and impersonal as a star—he sees the Divinity Student’s face silhouetted against itself—and staggers back as if struck, not recognizing anything human in that face. Fasvergil finally backs out onto the landing, looking at the Divinity Student in a convulsion. The Divinity Student stares at him from the far end of the room. The door slams shut between them.

Cramped in his room, the Divinity Student shakes awake in the middle of the night. He rolls over and takes his head in his hands, but now even sleep is strange—falling and waking with blunt headaches, half-dreaming all the time in weird fragments, dragged away and thrown in the river, or held down and screamed at, wordless, voiceless howling. Tearing the sleep from his head in shreds, he turns to look out across the expanse of floor toward the wall and its windows. Suddenly, he comes sharply awake, alert, the air seems to vanish, and his gaze accosts the furniture, objects, flowing their outlines into each other in the dark. Caught, they snap back within their borders and their borders go rigid.

He’s on his feet. Things scuttle in the corners; they whisper to each other, and the Divinity Student is beginning to understand them. One window in particular is asking for him, shining bright blue in a black wall. Padding across the floor, he can hear tiny scrabbling footsteps dodging out of his way, rustling like grass at his feet. He stops, resting his hands on the sill, and looks out.

There she is! It’s a woman, standing far off on a roof top, looking in his direction. She alights on a chimney and vaults impossibly high, landing on a neighboring gable as lightly as a falling leaf. Dancing bright bounds and leaps, she hurtles from one house to another, always coming closer and moving faster and making no sound. Even at a distance the Divinity Student sees her clearly: compact, a white pinafore with skirts like sea foam and black bands around her waist and throat, each hand gloved in black, fluttering in a lace cuff like a spider in a white blossom. Her long legs are also pitch black and likewise her hair, wrenched back in a tight knot on top of her head. She’s still far away, then suddenly she cartwheels along one roof’s spine and hurls herself out into the air like a thunderbolt, flashing through the air. He hears her touch down over his head, her two feet landing as light as birds. Footsteps tap up and down over his head—she seems to be dancing.

The Divinity Student throws open the sash and thrusts his head out the window, craning his head in time to see a flash of petticoat. Then suddenly her face appears between his and the sky, peering down. She smiles, and her smile strikes him with a tangible shock, like a hammer blow. Her teeth are jagged as a mouthful of venomous broken glass, her eyes, black and glistening like deep wells, narrow to two happy crescents. The Divinity Student steps back from the window, and in a flash she flips down, hanging from the eaves, slipping lithely into the room. Now she is immediately in front of him, silhouetted against the window. She puts her hands on her hips and looks at him, and her teeth flare in an awful grin when she notices jars on shelves and tables. She takes a step forward, one of her gleaming shoes crackles a spare page lying on the floor; she squats and looks it over—it’s one of his notebook pages—her eyes snap back up to him again, and they shine this time deeper than water, pinning him on the spot.

The page drops straight to the floor like a stone. She walks up, making ghastly delightful faces, and stands right in front of him, breathing cool air on him; she’s rustling and cool with flesh like tissues of liquid air, pulls a serious face and raps on his head with her knuckles. He jerks away but does not retreat. She raps again, gravely. Then he reaches for her, and she reaches for him, and what happens next—words fail, words fail . . .

Now he’s always dreaming, and so sensitive to the slightest excess of sensation that daytime is too much for him. He remains inside all day, quailing with a sense of brittle fragility that threatens to erupt in splitting pain, and when night brings him relief, he wanders the streets, passing cemeteries filled with ghosts standing in their graves, quietly chorusing “Oh see us,” after him, eyes closed, hands pat the air. His eyes close and his hands pat the air just the same. He then leaves San Veneficio altogether to walk outside in the desert. The monitors ignore him, lying motionless in rows, a petrified forest of black shapes against the horizon, eyes staring reflected light back at the city. He still sees strange things, but away from the streetlamps he can’t make them out clearly—they’re much larger and slower out in the desert, sometimes whispering past him just a few inches away, whale-sized or larger, and glacially silent, and the Eclogue takes on the mute immediate face of an animal. He’ll look up at the stars, or a gibbous moon, and a vast shadow will swim by overhead, diving between the clouds, occasionally sinking low to drift along the ground.

As he wanders there, sometimes he turns and looks at the city, and his eyes water and smart. Glowing, San Veneficio blurs into a jagged coppery smear along the horizon, shimmering at its base, its penumbra of lights dotted with spiraling shapes circling over the Orpheum, the plazas and spires, his house. Lustrous people-shaped things sail around the walls like uprooted anemones. Gazing at the city repels him, disorienting, making him giddy, and he turns away before too long.

Returning one night, sleep steals over him with such force that he drops to the ground directly, like a scarecrow.

Sunlight lances red-gray through his eyelids, the shadows of people fall across his face. He covers his face with his palms against the light, until, after blinking a few minutes into his hands, he becomes accustomed. The Divinity Student looks up, squinting. He’s lying at the end of Box Street, just inside the border where pavement gives way to bare dirt and trees. It takes a long time for him to make out the dim figure hovering against a wall nearby.

The Divinity Student drags himself up into a crouch and starts to move toward the other man—then stops. There’s a line drawn in the dirt in front of him. It curves around . . . it’s a circle. Someone had drawn a circle around him while he was sleeping. The Divinity Student surges forward and then staggers back. He pushes out to the sides and all around, but no good, he can’t move past the perimeter. Every time he nears the edge a greasy nausea rolls over in his stomach, and the physical burden of the sun’s light becomes a sort of sucking pressure snapping at his legs, making him tumble to his knees again.

The one against the wall is coming toward him. Now the Divinity Student can see him, the curious expression on Ollimer’s face, that he had not genuinely believed it would work, still doesn’t believe it.

“Now listen you,” he says quiet and timid, “just stay where you are.”

“Break this line and get me out of here.” The Divinity Student’s voice is harsh and disembodied, and for a moment Ollimer almost looks ready to obey. He straightens instead.

“I’ll let you out, provided you give me reason.”

“I don’t have my notebook and you wouldn’t get it anyway now break this line!” He points to the ground.

“You have to turn over the house! . . . You made a commitment and now you have to give us the words!” It’s beginning to dawn on him that the Divinity Student really can’t get out of the circle. “You’ll hand them over or stay right where you are!”

Time passes. Ollimer stands with strengthening resolve at the end of the empty street, the Divinity Student, squatting in the dust, glowers malevolently back up at him.

Suddenly he’s knocking back and forth inside the circle like a caged animal throwing dust in the air, howling and barking curses, and Ollimer jumps backwards startled. The Divinity Student freezes and stares intently at Ollimer, and for Ollimer it’s as if two black gulfs yawn in that face. This time the Divinity Student speaks quietly. “Break the line.”

Ollimer is trying to twist himself free, screwing his eyes shut against the two icy fingers that press out of the Divinity Student’s face onto his own.

“Come here.”

“You owe us those words!”

“Come here and I’ll give them to you.”

Ollimer takes a step. “You don’t have your notebook.”

“I was bluffing, I have it right here.” He shows the book, holding it between his long fingertips. “Let me give it to you.”

Ollimer is coming toward him now. “And the house? What about that—”

Ollimer has permitted his hand to stray over the circle’s border. He’s staring at the way his shadow falls across the circumference he drew on the ground, his head cocked to one side, gazing with the look of a daydreaming schoolboy at his hand’s shadow, realizing too late, in slow motion—and then the Divinity Student seizes Ollimer’s outstretched hand and drags him forward nearly tearing his arm from his socket. Ollimer’s feet gouge two long grooves over the circle’s outline, breaking it.

The Divinity Student explodes, hurling Ollimer down the street, sending him flying down the block, touching the ground roughly on his side and then Ollimer skips and spins along the pavement like a stone skimming the surface of a lake, slapping the ground with his palms trying to steady himself, finally he manages to get to his feet and runs in panic down a side alley. Behind him the Divinity Student is angrily scuffing the circle out with his feet, and when he’s done, Ollimer is just disappearing ratlike around a corner.

“Ollimer I’ll murder you! I’ll cut you out of your head and give your body to the butcher!”

His black coat bursts open in a cloud of dust, and springlike the Divinity Student sprints after Ollimer, his long legs reaching out and snapping back so far he nearly grazes his back with his heels. Almost out of control he ricochets down the alley, he windmills his arms seizing garbage cans and debris and tossing them out of his way, and he’s granted a glimpse of Ollimer at the other end of the alley, pale panicking face under flight-disheveled red hair. The Divinity Student bellows horribly at the retreating back. Redoubling his efforts he leaps over crates and heaps of trash, rappelling off of windowsills and fire escapes to keep himself in the air. He rounds the next corner, and Ollimer is vanishing down another alley, showing his heels like a scared rabbit.

Ollimer leads him toward the town center. Presently the routes widen, more people appear, until they’re both of them fighting their way through crowds, Ollimer weaving with agility enhanced by fear, and the Divinity Student stiff-arming pedestrians and cars out of his way. They’re murky shadows to him, scarcely recognizable. All he sees is a flash of red bobbing like an apple a few blocks ahead. But as time goes on his rage abates—he gets confused and worn out. The burden of the light and the enervating presence of other people seeps into his joints and saps his strength and determination by degrees, until he has to forget about Ollimer. He’s started dreaming again, getting a soft head, half-blinded by the obscure shapes milling around, their murmuring voices humming up and down in his mind. Something like a jackal is peering at him from a window. It throws its head back and its mouth tears wide, yellow shoots and leaves sprouting from its throat, so the jackal seizes the vine and pulls it, coaxing it to grow with its hands. The Divinity Student watches the blind drop between them, and a sodden depression closes on him. Further down the block, a long black car belching exhaust pulls up and disgorges a large black dog, disappears into a building. The engine stands idling, fumes catching in the Divinity Student’s throat, nauseating. Later, the dog comes back out again, back into the car, the door slams and the car speeds off, odd smell emanating. Feeble and lost, he wanders with arms outstretched in front of him like a blind man, trying to find his way back to the house.

He blunders up the Street of Wrought-Iron Workers, deserted now—it’s midday, and too hot to work with fire. He passes them drinking their tea on the corner. The street curves as it goes up, and soon they’re out of sight; he’s invisible, soaking with sweat, he stops, pulls the atomizer from his pocket, and sprays formaldehyde on his face. The Divinity Student stares around at the twisted black iron gates and rods in the shop courtyards, and it seems to him as if he’s wandering among strange oversized letters glistening in gullies and nooks to either side, limned in flickering inky fire. The impression of walking through a printed page becomes overwhelming, disarming, and he sprays himself again, taking comfort in the familiar bitter smell and searing vapor.