The Divinity Student (9 page)

Just past the churchyard, along the treeline at the city’s border, he can see a column of white vapor moving, sweeping along into town; curiosity bringing him closer, he comes in, watches the train slow and pause amid the grating of brakes. Steam envelops the station, billows out into the courtyard, and gushes through gargoyles’ mouths as it pours over the chapel. A group of people veiled in black darken the platform, dry hands like branches in the air, to receive a casket from a Pullman car. Six dark men in suits bring the coffin. An open carriage bowered in back with wreaths and garlands emerges from behind the church, pulled by a black mare with a high black plume.

The Divinity Student watches them load the hearse; the horse bows its blinkered head to gaze at the cobbles. He thinks of the horse, Desden’s horse, and recoils himself at a terrible idea. As they load the coffin into the hearse he has an awful idea.

He measures his pace, turning deliberately from the courtyard, and following the Street of Wax once again to the plaza, and he denies that he’s thinking about what he’s thinking about.

Then, just outside Woodwind’s, in the alley, he stops to regard a handsome cat perched on a windowsill. It’s all in black save for a white spot at its throat, just like him—all black but for a bleached collar, vaguely phosphorescent, peering out from his heavy coat. The cat is green-eyed, as is he, just sitting there, just looking at him. It tosses its head once toward a building off to one side and bounds past his shoulder, across the alley, disappearing. A hot wind snaps the tails of his coat; he looks both ways, up and down the boulevard, but there is no one. He slips into the building.

The lobby opens to him, scented with her fragrance, turning, and suddenly she’s there, within inches of his face, watering a potted rubber plant. Looking at him, her eyelids flare a moment, head inclining slightly to the side; she can see something’s happened. Then she relaxes, eyes almost closing, their color changing to purple, their luster deepening into distant facets, and she smiles brightly at him.

“You look different,” she teases, and shakes her head, light strands of stray hair tapping his face like drops of rain. The Divinity Student looks down at her pearls and grins faintly.

Miss Woodwind seizes his ear, “Tell me what happened!” just cajoling him, still smiling, her breath spreads twin crescents on his spectacles.

“I walked in my sleep,” a mock wince, his hands flutter at his side.

She releases his ear, but the contact brought her close. Her soft fingers had pinched his ear; her voice hummed through him.

The plant across the room needs water. He wanders up the stairs.

Householder and Blandings are playing dominoes in the corner; they ignore him—Ollimer rushes up.

“Could you do me a favor? I wouldn’t ask otherwise, but I don’t know who to turn to . . . ”

The Divinity Student tells him to wait, sits down at his desk and copies out his ledger, Ollimer all the while running fingers through his copper locks, cleaning his glasses, rubbing his palms on his vest, swaying from foot to foot. The other two rattle their dominoes and mutter to each other in subdued voices.

He finishes quickly and strides out the door, Ollimer following closely. “Please accompany me to the house . . . ”

He knows what to expect. They pass through the empty lobby and out into the alley, shooing dogs away from the door. With a furtive casting about for witnesses, Ollimer leads him back, quiet, glancing over his shoulder, nervous, and sad.

Ollimer’s parlor. The Divinity Student enters slowly, expecting the other man to trot out the wallet, produce the next fragment of the Catalog. With a stricken look, Ollimer gestures vaguely to the corner of the room, his aunt’s body is leaning up against a chair, stiff as a plank. Her eyes and mouth are open, her flesh looks like blue cheese. She’s been awkwardly dressed in a fraying gray terrycloth robe, twisted, plastered, and strangely wrinkled in her nephew’s haste to cover her. Her feet are curled up like two pillbugs.

“I’m terribly sorry to trouble you, won’t you please give her the last rites? You’re the only religious person I know.”

Ollimer cuts him off as he opens his mouth, “No priests—they all hated her, she wouldn’t want a priest.”

“All right. Does she have a bedroom?”

“Thank you so much, at the end of the hall, the door’s open . . . ” Ollimer’s gratitude pours out, meanwhile the Divinity Student hauls the old woman into his arms and turns in time to see Ollimer heading for the door.

“Get back over here!”

The other man freezes.

“Idiot! I’m not going to do everything for you! Now get in there and shut the curtains, and get the damn bed ready!”

Ollimer bolts down the hall like a scared rabbit, the Divinity Student swaying behind carrying the body. She’s heavy-soft like a cushion, all save her neck, her head stiffly upright, eyes pasty and dull, turning blue about the lips. In the dark of the hall a dim light shining through doughy flesh becomes visible just at the center of her head, he can see drifts of shining dust in her mouth and nostrils.

Just at the threshold of her room her weight seems to double and the Divinity Student stops, almost losing his balance. Her dead eyes roll in her head and the corners of her mouth turn up. She stares at him, winks an eye and grins wider. He steals a glance at Ollimer, who’s lighting candles with his back turned, then looks back at the body—she follows his eyes and draws air through her gums with a sticky sound, hushing him, a little secret.

“Quiet, stupid,” he says and slams her head hard against the door jamb. Her head drops, she goes still.

The room is small with rose wallpaper, the floorboards taken up in the corner, water rushing far below breathing mist up into the room. With care, he lays her down on the bed and straightens her robe. Not a large woman, wouldn’t take too much formaldehyde to pickle—and that’s enough of that!

“You,” he takes Ollimer by one shoulder and manhandles him to kneel at the foot of the bed, “stay.”

He leaps onto the bed, pulling a hammer from his pocket, and starts pounding nails all along the top of the headboard. In a moment, he turns and drives another row of nails into the footboard, Ollimer wincing as the hammer falls within an inch of his face. No time to waste, the Divinity Student withdraws a fistful of wires and some pliers from his pocket, and starts stringing wire from nail to nail over her sodden body. With much slicing of fingers and screeching of metal he draws the last one tight.

Then the Divinity Student stands over the body with the Holy Book in his hands. He sets himself on his feet, kneading the cover a moment with his hands, then opens it, to watch letters flicker on rippling pages in wan yellow light. He lets the words out into the room, lets them hum through the wires strung across the bed like a tone across guitar strings.

Air trickles out around her teeth and the hollow of her mouth humming in the walls and bedframe, rattling the windows, buzzing in the cords strung tight above her, draft reeking of stale ice, words bubble from her lips, shaped somewhere deep in her chest—but Ollimer doesn’t hear. The Divinity Student bends down to listen . . . only silence, wires blurred but quiet. The room goes dark, he can see her head lit up like a paper lantern, thin curtains of flesh shining orange from inside, out of her gaping mouth, lights shining on the threads, passing up and down their length like mercury in a thermometer. He passes his hand over her face—the words stop, the light winks out. He signals Ollimer to get up.

“Thank you,” Ollimer is fumbling in his pocket—the Divinity Student knows what he’s got. “ . . . here,” a familiar-looking scrap of paper.

Ollimer insisted that the two fragments stay together, that the Divinity Student could not keep it; the point wasn’t pressed. Later, the Divinity Student couldn’t recall the word itself:
mermeral
or
mermarescent
but definitely with
mermer
or
mermar
in it, with this definition, handwritten:

A prince, or a prisoner, on his deathbed remembered for the first time a childhood incident. Wandering in his ancestral home, he found himself in the dining room. Up until that time he had only seen it at night, in the company of adults, and now, daylight revealed it to be a false room—the windows were plain white paper, the furniture, decorations, even the plants, were all props, hastily slapped together, where they had seemed so fragile and elegant before. Upon leaving the room he found the house was empty. Then he died. The boy is a man remembering, on this one occasion, he is dying.

Again, the same disorientation, vertigo on the edge of the paper, words written as a guide toward an obscure center—

“This is my payment?”

“Don’t put it like that!” Ollimer comes up to him, hands open in supplication. “I’m very sorry—”

He brandishes the Holy Book and seizes Ollimer by his collar. “You’re going to be sorry for real this time if you don’t tell me who’s putting you up to this!”

Ollimer squirms. Perspiration oozes on his forehead.

“Baiting me! What is it—is there a schedule, do you give me a fragment a week, and more and more? And then what happens? What happens then?”

“Let me go!” Ollimer casts fearful eyes up at the book. “There was only one left to go after this one! They’re getting ready to tell you everything—you know as much as I do! You can’t possibly blame me for this!”

The body on the bed emits a high arching wail, the Divinity Student hurls the book at it hard, striking it across the forehead. The wailing stops. Dragging Ollimer with him, he staggers over to the bed and reclaims the book.

“Well, I think we’re going to wrap this one up ahead of schedule. I think I’m going to go straight to the source this time!”

Ollimer actually relaxes. “Yes, all right, that’s a good idea.”

The Divinity Student releases him gingerly. Ollimer looks as if he’ll faint.

“I’ll relay your wishes and get an answer—”

“You’ll tell me now.”

Ollimer deflates. With an effort, he turns to the desk and scribbles a name and address, sweat spattering the wood and scattered notes.

“Here,” he croaks, holding out a crumpled paper covered in botched handwriting.

The Divinity Student puts the book away, takes the paper, and walks out the door without looking back.

So the Divinity Student. whittles away the daylight hours in Desden’s meat locker, alternately watching the Saturday crowd marketing up and down the road through the doorway and playing hide and seek with the address Ollimer had given him. He puts it away for a while and then picks it out of his pockets again, stares at it without seeing, then folds it up, making shapes, being bored, paper

gets rattier and more crinkled until he can barely read it in the dull glare filtering in from the shop. He avoids making a decision by counting tiles on the wall and calculating how many checks there are in the floor, then how many black checks and how many white checks and trying to reckon their length and breadth measuring in hand-widths. It won’t be until sunset that he’ll make his decision, whether or not to go. He’s been missing nighttime, and being able to look up at the sky without burning his face, so he’ll wait.

Watching Desden he notices something. Every time a woman comes into the shop he tenses up, and just as she’s turning to go out the door again he’ll raise his hand and just wave at her a little. He waits until she’s almost all the way round with her back to him, but not so far that she couldn’t possibly see him, only enough to make it improbable that she would see him. The expression on his face—he’d jump under the counter if he was caught. But every time, like clockwork, that tiny wave at the turning head, hair and shoulders and curve of her cheek, a glint of her eye framed with lashes, then he goes back to his cutting, always watching the mirror as he cuts, staring hard into the glass.

Eventually, the Divinity Student gets up and meanders into the shop. Teo is sitting on a folding chair, knees spread over a bucket, plucking chickens with a sour, bored expression. It’s dimming outside, orange lights coming on at crazy angles along the street, pedestrians pass in glowing white cottons.

“I’m going out for a while,” he says.

“After I close up I might be able to find you a cot.”

He thanks the butcher and swings out the door into wine-colored air, his collar goes phosphorescent blue-white, and he looks up into cool azure sky and first pale lights, air stirring slightly with spare desert smells. He settles down, and sets off to meet Ollimer’s contact.

Behind him, a mush-faced little girl is watching the shop, sees him leave. A fly is buzzing in and out of her mouth.

He dawdles and hangs about, taking time to investigate back alleys, cockfights, musicians; he stops at a corner to eat bread and cold water, indulges himself with a stale plum-sized sugar skull branded with his name.

The address belongs to a house standing alone at the edge of an athletic field, an oversized brick box with one door in the middle of its face, and one narrow window immediately over it, resembling nothing so much as a cyclops. No lights nor mailbox, only a chain-link fence and concrete path. He knocks on the door and it swings open before him on an empty hallway lost in a vast unlit building. With a little investigation he discovers a pair of fine fishing lines running from a hook on the back of door to a motor, poorly concealed behind a bust on the hall table. The cobwebs on the bust are artificial.

Swift footsteps herald his appearance: Fasvergil floats up out of the unlit murk of the house into the paling orange light of the single window.

“I was told to expect you. You have been extremely impulsive.” Fasvergil’s voice is dry; it rustles along the walls like dead leaves.

“The power went out only a few moments ago.” He deftly lights a storm lantern, a column of light touching his saturnine features. Fasvergil is wearing his ordinary black habit. Chalk-dust still powders his sleeves and shoulders. Beneath, his thin ankles descend from the hem into small dark shoes.

“Shut the door.”

The lamp draws him in after Fasvergil, and as he immerses himself in the depths of the house he can see that the entire place is one vast chamber separated by high partitions, supported like stage flats by chains hanging from the ceiling. Their footsteps echo over their heads, and meet an answering tick of a hidden clock. Emerging into the vast central parlor he sees it is a lumberyard of carnival haunting-props from cannibalized ghost-trains, mired half in shadow, in failing light, like shipwrecks: dressers’ dummies leaning in the corner next to a skeleton, glass eyes on a shelf, chain-bound books with uncut pages next to a crystal ball on the table, all cluttered with deliberate disarray and aged with tea stains and fake dust. A heavy grandfather clock raps solemnly in the corner, and a dull bread smell comes from Fasvergil’s dinner, sitting in a pool of light from a wine-bottle candle on a card table; he pulls a Chinese screen across that corner of the room and brings the light out, setting it on an endtable.