The Wretch of the Sun, page 10
A woman enters the room; she runs the grocery on the square and sells him most of his food. She feels an uncertain combination of pity and desire for him and has brought him a mesh bag with three oranges. They talk amiably, she standing by the table, he sitting. The oranges nestle incongruously among the glue, wire, and twine. He is friendly and even flirtatious in a gruff sort of way. She fondly likens him to a bear in his cave and lays her hand on his shoulder.
Very calmly he puts the puppet he’s working on down. He glances at her hand on his shoulder, hearing her continuing to talk pleasantly to him without following what she says because there’s another . . .
With a slight turn of his head, he glances out the window at the sun, which is now immediately outside the building. It’s so close that her hair is brushing the outer wall, and her transparent hands are sliding into the room just starting to rumble.
He’s been walking directly toward her for a long time, eyes riveted on the sun rolling along the horizon, virtually horizontally, arms outstretched as always. Snow pours into his face from over her shoulders. The fluttering snow augments her light, the flakes are transformed into chill embers, and as the billows strengthen, pushing hard against him and getting thicker all the time, that gush of snow admits more and more of her heatless illumination which propels the snow—
The woman from the grocery is beginning to notice how still and abstracted he is. This is, she realizes, because he’s choking. He staggers to his feet and claws at his throat. She calls for help and grabs at his hands without any clear idea of what to do. Sweat bursts from all his pores and his clothes are immediately soaked with it. He feels limp, although there’s a kind of wild pulsation she can sense inside him, in his bones maybe. His knees won’t lock.
The wind splits the edge of his right hand, held up to screen his eyes, and blood oozes out, flattens into a paste matted with snow and spatters and thickens on his face. It’s a relief, as if his hand had been intolerably swollen. The blast scours the tissue from his bones. With a sigh, he folds into a drift of sharpened snow his skeleton clean and cold. Snowflakes bristle inside his long bones scrubbing the marrow out with a harsh tingling sensation. With an unbearable relief, his ligaments finally give way and the bones tumble apart in sections and pieces. The mandible comes loose from the skull with a gulping sound and lopes down the snowbank like a broken hoop. All the while, her arms arching over the ground are curving in toward him again, where the heap of him lies the foremost part of a comet with a long tail of red debris streaked back in the white.
The woman from the grocery has him leaning, his head and shoulders against the wall in a white square of sunlight. His face has a weird epileptic dignity, though sweat trickles from his scalp.
El Gigante takes the puppet head from C.’s table and flourishes it at the crowd outside like a ventriloquist dummy.
“El Miserable del Sollll . . . The finest in entertainment!”
(.)
An intimidater hovers over an intersection a few blocks away. Trudy glances up at it with hatred. What’s it watching? Is it watching anything? They fly them low, whoever they are, just because they can, to show us how little we mean to them. It’s great, they can step on a whole neighborhood at once, rattling windows and waking up babies. A prowl car oozes by with warbles and chirps, goosing pedestrians with the sound. Preceded by a spoiled-brat bawl, the police van slithers up behind it. You see them hanging around everywhere now, just parking with their headlights splashed across a sidewalk, the front of a house. They shine their lights right into the windows, blind everyone who goes by.
Celada used to complain about the construction in his neighborhood.
“My whole neighborhood is blasting with this carcinogenic noise,” he would moan, rubbing his forehead. “I can feel the vibrations in my bed when I try to sleep. It’s like contact poison.”
Celada referred to these instruments of urban torture collectively as disruptors, and then Trudy had suggested disrupters, since the “-ors” ending sounds a bit too grand. He’d agreed, laughing heartily. He had a funny laugh, a little like a clown’s. Shortly thereafter she’d coined the word “intimidater.” She couldn’t talk with anyone else about that kind of thing. No one else she knew liked to play with words much.
Walking home one evening along the outskirts of the park, suddenly a van with tinted windows zips up alongside her. It keeps pace with her while she’s walking, the entire length of the park. The stillness of the houses and the emptiness of the unused sidewalks becomes ominous. When she turns into a side street, the van disappears with a whoosh.
A few weeks later, a black-and-white had darted in on her as she was walking along the same route, in keeping with both rule one, use of vehicles to intimidate pedestrians, and rule two, employment of surprise. A light plays over her and a voice squawks from behind the radiator grill, demanding to know what she is doing.
“Going home,” she replied matter-of-factly. Trudy could stand completely still.
“buck What were you doing here tonight?”
“Walking.”
“. . . buck The reason I stopped you was because you were making what you call furtive movements you were moving furtively.”
Apparently Trudy is supposed to answer this somehow.
“I was going home,” she says simply.
“buck You know the park closes at sunset.”
This is a lie. People can be seen doing things in the park at all hours. There are no posted opening or closing times. In the silence that follows this lie, Trudy imagines a greasy look slide up and down her person. She holds her hands relaxed, and plainly empty, at her waist.
“Oh, it does? I didn’t know.”
“buck Yeah. So do me a favor and walk outside the fence, understand?”
“Just right around here?” she asks flatly, pointing to a gap in the fence a few feet away.
“. . . buck Yeah, right around there.”
The street is empty when she emerges from the gap. Looking around she watches the car crawl up under a railway trestle and beam a spotlight into its groin. The car eats bats, and huge rats bloated with garbage.
“That’s just police,” Celada had said later, with a flip of his hand. “Not Ukehy.”
“What’s oo-kay-hee?”
“Oh, didn’t you know? They’re the ‘they’ everyone talks about. They’re them, behind what-have-you.”
“You mean like spies?”
“Secret police. Open secret police,” he says, holding up a finger. “Everyone knows about them, subconsciously. In fact no one has to be told about them, because you know they exist. Immanently. I don’t mean by intuition, but because they’re like . . . what’s . . . drawn in the spaces between things. Like a negative image.”
“Implied?”
“Exactly.”
The implication is conveyed by a professional sneer and a look of supercilious rejection that wants to rediscover itself in other faces preparatory to gang-up. It’s a look from over the wall of the impregnable fortress of their hostile ordinariness, and majorness, and she would look them back squarely and say, if not quite aloud, not quite silently, either, and with equal parts weariness and anger:
“Yes. All right. Pretty scary. I’m a nigger. I’m stupid. I’m dirty. I’m ugly. To you.
“What are you? What do you do that’s so worthwhile? Because from my point of view I can’t see what’s so amazingly worthwhile about you. I am afraid of you. Yes, you’ve done that. But then I’m not the one who’s hiding. That’s you. Why do you hide from me? What makes you think you can?
“Nigger . . . stupid ugly and dirty crazy, bad . . . the oldest and the most boring of words. You’ll sit back there behind your ramparts and your walls and your secrecy lapping at those words forever like a stale old salt lick, chewing and chewing that same gravelly as the whole world falls to pieces and all the lights go out for the last time. And do you ever get sick of it? Don’t you ever get tired of that nasty taste in your mouths and get the urge to ask innocent questions? Or is it lotus flower, turning your brains to mush while you love it more and more?”
Trudy crosses Plaza de Invierno and takes a wobbling side street that curves out of sight, lined with crooked houses that jut across the pavement or hang back, creating cavernous gaps. This is one of many abandoned areas in the modelsuburb. Most of these houses are untenanted even by squatters, there being fewer people in Cimelia Cisterna than there used to be. There used to be much more money, if not much more variety. Then the crash, and, some things changed. People couldn’t afford cars after that, and the modelsuburb was built around cars—without them, every journey suddenly became significantly longer. Everyone who stayed had to move in closer together, or use the handful of overcrowded buses that still run.
The sound of hissing weeds. Then the air shudders, and suddenly there’s an intimidater’s metallic gargling in the sky. Plenty of fuel for them. Trudy ducks into the shell of an entryway and climbs a few steps toward the elevated front door, using the stone rims of the steps rather than trust to the fibrous gray wood. The gargle flaps gracelessly by and the building trembles, the sound jolting and fading awkwardly. Trudy is invisible to it, sheltered beneath the roof of the deep porch. When the intimidater is gone, she descends carefully and checks the street in both directions for prowl cars.
Now her route follows a guttered alley between a brick building and a plank fence. Her face in the black windows. Turning the corner, she walks up a short cement ramp to a sliding barn door, which is a little ajar, looks around, then waves her hand in front of the door. A voice greets her quietly inside, and she goes in. Standing just within and to one side of the door, she is taking a parcel from her bag and giving it to someone with a ragged sweater sleeve. She gets back a packet of tape cassettes, which she shoves well down in her bag and drags other stuff over before she snaps the snaps.
Celada jerked the crumbs off his plate into the sink set plate down heavily on the dresser turned back to retrieve his coffee with a loud sniff. Dunked the rest of the coffee from the bottle on the little gas ring into his mug added a spoon of sugar from a jar and stirred it around making a noise like a streetcar going by. Clang clang clang.
He clears his throat in the empty apartment. He has an open book crushed in his armpit, carrying it into the other room.
A sentence like this one, with respect to a house supposed to be haunted: “The ghost was reputed to shoot from the alcove, cross the master bedroom in a flash, and thrust its cold, thin arms under the covers at the sleeper.”
This is the type of absolutely incomprehensible statement that characterizes the haunted house in the literature. It seems bizarre to take something like that, which could only be described as an entirely unique experience, and turn it into an example of typical goings on. The gap there between the particular and the general is so enormous that it creates a charge, a charged particle . . .
. . . a negatively charged particle: let’s call it an isolaton. Pronounced ICE-oh-l’ton.
(Celada never does anything because he’s too busy trying to solve the problem why he never does anything, as if he’s going to forge ahead finally by means of collateral construction.)
Like the gluon, the isolaton is its own anti-particle.
Go to the window.
a bird singing in the empty street
note note
high low
if the sound were visible it would look like a Chinese character
God mutters something through this bird right now
He must, it’s telling him, synthesize the isolaton . . . accelerate the isolaton, raising its energy level, to see what will happen. Will it change? The machine would involve let’s say a book—its age might be a factor—about haunted houses, set into a metal frame and exposed to . . . a field, he’ll figure out which kind later.
The book is exposed to a field, and this, à la Faraday, should cause the isolaton generated by the disparity between general and particular in the book to accelerate out of the book and to be captured in a vat of glue or something.
Some days he staggers home hamstrung, feeling useless, prematurely old, hyperbolically rejected . . . That humiliation rises from memory again as he lies in bed. Don’t think it, he tells himself, and don’t not think about it. Just roll on it, like a clear rubber ball on a water, until it’s worn itself down. It’s physical, like nausea. You just ride it out. Never open it.
The book won’t open, it sits across from the reader.
The reader says: “Tell me a story, book.”
The book says: “No.” (Wiggling sassily in its seat.)
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. I don’t feel like it.”
“I’ll come back later, then, when you’re more in the mood.”
“No, read me now!” the book says, with a perverse glint in its something.
“Read what?”
. . . written in blood, everywhere he sees the word flash at him
COWARD . . . COWARD . . .
Celada can do anything he wants to, and he does practically nothing. And yet he is always busy, as though he had a demanding job in another dimension. It’s because countless things happen in his imagination. He’s always astonished when people ask him how things have been going or what’s been up, because nothing’s been up, and yet so much has been going on in his imagination.
There is something else, which may have been a real tour de force of his imagination, or not imaginary at all. One of his many little projects had been the exploration of Sanglade, last year, shortly after the fizzling out of his romance with Trudy.
Now entirely unused for any purpose, the conservatory is a separate structure attached to the outside of Sanglade. It consists of a metal frame, painted white, and many panes of frosted glass of a murky gray color. As ivy has overgrown it, the conservatory has become a sinister heap of dark flakes that shiver in the sun. Sepulchral old trees and a trellised, ivy-fleeced wall shade it. In the little enclosure before the door, there is a paved space where one can find a frayed wooden table, stacks of red pots, rusted clippers and weeding tools, an orange spade with a disintegrating handle, leaf litter.
The door opened reluctantly, seizing the floor more than once. Celada left it drawn back, because the carpet of ivy on the glass roof, obscured nearly all the nickelly sunlight of that day.
The air was rusty in there. The light threw a faint shadow on the bricks, on the gray, concrete floor, scratched with rust where steel tables had once stood in ranks. A broad sideboard ran at his right, sacks of potters’ earth stacked under it, strewn with pots and planters trailing wilted rags of long-dead plants.
His feet rasped against the floor. The only other sound was the regular interrogative call of a bird somewhere in the vicinity. To his left, the sullen gleam of a steel table, slotted and indented for irrigation. A faucet above it. Celada glanced at the rear wall, imagining it opening directly into the house by means of a grand staircase, and people descending in ball gowns and archaic finery. He imagined rows of orchids, and, incongruously, a butterfly collection in a wooden case down in the water too—why not? The steel was bare, with a crust of dried green scum along the edge.
A silhouette stood between him and the door. It was so close that, when he turned, he was nearly looking down at it.
The silhouette had been a woman’s. Nearly at his eye level, the bun in her hair was frizzy. The egg-shape of the head, the ears against it, the taper of the side of the face—but nothing of the eyes or features. The slender neck and the shoulders, the hands apparently at the sides, a dress.
He swung wildly away, around it, and reeled out the door backwards, tripped and fell without feeling the jolt, then scuttled until the enclosure stopped him, all the while shouting with fear. He imagined the silhouette advancing to the threshold to look at him, and he might have seen that. He rolled sideways and lunged to his feet, dashed onto the lawn, staring around himself at the sunlight and the trees, the familiar surroundings.
He hasn’t been back since, although the thought of the shadow no longer really scares him. Embarrassment, as much as fear, keeps him from going back.
No. He is really afraid. Not exactly of the figure, but of the stealth, the silence, the suddenness, with which it had appeared, and which seemed likely still to be invisibly there. And worst of all he had looked like a coward—been a coward!—in full view of the house.
((..))
One of the puppeteers, a slender cigarette dangler in a knit vest and a doily cap, a scurf of beard around his chops, sips from his beer bottle daintily. He can’t keep ordinary jobs because he can’t be bothered to keep track of other people’s business for them. He stalks past D.’s squat on long asparagus legs and stops a moment.
Glancing in the door, he sees E. sitting on a canvas folding chair looking at someone standing across from him in the thin shadow at the corner of the room.
“I thought I saw a boy in here with you.”
F. looks at him steadily, his face blank. “Perhaps he’s still around here somewhere,” he says without emphasis.
“You didn’t see him?”
“I’m not sure.” G. pivots and picks up a hand mirror from the table.
“Light blond hair, nearly white—maybe ten or eleven? Dark skin though.”
H. shrugs and puts on his makeup. In the mirror his eyes have a sinister, half-asleep look.
Trudy had trouble sleeping last night. When she knows she’s alone, she drops down onto a sofa in one of the parlors set aside for students. It’s time for her to be going home, and she waves to each of the people she met at the conference, who are all together in a clearing; she looks at each face in turn, mentally saying goodbye one by one. After a while, the road becomes a remembered route through buildings; she climbs in a window to find a pit at her feet. She knows she came this way before, on her way to the conference, but she doesn’t remember how she did it. She doesn’t remember the conference. There’s another window separated from this one by a buttress with an alcove in it—she could swing out over the pit, put her foot in the alcove, transfer herself into it, and then swing out to the next window, but instead she retreats outside and almost immediately finds a much easier, and far less dangerous, way to go.
