The Wretch of the Sun, page 13
Waving his hands in mesmeric passes over the dummy.
“Get up and walk.”
It follows him home, carrying its own casket. He puts it in the puppet show. Her advice is always good.
(.)
The two of them together on the veranda.
“Don’t you want me to?”
“No, I don’t,” she says shaking her blond hair.
“Are you lying?” he asks right away.
Someone might have come around a corner and have seen them kissing there.
They fold and knead together. On the inside, there is a dark place his mind’s eye conceives of as an organ, looking like a stone cut in half exposing the softly varied, creamy bands of minerals, grays and browns, radiating from a small hollow center with a thick outline of paler gray. A hardboiled stone egg, all made of implacably contracting tissue, which emits a warm molasses preparing to fossilize itself. Then together they shake, tremble, his thoughts snap into a single brilliant point, then billow out again and retire. Paralyzed woman in his arms. Her face takes a while to make sense. Then, in the morning, again, when he comes up behind her as she stands at the bathroom sink, and she turns around for shattering need stark and absolute.
These are only stories. Like manure, easy to spread. Spread it out like a warm quilt to get lost in. Lap the head in soft dark, unmoor, and drift . . . filled with glowing weakness. Then it contracts, because it must, with a bitter taste and a jostled discomposure in body, but nothing serious. The story cracks. Its glamor stays with Celada like the memory of fairy gold in what does last, which is the getting lost.
When he was a boy, and later in life, a few times . . .
He never saw their value until now. Those were the moments when the word pressed itself on him—”Lost!” It’s virtually onomotopoeia, like a groan of shock and thwarted hope, carried through dead trees on the wind, ending with a truncated hiss. Landmarks come in strings, but suddenly everything is a landmark, and nothing is. Teasing turning vicious by degrees, and fear starting to grow, imagining having to sleep hidden in a store and to eat trash.
Sanglade knows exactly where it is, at all times, and Celada doesn’t believe for a moment that its ghosts aren’t anything but artfully and maliciously lost in its world. It is itself a place, so it can’t get lost.
Yesterday he met Trudy in the street, and she told him about the record. When they part again, and because it doesn’t erase the moment he heard the ghost, no matter how it happened to be or not to be there, he finds it doesn’t make any real difference. The house is dirtied by a precious name and by an alert invisible presence that teases him for floundering and doing things by halves. It mocks him for keeping his life stored away unused inside him. That’s a fugitive, other Celada, that this Celada knows nothing about, capering, snickering, and dematerializing behind the louring facade of an exotic old arts-and-crafts house. The danger is that, of the two of them, this Celada here, in the street, will turn out to be the one who is a flimsy shred of make-believe, and that other will turn out to be the real one, dreaming a mediocre, incoherent dream of itself.
“Reality keeps scooping me,” he thinks.
It’s not that his stories come true, but that it keeps turning out that they might as well have been true, when he made them up.
“My stories aren’t true,” he goes on, as the words of a boring lecture pass unheeded over his head. “They aren’t descriptions of something that happened because I invent them, but I draw on what I see. Ergo, the bits and pieces of a narrative that I may absorb from what I see might spontaneously parallel or anticipate what does really happen.
“Happenings are one thing, but how did I guess the name of the secret police was Ukehy? It’s not even a word.”
“Blah blah blah,” the lecturer says.
“The best stories always lose their readers sooner or later,” Celada thinks, slouching down in his seat, doodling the outline of a familiar house in his spiral notebook. “The story ends, but the reading keeps going. Bon mots for the wind to drink. And piss into the ocean.”
COWARD, he writes at the top of the page.
“Basta. It’s time to do something.”
(.)
Trudy pictures a crumbling skull, an orangutan in a suit and a tie. She rubs her temples, imagining the skull crumbling under her fingers. No headache, but she’s been having trouble sleeping, her thoughts are tangled and painful.
Resignedly, and in no haste, she walks to Sanglade. At the gate, she pauses to take it in, and perhaps to divine its mood. She has misgivings; she is tired, her head feels as though fingernails had been gouging at it, and the shrill beauty of the house is more than ever more than she wants to have to handle. The porch swoops up anyway and closes over her, like a lid.
The air inside, and its silence, fall on her like unwanted balm, making her feel more weary. To defend herself, or at least to feel less canceled, she makes as much noise as possible going to her seat, walking off the carpets and letting her heels down firmly.
Sitting at her table, she rapidly completes her work and sits reading for a while, waiting for Dr. Camatsura to bring her another stack of papers to sort.
She is completely engrossed in her reading one moment, and the next, staring out the window in confusion. People are going by on the paths outside, through the deadly ornamental garden she hasn’t yet dared to visit. Which is white with snow, in and out of the orange pools of the rust lights in the midnight dark. The room seems larger around her. A sensation too weak for her to be sure of has broken her concentration.
The air resting on her shoulders is cool, even though the room is warm enough. She rises from her seat and crosses to the mantelpiece; perhaps the draft comes from there, an open flue or something. The mantelpiece is made of cold marble, with a strange-feeling grain; she takes the slab in her hands, and finds it is very faintly humming. It rumbles with the hum of a powerful song she can’t hear.
Trudy takes her hands away with an outraged expression, as though she’d just touched something repulsive. She goes to the bathroom, rubbing her fingertips together, and washes her hands. Then, she returns to her chair. The water from the taps has made her skin tingle unpleasantly. There is no snow on the ground outside. It’s daylight. No stream of people go by in the cemetery-like ornamental garden she hasn’t yet dared to visit.
It begins to seem as if the air were filled with tiny wrinkles, minute closings like closing eyelids. The dim colors in the room’s muted, clarifying light deepen, turn vivid, as though rain had just washed them.
Floating in the middle of the room, her feet resting on the bar of the chair and not on the floor because she doesn’t want that rumble getting on her feet, she has to struggle against these dreamlike feelings, and drag her eyes along the print. Her vision, like a heavy ball bearing, keeps rolling off the page. She thinks of the door standing open behind her, and wonders if Dr. Camatsura might come soon, or if she should go to her to get something to do. Or leave, if there is nothing to do. Yes, leave.
The letters are too distinct to read; they crowd each other, vying for her exclusive attention. A. V. R!
“This is stupid,” she keeps thinking. “Why don’t I get out of here?”
Gradually, the letters shrink. From time to time, a written word echoes voicelessly in her mind. She gropes for the sense of what is being said with a feeling like falling asleep. Wasn’t there something off to her right? She glances at an open door that she closed behind her when she came in, and the darkness on its other side. Some clown has put a dressmaker’s dummy there in the doorway for a prank, with the light from the room slanting down on it. She can just make out, below the silhouetted head, the weird gray dress. A gauze skirt falls down to the floor, and the shadow of the head is just barely visible in outline against the dark. The skirt is drawn, slowly, out of the light and grows more substantial, until the transparency is solid, the gray is dark blue, and she can see its fringe.
Now it has withdrawn completely into the darkness, and there is nothing there any more.
Trudy jumps up. The disembodied, living feeling in the air is gone. The doorway is just a lightless opening with the door swung out toward her, and she knows there is nothing there in the dark any more.
(.)
Celada can’t find Dr. Crapelin. Hunting in one of the libraries and happening across Dr. Isochronal in his karel, Celada asks him has he seen Dr. Crapelin and Czechoslovakia says “No,” without turning from his work.
He thinks he glimpses Dr. Crapelin in a high window, but the figure he sees is stepping into the embrace of a pair of bare arms and this does not seem entirely to fit the bill. Dr. Crapelin has a wife somewhere, she might even be teaching at Chthethostoa. She might be a psychiatrist.
Thinking to search in one last place and then give it up, Celada investigates the offices attached to the building adjacent to the swimming school. The place has a deserted feeling. Bats swoop in the air. Celada glances left, at an empty doorway, then right, at the unattended front desk, and, when he glances left again, William is standing in the empty doorway with his thumbs in his vest pockets, looking very erect and composed.
“I’m looking for Dr. Crapelin.”
William smiles without parting his lips.
“He’s not here. I don’t believe he teaches today.”
William’s steady, smiling look is hypnotic. He casually takes his thumb out of his vest pocket and beckons once.
“Come with me. I have something here that you might be interested to see.”
Celada obeys him uncertainly.
From a leather portfolio top of a card index cabinet he extracts three exactly folded, immaculately white sheets. Celada takes them, his thumb bending and smudging them. He freezes; they’re pages from The House of Triumph.
He looks up at William.
“Why are you showing me this?”
William shrugs his shoulders. The rest of him doesn’t move.
“A thing or two to do with Sanglade, I’d say . . .”
“. . . I hadn’t mentioned Sanglade.”
“Come with me,” William says again, and he goes out through a second door. Celada follows him down a hallway into an alley dividing the building they had been in from the dingy blue clapboards of its neighbor. William bounds lightly up the few stairs to a high door and throws it open, extending his snowy arm into the shadow and watching Celada climb up to him.
They are both plunged into felty darkness. The air is surprisingly fresh for indoors. It seems fresher than the air outside. As Celada’s eyes become accustomed to the gloom, he sees thick carpets Trudy would love to examine. William crosses in front of Celada, smiling back at him with a hint of teeth, and opens a yellow door framed by funereally heavy crimson draperies.
The parlor is dim, all plushly black cushioned and rugged and draped and embroidered with moonlight roses.
Miss Houseman sits in the deep divan by the cold hearth, looking at Celada. Her head is thrust forward by a cushion in the back of the divan, so she all but peers through her eyebrows at him.
“Well,” she says jocosely. “You’re Celada, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
She grins.
“Sit down, won’t you? I’m getting a crick in my neck. The young will grow so tall these days.”
The pages and now this. Watch yourself, fat boy, Celada tells himself.
William is gone. Celada sits in a chair opposite Miss Houseman, with the low table between them. At his back, an archway opens onto a more spacious and lighter room with white plaster walls and a black floor. He doesn’t quite like having all that empty openness behind him.
The chair, however, is amazingly comfortable. He feels his growing nervousness puddle in his midsection.
“How are your studies?” she asks without moving.
“They’re going quite well, actually, if I do say so myself. I’ve been working with Dr. Crapelin rather closely, as you may know.”
She nods once.
“I’m assisting him in his Orthonoia, which is meant to be built up over time in small touches.”
Celada makes a gesture in the air suggestive of a small touch, like dabbing a single stroke onto a painting.
“He compares the work to the development of the technology of baking bread; a highly sophisticated art, involving a simple biological agent, a formula with no superfluities, producing something that seems as natural as fruit.”
Miss Houseman is wearing a dark jacket over a white blouse. She has on a dark skirt. She is a compact woman, with small, leaf-shaped hands. Her skin is honey-colored, and somber freckles cross the bridge of her nose. Her hair is only slightly darker than her skin and forms generous curls close to her head. Her lips pout a little, giving her a habitually judicious expression. One of her arms rests along the back of the divan, which lifts her shoulder a little too high, the other hand rests palm down on the seat beside her.
“I’d heard something of the sort, very interesting,” she says. She has a deep, womanly voice, but speaks rather bluffly. Celada is unsure whether or not sarcasm is involved.
“William,” she calls, sounding stern but smiling a little. Her mouth opens on dark.
A stir of air behind him tells Celada William has appeared in the archway. He glances back at him, who is looking past him to Miss Houseman and nodding at something she does that Celada doesn’t see, because he’s looking at William. Celada looks back at Miss Houseman who says:
“Won’t you?” and she thrusts her right hand at him like a dagger.
William offers him a small tulip glass with a purple cordial in it.
Celada says “Oh!”
Taking it, with great surprise.
William pours another from a heavy rectangular decanter, strides over to Miss Houseman and presents the glass to her. She takes it from him, wrapping her lower lip differently around her grinning teeth. William claps the decanter down on a silver tray on the table and glides from the room. Celada indecorously sniffs at his cordial, and Miss Houseman is smiling at him over it.
“It’s made from berries,” she says wittily, taking a tiny sip.
The glass is doll furniture in his hamhock fist; the stuff smells like grape jam on a hot, cinnamony pastry. It is syrupy and saccharine, with a strength that grows like gingery heat in the stomach.
. . . and later . . .
What did they talk about?
There’s nothing but zoom in the top of his head. Yes boing boing she talkeda bout Sangl ade now he’s hiccuppi ng. Disjointed sentences whirl in his head like marbles spinning down a funnel that points up and ejects them into space—aah phooey. It’s too much trouble! He pictures himself walking down the street flailing at the air above his head grabbing for his thoughts, as they escape from a skull like a bubble machine. That would tire his arms out fast. And gain him nothing but cold gooey hands anyway.
He sees four flat hands appear one after another, overlapping, all pointing to a starburst of orange and brown light that reads “to go insane.” They are tan, with thick black outlines and red pinstriped sleeves that fade into nothing at the elbows: a flickering pinwheel of arms in the center of a building, spinning so rapidly it can barely be perceived to be spinning. The arms fly apart and soar overhead in a row. Birds in formation become buzzing kidneys chattering teeth. Every since he was a boy he’d been especially vulnerable to music and susceptible to music in particular plucking dinging thuddihng gonging ticking would get inside him like long-nailed fingers exquisitely plinking his nerves and driving him crazy so he would want to throw himself on the floor or ricochet around the roomb. The effect, the crazy musicians grin and stare and contract into their square decanters with their nametags on them and keep playing, their bodies and heads perfectly still, while their arms and legs blur and bells pop out all over their heads. They shoot flowered needles into his eyes and tap nails into his skull so he blinks with each tap like a patient patiently ubsmitting to a ourtine mecidal procejure . . . the drone is a glassy stare and a serene smile in a golden mask, a golden beak, crystal darts intangibly smash into his face and bax of hans. He moans like a cow coming back from the dead.
Four red hands on four tan squares of cardboard, evidently torn from boxes, point the way with lurid paint to El Miserable del Sol! Niños gratis!
A small tent, open on one side and carpeted with cross-legged children.
Celada watches the puppets with a pang of nostalgia, and something else . . .
Sorrow and anger. Why show this perfect gentleness to children who, when they become adults, will only be treated with contempt by other adults? He imagines limp puppets scattered to and fro. The puppeteers have vanished. Ukehy’s markless mark on the scene.
The puppets should observe silence in front of the children, and be motionless, looking at them, and at each other.
Celada walks carefully into the main tent, following droll music. He pays obliviously and finds a seat right at the back corner, making his way to it with small swimming motions of his hands. He sits down with relief, feeling his consciousness wobble around his head.
There’s someone in a golden toreador outfit decorated with yellowy tinsel, charading away with a big grin for the benefit of a shapely female mime in a balcony. She is smiling and waving at her admirer with girlish happiness. Celada isn’t sure . . .
His attention wandered for a while. But now she’s gone—yes, a pair of hands, in black leather gloves, reached through the drapery behind her and dragged her into the dark. The toreador now lies collapsed in a heap at the very back of the stage, and a janitor is lackadaisically sweeping him up with a wide broom. The music starts up clamorously, hurting Celada’s ears and mind with its noise and franticness, but his body is as slack as a sandbag. He knows he can’t tear himself away.
