The Wretch of the Sun, page 8
Wailing voices lighten the air, adding a pale, clear light, the kind preceding a fall of snow. Their polished metal shrine has glass vanes or sails, and a coterie of bronze figures seem carved out of the gloom in the shade of the boughs of the trees; thoughtful, black, naked men with arms crossed or folded behind their backs, half-dematerialized into the dark, and fashioned for the eye by dim streaks of glisten. The pilgrims have brought offerings of glisten to recharge the shrine. They have a shining metal vessel vital missal sanguine blade a song a lay a steely brittle vessel brittle brittle tested mettle a saw blade prattle brass steely vital metal pedal medal modal idyll idle stop, stop. Stop.
Migraine. Each grain of hurt pile up. Don’t rhyme. Don’t alliterate. Don’t assonate, or the other with the consonant, eternal consonation, to sound-with, soundwithing.
Lie down.
He still sees the window. Don’t rhyme, don’t set words off. Put them down one at a time, with care.
The black figures.
The pilgrims, their offering, the shrine.
There is a metal device, a container, ornamented container, they carry on . . . a plinth.
They are surrounded by men in long coats, with hats pulled down nearly covering their eyes.
Or are they men in generic down jackets, blue jeans, and baseball caps? But there they are, shooting from behind cars and out of windows, into the crowd. Screams erupt from the middle. The container carried by the pilgrims is damaged by gunfire. Pilgrims running in all directions—complete confusion. A few lie crumpled by the side of the road. The colored gases inside them turn drab, curdle, and blubber from transparent, elastic wounds, to form milky puddles in the street. A truck driven by beefy men in plain clothes pulls into the scene. On it there is a huge spinning gray egg that churns inside like an upset stomach, like his head so hot on top and empty and open on the sides. Drive in a spike for relief.
There’s sunlight beaming down in octagons out of a white sky, and two orange lovers, spirits out of an old nudie movie, strolling in the exuberantly lush meadow. Her bangs toss in the wind. Silent music swells around them (sick feeling now) . . . the man wears a white shirt and blue jeans, has a moustache. She’s wearing a sort of peasant print dress. They’re kissing now, in a filmy close-up saturated with orange sunlight and a brown haze.
She’s looking at him, at him, directly. The whites of her eyes blaze out of all that brown air. She talk-sings to him in a vocoder voice, her teeth blazing too sharp, too white and too clear in her dun face, and now the man has turned his face to Celada and speaks to Celada as well, his eyes and teeth fashioned from lunar glow like hers. Suddenly they’re naked, she on all fours in front of the man. His head obscures the sun, solarizing the sky around it. Their brown and orange colors dim and their eyes and teeth fluoresce, both sing-talking in harmony to Celada with vocoder voices, fucking and smiling complacently, and glowering at him with paralyzing malice, making garbled threats. Celada’s skin bristles in waves. He trembles.
He groans and raises his hands to his head without touching it, wanting to squeeze the skull until it bursts and imagining a relief so great he’d moan with bliss even with blood and brains oozing from splintered bone . . . knowing miserably that there will be no relief, just a begrudging, long-drawn ebbing out.
Ah, this complaining is a mundane task.
Warn him about what, or why threaten him?
The chairman of Ukehy. Who is he? He might be a massive man, like an idol ensconced behind his desk, brutal and crafty, with smoldering, beady eyes and skin like lead paste, or he could be an erect, spare, efficient man who stands at the window and peers out into the street. The sort of man who keeps a pair of small dogs and attends to their many needs on a minutely detailed schedule.
The family is jarred awake by a crash in the hall. The treasured heirloom clock or the Ming vase or the Fabergé egg lies shattered at the base of the stairs. Who did it? Poltergeist. The whole nation crumbled under a plague of poltergeists. Poltergeists can't be jailed, because they aren't citizens, have no bodies. They can't be deported either, because they aren't immigrants. They have no country of origin. Borders are nothing to them, not even the gauziest of veils to be brushed aside. Ruins everywhere, and nobody living, nobody with a name, can be found responsible, even as palaces spring up within fortifications like fenced-in garden plots. The rubble dwellers became silent onlookers, and then ghosts. Some knew and some did not know that they were no longer anything but images in a nightmare that also didn't belong to them.
Ukehy must have a chairman. Anyone? Perhaps the chair is enough. There is nothing so reassuring and quaint as a villainous leader. There is some leader or other, but he only coordinates what must happen. He did not invent Ukehy; Ukehy invented itself when the conditions were favorable. An evolution of death, mocking parody of the evolution of life.
(.)
She feels a thrill in her hair as she comes back into Sanglade, which is larger than she remembers and has an cool invisible shimmer just below the ceiling and down its sharp cutting angles. She came early, using her key. No sign of Dr. Camatsura. She’s alone inside. I’m in possession, she thinks. The key is my token.
She stands in the open space toward the front of the house, breathing in its stillness. Following her eyes, she moves over to the staircase and gazes up its length. Now she climbs the stairs, which do not creak. She feels as though she’s creaking inside. Not wanting to make much noise—although the sounds she does make seem to fall away into a more powerful, special silence—she ascends slowly. Actually she is relishing the savor of the house.
“Felix Houseman,” she says to herself. “Clare Bruce Wilcox Houseman soprano, mining company, Vliance.”
Dead wasps. Their houses, their music. Does it all deny her or is she supposed to deny it all, when there's no denial anywhere? Nothing but enchanted acceptance.
She comes up into the second floor. The air is soft up here. Soft rugs, spicy varnish smell, and none of the earwax smell of old houses. The stairs continue steeply up to a remote skylight.
The landing is a broad hallway. The ceiling is plaster with dark wooden beams gridding it, ornamented at the groins. The doors are reddish wood, black molding all around them with tiny square niches at the upper corners. From across the hall she can see there are tiny, light-colored things, designs maybe, or perhaps miniatures, set back in these deep niches, which are about three inches square. She’d have to climb a chair to see them clearly.
“How crazy,” she thinks, “and great of them, to install decorations no one could see. Or see easily anyway.”
She crosses to the glass-paned double doors. Through them, she sees daylight on the far side of a spacious, dark room. The doors are locked. While they aren’t heavy, they don’t rattle when she tries the white china doorknobs. Her key doesn’t fit them. Without touching the door, she peers through the panes; the floor of the room beyond seems surprisingly bare, and there are many thick pillars standing in the room. They don’t really harmonize with the structure of the house, which has its own unusual consistency. They seem more like objects on display.
To her left, the hall runs to the balcony, and to her right, it bends away out of sight. She goes to the right, because she wants to investigate a small skylight directly over this corner. The glass is frosted, so the corner is filled with snowlight that seems not to come from anywhere. A circular table is set into the corner, with a lamp on it, webbed lace, a pair of portraits in hinged oval frames. A narrow, tubular vase of dried blue flowers.
Gingerly, she picks up the portraits, feeling certain she is looking at Felix Houseman and Clare Bruce. The woman stands by a pedestal with an urn on it, wearing a white dress swathed over with gauzy scarves, one hand on her abdomen and the other resting by its tips on the pedestal. The backdrop is a gray blur involving vines and flowers. She is gazing past the photographer with an expression of dignified transportation, a solidly-put-together woman, with hair of no distinct color, complicatedly arranged. A blunt nose, her mouth is nicely shaped but charged with force. Trudy imagines it opening up, a little black spot in the picture and letting out a tone that would break the glass. Her eyes are small and seem, maybe it’s the contrast of the picture, queer and pale.
Houseman’s photo shows him sitting by a table in a wicker chair with a big haloing back. The light falls on the table before him and on the floor behind him, illuminating him indirectly from below, isolating him from the background, so that his image seems to hover in between. He’s wearing a light suit with a vest, looking very relaxed, a cheroot between his fingers, legs crossed. The other hand seems to have been permitted to droop into his lap, holding a lump of stone. His face is a high oval, with hair maybe light brown, thick and fine, carefully parted. He has a catlike chin, and a frowsy moustache over his mouth. The nose is sharp, the brows are straight, and the eyes cool and narrow. Where Clare presents a kind of stolid dreaminess, he manages to appear shrewd and wry and neutral.
She’s running out of time, and wonders if Dr. Camatsura has come yet. Giving herself permission to investigate just one more room, she goes around the bend in the hall and picks the middle door on the right. There are none on the left, just a wall with high transom windows in dark moldings, the wall itself covered with a web of coarse, purple-gray satin.
Trudy opens the door and pauses in the doorway. The room is deep and not too wide, lit also by skylights. A vast carpet, covered over in identical small medallions the size of a child’s hand, fills the floor. The wallpaper is covered in a single repeated Chinoiserie figure, so that the whole room is like a grid of dots. Then kneel to look at the medallions—an Anatolian boteh pattern, scarlet with yellow flakes, and a blue-black outline, set into a dark burgundy field. From this lower point of view, the repetitions buzz out into a flattened, vibrating infinity, that takes in both walls and floor. Trudy finds she likes the feeling of dynamic extension it creates in her, as though the patterns were drawing her out, like taffy, through her eyes.
The door snaps downstairs. Footsteps on the hard floor.
“I’ll visit the ‘infinity room’ again later.”
Trudy shuts the door and hurries down to greet Dr. Camatsura. Going to her own table, she works steadily in the quiet.
After lunch, the flickering light in the room undulates. The leaves are unusually agitated. There must be a real wind kicking up. With a start, Trudy realizes they’re birds, not leaves. A flock of birds is streaking past the window toward the ground in a long jet of living darts. On and on. And someone’s in the doorway. She turns her head to look.
The impression was perfectly distinct. She had done more than merely notice something. Trudy stares at the empty doorway with an image both vague and vivid in her mind, wondering if there is a dim swatch of daylight reflecting from the wood at about the right height? She turns her head to and fro, keeping her eyes on the spot, and there does seem to be an indentation in the gloom suggesting a corseted waist, but nothing like a face. It occurs to her that glass doors throw off reflections which, as they are opened and shut, will travel along walls and ceilings. Are there any glass doors in line with that doorway?
The image, though, involved the folding of hands at waist level, and eyes. She, or it, receded into what they call the fabric of the house. Trudy imagines a transparent model of Sanglade, sleeved in a trembling forcefield, like water pouring in thin sheets down every surface and at certain times folding out to emit an approximation of a person. They circulate inside the envelope, which must be a spacious mansion from their point of view.
Trudy finds reference to the construction of Sanglade in an architectural anthology. Vliance didn’t have much to say about it, but then he was never particularly open with the public.
Some delay in transporting rarer materials to site, but less than feared. The weather excellent; the land cleared rapidly. We the object of considerable interest to committee of white hounds, who welcomed with snouting and wigging of pink ears. Foreman presented shovel and I broke ground at H. on third day April.
Men threw into work with gusto. With haste but with care. Lanterns brought and pushed on into night, finishing around ten. Entire foundation excavated and concreted basement: fourteen hours.
This typical at H. Entire period construction, omitting only finishing interior, twenty days. Rate of work diminished after that, at my insistence. No qualms re: handiwork. Frankly wanted to linger.
For me, H. was by far most rewarding project.
Elsewhere she runs across a note complaining to the prefect about “vagrants” loitering in the vicinity of the house at all hours, and persistent trespassing. Attached records show that the intruders and loiterers, when accosted by police, invariably turned out to be men who had helped to build Sanglade. They kept coming back to admire it, or, as some said, simply to be close to it. They would return in the middle of the night, some still in pyjamas. They would come and stare at the house until someone moved them along.
(.)
There is a length of Agua Seca that is virtually ceilinged by projecting rooftops, dusty and shady, where Celada likes to stroll, haphazardly expatiating on his favorite subjects with Dr. Crapelin.
Celada: “While I admit that religion is rather silly—but show me what there is that’s of human origin that’s not marked by silliness? How is capitalism, for example, not completely silly? If silliness were a criticism with any real weight at all, the world would already be far more rational . . . Anti-space, anti-time, are as logical as anti-matter and the retrotemporal particles—or another space and time—so how can time end?”
“You like to start at the end,” Dr. Crapelin says smiling, hands behind his back, looking down at the ground. He places his emphasis heavily and deliberately.
“Well, but doesn’t what you think, or perceive, or . . . doesn’t that have to do with the end you’re looking from?”
Dr. Crapelin dodges a boy on a tricycle, sidestepping into a blast of daylight that half washes him out.
“Problems of subjective and objective are in part a consequence of the assumption that the subject, or soul, is in the body, bottled up in the skull, or the heart, for example.”
He lights a cigar, and the smoke fumes around him like threads of daylight, making his outline even less distinct.
“If we grant, instead, that we are linguistic elementals or processes—and I mean ‘process’ as in a kind of a growth, a protuberance, or excrescence, or a shoot—and if also we grant that language is neither inner nor outer, but sticking out, maybe half in and half out . . . or a third and two-thirds, what does it matter? What matters is that the language is lying across the line, on one side of which is inner and on the other side of which is outer—you see I mean the ‘inner human being’ and the ‘outer human being.’ If that is the case, then who we are couldn’t be inside us or outside us.”
Dr. Crapelin stops and turns toward Celada. The daylight streams over him and he looks like overexposed, colorless film.
“Alternately,” he says, putting his left hand into the inside right pocket of his jacket and resting it there, “we can speak of expressions, in which what is deep emerges or protrudes from the surface, or of situations that produce selves, perhaps by fusing, cophasing, or interlocking with a protuberant language process.”
“Like a neurotransmitter?”
“Like anything, like rice and beans. In any case, we could account thereby for possession, speaking in tongues, prophetic or mediumistic clairvoyance, and for ghosts, demons and the like. These things can all be said to be real . . . I emphasize said . . . without entailing the concomitant notion of supernatural dimensions in defiance of what knowledge of physics, etc., that we now possess. The stories we all know, involving ghosts and other spectral events, are not ‘just stories.’ They are structures or structuring instances, situations. Of course, they are also ‘just’ stories, as stories of justice. They are not exactly psycho-logical”
—a word he would always pronounce in a particular and suggestive way . . . A cloud drifts across the sun, and, in its increasing shade, Dr. Crapelin gradually materializes again—
“or folkloric in origin, as they are not effects of such causes but belong themselves to the echelon of causes. They are—they are—it is not necessary to read them that way. They can be far less accidental, nor archetypes, nor in fact representations of any kind whatever, although they—the situations—of course may be represented. They arise, a fortiori, precisely at those points at which someone has trouble drawing a clear distinction between being and representation.”
“What I mean,” Celada says, always just on the brink of getting lost, which is, for him, often a pleasant sensation, “is that we are accustomed to think of language as the instrument of consciousness, whereas it may be that language and consciousness are one and the same. As some people say ghosts are energy fields dissociated from bodies, but the ghost is not energy, not some thing with the name energy, while it is ‘energy’—the word, the name itself. Does that make sense?”
“You find yourself wondering then if energy is energy, or quote-unquote ‘energy’ is energy. Are the ghosts transcendent?”
“Yes,” Celada says with conviction. “They triumph over death. Like artists.”
“Even the ghostly Ukehy?”
“They are death,” Celada says after a moment.
A society of police spies and businessmen, he thinks. Existing only for itself. But then again, all good things exist only for themselves, don't they? You don't explain the value of a painting or a novel by referring to something else, the real value, you must value them in themselves. But do those people, whose decisions affect us so totally, and who are so difficult to affect, have any values we can share? So do you get up on the winners by defying them to the death like Amiri Baraka and run the risk that you are only inflating yourself by pretending to wrestle with a giant that takes no more notice of you than it does the fly in the corner, or do you reflect their smugness back at them by insisting the hardships they inflict on everyone else is really hardening up a generation of losers to fly at their throats?
