Member

by Michael Cisco

  *

  It’s a little later. I’m on my back. No sign of my visitor. I didn’t hear him go. Perhaps he wasn’t here after all. It’s conceiveable that I imagined the whole thing. I could have driven my own fist into my own solar plexus and knocked my wind out of myself, it happens all the time. Dim light from the windows sifts across the threshold, toward the bag, which lies open like a frog mouth. As I get up, I feel a pain in my knee. The pant leg is unbroken but the skin beneath it is bloody. Cold blood trickles down my leg as I stand again.

  Carrying the bag into the room, I shut the door a moment and switch the lights on. The bag is mostly empty, but of all things there’s a roll of bandages protruding from a pocket in the lining. With a little bundle of it, I mop the blood up my leg and wrap my knee, tearing the strip from the roll. The pocket also contains an unmarked metal tube, like a toothpaste tube, painted red. I unscrew the red top—white cream inside. I sniff it—mint. Magic toothpaste. I sit in my chair, smelling it for a while, under the reading lamp, the bag lying at my feet. I’m going—I’ll go. I sit with my head in my hands and wait for myself to go.

  *

  I take an empty, late night train in the middle of the day, to avoid the crowds. (There’s a woman here, and it’s just the two of us, but she won’t haunt me, I won’t see her again. I know that; it wouldn’t be consistent with the way she appeared to me: I know a one time only when I see it.

  The train car is swinging in the blue, empty but for that enigmatically smiling woman with tawny skin and reddish hair, cats eyes and leaf edge lips, who stands even though all the seats but mine are free. Maybe I’m in her spot. Now she’s approaching me. We wheel into the station, the fluorescents go out and break the spell; now I see she’s plain, with the goosey grey face of an old churchgoer, but is this the woman she’d been before?

  Suddenly the air is filled with announcements. Villainous announcements, and boarders. The train is full. There’s a soft scurf lining the interior of the car, irregular, many more colored bundles incline, raise and lower regular segments at intervals, emit noises, and from time to time they stride out through the doors, but not me. I am not one of them; I belong to a different machine. Chew, blink, extract objects from containers, package objects into containers, swivel, bend, straighten, bleat, swaying with the motion of the car, hiss, clatter, rattle, alternate and make gestures—the beating hearts and the gallons of hidden blood in motion, the breath in and out of bodies to bodies; not one after all, a great number of machines intersect here, and they are all relays. Responding to some stimulus, a head lifts, and the gaze with it. Across the aisle, eyes avert before the two sight lines can meet, like one magnet rebuffing another. The averted gaze drops to a bag. Hands rummage in bag. Another pair of hands adjusts a headset. A pair of lips are compressed. And so on.

  My inventing this description doesn’t represent any real change because it is not a distortion. I am a different machine part, and I state this as a fact, not as a preference. Is there a difference? What I mean is perhaps that I am not simply making up this idea to please myself, and I know this because I can’t alter it. I feel this to be true about these people whether I am judging them favorably or unfavorably. Whether or not I choose to do it, to see things this or that way, is a mystery to me. These differences matter, but the form affirmed by the mystics is not affected as an explanation by these differences. It remains an explanation, and satisfies the function of an explanation. The problem is, that’s a human function.

  Now we’re sitting here in a station, doors open, fans roaring; the kind of pointless waiting that people like to impose on each other just because they can, but it’s built right into the system and so no one really enjoys it. Waiting here conjures in my mind the fantasy of a box with a button like a garage door opener that would make the car doors close, a secret power of mine embodied in a button, and I recognized that as one of a type of idea I used to have all the time when I was small, and that I don’t hardly ever have any more.

  When I was small and my days were my own, I would, as I brushed my teeth or ate breakfast or something, arrange my projects. From there I would ramble on through my day, which took on a shape I somehow gave it, somehow using these projects. I drew pictures, made wooden boxes, or dug dirt. Everything was real then.

  Looking around, I’m sitting in a row of chess pieces, facing another row. They sway as the train moves. A spider the size of a city reaches out in all directions and trains roll up and down the length of its legs, trailing webs of steam and smoke, rattling, banging, squealing along the spider’s joints in jets of sparks. To either side of me the chess pieces form ad hoc systems with serial heads, limbs, and so on, even though they remain chess pieces. Ranks of pawns glide out the doors, and another batch glides in, so they weave through each other. Nervous pawns roll up and down the aisles.)

  I have to switch trains. As I move out toward the middle of the platform, I have to weave through the press of people trying to board; one of them, a tall, lanky guy with long black hair, suddenly swings by me and his fist slams my solar plexus.

  The blow knocks a yell out of me, mechanically, and I nearly drop to my knees. Somehow I get over to a bench and lean on it, struggle to draw breath. And I’m groaning. The noise of my voice is so loud it seems to come from somewhere outside of me. Longhair didn’t even look back; just boarded the train. I can see him taking his seat, casually toss the hair out of his face.

  I leave the station, hating being human.

  *

  I can’t find her house again. I can’t find her street. The streets all have an uncertain look, as if their weather were about to change, or maybe they aren’t too sure of themselves, either. Is this something I really want to go on again about—the sky, the plume of steam, and all that?

  Is this one mine? Did I leave the light on? Look up at the window. The room is dark, but I can’t satisfy myself that there is no faint light coming from the lamp. Or does the lamp on the contrary increase the darkness? I know I left...

  There are fewer and fewer people to be seen. I pass a delivery truck, parked and lifeless by the side of the road. The driver is leaning his head against the side window, his face, with a rapt expression on it, is upturned and he seems to be at the point of swooning. Everybody might be in the same condition; perhaps they received a dose of some kind of gas while I was lying breathless on my floor.

  I don’t recognize where I am. It might be my neighborhood.

  Is this your way of showing me the way?

  The streets you’re leading me through slope this way and that like curving ramps of blue-black cobblestones, winding among palely glowing white houses that cluster together. We travel by moon and starlight, only. Above the rooftops I can see, opposite the moon, a long wedge of phosphorescent clouds, and I know something is looking down at me from in there.

  You stay well ahead of me. You didn’t want the bag anymore, or rather the tasks it figures into, but you had to find a substitute. Me. The clouds are low, nearly touching the four-, and now the three-story rooftops. The sky above and behind me is still clear, the wedge has descended like the prow of a ship and the god is hovering in a cavernous hollow over me; the god is like a gleaming steel engine, and like a palace, trimmed in silver foliage that drops from its fringes and is borne off, spreading elastically in the wind, toward the horizon. Two vast globes, red and powdery with rust or the dried blood of sacrifices, wheel in two arcs around the thing, to meet in a silent collision above it, then below it, then above it again, in a movement that makes me think of undulating fins.

  You were going to show me the house where the woman is, but you died. The street is empty. There never was anyone in it.

  I’m standing in front of one of the houses, close enough to smell the plastery-yogurty breath from the blue archway, the little red-tiled entryway, and the door inside. The clouds have closed around that thing in the sky, but I can’t shake the feeling it’s still there, not exactly watching, not intent, but serenely taki
ng everything in, down to the minutest detail, down to a level I can’t see because it’s too small, and out to a scale I can’t manage because it’s too vast. I think it monitors, and contemplates, impersonally, and, not too infrequently, makes nightmarish demands that must be met.

  The globes collide in silence just over the rooftops, always in the same steady rhythm, and while there is no sound, I do seem to detect a mute pulsation. It’s not sharp enough to be the globes striking together; it’s probably the rolling displacement of the air as they sweep up and down, between strikes. There were figures—weren’t there?—moving behind colonnades or cloisters, carrying lights? Those might have been golden-looking pistons though, jumping up and down out of the valves. Despite its silence I’m sure that it was the source of the soundless, majestic music I had heard earlier.

  I make a steady circuit of the house, and I see a light in a high window, and bodies, naked ones, tossing on the other side of it. A man and a woman—the man I’d struck, I think, and the woman, her after all. They bound up and down past the window. Observing them, I have to hop over a wooden plank fence, and now I’m trying to walk crabwise through some dense weeds. Stumbling, I tear my eyes from the window and right in front of me are the tins. You did lead me to the right spot. They’ve been haphazardly tossed in with a heap of other stuff, old brown mummified oranges, heavy wooden tools, bits of twine stiff as wire, garden pots and some loose potting soil, on a rude wooden shelf protruding from the rounded side of the house, just above the carcass of a ruined old wheelbarrow.

  I pick out all six and shove them, with a sweep of my arm, into the open bag, along with some of the other trash in my hurry—something about “prizes” and I don’t know if they’re in cans too or what they are. Now I snap the bag shut and launch myself over the fence, my weight coming down over it like a rolled-up rug. The bag is hanging at the end of my left arm into the yard and most of me is lying along a narrow board that keeps the pickets together at the top. As I try to haul the bag up, my weight rolls right and the plank creaks, sinking about an inch. I freeze.

  I try simply folding my left arm, drawing the bag up, but it’s so heavy my arm gives out and I jerk to the left. The fence, none too well-planted, cants to the left. Not knowing what to do, I let the bag drag me back over into the yard, landing on my back. Shadows play across the window above—I’ve been heard. They’re coming. Getting to my feet I swing the heavy bag and knock two boards clear of the fence. The planks cross the street and clatter against the house opposite with a whole lot of noise, just under a window that bursts instantly alight. Charging out through the aperture, I get my shoulders stuck and, after a few more desperate shoves, wrench another board free from the fence and dash up the street in what I think is the way I came, throwing the bag out before me and letting its mass draw me forward. I should go back. If the bag can only be passed to a substitute, why not leave it for him, the man who insisted it was his, anyway? But he was kind of a bastard and I don’t want to do anything he’d like, so instead I keep going. Wouldn’t I have to notify someone about the change? Then again, who notified them about me? They might be able to watch anyone, like guardian angels. What if I managed to pass the bag off onto that man, only to regret it later? At first, I hadn’t wanted the bag at all—remember that—and then I’d wanted it so intensely the idea of it fascinated me. Now I have it, and there’s something about its weight at the end of the arm that’s making me sick to my stomach, like the cans inside it are bad. They’ve gone bad; I can even hear a voice in my head actually gasping those words “gone bad.” And that bad quality is tangible to me through the bag and the weight they impart to it.

  I need to know where I’m supposed to take these things, but the idea of unsnapping the bag, the foul air that would rise up in a puff out of it, and then having to handle those cans, looking for something like a shipping label or at least a clue as to their intended destinations, is just too disgusting. Right this moment, I could be passing the place where they belong, a place I might never be able to find again on my own, but I can’t bring myself to open the bag. In my mind’s eye I see the cans, and there were never any labels on them, but then again there might have been simple embossed messages stamped in crescents around the top and bottom. The containers, as I remember them, were fresh and shone like polished glass, but when I imagine them in the bag, they’re yellowed and webbed in sludge as if they’d just been dredged from the bottom of a river. It isn’t literally true, but it’s how they seem to me. Walking quickly is the only thing that gives me any relief; it keeps cool air moving over my face in this breathless night, and I’m hoping I can find my way to the park, where I can pour the cans out onto clean grass and have a look at them without having to touch them.

  The practicioner, or disciplinner: his motive is easier to trace. He wants to become something specific, by means of a training program. The ambition of the one I mean is to break with his fellow humans on a very fundamental level. He would have begun with foreign cultures, and quickly moved over them as simply alternate conformities. He would have become a connoisseur of conformism, bringing this conformity to a place where another conformity rules, in order to achieve a really deep and systematic nonconformity.

  The disciplinner’s program may not be all that different from insanity, but that it is different at all, under these circumstances of straitened possibilities, and given the prodigious resourcefulness of any conformity, is nothing to sneeze at. He is going to use the brute force of developed association to ratchet his frame of reference around until it stands at an angle to everyone else’s, with the admixture of regularity I prize, that goes so far toward making things real. Simply inverting associations wouldn’t work; while accomplishing this inversion would make him momentarily difficult to understand, in a highly conspicuous way, the usual incitements would still be driving his thoughts. Anyone who was prepared to flip everything on its head would be able to understand and anticipate him; the whole thing would be nothing better than a stunt.

  What I shoot for would be a stunt in any case, but it has to be a better stunt, like launching myself to freedom over an impassable gorge.

  I glance at every lighted window on an upper story, and it occurs to me I’m checking to see if that woman is bounding around on the other side of them, in the hopes she’s bounding alone now. The presidential palace in the sky isn’t there anymore. The place seems deserted; it must be very late. I can’t even hear any traffic.

  Letting go of it all again. I hear a voice speaking.

  “Now we are to be permitted once more to undergo a beingsmileduponprocess, to be succeeded by a murmuringprocess and a rummageprocess.”

  I see the landscape from too close up; it seems convex. Two brothers selling cereal from a kiosk, the language lives, he’s asleep, the sky and hill, I want to explore the world (why? what for?) and the horizonfringe leans up before me. I see it’s a wood, convey convey to the convex wood and the hill bends up to me rolling like a boulder I’m climbing and pushing with my climbing. Finally I stop, short of breath. The bag seems almost impossibly heavy, and the feeling it imparts to me, a revolting sensation, like cold grease injected in my veins, is getting to me.

  The moment I stop and set the bag down, a wave of fatigue drags at me and I wonder if I’m going to be able to keep standing. I know I was instructed to go directly to the construction site, but I don’t know where that is or how to find out. The idea of bringing the bag home with me is distasteful but I don’t believe I’ll be able to get rid of it. So I’ll take it home, and try to get some sleep. If another visitor comes calling then I’ll be able to tell him truthfully I didn’t know where to go.

  Settled firmly on that idea I take up the bag and begin making my way home again with suddenly renewed vigor. This feeling of invigoration keeps growing steadily as I walk, mounting more and more until it becomes something I don’t understand; it’s as if some kind of fascism or drug is overtaking me. Miles seem to fly by underneath my feet, and whole distr
icts of the city swarm up around me out of the distance one moment and dash just as speedily away the next. The sun is in the sky, well above the horizon. The day is already well advanced. I’m striding through the street like an armored column, holding the bag out a little before me. It has a wooden rod running along its top, and the brass rectangles that hold the handle in place are fitted around it, and with the forward end of this rod and the heavy mass of the bag, which nevertheless seems to float at the end of my right arm even as I flex my elbow to raise it, I’m ready to clear a path through the people who crowd the sidewalks. Even as they sway aside to avoid me, I feel as though I were treading them down, growing with every step. My eyes become more and more fixed as my sense of my surroundings grows blurry and vague. The bag seems to repel other people with an inverted magnetic force, and they visibly shy away from me, refusing to look at my face.

  “I’m invested with that disgustingness that the bag had for me before,” I think. “I don’t feel it now, because I’m totally inside it.”

  I take trains and call cars. Only then, when I have to stop, can I release the bag, but, when I do, a heavy mantle of fatigue comes crashing down on me. The moment I can feel my abdomen again, a nausea more intense than I’ve ever felt before grabs my guts and starts churning them with icy fingers. Yet, it won’t let me be sick. There’s no relief until I snatch at the bag’s handle again—then it all disappears, and I’m flying along again, rolling people out of my way with the bag like a magic talisman, as if the weight could be magnified and projected out from it in a dark wave. There’s no way to keep track of where I am; I don’t know where I’m going. Every part of the city I’ve ever seen and a great deal I haven’t charges by me—if I am still in the same city. I feel that I am. And all the while that sterner and sterner feeling is coming over me again, like a helmet closing very gradually around my head. An iron mask.