There’s a cloying, sugary smell that unfolds with their tapes, and a sharp, chemical odor on top of that. One of them hops over to a seamy, brainlike lump of black material and delicately palpates it, slipping tapes inside the seams and evidently reading the reliefs folded inside. Two others gather around a light, hexagonal frame of flexible, woody sprouts, anchored down by stones, or what might be very dense growths, half-embedded in the ground. The frame is covered in small turbines shaped a little like half-opened rosebuds, made of a translucent, waxy vegetable, with spinning vanes inside. The creatures manipulate the turbine-frame with their tapes, which flap in gusts of wind but seem to have some quick, gentle, deliberate motility of their own. I have no idea what they’re doing, but, after a few seconds, an acrid odor of rubber spills over me from their direction. It seems to be released by the turbines.
Their alienness awes me, and fills me with a despondency I can’t explain.
Chlorine, phosphoric acid, glycerol, a smart rubber polymer, myristic acid; somehow I can call to mind all kinds of abstract information about them, but I don’t understand most of it; it’s as if I’d rote-memorized a chart full of jargon and cryptic abbreviations without knowing for what purpose the chart was made. I know that no human being has ever visited this planet; and no human being is doing so now.
That realization causes me to turn again toward the fact or thing I have looming over me and I struggle to dive away from it once more.
I watch as the two creatures move away from the plant, take a few telescoping bounds like a couple of crazed bears and launch themselves into the sky. As they throw themselves upwards, they fold their bodies, slamming their heads down between their legs; their wings pop out, their tapes draw in like a closing parasol, and they’re gone. The chord they’d made together is suddenly only one note: the reader, still licking the inside of the lump. Now it’s turning, altering its purchase on the black brain thing by keeping the wind behind itself and its tapes streaming over the creased surface. It keeps looking, if I can call it that, in my direction, and shrinking.
Gradually I become aware that it’s reacting to something behind me. Redirecting my attention there is like trying to figure out the controls of an unfamiliar machine but in one moment I rotate in place long enough to get a glimpse of what there is and now I see what leads back to me what I’m connected to—
I’m crammed up against a building, my back flat to the wall, staring across the sidewalk at the gaping mouth of the bag.
Fading across my back is the sensation of gently pulsating suction, connecting me to something behind me, each tug slightly prolonged, just long enough for me to feel its insistence.
Gasping, staring, my face so strained it hurts. I think I scrambled backward on my hands, recoiling from the bag, until I hit this wall.
Why am I struggling to remember it when forgetting it is what I want to do?
It was like the head and shoulders of the corpse of a buried giant, exposed by the erosion of the wind, slouched into the landscape, the head right down between the shoulders and spinning. The whole thing trembled so violently it shimmered and seemed by the split second to shift minutely in place. It was a volatile, spectral, diseased living machine. That shimmering wanted greedily to seize hold of everything around it, and there was something in the middle of it that was active, frenetic, shuddering and plunging and ready to fill up the universe with silent images of itself, like the naked, twitching head of an embryonic chick, the dark recta of its eyeballs are still sealed deep inside the spasming pink bulb, linked to me in a revolting intimacy that grew and proliferated.
The connector was a bizarrely long arm, miles long, knobbed with countless joints and as regular in its contours as a chess piece, but it was a phantom arm composed of a mixture of materials, appearances, and impersonal memories. The thing I saw was a harmonious frenzy of material and immaterial machines shattering themselves in perfect silence. The arm, perched in me, was a relay, and I could feel it anchored inside my body, like a tether of heavy steel cable. I could feel the tether extending behind me, swaying by the wind, and drawing me laterally along with a tidal pull. That flickering, whale-sized head in the distance was intercoursing with me. The thing was a kind of organic, living, decaying factory, with consciousness, with intelligence—I don’t know how I know that, but I do, and I remember feeling, when I first glimpsed it, the same awe I’d felt when I first recognized the planet for what it was.
It makes no more sense than my own idiocy, sticking my head into my own bag and conking out half sprawled across the gutter.
Why shouldn’t I be here? Wasn’t the point of the discipline to answer a call from within me to cross to a higher order? Isn’t this the call that’s been scorching my insides all my life?
I get back up, and take the bag. I don’t know what will happen to me if I drop it somewhere. It doesn’t feel especially heavy at the moment—a quick grope tells me nothing has been removed. I suppose sticking your own head and shoulders into a bag is a good way to keep it from being rifled while you grab a quick forty winks. Overhead, it’s either dawn or dusk. Dawn.
A bus swings by; I catch it and stand in the thinning blue darkness at the back. I remind myself to remember the discipline. I don’t want to be a part of that inhuman machine. So instead I tolerate being plugged into this human machine? Is this a point of view where the hideousness is reversed?
I went the right way, but I arrived at the wrong destination. There was something not entirely human about the man who spoke to me. That was all right, I didn’t need him to be. He wasn’t one of the shaggy beings I saw, but his tailor had seen them. For a while I coast along and watch my thoughts jump around. I itch, in places. Rolling up my sleeve, I find I’ve got a mosquito bite. There’s one on my leg, too, and the muscle between the shoulder and the neck, toward the back. As I recall, I had my entire head, shoulders, and both my arms inside the bag. For how long?
It seems obvious. The bag or something associated with it regaled me with a vision brought on by my conversation with a cordial marksman in a gorilla outfit, evidently by attaching me to something out of the bottom of a lunatic’s delirium.
I didn’t say it all. I didn’t say any of it, I said nothing. I don’t have anything to say.
There’s a deadline or something everywhere I go; it follows me down the streets like a bad smell I can’t shake.
“You could do with some friends,” a man says. If he’s addressing me, it’s a bit late to start a conversation because I’m already on my way out the door. The bus hisses and veers around the corner. There’s what looks to be an octagonal stone building resting on a triangle of unfenced grass and garden facing me, calling to mind the prow and wheelhouse of a boat. Between us there’s a sort of asterisk where many roads overlap, and its center is marked by a crude rock antenna standing on some steps. I look up and see branches of trees, cool and remote above me. Through a gap in the canopy I catch sight of the first blue sky I’ve seen in days.
Is this what I wanted? I never expected to get so far away from humanity so quickly.
Perching my behind on the narrow sill of a low shop window I rub my chest through my shirt. I’m starting to notice my ribs. I don’t know when I last ate, or slept—it’s as if the appetite and the fatigue are there, but numb. My predecessor’s condition, his laughter, make better and better sense to me.
Speculatively, I grope in the bag a moment. Although I was reaching for something else, my hand brings out of one of the spells, a gleaming silver case with shallow, trapezoidal depressions all over it. The inevitable idea of tampering with it occurs to me, and the thing seems to detect the thought and retaliate with a horrible feeling—long fingers of ice-cold mist spreading weakness along my hands and arms. My muscles turn to water and I have to clutch the box with all my fingers just to return it to the bag. The hands I paw myself with are like tingling water sacks. As warmth and strength come back, I get a little extra dose of cold, like a pair of cold thumbs just laid a
gainst the skin of my neck on either side of the base of my skull, like a warning not to try that again.
Sliding down until my ass rests on the ground, I breathe and get myself back together. Then I give it another try, fumble in the bag until my hand closes on the butt of my tape gun. There’s the nickel panel with the words MODEL ONE, and, as I dimly remembered, a line of smaller type running along the bottom: Kris-Kravjnu & Co. Sekellxy Amoura SBJ 13, 45-KV/9. It doesn’t look like any address I’ve ever seen, but it’s the only place I can think of where I might be able to ask or even get a lead on where this construction site I’m supposed to be delivering spells in cans to is.
*
I stop at a gas station looking for a map but they don’t carry maps. Finally, I manage to locate part of one in mosaic tile, set into the wall of a municipal water building. The resolution is low; only the major streets are laid out and named, but one of them is SBJ 13. Is this the right kind of a name for a street to have? Since the map doesn’t bother to identify its own location on itself, and since I’m steadily losing confidence in my knees, I sketch the map quickly into my notebook and find myself a tree to sit under.
For a while I can’t manage anything better than labored breathing. I check the dressing on my knee. Peeled away, the wound begins to come back again. I put the old bandages back over the wound—they’re as clean as they ever were—and roll a few more over them for good measure. Scratching one of my new insect bites I find traces of blood on my hand. So I put a loop of bandage over that, too. One on each leg. After this I begin to feel a little more lively. After a short nap, I take out my sketch, which is complete if not aesthetically pleasing, and begin trying to sort out how I find SBJ 13.
The sun is dropping toward the horizon and I am waiting on the elevated line. I’m in an exalted, reverent frame of mind that I can’t account for, unless this is starvation taking hold of me. I board the train and turn, facing the doors. It’s as if I were on my way to my own execution and taking leave of all the beautiful things in life—that black, louring overcast sky, the sun breaking through and hitting me now as the doors slide open, hitting me like a heavy hot blanket thrown over me, and as the door closes, and as the train rolls along, the glare playing over my face, changing places with bars of shadow.
On the floor in front of me and a little to the right, the scuffs and scratches on the speckled black sketch an accidental face, prominent lips, an upturned nose, soulful eyes, a mop of curls. I can’t find it again when I finally locate my pen, and I can’t draw it from memory. A lovely young woman, sitting at the other end of my bench, is gazing out the window with such a sweet and gentle expression on her face that I look away and shake my head at my own stupidity. The overbeauty of everything, the acute, foolish preciousness, is washing my mind away. I tell myself to snap out of it. Everywhere I look I’m seeing eternity. But this is just some kind of mood. It’s nice, but it isn’t real. Is this so dangerous?
There’s a prolonged shouting going on in the distance, and a sound of scurrying feet. The people around me rush past, alone, or in small groups, but they’re all heading for the same place.
I’m coming now into what looks like a deformed plaza, a long and narrow canyon that divides the buildings. The shouting rises somewhere off to my left, and echoes against the far wall of the canyon to my right.
All of a sudden I feel cold hands all over me and I’m in the middle of the racket. I’m caught in a press of bodies. Clutching my bag tightly to my chest, I struggle to get the strap around me somehow. The hands that grip me are cold, and I can’t see who’s grabbing me; they aren’t holding me exactly, they’re gripping and releasing and regripping as I flow along with them like a leaf in a current. The bulky shadows around me are blocking the light; around and among them though I can make out a distinct group of men clearly, and the shouting is coming mainly from them. All of these men seem to be older, with skin like leather and craggy, weatherbeaten faces, and, with their heads flung back and their hands up in front of them, they beat out a raucous chant with stern ebullience. Their voices have a rough, ringing sound that reminds me of wood blocks. There’s nothing I can tell about the people around me, except that they are electrified and in motion, almost goaded along by the one long phrase those chanting men keep repeating in a ringing language I don’t recognize.
Above me, the buildings creep by, lights shining up their fronts from lamps that must be resting on the ground. We come to a corner and the space before us is black; entering a wider street the crowd thins and the hands gradually fall away from me. I check my pockets suspiciously, but everything seems to be there, and I’m too busy watching what’s going on around me to be much distracted by the layout of my property. A horde is gathering here, in front of a looming, domed edifice studded with lights of such piercing brilliancy I can’t make out much more than a general outline. The surface glitters with white tile. The crowd is filing in. From somewhere high over me words are being barked out into the air in a harsh, gargling, half-strangled voice, and now I see the grimacing mouth, not quite a foot across, actually embedded in the tiles of the building, up high. At first I think it’s choked with thick ropes of luminous saliva, but as I keep staring at it I see the mouth sparks and flashes with crackling electricity, dribbles curling snowy globules of tiny ball lightning that spirit themselves away like fireflies.
A knot of those chanting men closes suddenly around me like a wave and I’m swept along again; they smell pretty clean, that’s something. En route to the swept-back front doors I hit what must be exactly the acoustical right angle to the electrified mouth and the sound becomes clear. It recites:
“The greater part of this will be explained again. Assemble in the mind’s eye the full extent of the workings of the universal machine over all time. Concentrate the attention on the functioning of Chorncendantra within the discovered order. Find the self within Chorncendantra. The self is now growing toward ever greater participation in Chorncendantra.”
There’s a similar intonation in part of what the men are chanting, so I suspect they repeat a fraction of this speech in their own language. Once we get inside, I can see that they’re all wearing plain white caps and what at first glance I take for wetsuits. In better light, they’re snug outfits of thick silk, with subtle black on black patterns. The forearms and calves are closed with many cloth-covered buttons, and between these are wrapped black linen bandages. They’re wearing bandages as sashes, too.
We’re in a high chamber with thin, graceful columns. The chanters, without pausing for a moment, pass through tall, wide archways to a balcony on the left, where they take their places in two curved rows of straight-backed chairs. In front of me, there’s a depression in the floor like a shallow bowl, adorned with a spiral mosaic. People are wandering along the spiral arms entranced, some have dropped to their knees to murmur at the floor, others just lie there, on their sides or faces. The idol sits in the center of the depression and towers up toward the ceiling: a gargantuan white ceramic snail with a head like a chandelier and two rows of women’s breasts running down its front like caterpillar legs. Graceful, elongated cones of frosted glass sprout from portholes in the top of the shell, and glow with vivid pastel colors. The inscription on the base of the idol reads: NUMBER 1.
People, mostly alone, some in small groups, are scattered in the expanse around the idol. Its presence puts them into introspective trances, but some people are going wild. Beyond this area I can see the dome, sealed off with a blank white wall like a bellying sail. A doorway is set into it along the right edge, up a sinuous ramp pinched out of the dough of its material. From time to time someone slips through the gleaming white gate as furtively as if they were slinking away to masturbate. No one comes out. Something’s written above the door in a weird bit of scrollwork that seems too small for the amount and weight of ornamentation carved around it; solemn-faced angels, piles of fruit and musical instruments, fronds and filligree, all weirdly small and out of place in one corner of a vast
snowfield of blank whiteness, hold out or prop up a scroll with the one word “Bravery” engraved on it.
The air coming through the door smells bright and meaty, like a butcher shop, a strange commingling of a fresh cool flesh smell and heat like the blast from a stove mouth.
It’s blazing inside. There’s a cylinder within the cylinder and I’m at the base of a white ramp that coils up between them. Long slots open on the inner chamber, and people are milling around the ramp, entering and leaving through doors and hatchways in the floor, most of them dressed like doctors. I go to one of the slots.
The subjects are inserted into harnesses at the ends of long boom arms, thirty-two of them in opposing pairs radiating from an upright turnstile. Half swing one way and half the other. They lie face down on their stomachs with their heads outermost. The booms can be swept to bays all along the inner wall, where people are swiftly extracted or put into harness. The moment they’re fixed in place, the helper asks a final question, gets a quiet answer, and in one swift motion hacks open the jugular vein. The bodies swing, hurtling around the turnstile high and low, faster and faster, the blood spraying from their necks and spattering the steel walls. Gutters running along the walls at intervals brim with blood and drain it off. I see men, women, children, old people, whirling around, now high, now low.
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