Member

by Michael Cisco

  “There’s all kinds of wars, chum,” he says quietly.

  The hall goes back a fair way, and the ceiling is low. After a few dozen steps, I turn around and sneak back, peeking in again on the man in the office. He must have sprung from his chair the moment I stepped out the door, because he is already halfway across the room, wearing a goofy look on his face. He’s like a child who’s been released from some onerous confinement and can finally let loose all his pent-up silly energy. It must have been hard holding it in. He holds his hands out in the air before him, making a beeline for a deep, institutional sink with a swan-neck spout and a powdered soap dispenser—the kind you juggle your palm under. Humming, he turns on the taps with obvious pleasure and soaps his hands wildly in the sink, tossing flakes of lather in all directions, banging more soap out of the dispenser on the wall, mounding it up in handfuls. I can smell it from here.

  There are no red doors. This end of the hall doesn’t even seem finished. The bare cinderblock walls are exposed, and there’s a sickly smell of fresh construction. It’s as if washing his hands had been a reward, or a little treat he allowed himself for finishing a task he didn’t want to do. As I turn around to go back yet again, one of the elevators opens, silently. The car is all polished steel on the inside, walls, ceiling, and floor. I see my own smudgy reflection in the back.

  A rectangular gasoline can of unpainted steel has been carefully placed in the middle of the elevator. There’s a blank envelope resting against it, the kind of touch I associate with the finer restaurants and hotels, and a round metal case with a screw top sitting beside it. The envelope has an index card in it with a set of directions printed in anonymous pencil. I pick up the round case and it rattles. I unscrew it—long wooden matches. The can is heavy, but easier to carry once I slip it and the case into my bag. The card I put in the pocket of my sweatshirt.

  I’m well down the hall when I hear the elevator ding. Had it made any sound before? Did it have any buttons? Is this an elevator? I glance back and see what looks like a woman, leaning out of the second elevator and craning her neck to see me. The fog at this end of the hall makes her a little hard to make out. I start back toward her and she waves her hand at me, as if to tell me not to bother, to go on, shoo, git, then gives me the thumb’s up and pulls her head and arm back in through the door. She might be on her way to another floor. Perhaps that wasn’t an elevator either; they might have both been just closets with sliding metal doors, and if that’s true, then she would just be standing there, inside, like a broom in a broom closet.

  The card points me out by the “back way.” I have to hunt up and down long, dimly-lit grey passageways before I can find even one passable candidate for a “back way.” There were a few heavy fire doors, all shut so tight they seem impossible to move under any circumstances, like they were painted on the wall. My final choice for “back way” isn’t even a door; it’s a chute with a hinged flap over it. I slide down on my stomach with the bag in front of me, and a heavy rubber curtain, divided in sections, rummages over me as I slip beneath it and outside.

  The card got a little wet, but the directions tell me to walk four long blocks east. The storm has passed. Water drips from the huge arches of the railway trestle, and the sound echoes from piling to piling. No telling what time it is. It’s just night.

  How long has it been since I’ve eaten?

  I get visions of a big hamburger, crawling with orange grease, the blandly oily fug of a dinette counter, and I might as well be reading about the eating habits of spiders. No food. I stop by a bus bench and cut myself another strip of bandage, tying it above the first on my leg. As I suspected, the bandage, tied over no injury at all, assuages my hunger. The effect grows when I take the handle of my bag in my hand again; they work together to lift some of the weight of fatigue from me. I’m going to have to work out a schedule for adding more. If I’m going to be dependent on them from now on, then I’d best know when I’m set to run out. I scratch into my pocket notebook: “Where requisition bandages?”

  The directions take me well across town, although I can’t be sure of my mark because the card mentions no proper names, just so many blocks and then a left and then so many blocks and then a right. I don’t really have any intention of trying my hand at arson, but I am curious to see what building the High Rationals, or whoever, wants burned down. Provided I haven’t been dispatched to deliver a couple of gallons of gas to some marooned VIP with an empty tank. He, or she, might be a chain-smoker of tobacco pipes, I suppose, and fresh out of long wooden matches as well as gas. I unscrew the cap of the big can and take a sniff. It is gasoline. Smells like hi-test. These directions might take me to the construction site; even if they aren’t meant to, they are taking me through a part of town I’ve never visited before, and the journey might turn up the site by chance. Is this something I would know if I saw it? The bag might. Is this something it could make me aware of?

  The directions are taking me out into the suburbs. There are paved thoroughfares here, increasingly overhung with old trees, and dirt roads peeling off to the sides at intervals. The dark is gathering strength again, deepening, as if the day had been swallowed and night had merely paused long enough to turn dawn back into dusk. The gloom seems to sift down from the trees like fine ash, hanging listlessly in the air. The only thing moving around here is this bag and the man carrying it. Off in the distance I can see a few lights, low to the level ground. There are fields, or lots, behind these trees, which grow up clustered around the main street as if they were drawing nourishment from it. No lights here, though.

  The air between the trees is gunmetal blue, and the even light that hovers just above the ground is that color. Everything is an inflection of that blue, including the man I see there, stepping out from behind a powerbox or something, maybe a water district control station. He isn’t looking at me in particular but I must be in his field of view. Perhaps I’m just another blob of dark along the road to him, but he’s stopped where he is, broadcasting his gaze; his expression, as it seems to me through the vibrating blue dark, is one of vacancy, or dejection. Or resignation. Or meditation.

  I crunch over to him, my footsteps marring the breathless stillness that breathes itself over this place. I feel clumsy and conspicuous. All the same, he doesn’t direct any of his attention to me in a way that I could notice, but goes on absently not going on, not looking at anything. He’s tall and rangy, with a long neck and a short nose. Something about his chin and the drape of his upper lip makes me think of an aging lion, although he doesn’t otherwise seem old. There’s a furrow between his eyebrows, like mine.

  All of a sudden his eyes snap in his motionless head and he’s taking me in with a subtly wild expression that makes him look a little crazy. It’s as if a slot had suddenly flown open in his blank, derelict face, and a mischievous pair of speakeasy eyes peered out at me.

  “Warm night,” he says. “Much too warm for a fire.”

  I shrug noncommittally.

  “When it gets dark, I strike a light,” I say.

  Somewhere there’s a bird chirping. I listen to it for a while, an unreal sound. It opens space around me.

  “I’ve read about that,” I say, gesturing toward the sound.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “People make so much noise during the day that some species of birds have taken to singing at night.”

  He puffs once, which I take for about as mild a registration of my comment as possible.

  “Are all High Rationals as talkative as you?”

  Another puff, this time through the nose, and a wry grin.

  “Not one of them?”

  “No.” He rejects the possibility as flatly as if I’d suggested he’d done something beneath him, like mug an old lady for laundry money.

  “You work in Stationery?”

  “Not lately,” he says. “I really can’t be spared.”

  “No Operationals can. Or at least that’s what the charming man told me who wo
rks down there.”

  That does the trick, and he starts leading me along with a low swoop of his hand.

  The Operational walks like someone who’s just experienced a terrible shock. The movements are somehow remoted, the upper body is flexed a little back on the spine, the arms don’t swing much, the head doesn’t turn much. The expression of the face is enigmatic. The eyes almost droop. The shoulders never lift. The jaw hangs loose inside the sealed lips.

  “You’re not walking diagonally anymore,” I say.

  He doesn’t turn his head. After a moment, I hear his voice.

  “You noticed that?”

  “I did.”

  “You’re observant. It becomes more apparent at a distance. Right now, you and I are too near each other. But that’s the way I walk, all the time.”

  Now more trees, fenced gardens. Smells like burning paper. It takes me a while to realize it’s coming from the flowers—roses, daffodils, tulips, a bush covered in small white star-shaped flowers, blooming at night. They smell like smoke, not like flowers.

  The Operationals live together, in these houses. The exteriors are plain, but with well-tended gardens, full of flowers that seem too perfect, and that smell like smoke. He leads me down empty streets between these houses, quiet snowing down all around me. Many of the upper windows are brightly lit. There are no blinds or curtains, and in each room up there I can see only the bare white ceiling, and bare walls. Something bothers me about all those bare, empty white rooms, blazing all night with one unshaded bulb in the middle of the ceiling.

  My guide stops in front of a building. There’s a planet directly above him, a steady light. That one bird is still singing somewhere, and the notes echo faintly as they dissolve among the trees.

  I know each of these houses is basically the same. They are all completely bare, strictly clean. Tiled walls, even in the living room. Plain tile. They dress plainly. Sit together around the room in silence, their hands lying in their laps like long roots, their bodies are switchy and tough at once, like willow boughs. They must get together in these solemn rounds, looking like people too exhausted to speak. The room I enter is bright and bare, with a large, triptych-shaped window—no curtains or blinds. Nothing on the floor. A table by the wall, and a collection of folding chairs of diverse sorts. They’re made of wood, and the people sitting in them are made of flesh, but the distinction seems pretty abstract. My first impression is of a storeroom full of mannikins.

  My man offers me a seat and ambles over to one of his own, moving with the weightless jerkiness of a marionette. It’s the same with all of them, male and female young and old; drawn, hebephrenic features with invisible goblin gazes peeking out at me from the corners of their eyes. Under the frosty glare of a couple of lightbulbs this parlor is about as warm and inviting as a hospital cafeteria.

  My seat is more comfortable than it has any right to be; it’s as if it had been carved precisely to fit.

  “Would you care for anything?” one of them asks, perfunctorily.

  “Chorncendantra.”

  Many of them nod. A few of them echo the word automatically, in low voices.

  “It’s a game,” one says.

  “How do you play?”

  “That’s part of the game,” the first one says, clearing up slightly. The subject seems to rouse him. “There are two sides.”

  “Is this you versus the High Rationals?”

  They slump, all of them, with one reflex.

  “No... No...” they murmur.

  “The High Rationals split into sides. At least two.”

  “And they make use of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you serve any of them?”

  “Completely,” one says.

  “It varies,” another says.

  “Which is it?”

  “We love it,” says another.

  “It varies,” the first says. “But we are completely loyal for the duration of at least one task at a time. That much we are bound to do for them.”

  “Bound how?”

  That one shrugs and makes a little face, as if he were flicking a mosquito away from his nose.

  “It’s the least we can do for them.”

  “Everyone takes his or her part in Chorncendantra.”

  “Everyone of who?”

  “Well, certainly everyone here. Everyone you’ve met.”

  “We all take part,” one says, “so that we aren’t forced to do any more than our part.”

  “Any of you happen to know what side I’m working for?”

  “Either.”

  “Is this the side wanted me to play firebug tonight?”

  “Either.”

  “What did they want me to burn?”

  “A repository belonging to the other side.”

  “What gets reposed there?”

  Glances, shrugs travel around the room. They don’t seem to know.

  “And the other side put you in my way?” I ask.

  “I was placed on the road,” the first one says. “The rest was up to us.”

  “The High Rationals run everything at that level?”

  “That’s their fantasy,” one says. “They have to believe they run everything. They’ve even convinced themselves that they created the contact sun and the whole system.”

  “So who does?”

  “Run everything? We do.”

  She says it wearily, but lifting her chin, with the air of someone who’s sacrificed her vitality laboring unsung in a noble cause. They all have it.

  “Mind if I use your washroom?”

  “Be our guest.”

  It’s as clean as I’d expected. You could have done surgery on the floor. There’s a sharp non-smell in there, like the traces of a perfect antiseptic: volatile and odorless, like the feeling of chlorine smell in the nose, without the odor itself. Like washing the house with gasoline. It makes me feel dirty, like a filthy, lice-riddled ape, so that I can’t stop washing my hands. The air makes my eyes smart, and the glare from the bare bulbs framing the mirror is so intense I can’t see my reflection.

  Nothing in the medicine cabinet except an old brown glass aspirin bottle; it’s empty, but they kept the cotton ball.

  On my way back, I notice something. It catches my eye because it’s the only ornament, the only apparently superfluous thing, here. In an alcove, tucked into the wall of a hallway that radiates off the main, and which faces the wrong way for me to have seen it on my way to the bathroom, there’s a good-sized bronze statue of a gaunt, naked woman.

  At first glance, she appears to be decked out in long garlands of what might be seaweed; but on closer look I see they’re thick tufts of shaggy black hair trailing from her groin and armpits. The top of her head is bald, bare scalped bone, but she has two heavy black braids that coil once above each ear and dangle their ends by her tiny feet. Her hands are like mouse claws, her breasts are round, not dangling; she has a scrawny neck with stiff tendons. The murky grey surface is scored from top to bottom, giving her a fibrous, woven look. The figure holds a stiff pose, standing with the feet wide apart and with both arms raised in an empty embrace. Stoic, strained face. Nosegays of perfect little white flowers are heaped at her feet, spilling over the base and around it. Although it looks nothing like any Madonna I’ve ever seen, I know that this figure represents the devoted suffering of mothers in the same way, and is used for the same purposes.

  I stroll back into the room. I find myself rubbing my hands ostentatiously, to let them all know I washed them. Taking my seat, I assure myself that not one of them has budged during my absence.

  “Would you really have done it?” a younger, leaner one asks me, almost impetuously.

  “Torched some place? I might have.”

  “Did you intend to?” an older, leaner one asks.

  “I can’t say I was planning on going through with it, no.”

  The room breaks out in mute laughter. One by one, they lower their heads, faces crumpling. Their shoulder
s twitch, but their bodies don’t contract. Their hands remain limply hanging down or resting in their laps. For many minutes there’s no sound but strangled, nearly inaudible laughing. As the tears creep down their faces, I begin to wonder if they aren’t all really crying.

  The noise scatters and gives out, like the end of a rainshower.

  “I’m trying to find a construction site.”

  Reaching down, I pick up my bag and heft it once.

  “I have some spells and prizes in here I’m supposed to deliver.”

  Talking to the chairs instead couldn’t have accomplished any less.

  “Do any of you know where I’m supposed to be going? Or is this a silly question?”

  It’s as if they’d laughed themselves stupid. Not one of them seems to be aware of me anymore.

  Jumping to my feet, I put my face an inch away from the first one’s nose.

  “Hey!”

  His eyes flick up to mine.

  “Nobody knows where you’re supposed to go. Nobody here,” he says, like a man who has been compelled to make a humiliating admission.

  “I thought you ran everything.”

  “We do,” he says, mournfully. He doesn’t elaborate.

  “So how does that jibe with your not knowing where I take these?”

  I rattle the bag with my foot.

  “Nothing can happen without us. That’s all,” the younger one says. “The High Rationals refuse to work. They just think things up. We do everything.”

  I scan the room again, with those two bulbs sizzling the back of my neck. Finally, I go back to my chair.

  “Well then,” I ask, looking steadily at her. “Who, where?”

  One draws breath through her mouth, still keeping her eyes down, and sighs.

  “Is this something anybody was ever going to tell me?”

  My voice is rising despite myself.

  “Is this a cosmic mystical riddle where I blunder around like a fool until I find something that I think is meaningful and decide that’s the point of the whole thing?”

  A number of them shake their heads.

  “They probably,” the first one says, “don’t trust you enough yet. But those spells and prizes are very valuable; as far as I know.”