“What?”
“Well, we eat,” he goes on, leaning on his hands, which rest on the forward two corners of the chair, “but this is only under strict dietary requirements. This food is to be purchased in a special way, using the natural money, like everything else we purchase.”
I thumb the open doorway.
“That a ‘natural’ toilet in there?”
“This food is paid for so carefully that it becomes perfectly digestible. No waste.”
I squeeze the handle of the bag, wringing it. Suddenly—pop!
“You were expecting a courier?”
“Of course. Many. This is a future center.”
“Center of what?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Chorncendantra?”
“Well, naturally!” he says. “Why don’t you already know all this?”
“This is not my...”
What do I call it?
“Your?”
“My destination.”
“No?”
I shake my head, then look around at the gloom. There’s a faint odor of fresh paint.
“You’re just sitting around here, waiting for the center to be built? Built around you?”
“That’s right, although it’s more correct to say the center is established, not built.”
“So is this a construction site?”
“Oh no! This idea is to be vehemently denied!”
“Is this a center?”
“Not yet,” he tells me seriously. “I hold the place.”
His eyes keep straying to the sparkling toilet, and he’s becoming increasingly fidgety.
“Eventually others will come?”
“That’s right. But first a number of couriers have to bring spells here.”
Opening the bag, I try to pull out one of the spell canisters, but a nauseating shock twines itself along my arm and my hand jerks violently away. Tipping the bag forward to let him see inside will have to do.
“It this one? Spells like these?” My voice is thick. I have to clear my throat.
He cranes his head and peers inside.
“This metal orange-wedge looking things?” he asks. “I suppose. There are many different kinds, each manufactured for a specific task. If this is not intended for this center, then this—these—spells, will not work.”
The idiosyncrasy of his way of speaking is an affectation, I decide.
“Excuse me,” he says finally.
He doesn’t do what I expect—only goes to the toilet, stands over it for a moment, then adjusts the handle.
“This is always trickling to itself,” he says to me as he comes back, rubbing his hands. “I never can tell if this is filling properly or if this is only running water out the open flapper.”
“If your carefully-paid-for food doesn’t turn into waste, what do you need a toilet for?”
“Visitors,” he says.
“I thought you didn’t get visitors.”
He looks worried.
“Well, this is free for you to use, of course,” he says hastily.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Visibly relieved, he tells me, “They are really wonderful examples of simple machines.”
Taking him in at full length, I note he’s better dressed than the slob in the stationery office.
“You a High Rational?”
The smile on his face widens, becomes benign and majestic.
“Who makes these spells?”
“We do,” he says grandly. “All together. They are stored over time and emitted at precisely determined intervals.”
“Is this done by emitters?”
“Yes.”
“Who makes the emitters?”
“Uh—we do,” he says.
“Why don’t you park the emitters at your construction sites, so they can fart out spells where they’re needed and dispense with my services?”
“Because,” he says, with the air of someone who’s just been asked a stupid question, “the spells have to be delivered to the site, not emitted at the site. The courier is a vital protractor member of the articulation of Chorncendantra.”
As he says the magic word, he seems to catch himself, then makes a hand gesture, closing the thumb and forefinger of each of his hands into two linked rings, then opening them, turning his hands about forty-five degrees in opposite directions and repeating the link.
“What is Chorncendantra?”
Now he really does look surprised.
“The universal systemmechanism. What else?”
“You trying to tell me you invented the universe?”
“The cosmos is subject to a variety of... articulate-schem... atizing—I’m sorry,” he says, glancing back through the door again. “This is just such a nice model.”
He gets up and fiddles with the toilet handle again.
“One of the old kind,” he adds, coming back.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the address of the site I’m supposed to... to take these to is?”
“Address? Address?” He pronounces it both ways.
Rubbing my face a moment, I devoutly hope that this isn’t a new concept for him.
“If you could look it up?”
“Look it up?”
“Look it up. In the records or something?”
“Which record?”
“The address,” I say wearily. “Of the construction site?”
“There is no reason to have such a record.”
“Isn’t there an address?”
“No.”
“No street address?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There is no street.”
“No street? You mean it’s just ‘out there’ in the world?”
“Of course.”
Mental emptiness is burying me in a heap of dusty old rags.
“I mean,” he adds, in answer to the persistence of my look, and speaking as if he were surprised at being required to spell out something that should have been obvious on the face of things, “of course, there is nothing there. Nothing else. But, to get there, you...”
He rattles off an interminable set of directions and, at about the fifth “go two and a half miles” I wave my hands.
“Hold it,” I say. “Write it down.”
He paws his breast pocket.
“I’ve lost my pen,” he says.
“So have I,” I say.
He starts the directions over. I listen as attentively as I can, furrowing my brow, and ask him to repeat it. Every repetition is exactly the same. I’ll bet they last exactly the same amount of time.
In the middle of the fourth run-through, he trails off, pops up, rushes to the toilet, and begins waggling the handle; a jangling sound issues from the tank.
“I thought I heard this go off,” he says unhappily, removing the lid with a sound of grating ceramic. He starts fiddling with the interior, then waves me over. Slender rods criss-cross the interior of the tank, attached to pivots and trailing lengths of fine chain with weights and stoppers on the ends.
“Here, hold the ends of that one steady,” he says pointing. His shadow is in the light, which comes from directly overhead, and I can’t see.
“There! There!”
“Well move your head, then!”
I take hold of the cold rod ends, and he reaches around my hands and does something further down, by feel. He has to get his arms well down into the tank, so he bends his head to one side, pressing his cheek against my back. A thin bronchital whispering comes from far down inside the toilet’s glacial interior.
“Now hold this here,” he directs me.
“Your head,” I say.
Eventually we’ve switched position, which required a great deal of especially finicky care about when to hold what and how long and what to move where. Now my head is right up against some cabinets and I’m pinching a little post with one hand while the other, right down in the chilly water, keeps a chain taut by pulling d
own on it. The chain seems to be pretty frail. I don’t dare pull down too firmly or it will break. Meanwhile the corner of a set of shelves is digging into my back, and I have to put one foot up on the box the toilet brush is kept in. Meanwhile, the High Rational is nearly doubled over, one arm submerged up to the shoulder while the other reaches below the tank somehow and steadily turns something that squeaks. His left foot braces him against the opposite wall while his right foot is actually down in the bowl with the water around his ankle.
With catlike agility he extracts himself from this posture all of a sudden.
“You are being so helpful!” he exclaims, giving me a thump on the shoulder. “Ah! Wait! Don’t move! I’ll get you something!”
He leaves. I stay where I am, contemplating the finish on the cabinets and repeating his directions to myself as best I can. Go two and a half miles past the elm grove with—no without—the box hedge, then take the fire trail up to the ridge line... The contortion I’m in is so difficult to hold that I can’t think about anything else. I’ve never been exactly what you call a limber man. I hear footsteps scrape in the room outside, but they stop abruptly, as if whoever it is were struck by a sudden thought, and has to stop everything he’s doing in order to focus his attention on it and capture it. Fatigue washes down my arms.
The High Rational comes back, carrying a flask. He unscrews the top, which flips back on a metal hinge, and hands it to me.
“This is very good—oh!” he says in virtually the same moment, and pulls the flask back. “Don’t move your hands.”
He brings the flask up to my face and pours some of its contents into my open mouth. I splutter. It’s rocket fuel.
“This is nice?”
He resumes working, setting the flask on the shelf behind my head.
“Smooth,” I choke. “Odd taste.”
The fumes of the stuff are bogging up my head. I can feel it tingling in my empty stomach.
“What?” he asks, head down.
I clear my throat. “Odd taste. What’s that herb?”
“Which?”
“Is this flavored with an herb?”
“Hold this part now, will you? I don’t know.”
“Is this thyme?”
“Is it?”
“It’s like thyme.”
He straightens, looking thoughtful.
“I wish I could remember. I really do. Have another.”
He pours more of it into my mouth. The flavor is almost lost in the cavalry charge. My eyes water and my head and body get further apart.
“Exhale through your nose,” he says. “Get a good savor.”
Once again, he resumes work, repositioning my hands now as he pleases, without asking me.
“It’s not like thyme at all,” I say, when I can speak without kicking chlorine gas back into my sinuses. “Don’t you know what it is?”
“I didn’t select this, I’m afraid,” he says distractedly. A few moments later he adds, “Is it rosemary?”
“I thought you didn’t eat!”
“Well, any schoolboy knows what thyme tastes like. Maybe this is the other one.”
I’m getting steamed. I’m standing here in a yoga posture with my hands in a toilet and he’s feeding me liquor, getting me drunk while I repeat to myself again and again the convoluted directions to the construction site he couldn’t write down for me because he’d thrown his pen away a moment ago. Muttering something or other I let go and walk around him. The floor sways under me and I find I have a real need for that chair.
With a sigh, he joins me a moment later, sitting opposite me again much as before. He wears a drawn, unhappy look.
The prizes... I’m about to ask him about the prizes, and whether he wasn’t saying he knew what t-i-m-e tasted like, when I suddenly become aware that someone else has entered the room, well back in the darkness that yawns behind him. He knows it, too. The same stiffening energy is flowing into the both of us at once, and his expression goes blank with anxiety. A figure rolls steadily forward out of the dark; I see the face, the hands folded on the bosom, limned in light dab by dab. The mouth opens and a cultured male voice drones:
“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.”
Pivoting smoothly, the figure glides toward a doorway in the wall facing the window.
Moustache man is out of his chair, following this stately figure and murmuring quietly to him some words too indistinct for me to make out. The other keeps rolling, impassive and majestic as a parade float. Moustache obsequiously opens the door for him, bowing and still murmuring. As he rolls through the door, big majesty pats the air slightly with his right hand.
“Yes, yes...” he says, talking over moustache. “This is fine. This is fine. Yeees, yes...”
Moustache watches him go, then closes the door slowly. He rests his weight on it.
“The greater part of this will be explained again...” comes from the other side.
I clear my throat.
He makes his way back to the table and sits down again with his head lowered, refusing to meet my gaze. I get up, looking down at him in disgust.
“A High Rational, huh?”
“I never said I was!” he shrieks, balling up his fists on the table and staring at the wood. He holds himself in this posture, trembling. A drop of sweat, or a tear, falls on the table and flattens out there. After a moment, he slackens and puts his head in his hands.
“You had—You had better follow...” he murmurs to the floor.
“‘We don’t eat,’” I say.
I follow the real High Rational.
“Please don’t leave the door open!” he calls after me through the open door.
I ignore him.
*
High mountain plateaus, all piercingly vivid blues and yellows. There are openings in the chocolate-colored soil, archways lined with huge irregular blocks of gold, from which issue human forms without arms or heads. They’re a uniform, dingy, artificial white color, with spindly legs and skimpy torsos. They’re scarecrows, with empty sleeves dangling from their shoulders, trembling with giddy excitement, like children who can’t wait to see something, streaming over the landscape in sinuous, soldierly columns, pressed closely together and converging to follow a twinkling brook, flowing between boulders striped red and white, and other rocks whose black-pitted and blue metallic surfaces are freckled with pale green lichens. There are transparent bonfires spouting from the ground, and these seem to draw the crowds, funneling them between gently sloped hills into a sprawling valley.
This planet has a white blister that looks like a cue ball as big as the moon sticking to its surface. The blister towers over the mountains at one end of the valley, adding its luster to the brilliance of a blue, sunless sky. There is an earthen ziggurat at that end of the valley, its tiers alternate tapering down, then up. A stone ramp extends from the broad, level top down to the base. There’s a low construction of stone blocks on the top, marking one end of a wide fissure; as the valley fills with scrawny, headless figures, a stately procession slowly emerges from the fissure and takes a position around and in front of it, crowning the ziggurat.
Bare-chested young dancers, brandishing heavy ritual implements over their heads and upholstered all over in stiff cables of muscle, caper in a circle around the elaborately-robed celebrants, and, most elaborate of all, a single figure with close-cropped hair and golden skin. The celebrants bow to the four cardinal points as the two dancers gambol round and round. In one smooth motion, a dancer swings his long, heavy chopper and brings the blade down on the chief celebrant’s bowing neck, severing the head cleanly at a stroke. A jet of blood spouts from the severed neck. The blood folds into a sheet that races across the lev
el surface of the stone platform, and then cascades down the ramp, its ripples dance and sparkle just as the rippling water of the brook dances and sparkles.
Still in his bowing posture, the chief celebrant reaches out his hands, seizes his own head between them, picks it up, and raises it at arms’ length, straightening, lifting it high, holding it high above the stump, set against the dawnlike light of the planet’s blister—the head cries:
“Chorncendantra!”
—drawing out the last note—
The heads and arms of the throng of doll-like creatures filling the valley now seem to burst into existence out of nowhere, shooting out their sleeves and popping up through their shirt collars as if they were sprouting out of inner compartments, and their bodies take on the appearance of official clothing in a rapturous wave that sweeps out from the ziggurat and heaves them like a wave heaves water, hurling them up into the air. The reborn High Rationals hold hands and fling back to the ziggurat the triumphant, protracted call.
The figure atop the ziggurat keeps repeating the word, blood pattering from his head, tears streaming down his face, his brow knotted and bunched as the other celebrants wave their hands in benediction over a heaving surf of ecstatics swirling with greater and greater lightness and speed around the base of the ziggurat. Most are in white. They look like little flurries of snow, spun up by frisks of wind. They rise and fall, going up higher and higher, forming into long, heavy kite-tails. Jackets, neckties, pressed slacks, sober skirts... fountains of fountain pens, leather-bound ledgers, file folders, printed forms, crystal pots of white out and vials of ink, fasces of bound pencils, shimmering staples and fanged dentures of staple removers, carnation pink erasers, paper clips spangle the air like rain...
The High Rationals fly off in awkwardly rolling chains, up into the deepening blue sky like plumes of smoke, or milkweed fluffs. Colossal white petals close convulsively around the ziggurat, sealing the officiants inside an onion dome of billowing sails. Overcome by the dazzling intensity of the blue and the yellow, the limitless freedom of the air and the effortless, windborne lightness of their flight, in a paralysis of blissful amazement the High Rationals are swept up into the blackness of space. The atmosphere releases them and the light from the planet below becomes spectral on their faces. Their grins become fixed, their eyes stop blinking, their movements stop, the intense flutter and rustle of the wind in their garments is gone, the wrinkles frozen in place. They drip from the planet and trail out into the void like dead sperm, their rapture instantly trapped and preserved by the petrification of space.
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