The moment it’s caught, the man’s face lights up with a vicious joy at the prospect of revenge; grinning savagely he uproots the fork and, with tensed, electric swiftness, cruelly stabs the creature with it. The imp twines and jerks with loathsome rubberiness as he torments it. I can hear the thin, piping screams of its agony through the window, while the man drinks them in with mounting avidity.
A claxon begins to clamor inside the camp, not near me, summoning the next work detail, and the cry is doubled and returned instantly by the buildings standing exposed behind me. Suddenly he brings his thumb down hard and breaks the imp’s spine. Settling sidesaddle on the table, he falls to amusing himself tumbling the limp form to and fro with his fork. His leer of delight has subsided to a hard, thin-lipped smile that’s almost worse for being cooler and more clinical.
I hurry to get further away from the claxon. No need. It dies away. I stand for a moment by one of the rows of neatly ordered trees, the paved lane littered with chestnuts ground to flour under the heels of the Operationals.
Here’s an infirmary, a different one, with a sort of cupola on top. There’s also a stoop, and Yunis sits on it, listening, and using a spoon to stir flames into a pie-plate filled with some charred ground meat. He’s using a piece of flat bread as a potholder, and there’s a scratched up tumbler of coffee next to him on the step.
“I have a party of climbers prepping over by the concrete mixers,” he says. “Care to join us?”
“What are you going to climb?”
“Artifact,” he says, shovelling food into his mouth. “Thought you might like to get an up close look.”
Operationals and High Rationals, Galvophones too I assume, would be able to visit the artifact whenever they liked.
“Who are your party?”
“Visitors,” he says. “They want to see the artifact and the view from up top. And something else, if they can.”
He adds this last bit slowly and significantly.
“Is this about Wa-Zo-Li-Ring?”
He nods.
“Don’t say the name,” he says. “People around here are protective of them. They’re like the holy animals of the artifact. So they’re not supposed to exist. No one talks about them. But they all want to see one.”
“I’ve seen them.”
“Not these. You saw the stay-at-homes. You used your bag, right?”
I nod.
“These are different.”
“Then why are you showing them to outsiders? They are outsiders, right?”
“You too,” Yunis says, chewing. “But they wanted to see. Been a while since I climbed. Thought I’d like to get back up there.”
He looks at me for a moment longer, working his tongue along his lower gumline inside closed lips.
“And they pay,” he adds now.
“What do you need pay for? I thought this was a cashless utopia.”
He puts the plate down beside him and hoists his shirt out of his waistband, showing me the dark crevice that runs like a mountain crag up one side of his abdomen. In the gloom, I can see distinctly the tiny white flames hobbled inside, turning and tilting like candle lights.
“Why can’t you just put them out?”
“They keep going out. That’s the problem.”
He tucks back in.
“I got to buy more heat for them.”
I tap my pockets.
“Well, I don’t seem to have my wallet any more.”
Yunis shakes his head.
“Not money,” he says. “There’s all kinds of ways to pay.”
He finishes his food with two quick mouthfulls.
“Come anyway,” he says, getting up. “I’m going anyway. One more is fine, more or less.”
He takes his fibrokinetic barette out of the breast pocket of his battered felt shirt and lifts it to the back of his neck. I hear a click, and when he takes his hand away, the thing stays. As if by magic, the coffee glass floats up next to him and follows him as he takes his aluminum plate to a trash can and tosses it in.
*
Now I’m back in the infirmary again. It’s dark. I don’t ever seem to see the daylight here; even the days I can remember, like dreams, I can’t remember seeing the sun, only a great contrasting brightness overhead. And just a moment ago, the face of the man who died when I arrived, asking for whiskey, passes in the window. I rushed out as he was passing, asked him, not knowing what else to ask, where he was going.
“Back to work,” he said.
I asked him where he’d been.
He didn’t stop, only turned his head to show his teeth to me, smiling as he went by without breaking the rhythm of his pacing toward the artifact, the work site.
I went back in, and now here I am, waiting until the time comes to join Yunis and scale the artifact. The infirmary is dark. I don’t ever seem to see daylight here. A face flashes by the window and I head outside and begin walking. With joy I return once again to my practice.
I’ve tried meditation many times and I find it an unrewarding practice for someone of my unsettled temperament and why should I try to rise above a confusion that is all I know? My thoughts run on in longer and longer diverted sentences with more parcelled into them all the time, so the final phrase is blinking back at the dim origin. It’s not the untroubled center of meditation but the steadily measured unspooling linear movement of trances that I need, the focal joy of proceeding in a straight line with the eyes fixed on a distant spot that is not the goal, since the goal is achieved in oblivious straight rapid and regular movement without a swerve.
I leave the camp. These short thoughts drop away like street signs, and there’s no need to hold on to them any more than there is any need to turn aside into this or that side street. So here’s a park, nestled in among some houses with front yards and backyards, and hills rising in ridges over them. Wind, and insect sounds. Leaves.
Now coyotes raise up cries like raucous laughter. Their ragged shouts of joy burst out from the pitch black hillside just ahead of me and above me. They giggle and whinny, unable to contain themselves. The cries echo from the other ridges, coming, going and returning.
Now there’s silence, and crickets, and peace that seems as if it had never been broken. Not by day, not by human difficulties; refreshing its ordinary eternity without ceasing. Unfolding just here, without it mattering where here is.
Then again, those cries sent up from invisible throats buried in the night landscape, their spell of wildness singing out from nowhere exuberant as before, make me remember how I wanted to leave and find the way into the other world. An uncanny wilderness that could never be mapped.
Glancing around, I notice a humped shadow at a picnic table. It’s completely black, silhouetted against the lamplit street. It might be nothing more than a bag of refuse left there on the table, or it might be someone sitting there, watching me. A large, slumped figure. It’s like the blind spots I get when I glance at a streetlight with my adjusted or unadjusted eyes, a zone of no vision.
The park around it, and me, is a jumble of smooth trees like bones, trees that spout many big trunks from one root, a sprawl of big trunks leaning away from each other. Near me, an old olive tree sits on a whorl of roots like countless interwoven old hands, muffled and paralyzed by something in the hour and the sky over it, and perhaps in my gaze. Over in the other direction there’s a high window. The room isn’t lit, but the room beyond it is, and in the wan gold light that glows there I can see a thing or a figure faintly outlined. It has a glossy head like a wooden balloon, polished and sloping shoulders, the half of it I can see as it seems to peer around the sill, not at me, but out.
The barkings and cries are mixed with sounds of distress, victorious sounds, crazy. I stand still and join myself to the night air without having to try. You just stop and be alert, and go along, wanting to find, in among these solitary trees, a gradual and receding gateway you can overtake, passing through it easily into the other world that is also still this world he
re.
I look again, and note with alarm that the silhouette among the picnic tables is now huge, the size of a small truck. Its upper part is engulfed in the hanging boughs of the trees, and its sides, which are the only part I can really make out, are even.
So I withdraw from the park, feeling as though, by wandering into it, I had taken a step I couldn’t take back, and somehow linked my destiny to whatever it was that was bigger whenever I looked at it again.
A noise of laughter and conversation, coming from one of the houses lining this street scribbled over heavily with shadows, draws my attention. From night, through lighted windows I see an ordinary dinner party.
*
He rushes up to me, seizing me by the lapel and shifting me.
“You know magic!” he says fiercely, gnashing his teeth.
“What? I don’t know any—!” My voice sounds weird, deformed by the effect his violence has on me. “I’m not magic—”
“You’re a courier—you have to!” he snarls, like a man who’s already heard all the denials he’s prepared to hear. “You carry spells—you have to!”
I wrench myself free.
“Look you bastard I said I don’t know and that means I don’t know! Now lay off!”
“Where’re those spells?” he snaps abruptly, and starts searching the ground for my bag. He’s the stout man I’d seen forking an imp earlier. “Will you tell me where those spells are?”
Guerrero glides down his ramp and rolls over to us, his leg precedes him, a dingy grey figurehead. I wonder how long he’s had the thing on.
He greets me first.
“Something the matter, Loring?” he quietly asks the other.
The stout man, Loring, points at me.
“He’s brought spells.”
Guerrero takes his time.
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes,” Loring says with an emphatic nod of his head.
Guerrero suddenly seems uncharacteristically indecisive. He seems as though he’s slipping into a trance.
“W-well...” Guerrero says. “I...”
Loring crosses his arms and taps his foot. His breath whistles in his distended nostrils.
“Look,” I say, and Guerrero’s attention shifts entirely to me, his face blank. “I deliver these. I don’t hand them over on demand. There’s a difference.”
“Sophistry!” Loring says with disgust.
“Presentation on demand and delivery are two different things. A courier, and that’s what you say I am—”
“You’re a courier only because you’re carrying that bag!” Loring butts in, getting redder in the face.
“If I am a courier,” I say loudly, “then I have a responsibility to make sure this stuff doesn’t get into the wrong hands.”
“Wrong hands!” Loring cries marvellingly. “Can you believe it?”
“Ask Clare,” I say. “She’ll tell you.”
“Why bother bringing her into it?” Loring snaps, now thoroughly red. “Will you order this hatrack to seven seventy-one or not?”
“Clare?” Guerrero asks, like a man in a dream.
“Yes, why not ask her?”
“Leave her out of it!” Loring shouts.
Guerrero wheels his chair a little to one side.
“Clare?” he calls to the darkness. “Could you come here a moment?”
Loring puffs and fumes.
Guerrero’s mind might be pouring out his eyes into the darkness. He remains still, with his face turned away.
I grip the handle of the bag tightly.
After a minute or two, Clare lopes into the circle of lamplight, elongated and tilting like a scarecrow.
“Arturo?” she asks, pronouncing the name with a torturous lack of accent.
“Eh,” he says, “these two...”
Clare surveys us both.
Loring has his arms folded on his chest and his gut thrust out defiantly.
“He wants my spells,” I explain, since no one else seems to feel like it.
“And?”
“And I don’t want to give them to him. And your husband don’t want to decide whether or not to order me to give them up.”
Guerrero gives me a harder look then.
“So he called on you to advise,” I finish.
“You’re the courier,” she says.
Where she stands, to one side of Guerrero’s chair, the light bounces up onto her face, while none falls over her. It gives her a baleful quality, like a catfish.
“Making deliveries is up to you.”
“Look, who runs this place?” Loring yells.
Clare doesn’t flinch.
“I suggest you keep a civil tone, Loring. That’s my advice.”
Loring doesn’t answer.
“Not all couriers are bonded,” she goes on. “Some are free agents, or act as free agents for a time. Some,” she turns her head slightly so, pupilless though they are, I know with a chill she’s shifted her eyes to me, “lose their freedom, when Chorncendantra goes against them.”
Back to Loring.
“If you want his spells, take it up with him.”
“I never said I wanted his spells!” Loring sings in frustration, “I’m demanding that he abide by seven seventy-one!”
What’s seven seventy-one?
“Is this necessary?” I ask, assuming it’s usually a reasonable question. The non-melodramatic ordinary everyday void coolly slides itself underneath my improvisation.
“Will you be quiet?” Loring sings.
“Clare?” Guerrero asks, vaguely.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Clare asks, with a blankness that prevents the banality of the question from dissipating any of her weird menace.
“Make sure you abide by seven seventy-one. Do it right away.”
“I thought...” I blurt—stop myself. If I say I’ve already done it, they’ll almost certainly realize I don’t know what I’m talking about. “I thought that was already taken care of.”
“Will you quit arguing!”
Wrapping her long, flipperlike hands around the handles of Guerrero’s chair, she trundles him back into the gloom with her. I watch the darkness engulf the back of her white cardigan. When I turn, Loring is gone, too. I can see him, arms and legs pumping angrily, receding into the dark in the other direction. Now I will disappear into the darkness, myself, and see what it’s like out there.
*
It’s nice. I haven’t eaten, or taken a drink of water, in I don’t know how long. The hunger and thirst I ought to be feeling is what doctors call referred; that is, I don’t feel them where they are, in the affected part of me, but in another part. If you really could feel pain in your heart when you’re having a coronary, then you presumably would feel your heart all the time. You would feel the slosh slosh of your blood in there, just as much as if you were squeezing it in and out of your hands. But you don’t. When the coronary comes, you feel it in your neck, in your arms, in the parts of you that can feel such things.
My hunger and thirst register as an airy, dry, stretching sensation inside my limbs, especially my arms, my left arm. No, it varies with my attention. Now it’s stronger in my legs. My veins and arteries must be like baked desert clay. This is what snakes experience. Like being a flying snake.
I wash myself in the outdoor shower behind one of the barracks. Is this ever used by the Operationals? They seem to go directly from bed to work and then back to bed again, but, for all the sweat that gushes out of them, maybe for them showering is unnecessary.
My bandages are covering me. They cling to me in the water like lampreys, huddling up against my skin. The air moves over me, and I crush water into my hair. Blinking it away, I turn to get the soap again, and something makes a pale streak, with my own movement, not I think moving on its own, out there. The being-watched feeling bristles all over my back as I turn it out to the night and get my head under the spigot again.
Act natural.
Coating my front an impromptu garment
of suds, I put the soap back and take a quick glance. Two pale lights out there. Clear and cold. Fixed, I have to say, on an embarrassingly prominent part of me—should have bandaged it up too, but couldn’t bring myself to.
The sirens explode and I twist in surprise.
*
Lights are bursting out all over the forest. It looks as though giant, supercharged fireflies are drifting through the gloom; the colors are harsher, more like the blue-white glare of magnesium flashes. The pyrotechnics are accompanied with whining and fizzing, birdlike squawks and shrills. These flashes expose nothing but patches of the littered forest floor, startled by a glare that seems to flatten the long, skinny tree shadows in fearful prostration around the sudden mosaic of dead blonde leaves and their own shadows. Some go off higher in the boughs, creating momentary soap-bubble ornaments full of tangled, criss-crossed inner mechanics. The whole forest chitters and whistles like a defective radio, while the landscape all around is still, echoes and glints crossing it as they escape into outer darkness.
Those lights draw my attention to an enormous object that hovers unsupported in space, near the place where the edge of the forest stands distinct against the horizon. The smooth motion of the two globes tells me what it is.
“It’s the Newest.”
There’s Loring, sitting on a log not twenty feet from me.
“That machine with the globes?”
Fixing his eyes on it again—as he must have been watching it when he became aware of me—he simply bares his teeth, sucks his lower lip a second, and nods once.
I ask him what’s going on.
“They look like they’re holding a conversation,” I say.
“They are!” Loring says pertly. He leans toward them, glassy-eyed. “Let’s get closer!”
He takes off, and I follow him. Tiny blue sparks of static electricity frisk all over and between the layers of his clothes as he moves, making him look like a miniature thunderhead.
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