Member

by Michael Cisco

  The bailiff, straight as cricket, is officiously waving us out of the room.

  I’m still turning around in circles, looking for a way out. One of the last remaining High Rationals comes up to me. She doesn’t say anything, but she has a kind of significant way of looking me in the eyes. Now she turns and presses a distant window with her finger, as if it were an illuminated elevator button hanging in space. Total darkness, and this time I really am alone.

  *

  Now, I have to be cagey. Things are beginning to adopt interesting contours. That queasy feeling is back, but not so strong. It may get stronger, but it just doesn’t feel the same.

  There are numbered doors here, and windows, too, with numbers on their shutters. I tug on every available handle and from time to time I’m rewarded with a yield into black rooms lit by white windows, white streaks on black floors, and cool office air.

  I’m turning to go on to another set of shutters when I realize I can see through this window through a window in the office, and, in that other window, there is an eerie, pale blue light that can only be moonlight. When was the last time I saw the moon?

  A sharp, nasal buzz comes at intervals from that window, across an office I can’t get into. It sounds mechanical. Every few seconds, and there’s a click just after it. A window, a room, another window, a sound, moonlight. I’m in the act of relinquishing my post there at the window when a movement catches my eye; with my nose right along the left edge of the window, I can see what’s going on through there. A woman is being welded into a steel dress that seems to be standing by itself. The skirts are overlapping plates reaching all the way to the floor I think. The woman is in profile; two other women, whose black clothes contrast with faces and hands as pale as carved soap, are sealing her in. One raises the arm on my side, and the other claps the steel around the woman’s ribcage. Tabs of metal come together forming a seam there, under the arm, and now one of the women seals the tabs together with an electric spot welder. That’s the buzz. The woman is familiar, even if a shadow lies across much of her face. One of the helpers has retrieved a steel bouquet from somewhere, and now lays it on a table within her reach. Looks like wedding preparations. The woman isn’t Clare. Sorrow and majestic resignation billow out from her. The hair is too long for Clare, and the wrong color.

  Well, it isn’t #7A. I can’t make the number out, but touch tells me it has a cross bar up too high for a seven and there’s only one figure there anyway, not two.

  A few more empty rooms. Then one with a female torso sitting on a table. There are molds stacked on the floor, male and female. Heads on racks in the darkest part of the room. Male and female. A window there in the back. Moonlight there in the room beyond it, and a mirror on the wall; in that mirror, I can see Guerrero in his wheelchair and he’s not alone. They are silent, frenetic activity notwithstanding; the window must be pretty thick.

  All right. We can cross June off the list of prospective models of steel dresses.

  The number on this one is definitely seven, but I have no idea what the second figure is. The door has several knobs and the noise they make seems to draw my outline in the air, as shrill in its own way as an alarm.

  The light falls past me from the hallway into the pitch blackness of the room. It shines on a patch of oriental rug, whose pattern is so frantic it shivers the light apart and scatters it. There’s a gleam of a sequin here, and an eye over there. It looks like an ordinary, old fashioned, furnished room. Mute, statuesque, elaborately half-dressed women are standing all around its walls, hands clasped in front of them, gazing down at the bit of rug. They don’t seem to notice me. I can only imagine the sort of person who could stride confidently into that room, full of the sound of their breathing. Each of them is buried in thought, unless they’re asleep. Standing up and sleeping. The baubles hang straight from their ears. The long, exposed or stockinged legs do not shift. There’s a clash of perfumes fixed and paralyzed in the air, directly over the carpet. I draw the door closed again, as quietly as I can; I don’t want to break the trance.

  “#7A” appears in the room. It hangs written in space, a deep, hot orange color that dims and flares like an ember in a draft, and melts back into the gloom when I reverse the door. Experiment: as the door draws closed, the writing reappears. Redissolves when I open again. Now I notice the tiny ivory statue of a queen on a throne, like an old chess piece. The tines of her crown are exceptionally long. Seems as good a place as any. So I slip the letter in there between the tines. It looks right, from the door. She grips the arms of her throne, there on the farthest rim of the little swatch of light on the rug, and seems to hold the letter out to be read with a peevish thrust of her royal brow.

  Outside, nine Operationals are digging graves in a square formation, three ranks of three. Clare appears to be supervising them, and Loring is pacing animatedly to and fro, watching the work.

  I go over to Clare, who does not look in my direction. She’s wearing a flaring evening gown that all but bares the shoulders, and a wrap.

  “What is this?”

  “They’re digging graves,” she says, watching them.

  “Well, was there a cave-in or something? Who died?”

  “They’ve expired.”

  She continues watching them, lost in thought.

  “I mean,” she adds after a moment, “they’re too worn out to work.”

  “But they still have to dig their own graves?”

  “Who else? Are you going to do it?”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “They’re hanging crepe,” she sneers, but not at me. “That’s stationery, isn’t it?”

  There’s disgust in her voice as she stalks off into the gloom again.

  Loring comes over and stands next to me.

  “What’s the good word?” he asks.

  I’m not sure what to make of the bashful, why-can’t-we-be-pals way he puts it. He seems wary but without animosity, fingering a little cigar.

  “Clare had somewhere else to be pretty quickly just now.”

  He comes on sheepisher and drags on his butt for a second or two. The smoke smells like burning maple leaves. Leaving the end in his teeth he says,

  “She’s bugged at me. Says I overdid it the other night.”

  Now his hand is out.

  “No hard feelings, anyhow.”

  Loring folds my hand in his, warmly.

  And I think: “This man is my enemy.”

  “Perhaps you should work with someone else here.”

  “I’d rather it be her than the man she married.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with him?”

  “Aw,” Loring flaps the air with hand, then rubs the back of his head with it. “Well, he’s not consistent. That’s for one thing. He’s got so good at being careful and estimating the ever-changing angles of the thing that he’s abstracted himself right out of contention.”

  “For what?”

  The hand drops to his side and he keeps his head lowered, looking up at me.

  “For the stakes.”

  “Such as for instance?”

  He grins at me.

  “Eternal life.”

  We look at each other for a bit, neither of us changing. I try not to change, since he doesn’t. I sway, and once or twice I glance momentarily away, but otherwise pretty successful.

  “Is this a joke? You want to...”

  The line peters out. After a few minutes longer, the silence and the unaltered postures strike me funny. I laugh.

  “OK, OK,” I say, and he blinks and straightens up, still smiling. “Guerrero’s goofing his chances, and you’d prefer to hitch yourself to someone who’s going places.”

  Loring watches the Operationals carefully lowering coffins into new graves. Inhaling deeply through his nose, a wisp of smoke playing about his cheek, inflating his body significantly, he, a moment later, breathes out again the same way.

  “Weeelll,” he says, “That just might be.”

  �
�But in that case—why...?”

  “Why do I serve him...?”

  I’m struck by the Faustian quality of that “serve,” and I wonder at the antecedent.

  “Why, indeeeed?” He takes the cigar in his lips from rigid scissor fingers, which he holds open before his face like a fan as he takes a drag, then convulsively snatches it out again. He then abruptly shifts his attention from me to an Operational hanging a black banner of heavy bunting on the side of one of the barracks.

  “What in hell do you call that? Will you look at that? What do you call that?”

  Loring strides over to the wall. The Operational stops where he is and turns to face him stolidly.

  “Is that level?” Loring streaks the air with his finger, pointing at the bunting.

  The Operational continues to regard Loring.

  “You’re hanging it parallel to the ground! The ground here slopes, and that will slope with it! You’ve got to take and hang it true level.”

  The Operational eventually gets back to work, although I don’t see that he’s going about it any differently than before.

  Loring walks back over to me.

  “You’d think I wasn’t speaking the same language for all the cooperation I get,” he huffs.

  “You’re not a High Rational.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference!” he snaps, with the old irritability.

  “They don’t see you the same way, that’s all. An Operational looks at a High Rational going by and puffs up with pride. He says to himself, ‘It’s my work that makes that possible. That’s what we Operationals have to show for ourselves.’ Like a maiden aunt who does without for the sake of a beautiful niece. He only gets angry at what he takes for their ingratitude.”

  Loring grunts.

  Once the coffins are positioned correctly in the graves, the Operationals step down into them, lie flat and pull the lid shut. The lids are strange, built up in levels like a step pyramid, and in a moment I see why. Having shut the lid, it is then necessary for it to be nailed down, and this is something the occupant of the coffin must do for him or herself. The lid is shut, then a lid in the lid is opened and the Operational sits up inside this aperture in the primary lid and nails it down about the feet, then further up toward the head. Then the lid in the lid is closed, and a third lid is opened in this so that the second lid can be nailed down. A fourth, fifth, and sixth lid, each smaller than the last, are all sealed the same way.

  It looks to me like this system of multiple lids in lids is necessary because, if there were only one lid in the lid, it would have to extend far enough down the body’s length for the Operational to be able to sit up, in order to nail in the lid at the foot of the coffin. Such a long lid in a lid would then be impossible to nail down from the inside, unless the burialee were a contortionist and could reverse head and feet inside the not too generous coffin so as to bang in the nails using a smaller aperture. Since Operationals generally lack flexibility, owing both to their sturdy builds and the stiffness that comes with endless hard physical toil, so you got to go with the long lid. But a long unnailed lid in a nailed lid is practically no different than leaving the first lid unnailed, so you need another lid to nail down the long lid. Being shorter than the first lid, it can be nailed down by someone who is only just lifting the upper portion of the body more or less from the waist. And so on.

  The Operational nearest me has nailed in the last lid and withdrawn her arm inside the coffin through a circular hole in the middle of the last lid. Attached to this hole by a hinge is a round plug. There’s a brief pause. I wonder what she’s doing in there. Just settling the hammer she’s to be buried with in a place specially set aside for it? No—the hand reappears and tosses the hammer and a packet of leftover nails expertly out of the grave, all the way up, onto the level ground above. The two land right next to each other by my feet. No waste.

  After another, more poignant hesitation, I see the hand slide calmly from the round hole and grasp the crossbar inside the plug. The plug swings down into position without a sound, and begins to turn in stops and starts. The turns are all even, not too fast, not too slow. The plug is screwed down into the aperture from inside. It turns, turns, turns again, then stops. The coffin is as still lifeless unmourned and forgotten as if it had lain that way at the bottom of a tideless ocean for hundreds of years.

  Loring coughs beside me.

  “Who shovels the dirt on top of them?” I ask.

  “You do,” he says, handing me a shovel.

  That snaps me out of it.

  “Me? What do you mean me—why in hell me?”

  Clare looms up over my other shoulder, taking me completely by surprise.

  “If I were you,” she says in a voice that doesn’t bother with my ears but drills right into my brain direct, “I would fill in those graves. That’s my advice.”

  I fill in the graves.

  When I’m finished, I look up, and lights come on across the artifact.

  *

  I spend the night wandering in and out among the barracks, up and down the grid of dirt paths. I say ‘the night,’ but who knows. It’s all night of one kind or another here. Every possible variety of night, shading into each other, and twilight. Except starry nights, or moonlit nights. They don’t get those here.

  This wandering of mine takes the place of sleep. My mind sleeps and my body walks. That’s the bag at work. If this isn’t the condition I rescued its previous owner from, it can’t be too different. Every time I turn a corner in the grid formed by the barracks, the bag’s handle emits three soft tones and then two lower ones. A half step lower, I think. When I was a boy, I knew someone who knew something about music, and I picked up that ‘half-step’ from him, without ever learning what it really meant. I think it means the difference between a white key and the black key adjacent to it or something. The higher tones are accompanied by the appearance of two parentheses of faint and transparent grey light around the handle, about four inches out, and the lower by two more inside the first, about two inches from the handle, and then they both vanish when the tones are finished. Whenever this happens, I feel a cold brace lock around my arm as a tiny, cool spot sails up my nerves to my brain and drops there into a growing heap. It’s like doing an elaborate math problem with many parts, all of which are supposed eventually to get calculated together into one answer, but won’t.

  My hands are filthy. I smell. My clothes are dirty and torn. I know this walking phase is over when I stagger over to a barracks with a spigot sticking out of it and lower my head into the stream. My waist is as stiff as metal when it comes to bending down, and there are some startling pains in my lower back. My shoes are like ovens, but my skin is clammy even before I dunk my head.

  Straighten up, water trickling into my collar. Without thinking, more because the motion appeals to me than anything else, I raise my free hand and let it fall on the railing of the steps near me. Drag myself up the steps.

  Not a barracks after all. The darkness ahead of me unfolds into all kinds of little rooms and corridors that seem to hang in a felty cloud. Smells like cats in here. Are those things big hanging glass ornaments? They’re the shape of chrysalises and the size of sixth graders, turning in the dark more dark than light, so that only their reliefs catch the dim gleam. All this means is that there are, all over the dark, places where you see smooth white curves undulating as the glass rotates.

  I’m a dozen or so paces from the door when it occurs to me these could be colossal light bulbs about to come crashing on, and the presentiment of being blinded and scorched stops me in my tracks. At first I look at them, then down at the floor, in sudden terror. It’s not too strong a word. After a few minutes, I begin to relax again. For no better reason than this: the general sense of absence here doesn’t have any tension of waiting in it. There’s no apprehension around me to suggest a pounce is imminent.

  People are sitting here, at tables. They are probably Operationals, or mixed in with some of Chornc
endantra’s junior functionaries, bookkeepers, accountants. All alike, they sit with their hands in their laps or their forearms straight ahead of them on the tables, each looking down into a pot.

  I spot Guerrero. He’s wheeled himself over to one of the windows and gazes out of it, over his bandaged leg. Muttering spreads around me as I go over to him, not I think in response to my arrival—more like I’m coming out of an acoustic fog, like someone whose ears are returning to sound after an explosion set them ringing.

  Now I stand beside him, and the low conversational hum has grown so that I can speak to him without feeling as though I were breaking a silence.

  “Come here often?”

  Guerrero’s eyelids flutter. He draws a long breath through his nose before he shifts his gaze to me.

  “Sit down,” he says.

  I pull up a chair.

  He keeps his eyes fixed on the window, looking out, I now see, at the artifact.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks hoarsely.

  “Sitting comfortably,” I say, in a voice even rustier than his.

  “What are you doing in my camp?” he asks again.

  My neck bends, as though a weight had just been set on my head.

  “What are you doing in my camp?”

  He’s drawing long, silent drafts of air through his nose, then letting them out again in quiet puffs, as if there were a weight on his midriff. Could be surf, heard from afar.

  “What are you doing in my camp?”

  The question is receding into him, becoming rhetorical, becoming self-directed.

  “Is this tea sweetened?”

  “I’m the foreman here,” he says, drawing another long breath first. “No Operational can put one bolt in one bolt hole without my say-so. No Operational can sleep without my say-so.”

  Wind sets canvases and tarps rippling across the artifact. It’s like the stirring of a huge, ragged sail.

  “I’ve been here for three years,” Guerrero says.