The Divinity Student

by Michael Cisco

  A noise wakes him up—somebody has set a glass down firmly on the table in front of him. Looking up, he sees a big dark-skinned man in a shabby suit of violet satin walking away across the circle of light. He sways over to an elaborate organ under an awning, sits down at the keys, turns a few knobs, and sets it going. In the light from the console, the Divinity Student can make him out—bald and heavy, baby-faced with black filigree tattooed around his eyes. A sign on the organ lights up, “The Clown Filemon” it says. Little blue and yellow lights wink over the organ pipes and keys, luminous strands of clear syrup draw a web in the air over his head, clinging to rigid silver wires, and translucent tubes, gathered around the console, glow with bubbling, phosphorescent green liquid. With slow and deliberate motions, Filemon begins playing—a mysterious, confidential humming in the pipes—but his eyes remain fixed, watching the Divinity Student. After a few minutes, he makes a quick gesture, as if lifting a glass to his lips, and jerks his head at him.

  The Divinity Student looks up, and then picks up the glass in front of him—all right so far?

  Filemon nods, and raises his eyebrows.

  The Divinity Student empties the glass.

  Filemon smiles and goes back to his playing, soft and low, for nighttime.

  The Divinity Student settles back and listens to the music washing down onto him. A few moments, and then he pulls out the box. He looks up at Filemon, but the clown is watching the keys. He opens the box, and instantly the mechanism emits a clicking, hollow-timbred melody that merges instantly with Filemon’s music. As the Divinity Student shifts his hands over the box, he notices that the tone bends with even the slightest change of a single finger’s position. He tries the bottom, but there the box is thickest and there’s no change. The edges and corners, which are singed, darker than the rest of the box, not only change the pitch when touched, but also cause a second, parallel tone, breathy and faint, to fill out the first.

  As he fiddles with the box, he senses that either the random changes he makes in the melody are starting to complement Filemon’s music, or Filemon is anticipating him. He starts pressing the box more deliberately, the organ follows, the notes begin to weave around each other, the Divinity Student begins to decipher the pattern of the notes, and they play together.

  When he next looks up from the box, it’s dawn. The music winds down, until finally they end on a single chord. They sit still a moment, listening to the sound ripple along the surface of the surrounding buildings, trickle and fade down the streets. When it is gone, Filemon shuts the organ off, smiling down at the keyboard in satisfaction. The Divinity Student puts the box back in his coat and sits back in the chair again, then looks over at the Clown. Filemon gets up without looking at him and vanishes into the cafe.

  The Divinity Student takes a pad from his coat and writes at random, fragmentary notes about something: “Kill this idea by scrawling it. Happiest man, ribbon, water, droplets/griddle light, chord of music, through body in threads of water—close eye/defocus/reopen/mind-body aphasia momentary discrepancy—flash S.V.” He looks up a moment across the street at a spout draining. He stops writing, it stops draining. He starts writing and it starts draining again.

  Two tables over, a card game degenerates, two men fling cards angrily at each other.

  The Divinity Student rests for a while, and then heads back toward Woodwind’s.

  seven: the lesson

  The day is long and slow. The Divinity Student leans over his desk, filling columns of words. Householder is absent, Blandings dozes over his ledger, and Ollimer works with typical diligence in the corner, conspicuously not looking at the Divinity Student.

  “He’s waiting until after work to approach me,” he thinks, yawning dust. Cars race by beneath the one tiny window, rattling the pane—sometimes idling just close enough to set his teeth on edge. Every now and then he remembers the box in his pocket, gets nervous, “What if some car stops me and finds it? Bad enough I’m carrying the Holy Book—bad evidence.”

  It’s hot in the office; he’s sweating, but he won’t take his coat off. He sits in a column of his own hot air, smell of wool and linen, and a fainter odor of old papers . . . an involuntary spasm jerks his arm, smears a word—remember a blast of light by a Seminary wall, jolted alive again in water? Blandings is looking at him, grinning, and the Divinity Student flips him off, hooking his thumb under his chin and snapping it at him; Blandings just laughs and turns back to his dozing.

  No good trying to concentrate, his mind chasing after a dozen different things, just killing time. Is Ollimer actually his contact—why wait around? The Clown was sent to teach him how to use the box, make him ready to play it for Magellan.

  So he goes for a drink of water, slouching heavily down the stairs, enervated, flat warm water from the cooler flavored with wax from the cup, just transferring weight from the cup to his mouth and down his throat.

  Miss Woodwind walks by with her ledger. It’s thick and tidy, unlike those of the other word-finders with their pages sticking out or dribbling on the floor. She’s the best of the lot, has found more words than the rest of them combined, every page in her ledger neatly typed, with no mistakes. As she passes she favors him with a pretty grin and a graceful inclination of her head, fragrance trailing after, think then of father Woodwind sleeping on the clouds, her hair raining on his face in his dream.

  He drags himself back up to the office again and stares at his record book for the remaining hours of the day.

  He leaves Woodwind’s quickly—he doesn’t want to get trapped talking to Ollimer again. Once safely lost in San Veneficio’s warren of streets, he lets himself drift—today would not be right to go to Magellan, he thinks, “the time is not yet.”

  This day was dull, flat, and now so is he. Tomorrow will be Saturday, he won’t have to go in to work, he can get right with himself before visiting the Orpheum again. The streets spiral him out to the city’s limits, this time to mount the encircling wall under the lictors’ watchful eyes, glittering behind hexagonal black panes set in their chrome half-masks.

  The Divinity Student watches night descend upon the desert’s face. The great monitors are just visible, lumbering dark shapes streaking around, positioning themselves for their night-watch.

  As the lights of San Veneficio come up behind him, he sees their eyes for himself, growing in brilliance like the stars overhead as they reflect the city’s luminance back in tiny points. Like statues, they stare at San Veneficio, and at the Divinity Student, and the Divinity Student gazes back, amazed, at them.

  Moved by a nameless impulse, he wanders over to a dim lamp hanging from one of the battlements, and draws the book out of his pocket. He reads to them from the first chapters, about the first world. The gray twilight place, trees, and rain. The trees’ shadows fill with rain and the rain mixes with dirt until the shadows of the trees take substance in clay. And these shadows, having dimension and substance, begin walking around. They go to the beach, and eventually an intermediary comes from over the water and makes people out of them, and then leads them through the water up to this world.

  He stops there. The monitors’ eyes shine impassively back at him, and he puts the book away with a sheepish expression on his face. Those old eyes make him feel stupid, standing there with his book.

  The Divinity Student’s journal from his school days: “I met a cat dressed like me on a night road—all black but for a white collar, like me in my coat. We stared at each other across the road, orange yellow gold eyes it ran off when a car came, I went into the dark feeling em,powered, like an exchange had been made.” More recently he added, “Now I see them all the time.”

  He goes, eats dinner alone, and sleeps in a grotto in the park.

  The morning sun strikes colors off the grotto walls and fills the chamber with pale halo-light. The Divinity Student has stripped himself and is bathing in a chuckling brook that spreads its sheet of water across a bed of smooth stone. He emerges glistening white in the new
daylight and goes over to the sandy part of the cave, still full in view of the sun. With care, he draws the signatures of three spirits in the sand and kneels between them. He lights a small heap of incense beneath his coat, which hangs from a spur of rock within arms’ reach, to cure it in the smoke. He burns likewise a paper prayer next to each of the three signatures. He anoints his hands and forehead with a little oil. Then, he sits still.

  Kneeling, he puts his hands together before him and begins a chant from the Seminary—these are words that will trail in the gaps between divine words. The glinting morning air chills his wet skin and chill blooms in ghostly waves over his body and up under the hair on his head. Now, he starts rocking, gently, forwards and backwards, just slightly, just waving a little back and forth, like a blade of grass in a weak breeze, still chanting. The air is quiet. His voice is quiet, touching here and there on the rock walls behind him and humming sometimes at the cavern’s rim, just audible over the hush of the stream. The chant rings hollow, the syllables proceeding chromatic in a slow kaleidoscoping pattern of cadence rising and falling. His hands rub together only a little bit, adding a dry, regular whisper of rustling skin pacing the tones. The chant is spiraling up with the smoke from the prayers and the incense to the roof of the grotto, to linger a moment and then drift out into the open air. The sounds all mount together, something nameless growing within them, to mingle with the light that strikes stone and water like a chime. Hands pressed together, fingertips brush brow, mouth, and heart in regular, circular motion, each gesture the same as a syllable, another sound falling, and all regular, nodding back and forth in rhythm, steadily back and forth in rhythm.

  The chant ends, but the light, the water, the rhythm stays with him as he gets up, stays with him as he gets dressed and covers the traces, stays with him as he comes clean out of the grotto.

  At the top of Calavera street, a small portal in the wall of the Orpheum opens onto a miniature courtyard. Above, Magellan’s window is visible just beneath the dome, and within the walls, a few young trees in circular planters, the largest, an oak, in the center, and all connected by a stream that flows from a low opening in the inner wall. The paving stones are black, but three concentric gold rings radiate out from the oak planter in the center, describing a compass. There’s no one there at all.

  The Divinity Student steps out carefully, coming up close to the wall. He sees movement in the water and freezes—the channels are deep, the stones are smooth and clean, and there is a column of small children gliding slowly by, faces down, propelling themselves with only the barest movements of their golden arms and legs, so that the surface above them remains calm. Startled, the Divinity Student steps back, and then forward to look again. Still they flow by in a steady stream, alone or in pairs, and without needing to come up for air. He watches them, and then he sees it—a single child breaks off and vanishes into the submerged roots of one of the young trees.

  These are larval oros, enjoying the relative freedom they are afforded before pupating in the trunk of a tree. Eventually they will emerge as mature adults, varying in form depending on the tree. Oak oros, for example, have porcelain mouths.

  With care, he pulls the box out of his pocket, then looks up at the oak tree—and there, rustling, maybe the wind only but perhaps some moving black limbs, a brief glint of white.

  “If you’re going to spy,” he says, not loud, but clear and sharp, “then help me. That’ll give you something to spy on.”

  Without waiting for a response from the oak, he sits down and opens the box, trying to remember how he played with Filemon the night before. The oak’s boughs sway in the hazy light, its smell comes to him on the wind, settling in his face and lulling him into a reverie. Behind him, in the water, he can sense a change in the orbit of the oro larva. Each one parts its lips and sends a bubble to the surface, a tiny puff of breath popping into the air, filling the courtyard with a fresh cool green odor that lingers in his nostrils and wreaths his head. Cool and calm now, the Divinity Student begins pressing the box first on its sides, then around the rim, moving languid fingers over holes in the top, the edges and corners, playing as he had with Filemon, sending a resonant wood-tone through the stones and glass and up to Magellan’s office. The music grows wide and full without becoming loud, mingling as had the chant with the light and the water sounds. The trees rustle their fingers.

  When he’s done and turns—there’s a black boat waiting for him, motionless in the narrow channel. Rock steady, it neither tips nor sways as he gets on board and sits—it’s small, carved from the trunk of an ebony tree, and polished. Once he sits, it begins to move, drifting toward the black recess in the wall. As he draws near, the Divinity Student can feel spray misting in his face—in he goes. The Orpheum weighs heavily down atop the arch a foot above his head, a turn, and all light dims and vanishes.

  The progress in the dark is quick and steady, cobwebs of stale air brush against his face. It’s lightless and silent as empty sleep.

  Presently, a dim phosphorescence limns a dirt shore before the prow of the boat. Drawing in close, a narrow beach, with cypress and willow trees beyond, stiff blades of grass, lit with eldritch yellow light. The boat glides hissing up onto blue sand, and the Divinity Student disembarks. He glides across the beach leaving no footprints, and moves cautiously through the copse to an open patch beyond. He looks up—no ceiling, around—but no walls, the light has no source. He sinks to his knees, pulls out a matchbox with a small mirror set in the bottom. He holds it in the palm of his left hand, and swings his pendulum in an arc over it. His right hand is the still point. He listens to the crickets, the cries of mourning doves from dead trees looming like spiders; in the gloom, the pendulum is a pale smudge drifting over his palm. It takes a long time, but eventually it stops, pointing straight ahead, toward a break in the trees.

  Where he passes the leaves change color. Stepping over a low hummock, the grass beneath his feet shifts from yellow to blue, and up ahead—a ruddy glow, grainy at the edges, halos a boulder. The Divinity Student draws in close, and feels the rock warm against his palm as he feels his way to the light. He finds a small clearing bordered with frosty blue and purple-black flowers hiding in the lee of a rock face, crowned with flaccid tendrils of moss, and dead trees. Tombstones and crosses shine bleakly in clumps of grass all around, ringed round by a ruined wrought-iron fence. A few ghost lamps hang from posts, the grassy face of the clearing is littered with parcels, bundles. Dimly he can see small gray forms skipping over the ground like pebbles on water, carrying things to and from an open pavilion sprawling in the center of the clearing. Coming closer, the Divinity Student sees Magellan lying on a couch under heavy veils, his face still painted white and black, but now he’s wearing regal garments, a yellow half-coat and long green vest, ruffles at his wrists and throat, knee-pants and white stockinged calves marble-smooth tapering into black slippers. Incense coils around his dreaming head from braziers fanned by his imps, who pour him cups of poison that he drains in contempt of death.

  The Divinity Student enters the burying ground unchallenged, lets Magellan’s blood-purple canopy draw him in, up to the couch. The high priest’s eyelids are painted dark, now two diamond-shaped openings in his face, the Divinity Student feels their non-gaze settle on him. He sits down in front of the couch, an imp slipping a cushion underneath him as he kneels, and opens the music box again, slowly, letting the air calm his fingers, not talking nor trying to talk, but just playing as the oro in the oak grove had directed.

  The air guides his fingers. A ululating phrase whistles out like a jet of steam, or a moth’s fluttering wing, and repeats itself over and over again. Magellan snaps bolt upright; wan, hollow shapes come swirling in the pallid light around the circumference of the clearing, fast drumming follows, thundering up under the phrase, levitating it.

  Magellan rises from his couch, bringing his arms out wide, he permits his familiars to bear back his sleeves, and he cuts his white arms with a cobalt knife.
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  Again, the Divinity Student repeats the phrase.

  Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.

  Again, he repeats the phrase.

  The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.

  Again he repeats the phrase.

  Vague whitenesses gather about him; they open their dark smudgy mouths and exhale together, filling his head with a voiceless whispering of breath like wind in trees, whistling and yawning all around him, rising up over the thunder of the drums to lighten his head.

  Again he repeats the phrase.

  Sensation now of his face being pressed against something like a metal barrier, already it bends as he is pushed into it. Magellan steps forward, lifting him, lightest possible touch of Magellan’s hands under his arms, as if he is only a column of air, bursting through headfirst and the metal shatters and tears, rising into a rare darkness he has seen before, frozen a moment over the earth in a column of light, the unique nothing in the shadows of Magellan’s eyes, flame rilling over his body, blood and perspiration and the rustle of dry papers sewn inside like a rag doll. He’s a column of air. He’s a vapor. He is evaporating out of a jar of formaldehyde.

  The sun settles mundane light on a courtyard filled with trees. Quiet, not busy yet, empty canals of free standing water, the Divinity Student sprawled sodden on the pavement. A custodian wakes him, leaves him dazed on the ground and goes for a lictor or a guard. When he comes back, the Divinity Student is gone—wet footprints, sour smell of chemicals.