The Traitor

by Michael Cisco

  I then watched him bring the tombstone, carrying it over his head, although it was as heavy as he was.

  A body was laid out in the center of the chapel. The upper portion of the coffin lid was hanging open on its hinges. A young woman was inside, her hands bound on her chest by a loose bandage around her wrists, her head swathed in gauze so that only her blue face was visible. She had been dead for at least a week. Wite pointed out that she had been pregnant. He and I lay on opposite sides of the chapel with the bier between us. The gravedigger had brought in a few bags of compost for us to lie on. Before he went to rest, Wite had stood over the body and stared at its face, staring at it, I want to say “mechanically” although I know this conveys nothing. The night passed.

  I had thought this was a nightmare: I could hear the dead woman wailing, this went on for hours, I would notice it again and again, realize to my shock that this was the same wailing I had heard earlier, that she was still wailing, it seemed she was sobbing for hours, for her own destruction. She stopped abruptly, I thought at the eruption of Wite’s voice. I heard her speak without understanding, but from the tone of her voice I thought she was bargaining. Wite’s voice was brutal and flat when he said, “Yes.” After a pause the wailing began again, and continued until I awoke in the morning. I was disoriented and unsure as to whether I had woken up because the wailing had not stopped. The woman’s body was contorted, and her face had the blank, unrecognizable, ruined look of someone whose soul has been devoured—oily tears had carved streaks in the dust on her face. A naked, squalling baby lay on her now flat stomach, angrily snatching at the air with its fingers.

  Wite was standing by the door, he had been dozing on his feet, leaning against the jam, and I saw that his right hand was covered in filth. With this hand he opened the door of the mortuary chapel and stepped outside, moving with renewed energy. Later on he explained to me that the purpose of spirit-eaters was to clear away old rubbish. He said that spirit-eaters turned their blanks out in the way that a person who suddenly starts screaming in the middle of a crowded street clears a space. He began talking about the man he’d killed, and explained that when he ran off he’d had a revelation—he insisted on the word “revelation” and repeated it—and that he’d seen the world blanked out by sheets of snow. Wite had started talking when I mentioned the dead woman and the live baby, and he was explaining to me in his fashion. Wite said nothing more about it. I was made to understand somehow that he would answer no more questions about it, and say nothing more.

  While Wite and I were traveling to the border, we always used graveyards for hiding, and we were everywhere sheltered by gravediggers, but like all spirit-eaters we had spent a great deal of time in cemeteries. Death does clear the necessary space for life. Life proceeds in sequence, and it requires death to clear each step, and the spirit-eaters are clear; they do the clearing. Because they are blank, they are able to volatilize their blankness and make it poison, make it an acid. Wite had been driven out into the woods and toward his own country by this thought of an infinite and volatile blank. I imagined it as he did, like a sheet of snow.

  Wite and I fled toward Heipacth together, we were almost always together during this time, and I remember that, in some way, I was starting to feel my own life. I remember how ghostly my own life seemed to me. The peace of the graveyard made me feel it like a steady insistent rain in my body. Wite said that he felt not so much his life as what was left of his life like a colony of ants endlessly at work in every part of his body—this was typical of the way Wite generally expressed himself, although I can’t reduce this to a principle, actually I won’t reduce it to a principle. Wite spoke briefly of his life and I thought about and felt mine, and now I feel my life bleeding out of me in steadily diminishing pulses onto this page. When my body fails me altogether, at last, the spirits will devour me, or Wite will, so that I imagine I will fall into his infinite sheet of snow. I don’t imagine however that it will make much difference, even to me, although I am starting to make plans, I’m starting even now to carry out little thought experiments, as I glimpse my dying day ahead. There are small ideas coming to me gradually; you’ll hear of them by and by.

  Once, when Wite and I were drawing close to the border, we stopped at another cemetery; we had stopped at so many cemeteries our trip was turning into one continuous cemetery laid out like a stripe from the capital to the border. The gravedigger had hidden us in an empty stone cottage on the forest border of the cemetery. We sat in there, and Wite finally explained to me that he was returning to his so-called native land to see his cousin, who was an aristocrat. I had been expecting something like this, but he had never told me his plans until then. Wite planned to kill himself after he saw her—somehow I had expected this as well, at least I don’t remember being surprised. Wite was from Heipacth, and very few people understand that Heipas, as they call themselves, cannot die outside Heipacth. If a Heipa is mortally injured, or felled by an illness, or by the effects of age, outside the boundaries of Heipacth, and these boundaries are not at all clear and distinct, he will lie dying indefinitely; or, until his body is returned to Heipacth. Even over a space of years, there was no telling how long a Heipa could lie dying outside Heipacth. Heipas seldom travel alone for this reason. They must return to Heipacth or lie dying forever—imagine that! They never go to sea. I imagine lying here on my prison floor until the stones crumble beneath me. Wite plainly told me that he intended to kill himself after meeting with his cousin in Heipacth. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t make it a practice to bother him with impertinent questions and I virtually never could come up with any that didn’t seem impertinent after a moment or two of reflection. Life for a soul-burner is nothing but unease, not to say pain, and it only gets worse; there’s no improving it; after a certain point that seems to pass almost at once, in some cases perhaps before the spirit-eater becomes a soul-burner, the soul-burner is a lost cause. Wite was clearly a lost cause from the beginning. On the other side of death, there is a kind of other life waiting for strong soul-burners, the soul-burner can escape into death in his own way—this is something that can’t be described, it bears only a slight similarity to, for example, the case of a hopeless invalid who kills himself. It can’t be said, what death is for a soul-burner. Almost all soul-burners kill themselves; a soul-burner finds greater suffering in his body every day, wakes up with a kind of disappointment to find his arms and legs trailing on all sides. At least, this is what I believe to be true. I had been expecting something like this from Wite.

  If I go on and on, if I seem to want to talk forever, let me remind you that I fled with Wite for weeks; we were together constantly, and whenever we were together I felt him hammering at me, volatilizing me, beating my own hatreds out of the brush—my hatred for the people who were at every moment racing towards us like so many arrows, and for the people who had sent them after us. I held everyone responsible, and I still do now. Then, and for most of my life, I had nothing to say to anyone. Now that I’m sure to die in the next few days, in such a short time, I find I have everything to say.

  Wite held no one responsible, he took all responsibility on himself. He had been universally adored from the first days of his life. He told me that his childhood had been filled with nothing but love. Wite had been encouraged in every enterprise, his family had thought him very “enterprising.” Wite said that people had thought the world of his intelligence and talent, and that he had been given every opportunity. Wite was still a young man then. He had never suffered, except for little things. All his sufferings had been on a petty scale, only little things. Now that I can do nothing but think, it seems to me that the most trivial pains are more important than the tragedies; they cause the most unbearable desperation; they gradually build up into a suffocating mass. Everywhere you go you will see people very slowly suffocating under the pressure from this mass of little pains, having the life squeezed out of them every day by this suffocating mass, suffering that’s all the more intense for bei
ng worthless, incommunicable. Wite said that he had been suffocated until the moment he had, arbitrarily and randomly, murdered. He insisted that I understand he had felt no special resentment toward the man he killed, that man had vanished the moment he died, that man had no presence for Wite; he felt no guilt, he could have just as easily saved that man’s life, given his own life for that man, as killed him, and, when he said this, I could tell that Wite was not denying a guilty conscience to me, he was telling me that he had no conscience—he knew that I in particular had to understand that. Wite had killed the smoker absentmindedly, and he had killed Prince Eskellde the same way.

  I had been filled with nothing but bad thoughts for years, and I had done nothing at all about them. I lived as if my every thought and feeling hadn’t existed. Wite had not only refused to deny himself even the smallest act of selfishness, regardless of its consequences, he had refused for no reason at all, while I had plenty of reasons, my entire life was my reason! Of course, I say this knowing how bad it sounds; I say it because it sounds bad. when I saw Wite kill Prince Eskellde, I hadn’t done anything at all to stop it happening, and this was the first selfish thing I had ever done. Or perhaps it wasn’t, I might have been simply too surprised to act. This testament is the last selfish thing I’ll do, unless dying is selfish. Can I act selfishly after all? Suddenly I’m unsure. Wite’s plan to commit suicide was absolutely selfish, it was the most selfish thing he could possibly have done, his suicide had nothing to do with “killing himself.” Wite’s suicide was precisely his way of avoiding “killing himself.” Actually I suppose it’s very common for people to kill themselves to avoid dying, it’s the most common thing. They inure themselves to death by taking it in small doses. Spirit-eaters do this professionally, they make a profession out of it. Wite was planning to take it still farther, as I was to learn; he planned to put it into effect in a wholly novel way. I can’t say this any more clearly—he planned actually to do it. He had the most inventive plan, a very creative plan. When he told me, briefly, without the slightest detail, that he intended to kill himself, I knew that I would do everything I could to help him in the same way that I knew when I saw him in the clearing that I would not shoot him, that I would help him to escape instead, and that I was still helping him to escape. Wite’s suicide was the final step of his escape. But he had to reach Heipacth first, and he wanted to see his cousin.

  The night before we crossed the border, we stayed in an empty gravedigger’s shed, by the treeline. I remember the sound of the wind crashing through the trees made me feel exhausted and glad to be inside, but Wite was nervous. He stood at one of the tiny windows and stared out at the sky, which had been scoured clear by the wind. I lay down and watched him standing motionless at the window. Later, still in the middle of the night, I woke suddenly in a panic, having just then come awake out of a very deep sleep. I was completely asleep, I mean as asleep as I have ever been, but even in the midst of this total sleep I had felt something terrifying and been jerked awake—I had been hearing a low, continuous sound that had seemed to me, as I slept, like something invading the shed. I was completely disoriented for a few minutes. My senses were overlapped and I had to untangle them. Finally I could tell that the sound was coming from Wite, that he was moaning in his sleep. His mouth was open and a cry was quietly pouring out of it. I think I sat there staring for some time without knowing what to do, I had wondered if I ought to go outside, I actually felt embarrassed. Then Wite snapped upright and he screamed, his body blazed and he threw his arms up in front of his face, he lunged forward thrusting his hands ahead of him, diving at the wall. His hands disappeared into the stones of the wall and exploded knocking me back as if I’d been struck in the chest with a mallet. I had seen flame in his fingers as he’d lunged forward and I had seen the stones shiver into powder when his hands sank into them. The windows broke too—I had to sit still and stop my whirling head; when I could manage to look around I saw that the shed had burst open on one side, the wall had been knocked out and there was a great ragged hole there. I scrambled out through the hole in the wall without thinking, or at most I was afraid the roof would cave in on me.

  I got outside into the open air and a blast of wind brought me to my senses. I began to look for Wite. He had shot out of the shed when the wall flew apart and torn through the high grass along the treeline. A few moments later I found him, lying in the grass, which was thrashing back and forth over his body. He was lying on his back and convulsing, his spine was scissoring off the ground driving his head down into the earth below him and his arms and legs alternately jerked and went rigid; his eyes were gaping wide staring up at the sky and his mouth was stretched, he was gasping and taking deep frantic breaths. He appeared to be struggling beneath an immense weight. As I came up to him, his hands shot out at the sky, and they snapped shut on empty air. He did this several times, and when I leaned over him to try to help, he pushed me off awkwardly and his breathing became more ragged and desperate. I sat back and gave him air, and he continued to writhe on the ground for a while. For some reason I found it calming to watch him. His breathing eventually slowed and he stopped stabbing the air with his arms. His eyes remained fixed on the sky, which was absolutely clear. Then, all of a sudden, Wite was fine. He stood up and walked back to the shed, without speaking to me, and looked at the ruined wall for a few minutes. He seemed prepared to go back inside, then he turned and walked over to the horses, lying down in the roots of a tree, and went to sleep. I couldn’t bring myself to go back into the shed either, and so I lay down in the grass where I was.

  Later, Wite explained that he had had a nightmare in his hands. He dreamt that ghosts were trying to pull him down into the ground, that they were trying to crush him under the shed, and that he needed to get out into the open air again.

  Chapter Four

  Now I want nothing but water. After I don’t know how many days, wasting my little strength trying to explain to them that I don’t want them to bring me any more food, no food of any kind, today they left me only a pitcher of water. I drained it all at once and immediately regretted it, was too weak to ask for more. Now it strikes me as ridiculous, contemptible of me not to ask for more. They bring me pitchers of water and I drain them all at once, and it drains away and disappears into my body without a trace, while my brow is forever hotter and drier, my throat is forever hotter and drier. Wite was revolted by food and digestion, and as spirit-eaters we both know better than anyone, we have as much to do with dead bodies as gravediggers do. When examined as an object, the human body is insanely complicated, like a dream made concrete, assembled from the most unwholesome things imaginable. Even the nerves are revolting to hold in your hand. But here my nerves, as brittle as glass, are yet perverse enough to drag my ponderous body up, when I should have no more energy than is required to die, and compel me to write. I feel new energy when I begin to write, a surplus that is drained away as I write, but which leaves the principle, my body, untouched. But I could not prolong my life by prolonging my testament, because of course my story is my life. If I were inventing things, that might keep me alive. Without sleep, all the partitions fall out of time, the days and nights collapse together into a single beam of time from which I feel myself beginning to fall away already, by increments.