The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  My memory loses something here; I may have simply become distracted, begun to think of Courer. But I do remember what she said about the summit:

  “When you are on the peak, nothing else exists. You are in the realm of theory. There is a faint tingling of broken ice on the sides of it, but at the top, there is only rock. We could barely see it, because we were dying. Courses of black at the edges of my vision. I wept. The lining of my helmet was soaked with tears and sweat. The land below did not exist. There was only a flat sheet of cloud and a sun that was revealed to be quite real. The sun, without cloud or color, without symbolism or meaning. Perhaps that is what God is like. A priest must be addicted to the presence of God. Once you have seen Him, you must be with Him. And that is why I need to go back and why I want, next time, to take you.”

  She had spoken throughout in a clear strong voice. I admired its purity, as I admire my God’s own purity — of which I had almost become a part, if purity can have parts.

  I lingered too long on the balcony after the show. I had run out of handkerchiefs and toilet paper to blow my nose into, and kept having to snuffle grotesquely, but I couldn’t find it in me to leave. I was tired and cold, and I had just seen the story that had occupied the past two years of my life (do you see how it crystallizes, the reckoning in years, after only a little while in Catchknot?) told without me. I had lost everything, due to Disaine, do you understand? No home, no work, no religion, no eye of God, no hand of God, no part of God. And I realized as I sat that I had not yet lost Daila, more’s the pity. He was weeping.

  The weeping was pretty gory stuff. Among the Holoh it is thought fine for a man to cry, but only if he can keep the whites of his eyes as clean as linen and his snot clear. Daila had been, as in all other things, the ideal of a Holoh man. But now, with no reputation to lose, he was sobbing. I wondered if he had bodyguards here, even his patron, or if he had slipped up here because he knew he’d cry — and for what? For the lost mountain? For his failure and Disaine’s success? For I am sure that, although he might not believe in magic and might have but inconsistently believed in God, he believed in Disaine. Or for the general things, things everyone weeps about — for youth and strength, and first love, and the marrow of life?

  Well, it wouldn’t be for me. I got up, gathered my wads of cotton and paper, shouldered my pack. I did it at leisure; I was afraid, but only in the ordinary way. Daila’s weeping was like the sweep of the broom across the stage, the crackle of ushers picking up ruined playbills in the seats downstairs. It was part of the cleanup of the evening. I needed nothing from him. As I turned to go, I glanced up at him — a last glance — and our eyes met. He stood.

  My mountain-awareness — the compass every mountaineer carries within himself — buzzed on like a lamp. I knew that Daila was above me and that behind me was a drop of eight hundred feet, and I knew that he was massed with envy and sorrow, and that he believed. I knew he would not really push me, but the gap was there and the rail would not protect me. The anger that had always been between us was alive, a solid thing. And if I showed fear or conflict or any softness in the eyes, he would be even angrier. His eyes and nose were red and wet, but he stood there with a dignity befitting his beauty and station. I adjusted my pack on my shoulders and turned to go.

  He said, “She loves you, and she would never have come down without you.”

  I went through the row of seats and down the ten flights of stairs, stumbling a little from time to time as my hand hit a tear-slick spot on the black paint of the banister. When I came out of the theater, it was cold and I was alone. I set off, aimed in no direction in particular, just away from Daila.

  Months later, you took me to see a play at this theater. The scene I understood best was when the actor walked in place as a long scroll of scenery was rolled by behind him — a false or imagined journey, though I couldn’t work out whether it was supposed to be him or us that imagined it. I was unfamiliar with drama then.24 The walk I now took through the city was like that. I seemed to be treading the same bit of cobble over and over, while around me the buildings passed with a hum of machinery and a sizzle of talk.

  * * *

  24 I disagree. Who’s seen more goddamn drama than you?

  * * *

  I felt charged with a kind of magic, an uncomfortable excess of power and activity in the body. My pack was heavy on my hot back. There was a smell of snow. Smells are different since I lost the piece of my nose; they’re too immediate now, too sharp, an almost physical feeling. A stab at the meat of my sinuses. I’m almost sure this is imaginary. There’s nothing in my body that’s really changed. But it feels that way.

  From the theater district I passed to the universities. With the dark domes of the great schools still ahead of me, I came to the high and narrow stone archway, densely lit, that marked the door behind which you were sitting.

  The Shilaad School of Medicine. I had heard its name from Courer many times, been told about this doorway, with its cardboard sign marked out in spiky capitals and pinned over the door. All these years and it was still there, the black ink a little more smeared and fragmentary. The lantern set above the cardboard flickered, and there was a faint sound of metal against metal. The door beneath was old and half-rotten, varnished brown. It opened easily.

  It was one of those moments in our lives that are hieratic, where what we see combines with what we feel and they become the same, such that the easy swing of that rotten door, dangling on its light hinges into the stone room with the brown desk, was the thing that I felt when I peered into the room: fear and a burning welcome.

  “The clinic is closed,” you told me. “But I’ll see if I can help you. Do you have a fever?”

  I undid my mask, the better to speak with you, and I saw you pale and make a noise at the slick ruin at the center of my face. Then you stood up, fists pressed to the desk, and came around to look closely at me. A burning breath of coffee, a sense of solidity and strength, black and gray hair loose-looking at the scalp and caught up in a barrette, and a steady fierce look like some tame animals have. You peered at me with one eye closed and your mouth open. You said, “It’s you.”

  “Which me?” It was the only way I could think to say it.

  “Oh!” You were still peering at my face, and then you opened your eye and stepped back. “I heard that in this town there was a girl with these scars. I wanted to see them.”

  “I’m hardly a girl.”

  “Woman, then.”

  “Years of being pickled in bullshit have kept me young.”

  You laughed, looked at me even more intently than before. “Wish they’d have done the same for me. These wounds have never been infected.”

  “No.”

  “However did you manage that?” you asked, and brought up a thumb to touch my cheek. I felt your second finger briefly brush my jaw.

  “I’m Holoh. We don’t get infected.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s remarkable, and I’ve never seen a bit of work like it.” You sat down on your desk and gave me your glowering look, the one that means, “Come closer.” “Holoh, huh? What brings you to the school? Are you here to visit someone?”

  “Well — it’s hard to explain,” I said. “I just happened upon the place. I used to know someone from here. Who went here. Courer Seav.”

  “I knew Courer,” you said. “Quit just before she would have graduated. She never qualified. Where did you know her from?”25

  * * *

  25 You make me sound like I didn’t care about her. Well, I make me sound like I didn’t. I really said that? I want you to know that I didn’t mean it that way. I always worried about Courer, worried to death. She always seemed like the Fool in a pack of cards, walking on the edge of a cliff, hands clasped demurely in front of her, so as to weaken her balance. And chin high.

  You always get the sense, with Courer, that she would have been great, only the thing she would’ve been g
reat at hasn’t been invented yet. Or else it’s something long lost.

  * * *

  I hesitated, then said the holy name of my village, which since I am excommunicate I should try to forget.

  “Where’s that?” you asked me easily.

  “The mountain. I’m Lamat Paed. I didn’t just know Courer, I loved her.”

  Your face softened, and you gave me a look that was almost incredulous. “Oh — you’re that author.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Oh, well,” you said, and smiled. When you smile the edges of your mouth are sharp, and your eyes are wan, but it is all the more beautiful a smile for that. The most beautiful smiles are only the simplest, I think. “Loved Courer Seav. Well, now what? Do you want to see her room? Do you want to talk to me about her?” You were still smiling. There was a touch of confrontation to the words, but in a dry way, the phrases individual and free of each other. You could have gone on.

  “Maybe,” I said, caught off my guard. “I mean I really didn’t expect anything. I just saw the door and had to come in.”

  You took me to see her room, now occupied by another girl, not here tonight but with her family in Som-by-the-Water: a narrow space, formerly a sort of sleeping porch, now closed in with an uncomfortable weight of glass stained by paint at the corners and furnished with a bed and a brave bouquet of old carnations.

  “So much for that,” you said.

  You could not leave your post behind the desk, you explained, but we could talk there, and so you made me tea from a kettle with a big dent like a head wound, and we talked about Courer and medicine.

  “Courer always said she left because she missed her father,” you said. “I wondered what that meant. It wasn’t that she’d find him where you were. At times she used to talk about how much the Holoh revered medicine, and I always thought that maybe that had more to do with it — she was sick of not getting any damn respect.”

  I realized that when I had known Courer I had not been as observant as I am now, and the new colors I had added to my image of her over the years did not disguise that it was a static portrait. I told you, “I didn’t realize we revered it.”

  “Well, you respect it,” you said. “So it’s said. And that’s more than we get. We have to love medicine, you know, because we sure as shit can’t do it to be admired. You must know how it is down here.”

  “I do. But I don’t really understand it. Surely people admire how much you know about the body.”

  You slapped your palm on the desk and laughed bitterly. “No. Well, number one, we still don’t know much about the body. Like I said, frostbite amputations like yours — the person would die. No question.”

  “They weren’t amputated,” I said. “They just dropped off.”

  “Asam! How can you be so blasé about them?”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  “Exactly!” you said, and leaned forward, beaded necklace grazing your desk. “And number two, we’re not scientists, is the thing. The Arit Brotherhood are scientists. We’re just craftswomen, or maybe more like butchers. Cooks. People who can tell a hamstring from a humerus.”

  I could guess at “hamstring,” and I vaguely knew — “Isn’t the humerus in the elbow?”

  “It’s the long bone of your upper arm,” you said. “The standards really are very low.”

  I touched the flesh of that arm. “But you don’t see it that way.”

  “Half the time I do,” you said. “My whole life I’ve been fascinated by the body. Whole valleys open up in my mind when I think about it, when I think I’ve started to finally figure something out about how blood gets into the muscles, or how the ball of the shoulder is lubricated.” As you spoke, you flexed your fingers, rotated that ball of the shoulder. “Then I go out there and I see people just accepting that a plague goes through every few years and there’s nothing we can do about it, and worse, they feel like I’m… to be pitied. Because they see the body as dirty, essentially. All wet and full of shit. And we have bones, ooh, and that makes people think of death, and that’s no good. While if you’ve seen as many bones as I have, you’d realize how remarkable it is that we’re made of a stone that we’ve grown into a support for these strong, soft, slippery materials that we use to move the stone around, and at the top, at the crown, is this wonderful gray material that we can use to see gradations of color and understand what a touch means. I could jump onto this fucking desk and sing you a hosannah about the body, but all they’ll see out there is a dumb bitch who can’t get married, so she sticks her fingers into men’s corpses instead. Like I want anything else out of men anyway.”

  The skin of your face was inflamed now, and you were half-standing up, looking at nothing in particular, flecks of spittle at your lips. I was looking mostly at your hands, clenched on the desk, fine hands with short fingernails, and at your body in your arbitrary pink dress with the lace collar, and how it trembled with emotion. Then you sat down again and smiled at me.

  “Anyway, that’s how I feel.”

  “Were you with Courer?”

  “Now, why would you think that?”

  “You said you weren’t interested in men. Neither was Courer.”

  “That didn’t mean we were interested in each other. Fact, I always thought Courer wasn’t interested in women, either. You gave me quite a surprise just now. Maybe her too.”

  “I never knew if we were — interested in each other, either. But she was my best friend, and I loved her.”

  “She loved you too. Know how I know?”

  “No,” I said, struck by the strange feeling of being told this by two disinterested parties in one evening.

  “You guys were best friends, you said. And Courer couldn’t tolerate most people.” Your eyes went flat for a moment, and then met mine again. You made an unusual amount of eye contact, as if you were holding the person you spoke to in place for a conversational procedure. “If she liked you at all, she loved you.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Yes, it is.” You took up your cold tea and tried to drink it. “This is shit.”

  “Well, I appreciate it. It’s the best hospitality I’ve ever had in Catchknot.”

  “Catchknot is a shit of a city, too. You’ll learn to hate it.”

  “Then why do you stay here?”

  “Catchknotters die a lot,” you said.

  “When I first came here, I had a sense that the city was founded to hide something,” I said, and when you didn’t look like you understood, I tried to clarify. “That everything here is all built on avoiding some subject. Maybe that’s sickness, the plague.”

  “It’s the body,” you said. “But you’re right.”

  Then there was a clatter at the door, and a student came in, all umbrella, and you stood up and signed her in and helped her upstairs. I sat awkwardly at the edge of your desk while I waited for you to come back, hoping no one else would open the door. When you came back, finally, I was looking through some books you had on the desk, drawings of awful injuries to the eye, shattered glass, torn tubing.

  “Gross, right?” you said, and pulled them closer with a fingertip. “But fascinating. I did these. My old teacher wrote the book.”

  “They’re good.”

  “Well, this poor person, I can’t remember much else about them, had to die in this accident. A train derailed and broke into a row of houses, and they died just lying on the couch. It’s shameful not to use their death to at least learn something. So I tried to dissect the eye, and draw it, with respect. I tried to make it so that we can understand all we need to from this accident so we don’t need another one. You’re the mountain climber, right? Who went up with that preacher?”

  It was then that I realized you hadn’t read my book. I said, “Yes.”

  “You must think like that, right? Try to figure out how to use your accidents to learn.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Well, I try to, but we make the same mistakes again and again, mostly fr
om fatigue. Like anyone.”

  “I see.” You sat down behind the desk again. “Well, it’s not my business if people want to die on the mountain, and it’s the opposite of my business if they want to argue that they won’t die for good. I’m sorry, I’m sure she’s your friend, but that’s going to set back my cause fifty years.”

  “You been to see her?”

  “No, should I?”

  “No, if you’re serious about life and death. Though — what she says about Courer — that happened. Not everything she says happened, happened. But that did.”

  “Fuck,” you said, and both your eyebrows shot up. “She’s lying? About the mountain?”

  “Of course about the mountain.”

  “Did you know she’d do it?”

  “Nope.”

  “What a bitch,” you said, and a flush dawned in your cheeks, of anger and the thrill of anger, and finally of excitement. “And a hypocrite, because I know she talks shit about doctors, and yet to make those suits she had to know so much about the body — she had to have read our books!”

  “Disaine is a hypocrite.”

  “Well,” you said, and there was a wildness in your look — you seemed more impressed with me than you’d been the whole time we’d been talking. “How far did you get? How was it done?”

  I told you a little about it. We talked for an hour. At some point you took my hand — I don’t remember when, one of the parts about Courer — and you did not let go, although your excitement had quieted by then, and our hands grew tired and sweaty.