The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  When I was done, you said quietly, “Honey, you should stay here for the night.”

  “I’m tired, yes. If you have space.”

  So you showed me to a room upstairs — a storage closet, tiny and windowless, with a loud metal bed and an old trunk sitting as if unearthed among the debris on the floor.

  “I lie down here myself sometimes,” you said, and your voice got high and awkward for a moment, “when it gets to the middle of the night and I know all the girls are accounted for.”

  “Thank you.”

  I am glad that I was sick when I met you. I had that nostalgia carrying me along — that free, unattached nostalgia, hard and tinkling, that throws its light on the present as well as the past. Without that dazzle illuminating your face, what would I thought of you? Not the same things; I’m certain of that. I would have seen you as a neat doctor-stereotype with overstuffed notions about the body. (Stereo-, an overseas word, double; type, a good old Parnossian or Holoh word, referring not to printing but to the self — one of our lost pronouns, like the pronoun for God. To attach a stereotype to someone is to give them a second self, usually a simpler one.)

  Why am I nostalgic when I am sick? Nose and nostalgia share a root, of course — everyone knows that. It’s the Parnossian word for fragile. But why do I feel it? Is it a lack of oxygen to the brain? Or is it a very old memory of being cared for, of getting to rest?

  Anyway, nostalgia tells of a past that was nothing like the past; it reminds you what you liked about things that were really pretty awful. It covers everything in a warm reflective dew, so that even Daila becomes slick and smiling. This nostalgia, the one that carefully haloed you for me, told instead of a future. It was nothing like the future we had. But it picked you out for me, so that I could recognize you later. And so I noticed in advance how beautiful your hands are, how extraordinarily cool and dry on my body, and how you wanted to help me.26

  * * *

  26 It’s kind of you to pay me all these nice compliments. But I am a woman whose own mother once said, albeit not to my face, that I looked like A BRICK WITH HAIR.

  * * *

  It must have been late in the morning when I woke up; there was a settled feeling on the air, and everyone outside seemed to be gone. I banged my way out of the little room and found the bathroom and the lower stairs. The lobby was empty now, the chair shoved into the desk. I didn’t want to just disappear, so I poked around the doors I saw until I opened the one that breathed out preservatives and decay, and descended into the basement, where a tiny high window made a piercing light, and you were standing over a dead man on a steel table, in a classroom full of other steel tables, with your face masked and throat muffled by white fabric. It was very cold.

  “Is it you?” you asked carelessly, but when you looked up I saw that you had expected someone else. You put down your scalpel as if you were putting down a fork, and said, “You okay?”

  “I guess so. Are you just dissecting that guy?”

  “Sure am. And I should be wearing these.” You put out a hand for your goggles, clear bottle-bottom glass in brown leather.

  “Is this just something you do alone?”

  “Mostly I do it in front of people. But he died of pneumonia and he’s as fresh as a biscuit, and I wanted to do him while I had some contemplative time. You’re not scared of him, are you?”

  “No. I saw bodies all the time, on the mountain.”

  “That’s good. I wish more people were like that.” You stuck the scalpel into the man’s naked chest and began to incise. “People don’t understand that bodies are just leftover material. They’re objects, and sometimes objects of study. They had a purpose and now, if we play our cards right, they can have another one. Here, you want a lesson?”

  I came the rest of the way down the stairs, and you showed me where I could get a jacket, muffler, mask, goggles of my own.

  “Why do you wear these?”

  “In case of spray,” you said. “Yes, they’re just objects, but they’re gross.”

  I stood at the other side of the table, and you gave me my first lesson — showed me the wet lungs, the liver, the spleen, and told me what they implied about the dead man. He was sandy-haired, not young, with a permanent tan.

  “A laborer?”

  “An actor.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, imagining special calluses.

  “I’ve seen him play. He was a summer creature. He died in the cold. Colds develop into pneumonia because of a lack of the sun, we think. He drank, too, but that’s most of it.”

  “Why doesn’t everybody know this?” I was in the habit of asking that question to people at the bar, people who told me especially crackpottish things — it was my way of protesting while appearing to share their frustration. I think you picked up on this, but you ignored it.27

  * * *

  27 I didn’t pick up on it at all. The thing is that the wronger a fact, the more likely everyone is to know it.

  * * *

  “Well, sometimes it doesn’t work. But if you spend more time in the sun, you’ll get sick less, and nobody knows why. I’m doing this to steady my hand, if you’re wondering.” And suddenly your voice had a different, a deeper tone. “I need to remind myself that whatever Disaine did — and I would rather have believed that she climbed the mountain, it’s a lot damn easier, and maybe that’s why she put so much stress on it, do you think that’s true?”

  “I think there was more to it than that, but yes.”

  “Whatever she did, it doesn’t change what I do. I have to go on doing exactly the same thing, whether some tissue in this man remembers his gestures and speeches and would respond to the right joke — or not.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Courer would’ve done the same.”

  “I’m not sure about that. Courer was a believer.”

  “Not in God.”

  “But in other stuff. Lots of stuff. A person who believes.”

  “You saying that from the inside or the outside?”

  “You mean — am I like that?”

  “Sure.” You pulled down your mask with a clean finger, and I saw the set of your jaw.

  “From the inside,” I said. “Though maybe that’s put me on the outside.”

  “Fair enough.” You hooked the mask back on. “Believers aren’t rare. But people who know what they believe are. It’s no knock on people who don’t; it can be a healthy thing, and honest to admit it. But when a person knows what they believe, and can hold it up all solid, like a piece of bright candy, and even admit it to other people — that’s a special person. That’s where Asam came from.”

  “I don’t think he knew what he believed. I think he climbed the mountain to find out what it was.”

  “See,” you said, standing all the while by this dead man, whose chest cavity was open and the skin stretched back, with blood on your jacket, “you know you believe that.”

  “Well, I’ve been where he was,” I said.

  “I believe you have.” You were watching me through your goggles. “There’s a letter for you in the desk.”

  “For me?”

  “You didn’t tell me you knew mob creeps.”

  “We didn’t have time to go over that last night.”

  “You safe? Is someone after you?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Good,” you said. “I wouldn’t know what to do, if someone were after you.”

  But when I got upstairs and had rustled all the drawers of the desk, I realized that, in a manner of speaking, someone was.

  Dear Lamat.

  Daila told me you were at this address. I didn’t expect to hear from him again, he seemed pretty done with you and maybe even vengeful in the way he funded us — did you get that sense? — but last night he sent a messenger to me, with a note to use the information, please.

  Lamat, I know now that you’ve seen me perform. Please do not be angry. I hope I have done you justice in the way I spoke of you.r />
  Nobody believes me. It might seem that way, from going to the talk, but if you’ve read any of the papers about it you’ll understand (and if you haven’t read them, go read them, it’ll all make a lot more sense). I need your help to make them believe. Your disappearance — which was my fault — has done so much to hold me back, and now I devoutly wish and ask you to come to me, corroborate what was said — you don’t need to corroborate it all — but tell them about Courer, tell them everything. If you love me, do this. You think you can avoid taking sides, but you can’t. It was on purpose that I didn’t give you that option, Lamat. It’s better for you and better for everyone else. Didn’t honesty feel good, when I told everyone about Courer? It would feel just as good to affirm our friendship before the world. To keep what I’m making from becoming a dumb cult, to let it set sail, stretch out, turn into a movement, a motion. I am not stupid enough to be happy with a cult, and I’m terrified this is what I’m getting. Come and see me at the theater anytime.

  Disaine.

  Did I do it? You fucking bet I did it. Anyone can make me do anything.

  Chapter 14

  “Love is the only way we can conceive of the will of God,” said Asam. “As bats in the night send out noises in the dark, and feel them come back to them, so do we send out our love, and thus perceive dimly and inaccurately the shape of things.”

  — The Gospel of the Arit

  I thought it would be hard to get ahold of Disaine, but when I went to the theater — a high dirty facade in the daylight, like an old snow — and snuck around the back trying to find the stage door, I found her instead, feeding a troupe of pigeons from a box of buttered pastries. She crumbled them up in her palsied, half-broken hands and gave them directly to the birds and dusted her hands off and then began the whole process again. I got pretty close before she noticed that I was anyone out of the ordinary.

  “Lamat,” she said. “Pastry?”

  “If they’re any good, why are you giving them out?”

  “To feel their little tongues,” she said. “A pigeon’s tongue is hard and dry. And because there’s more than I’ll ever need. But they’re good. They’re okay. Want one?”

  “No, thanks, Disaine.”

  She tossed the box onto the chair that propped open the stage door. This little court sat between three blank walls, with a pane of sunlight at the top that seemed as grimy as if it had come through a skylight. “You came.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “What did I say I was doing?” she said patiently. “Achieving the apotheosis of the Arit. Getting to the top of the mountain. Following my spiritual destiny. Fooling everyone. You believe in means, and I in ends, but that doesn’t make you right, whatever the novelists say. You are too influenced by novelists, Lamat.”

  “You just said about five too many things.”

  “Don’t guide me. We’re on flat ground, and you are not my god.”

  “Does that make you mine?” I asked, and though I had tried to be light, I realized that it was a little too correct — she looked uncomfortable. When Disaine looked uncomfortable, she really went to town. Her whole face would crumple, become a fist in a loose glove.

  “Certainly not,” she said brusquely. “Your god is strength, and strength only. I am a very weak person.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

  “They tempt me. To lead them.”

  “You want to lead them.”

  “That’s what I said. But I don’t have anywhere in particular to lead them to. All I know is how to make myself happy — well — how I might do it, if I had the means. I don’t know how to help them come to God. Though they seem to get something from my example.”

  “Disaine, how does a lie bring you closer to God?”

  “Your nose is dripping,” she said, and it was true — my face was wet, I had a headache. She motioned me into the interior of the theater, and we went down a long warm tunnel to her dressing room, which looked much slept in, and had already acquired a rustling and a smell. She gave me a wad of handkerchiefs and put the box of pastries on a mirrored table.

  “A lie brings us closer to God,” she said, seating herself in the room’s only chair, “when it provides the grease for the conveyance to heaven, Lamat. That is an incredibly childish question, from a woman who I know had no childhood to speak of, nor first nor second. Why would you ask me such a thing?”

  “This is a shitty way to get me to help you.”

  “You know you need to help me.”

  “To do what? To go to the mountaintop in a machine!”

  “The body is a machine God made. The suit is a machine I made. This will be a better machine. I don’t want to argue with you; you agree with me or you don’t, and if you don’t, all I’m doing is posturing.”

  “Do you still have hopes for the queen?”

  “I wish I’d never told them about the summit,” she burst out. “I wish I’d stuck with Courer. That was a better miracle anyway, even if it’s not the one people believe — I could replicate it, if I had to — if I had someone who needed it enough. Which I never will again. What am I supposed to do? Bury myself in the snow with another grieving lover? It becomes absurd.”

  “Disaine, let me tell you something,” I said. “I don’t give a shit what you do or if you succeed.” Her red mouth opened, and I felt a horror at myself as if I had planted my hand in her chest and pushed her backwards off a cliff. “But I don’t want to let down a friend. I know that if I talk about this, people are a lot more likely to believe you, and I am willing to help. Within reason.”

  “You’ll talk to the press?” she asked me faintly.

  “I’ll talk to the press about Courer. It sickens me that you’ve made me lie for the rest of my life or else betray you. But that was true, and it should be believed, and it disgusts me even more that people won’t trust you about what’s real.”

  “You are brave,” she said quietly. “Like a knight. I never knew how much.”

  I don’t think this was manipulation, Otile. I think that this was real. She had a way of removing herself from a conversation and speaking, as if in aside, to herself, to history. And she had a fanatic’s grace. She said, “You have become brave. I take a little credit.”

  “Bullshit,” I said heartily.

  “That was brave as well,” she said, and leaned forward and gave me a hug. The grip of her body was tight as the suits, the pressure of them; for a moment I smelled the cold scent of the mountain. “I can pay you, too. You won’t have to work again.”

  “You already paid me.”

  “This is a new kind of guiding,” she said. “You’re going to guide me to the summit now.”

  “The shows must be hand over fist.”

  “The preaching,” she said modestly, with the flick of a wrist. “But there’s not-have-to-work money and build-the-machine money, and this is the former.”

  “Are you ever tempted just to take it and run?”

  “What would I do with it? How much time do I have left? How the fuck can I leave this place now, after what I’ve started? I never needed to live in style. I’m a priest.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “You don’t love luxury.”

  “Of course. Though I will say I didn’t mind some of that silk and fur stuff we wore on the mountain. It made me feel quite rakish.”

  “On the mountain you need luxury,” I said. “You must live like a king to live at all.”

  “That’s true. And you have to be selfish. That’s something I prefer about life down here, in the warm. Lamat — I need you to know how much I thank you. In all my life I’ve only met one or perhaps two people who understood what I really need.”

  “Am I the one or the perhaps two?”

  “You’re the one.”

  “Thank goodness. If I were only the perhaps two —”

  Well, I lied and lied and lied. I lied to the reporter who had written the first story, a weak man but sharp, like a little wi
re. I lied to the second reporter, a man whose name you’d know, a soft-eyed one with a sensitive look. He was cleverer than the first one, a close and brutal examiner; he understood that a soft substance can take the impression of a person better than a hard one. But I was fired by the excitement of finally talking about Courer, her whole self and what was left of it and how she had saved me one last time, and to be honest, nobody noticed that my comments on the summit itself were halting and vague; they took it for awe. Disaine was always ready to swoop in, talk about the craters, the light dusting of sun, the silence, the gaping wind like a choir.

  I never had to be in the shows, the “preaching,” or the preaching without quotations, but Disaine kept me close, in her entourage, I think because she never could trust me fully. We went from city to city. We talked, sometimes, though more rarely as she grew busier with her patrons and the first royal envoys. The thrill of fooling everyone — which at first, I admit, was powerful, a drunken revenge, the chance to be another woman, a worse one, an uglier one, someone you’d never talk to — was receding. What was left was something small.

  I never once told her about you. Not a thing. I knew you weren’t safe from her. I thought of you — very often, as I have told you before. And I wished I were good enough for you.

  The royal performance was an ordinary one. The queen preferred ordinary performances. She sat, a small figure in a white jacket, before a curtain of white satin that enveloped the whole edge of the balcony and seemed to extend out from her body as if she sat on the back of an eagle. And I had never seen Disaine speak more finely — with more force, more elegance of description, more thwarted rage, more hatred of everyone who had ever helped her, except for me, for the moment. And it was all moving up, in a fine thick diagonal, toward the queen. At that performance I mostly saw Disaine’s throat and chin, bared sacrificially to the crowd because she was talking to the only audience she wanted.