The wretch of the sun, p.19
The Wretch of the Sun, page 19
So much fruitless trying! So often the opposite of the desired effect appears to mock the effort and the calculus the whole business of calculating chains of cause and effect, the habitual calculus of expectations, the failure of the future perversely or obstinately to appear or the past to pass. This preoccupation with time and with death are related, because death is nothing but absolute time. You may become cold, but you will impart no heat.
He wants to have her eyes forever, so his “and yet” becomes a “therefore.” The body becomes immaterial again; it is transient again now that decay can destroy it.
The third party writer has to be assumed, because stories can’t reproduce on their own. He is already burying the woman inside his skin, on the surface of the drawing of her eyes. Without her eyes he moves aimlessly in a dark dream. They guided him to their own concealment, and now what? Is this suffering? Is it time? Time will get power over you through doing little favors for you; instead, you must enter the underworld, especially because this all has been the underworld in some way (only in some way) all the while. So I am him again, dying forever and never completely—you can only pass through oblivion, you don’t remain in it, because there’s nothing to do the remaining.
A wild mirthless humor or giddy hilarity every now and then. Starting over. I look at some of the white men, and I imagine I can betray my ancestors and throw off the burden of their exacting stares—I hear their screams. Did he write this?
(Trudy sways. Her mind staggers with sleepiness and fatigue.)
Once you lose sight or look away, once presence is interrupted, no matter how briefly, nothing whatever can be determined. The slightest lapse returns you to the beginning. Repeat.
Can a gaze be counterfeited?
she must not be a shadow
proudly impractical house
Other lives = other rates of time.
Escape—but by magic or by enlightenment or illusion,
Behind her, Trudy hears a very faint sound, like an arm moving inside a sleeve.
She stops reading, but does not turn to look. She is feeling the house around her . . . press on the door and feel it swing heavily open, the flutter of air around her face, the clopping of feet on the pavement.
Behind her, at the end of the street, she can feel the outline of the house against the horizon: you are mine, on the grainy black-and-white carousel. A car smashing into him the moment repeats and repeats and now it is bursting into flames, now it bursts in flames and the fire jets out to the sides dousing other cars with flame, now all the cars on the street burst into flame, now the entire street bursts into flame, the block, the neighborhood, the modelsuburb . . . and he in the shuddering center of the heat and flames, his pink face transported, a diamond foetus in the fire, the child flashes all over the room.
(O.)
The joyless, silent streets of Trudy’s neighborhood are lined with deflated, peeling houses and lots choked with big trash piles. The sewers can be smelled, although there is no sewage above ground. Every now and then a knobby-kneed little brother with a finger in his mouth and his staggering younger sister at his other hand creep by in a daze together, or you catch sight of them, watching through a hole in a screen door. The adults are fairly young and prematurely old, grim or fretful, and there are many old people who are fairly young.
She’s tired, and if her bed were anywhere else she’d go directly to it, but it’s in her neighborhood she can’t bear now. The part of the modelsuburb she crosses is more lively; groups of drunken students and ordinary drunks are suddenly everywhere being loud sick and abrasive. The air is thick with noise and every kind of bad smell. Suddenly a slanted blond man appears from an alley doing up his fly and propositions her; she keeps walking, stiffening beneath her shawl, and he mutters at her back. A few blocks away she wonders coolly if she shouldn’t have taken him up on it. She imagines him pastily travailing on top of her and thinks the disgust would do her good, it might cure her of mawkishness and groping for a hand to hold. She balances on the seam in the sidewalk. I don’t need damn comforting. I need to snap out of this. She doesn’t want to go talk to Celada, so she wanders back and forth across the sneerline bordering her neighborhood, feeling her life going rotten at the edges. To her right there opens a short cobbled street, a cul-de-sac ending in a vibrant blue-white wall with an archway in it, tall weed field on the far side. The uneven street is dotted all over with puddles, and stars reflecting in the still puddles.
It’s very beautiful, and Trudy stops to look at it. There are no working streetlights on this cul-de-sac, or near it on the through street, and most of the buildings are deserted. It’s quiet enough though the wind seems loud. The boy walks in the field beyond, picking up his bare-kneed legs. The teary light of the rays cling in droplets to his cheeks. The world he brings with him has nothing in it; it’s a pastoral, timeless . . . Elysium . . . is the name . . . a moment that never changes, as many of them as there are spirits to haunt them, or they are all sharing the experience of one, wander indifferently through beautiful shrine and starry groves, look up at the star, still there, look up at the star, there is no “later” here, and it’s still there, or just there, there’s no “still.”
“Trudy, I’m calling you!” Merle takes her by the elbow. Trudy turns to her, inwardly startled but not showing it.
“I’m sorry,” she slightly shakes her head as if to clear it. “What’s happening?”
“I was calling and calling, albeit not too loud,” Merle says in her glib way, but without raising her voice.
“What is it?”
“Time for class!”
She pulls back, a young tanned woman with straight black hair in a sloppy knot at the back of her head, and a frumpy, half-asleep look.
“Were you on your way? Sure, I’ll come with you.” Trudy says it lightly, and they go along together, without saying much.
“The clouds are really quite low,” Merle says.
“I hope it doesn’t rain,” Trudy says.
It’s always difficult to tell which classes are legal and which illegal; the rulings concerning the legality of the material, and of teaching itself, frequently change, and there is the additional difficulty of miscommunication, the usual trouble getting reliable information. Subjects that have been permitted for so long that they would seem to be immune to interdiction will be suddenly banned; some subjects that one would assume were forbidden are perfectly legal. Students and teachers are sometimes arrested on general principles, since, what with so many illegalities associated with education, it stands to reason that any student is likely to be receiving, or teacher providing, some contraband or other.
Within ten minutes Merle is leading Trudy down a street lit only by a single, very bright, very strictly contained streetlight. The rest of the street glows blue with nighttime cloud light. Merle leads her to the memorized address, a house with a tall, narrow, shell-like entry way. She advances boldly to the door, opens it with a key, and the two of them dart inside.
“No lights,” Merle says. There had been only one light on in the entire street, a window like a tiny brass ingot in a blue stream. That was further up on the opposite side. Merle and Trudy avoid the windows. The house has a clean smell, like freshly beaten rugs. Red tiles on the floor, no furniture apart from an upright piano and a wall hanging covered in broad zigzag stripes.
Merle whispers, “You go keep an eye on the back. She should come to the front door. Come back up here in about five minutes. If she hasn’t come by then, we should leave.”
“Is it Anatolian today? Or Caucasus?”
“Anatolian!”
Everything is white, and she finds she can see well enough. There’s a low stairway in the corner, with a bit of wall built out from it that screens a door leading to the rear of the house. On her left, a short passageway, a little study with a wicker chair and some low white bookcases. Then the back of the house, tiled kitchen, completely bare, and a monochrome yard through sliding glass doors.
When she comes back into the front room, exactly and only five minutes later, Merle is gone. As she enters, whatever it is a smell, a little sound, makes her hesitate, she hasn’t got time to pick out the cause, and she moves slowly and silently. Trudy looks into the empty room to one side of the front room, then carefully ascends to the top floor. The steps are carpeted, muffling her feet. She stops a little past the midpoint of the stairs, straining her ears, breathing inaudibly through her mouth, and sinks to one knee the better to stay without moving. Luckily she’s not wearing anything bright. She should be difficult to see. She knows somehow that Merle is not upstairs.
A shoe scrapes quietly on the pavement outside; a brief, incidental, but furtive sound.
Merle had been wearing dark slippers, whose soft soles could not have made that scrape.
Trudy waits what might or might not be a long time. She won’t move, but her rigid body is tiring. Again and again the scrape sounds in her memory. It was simply too protracted to be the step of a mere passerby. That was no nighttime stroller, that was Jack the Ripper scraping into the shadows folding his knife into the portable obscurity of his coat.
Mentally she explores the house, but always her feet are steered again to the front door. Finally she acts not as prompted by caution but impulsively, descending the stairs sideways, using her hands to help distribute her weight, at a snail’s pace. She pads toward the door, jerking up her hands and knees as if the tiles were scalding hot, then setting them down straight and slowly. The unlocked front door oozes toward her. She feels like a body waiting to leave the tomb. Cold doorknob fills her hand. She turns it imperceptibly. Finally, there is a faint click, and she pauses for a long time, feeling the magnetic propensity of the door to swing checked by her arm.
She allows the door to fall open. The external shell permits her to lean forward and look outside without exposing herself at a window, and the light won’t fall on her. It doesn’t seem as though anything has changed, but she mistrusts her ephemeral memory of the way the place looked as they came in.
By and by Trudy eases first one foot and then the other over the threshold, and draws the door closed. When it is shut, she stands in the elevator-like enclosure with her arms at her sides, sensing the portentous night and space from which it encloses her.
There’s a small irregularity in the wall, just below one of several tall ornamental slits, cut like gills into the blue-white plaster. The night light cancels its color so she can only see that the droplet is inky against the white. Silently, without rustling her clothes, she leans forward.
The droplet is dark red, still mostly liquid. With a comet tail smear angling away from the street where a finger smudged the blood.
Trudy notices only too late to stop them the abrupt intakings of her breath, which sound noisy to her. With a paralyzing feeling of fatality she walks forward into the street.
There’s no one there.
She begins walking away from the house in what feels like an icy tangle of murderous stares.
“Right now, they are ripping Merle.”
(:)
. . . sinuous bones slither in the blue-black mold, claws ribs and thorns sprout from long bones and long fangs crinkle as they grow from smooth carious wens slick with water. These are bones of no living animal, they never were born, never reproduce, and never die, but sprout and shear their elaborations perennially while retaining their kernel shape.
When I was a boy . . .
He briefly struggles for breath.
. . . I would play chasing games with girls. Chasing and being chased. What I would do if one of us caught the other I didn’t know. It’s not unusual to want to be liked, and to want to impress girls, and please them with some stunt or other, and I was no different from most other boys in this respect. But I think I was different in that I also wanted the girls to love me, and to enjoy not just what I might do but simply who I was. I was preoccupied with proving myself worthy to be loved.
I’ve spent so little time with you, and yet you have marked me with an indelible mark, it seems. I feel as though you are always present, as if you were clairvoyantly, neutrally, but not unkindly, observing me from afar, and I often become self-conscious when I wonder if, by this or that action, I would cause myself to appear more worthy or less worthy to you. My new, lighter body helps offset my fatigue; I seem to dance on wires down to the basement for another drink. The water fills me up and rinses my insides, and like liquor it goes to my head, but without murking my thinking that is more distinct now than it ever has been in my life.
(.)
The committees paper the town with WHO ARE UKEHY? The word printed in all-red capitals sidles down dry gutters and scrapes across shining squares in cool autumn sun.
Please and thank you, a big friendly smile to blanket Cimelia Cisterna in a moment of silence while people vanish politely, as if they’d never existed; because it is the whole question of what is what exists is what is controlled. Trudy is sketching abstract designs with a fountain pen. The executioner comes into the dungeon and he doesn’t even say “this hurts me more than it hurts you,” which would be bad enough, let alone, “this is for the greater good,” to which at least one could reply, “Fuck your greater good I want to live!” No; when the executioner comes into the dungeon he says “I am you.”
( )
The rear of the fourth floor is a large empty hall, so broad the high ceiling seems lower than it is. One enters through a pair of very wide French doors with many small crystal panes and heavy teardrop handles of glittering steel. This might have been a banquet room, but it would have been odd to put one so high up in the building. There isn’t a stick of furniture. Large windows with satin gathered curtains, like pale bronze, line the rear wall. A number of long bundles lie against it.
On investigation, these bundles contain pieces of bookcases. Many large sets of shelves would fit easily in here, if it weren’t for the six enormous columns that stand in a semicircle, like menhirs. They are solid wood, the trunks of colossal trees; almost three feet in diameter. The columns have sloping collars at their bases, and blocky tops, which are darkly stained—there is some marbling of grain, or so it seems, shadowy and brown as beer—while the body of each column is matte red, vivid without being bright. Where the columns join their bases and tops there is the dreamy luster of a single, thin cord of gold.
Felix Houseman brought these columns from the other side of the world somewhere. They had been made for a shrine that never got built. A god and his consort, carved larger than life from smooth, rust-colored rock, were to stand between each of them. The proposed site for the shrine had been an exposed spot high on the side of a mountain, where it could take advantage, in some way, of the incessant wind. The columns had been stored up there for years, and a residue of wind clings to them; their wood odor is all blown away, and looking at them one has a sensation of wind, even if none blows. We both have permitted ourselves the luxury of these columns.
Crossing the room to the high window, there is for a shocking moment a light there in tops of the dark purple trees; that’s the modelsuburb. It’s not real, but it is attractive, and it likes to exhibit its lights toward the house once in a while. It likes to hover there, in miniature, nocturnal effigy, before scattering like a swarm of fireflies. Outside the hall, there is a dark landing, a square scabbard around the sword of the long staircase, and all the light comes from below, up the shaft and streaming past this landing in a rectangular beam. The timer operating the light shuts it off. Celada’s eyes adjust at once to the darkness.
An explosion high above him, and a body tumbles down the entire length of the stairs, plummeting past Celada in a headlong whir, followed by a crash on the floor below. Celada rushes to the banister, clutching it with trembling hands. At the bottom of the stairs, she is lying, wearing only the gloom of the house, her eyes fixed on his, waiting calmly, her shattered limbs tossed all about her.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says.
(.)
On her way home, Trudy pauses a moment in front of the swimming school. The grate is pulled to, but, as she approaches, she sees the open padlock only hooks the chain together. She undoes the chain and slips into the square funnel of the entry way, which smells a little like the inside of someone’s nose. One of the black iron doors, dabbled with pale reflection of the street lights, has a disc section at its base, where it scraped aside the grit and dried leaves. The door is locked. Trudy finds the key secreted in a light fixture adjacent to the door.
Lights in metal bowls all over the place swell. The soft croon of the generator is nearly silent. Picking through papers largely meaningless to her, she notices a locked filing cabinet and searches mechanically for the key, if only for the sake of unlocking something. To her surprise she finds this key as well, tucked into a magnetic case among the refrigerator coils at the back of the cabinet. The top drawer contains a bottle lying on a bed of brown newspaper. She finds a folder of his notes in the second drawer down, begins skimming them, then takes them over to an enormous table spanning the empty jacuzzi and reads them with more attention. The notes are prolix and unnecessarily elaborate, sprinkled with questions he doesn’t seem to answer. Trudy begins working out these answers, related to the capture of the isolaton.
A sort of whistle makes her look up. William stands not far from the door with a box between his hands.
“Celada’s not here,” she tells him. “I don’t know where he is.”
William comes toward her, stepping easily over the bundled cables and other litter, his eyes on her.
