Celebrant (57 page)

deKlend spreads his map out on a round table under a hanging lamp and begins filling it in with the places he’s been.
Long journeys make for a patchy map.
Given the music, which is compelling if not too loud, the jostling and the huge volumes of smoke, the people bumping the lamps, the table, spilling their drinks on the map and staining it, it is extremely difficult to work.
But deKlend is seized with the impulse and must work on the map
now
.
The mere thought of delay seems enough to jeopardize the whole thing, whatever it is.

Why should it be that there would appear to him in the holes in the smoke, where the smoke is thinner, the vision
—
shockingly clear
—
of a young girl in dirty leotard running nimbly, foot-before-foot, along the top of a wall?
Against the copper of sunset?
Who is this little girl anyway?
And why her?
And why should he feel, immediately on seeing her, if not even a little before he really started seeing her, love for her?

It’s a sign (he thinks)
The girl, and the love, too.
Perhaps she is my love, personified.
Goddess seems too grand a term to apply to a girl
...
little girls can’t be goddesses can they?
Why does goddess sound grander than god?

And love what?
What do I love?
Myself?
—
Preposterous.
But is there sneaking love of myself hidden behind that ‘preposterous’?
If I ask myself what I love I want now to say that I love nothing and then to say I love everything.

Who is this little girl?
I’m sure I’ve never seen her before (he thinks) and yet somehow I’m seeing her as if she were familiar.

deKlend considers rising and crossing over to inspect the smoke more closely, but for one thing he has the feeling that his proximity to it would interfere with it, a little like trying to get up close to an image thrown up on a screen by a projector behind you.
For another thing, he can’t see her in the smoke anymore.

It was far too distinct to have been an illusion (he thinks abstractedly)
I might have been there, in the autumn twilight.

A thrill sizzles through him
—

Was I there?
Did I go
there
, just for a moment?

There’s no doubt he never ceased to be just where he is.

The vision was simply so vivid that I was oblivious to everything else (he thinks)
Perhaps that little girl is somehow the guide
...
but I’m forgetting that sensation of love.
It was more than just a nice feeling.
I specifically loved
—
there it is again!
—
loved that particular little girl, as if she were closely related to me.
And there was more to it.

Even if age makes a horrifying wreck out of me, my heart will always be as green a garden for you.
What does insistence on the innocence of children say about adulthood?
That it is naturally corrupt and wretched, something from which children are protected as long as possible and into which they don’t grow so much as fall.
An innocent adult is childish.
Finally, you must accept and even embrace corruption.
If this makes you feel bad, you redeem yourself by shielding children.

When I was a child, I did what I already knew was wrong, often just to see what it was like, and what would happen.
I wanted to be touched, I wanted to orgasm.
I wanted to touch, and to cause orgasm, shape changing in another form.
My capering and fidgeting would turn into fits that were neither under nor out of my control.
Now I have that ability, traded for those flights of high-vaunting emotion
...
no, they are less frequent, but they still wrap me in throes of exaltation now and then.
Is that luck?

So was I a corrupt child, or still an innocent one, and what am I now?
Namby-pamby half-and-half is no answer at all, adding shadings to everything is just as indiscriminate a way to think as seeing no shade but just the two tones.
Neither/nor isn’t better enough
—
why not just say there’s only innocence?
Innocence opening on more innocence on more innocence, on and on like plunging your arms through layers and layers of pink and white tissue paper that rip and dash around you like weightless surf.

He closes his eyes, and watches it again.
The girl expertly slips along the top of the narrow wall, not quite a shadow against the coppery sky.
There are high satiny clouds, autumn feeling.
No, summer’s end.
That other emotion
—
it was not exactly tragic, there was no foreboding, not sadness.
And the girl, like a sunbeam my mind can always make.

deKlend can still feel it, but it’s elusive, he’s tuning into black radio
—

It felt, perhaps feels, a little like loss, intermingled with a piercing feeling of admiration.
I imagine that an old woman might, on her deathbed, have this emotion looking back at herself as a child, or perhaps at a sister she lost at that age.
A friend?
There is yearning
—
not exactly for the girl, but for a life.

To live that way?
Lost?

deKlend looks down again at his map.

So is all this a waste of time?
(his eyes ask the map)
All this work?
Eh, but it hasn’t been so much work.
Certainly, while it has cost me an effort to do it, it wasn’t an effort I much minded making.
But if not this, then what?

No (he thinks decisively)
—
she appeared to me as I was making this map.
That might be a form of warning against relying on a map, but then why not warn me when the map was presented to me?

Did she?
Did I see her then?
...
No.
No, she wasn’t at the party
—
no children at the party.

But what warning?
And this seems to me to be a matter of showing her to me, not her showing herself.
—
It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that she appeared at this time and no other.
I was not in any special frame of mind, to my recollection, just at this moment.
Not especially receptive, just now.
No, she was confirming for me
—
that is, she was a confirmation to me, that this approach is the way to her.
Because, there can be no doubt about it, she was
—
is
—
there
.

deKlend picks up his pen, but, even as he reaches out to join its tip to an interrupted line, he realizes that all this reasoning has drained him.
He relaxes his bicep, and his forearm drops onto the table.
With a sigh, he caps his pen, elaborately folds up his map and tucks it ruggedly into the inner pocket of his jacket (which bulges with it).
Pushing his chair away with the backs of his knees, he stands up and seems enormously tall.
He crosses the chamber, the brief flight of steps notwithstanding, in what seem like only a few effortless, wildly elongated strides, and is out under the arcade in no time.

The arcade snakes along.
It’s like walking from one enormous stone pullman car to another.

As loyal to me as my death (he thinks again)
Stupid.
I only think I think about death, but those are not really my thoughts.
They’re flimsy thoughts.
They won’t bear any weight.
They don’t have to be convincing, they just have to pass through my head, like the mere word death, and then I can say I’ve thought about it.
I mean, that I’ve contemplated it, with fearsome self-discipline.

I can’t stop dribbling to myself like this.
But I’ve known blasts of terror, too, that made me leap up and run for sheer fright at the thought
...
That’s real, but so what?
I wouldn’t call that thinking.
What good is thinking
—
what I would need is to face a death
—
but then I’d face my own only through grief.
I can’t grieve for myself with a straight face!
Is that good, or bad?
Isn’t there something bad about that?

This passage is especially empty, and its remote end seems to dissolve in feathery mist.
The barking of a dog somewhere behind him.
The shops are all shuttered, most of them for good.
He went walking principally to clear his head a little, get his blood moving.
While his head does seem to have a renewed interest in paying attention, his body feels a little funny, slightly heavier.
Particularly the shoulders.
And there’s an odd thing
—
there’s a band of warmth, like a heated scarf, mantling his shoulders and the back of his neck.
He wishes he was out in the open.

I’d rub my neck (he thinks) but I have to keep a hold on my shawls or they’re liable to spill off my back like moth wings.

And an odd smell
—
like fresh perspiration.

He pats his forehead with his fingertips.

No, I’m not perspiring.
And yet, I’m completely alone (he thinks)

He turns a little, and there’s a sensation of shifting mass, suspended on two points, resting on his shoulders.

More barking.
deKlend rubs his face again, trying to remember the little girl
—
how old was she?
Ten?
I can never tell age.
I suppose if I were a father, or had raised younger sisters, I would be better able to estimate by height, or however it’s done.

Was she a sign, or did love conjure her up to show me what I love?
That’s still a sign.
Is there any way she could not have been a sign?

He rolls his shoulders a little, adjusting them.
The weight that he surely imagines there, jostles.

She was a sign
—
a spirit of Votu!
(the idea brightens his face)
However far away I may be from its streets and its people, I am not impossibly far away!

Rounding a corner, he straightens up.

Ah, that’s better (he thinks parenthetically)
That illusion of weight has disappeared as fleetingly as it came on.
Face shape, or voice depth, or what
—
what would be a better index to age than height?
I think height must be the most straightforward way to go about estimating age.
There is that time, though, when girls become nothing but legs with shoulders attached.
Does that make them seem taller, or are they actually taller?
Taller than they should be, at that age?
But then, if it’s so common as to be remarked by me, a man who has paid almost no attention in his life to children, then it would be, so to speak, factored in to the question of determining height by age
—
no, age by height.
Age by height.