A Dirge for the Temporal Page 3

  The fields that we play in, we always will play.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Sept…”

  Her voice came from below. He leaned over the balcony rail to find her smiling up at him. Something belonging to the moment, something about the unassuming expression on her oval face, or the last of the afternoon sun dancing in her hair, made her look especially youthful. He wondered how old she was, but there was no answer to be found in gazing upon her rather wistful, though lovely, features. Her eyes belied her visage, and vice versa.

  “Please call me Galen…Verena.”

  “Of course. If you would like, I will have dinner ready for you, Galen.”

  “You prepare it yourself?” he asked.

  “There is no one else. Not for a very long time.”

  He confessed, “I’m confused. Earlier you referred to it as our restaurant. You said, ‘We don’t get many visitors.’”

  “It is…how do you say…a figure of speech?”

  He looked at her a moment before asking, “Did you come back here expecting to find me on the balcony?”

  “I was going to the waterfall to wash my hands.” She held up the right one, palm to him. “I must know if it will wash away.”

  “Wash away…” Seeing nothing there, he shook his head to suggest that he did not understand her. But she was already walking in the direction of the waterfall.

  “There’s a nip on the air,” he called after her.

  “It is always so,” she called back. “In Sept it only pretends to grow cold. As it only pretends to grow warm.”

  As with other things about her, which occurred to him seemingly at random, only now did he notice what she wore. Both sweater and pants were a nondescript beige, in harmony with her elegance. Her feet, he was alarmed to see, were bare. He thought to call again, but opted instead to treat his eyes, without further interruption, to her grace. She moved with a fluidity that enchanted; she was the first zephyr of September, a specter, a muse. When she reached the pool, she pulled up the legs of her pants, patted out into the water. She extended one naked foot, teasing the falling water, teasing the senses of the man standing on the balcony watching her. More tentatively, she reached out her hand, middle finger stretching as if to test the shimmering column of fire cascading from the mountain. When it was not burned, she plunged her hand into the flame; when her hand remained whole, she lay back her head and laughed happily.

  Stepping back out of the water, she found his gaze across the reaches, holding her palm to him, triumphant. He waved back…as he had waved at Laura, her own palm white and segmented against the misty window of the cab. She hadn’t even let him see her to the airport, though he went anyway, without her knowledge, saluting again as the plane flew away.

  Verena wasn’t flying away. Verena was coming back. Verena was here, now, alive to him, accessible…though he had watched her bathe in the sacred falls. The moroseness he had glimpsed had been replaced by something incalculably more difficult to define.

  “Will you come soon?” she said.

  “To…oh yes, of course. Dinner. Would you care to…I mean, may I invite you…?”

  “Loneliness dwells with me too, Galen. I know.”

  Yes. She knew. Somehow he knew that she knew.

  “Look,” she said, holding up her palm. “It didn’t wash away.”

  “What didn’t wash away?”

  “My hand…the hand that you touched.”

  Now an emotion that he did not like visited him. An emotion with tentacles that wrapped themselves around his nerve bundles, caused his breath to come sudden. Its name was old, old, and it chilled in any season, though the mercury never drop and the wind never blow.

  He reached for her suddenly, as if he could compel his arm to stretch that far, far enough to take her hand in his own. “What has happened here?” he queried. “Where is everyone?”

  “I’ve told you,” she answered, a curtain falling over her features. “There is no one.”

  “I’m afraid,” he said quietly.

  “Shhh. Be still,” she said.

  He was, not realizing what he was opening his senses to. Almost immediately the perception of place warped out of all familiarity. A sound that was both deeper and more vast than silence held him suspended. It was as if the Void were coming in like a great sighing maw to devour them.

  “What is it?” he whispered, eyes darting around him, up at the purpling sky.

  “The gears of September,” she said. “Your return has brought them to life again.”

  His skin felt as if it were being pulled from his bones. He clutched his head between his fists and prayed it go away. When he opened his eyes, a tear emerged, slipping down his cheek. In its magnificence she was reflected. He knew; he saw her at the same time in the waterfall.

  “Your table will be ready within the half hour,” she said.

  He fled into his room, sliding the glass door shut. As the compartment pressed in on him, with its strange, mysterious objects and props—TV, pictures, safe, bed, mirror, mirror—he knew he could not remain here. Not now.

  He left the Gasthaus for a ship that might right itself again without him aboard. The lobby was empty as he passed.

  Outside, the afternoon grew a deeper purple, the sun long gone behind a ridge. The stream flowed inevitably. Smoke pumped inevitably. Yet there were no cars except for the wagon he had brought in. There were no people save him. He felt as if he existed in the lull of nightmarish sleep. He foresaw the key turning in the ignition, the engine coming to life, the tires snatching at the asphalt in their haste to obey him. He saw the sign as it would appear in his rearview mirror. Would Verena run after him, pleading about the gears of September?

  September is May and May is September,

  Nor free to forsake, when bound to remember.

  He would laugh as he drove away, he swore. Laugh for the being done to. For the goddamn being done to, Laura. The keys in his fist were like tangible her, biting into his skin, cold, inflexible. He shook from the others the one key that mattered. The noise of the stream lifted as he neared the wagon.

  “Galen!” came the voice of Verena over the rushing water.

  He wasn’t going to look back. He stepped around to the driver’s side of the car, key in front of him like the stolen screwdriver or ice pick in the hand of the prison escapee. As he grasped the handle of the door, he caught sight of something on the stream.

  His eyes locked on the object, instantly recognizing it as a body, a limp, naked human body riding the flow from the direction of the high Alps, now passing under the footbridge, a rag doll at the will of the current. A half second elapsed between its clearing the shadow of the bridge and passing the line of Galen’s vehicle, but it was enough time to reveal the change that visited the body, a shift which shook Galen the witness down to the bone and marrow.

  The body had turned on the current and opened its eyes to mark him.

  No sooner had he beheld this terror than another body passed under the bridge, emerging in a similar surprise of flesh and awakened eyes, rolling against the force of the current, pulling and dragging as if to impede its momentum. In its wake came a third—the other two now having swept out of sight—and behind the third came a fourth. In all Galen counted seven before their abrupt cessation reminded him that he was supposed to be inside his wagon and on his way out of this haunted pass in the foothills of the Alps.

  Slamming the door behind him, he turned the key to the beautiful greeting of a trusty engine waking from a doze. He pulled the shifter into reverse and backed out somewhat slower than he would have liked, in case Verena had decided to come running up behind with her plea. He caught her in his mirror as he shifted again, preparing to speed of
f in the direction from which he'd come. Out in the street in front of the Gasthaus, she stood akimbo, striking him—rather perversely—as stirringly sexy in the pose. Nonetheless, he put the pedal to the floor and was almost out of there when they appeared in the road in front of him—four, five, six, seven of them, all sexless, of a sickly yellow hue, flesh leeching to their bones.

  He slammed on the brakes—too late as one went flying over the top of the car and another buckled underneath. As the others stared through the windshield at him, mouths stretched in every rictus and scowl, he saw that their expressions were the only thing of life they possessed, making them, as he saw it, fair game. As he yanked it in reverse, however, bringing the RPM to critical mass, the creatures divided, rushing by the car, more interested in what was behind it than what was inside.

  Verena! He let reverse carry the car all the way around, one hundred and eighty degrees, paused only long enough to convince himself that he wasn’t about to invite real-life blood into a hallucinatory reality, then he rode them down like pylons in a road course, too tempting to leave be. Having punched through the last of them, he found himself and his wagon, in a haze of hot rubber and clutch and brakes, facing Verena. Verena and the akimbo. Would he or would he not come to dinner?

  She did not protest, in spite of her impatient stance, as he dragged his victims one by one back to the stream, where the water accepted them eagerly, instantly sweeping them away. He never looked at them as he did the work. He did not know their nature and did not want to know. To his hands they were cool, moist; it was enough. He glanced once they were in the clutch of the stream, then just for a second, to make sure they obeyed.

  He left the wagon in the middle of the road. It was an admission.

  To be denied no longer, Verena held out her hand to him.

  Inside, at their neatly laid table, the candles provided a scent as well as light, but the light was exclusive and the shapes of their faces drifted radiantly. She made him eat the petals of flowers, drink water from the falls, kiss her face when there wasn’t enough. She was Laura, she said. And Ginger.

  “Once, a long, long time ago,” she recalled, “a stranger ambled in off the Wanderweg. His arrival caused the gears of September to freeze. His presence caused the stream to flow backwards into the wilderness of ice and snow, carrying with it the vitality of our little village at the end of civilization. Now you have returned.”

  “Sept is a delightful name for a village.”

  “Your village,” she said. She raised a glass. “Unforsaken.”

  Indulgence

  My mother was a manic-depressive, my father was a circus clown, and I have never suffered for it more than now, nearly twenty years since their departure.

  The hunger-lust, in one form or another, has been around since my adolescence, but the ritual is developed. Things dark or red, sweetly decadent, satisfy my cravings. Things reminiscent of my deeper moods, things that can be savored by candlelight. You might say I am a sort of vampire for cherry pies and chocolate cakes, Bloody Mary mixes and richly red wines. My mother’s binges, on the other hand, went somewhat beyond the sweet tooth. But I become one with her through abandon not mimicry. Abandon is bliss.

  Abandon is when the curtains are drawn, the candle lit and the feast spread out before me. Only then may I cease to suppress my magnificent appetite. Only then may I fully give over to the voraciousness and savagery that define my nightly indulgences. But the banquet goes not without its pauses, moments to close the eyes and to relish our finding each other over the chasm, my mother and I, dripping fingers interlocking, feet gingerly balancing on the red polka dots scattered across the whispery white fabric that serves as the bridge.

  I often use my father’s only surviving costume as a tablecloth. The reds have long since bled into one another—thanks to my utter lack of etiquette—but there is some comfort in having the clown suit there, some…sanity. One day I will burn it. One day, when its simple motif is no longer recognizable, I will set the candle flame to its flowery cuffs and listen to the clown scream. As for tonight, I will let it serve the practical purpose. I am hungry, after all, and the shadows are already dancing around me.

  Ah, the rich, the delectable, the sinful and luscious! How I do anticipate these feasts. From the early office hours to the bakery’s last call, it is all I can do to contain myself. You see, my deeper moods have become my shallower moods, abiding, as familiar to me as my own face. And the darks and reds blur my vision with such incessancy that the lenses of my glasses might as well be tainted. The ritual becomes as much a leash as a release, and the world is spared the monster even as the monster suffers.

  Though the only suffering I know now is the oblivious suffering of gluttony.

  But—a syrupy cherry has fallen from my maw. And—I look at it against a brief, very brief patch of white, watching it saturate like ink, like blood, the ridiculously virginal bit of fabric. Now the flicker of the candle…the flicker, flicker, moth wings...

  You bitch, you bitch, you BITCH! I have watched you deteriorate to this state, throwing your black shadow over our home, devouring everything in sight, for the last time!

  Ah, Daddy, home from work at last, still in his clown costume…

  I’ve had damn well enough. Do you understand me, you bitch? ENOUGH!

  …wielding his bottle of bourbon like a club.

  There! How’d that feel? Still hungry, you?

  Now like a knife.

  I’m going to take you apart like a chicken!

  Daddy, home and screaming. Must be in that sort of black mood Mommy gets.

  The tablecloth’s motif is scarcely discernible, I notice. The polka dots are no longer distinguishable from the rest of it, the entire garment now saturated by the ritual syrup. I should do the baptism tonight. Baptize. Uncle Trace used that word after they took Daddy, naked and screaming, away. The costume—my god, we’ll have to baptize it with gasoline and a match. Uncle Trace is my mother’s side.

  Like a chicken! Know why? Cause I can’t help it, that’s why! I’m famished! Ravenous as a wild dog!

  Now like a fork. A dinner fork.

  The candle flame to the tablecloth’s flowery cuffs and listen to the clown scream. This time in pain. And not the sort that a painted tear and a bottle of cheap bourbon describe.

  The Shades of New Geneva

  Funny, they had built the great triangular Prism in the center of New Geneva as a symbol of what they called “unity in diversity.” Now the dispersed bands of light melted into the miasma enveloping the city, creating a spectral stew. Like the population itself. Like the streets of the dreadful place.

  As he stood looking down into the valley of the city, Lane didn’t want to go back in there. He would never speak those words to Leah, who stood tautly beside him, her temporarily concrete-colored eyes refusing to reflect the weird lights below. She had lost something to New Geneva, something intrinsic, and she had finally summoned the courage to go searching for it. He would not compromise that. The strange silence surrounding their merged roads, an infection of which she was the source, must end. The possibility of leaving her had long since evaporated. She had infected him too thoroughly.

  He glanced at her, finding that she had fixed on a point beyond the valley, in the direction of the sea. He followed her gaze to a motley object sewn into the deceptively clear fabric of the morning sky. It was a hot air balloon, and moving towards the basin, as if to enhance its navigator’s high with the toxic vapors of the city. The French Alps to the north and the Mediterranean to the south, New Geneva had once been a favorite destination for adventurers and their colorful toys. Not anymore. If pleasure was the function of this vehicle, then it was piloted by either a fool or a madman.

  “Come,” he said, motioning her ahead of him. Sh
e led the way down the path with a sureness to her light step, the familiarity its own brand of homecoming. They wouldn’t be giving her a parade in New Geneva. They might toss her a dwarf or a senseless riddle, ogle her with swollen tongues and drunken serenades. They might even allow her to pop off a few shots at the rats, or pose for the spiegel, or partake of the âme, but they wouldn’t be giving her a parade. New Geneva took more than New Geneva gave. Lane knew because he had been here multiple times on business. Lane knew because Leah knew; she had been a citizen.

  As they descended, the city’s structures sank into its miasmal aura, leaving only the Prism itself, filtering the rising sun into the chaos over which it stood sentinel. The hot air balloon grew, letters beginning to take shape out of its stripes. As the city welcomed them, so did the obsolete advertisement: unity in diversity.

  ~

  The city got its name from the melting pot of cultures and languages and peoples that Swiss Geneva was. Only the namesake was to be an even more civilized, more organized, more modern-day Babel. unity in diversity. Lane looked around him and he saw exactly one half of that equation, to the extent that he suddenly felt physically distanced from Leah, who was right beside him, her hand grasped tightly in his. The eyes she turned on him told tales of their own. The concrete color had dissolved to make way for the iridescence which he had seen on occasion, a quivering rainbow stolen from the armor of a beached fish in the sun’s glare. Or from the swamp lights drifting within New Geneva’s poisonous nimbus.