A Dirge for the Temporal (4 page)

  He surrendered to the reverse gravity, eyes drawn upward. Amazingly, something had punctured the miasmal shelf, a small dark
something which he deduced immediately to be made of wicker. Luxurious, temperamental flames gushed occasionally, as from a dragon’s mouth. Nylon broke the miasma, stripes of color seeming to pour from aloft. The balloon blossomed over Germantown’s square. Cheers rose, calling not for
unity in diversity
but for the owner of a strange, unconnected name.

  “Who…?” Leah said to Lane.

  “Citygirl!” a voice chided them. “Only the biggest pop star in the
world
!”

  “Aha,” Lane said, looking at Leah. But she was engrossed again, eyes only for the heavens.

  A crackling sounded as speakers came to life and music spat upon the square.

  “Citygirl!” they shouted in a shatter of unison.

  As the basket descended, its passengers came into view. One face made itself visible, one voice singing down:

  “
I walk the streets, the streets walk me…
”

  Lane was about to tell Leah that he believed he had heard the song before, but her expression froze him.

~

  In her silence, Leah did not lose sight. Faces from balloons were faces from balloons, even when they circled into the face of her mother.

  Her mother had been terrified of whirlpools. Something about them had imbedded in her subconscious and many a morning had been spent untangling herself from the tornado of the covers. She had stilled her lips and eyes and illogic when Leah’s dad had purchased just such a toy to enhance their New Geneva-style home. Leah had heard her say, “You use it, Edward. I will rely on my boa.”

  “One night I’ll convince you to join me,” he said. “You’d have the time of your life.”

  One drunken night she had dived in on her own. The intoxication, like its wellspring, had great power. Gena existed in a toddler whirlpool of her own, Leah in nightmares that hadn’t fully formed. But so did many
in this new enlightened age, in this its model city, with the alcohol pouring
from every fountain and every faucet and the philosophers dancing in the streets. Yes, one night their mother had dived in on her own—but not until after she had tucked her two girls in, confessing that fears must be confronted, doors musn't be left ajar letting light spill in from the hall. The little girls hadn’t argued because they could see Mom’s own light shining in her eyes. As it turned out, she had missed securing the door in its frame and her voice sang thickly and cheerily as she faded along the hall. “Swimming,” she sang. “I’m going swimming.”

  Leah had never known how it happened. Whether the city had sucked her through its pipes, pinning her against the drain, breathing water into her lungs. Or whether Leah’s dad, who had been out on the sofa, had woken into a moment of clarity and performed the deed himself. Still another possibility was that their mother had set the example for Gena to follow, maddened beyond repair by the snap-together city she called her home, committing the act against herself. Leah knew only that
she woke to her dad’s howls sometime in the night. She found him standing
over the whirlpool, holding the boa in his fists, perhaps the only article Leah’s mom had worn to her date with death. The reflections on the walls were the color of skin.

  As Leah looked up at the face in the wicker basket, it sang that special
song from childhood.
I’m going swimming
.

  The square cheered the singer on and the singer raised a hand to wave at them. Clutched in it was a feathery scarf of Holland tulip purple.

  Leah opened her mouth, but her silence would not let it out.

~

  Her eyes had become the hue of the scarf that Citygirl waved. Lane grew alarmed as several
spiegel
, perhaps sensing the local temperature change, began to gather around Leah. The silky tulip purple reflected in
the mirrors that were their eyes. Lane pulled her against his chest, feeling
enveloped as he always did when she was this close, spinning her silence around him. Eager hands caught the balloon’s basket at it landed in the square. The speakers posted about the place continued to pump the music of the pop diva. The mirrors abandoned Leah for her, the petal flames whispering out in their eyes. With the release a single word spilled out of Leah’s mouth:

  “
Mine
!”

  Lane watched her raise an accusatory finger, but for a moment could make no sense of it. Then realization, on its own parachute, arrived.

  “Is that it?” he said. “The thing in her hand?”

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Then by God, let’s grab it now.” He tried to lead her through the pressing throng, but was squeezed out. Looking around, he located a patch of
âme
converging on the same icon that attracted everyone else.
Using Leah’s envelope of silence as a sail, he steered them into the ghostly
caravan. The physics of it were such that the pocket of liquid and light
swept them along as part of its own. Citygirl grew into a face with fea
tures, a voice with nuances. And suddenly the sail narrowed to the pitch of a knife’s honed edge.

  “That voice…” Leah said. “I know that voice.”

  Lane looked at her narrowly. “Don’t say it’s Joy’s voice. Don’t you say it’s Joy’s voice appearing with your scarf. There are a million people in this city.”

  “Yes, but Joy’s voice is
in
that voice. Maybe this Citygirl is a product of all the most unique voices, a thousand of them, combined.”

  He looked from her face to that of the pop star. Muttered, “…in diversity.”

  The caravan bore them to the very rim of the basket, the transparent arms of the
âme
reaching out to caress Citygirl lovingly. As Citygirl’s eyes turned on Leah, Lane saw the bands of the spectrum exhibited there, mimicking the panels of the parachute above her. And he understood that the creature he looked upon was the city of New Geneva personified.

~

  In her poised, tense, fragile silence, so did Leah. She raised her open hand to the girl whose eyes were ribbons of color, and the girl accepted the invitation, bringing the boa with her as her hand landed in Leah’s grasp. At that instant, as if in obedience to a separate instinct, burners exploded with air-heating flames, and the balloon began to lift. Leah would not let the boa go and felt her body rise on its toes, then off the ground, then suddenly lurching upward, arm nearly dislocating from the socket. Her lungs took in the air of the event as she turned to look down
at Lane. His arm, its hand extended futilely, grew smaller, more desperate
with every clenching of the fist.

  The people and their own empty hands and their recorded music diminished. The miasma embraced. The glass monolith that was the Prism appeared, rising through color-wrenched strata, and Citygirl, in a swirl of purple feathers, entered Leah’s sphere. Hostess breathed of her guest and when her guest didn’t object, tossed the scarf around Leah’s neck and put her mouth over hers, pulling at the silence within her.
Losing all sense of who and what and where she was, Leah broke the contact, and in the interim the bands of the spectrum warped and spiraled
. She felt herself falling.

  The rush of air was noise again, great mysterious noise again. A hand reached down towards her, but it had no rope to reach so far, no feathers on which to hitch a ride.

~

  The city did not have a name now. Leah had been a name and more to Lane. Gena had been a name. Even Joy, whom he did not know, was a name. But now…

  He moved through the center on feet of lead. Although their numbers only increased as he went, the
âme
relinquished him gladly, for he was a
bruise to them. The inner city burned like a beacon, hot across window
sills and stoops, singeing the hair of rats, searing the tongues of the prophets. When he entered the park and the walls of the Prism became visible, Lane wished only to take shelter there, like some lighthouse keeper, out of the storm of nothingness.

  There was such an individual, though he’d no optic with which to work, nor ships to guide. A look at his aging face as he rose from the base of the Prism, where he’d been immersed in a sandwich, revealed as much. Lane told him he was looking for a girl. She’d last been seen in a balloon
over Germantown. Without realizing he was doing so, his hands pirouetted
before his face, describing Leah’s eyes. The man’s amusement drew attention to the fact that the man himself bore no signs, not in his vessels
of sight nor anywhere else.

  “But how?” Lane said.

  “I do my duty,” said the man. “I see that the Prism remains functional
and unmolested. The city needs me for no other purpose.”

  “Have you seen or heard anything of her?” Lane said.

  The man shook his head.

  “If you were to take me up into the Prism…”

  “That would not be neutral,” said the man.

  “Can you be neutral? Knowing what New Geneva has become?”

  The man took a bite of his sandwich, chewed with an enunciative care and deliberateness. When he swallowed finally, he opened his eyes wide, that there be no mistake as to their naturalness.

  Lane said, “Those may be the eyes you were born with, but what do they
see
?”

  The Prism keeper sucked his teeth. “I’ll tell you what they see. They see a fella who’d best be on his way. I have lost my patience.”

  Lane was swift in his assault, driving the keeper against the glass wall, where he jolted the man’s head to erase the present. The old man was stout and stood there on powerful legs, dazed, while Lane searched his pockets for the key. Lane found it in short order, clutching the means in his fist as he scanned his surroundings. Some ghosts and some mirrors hovered on the fringes of the park. The language of the former spoke more to amusement than concern, while the latter related in the only way they could, by reflecting. Satisfied, Lane turned to the task at hand.

  The door in the Prism’s base proved small and plain, the monolith having never been a place for tours. The narrowest of passages wound upward through its glass composition. It might have been sculpted out of an iceberg, but for the absence of ice. As he reached the lower miasmal strata, the colors clothed him. The vertical edges of the triangular body, otherwise undetectable, expressed themselves by splitting those colors so that the pigments seemed to flood the visitor’s senses from all sides. The glass trapped heat, which spread through Lane’s own material, writing out a definition of integration. The claustrophobia was less kind, pressing
him within a house of mirrors, depriving him of oxygen. His mind, of its own accord, turned to the question of what he had to offer New Geneva. He wasn’t a citizen, but he was a thief, as solid a fixture on the urban set.

  Nevertheless, he rode the stairless spiral up through the invisible roofs of surrounding buildings, imagining melting ice and released oxygen even as the drops of sweat fell from his brow. Perception overtook this retreat, however, as the whole tower turned upside down and he was sliding along its spiral tunnel towards cool water in which to plunge. The colors began to dissolve as speed and altitude and depth became one thing. An effulgence of fire encompassed him. He looked outward and saw a fan of color dispersing from his own person. The fire dissipated into clarity, and clarity reigned. The nimbus roiled below his position as he realized he could breathe again, he could taste with his senses again. He was above the city. He was above the prophets.

  Hands of clear liquid glass, clearer than the substance of the incorporeal
âme
, took his hands and led him to a terrace. Motion and color disturbed the clarity. As he stepped out into the air, he realized that the disturbance came from beneath his feet. There, in the transparent floor, lay Leah. Her arms moved wildly, her mouth formed infinitudes of expression, her eyes shone ice-clear as she stared up at him through her prison. The noise of air, hot and rushed, sounded above him. He looked up to see the bottom of the wicker basket. The boa dangled from its rim like a temptation out of the Garden of Eden, the serpent in its ultimate allure, with promises of a wonderful something just beyond the mortal grasp.

~

  In her silence, Leah’s tears fell from her eyes to become drops of glass on her cheeks. Her arms waved the gift away, she didn’t want it after all, the city could have it if only she could be allowed to go where her sister had gone. The air smelled like smog. The sky looked like nuclear winter. Lane expressed like some prophet out of the dumpster. His hands were smeared with dirt and blood, his eyes had grown the color of girders. Words came out of his mouth, but she couldn’t understand them through the silence. The gift lolled over his back, like a teasing tongue. It didn’t
mean anything, the dime store thing. Voices, things…nothing was intrinsic
except the fascination. No one belonged within.

  Which was why the tears did not continue to fall as she watched the tulip-purple boa wrap around Lane’s neck, seizing him tightly and drawing him upwards, against his bulging eyes and his rotten tongue. He swung out there in the nothingness filled with sun, and the tears on her face began to melt. She rose up out of the silence, spreading out over the miasma, and she felt, in every molecule of her, the call of New Geneva. She looked down into the swirl, laughing for the pleasure of it, and as she surrendered herself she felt the hands of the
âme
rise up out of the storm of nothingness to catch her and bring her down gently to the urban beds that had been calling for her in shouts and screams of silence.