Word Made Flesh

24

You are here as a convenient pair of ears, Gilrein. Make no mistake, it might as well have been any one of my silent passengers in the rear of my taxi. Or even the orderlies who broke my rib strapping me to the table where they injected me with their controlling fluids. The joke is very likely on them, yes? My liver will not process their chemicals. I am not one of them. I am not like you. I am an exile. A true exile. Not like you, Gilrein. Yes, I know, I’ve watched and listened. I am aware you fancy yourself the outsider. But it’s an act of vanity, mister. For you, it’s a pose, a way of killing time, as much as driving the taxi or drinking coffee in the Visitation.

You want a story, Mister Taxi-Boy. Very well then, you listen to me now. As you have never listened before. You listen to the end of my story and you memorize it. You are my receptacle. You are the only form of media left to me. You owe me this act, to become the listener, to give me your ears so that I might fill them like a satchel. You listen, Gilrein. As atonement for your arrogance.

When the Censor emerged from Haus Levi, the manuscript tucked under his coat, crews of latex-clad sanitation workers were sorting through the spoils, the booty of jewelry and knicknacks and wallets, tossing the better goods into money sacks imprinted with the Treasury’s seal, tossing photographs and clothing into thriving fire pits. A secondary crew was hosing the tenements down with liquid accelerant from tanks strapped to their backs. A phalanx of heavy machinery waited outside the mouth of the Schiller, behind the walls of cyclone fencing, cranes and backhoes idling under their drivers who were annoyed with the delay but appeased by the overtime wage. Meyrink called a foreperson over and asked for an estimated completion time for the entire project. The young woman consulted a clipboard and guessed it would be dawn before they could be ready to start burning and leveling the tenements.

Meyrink was barely listening. He approached a vice-chancellor who was sipping kava beside the Obliterator and, mumbling something about exhaustion, relinquished command.

Not wanting to take a staff car and aware that all the taxis had been rerouted for the night, Meyrink walked the three miles to his home, a nondescript town house in a bourgeois neighborhood. The walk allowed him time to think and build the correct degree of relish and expectation he felt the coming days deserved. An evolution of this magnitude should be acknowledged and embraced, received by every sensory port available, no matter how painful.

His deputies were waiting by the curb in a Ministry jeep. Meyrink stopped by the driver’s window and exchanged with Varnbuler his house keys for the generous bonus that would buy their discretion.

“Any problems?” Meyrink asked.

Varnbuler shook his head.

“Is she—”

“She’s awake,” the deputy assured him.

“And you—”

“Just as always,” Varnbuler interrupted for the last time.

Meyrink nodded and gestured that they could leave. He waited for the jeep to vanish around the bend of Morgenstern Road, then walked up the stair to his front door, barely able to contain the intensity of some new glandular response that resembled both glee and fury. He let himself into the foyer, made himself stop and pick up the mail that had been pushed through the slot, willed himself to sort and glance at a succession of bills, solicitations, and a letter from his mother on holiday in Matliary. He stopped in the pantry and poured some sherry, inspecting the sideboard to see that the housekeeper had done a thorough dusting. Next, he took his drink upstairs to the bedroom and removed the manuscript, placing it delicately on the bed as he changed out of his uniform, then reattired himself in tennis shoes, work pants, sweater, lab smock, and skiving apron. He studied himself in the mirror, stepped into the bathroom to slick down his hair with a wash of tap water. He dried his hands exhaustively before picking up the papers. Finally, unable to further postpone the culmination of his yearnings, he carried the gospel down to the cellar of the house and into the hobby room.

He threw open the door to find Alicia conscious, naked, and chained to a large brass hook that protruded from the center of the ceiling. Just as his deputy had promised.

A piece of silvery-gray duct tape was bound across the girl’s mouth. She stared at Meyrink, silent in terror and confusion. He stepped directly in front of her and though she tried to recoil, she could only bow her body back so far.

Meyrink held the stack of mismatched papers up at chest level and said, “In the beginning was the word, yes?”

Alicia mouthed something that was obscured by the tape.

Three of the room’s walls were fitted with oak worktables of differing widths and heights, their surfaces inlaid with ship’s linoleum and Formica. Each table was fitted with Anglepoise lamps of higher than normal intensity and two of the tables featured an expensive brand of German magnifying glass on bendable mounts protruding from sockets cut into the wood. Above each table sat a series of pegboards and cupboards and cabinets holding an impressive and long-assembled collection of tools, implements, and utensils including tenson saws, carpenter’s squares, band nippers, strops, awls, G-clamps, trindles, blunt-ended shears, back scrapers, sewing keys, rods, riveting sets, light hammers, backing hammers, loaded sticks, gilder’s tips, bone folders, chisels, bodkins, backing boards, dog-toothed burnishers, piercers, pins, paring stones, steel rulers, sandpaper blocks, mini-vises, and, perhaps, the most impressive collection of cutlery in central Maisel — knives and scalpels and lancets and razors and blades imported from all over the globe, some antiques and some custom-made, some known mainly to common village cobblers of Old Bohemia, others used solely by research surgeons in clinics unchartered by the republic’s Ministry of Health. But all of the metal kept meticulously polished and obsessively honed.

At the wall-head of the central table was a set of three glue pots set in a heated water jacket. On either side of the pots was a line of small cans and glasses containing an assortment of brushes — glue brushes, paste brushes, watercolor flood brushes, sable-hair brushes, hog’s-hair brushes, natural thistle brushes.

Beneath each table was a leather-topped tavern stool on rubber-tipped legs. At the far end of the room was a standing iron board cutter with a guillotine arm that could slide through anything reasonable, an antique English standing press, and a smaller, solid iron nipping press mounted atop a matching iron bench. A variety of sewing frames leaned against the roughstone wall, resting on the floor next to a large, black-wood plan chest with narrow drawers. The top drawers were stocked with papers — decorative marbles and Japanese tissues and pricey Ingres. Wrapping papers and blotting papers and art papers and writing papers and drawing papers. All in a spectrum of colors, weights, grains, and pH values. The bottom drawers were stocked with a supply of preskived leathers in various qualities.

Wire drying lines were strung wall-to-wall behind Alicia’s head. The floor beneath her bare feet was poured concrete fitted in the center with a grate-covered drain. There were no windows. Adjoining the room, there was a private lavatory which supplied the running water. There was also a walk-in closet from which the doors had been removed and the interior remade with fitted shelving that displayed an impressive assortment of books in pristine and matching bindings. In the middle of the closet area was a wood-and-glass display case filled with two slim books bound in an ugly brownish-purple covering. Their installation inside the hermetic case was the only indication of their status above the shelved volumes.

Meyrink moved to a worktable without taking his eyes off Alicia. He picked up a pair of rubber gloves and made a production of stretching them over his hands.

“Everyone needs a release,” he said, contorting his fingers into latex. “A way of calming themselves. Of leaving the pressures of the job. Retreating from the jostling of the outside world in general. That’s my feeling, at least.”

He moved back to the girl and stood before her, examining her body as if it were a canvas filled with some difficult work of art, some new form that takes effort on the part of the viewer before it will give up its hidden meanings. He stepped back, moved his head from shoulder to shoulder, squinted his eyes. He walked a full circle around Alicia, slowly, stopping for a moment when completely behind her and making a number of snorting and sniffling noises.

When they came face-to-face again, he was nodding, smiling, pleased by something he seemed to have confirmed.

“Very good,” he said, probably to himself. “Just fine. Wonderful texture. No major blemishes. Tremendously supple.”

He lifted a hand to her cheek for the first time, brushed back to her ear, then adjusted her hair behind the ear.

“You are wonderful,” he said to her. “You’ve taken care of yourself. I can’t tell you how pleased that makes me. So many of the young people today, with the cigarettes, the sun worshiping. The alcohol while still in their teens. And then, these days, the body piercing. My God, not just the ears, mind you, but the nose. The tongue. I have even heard they desecrate the nipple.”

He walked back to a workbench, shaking his head as he went. He opened some of the cupboards and began to take down tools and place them on the table.

“I consider it a form of self-mutilation,” he said. “And I know all the arguments. The talk of expression and rebellion. But I think this is the nonsense of youth. I think we’re seeing the herd mentality. I will put a ring through my nose because Ottla down the block put a ring through her nose. So much nonsense.”

He stared up into a cupboard for a moment, apparently looking for something, then closed the cabinet door and walked back to face the girl.

“I would love to take the tape off. But I have neighbors, of course. And though the house is well insulated, I’m a man who does not enjoy taking chances.”

He ran a thumb across her covered lips.

“I know it can be difficult breathing this way. But concentrate and you will find a rhythm. It will begin to feel natural, I promise you.”

He took her face by the chin and turned it side to side, inspecting the neck. From here he began to run both his hands around the neck, poking mildly with the thumbs like a doctor checking swollen glands. He moved down her body, over the shoulders, down over the breasts, up under the arms, turning the arms back and forth as wrists rubbed against manacles, all of it very clinical and methodical, in much the same manner that the state nurses inspect the refugees at the border train stations.

“While I’m apologizing, I should also tell you how much I regret these gloves. A problem for both of us, in the tactile sense. So sterile and cold. But in this day and age, what can I say? It’s a matter of safety. Of hygiene. You must see that. An intelligent young lady like yourself. You can’t take the kind of risks that we would have disregarded in the past.”

He spent a good ten minutes inspecting her body, half of that time down on his knees and behind her. From time to time he pinched and poked, pulled skin out from its natural fall over the bones. He even ran a finger in and out between her toes. When he was finally done, he struggled back up to standing and gave her buttocks a playful slap before walking back to the work-bench and extracting two or three more implements from the cabinets.

“You look healthy as a horse,” he called from across the room, taking a grindstone down from a shelf and climbing onto a stool.

“I mean that, of course, as a compliment,” as he selected a midsize skiving knife and began to sharpen its blade against the stone. “Your color is exemplary. No sign of jaundice at all. You have to understand, we, on the outside — outside the Schiller, I mean — we’ve heard so much about the effects of a poor diet, the results of malnutrition and such. You begin to accept it as fact. But obviously, your environment did no lasting damage to your body.”

He stopped sharpening and turned his head to look at her, saying, “Nor your mind.”

He put the knife down gingerly and picked up the manuscript, slid off his stool and approached the girl once again.

“It’s a stunning achievement,” he said, holding the stack of paper up for her to see. “What you have done is simply amazing, my dear. You are a very talented artist. A writer of the first degree. This is my opinion and, certainly, I am not a trained critic. But as they say, I know what I like. I know what I am impressed with. Do you know the shock that would ripple through our city if others saw what you were capable of? A little guttersnipe from the Schiller, barely old enough for the violet passport? I’ll tell you this, they wouldn’t believe it. There’s a very prejudiced mind-set out there, darling. You must trust me on this. I have more experience. I have lived more years and traveled widely through the strata of Maisel society. The bulk of my people could not accept it. This kind of achievement from the vermin of the Schiller. Impossible. This is what they would say. I swear it. I have the proof here in my hands, but it would do no good.”

He brought the manuscript back to the workbench and deposited it there, brushing off the top sheet gently, then pausing to reread a few opening lines.

“You have done no less than create — with just ink and scraps of cheap, horrible paper — a totem. Do you know what that is, my child? You may well. I would put nothing past you. Not after reading your art. Think of this. In just three days, without study or planning. Without help or advice or a mentor who might have steered you along your course. Without an aesthetic skeleton. Without an envelope filled with a lifetime of notes. Without the slightest indication that there was a single reason to even do so, you have created a bomb. That’s what this is, my love. That is exactly what we must call this messy pile of paper. A bomb. A bomb that goes off, again and again, an explosive device whose trigger is the eyes of any and every reader to pick it up and take in the first words. It is an epiphany bomb. Are you familiar with this word, child? No? No matter.

“We could talk of an idiot savant. But I know this is not the case. Your extraordinary talent was not given at the expense of normality. This is self-evident to me. You are a beautiful young rose that has grown in the midst of the sewer heap that is the Schiller. You were put here, “in all your beauty,” his finger pointing out at her, in all your innocence and your wisdom, to make me into an everlasting symbol. Because of you, I will always be here, unadulterated in my darkness.

“I don’t mean to be melodramatic, my friend. But surely the moment calls out for it. You have created from nothing a world of written language, ink on paper, a cosmology of symbols, the sum of whose parts is entirely greater than the graphic signs themselves. You have forged the manifestation of reality through your little story. How proud you must be, child. How proud your family and friends, your whole community would be, if only your story had never taken place, yes? It’s an awful irony. Even a paradox — if they exist, there is no story to be proud of; if they die, there is no one to be proud.

“But I will be proud for them, young lady. I will do your masterpiece justice. You must trust me on this. I could show you my own best work, but it would pale in comparison to your triumph, believe me. I would be embarrassed just to parade my paltry craftsmanship before the eyes of such genius. And besides, past work does not really ensure success in the future, because each project is a job unto itself. We never know what the result will be like. But we will do our best. This is all we can do. Don’t you agree? We give what we have, not what we have not. Our doubt is our passion, as someone once said.”

From one cabinet Meyrink took a wide and deep roasting pan, something you might use to cook a holiday turkey. From another cabinet he took a plastic bleach bottle topped with a blue twist cap. The brand label had been peeled off the jug and in its place, printed in black marker, was the word RESTORATIVE. He carried them both to the floor near Alicia’s feet, uncapped the jug, and filled the pan about halfway. The basement filled up with a chemical smell, a nauseating cross between dentist’s office and reformatory boys’ room.

Meyrink moved back to a workbench, took down a small bottle of bluish liquid. He unscrewed the cap, pulled his handkerchief from his pocket. He poured a small amount of liquid onto the rag and quickly recapped the bottle.

He came back to Alicia from behind and forced the wet cloth against her face, covering her nose, holding the back of her head steady.

“It won’t be long now,” he said.

In a moment, he was back in her line of vision, though already fading a bit, gauzy, seen through a panel of lightly rippling water. He was holding the manuscript again, placing it inside a plastic bag. His mouth moved.

“In case there’s more spray than I anticipate.”

The weight of her body seemed to increase, pulling on the wrists bound inside the manacles. The sense of balance began to dissipate. Time moved closer to its state in sleep, a wavering, unfixable condition of varying speed and depth. The sound of his voice appeared almost detached from its port of origin, the mouth moving in a somewhat different pattern of motions than the noise reaching her ears would have implied. And yet, despite this discrepancy, she completely understood the last words she heard. The words were not original. No words are. But this particular grouping had a persistently familiar ring to it. Someone with a clearer perspective might have labeled it a paraphrase.

Though the words were not from Alicia’s specific tradition, her native history, or her culture, she was acquainted with them. She had been, after all, in the end, maybe more than anything else, a reader.

“In the beginning,” Meyrink said, “was the word, and the word was with the author, and the word was the author …”

He pushed the blade of the scalpel into the soft enclave below the neck and opened the body to the exterior world.

For how many hours did he work on the girl? Do we need to be mindful of the passage of time? As in the Bible, where we are told that God made the whole of the universe in a specified interval?

How intense his concentration must have been, cutting sheet after sheet of epidermis. How satisfactory, finally, when he could pull away the entire jacket that covered the torso.

There is no need to dwell on how the body was disposed of. The deputies had handled errands of this nature before, of course. And what was one more body when we consider that this took place at the height of the pogroms collectively known as the July Sweep?

The tanning process you might find somewhat more interesting. The way he dried Alicia’s skin and worked it obsessively into a binding material, into a unique hide that would forever gather and house the pages of Alicia’s story.

But what I really want to leave you with, Gilrein, at this late date, is the fact that Meyrink’s book was stolen from him. At some point in the end, during those frantic and confusing days following the Erasure of the Schiller, when the Censor of Maisel was of no more use to the state. Alicia’s book was taken from Meyrink before he fled to America. Or, perhaps, just after he arrived. One more wretched outcast yearning for the new Eden that could give him sanctuary.

There is a myth that the book was taken by a survivor of the Erasure. An Ezzene who was not present on the final night. But I find this hard to believe. How could such a person live with himself? How could he survive a guilt of this magnitude?

Gilrein walks to the Checker carrying the manila envelope given to him by Larry the security guard. The envelope contains Otto Langer’s personal belongings. When Gilrein asked, “Don’t you want me to sign for it?” the guard just ignored him and went back to reading the mutant virus exposé.

Stopping at the rear of the cab, Gilrein unclasps the package and slides a worn brown goatskin wallet onto the trunk. He opens the wallet, fans through the billfold, counts off thirty-nine dollars. He flips through a series of cellophane photo sleeves that contain business cards, a hack license, a driver’s licence, a citizenship card, an expired inoculation card, and a biloquist permit issued by the city of Maisel and valid only during the carnival season.

And a single photograph. It is a picture of an almost-beautiful young girl with deep circles under her eyes. Maybe seventeen years old, she’s dressed in a sweater and she has a pencil lodged behind her ear, pushing the hair back on the right side of her head. Carefully, Gilrein slides the photo out of the sleeve and makes himself turn it over in his palm. Makes himself read the inevitable words

FOR PAPA,

WITH ALL MY LOVE FOREVER,

ALICIA