The Narrator Read Online Free Page B

rise and fall in vertical orbits, on a current, I guess, of air crushed against the bricks and forced aloft. The dust looks like a woman, with a long dress and a wide hat; and now she seems closer, as though she had traversed a wide space between us and were peering through a window at me. I see her eyes, not the luster of her eyes although there was light in the face—like a face of gold ash on a wax head—and her gaze “glowed” into me, without light. Water splutters from a drainpipe opposite me, and spills down a shallow channel in the dirt along the middle of the alley, thickening with dust until its front end is a bulbous brown lip. I can’t see the woman any more, nor can I remember her face.
    The ground is elevated here, the view is unobstructed and full of wind. The sheer black trench of the Idle runs away from me, black wrinkles in a grey ribbon, and on its far side is the spiracle mound of the death precinct, from which on some nights it is recounted one can see the titan form of a grinning mortuary student rearing up to set a green death taper in the sky. There’s the Embalmer’s College, crouched like a toad dropsically bloated with venom and warted over with cupolas; its presence exceeds its size, and draws attention to it among these other buildings as the eyes draw attention in the face.
    I walk toward the river, and in less than a quarter of a mile I find a bridge to cross into the death district. Shreds of black crepe, and the dried husks of flowers that might have come from funeral wreaths rasp along the ground, are toyed with by the air. The bridge is encrusted with what look like brass teacups broken in half, like scales growing out of any order, embedded in yellow solder. I cross the empty bridge as the sun begins to slide down toward the backs of the mountains, and night’s elaborate mechanism whirs to life all around me. It’s just tuning up.
    So this is the death precinct. I find willows sighing over strewn empty streets, dust and attentive calm on the other side of the bridge. Sunset takes hours, and there are no lights lit anywhere yet. No sound but rustling skirts of air, the half-hearted whine of a shutter’s hinges, crickets who chirp two or three times and stop. I wander without thinking, and as the darkness falls I am picking my way through unlit streets with bushes growing from the pavements; in the gathering night, everything is felty and dim, the stone buildings luminous pink and silver with bare lividity, patched with lichen and veiled in ivy. I am thirsty, but the stone trough I find is too scummed over to drink from. I haven’t eaten since the morning, and so imagine the state I am in. I have wandered too long to go back, and my mind is unclear. I start pushing in at doors and even windows, and here one door opens. For a moment my thoughts are sharp again. Charred beams and broken plaster on the floor, smashed furniture, walls glow white-blue like cheeses. Here on the window sill a chipped tin cup with a little sand at the bottom is nearly full of rainwater. I drink it down carefully so as not to drink the sand. I can feel it pouring down cold into my empty stomach. There’s even a thin, narrow mattress or pad here folded on the floor. I pull my jacket around myself and lie down on my side. My body groans with fatigue but it takes me a while, or so it seems, to get to sleep, listening to the wind, and the faint sound of settling dust.
     
    *
     
    Ravenous morning. I am already in the streets before I wake up all the way. I hear the voices long before I begin to see people, and then only a face here a face there. Mostly white people. I am blinking all the time, but it’s hard to see. There are mortuary students everywhere, the males in vested suits with cutaways and cravats, silk hats with black crepe around the band, and the females in black dresses and flowered hats. Only those who have matriculated may wear veils. I wash my face in a fountain and take another drink—a belly