Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Winterking:Summerking
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
A little before midnight, I followed the path through the little woods and out onto the frozen hillside, chanting lines from one of William Blake’s more mystical and interminable books. Because you asked me to. I tied the satchel to the listing wire fence by the ravine, the little bag with herbs, snips of wire, a lock of your hair. Because you asked me to. I stamped the snow into the pattern from the page of crop circle book you’d ripped out and tried to burn. Because you told me not to.
I worked around three times before it appeared, shimmering simultaneously up from the ground and down from the sky.
It had glass-delicate features of Arthur Rackham elf and the eyes of an X-Files alien.
“Minion of Los?” I said.
It didn’t move. I bowed anyway. You’d meant me to pay the last of your debt, not strike my own bargain.
“Snellsmore,” it said, “Okehampton.”
Belatedly, I started the recorder, and repeated the first two names in my head.
It droned on: “Ruislip, Haddon, Heaton, Mondrem.”
It spoke, as the far ones do, in places. England, maybe Canada. With each, I felt the twinges you’d described, down my spine, deep in my gut, behind my knees–each pinch foreshadowing a pain that would grow with the years.
The minion began to revolve with slow grandeur, its droning rapid: “WestrayOrmskirkNethertonLongthorpeBodminStonebarrowScilly.”
It shimmered apart, left and right, like light flaring on glass, and was gone.
I shivered that whole winter, no matter how many blankets I piled on, how high I turned the heat. But you’d taught me how to get through: double sweaters, soup close to boiling every meal, all the herbal supplements on the lists you’d left. (Had you known the warnings would only make your stories more irresistible?)
As the days outgrew the nights, I traced and retraced the lines on the map, the constellation of places the elf/alien/imaginary/too real thing had named. I bought tickets; consulted almanacs, starcharts, and train tables; sublet the apartment; left.
I’d travel, while the leaves greened and gain the Crown of Los, the gift of creativity that had sung in all your symphonies. The same gift as you, although maybe a more visual art for me. But the same price, same decline, same pains. But that was OK–they’d be as much a link to you as the ten-year summer of triumph.
Tournament Season
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
I saw her at the roof-races, her crimson stilt-car ambling along at the middle of the pack. Her name, I didn’t catch, but the winking skull icon on the hood was hard to forget.
I saw it again at the hot-air balloon demolition derby, on the chute she used to bail out amid the aerial apocalypse that took the field from fifty contests to three in moments. She waved, perhaps in my direction.
I met her at last in the undercity after the giant eel slalom. She was dripping into the celebratory champagne, and giddy before her first sip. She’d placed in the top five.
“I’ve seen you,” she said, “in the stands, always with that hat. I’ve taken it as a good luck charm.” She handed me a flute of watery bubbly. “Please keep wearing it.”
I stammered something, but she was swept into the crowd of well-wishers and people who’d won money on her.
It wasn’t a hat. It was a job, a series of hats I was paid to wear, some kind of advertising campaign building through the tournament months. But as long as they looked similar, she’d get her luck, and I’d get my paycheck.
The next hat, the next event went fine. I sat just behind the reviewing stand at the skate-boat regatta–I got a bonus for visibility. The winking skull sloop placed twelfth, enough for a small cash prize–bonuses all round.
But the next was all disasters. I overslept, arrived late, only found a seat in the second mezzanine; the hat wasn’t much like the others, and looked even less like them the way I’d thrown it on; she was eliminated before the first intermission.
“Combat opera,” she said when I found her, alone, backstage, “Easier than it looks. Until you miss a cue.” She smiled behind the icepack. “I’m done.”
“There’s the ornithopter relays,” I said. “The mole-machine rally. Tournament season’s barely begun.”
“No, tonight was it. The launch.”
“Launch?”
“The icon,” she said. Then the crowd found her, and I lost her.
Ad world connections told me the winking skull mark auctioned well the next morning. I saw it frequently over the next months, openly on tea packets and fig tins, subliminally in magazine photo shadows.
Next spring, her stilt-car bore a laughing rhino logo and I resolved to keep wearing my motley-lapelled smoking jackets through the season, to see what luck would bring us.