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solved the algorithm of guilt so well that they could enjoy the croissant
Sundays
that kept them home from church.
Until now Bob had not understood quite what it was that distanced him, from
the church. A few days in the bright shock of a new form had made it all
clear, though: on a planet that so obviously needed the love and protection of
its most clever species, a heaven-directed church seemed anachronistic, its
indifference to the welfare of the earth fundamentally invalidating.
When the Indian began shaking a carved stick over a fire, a fine pin of unease
entered Bob's mind. Religion may or may not be invalid, but rituals aren't
hollow. In the hands of the believer, the ritual is a powerful force indeed.
On its deepest level Bob's change had been a matter of the wall against this
kind of belief breaking down in him. His first transformation, in the hotel in
Atlanta, may indeed have been imaginary. Because it was so realistic, though,
he had believed in it. After that, everything else had become inevitable.
He stared transfixed at the Indian's preparations. Western culture had
destroyed the Indians because it had destroyed their ability to believe in
their own magic.
All the Indian had to do was to transform Bob back into a man and all of his
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magic would work for him again, because his success would strengthen his
belief.
The tribes, broken in spirit, would spring back to life.
At the end of the stick that danced in the Indian's hand was a tiny dancing
man.
He stared at the naked thing. Was it wax or real? It had no face, or perhaps
the face was simply too small for wolf eyes to see.
He thought of the ritual deaths of kings. To give the Indian back his
birthright, the wolf would have to die. The man at the end of the stick
danced, a slow and regular dance, as graceful as the drifting of a finger in
the sea.
He was a weed of a little man, down at the murky bottom.
His arms rose and fell, his legs flashed in the spreading light. Kevin cried
aloud, clutching down into the folds of his mother. A crow landed nearby. Bob
smelled rabbits on the wind, and wondered how far away they might be.
He didn't wonder long though. The Indian kept chanting, shaking his stick, and
Bob knew that there was another smell in the air, a human smell, small and
intense. There was a suffering, real man at the end of the stick. He wept as
he danced, the same awful, universal mourning that made Lewis Carroll's Mock
Turtle such a figure of childhood dread. The weeping without reason and
therefore without consolation, reflected in the tears of the Indian.
Bob felt the movement within and knew that the man was striving to escape as
the wolf had escaped. He sensed the crow alight from its food gathering,
sensed the rabbits across the mountain grow still, sensed the failure of the
wind and the stopping of the leaves. He had known a body that saw by eyes and
one that saw by nose. It was difficult to imagine how the planet saw and felt
and knew: the
whole of life was its mind, its nerves, its vision. The earth was a great
cyclopean eye rolling through space, looking out into the void. What awful
consciousness had urged the spawning of man, or more, had ordered him to
become what he had become?
He felt anger rushing through the stillness. No wonder the tiny man cried, no
wonder the Indian cried, no wonder his son hid in his mother and the crow
became silent. Within him the man rose and clambered, stuffed himself into the
shape of the wolf, and he felt his muscles longing to stretch, his skin
longing to shed its stuffy fur and spread to the caressing air. His stomach
did a grotesque turn. Green-flecked vomit burst out of his mouth and he stood
tottering, a tall, naked man who could not help but dance to the command of an
Indian with a stick.
The Indian threw the stick down and screamed. Cindy cried out, Kevin shrieked,
and Bob saw a chance of madness in the poor child's eyes.
His scream, his father's anguish, spread through the silence as quickly as an
atomic expansion. Then, as quickly as a trap taking a rat, the wolf snapped
back around Bob and he fell down, his jaw working, growls scumbling in the
thick mucus that was the waste matter of these furious changes.
"Bob, Bob!" Letting her boy fall aside, Cindy rose up. Her face was distorted
to a Hydra grimace, her hands were working in his fur like snakes, her body
bursting with thick panicky stench.
"Bob, please come back to us." Her voice was not steady. She was thinking
fast.
"I never expected you wouldn't want to. You don't though, you don't! Oh, Bob,
you got a rejection from the Poetry Review, but it was a personal letter.
Bob, they asked if you were aware of the Imagists. I sent a reply, I said yes,
but you didn't care for Amy Clampitt. Was I right, Bob? Oh, come back to your [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]