All Tomorrow's Parties

31. VIEW FROM A HELLWARD STANCHION

HE dreams a vast elevator, descending, its floor like the ballroom of some ancient liner. Its sides are open, in part, and he finds her there at the rail, beside an ornate cast-iron stanchion worked in cherubs and bunches of grapes, their outlines softened beneath innumerable coats of a black enamel glossy as wet ink.

Beyond the black stanchion and the aching geometry of her profile, a darkened world spreads to every horizon, island continents blacker than the seas in which they swim, the lights of great yet nameless cities reduced to firefly glimmers at this height, this distance.

The elevator, this ballroom, this waltzing host unseen now but sensed as background, as necessary gestalt, descends it seems down all his days, in some coded iteration of the history that brings him to this night.

If it is night.

The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt.

The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand.

That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

And now she turns to him, and she is in that instant all she ever was to him, and something more, for he is aware in that same instant that this is a dream, this mighty cage, descending, and she is lost, as ever, and now he opens his eyes to the gray and perfectly neutral ceiling of the bedroom on Russian Hill.

He lies dead straight, atop the blanket of gray lambs wool made up in military fashion, in his gray flannel shirt with its platinum links, his black trousers, his black wool socks. His hands are folded on his chest like the hands of a medieval effigy, a knight atop his own sarcophagus, and the telephone is ringing.

He touches one of the platinum cuff links, to answer.

'It isn't too late, I hope, says the voice.

'For what? he asks, unmoving.

'I needed to talk.

'Do you?

'More so, lately'

'And why is that?

'The time draws near.

'The time? And he sees again the view from the huge cage, descending.

'Can't you feel it? You with your right place at the right time. You with your letting things unfold. Can't you feel it?

'I do not deal in outcomes.

'But you do, the voice says. 'You've dealt a few for me, after all. You become an outcome.

'No, the man says, 'I simply discover that place where I am supposed to be.

'You make it sound so simple. I wish that it were that simple for me.

'It could be, the man says, 'but you are addicted to complexity'

'More literally than you know' says the voice, and the man imagines the few square inches of satellite circuitry through which it comes to him. That tiniest and mostly costly of principalities. 'It's all about complexity now.

'It is about your will in the world, the man says and raises his arms, cupping the back of his head in his hands.

There follows a silence.

'There was a time, the voice says at last, 'when I believed that you were playing a game with me. That all of that was something you made up for me. To annoy me. Or amuse me. To hold my interest. To ensure my patronage.

'I have never been in need of your patronage, the man says mildly.

'No, I suppose not, the voice continues. 'There will always be those who need certain others not to be, and will pay to make it so. But it's true: I took you to be another mercenary, one with an expressed philosophy perhaps, but I took that philosophy to be nothing more than a way you had discovered of making yourself interesting, of setting yourself apart from the pack.

'Where I am, the man says to the gray neutral ceiling, 'there is no pack.

'Oh, there's a pack all right. Bright young things guaranteeing executive outcomes. Brochures. They have brochures. And lines to read between. What were you doing when I called?

'Dreaming, the man says.

'I wouldn't have imagined, somehow, that you dream. Was it a good dream?

The man considers the perfect blankness of the gray ceiling. Remembered geometry of facial bone threatens to form there. He closes his eyes. 'I was dreaming of hell, he says.

'How was it?

'An elevator, descending.

'Christ, says the voice, 'this poetry is unlike you. Another silence follows.

The man sits up. Feels the smooth, dark polished wood, cool through his black socks. He begins to perform a series of very specific exercises that involve a minimum of visible movement. There is stiff-ness in his shoulders. At some distance he hears a car go past, tires on wet pavement.

'I'm not very far from you at the moment, the man says, breaking the silence. 'I'm in San Francisco.

Now it is the man's turn for silence. He continues his exercises, remembering the Cuban beach, decades ago, on which he was first taught this sequence and its variations. His teacher that day the master of a school of Argentine knife-fighting most authoritatively declared nonexistent by responsible scholars of the martial arts.

'How long has it been, the voice asks, 'since we've spoken, face-to-face?

'Some years, says the man.

'I think I need to see you now. Something extraordinary is on the verge of happening.

'Really, says the man, and no one sees his brief and wolfish smile, 'are you about to become contented?

A laugh, beamed down from the secret streets of that subminiature cityscape in geosynchronous orbit. 'Not that extraordinary, no. But some very basic state is on the brink of change, and we are near its locus.

'We? We have no current involvement.

'Physically. Geographically. It's happening here.

The man moves into the final sequence of the exercise, remembering flies on the instructor's face during that initial demonstration.

'Why did you go to the bridge last night?

'I needed to think, the man says and stands.

'Nothing drew you there?

Memory. Loss. Flesh-ghost in Market Street. The smell of cigarettes in her hair. Her winter lips chill against his, opening into warmth. 'Nothing, he says, hands closing on nothing.

'It's time for us to meet, the voice says.

Hands opening. Releasing nothing.