The Narrator by Michael Cisco Read Free Book Online Page A

up at and a little into me. “Meqhasset is enchanted, everyone says. I want to see it.”
    “Enchanted how?”
    He drops his eyes sideways.
    “I don’t know exactly. Whatever it is, is interior. No inhabitants have anything to do with it, and they don’t talk about it. I heard about it from my cousin. He had to go there, on a boat, and he heard stories. And he saw something too, I think, but he would never talk about it.”
    “What does he think of you going?”
    “Oh, he’s dead. My whole family is dead. No wife, nobody waiting, so,” he shrugs, “I can throw my life around if I want to. And I’ve been on campaigns before. I learned always to avoid glorious campaigns—everyone is more likely to die in glorious campaigns. You get yourself assigned to something small-time deal like Meqhasset, where you spend half your tour getting there, and you’ll come back alive. Probably alive.”
     
    *
     
    I follow the river into the commercial area. There are kiosks selling mineral water and witch hazel, porters rushing everywhere with heavy bales of cinnamon, camphor, cotton and kegs of sea salt. Here’s an overwhelmingly fragrant row of tobacco women with barrels and great swatches of the leaves, cured and fresh, camphorated or spiced. In the meat market, they have whole ambuloceti for sale, hunted by the unusually brave and well-armed in the marshier land down river where the camphor grows.
    Representatives of the Embalmer’s College wander among aisles of corpses, heaped in pyramidal piles. They’re soft and spotty like overripe fruit, the students and masters pinch, sniff, and squeeze with judiciously long faces and expertly-seeking eyes. The merchants sit wooden-faced on stools impassively fanning away the flies. Barrels of hands, feet, and genitals quiver as heavily-laden carts rumble by, and here a beefy woman dressed in a black leotard and brown leather apron sells skin and hair. On her foot-long wooden spools, ranged upright in a sort of abacus along the back of her stall, are glowing, convex cylinders of lustrous blonde, umbrous red, slick black hair glistening like onyx, feathery curls and hair straight and thick as wire, and sheets of skin in various widths from tapes to broad sheets, from sheerest transparency to skin like granulated oil over a barely-perceptible, delicate pink. Gland dealers are set well to one side, with the intestine men, who wear their wares in discrete coils around their arms and legs. The smell among the gland dealers is a cool sour haze of pungent ammonia, deep biting musks, rancid cheese reek, and woven in with the rest is a weird platinum note that glides through the sinuses like a love spell, casually drawing all attention and will together into a long elastic cone pulling me along until I blunder transfixed into the nearest counter. Steel trays and salvers, jars, metal urns, strings of dried gonads like bundles of garlic hanging in the drafty air.
    An embalming professor from the school is tying up a tall stack of severed hands with twine, her veil held in place by a black petalled chaplet. She snaps the fingers on her own hand, the tips exposed by the fingerless lace gloves, and Jil Punkinflake appears from one of the aisles adjacent, pulling the ladder from his vest and smiling unctuously. The death’s-head moth holds its wings out at full length.
    He helps her carry her parcels to her phaeton standing by and winks at me. She clips away, and he ambles over, hands in pockets.
    “Well? Are you an army man?”
    I explain.
    “It stinks,” he shrugs. “Let’s go drink some of your scrip, Low.”
     
    *
     
    I find unaccountable difficulties always arise in searching out the narrative sections of any marketplace, but of course how could I know that? Anyhow there always seems to be some distraction, or the sort of wrong turn that, having drawn you into the trammels of its mischief, dodges behind the innocent turns and loses itself among them like an absconding pickpocket. No