Chapter 14 Vikurthimagga

Consider the monster.

Electric Head, in the city of the dead, skull cleaved in two, fever burning. Daytime is safe from the dead now; the municipal authorities have put out fiery barrels of imported dummala resin at regular intervals on every street, spaced between the rain trees and the flame trees, belching out great bitter clouds of smoke. Restless and fuming she stalks the streets of the city of the dead, breathing in the smoke and puffing it out again. Odeg and Mrs. Akan are of no help in resolving her dilemma. They are separately concerned with the dummala crisis: Odeg with a pro bono case his firm has taken on, alleging corruption scandals to do with the mass of import licenses issued after the ban was rescinded; Mrs. Akan with ongoing harassment from the revengeful would-be cartel of Luriati yakahalu plantation owners. The other day she and Vidyucchika woke to find a black rooster nailed to their front door, its viscera splattered below. The maggots were pleased, at least.

"They'll kill me, Vee-daughter," Mrs. Akan said. She did not sob; she merely said it out loud as prophecy, to which Vidyucchika shook her head but could not speak otherwise. This will be, as Vidyucchika knows perfectly well but does not wish to look at in the face, how Mrs. Akan dies. In death, perhaps, at least mother and son will find rapprochement. The wish is sincere, but faded, as if it were already memory. Ever since her conversation with Grandmother Sits, Vidyucchika has had one foot out of this world.

Consider the monstrous: it portends a greater and more marvelous world. Vidyucchika understands this now. She sees a little more clearly the devils and ghosts that haunt the mundane, senses with fevered delirium the horizon red and wheeling, the world bordered by the red ocean of all stories, all possibilities. It seems to her that she herself is the axis, the flayed ape crucified on the world tree, upon which the universe rotates, but she knows from experience this is merely the trick of perspective. Walking down the street, sometimes she is compelled to chase after things unseen, the uncanny oddities at the corners of her vision, the distant blurs of the weird. She forgets sometimes that others cannot perceive them. She leaps into a tuktuk and says,—Uncle, follow that devil!

The driver, unseeing and frightened, throws up his hands until Vidyucchika guides and directs him turn by turn. The devil is too distant or too monstrous for her to make out its precise shape, except that it is too large to be human. It moves with purpose, always a street ahead, always turning a corner just as they come into sight of it, just long enough to see where it went but not enough for her eyes and her mind to resolve what she is seeing, the long white arms, the spikes and locks of its hair.

—Is there really a devil, the driver asks, and she nods yes when he meets her eyes in the mirror.

—We are hunting treasure, Vidyucchika says gaily.

The driver crosses himself. He has a symbol in polished stone at his neck, a floreate cross whose prongs each are fruiting, stood in a grail. An old symbol, popular even on this peninsula dominated by the Path Behind. There are many religions here, all strange, most old. There is no religion that Vidyucchika knows that concerns itself primarily with devils; they are in the background only, old and always half forgotten, dealt with by unregulated aduras. There is no saint to act as ambassador to the demon-haunted world.

Though they cannot be perceived by most, they are still believed in. They are true stories, taken on faith for twenty-five centuries. The figure of the monster, the devil, is in vulgar folklore associated with hidden treasure, usually interpreted to mean buried gold and jewels from the age of kings.

—Not that the age of kings is over in this world, Vidyucchika says, unaware that she is completing half a thought out loud.

This observation seems to calm the driver, though; he responds to it as politics.—Ah yes, he says.—The Absent King, the Absent Queen, we are still bound shamefully to monarchies that have no place in a modern republic…

He continues in this vein as he drives, pausing briefly only to follow Vidyucchika's directions, until she loses sight of the devil and has to stop the vehicle and get out, frustrated. She digs in her purse for casi but only has a single fanon. She hands the driver the note, brushing the maggots off its silvery threads, and he protests that it's too much twice over, but she insists. When he drives off, she tells herself, there, no more tuktuk money. No more chasing devils today. What's wrong with me?

The problem is that her next step is both necessary and impossible to plan; it is too much, too vast. She grinds her teeth at overly wise and gnomic grandmothers. Her fever trembles and her thoughts skitter. No, she must trust herself, in the end—or rather, to the beginning.

She walks to the nearest light rail station. In Luriat, the rail is free. She consults the map on the wall to figure out how to get home. She has wandered far in the city, into districts she does not know, and needs several connections to get back. A two-car train arrives, and she gets into the rear car, which is empty and ill-lit, the lights flickering and cold. The stuttering of the light makes her head hurt. Sitting and nodding, she keeps looking for monsters through the windows and it seems that the more she looks, the more she sees, moving through crowds, clinging to the sides of buildings. She has only impressions of twisted bodies, elongated limbs, distorted faces, indistinct but unhuman, forcing her to blink her eyes rapidly and try to focus.

The folkloric treasure of the devils is not gold, of course. This is an obvious allegory; the treasure is secret knowledge. A world is not as the mundane experience it devises: once that was secret and awful knowledge, though now it's a truism to be found in any glossy magazine. Solids are mostly empty space. Objects are not discrete. The perception of time is an illusion. Seeming biological realities are socially constructed: gender is only genre, race is a race to the bottom, species as arbitrary as specie. Seeming social realities are machinations of power hiding their inverse: slavery is called freedom to disguise its exploitation; ignorance is called strength, to champion political illiteracy; and most of all, most of all, war is called peace, the peace bought by murder, the peace of the unmarked mass grave.

We put on a play for ourselves, we ghosts, we people, we devils, with our superstitions like solidity, objects, time, or justice. We live in confusion, we swim in it. But the world is not a river to swim in; it is a glacial ocean, always whole, already complete.

The truth is terrifying. Teaching is terrorism.

Vidyucchika looks out of the window of the train car and sees herself in the glass, lit in dull gold as if from within, her eyes too wide, her lips slightly parted as if she's breathing hard. She looks ready, she thinks, to be flayed.

—I know, she says, out loud in the empty car. It echoes; her voice sounds raspy and unfamiliar, trembling from fever. Lambajihva rustles in the meat of the empty chair opposite her, and then he comes out to sit on it. She addresses him, a mirror to speak into.—I know what opened my eyes. I did it myself.

And then and there in the train, she closes her eyes and reaches back through time to force her own awakening.—Hey, she says, to the swirling fractals of her inner eyelids.—Will you hold my hand while I go? She reaches out a hand in the dark; cold fingers curl stiffly around hers.

The path of distortion, the vikurthimagga, the art whose strictures she must simultaneously invent and adhere to, is violence. There is no explosion, but it's like a bomb going off, scattering doll parts everywhere. The world creaks under the strain, metal and stone, rubber and flame.

Vidyucchika opens her eyes and she is skinless and cold in the undark, the absence of shadow and photon. Who took my pelt from me, she asks, but there is no sound, even in her head. She reaches out in the direction of her grandmother—that's easy, it's the opposite direction from the northwest into which Grandmother Sits always stares—long enough to meet her eyes and find her way to a kitchen table. She takes the explosive.

(In a silent room where she waits alone, Grandmother Sits says ah when she hears the crinkle of the paper bag as the radishes drop to fill a sudden emptiness.)

Vidyucchika looks for Lambajihva, but he has not come with her. She looks for him again, the mirror she used to know so well before they were set apart—my fault, my fault, she says—and finds him in the moment of stepping onto a street, vehicles in disarray.

She admires the

moment,

the symmetries,

as if it were a painting; every frame of the akashic record is perfected documentation, the world that sees itself.

She builds the bomb in his backpack in the very moment that he swings it off his shoulder to hold it in front of him. Thank you for the birthday present, grandmother. When he opens his mouth, laughing with his tongue out like a demon king, she kisses the C-4 goodbye, her electric head a detonator—she bites off a chunk and swallows hard into the bloom.

She does vomit, somewhere in the red web. Grandmother was right about the side effects. But what a buzz, myalgias and haematuria aside. She needs to pee. Dizzy, she lands with a splash in the shallows of a lake under a full moon, reddens the water, frightens the crocodiles. The water is thigh-deep and cold. She giggles a little. Oh, quick, before another grandmother gets here, a grandmother by another mother. She wades forward, waving her arms at the men huddling over another on the lakeshore.

—Oy! Fuck off!

She doesn't know what they see when they look at her, she doesn't know what they hear. She hears her own voice and it is strange and full of strangers, rough and multiple, more teeth than she has in her mouth. They look at her and their eyes widen and they run. They leave behind the dying man. They leave behind the body.

She kneels by his side. He is still alive, though life flows out of him; he's gurgling, spitting blood, his eyes clenched shut.

She puts her skinless hands on his temples and forces his eyelids open with her thumbs as he dies.

She reaches up into the sky and takes the full moon between finger and thumb, and she places it in each of his eyes like a coin.

—Your passage is paid, she says.—Your beard still sucks. I'll see you later later. I'm gone, gone, gone to the other shore.

And she's gone, running downhill at an angle out of this world, laughing as she tears skinless through the skin of world after world, laughing as she grows vast and sharp in the tooth, as serpents crown her head with their forked tongues like thunderbolts, as her eyes bulge from all that she has seen. She is moving so fast when she lands, like a meteor molten from the path it carves through the layers of history and atmosphere, that she barely sets foot in that haunted jungle—the cicadas hush and she can feel the dead children flee from her, like ripples from a thrown stone in water—only for long enough to leap in joy and homecoming into that girl's open mouth. Then she's gone, and Annelid clamps her hand over her mouth and laughs and laughs and laughs.