Free The Narrator by Michael Cisco

...”
     
    *
     
    I visit the camp again. It’s nearly deserted, and I’m thankful, but presently I come across a soldier who tells me our new orders will be delayed by about a week, according to the latest dispatch. That means there are orders, after all.
    I spend several more days at the college. In vaulted cellars filled with a dense, clammy haze I watch from the visitor’s pew in a corner as ranks of students whisk through timed autopsies. The crews are ranked by speed and neatness on a chalk-smirched board; a grandly-whiskered instructor holds up a stopwatch the size of an apple. His round cheeks are red and shiny in an otherwise waxy, greenish face, and a variety of dissecting tools hang jingling from the front of his apron. Bodies are slung up onto the tables one after another, eviscerated and binned; Jil Punkinflake and his team are highly rated. Red hands pull open the body cavities and a meaty, excremental, liverish perfume is emitted; then he and Keen, their hands flitting here and there like birds hopping in the lane, isolate and remove each organ, handing them to Nectar. He plops them one by one into a produce scale hanging from the ceiling and notes their weights on his smeary clipboard.
    Slack human bodies are bustled and tossed everywhere I look, sliding across the floor in low heaps, pushed along by oilskin-aproned dieners with slick rubber spades. As each fresh cadaver is positioned on the dissecting table, Jil Punkinflake takes the temples gently in his grisly hands and gazes down into the dead face with a look like mother love. That look trembles on every face in the room, their caressing knives part skin, muscle and fat, and the bodies seem to offer up their contents to these hands with blissful abandon like dreamers unhasping their grip on the brink and allowing themselves to drop away into deep, balmy waters.
    Last glimmers of sun blaze in the narrow arch linking two terraced buildings. The sunset is turning the sky to red and orange sherbet, and a few lamps are already lit, swinging under the eaves of the buildings. Amber cones of light fall from the lamps and splash along the walls, wind scuttles in dry weeds, brings me a gust of smoke, dust, oil frying.
    I hear a rattle of wheels and hooves; a hearse— the hearse—pulls up before me and stops. The driver, dim against the half-blue sky, gestures me inside.
    My hand trembles on the latch—I pull the door open and the compartment is empty. I climb in and not quite knowing why nor why not sit; falling in place not really under control, not used to climbing in and out of carriages. We go a short distance and then stop. Suddenly a hatch opens in the roof opposite me and the driver clambers down, with know-how if not with grace, into the carriage. He shuts the compartment and sits across from me with a piping sigh.
    “Well,” he smiles, enjoying the softness. “Comfortable? How d’ye do?”
    He puts out his hand.
    “Orvar,” he says, “just Orvar, no mister.” As if he wanted to spare me any unnecessary trouble. He repeated my name as I pronounced it, nodding once and sweeping his face down and back, reaching into his jacket for something. His eyes seem alternately drawn and repelled by my face. He pulls out a small metal bottle wrapped in a leather sleeve, undoes the cap and offers it to me—“Tea?”
    It’s brackish and slightly viscous, going down my throat in one cool lump. As he takes a neat swig, without touching his lips to the bottle, as I had done, I feel a sort of inner dislocation, and it’s as though a dirt robe were slid under and around me.
    He gives me a friendly smile. “It’s a bit too strong, but it’s no poison.” Puts the bottle away and thrusts his fingers between each other.
    “Well,” he says, talking down toward my shoes. “Well.”
    I can hear the rasp and unrasp of his fingers against each other as he jams their webs together. I wait. His smile refreshes itself as a thought visibly occurs to him.
    “She