Free Celebrant by Michael Cisco Page A

with a warbling distortion running through it, like another voice hollowly encompassing it. The music director, looking off into space, shakes his head. Static gushes from the speaker.
    deKlend tries to sleep.
    Sleep, by which I mean a discontinuous series of solitary gymnastics in sweat-soaked blankets in an airless room (he thinks bitterly)
    While they ‘sleep’ in canals lined with clove trees under hooning woodwinds.
    Abruptly he lifts his head and looks around. The music director is no longer sagging behind the door. deKlend is alone in the gaunt room.
    Again he is pierced with an unaccountable pang of intense fear. He tucks his clammy hands under his arms to warm them. Cold nausea settles ponderously down on him. He lies flat on his back, his head propped up on the armrest, uncomfortable, and convinced he’ll vomit if he moves. The stink of institutional food in his nostrils sickens him, he begins to hear orderlies walk the hard waxed hallways outside and the abrupt, resounding noises of a hospital ward. His breath erupts from his mouth, and through his own irregular gasps he can hear the muttering of the orderlies ...
    The idea has its moment. Miss that moment and, even if it can be remembered and set down later, even if it is set down word for word as it was, the delay will have killed it.
    Reason is the magic. Remember that at all costs, even if it must be cut with a knife into the body.
    A child can see it — the magic — but the child won’t be able to understand it. The attention of the mature person is fixed on plans which won’t come to fruition for a long time, if ever, and from which they divert themselves with hasty half-snatched one-quarter-pleasures, and this costs them the sensitivity.
    That’s it (deKlend thinks, quaking with terror under his thin blanket) Think slowly and methodically, don’t skip ahead, not a single step. Articulate each thought distinctly to yourself, elaborately — drag them out, grind them.
    The skilled practitioner must cultivate a sophisticated reason. This is why magic is uncommon. Those who have the vision usually lack the reason, and those with the reason usually lack the vision. Only the one with both reason and vision will be able. What has been underway —
    His teeth grit in a spasm of fear, and he sucks breath through his teeth.
    — prayerwalking is walking in place/in spirit, walking homeless in the spirit. What is the spirit?
    His eyes stare up as though an orderly were bending over him now, clutching some steel implement —
    THIS is the ‘lurking evil’ (he thinks) The evil force threatens me with the sanatorium —
    He takes a deep breath and holds it, his skin icy and criss-crossed as his every hair stands on end.
    — The enemy!
    He swallows arduously. It’s like engulfing an egg.
    ...Reasoning: This theme will have two aspects.
    deKlend concentrates doggedly, desperately, on the pedagogical tone, a classroom, a boring seminar, the most boring, the most pedantic teacher imaginable is rattling on to him about the theme having two aspects, one, the more obvious, being the possibility that deKlend is an inmate of an insane asylum and all of this stuff about Votu and the Madrasa and the Bird of Ill Omen is his hallucination, through which the sanatorium can be glimpsed when the delusion wears thin and now the full storm of his terror shakes him like a rag ... the pedant quails against the blackboard, a huge shadow gathering its darkness before him, but somehow, through chattering teeth, he continues the lesson:
    S-second is the p-possibility that the sanatorium itself is a menacing s-spirit —
    His face twists wildly.
    — like —
    — A MONSTER!
    (his voice rises to a shriek)
    — A DEMON!
    This outburst unleashes his words and they erupt from his mouth in a complicated rush, like verse, hastily-recited, but distinct:
    A demon that closes around you when something about you, a thing that involves your personality, your power, your imagination, your