But what must such laughter say when it rings beyond the windows of those, women or men, who are sick to their death?

  When I was a child on my marginal island that I thought, then, was the world, inland tribes sometimes held festive navens, where everyone dressed up in everyone else’s clothes, the chief hunters and the head wives pretending they were beggars and outcasts, while the social pariahs were obeyed like queens and kings for the day. Women pretended to be men; men dressed as women. Parents made obeisance to their children, and children strutted like adults. It was a wonderfully healing practice. In the midst of it life itself became a wonder-studded tale with endless lessons for later use woven through with delight. I am truly pleased at this carnival time in Kolhari. Some go, rather, to a monstrous calling—not I. I will walk out in the streets, singing among the festival’s celebrants.

  For the Liberator has come to Kolhari…

  Still, when I think of what those songs, that laughter must mean to those who are excluded from it, I want to flee this city, this country, this land ready to think of anything but the pain within it. Only considering what lies on the other side of such flight stops me. And when I consider, I imagine in place of my personal exile, some text, a tale I might weave together, here, now, in this room at the end of this Kolhari alley, a luminous fabric that leaps from the loom of language for a monstrous, phthartic flight, soaring, habromanic, glorious as song and happy as summer, till finally it sinks into the savage and incicurable complexities of its own telling, to be torn apart by what impelled it: angry criminals fall to ravage a cartful of parchments.

  This will be a fine celebration.

  This will be a dark carnival.

  7.5 Historically the official reaction to plague in Europe was the one described by Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘The government…appointed public prayers and days of fasting and humiliation, [and encouraged the more serious inhabitants] to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to avert the dreadful judgment which hung over their heads…All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such like-doings, which had bewitched the people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenance even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their Grave, not of mirth and diversion.’

  Defoe’s last few lines may betray that this is the official interpretation of the response as well as the official proscription: if there was, indeed, ‘no trade,’ why would these merry-makings need to be ‘forbid,’ ‘shut-up,’ and ‘suppressed’? At any rate, even in Artaud’s conservative schema, once ‘official theater’ is banished during the plague, the reemergence, here and there, of spontaneous theatrical gestures in the demoralized populace at large throughout the city represents, for him, the birth of true and valid art/theater/spectacle.

  Though not burdened with a modern theory of germs—not obsessed with acronyms—Nevèrÿon certainly has some intuitive knowledge of contagion. And despite (or because of) the inhabitants’ suspicions of its officially sanctioned Carnival and its official invitation to the Liberator to take part in its cabinet, this unusual response has opened a marginal space for a certain radical gesture.

  Do I, however, know what it is?

  7.6 That morning Pheron sat at the table, sore at groin, back, and flank, not thinking as much as possible between moments of yearning after his workshop. But his walk to the end of the block and back, which he’d been forcing himself to take (almost) every morning, had again confirmed that he was not strong enough to go the three-quarters of a mile through the busy city and return.

  Where was the scamp who’d helped him out at the workshop the week before the illness had forced him home? Not that he expected to see him again. Oh, definitely a girl next time. No more boys. Not in the shop at any rate. The girls appreciated his wit, were impressed with the stream of (impressive) clients in and out, fell in love with him a little, and worked dreadfully hard because of it. With the boys, however, even the ugly awkward ones he’d offered jobs only out of compassion, sure he could never feel anything but pity for them, it was always he who began to fall a little in love (or into too great a pity). He grew lax. They grew lazy. No, definitely a girl—

  A chill moment caught him up as if a wind had come through the window; because he was not getting better, he knew. He was only teaching himself to live with the decayings, failings, breakdowns in the body that marked an inexorable deterioration.

  Hung in a fringe across his window, yarns were black with the sunlit blaze beyond.

  Somewhere outside a wagon stopped.

  Two of the three planks still leaned in the door frame, but the leather curtain hung in front of them. When leather moved, he thought it was Norema come with more water.

  Backed by sunlight, the figure swayed.

  Pheron sat up—not as quickly as he might—and blinked.

  The boy—it was a boy’s voice and a boy’s body outlined by the sun—put his hand on the side of the door and leaned.

  Further out in the sunlight stood an older man. His brocaded robe suggested that he was a lord. There were others as well—

  The boy said: ‘Excuse me. You’re Pheron, the dyer and weaver?’

  Pheron nodded.

  ‘You are very sick…?’

  Pheron squinted.

  ‘So am I,’ the boy said. ‘I…so are we. My name is Toplin. I’m a student from one of the academies near Sallese. At least I used to be before they sent me back to my mother’s. And this is Lord Vanar, with me. May we come in and talk with you?’

  ‘I’m not very…’ Pheron began. Then he said: ‘Yes. Please. Please, come inside! Sit on something—yes, there. Please…’

  8. There was another hustler, twenty-four or twenty-five and maybe six-foot-three, very thin, very blond (very curly), who’d also had his top teeth knocked out at one time or another, so that when he smiled, his canine fangs hung either side of his grin. Like Joey, he lived on the street and used to sit on the stoop next to the drycleaners or hang out with his hands in his pockets in front of the comic-book store, sometimes asking you to go into some grocery and purchase something for him if he gave you the money—beer, a sandwich—as he was (like Joey) usually too dirty and too disheveled to get served.

  Sometimes I used to tease Joey: ‘You have to work hard when you’re out here, man. You think you’re the only toothless junky hustling? Your competition’s right over there.’

  Toward the end of last July, about ten o’clock one hot morning, as I was coming up Eighth Avenue I saw Joey wandering down the street. Fingertips under the waist of his shorts and wearing a grubby maroon tank-top, he came over to me: ‘Hey, Chip, is there any way you can get me a room somewhere? I really don’t wanna be sleepin’ on the street for a while!’

  Occasionally I’d given Joey a few dollars. On his more presentable days, I’d take him into the Fiesta for a beer. In the first few months I’d known him, when a cold snap got me worried about him, I’d rented him a cheap room for a week. But such needs as his are endless, and to remain friends with him, I’d known from the first I would have to disentangle myself from his survival—which, for a couple of years now I had. ‘I can’t spend that kind of money,’ I told him.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘It’s really weird out here.’

  ‘What’s weird?’ I asked.

  ‘You remember that kid you always used to say was my “competition?” The other one with no teeth?’

  ‘Yeah, what about him?’

  ‘He got killed.’

  I looked surprised.

  ‘Last night. And he’s the fifth!’

  ‘What in the world happened?’

  ‘Oh, man,’ Joey said, ‘it’s been crazy out here for the past few weeks. You ain’t been down here. But some guy’s running around the streets at night killin’ people. And it’s gruesome, too. When they’re asleep, in doorways and places. About three weeks back one night—’ we walked past the comic-book store and the boarded-up windows of the old Haymarket, along that stretch called by only a very few people, for reasons I’ve never learned, the Minnesota Strip; in this neighborhood, most of the stores and shops that are going to open up, are open by now. The others are permanently shut—‘I went over by the waterfront to shoot up, by the tracks under the bridge, where there’s this big garbage pile; and while I was going under there, I smelled something, man. You ever smell a dead body? I mean, after it’s been there a few days. In heat like we’ve been having too.’

  ‘Yes I said. ‘As a matter of fact, I have.’

  ‘Well, that’s what it was. I didn’t even take my works out. I mean over there. Then. I just got out. I didn’t want to even see it, you know?’

  ‘You didn’t report it?’

  ‘Naw. But two days later, I heard they found it. Some girl got cut up and dumped over the bridge, right on top of the garbage pile. But the same night I went under there, a guy got sliced open down on Thirty-eighth Street, sleepin’ in a doorway. We all heard about that one the next day. Then, a few nights later, two kids got killed, a boy and a girl together. They were sleepin’ with their knapsacks under some steps. He left a note on them: “Death to the Street People!” But he doesn’t just kill ’em, man! He really cuts ’em up! That why they think it’s all the same person doing it. The guy I told you about—my “competition”—that got killed last night? It was right around on Forty-sixth Street, over there. Right near to that restaurant where all them young actors go.’ He thumbed toward Restaurant Row. ‘Him and his partner went over there to sleep under the steps. About four o’clock in the morning, his partner woke up and said he was goin’ for some breakfast. The toothless kid said he was gonna stay there and sleep, you know? And an hour later, his partner come back—and the kid’s stabbed to death. And hacked up, too. His nuts were cut off. And his stomach was split open and his heart was pulled out! But that’s the kind of stuff this weirdo’s been doing. People all up and down here are scared to go to sleep!’

  ‘Jesus!’ I said.

  ‘The others were like that too Joey said. ‘Can you imagine, doing something like that to someone?’

  ‘That’s a pretty messy thing to do,’ I said. ‘How do you get home through the streets after you’ve done something like that?’

  Joey shrugged. ‘Well, he’s done it five times now—if the first girl was done by the same person. She was cut up pretty bad, but not quite as bad as the others.’

  A few minutes later, after Joey had wandered off somewhere else, I walked across Forty-sixth Street. A section had been roped off along the south side. A few policemen still stood around. The remains had been removed, but apparently the forensic crew hadn’t yet (or had just) finished.

  8.1 The conversations were muted in the high council room:

  ‘…not what we were prepared for, with this Carnival…’

  ‘…I am afraid so, yes, that every sedition…’

  ‘…certainly in the streets, but I have heard that beneath them…’

  People left the room, with sweeping robes. Others entered and swept by still others bending to clean and straighten up after the meeting.

  Near the door to the antechamber, a minister approached a woman in a white dress, her dark hair cornrowed severely over her head. He moved his hand toward her arm, not quite touching her; it was only because she chose to glance at him that he actually spoke.

  ‘The Liberator is coming; yes, this we’ve all agreed to, Your Highness,’ the minister said softly in unaccustomed agitation. ‘But are you aware that certain elements come, not with him, but no doubt because of him? Certain subversive and dangerous elements have arrived to exploit the days of merry-making entirely in terms of this accursed plague that the Carnival you have declared and the man it honors was called precisely to distract them from. How does one say this to such a noble presence as yourself? But our customs inspectors have found a wealth of magic fetishes being smuggled into the city of late—and rumors of a terrible Wizard descend upon us; oh, and in one cart of contraband, when the tooled-leather cover was pulled back, what was there but a miniature model in exquisite detail of Kolhari herself, with all her avenues and alleys, her secret sinks and cisterns, from the Spur unto the High Court—like some hugely out-sized garden maintenance maquette! This is not right. There is rumor that a woman cooked a two-headed goat and sold it for barbeque from a cart in the Old Market, that bloodred ships have drawn up to the old docks along the port where the fog refuses to leave the streets, and that certain children with blue eyes and coppery hair have added strangely improvised nonsense names to their gaming chants as they play ball by the cisterns of the inner city: names that make even the wisest of our sages, who pass them in the sunlight, suddenly chill from their unspeakable implications. We do not talk of this in the council, Your Highness. But are you aware that these unmentionable things are all anyone mentions—and with grave trepidation—going to and from it?’

  To which the Child Empress, who was soon to be forty-seven and had her own annual carnival in the month of the Rat, when her birthday was combined with the anniversary of her ascension for a similar week of celebration during the winter days of short-light, answered crisply: ‘Yes. I am aware of all things in my land,’ and started ahead to join her maids and servants, who turned to her now in a flurry of forehead knocking, with lowered faces and raised fists, ready to depart for the royal suite.

  Before she joined them, however, she turned back. ‘Have you heard, as I have, that there are plans and plots afoot in the city to call up the old named gods and ancient powers: Hellwart, Gauine, The Thrine Sejcenning; Oning har’Jotheet, the Amnewor, and Ropig Crigsbeny; possibly even Dliaballoha, and Doonic Yenednis…?’

  The minister’s silence went out to all corners of the room like cords from some tangled knot at the center; here and there a servant or another minister glanced over. Yet it did not rope in the entire space, for the conversations and motions that halted here and there began again at other places. The minister drew up his arms within the long sleeves of his robe, and said at last: ‘Your Highness is well aware that these names have not been spoken within the walls of court since—’

  ‘—since eternity’s dawn, when the nameless god of count and accounting sorted the night into her left hand and day into her right and began to juggle the two.’ The empress did not smile. ‘They have not been mentioned within these walls since I came to live among them, Lord Krodar. And as they were not gods local to this part of the country, they have never been mentioned much outside.’ She paused a moment, lifting her hand to touch her low collar. ‘Or were Dliaballoha, Gauine, or the Amnewor, some of the “nonsense names” that the children have been gaming with? You know, when I was a very little girl, before I came here, those names would terrify me. Then, when I arrived in the north, to be given a whole new gallery of nameless gods and the promise that they would protect us from those awful, ancient demons, I was terrified all over again. Do the old or the new gods terrify you now?’ Suddenly she smiled and took the minister’s arm. ‘Look about you, Lord Krodar. Suppose I had mentioned these same evil entities ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, toward the beginning of my reign. The whole room would have dropped into a stunned paralysis as palpable as the granite walls themselves. But look. Listen. Many of these around us now were born here. They live in precisely the world we once hoped to create: a world where such gods as once terrorized a third the nation now sound, indeed, as silly as the nonsense children babble in the streets in time to their ball bouncing. The nameless gods have created a barrier of silence that has imprisoned these malignant and alien deities and demons till their callings have been stripped of terror.’ She looked at the floor, considering. ‘We feel, Lord Krodar, that we can indulge a certain flexibility—indeed, must indulge it, if our reign is not to be fragile and friable. I have been conferring with my good vizerine. She reminded me that my grandfather’s mother—her own great-great-grandaunt, you no doubt recall—whose reputation is glorious in the south and somewhat…awkward in the north, nevertheless put the northern dragons under her Imperial protection, to the glory of Ellamon. I think that we in Kolhari can afford to have a similar attitude to these ancient and endangered monsters. Who knows. It may even win for us a similar glory. At least in carnival time.’

  8.2 A friend since my high-school days, Queenie works the night shift as a registrar in the emergency room at a better New York hospital. She called me up for a breakfast date, and in a Columbus Avenue coffee shop with tile-top tables and aspiring actors for waiters, we ate overpriced fruit cup, toasted bagels, and drank cinnamon shot coffee: ‘Chip, I see one, two, sometimes three AIDS cases come in to the emergency room a night! I read somewhere that for the whole city they’re coming in at the rate of five or six a week, but we get more than that during the night shifts where I am. Maybe that means it’s going up—Right now, I’m about at that point where I can look at somebody across the desk and tell if he’s got it—I mean, you’re very sick, and you’re not pretty. Like I said, this is the night shift in the emergency room in a hospital that doesn’t have that big an emergency service. And someone who suspected that that’s what they had would probably go down to St. Vincent’s anyway, where they have that special AIDS clinic. It’s very scary. And I’m worried. About you.’ I reassured her I’d put some sharp curtailments on sex outside my main relationship. (When sex is as available as it is in New York, monogamous gay relationships tend to be the exception.) ‘The problem,’ I told her, as we went on looking for a waiter, which we’d both been doing almost ten minutes, ‘is that since they still haven’t discovered what virus it is yet, there’s no way to be sure of the incubation period. People are theorizing up to thirty-six months. I’ve been very careful since February of eighty-two.’ (This was spring of eighty-three.) ‘But how am I supposed to know what I was doing three years ago, if I should come down with it?’