The day in Against the Day

[Kamil Prusakowski]

'He would wake to the day and its dread'

'If you are not de-voting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to
destroying those who slaughter  the innocent as easy as signing a check,
then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated
with the day, from those ab-solute terms.'

“In the office,” the reedy Serb called over his shoulder, breezing on to
meet the day’s next intractable difficulty.

---

“I see something,” Kit shrugged.

“The same began to happen to me also at your age,” Tesla recalled. “When I
could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it’s always
find-ing the time, isn’t it.”

“Sure, always something… . Chores, something.”

“Tithing,” Tesla said, “giving back to the day.”

“Not complainin about the hours here, nothin like that, sir.”

“Why not? I complain all the time. Not enough of them, basically.”

---

Going on to explain, as he had times past counting, that the twenty-two
cards of the Major Arcana might be regarded as living agencies, positions
to be filled with real people, down the generations, each attending to his
own personally tailored portfolio of mis-chief deep or trivial, as the grim
determinants appeared, assassinations, plagues, failures of fashion sense,
losses of love, as, one by one, flesh-eating sheep sailed over the fence
between dreams and the day.

“There must always be a Tower. There must always be a High Priestess,
Temperance, Fortune, so forth. Now and then, when vacancies occur, owing to
death or other misad-venture, new occupants will emerge, obliging us to
locate and track them, and learn their histories as well. That they
inhabit, without exception, a si-lence as daunting as their near
invisibility only intensifies our challenge.”

“And the crime, sir, if I’m not being too inquisitive, just what would be
the nature of that?”

“Alas, nothing too clearly related to any statute on the books, nor likely
to be … no, it is more of an ongoing Transgression, accumulating as the
days pass, the invasion of Time into a timeless world. Revealed to us,
slowly, one hopes not terribly, in a bleak convergence … History, if you
like.”

--


'Both women kept up a level of determined bustling, as if allowing the
thousand details of the day to fill up what otherwise would’ve been some
insupportable vacuum.'

'The town abruptly became an unreadable map to him. Since Mexico he had
been sorely conscious of borderlands and lines cross-able and forbidden,
and the day often as not seemed set to the side of what he thought was his
real life.'

'And the day, before they knew it, had accelerated upon them, avalanche
style.'

'The days would then proceed to drag their sorry carcasses down the trail
of Time without word one from Deuce. '

'The need not to offend the King, to remain aware of rival bureaux and
their own hidden schemes, to calibrate everything against the mortal mass
of Germany, forever towering over the day.'

 “Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field
equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an
itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and
again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the
side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the
worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety…
. Within the mirror, within the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious
and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary,
the corrupted pilgrim’s guide, the nameless Station before the first, in
the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist.”

-- 

They had to keep wandering the world whose deceptions and melodramas, blood
and desire, we had begun to sense, perhaps not seeking anything with a
name, perhaps only wandering. People called them *podpol’niki, *underground
men. Floors that had once been solid and simple became veils over another
world. It was not the day we knew that provided the*stranniki *their light.”

-- 

The moment he passed through the Gate, Kit was not so much deafened as
blinded by a mighty release of sound—a great choral bellowing over the
desert, bringing, like a brief interruption of darkness in the daytime, a
dis-tinct view now, in this dusk, of sunlit terrain, descending in a long
gradient directly ahead to a city whose name, though at the moment denied
him, was known the world over, vivid in these distances, bright yellow and
orange, though soon enough it would be absorbed into the same gray
confusion of exitless ravines and wind-shaped rock ascensions through which
they had labored to get here and must again to regain the Silk Road. Then
the vision had faded, embers of a trail-fire in the measureless twilight.

Throughout the journey, then, Kit had dreamed of the moment he had stepped
through the Gate. Often the dream came just before dawn, after a lucid
flight, high, æthereal, blue, arriving at a set of ropes or steel ca-bles
suspended, bridgelike, over a deep chasm. The only way to cross is
face-skyward beneath the cables, hand over hand using legs and feet as
well, with the sheer and unmeasurable drop at his back. The sunset is red,
violent, complex, the sun itself the permanent core of an explosion as yet
unimag-ined. Somehow in this dream the Arch has been replaced by Kit
himself, a struggle he feels on waking in muscles and joints to become the
bridge, the arch, the crossing-over. The last time he had the dream was
just before rolling in to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian. A voice he knew he
should recognize whispered, “You are released.” He began to fall into the
great chasm, and woke into the wine-colored light of the railroad carriage,
lamps swaying, samovars at either end gasping and puffing like miniature
steam engines. The train was just pulling into the station.

--

What had been certain and mandated by Heaven was now as loaded withuncertainty
as any peasant’s struggle with the day, and all, regardless of wealth or
position, must stumble blindly.


-- 

“Shambhala,” cried Miles, and there was no need to ask how he knew— they
all knew. For centuries the sacred City had lain invisible, cloaked in
everyday light, sun-, star-, and moonlight, the campfires and electric
torches of desert explorers, until the Event over the Stony Tunguska, as if
those precise light-frequencies which would allow human eyes to see the
City had finally been released. What it would take the boys longer to
understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil
separating their own space from that of the everyday world, and that for
the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala, their
protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before
the earthbound day.

--

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed
beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters.
Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade,
sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious
pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly
faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty
remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and
possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm,
hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare
them against the day.

--

What they would find difficult were not so much the grander elements— they
had discovered that they all three tended politically to be Anarchists,
their view of human destiny was pessimistic with excursions into humor only
jail occupants and rodeo riders might recognize—what really made the
day-to-day so laborious and apt at any turn to come apart in disaster were
rather the small annoyances, which, through some homeopathic principle of
the irksome, acted more powerfully the more trivial they were.

--

They made their way up off the Plain of Thrace, into the Rhodopes and then
the Pirin range, over toward Macedonia. Some days the light was pitiless.
Light so saturated with color, brought hovering to such tension, that it
could not be borne for long, as if it were dangerous to be out in country
filled with light like this, as if anyone beneath it were just about to be
taken by it, if not over into death then some transformation at least as
severe. Light like this must be received with judgment—too much, too
constantly, would exhaust the soul. To move through it would be to struggle
against time, the flow of the day, the arbitrarily assigned moment of
darkness. Sometimes Reef wondered if maybe somebody hadn’t triggered that
*Interdikt *after all, and this was the residue from it… .--

“Always that risk,” agreed Father Ponko. “When God hides his face, it is
paraphrased as ‘taking away’ his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects
his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see
it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the
essence if he is to be at all operative in the world.”

-- 

The hegumen seemed to recognize her from a previous metempsychosis. “The
mooned planet,” said the hegumen, “the planetary electron. If
self-similarity proves to be a built-in property of the universe, then
perhaps sleep is, after all, a form of death—repeated at a daily frequency
instead of a generational one. And we go back and forth, as Pythagoreans
suspected, in and out of death as we do dreams, but much more slowly… .
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