himself?
Soon, the procession made its way down the parade route: the vast, engulfing cloth kites with wire ribs that formed the shapes of giant squid, paper streamers for tentacles running out behind as, lit by their own inner flames, they bumped and spun against the darkened sky. Ships followed them — floats mounted on the rusted hulks of mechanized vehicles, their purpose to re-enact the same scene as the boys with their toy boats: the hunt for the mighty King Squid, which made its home in the deepest parts of the Moth, in the place where the river was wide as the sea and twice as mad with silt.
Dradin clapped and said, “Beautiful, beautiful,” and, with elegant desperation, ordered another drink, for if he was to be starving and penniless anyway, what was one more expense?
On the parade route, performing wolfhounds followed the floats, then jugglers, mimes, fire-eaters, contortionists, and belly dancers. The gangrenous moon began to seep across the sky in dark green hues.
The drone of conversations grew more urgent and the cries of the people on the street below, befouled by food, drink, and revelry, became discordant: a fragmented roar of fragmenting desires.
Where was his love? Would she not come? Dradin’s head felt light and hollow, yet heavy as the earth spinning up to greet him, at the possibility. No, it was not a possibility. Dradin ordered yet another Red Orchid.
She would come. Dressed in white and red she would come, around her throat a necklace of intricate blue and green beads, a rough emerald dangling from the center. He would stand to greet her and she would offer her hand to him and he would bow to kiss it. Her skin would be warm to the touch of his lips and his lips would feel warm and electric to her. He would say to her, “Please, take a seat,” and pull out her chair. She would acknowledge his chivalry with a slight leftward tip of her head. He would wait for her to sit and then he would sit, wave to a waiter, order her a glass of wine, and then they would talk.
Circling in toward how he had first seen her, he would ask her how she liked the book, the necklace.
Perhaps both would laugh at the crudity of Dvorak, and at his own shyness, for surely now she could see that he was not truly shy. The hours would pass and with each minute and each witty comment, she would look more deeply into his eyes and he into hers. Their hands would creep forward across the table until, clumsily, she jostled her wine glass and he reached out to keep it from falling — and found her hand instead.
From there, her hand in his, their gaze so intimate across the table, everything would be easy, because it would all be unspoken, but no less eloquent for that. Perhaps they would leave the table, the tavern, traverse the streets in the aftermath of festival. But, no matter what they did, there would be this bond between them: that they had drunk deep of the desire in each other’s eyes.
Dradin wiped the sweat from his forehead, took another sip of his drink, looked into the crowd, which merged with the parade, crashing and pushing toward the lights and the performers.
War veterans were marching past: a grotesque assembly of ghost limbs, memories disassembled from the flesh, for not a one had two arms and two legs both. They clattered and shambled forward in their odd company with crutches and wheelchairs and comrades supporting them. They wore the uniforms of a hundred wars and ranged in age from seventeen to seventy; Dradin recognized a few from his hostel.
Those who carried sabers waved and twirled their weapons, inciting the crowd, which now pushed and pulled and divided amongst itself like a replicating beast, to shriek and line the parade route ever more closely.
Then, with solemn precision, four men came carrying a coffi n, so small as to be for a child, each lending but a single hand to the effort. On occasion, the leader would fling open the top to reveal the empty interior and the crowd would moan and stamp its feet.
Behind the coffin, in a cage, came a jungle cat that snarled and worked one enormous pitch paw through bamboo bars. Looking into the dulled but defiant eyes of the cat, Dradin gulped his Red Orchid and thought of the jungle. The moist heat, the ferns curling into their fetid greenness, the flowers running red, the thick smell of rich black soil on
Dradin shuddered again from the cold of the drink, and thought he felt the deck beneath him roll and plunge in time to the music of The Ravens. Was it possible that he had never fully recovered from the fever? Was he even now stone cold mad in the head, or was he simply woozy from Red Orchids? Or could he be, in his final distress, drunk on love? He had precious little else left, a realization accompanied by a not unwelcome thrill of fear. With no job and little money, the only element of his being he found constant and unyielding, undoubting, was the strength of his love for the woman in the window.
He smiled at the couple at the next table, though no doubt it came out as the sort of drunken leer peculiar to his father. Past relationships had been of an unfortunate nature; he could admit that to himself now. Too platonic, too strange, and always too brief. The jungle did not approve of long relationships.
The jungle ate up long relationships, ground them between its teeth and spat them out. Like the relationship between himself and Nepenthe. Nepenthe. Might the woman in the window also be called Nepenthe? Would she mind if he called her that? Now the deck beneath him really did roll and list like a ship at sea, and he held himself to his chair, pushed the Red Orchid away when he had come once more to rest.
Looking out at the parade, Dradin saw Cadimon Signal and he had to laugh. Cadimon. Good old Cadimon. Was this parade to become like Dvorak’s wonderfully ugly tattoo? A trip from past to present? For there indeed was Cadimon, waving to the crowds from a float of gold and white satin, the Living Saint beside him, diplomatically clothed for the occasion in messianic white robes.
“Hah!” Dradin said. “Hah!”
The parade ended with an elderly man leading a live lobster on a leash, a sight that made Dradin laugh until he cried. The lights along the boulevard began to be snuffed out, at first one by one, and then, as the mob descended, ripped out in swathes, so that whole sections were plunged into darkness at once.
Beyond them, the great spits no longer turned, aban doned, the meat upon them blackened to ash, and beyond the spits bonfires roared and blazed all the more brightly, as if to make up for the death of the other lights. Now it was impossible to tell parade members from crowd members, so clotted together and at-sea were they, mixed in merriment under the green light of the moon.
Around Dradin, busboys hastily cleaned up tables, helped by barkeepers, and he heard one mutter to another, “It will be bad this year. Very bad. I can feel it.” The waiter presented Dradin with the check, tapping his feet while Dradin searched his pockets for the necessary coin, and when it was finally offered, snatching it from his hand and leaving in a flurry of tails and shiny shoes.
Dradin, hollow and tired and sad, looked up at the black-and-green-tinged sky. His love had not come and would not now come, and perhaps had never planned to come, for he only had the word of Dvorak.
He did not know how he should feel, for he had never considered this possibility, that he might not meet her. He looked around him — at the table fixtures, the emptying tables, the sudden lull. Now what could he do? He could take a menial job and survive on scraps until he could get a message to his father in Morrow — who then might or might not take pity on him. But for salvation? For redemption?
Fireworks wormholed into the sky and exploded in an umbrella of sparks so that the crowds screamed louder to drown out the noise. Someone jostled him from behind. Wetness dripped down his left shoulder, followed by a curse, and he turned in time to see one of the waiters scurry off with a half-spilled drink.
The smoke from the fireworks descended, mixed with the growing fog traipsing off the River Moth. It spread more quickly than Dradin would have thought possible, the night smudged with smoke, thick and dark. And who should come out of this haze and into Dradin’s gloom but Dvorak, dressed now in green so that the dilute light of the moon passed invisibly over him. His head cocked curiously, like a monkey’s, he approached sideways toward Dradin, an appraising look on his face. Was he poisonous like the snake, Dradin thought, or edible, like the insect? Or was he merely a bit of bark to be ignored? For so did Dvorak appraise him. A spark of anger began to smolder in Dradin, for after all Dvorak had made the arrangements and the woman was not here.
“You,” Dradin said, raising his voice over the general roar. “You. What’re you doing here? You’re late.
I mean, she’s late. She’s not coming. Where is she?
Dvorak moved to Dradin’s side and, with his muscular hands under Dradin’s arms, pulled Dradin halfway to his feet with such suddenness that he would have fallen over if he hadn’t caught himself.
