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  THE GOLEM

  MICHAEL CISCO

  Cheeky Frawg Books

  Tallahassee, Florida

  The Golem copyright © 2004 Michael Cisco (as part of The San Veneficio Canon).

  Introduction © 2012 by Paul Tremblay.

  Cheeky Frawg logo copyright © 2011 by Jeremy Zerfoss.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  Cover art copyright © 2013 by Jeremy Zerfoss.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  Special thanks to Centipede Press for their 2012 limited editions of these novels, from whose preferred text these e-books have been created.

  This novel has been re-released as Cheeky Frawg’s 2013 Weird Summer Beach Reading Selections. Cheeky Frawg: We Believe Summer Beach Reading Should Creep You the Hell Out.

  Check out the full line of Cheeky Frawg Books at:

  www.cheekyfrawg.com

  Cheeky Frawg

  POB 4248

  Tallahassee, FL 32315

  [email protected]

  INTRODUCTION

  Paul Tremblay

  “Threads coming together again . . . ”

  The Golem is not without antecedents.

  A golem is an animate being wholly constructed from inanimate material. One of the most famous stories in Jewish folklore is the Golem of Prague: In the late 1500s, Rabbi Loew fashioned a golem out of clay to protect Prague’s Jewish ghetto from the pogroms of the Holy Roman Emperor. Rabbi Loew etched the word “emet” (truth) on the clay forehead of the Golem, bringing it to life. In most accounts the Golem became increasingly violent, killing Gentiles and eventually turning on the people it was supposed to protect. Rabbi Loew deactivated the Golem by erasing the first letter from the golem’s forehead. “Emet” was transformed to “met,” truth transformed to dead. According to folklore, the body of the Golem is kept in the attic of Prague’s Old New Synagogue and it could again be restored to life if the single word on its forehead was to be transformed again; dead changed back to truth.

  (“I suppose he’ll always come back.”)

  Award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer has aptly referred to Michael Cisco as “the American Kafka.” Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born in Prague, the city of Rabbi Loew’s Golem. Kafka’s parents were Jewish, middle-class, and German-speaking. His surrealistic fiction is often concerned with outsiders mercilessly pitted against bureaucracy and/or the menacing and dehumanizing vagaries of the state. In the oddly humorous and endlessly unsettling The Trial, bank clerk Josef K. is arrested by an unknown authority with his charges/crimes never being revealed to him. In his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, salesman Gregor Samsa, who hasn’t missed a day of work in five years despite loathing his job, wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect; his spirit initially trapped, then conforming to his grotesque, chitinous vessel.

  (“Many will eventually recede so far that they stare out in horror at the boundaries of their own bodies.”)

  “I feel that spiced breath from the mummified lungs once more.”

  The Golem is a sequel to Michael Cisco’s visionary first novel, The Divinity Student.

  In the novel, which introduces the dreamlike desert city of San Veneficio, the Divinity Student is cut open, gutted, and then filled with pages torn from ancient books. Resurrected, he is sent to San Veneficio by agents of the shadowy seminary to rebuild the Lost Catalogue of Unknown Words; a vocabulary of a menacing God. He finds many of the words hidden within the memories of the dead. By the end of the novel, paranoid, broken, but obsessed with his inscrutable mission of the missing words, the Divinity Student is pulled almost entirely into the dead’s unreality.

  In The Golem, exhumed by bumbling body-snatching detectives, the Divinity Student is again resurrected, or re-resurrected (“clouds of torn paper flutter out from between his lips”) by mysterious means. In a doorless, black room full of control consoles, an enigmatic entity silently makes adjustments. The Divinity Student’s return is described as a great fall, a fall from grace, or toward grace; a horrid, rotten grace, one he’d reject if he could. (“I don’t want to get well!”) The first words the Divinity Student speaks are, “It’s not what you think.”

  Convinced that he cannot simply keep the formaldehyde flowing through his veins, that he cannot keep his patchwork-self together for much longer, and in an effort to pursue his former fiancée, (“The bargain was struck some time ago, in a dream.”) the magician Christine Dalman (“Everything reacts to her, people, buildings, sky and ground.”) down into the underworld, the Divinity Student builds a golem to act as a vessel for his battered and weary spirit. With the help of his butcher friend now turned knife-thrower for the local circus, the Divinity Student builds the monster from assorted body parts culled in the great morgue. The flesh is molded in his imperfect image. The Golem, like the Divinity Student, is full of pages, words, and formaldehyde.

  (“he will know from me . . . I will be in him . . . but he will not be in me . . . ”)

  “He can’t act unless summoned to act, by the story he is living.”

  The Golem is a scream, a howl of the ambition and audacity of imagination.

  The language of this novel is that of images. Cisco juxtaposes intricate scenes of phantasmagoria bursting with curated detail to the stark binary of white and dark: black words on white pages; a flash of white skull peering from beneath a dark wound; San Veneficio with its plazas of white-plastered coffee shops and white-shirted citizens, its white muslin sheets acting as film screens (there are many references to flickering images of film); Christine’s luminously pale skin, her dark red silk sleeves and dress, and swarmed by butterflies the color of scarlet rose petals; and finally, the desert surrounding the city and its black mountains and black sky illuminated only by a terrible field of white stars.

  The alchemy of words ceasing to be words, words seamlessly melting before our eyes into grandiose imagery, into soaring hallucination, into fever dreams that tap directly into our subconscious and perfectly describe emotions that cannot be described is something that no author achieves with more effect than Michael Cisco.

  The Golem is an intimate, private conversation with an artist. An artist in perpetual pursuit.

  The Golem is Michael Cisco, the author, the artist, the one who divines from our dreams and nightmares.

  We are all his Divinity Students and we are all his golems. We are the ones he pries open and fills with his pages, his words, and those words transform us.

  (“we are all phantoms manufactured from words”)

  PROLOGUE

  Threads coming together again with a racing, vertiginous feeling, speeding down a tunnel hands thrown up in shock and dismay—it’s time, a darkness falls open below—

  Read: a white room, wide white pallet, a long window with Venetian blinds, a closet, one door hanging open, a mirror on the inside of the door. Mild, milky light snowing across the thick carpets and across the walls, everything quiet. The room is empty; no one is here. Turn to leave with a tearing disengaging feeling and see in the mirror a collapsed figure, the nearer hand sweeping heavy as stone and slow as he turns to go, hanging his head and turning like one turns to run from a nightmare, straining inside against his body as it petrifies into gray film and slows . . . and slows . . . tragically not stopping—helplessly jammed in time, jammed stagnant and decaying.

  Miles beneath this white room, a lightless black room filled with control panels is embedded in the rock, hands and eyes fluttering like bats above illuminated displays. Now and then a hand or an eye flaps up to make control adjustments, suddenly animated. The keys thrill again to the p
urposive touch of icy fingers. Turning from the mirror, emptiness opens at his feet and he falls fixed in an endless shift of equilibrium, arcing forward hands thrown up to protect but so slowly that he feels his body ticking through increments of space. When he finally drops it’s as though a hand had turned him out of its palm, and he falls, spinning, closet light and mirror winking out in space above him.

  Now—this is always difficult—boundless space on all sides. His pupils dilate until the iris splits, his back arching headfirst downward, neck whipping right and left in the onrush of air. Repeated pulses of nausea, he vomits from an empty stomach, stinging bile churning between the teeth, up the cheeks, over the chin, into the nose and ears, hair, splattering the throat, searing the eyes. Doubled-up spins faster screaming without hearing the screams, screams unheard by anyone. A sudden cold sensation on a wet face, a struggle to breathe through ropes of mucus, eyes tearing uncontrollably, a stink, unraveling body. Wild attempt to catch hold of something, a pawing out with hands. Very soon, there is no physical sensation, no sense of his own body, only an intensifying forward tilt of falling, expansion of a body, weightlessness, rigid and uncoupling, crashing through soap-bubble panes of space like icy glass, numbed; this falling body begins to trope through all its forms.

  In the darkroom, hands on controls.

  The outer surface of a skin comes first, bleached opacous white, then raw red eyes, raw as raw meat in hot eye sockets, thin hair—the color rilling out of it draining transparent fibers, finger and toenails flick past, teeth turn clear over incandescent nerves and blue and red blood vessels, oil beads appear on the skin and then spread in the force of the wind writing trickle-patterns across skin tightened and painful. His back hunches and seams, distending in funnel-shaped white loops of manta-ray flesh, opening in the front to catch the air and tapering back through rings of convulsing muscle to stream out through openings in his sides, two jet sheets of air streaming across a lower back and some trailing legs, blurred chalky white like fish under murky water.

  Burning cold air, stabbing and knotting in his muscles as he gnashes soft teeth, angling himself up to push himself up off the air and stop his fall. His body restored for the first time, rigid in its full weight, he retches again and it pours down out of him, tan jelly mixed with tiny threads of blood, caustic against his oily skin. His ears pop and then crack, and his eyelids squeeze together oozing tears that steam off his cold cheeks, his hair prickling. He is strangling and toppling unconscious—turning in midair, end over end, slower and slower, like someone turning in a nightmare, clicking through separate increments of space, spinning down through clouds and a dimming night sky. Below him, a desert landscape ringed with mountains, a city gleaming with light, and beyond its walls a sea of reflected lights shining in pairs, watching.

  Elsewhere, hands flutter and adjust the controls, and then hold.

  To be read another time, a separate time.

  There are two kinds of priests or priestly people. One sort are linked by tradition to the lives of their parishioners—they perform socially. These are the kind who organize charities, who extend aid to the needy, who regard the well-being and happiness of all their flock as personal responsibilities. The other variety exists in mortal terror and loathing of the material world, and recoils from every object as if it pricked like a needle—and that pinprick is a conduit to a withering current of anguish that flows from contact and which floods them to the core, like an infection and a lingering illness. This second type will take what limited refuge it can in the cloistered, monastic life, where everything is assiduously marked and branded with the icons and names of the divine, giving these objects an elevated status as corporeal components of ideas, making the fact of their material existence less chilling. But once begun, the process by which these priests shrink from the physical world is difficult to arrest. Many will eventually recede so far that they stare out in horror at the boundaries of their own bodies, feeling at every instant the impossible weight and degradation of their filthy garment of flesh. They walk cowed and bent, with their heads drooping to one side, their eyes screwed up so as not to see too much or too clearly, and their bodies are dwindled and transparent, as if they’ve begun to evaporate in the rarefied air of their retreat. All the force of their faith and expectation is directed toward the moment when they will finally lose themselves once and for all in limitless absolute noumenal perfection, and anything not also touched, and flawed, by the idea of perfection, is forever beyond their grasp. The Divinity Student is one of these.

  If there’s ever a film . . . clouds and sun, sunlight ebbing and flowing in clouds.

  THE PREFECT’S DREAM

  Arms fling the curtain apart, and darkness pours out. No moon tonight; the desert exhales powdery ropes of darkness, as glacially indifferent and absent as the sky, with a positive substance of darkness. From horizon to horizon the only light comes from San Veneficio. I feel that spiced breath from mummified lungs once more. The marble domes and brass onion-shaped minarets, high glass ornaments and quartz monuments, all gleam in a field of diffused light, concentrated here and there at bright points, from whence it issues, and overhead the stars collect that shine without radiance, and out in the desert giant monitor lizards, the size of horses, have emerged from their daytime hiding places to watch the city as they do every night, standing completely still, the city lights reflected in their enormous eyes. Looking out from the city walls, one is hemmed in on all sides by blankly staring eyes, beaming in pairs from the desert floor below. The beam from each eye is a thread in a web they weave out of San Veneficio’s light, which strains the desert’s exhalations through its mesh, and binds the city to the ground like a net, to prevent the desert from releasing it into the sky.

  From a distance, looking back, the city is hemmed in only from behind, because the monitors in front have their backs turned, and their eyes cannot be seen from out here. Then, one pair of eyes detaches itself from the others and begins to move in this direction. They pass the city and continue out into the desert, without dimming or changing in intensity, although they flicker as the car goes over a bump in the road—those are headlights, not eyes. The car is following a pale ribbon of compacted clay, heading for a low hill outside town. Now it stops at the base of the hill, pointing its weak lights up toward the peak. They shine on a few desultory dead trees and collapsed iron fencing, and on a flat broken stone thrusting up from the ground.

  Somewhere, within the walls, the Prefect of Police is awake, sitting in his nightshirt by the telephone. One hour ago, he started from sleep, his mind a chaos of dream fragments. He often has these especially alarming, unspeakably shocking dreams, which invariably prove prescient. Even in the alarm of his first few waking moments, as his eyes swept back and forth over the contents of his dark and sinister bed chamber, a familiar feeling of satisfaction came over him as he recognized the telltale signs of an oracular visitation. Within a minute or two, he had perfectly regained his composure; he suavely resorted to the telephone, summoning his two principle detectives, like two pet devils, from their sleep.

  Now, three men emerge from the back of the car and open the trunk. The pet devils appear from the front to watch. Picks and shovels are shouldered, and the five of them make their way up through dead, waist-high grass. The grass rattles in the wind, rather two winds mixed, one warm and one cold. The two detectives have no tools because they’re in charge, and they are moving back and forth among the tombstones now, peering at inscriptions with a small lantern. Their seamed, impassive faces loom down in the feeble yellow light of the lamp, and for a moment hang suspended in black space above the graves—the air is very clear. Then they move on. From grave to grave until they’ve seen them all, and then they pause and put their heads together. The wind comes up again, and the dead trees scrape their branches. The two men make up their minds and wave the lantern at a grave with a blank stone.

  One of the workers carves an X in the baked-hard ground, and then together they pl
unge their picks into the breast of the grave, breaking up the clay and dragging it aside. Their overseers stand and watch, and yawn and check their watches. The car’s headlights blanket the hilltop with a tawny spray of dim light, barely enough to see by, or to obscure the yawning sky overhead. Now they drop their picks for shovels because there is soft loam beneath the clay. There is no sound except the scooping and choughing of the shovels and the hiss of the wind in the grass.

  As the grave deepens around the digging figures, the wind catches in quick eddies around their feet, stirring the dry soil and whistling in the small tunnels and burrowings that the shovels uncover. The wind brushes away the last thin veil of dirt. Wedging their feet awkwardly around the sides of the coffin, they work the ropes underneath and then step gingerly up onto it, kneeing themselves back up into the stiff grass overhead. The detectives, whose names are Pracke and Kipe, approach, and look down into the grave. Its walls are lined with tiny colored lights embedded in the dry dirt, flickering in little pools of blue, green, red, and yellow, dappling the white ropes with regular patches of color. Kipe nods to the others, and they take hold of the lines. The coffin seems to float up to the surface; the lights winking out as it passes them, leaving all dark below, streaks of tiny colors gliding across the unvarnished sides and lid, the iron handles . . .

  With an effort, they lay it gently beside the grave, and no sooner do the lines fall slack than two men rush forward and start pulling the nails out of the lid. The wind carries the sound of complaining wood down the hill and across the road. The last nails pop out simultaneously, one at the foot, one at the head, and the workers turn their eyes to Kipe and Pracke. Kipe nods again. The others look at each other, and then they ease the lid off. A lizard sits on the body’s chest; it jerks its head up, staring directly at the two detectives. Pracke steps forward, languidly shooing it back into the grave. He moves slowly, standing over the open coffin, gazing steadily at its occupant.