The Song of the Earth

by Hugh Nissenson

  He told me he was fifteen years old. Only fifteen! He was a keepie in the tenth grade at Cather Keep High. He seemed much older. After school, he worked as an apprentice hairstylist.

  He said, “I’m learning a trade so I can support my habit.”

  “What’s your habit?” I asked him.

  “Drawing,” he told me. “I love to draw. I want to draw your mask.”

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  “You mean it?” he asked me. “When?”

  “When’s good for you?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “What about school?” I asked him.

  “I’ll learn more here,” he said.

  So I said, “Then tomorrow morning, here, at nine.”

  John Firth Baker to Anselmo Diaz, November 1, 2052:

  Where’d you go, for Christ’s sake?

  Anselmo Diaz to John Firth Baker, November 1, 2052:

  Do me a favor.

  John Firth Baker to Anselmo Diaz, November 1, 2052:

  Anything.

  Anselmo Diaz to John Firth Baker, November 1, 2052:

  Get outta my life.

  From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:

  On my way home on the subway, I got the idea for my scratchboard drawing The Knowing Look. I was excited and happy. That Halloween night everything seemed possible for me.

  Next morning I cut school and arrived at Mookerjee’s with my drawing materials at nine on the nose. Billy Lee was having a cup of coffee in his kitchen with Emma. His uncombed hair hung down to his shoulders; his beard needed a trim. He was wearing a ratty blue terry cloth bathrobe that was closed at the neck with a safety pin. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a bra. His tits were bigger than I remembered. And he had very hairy legs.

  Emma Torchlight

  Johnny said he was influenced by Shubha Roy’s lean graphic style. He told us he was going to make a scratchboard drawing of Billy Lee wearing my Green Man mask.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  Like my folks, Roy was a Bengali devoted to the Divine Mother. I admire Roy’s work. Johnny and I talked about the letters she wrote her father from exile in Nepal and her miserable death there at the hands of the phallocrats. Johnny mentioned his neighbor, the book repairer Indira Rabindra. I knew Indira; we were both members of the Mid-Western Vedanta Society.

  Johnny said, “It’s a small world.”

  Then he was all business. He put the mask on my butcher-block table and sat down opposite it with a big pad and a pencil.

  Emma Torchlight

  I had a train to catch in Chicago for London, so I said good-bye. Johnny pointed with his pencil at the mask and said, “I’ll try and do it justice.”

  He was so serious for a kid his age, I felt sad.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  I left Johnny to teach my three-hour teleseminar on geophysiology, which still meets every Tuesday morning at ten, E.S.T.

  From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:

  I was finally alone with Torchlight’s mask. This was a big moment for me—the first time I could handle a work of art. I ran my hands all over it.

  The mask was hell to draw. It took me all morning to flatten its volume into a lineal, two-dimensional composition on a piece of tracing paper.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, November 7, 2052:

  Today Johnny completed a scratchboard drawing he calls The Knowing Look. It’s his impression of a wooden foliate mask worn by Billy Lee Mookerjee at his costume party in Omaha on Halloween. The mask was carved and painted by Emma Torchlight, the First Nation–British Columbian artist. Torchlight, who’s a shrewd self-promoter, dubbed herself “The Kwakwaka’wakw Carver” on an ArtChannel show about her, which Johnny and I enjoyed last spring. Johnny sent her The Knowing Look as a gift.

  The Knowing Look, 2052, scratchboard drawing. Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee

  I’m jealous.

  Emma Torchlight

  Soon as I laid eyes on The Knowing Look, I figured Johnny for an arsogenic metamorph, like the dead little Russian girl, Nadia Kammerovska. The President of the American Association of Naturally Gifted Artists was recently quoted as saying that Nadia’s death was a divine punishment. I thought, “Poor Johnny!”

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  Just before Thanksgiving, Johnny sent me a copy of The Knowing Look. I thought it was good work for a fifteen-year-old. Emma told me she thought Johnny was an arsogenic metamorph. I said, “Poor kid.”

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee to John Firth Baker, November 15, 2052:

  I like your drawing.

  Indira tells me you live with your Mother in Cather Keep. I invite you both to join me and some Gaian friends for dinner in my apartment in Omaha at 8 P.M. on December 24, 2052.

  Instead of Christmas, we Gaians celebrate the feast of Mother Night. Please join us!

  P.S. Emma will be here. She asks to be remembered to you.

  Polly Baker

  Jeanette said, “I’m going out to that party come hell or high water.”

  Jeanette Baker to Monique Chung, Ph. D., November 15, 2052:

  Your records will show that I’m a keepie shut-in who dropped out of Grex therapy in August 2038. Since then I’ve lived a productive life in Cather Keep and, until today, never felt a need to leave. However, I just received an invitation to a dinner party to be held next month outside the keep, and I’d like very much to attend with my fifteen-year-old son.

  Your records will also show that I’m a recovering alcoholic, for which I take 5 milligrams of Endcrave daily, and type A-2 unipolar depressive, for which I take 2 milligrams of Euphorol daily. I’ve had it up to here with drugs. Is there any alternative you could suggest I do in the next few weeks that would enable me to go to the party with my son? My financial resources are limited.

  Thank you in advance for your help.

  Monique Chung, Ph.D., to Jeanette Baker, November 16, 2052:

  The best advice I can give you to achieve a temporary remission, without drugs, of your agoraphobia is to try a version of gradual exposure (Grex) therapy. Agoraphobics often find that a trusted companion’s presence in a new environment assuages their symptoms. In the weeks to come, make excursions of gradually lengthening duration outside your keep in the company of your son. Work up to having dinner together outside. Take a little walk afterwards. You should then be able to attend your party with him.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, November 18, 2052:

  Johnny’s presence gives me strength. After work today, we walked arm in arm east on Arbor Road about a quarter of a mile, then back home again.

  John Firth Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, November 18, 2052:

  Mother and I look forward to joining you and your Gaian friends at 8 P.M. on December 24th for the feast of Mother Night.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, November 20, 2052:

  Went with Johnny today to the crowded secondhand bound book market on the corner of 56th Street and Fletcher Avenue, where we overheard one womin say to another: “My life sucks!”

  Johnny and I said together: “Not mine!”

  Have nothing to wear for the party.

  Polly Baker

  “Keepie pallor” was in fashion. Jeanette was very pale. She bought herself a black silk Chinese suit, which made her look even paler than usual. Also a new winter coat of many colors. Johnny didn’t own gloves, so I bought him a pair as an early Christmas present.

  We had a happy Thanksgiving, the best in years. Maybe the best ever. Jeanette roasted a twenty-two-pound turkey and made chestnut stuffing. I baked cornbread. We ate dinner by candlelight in my dining room: Jeanette and Johnny, Paco, me, Indira, Ben, the Thomas family, Frances Petrakis, and Teddy, home from Oberlin.

  The Rev. Theodore Petrakis

  Over coffee in a corner, Johnny asked me what I knew about Gaianism, and I said, “It’s a kind of neopagan mysticism, a crackpot new religion of the Earth
.”

  Johnny said, “Maybe so, but the Gaian guru in Omaha is a wet dream.”

  First thing next morning, he calls me and says, “Guess what?”

  From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:

  I had a wet dream starring Billy Lee Mookerjee. I made one of the images into a scratchboard drawing called Wet Dream.

  Wet Dream, 2052, scratchboard drawing

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  Johnny’s drawing is flattering, but not accurate. I’m circumcised. I had myself circumcised after I gained Gaian Consciousness. I did so to reclaim the rite from the Jews, who stole it in ancient times from the Egyptian priests of Isis. My circumcision marks me as a modern servant of Gaia, our living Motherworld.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, December 25, 2052:

  The Gaian guru Billy Lee Mookerjee lives in a seven-room, terraced apartment with two working fireplaces that occupies the whole sixty-first floor of a turn-of-the-century blockhouse for the rich.

  Mookerjee greeted Johnny and me wearing a Mongolian yellow robe with a red sash; sandlewood-scented beard and sleek blue-black, shoulder-length hair. Eyelids lined by kohl, rouged cheeks and lips. Everybody calls him-her “Srimaanji.”

  Srimaanji’s sheila (an Americanized version of the Hindi word “chela,” meaning disciple) is a twenty-nine-year-old bearded she-he named Alfred Howe. Johnny looked daggers at Howe all evening. The two of them gazed at Mookerjee with their hearts in their eyes.

  Guru and sheila refer to each other consecutively as “him” and “her.”

  Mookerjee: “Alfred went to Harvard. He’s a digital physicist. She believes that space and time are discreet, the laws of the universe are algorithms. Am I right, Alfred? And what else?”

  Alfred: “The universe works according to the same principles as a computer, Srimaanji. In fact, the universe itself is a computer.”

  A vegetarian buffet: vermicelli with roasted peppers, garden burgers, and spicy mixed-vegetable biryani.

  Suspended above the center of the round dining room table was a soccer ball-sized hologram of the Earth seen from the moon. As we sat down to eat, Mookerjee said: “Tonight we Gaians celebrate the mystery of the creation of our Universe from a random fluctuation of the quantum mechanical field we call the Full Void, or Mother Night.”

  The bald black butch seated opposite me got to her feet and sang in a clear, light soprano:

  Mother Night,

  Holy Night,

  Ever dark,

  Always bright.

  We have taken

  In our care

  Earth your daughter,

  Sweet and fair,

  On this holy night,

  This your holy night.23

  Emma Torchlight’s also a dyke. She took the seat on my left. High cheekbones; a flat, oval face, framed by short, straight, black, bobbed hair, which is shaved in back along the hairline. She told me Mookerjee lives in his apartment rent free, thanks to a realtor’s rich widow who’s a recent convert to Gaianism. The widow is celebrating the Feast of Mother Night in Bombay with the top Gaian guru, Srimaati Brianna Andrews.

  All seven other guests were wimin, five of whom were straight, skilled workers: two carpenters, a pretty book repairer (friend of Indira’s), and three software engineers. Emma introduced me around. Bobbie Washington, the bald, black, butch soprano is a well-known Transpacific subway busker.

  Emma: “In the States, Gaianism attracts mostly wimin—lesbian and straight, artists and intellectuals, and some ecogynarchists as well, who call themselves Gyn-Gaians. An apolitical, mystical Gaianism is big among European earth scientists. The same in Japan. In India, the religion in a slightly different form is spreading among the lower castes, particularly Untouchables, of both sexes.”

  Emma and I exchanged Net addresses.

  After dinner, everybody gathered around the gas fire blazing in the living room fireplace. Mookerjee showed off his celebrated mask. Each of us tried it on. Then Mookerjee tossed it on the flames. Johnny and I gasped; the paint peeled off the smoking wood. The pungent smell of burning cedar. Johnny’s eyes filled with tears; they glistened in the flickering light. No one moved. We just stood there watching the mask burn up on the grate.

  Finally, Mookerjee said, “Johnny, why do you suppose I burned the mask?”

  Johnny: “You got me.”

  Mookerjee: “To remind us that even art perishes. Only Gaia, our living Motherworld, is here to stay.”

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, December 29, 2052:

  A fight today with Johnny over Billy Lee, whom I called a religious nut. “Art means shit to him!”

  Johnny: “I don’t care! I love him!”

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, February 1, 2053:

  TOP IN-NEWS STORY:

  CLONED CAPABLANCA METAMORPH WINS HUMIN

  CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP IN OSLO

  Ishtar Teratol, 14, To Play IBM’s Chess Maven

  Next Fall In Bid To Win World Chess Championship; Russian

  Orthodox Patriarch And Polish Cardinal Jointly Condemn

  Girl As Unnaturally Talented

  From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:

  Billy Lee wouldn’t have me. I was frantic for a man. I sent my old boyfriend a message: “Anselmo, Be an angel! Take me back!”

  He didn’t answer, so I made him a Valentine. It’s a combination cutout and scratchboard drawing.

  Anselmo Diaz

  On Valentine’s Day, I got this card from Johnny that he drawed by hand. I thought, I’ll be damned! I was real impressed. To think he went to all that trouble just for me!

  From Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, February 15, 2053:

  Around nine last night, Anselmo called me from his one-room squat on Ames Street in Omaha and said, “Come to Daddy!”

  Valentine for Anselmo Diaz, 2053, paper cutout on scratchboard drawing. Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee

  I went to him in the freezing rain. He pulled down my pants, put me over his knee, and spanked me for being a naughty girl who left her Daddy in the lurch on Halloween. Then he bathed and powdered me and made love to me till midnight.

  We smoke a lot of dope together and swill Amae. Made a date with him for Saturday night.

  Anselmo Diaz

  I said to Johnny, “Wish I could draw.”

  He went, “Wish I could, too.”

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, February 19, 2053:

  Anselmo had a Mexican father and an Irish mother. His father deserted his mother before he was born. His mother deserted him when he was eight months old. He was raised by her mother in the Seattle barrio they call “El Cagadero”—“the Latrine.” His granny sold him at age eleven for $20,500 to a twice-convicted dogfight promoter. Anselmo was the guy’s slave. He wore an electronic dog collar day and night for two years. His master zapped him with a shock if he didn’t hop-to. Anselmo’s job was to trap alley cats and tie their legs together. Then he tossed them in the ring between two fighting pit bulls to arouse their blood lust.

  On Christmas Day 2042, Anselmo managed to deactivate his collar and give his master the slip. He says, “I raised myself up from the depths and made me a good life.”

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, February 24, 2053:

  Developed a new symptom today soon as I tried leaving the keep alone. First my left temple tingled. Then, with increasing intensity, the tingling spread to the whole left side of my face and into my mouth and tongue.

  Polly Baker

  The tingling was the last straw. Jeanette said to me, “Let’s face it: I’m a keepie shut-in for good.”

  Emma Torchlight to Jeanette Baker, March 3, 2053:

  Hello! Remember me? I’ll be at my dealer’s in St. Paul this coming Friday (March 7). Can you join us there for dinner?

  Jeanette Baker to Emma Torchlight, March 4, 2053:

  I don’t like going out in the weather. Why don’t you both come here Friday aroun
d eight for a home-cooked meal? I’ll make us apple-bean jumble with carrot corn bread and red potato-spinach salad.

  Emma Torchlight to Jeanette Baker, March 4, 2053:

  Thanks. Nina, my dealer, can’t make it, but I’ll be there with bells on.

  How’s Johnny? Send him my best.

  Emma Torchlight

  As luck would have it, the subway computer went down, and I arrived at Jeanette’s two-and-a-half hours late. Johnny, who’d already eaten, interrupted his homework to sit with us awhile at the table. Since last I saw him, he was much more physically mature: his features were thicker, his Adam’s apple bigger, his shoulders broader, his voice deeper. There was fuzz on his upper lip. I noticed little black hairs already sprouting below his sideburns, alongside his ears. He was taller, too.

  Johnny asked me if I was sore at Billy Lee for burning my mask, and I said, “Sure I was sore. But I forgave him. He can’t help himself. He is who he is.”

  “Which is what?” said Johnny.

  “Well, I once asked him, ‘Billy Lee,’ I said, ‘Who are you—really?’ And he said, ‘Sometimes I can’t tell where I leave off and Gaia begins.’”

  Jeanette showed off Johnny’s drawings, which embarrassed him. He left the room in a huff. I sympathized. My mother did the same with me. She once showed off my carvings to a total stranger on a Port Churchill street.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, March 8, 2053:

  After supper, Emma and I strolled around Lake Twilight. Told her Johnny’s an arsogenic metamorph.

  Emma: “My mom would have done the same for me if she could.”

  Emma’s mother, who’s a carpenter, apprenticed her at age twelve for seven years to the innovative Tlingit maskmaker Tommy Rough Surface, who’s transformed traditional Native American maskmaking.

  Emma: “Tommy taught me a mask must reveal the face concealed by the mask of the face.”

  Me: “You’ve got a lovely hairline. Don’t let your hairstylist shave it. Tell her to cut your hair in a curve that follows the nape of your neck. Better yet, let me cut it.”

  Emma: “I will.”

  We spent the night making love in my bed. I discovered the little blemishes on her body peculiar to her trade: the thick calluses on her right palm and along the joints at the base of her fingers and right thumb, the two small crescent-shaped scars—which I covered with kisses—on her upper right breast and the one in the middle of her right thigh. It seems that now and then the curved knife blade with which she carves a block of cedar on her lap slips on the wood and gashes her flesh.