Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  In the middle of the night she woke, and oh god the second coverlet was flat and smooth. Anna sat up and stared, her heart pounding, where is my baby? She lay down again with fire spiders crawling through her nerves, in intolerable distress, too horrified for tears, remembering that she had left him behind. Her nightmares about what went on in the Rectory seemed entirely real. Shambling old Godfrey fucking his daughter, drunken Isobel ignoring it all, Spence fucking Jake… Oh, God. It could be true! Often, nowadays, the doomsday scenario is not an exercise. It dawned on her that, since she couldn’t trust Spence and Meret was a little girl, she had entrusted her child’s well-being to Charles Craft. Charles, you bastard, you’re not such a bad bastard, if any of it is true you must know: for god’s sake don’t let me down.

  She lay thinking about her new, outlaw life. She had the name of a gallery, geniTALia: nothing else, no address. When she’d showered and dressed she used the room’s online services to track down geniTALia and didn’t even check what she was being charged, which was unheard of for Anna, but it was okay. She was no longer in danger of losing touch with her poverty. She would run out of credit soon enough. Armed with the address she set off on foot, her carry-on bag on her back like a rucksack. If she knew anything, she knew that she had an invitation, an open door with no time limit. If you ever change your mind, about leaving me behind… If you ever realize that I was right all along, come and find me. Nobody, especially not Spence, understood the permanence of this relationship: that if either one of them made the first move, it would always be there. The great alternative; Anna’s other life.

  She walked through the shabby, bohemian streets of Lower Manhattan—and the people she passed were so colorful, so insouciantly pierced and scarred, boned and feathered, it was as if she’d already joined the pirates. And here’s geniTALia. She walked in boldly. The gallery was about the size of an English corner shop supermarket, with a floor of blond polished wood and a flat screen in the center of each of the three walls; no other items. In the middle of the room a spiral staircase climbed up to another floor. Beside this feature a girl with cropped brown hair and many piercings, dressed in a dark red shift to her ankles, sat at a spidery desk.

  “Hi, I’m beebee. That’s b-e-e-b-e-e, all lower case. Can I help you?”

  “I urgently need to get in touch with Ramone Holyrod.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I can… May I take your card?”

  “You see, I need somewhere to stay, and Ramone said if I was ever in New York—”

  She shouldn’t have checked out of the hotel. Suppose Ramone was out of town? She’d have to find another hotel, with a room that DIDN’T HAVE TWO BEDS, because she couldn’t stand waking up and finding Jake not there, not again. And what about when the credit on her cards was used up? What then?

  “I’m afraid Mizz Holyrod is out of town,” said beebee, sunnily. “And I can’t reach her.”

  “What about—um—Karel and Rio?”

  “Ri. I’m afraid I can’t reach them, either.” beebee pulled a little face, beginning to tire of her brush-off routine. But she read Anna’s card and gave a yelp.

  “You’re Dr Anna Senoz?” She stared into Anna’s face. “Hey, you are her! You look just like your pictures. I’m so thrilled to meet you! I wish my boyfriend was here!”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “Ye-uh. I’m het.” She beamed. “I know, I don’t look it. But it’s the way I am. He’s a major fan! You’ve had email from him, but of course you can’t read everything, you must have tons of mail. Look, I’m not kidding, I really don’t know where they are. That’s the way they like to be, sometimes they just disappear and they are gone.” She frowned, sucking on the silver bead that jutted from her lower lip. “Listen, this is what I’ll do. I’ll give you the address of their place, I’ll call you a taxi, and I’ll get the super to let you in. I’m unconditionally sure they’ll be back soon, but no matter what, you’ve just got to stay in their place while you’re in New York; it’s a trip. You’ll love it. If you’re not doing anything this evening, I could take you to dinner somewhere? I’ll call you. I’d come with you now, only I’m not supposed to leave this dump. Mother of God, the sex destroyer lady, in my shop; my boyfriend will kill me!”

  Anna didn’t bother trying to understand, she had never found the strange cheepings of the media world to make any sense. She took the taxi, which stopped outside a solid nineteenth-century building, dark reddish brown in color, that looked like the scene of Rosemary’s Baby. So here I am. A row of gingko trees lined the sidewalk. It was a street of basement restaurants and dog-walkers, strangely lived-in and normal for a trio of in-your-face art-monsters, but perhaps they were wise to property values. Artists are the ants, after all, getting in their stores and establishing status with the minimum of effort. Anna had been the grasshopper, singing and dancing and wearing herself out for no profit at all. More fool Anna. But she felt proud of her folly, after all these years of believing herself the sensible, boring one. She had butterflies in her stomach. Her name must be on a list of People It Is Okay To Let Into My Flat, but now she had doubts. She wished she could remember exactly what Simon had said about Ramone’s kooky ménage.

  The building supervisor must have been watching her arrive. The doors were open, he was standing in a pleasant, black and white tiled hallway, with mailboxes and large, healthy potted palms. “Miz Anna Senoz?” he asked, looking Anna over. He was a big man, dressed in black. There was a large handgun in a holster on his belt: he looked more like a very ruthless bouncer than a man who replaces lightbulbs. Here is where I get raped, killed, and eaten, thought Anna. Nothing occurred, except that he kept casting sly glances, as he traveled up with her in the repo Art Nouveau lift: like a man identifying a well-dressed woman as a whore, on the grounds that she is sitting in a hotel bar alone…

  “So you’re the new house-guest. You know these people?”

  “I know Ramone Holyrod.”

  “I guess this means they’re coming home soon.”

  They reached the fourth floor. He led her to the door of the apartment. “Okay, you’re just going to set down your bags, I’m going to show you how to use the door key and where you’ll be sleeping, and then you’re going to come with me to meet the recognition programs. Got to get you ID’d on the hard drive, or you won’t get into the building.”

  He handed Anna two slips of plastic on a loop of bead-chain, showed her which one to use and stood by the doorway. She walked into the studio apartment, studio not meaning a bedsit but a large and airy set of open plan rooms. She felt uncomfortable about the way the man was standing there.

  “Jeezus. Good luck, is all I can say. I used to feel real sorry for that little Ramone, until I saw the way she would bring home the extra guests, just to give her own hide a rest. Watch out for the Korean woman, I think she’s Korean. Did you ever see that video game of theirs? I guess you must have done, called The Blocks of Wood. One Two and Three. My fucking god. You know their ‘model’ for that game? She’s in the nuthouse for life. Young Canadian woman. She was their houseguest too.”

  In the middle of the biggest room, which was the one you walked into, stood a surgical table. It looked as old as the building, nineteenth century, scoured wood with a row of metal cleats along each side. She looked at it and passed on.

  “Yeah, it was a major scandal. But what happens? Nothing. The shocking story of what they did to a girl makes the so-called artwork more desirable. Can you figure that?”

  In the room that must be Ramone’s because here were her books, here was her characteristic spartan disarray, there was an array of hooks and straps and pulleys above a bunk-shelf that looked like a butcher’s slab. The leather looked well-used; it was stained with both sweat and blood.

  “Some of those feminists ought to take a good look at what happens in this apartment. What it says in the literature is there’s a pair of female artists getting in touch with their suppressed erotic desires. What I see is a guy who likes
beating up girls, and the more they let him do it the more twisted he gets.”

  “Sounds like Tex,” murmured Anna. “Sounds like she found another Tex.”

  “If this is what women do when they’re on top, I say you girls ought to be taken down from there for your own protection. So tell me you still want to move in?”

  Oh, trust you Ramone. You always did walk too far on the wild side for me. Trust you to whip the blanket away, the moment I decide to jump. Those straps were too much. She walked past the grinning man without looking at him, headed for a door marked STAIRS, and pushed through it. “Hey lady,” called the supervisor, showing no inclination to follow. “Hey, lady, you forgot your bag.”

  Anna went out into the street. Someone in the coffee shop opposite Ramone’s building seemed to be staring at her. She walked quickly, wiping away tears. Everyone was staring. Was Ramone’s flat really furnished like a torture chamber? It couldn’t be. She was having a relapse, a return of her horrible symptoms. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, nowhere to hide.

  “Anna?”

  Someone was holding her by the shoulder. A large face peered into hers.

  “It is Anna! Gee, what an amazing coincidence. Here I was sightseeing, I love this city don’t you, and suddenly I see Anna passing by! I had no idea you were in New York.”

  Anna gasped. “Oh, hello, uh—” It was a name she had never been able to use easily, a name censored by defense mechanisms from before the dawn of time—

  “LouLou,” the big face prompted her. “Remember me? Your husband’s Mom?”

  “Oh. LouLou. Yes.” Anna looked around for her bag, which she had left somewhere. “What a coincidence. Are you here on holiday. I’m, umh, I’m sorry but I’m in a hurry—”

  “I think I’d better take you home. You don’t look too good.”

  “What…to Illinois?”

  “Well, no. I don’t spend much time there now. Fact is, I’d have sold the house years ago if it wasn’t for Spence. Looks like you found me out. My secret life. Home is, well, you’ll see when you get there. There’s some people will be very glad to meet you—”

  “I really must go.” Anna panicked and made a lunge for freedom. The hand on her shoulder stuck fast.

  “Okay, you don’t have to meet anyone. Just come with me.”

  The urge to treat mental dis-ease as physical illness, thought LouLou as she put her daughter-in-law to bed, is a very good one. She’d have liked to put Anna in a properly comforting sick room, airy and windowed, decorated in pale yellow, green, and white: because Spring is the time when we get better. The commune house being full to overflowing (they were negotiating the purchase of a neighboring property) she had to make do with an air-mattress in the former family room in the basement, which was also the home of Andreas’s drum-kit, several mildewed boxes of black vinyl record albums, some broken furniture, and a few other odds and ends. Still, it’s the thought that counts.

  Anna had been given a hot bath with cypress oil and put into borrowed pjs that were clean and warm; the elflocks of her damp hair had been combed into order; she had been given a bowl of chicken soup (she hadn’t eaten more than a spoonful). All the proper things.

  “You lie down and sleep. If you need to pee, there’s a little bathroom through that door by the cymbal stand. We’ll talk in the morning. Here’s the button for your bedside lamp. The connection is a wee bit flaky, but if you wiggle it around it works fine.”

  Anna was distressed because in the bathroom upstairs, when she had been dressed only in a towel, she had glimpsed in the mirror the hair in her armpits. She was very conscious of the fact that her mother-in-law had seen this hair, which Anna didn’t shave often enough, but very little conscious of anything else. She struggled with her shame and transgression, until she remembered that she could switch off the light. The basement full of strange traps of steel and cable was plunged into utter, unrelieved blackness. No amount of wiggling would bring the light back. She lay still.

  When she woke up, LouLou was sitting beside her.

  “You want some herb tea?” She sounded exactly like her son.

  Anna shook her head.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A bit confused,” whispered Anna. “Can you explain anything?”

  LouLou nodded. “Oookay…” She paused on this long drawn out reassurance, her big face calm. She was wearing her jet black hair combed straight back and braided at the nape of her neck, Indian squaw style, the same as when Anna first met her. Still wearing the same sort of clothes, a long multicolored Mother Hubbard smock with a fringed yoke, and feathers. Her very Spence-like features looked like undersized currants trying to push their way through the olive glaze on a large, smooth bun.

  “Where shall I start?”

  “Did you really run into me accidentally, yesterday? Was it yesterday?”

  “It was yesterday. Well, yes and no. I’ve been watching Ramone’s place.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve been missing for three weeks, Anna. We knew you’d come to New York, we found your name on a flight. We could have traced you here, by your credit cards. But that would have risked the media people getting to know you’d disappeared: we didn’t want to get into that; we knew you wouldn’t like it. My no-good son said you had to be looking for Ramone Holyrod. She’s out of town, but the best clue I had was her address. So, I staked out the building,” she explained, with pardonable pride.

  “Does Spence know you found me?”

  “No, he does not. I’ve told him I now know that you are okay, and that I am on the case. Won’t do him any harm to sweat a little longer. I’m not going to tell him anything at all unless you want. D’you want to tell me where you’ve been? What you’ve been doing?”

  “I don’t know… I think I was staying in a hotel on 42nd street. I thought I had Jake with me. Oh! Oh, God, I left him behind, anything could have happened—”

  “Jake is fine. I talked to him yesterday. He just knows you’re away on a trip, he’s missing you but he’s okay.” Anna, who had shot upright, eyes starting in terror, fell back on her air-mattress pillow. LouLou refrained, with a mighty effort, from the questions that were on the edge of her tongue.

  “D’you want for me to fix it so you can speak to him, without Spence knowing?”

  “No,” said Anna softly.

  She looked around. The rotting boxes, the smell of damp and cats, the odd assortment of paraphernalia, the windowless walls: she had woken into a scifi apocalypse, a bunker for survivors after the end of the world. How could she speak to Jake and not to Spence? She was astonished that LouLou had suggested such a thing. The ruthless cosa nostra of the female world could still shock her.

  “Where am I?”

  “Geographically? You’re in upstate New York, in a house in the woods by the Hudson river. Emotionally speaking, you’re among friends.” LouLou hesitated. “You might as well know the worst. Among followers.” She picked herself up. “My Goddess, I’ve been so proud of you, Anna. You would have been embarrassed to death, the amount of times I’ve boasted of our acquaintance. What we’re trying to do here is to find a way to live in the world that you’ve discovered, the future of the human race. At the moment we’re feeling real pleased with ourselves, because the big cover-up has collapsed, thanks to you. The conspiracy of silence is broken. But you can catch up on the world news later.”

  Anna blinked at her dazedly. “Are you still a witch? I mean, last time I heard—?”

  “Oh sure, I’m still a Wiccan and still practicing magic. You should know, Anna. Transferred Y doesn’t change anything important. We go on being the same people we were. I’ll bring you some breakfast. When you’ve eaten, you’ll feel stronger. Then, if you feel like it, you can come on upstairs and meet my other family.”

  “Transferred Y?”

  “Sure. What else is in the news?”

  Anna lay staring at the ceiling in complete bewilderment.

  She met the househ
old. They were nine adults and three children, a boy of twelve and two youngsters of six and eight. The eight-year-old, whose name was Hilary, was the only true inter in this group, a child born with indeterminate sex organs. The others, of varied sexual orientation, confessed to being anatomically male or female, though Clarissa had been born ostensibly male. Those who could afford it had been typed, and one member knew that his sex-pair chromosomes bore no trace of the infection: but there was no stigma. They called themselves Transformationists.

  They looked on Anna as a living saint.

  “You are a prophet,” explained a Catholic nun called Dorothy, who shared the parenting role with LouLou. “For twenty years at least, there has been a Transformationist community and culture in the USA, and we have links with other groups all around the world. People in all walks of life, all kinds of people, have felt that the sexual divide was no longer working. We knew what was happening, we were living it. But you’ve given us a voice, Anna. You’ve given us—” Her eyes glowed—“a rationale. A scientific explanation.”

  “But… You’re still a nun?”

  “I’m in dispute with my bishop,” said Dorothy with dignity. “My Mother Superior understands. Didn’t the good Lord say, that they all may be one, father, as you and I are one? Wasn’t he born a man and lived the life of a woman, tending the sick, feeding the hungry, minding the children? I think the message is clear enough.”

  Anna didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  I’ve founded a cargo cult.

  She settled, in the end, for a smiling silence.

  The Transformationists seemed content with this. They would tell her things: like, the rumor about group sex was a base libel, Transformationists were as moral as anyone, and it wasn’t true about the hormones either. There were no rules about taking hormones or not, or about orientation, or having a job or not having a job, or following any particular religion or occult practice. The only rule was to live together lovingly: part of which required that if you were a man you wore a dress, at least sometimes. And that was only a “rule” because nobody had to remind women to wear pants from time to time. She did not catch up with the world news, though she was welcome to do that. The cultists used their connectivity only to chat with other Transformationists and to watch certain treasured movies. She took her place in the cooking rota, her share of the household chores. She went with LouLou, in her big battered old car, to buy provisions and was surprised to find there was a town outside the commune house: buildings still standing, people going about their business. When she looked into the store windows, she was surprised to find she had a reflection.