“Daddy,” giggled Alyssa. “We’re going the wrong way!”
“No we’re not, darling – I’m trying to find the right turning,” I replied. “The goddamn traffic –” I muttered under my breath.
A moment went by, as I continued to try and identify a clear turning on the right. The way it looked, we’d end up down at Wall Street and having to cross through Battery Park City. At least that would be empty on Sunday afternoon.
“Daddy,” said Alyssa again.
“Yes, darling,” I said, peering past the next turning, which was a one-way street running the wrong way – that is, towards us. “Battery Park it is then I guess –”
“Can I go to China this summer with Tammy?” At this Alyssa clasped Tamara’s hand tightly. Their fingers squeezed hard up against one another’s. Still, despite this obvious demonstration of emotion, Tamara resumed that same blank but condemning stare of defiance she had sported a moment ago. It was fixating … hypnotic.
“China? Is Tama- are Tamara’s parents’ OK with this?”
“Tammy says that they are always telling her to bring back visitors from here.”
“Really?”
At this, Tamara spoke up. “My father says it’s the least they can do since you’ve had me stay for the past two weeks,” she said in a perfect East Coast American accent. In fact, Tamara’s speech was more the version of politeness with which my own parent’s would have been accustomed to than anything specifically contemporary. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d last heard anyone utter the words “my father” except at Sunday Mass.
“I – I really don’t know? You’ll have to give me ti – did you ask your mother?” It was usually my wife who ended up having the final say on such matters of domestic import.
“Yes,” replied Alyssa.
“What did she say?”
“She said to ask you.” That was unusual.
“I wonder why – never mind,” I said. “How’s your Chin-” I stopped and purposefully spoke directly at Tamara. “Honestly … how is her Chinese coming along?”
“It’s OK. She can’t do the tones very well though, still.” Alyssa thumped Tamara’s left arm softly with her right elbow, but the girl’s forthright candor impressed me.
“Well, looks like you’ll have to get your tones sharpened a bit, first ….” I said.
Somewhere in the distance, a horn was sounding, but it was hard to tell where the sound was coming from precisely – whether it was from immediately behind us or somewhere in the distance.
The hail that had begun to fall was creating a moving grey veil over anything a couple feet in front and behind us.
Addressing Tamara directly once again, I asked, “And where would she be staying in China? I mean, what part of China do you live in? Beijing?”
“No, sir. We’re in Shanghai most of the time, so that’s where Ally will come and stay with me – with my family, I mean – of course.
“We have a house there about two miles outside the city.” And then she added, after brief consideration, for whatever reason: “My father’s office is in Shanghai – that is, right now, most of the time. He’s just bought a bank there so at least for now we don’t get to stay in the other parts of the country that much.”
And those were the last words I heard Tamara say before a big freeloader, heavy weight four-by-four, slammed up into the trunk of the Tanata.
For a moment I breathed a sigh of relief and crossed myself in Catholic style as I thought we had made it safely out of the trap of steel piling up behind us and soon to be in front of us.
But the speed of the Tanata, combined with the blinding hale snapping loudly from the riverside quickly erased any real chance of let-up from the giant crush that was bearing down upon us too soon. There was no time for action.
“Daaaaaaddddy!!!!!” Alyssa cried out, her scream increasing in pitch in a disorderly sequence of octaves. “Ahhhhhhaaaaaahhh!!!”
I tried to focus, but the wheel in my hands already had a kinetic mind of its own, led as it was by the rubber tires that skidded in an unbearable, high-pitch screech diagonally across the drive, propelled by the Turbo engine I had insisted be installed only months ago at an extra five-figure cost.
Now, with the tires tearing up a putrid thick grey smoke over the windscreen, with the blood on my hands from the shards of glass that crashed in upon their desperate and hopeless last tug of the wheel, with the girls’ terrifying and agonizing screams and that pulse-stopping hopeless deadness in their eyes, there was a real recognition of something sinister at work, a perennial panic-attack, a plan of comeuppance, and I could see its gleaming black face whole now like a demon from another dimension, it’s teeth glinting in broken braces in the crack of the purpose-frosted side-door mirror like those of a madman rapist intent on proving his power whatever the human cost.
Ω
THE CHILD star Stephanie Dreyfuss, 8 years old, was pulled screaming into the operating theater with the burning rim of the vehicle’s steel hull plate welded into her lower back. The metallic surface glinted under the lights of the theater. It had sliced and contorted the girl’s petite frame completely out of shape, like a metric ton of white-hot shrapnel from Fat Boy lodged in the side of a Hiroshima school bus. Thomaso Binocci, the leading spinal cord surgeon in the New York Tristate area, studied the girl’s disfigured body as the anesthesiologist cupped her bloody mouth. A maroon red cartilage bubbled out of it to the surface.
“This is the kid? I was told she had a slipped disk, not a spinal rupture,” said Binocci.
“That was the preliminary diagnosis. At first no one noticed that the vehicle behind had kept going. It rode up right into the back windscreen and jammed her against the rear of the driver, however,” explained a nurse.
Binocci turned to the nurse. She looked Asian, maybe Sri Lanka, in appearance. She was no older than twenty; an intern, he guessed at the adjunct University. Less and less nurses these days seemed to come from the middle of America, and an increasing number from some far corner of the Pacific Ocean.
“How long has she been in this state now? With the steel like this?”
“It happened right away. So maybe twenty-five minutes.”
“That’s why it hasn’t cooled yet –”
From underneath the mask that covered her tiny mouth, Stephanie let out a piercing scream, which jolted Binocci and the nurse like two people in front of a horror movie playing in the dark. Binocci could make out her teeth under the bloody stew she was spitting against the clear green plastic of the mask, turning it muddy. They were milk teeth – children’s teeth, all perfect little healthy white stubs of enamel. She would be lucky to see the day the next of them gave way to the ones of her adolescence, he thought abstractly.
“We can operate like this but it’s dangerous. We could sheer her spinal chord completely, then. I don’t want to take the risk.”
The high pitch screaming dulled an octave as the general anesthetic kicked in to her frontal lobes and dulled her senses. The Asian nurse asked hesitantly: “Is she gonna act, I mean again. What do you think? Doctor?”
Binocci remained looking at America’s latest obsession lying helpless on his operating table. Nothing – not even the eleven years of medical school and the twenty years of operating that now lay behind him – could save this once-luckiest of them all. Despite her fame and previous good fortune and the love that would assemble for her in the next few hours outside the hospital building in the form of so many well-wishing fans when the news broke, the chain reaction crash caused by the random acceleration of a white 2012 Tanata SUV into the rear of the car that had been ferrying the actress home after attending her best friend’s tenth birthday party had killed her on-screen and off-screen presence, he knew. She looked like an angel that had fallen from heaven into the subterfuge of hell, once white with ghost-blonde hair, now covered in a sticky black-red with the smear of her own blood, limp and disfigured like one of the Devil’s own whores. Stephanie’s moans
and grunts were drug-fueled, anaesthetized, Under the sounds of them hummed the bleep-bleep-BLEEP-bleeeep of the cardiogram, its internal technological contents right now the only things that were keeping her alive. “She’ll be lucky if she sees double digits. If I had the chance I would personally castrate the bastard who did this to that little girl, movies or no movies in her history. I’d break my Hippocratic oath and cut his spine with my own hands.” The doctor studied the student for a moment.
“Dry your eyes,” he said flatly. “This is a hospital. Remember, it’s here where the darkest side of humanity often lurks.”
“No, Doctor, it’s n-not,” she said, pushing a forefinger up over a perfect tear-drop. It rolled over her nail and splashed on the mirror-clean white floor tiles. “The darkest I mean.
“It’s where they make the cars that do this to people – that’s the dark side, Doctor. It’s like hell to live and like … like somewhere just above hell to sleep at night. I’ve seen it Doctor. The place they make them, those cars that do this to people.”
And it was then that the Mandate first stirred on Earth in many thousands of years. It stirred right then in Stephanie, throughout the young bodies of Milana and Sofia and primarily up through the unconscious of Alyssa, my daughter, right before she died and even for some seconds there after she died, and it made the lights flicker and the cardiogram stutter and come to a silent stand-still.
Binocci clasped his bared hands together in a a loud CLAP!, and they quickly went limp and crooked in response.
“Lights on! G-get the lights back on in here!” the surgeon, who yields life to the dying, yelled in the dark silence of the amphitheater.
But the only sound that he could hear back right then was that of the wrinkled sea crawling about the rocks beneath the cliffs where the eagles watched for prey in some nearby New Jersey town.
Ω
And even then, once the lights of the cardiogram had flickered off, it stirred again inside her, right before she was resurrected, and they reappeared blinking in a chaotic hailstorm of rainbow strips.
And as to her resurrection, this is the story that unfolds on the pages herein. Do not assume that the resurrection of the Mandate was a simple affair, however: how could it be after more than a Millennia in hiding beneath the ocean and under the tectonic plates of human beings sabotaging human beings for years on end, for none other than the reason of political gain? In fact, his resurrection – and her Millennial incarnation – were as complex and profound as her physical essence itself, being part-real, part-imaginary, as for all dynamic arithmetic.
And so it would come in stops and starts, revealing itself in the development of her spirit here on Earth, sprouting first in the West and eventually spreading East-bound with the wind. For like the wind, she was a spirit that could move anywhere and everywhere she wished to at once, throughout worlds both real and fictional, in lands as physical as they were hypothetical, and in forms as tangible as they surely were imaginary – for this is the nature of the Spirit of the Mandate, born into flesh and embalmed in the myth of historical folklore.
So long as the truth remained a part of her physical essence, so the Mandate had become one with the era of the virtual, the almost-real, the image-consciousness that was the product of technology’s core being, electricity.
And so then swiftly, close to where the sun blazed the azure sky up in the loneliest of lands, right there it was that like a thunderbolt, he fell.
CHAPTER II
Original Sin
Ω
April, 1997
IF THIS had happened in a dream then Milana may never have woken up at all. If she had awoken, it would likely have been with an almighty gasp, her thin lips parted in one single oval breath of ecstasy as for not the first time she felt the true power of the gentle touch of her fingers over her young, moist clitoris, the shower spraying over her tender nipples and running down off her slim body into where her hands gently massaged those erogenous zones the power of which she had only fairly recently begun to discover.
Her long black hair fell forward in several tangled knots and dripped over her pale, pale face as she looked down to her hands. Her thighs quivered; her back arched, her puerile body squirmed as she lightly rubbed the tip of her clitoris. There was no escaping the reality of it this time – she was thinking, as she had never dared allow herself to think before.
Usually this process was routine and took only several minutes. She had preventative measures in place within the various transportation faculties of her fantasies: guilt erected a certain high-rise mosaic –a skyscraper- screen of cognitive toll-roads and no-fly zones. This made living with reality of her necessity less burdensome, even if her clitoris ached agonizingly for a more explorative imagination.
Even if it was in church when she was most aroused, imagining tongue fucking the innocent plain-faced girl next to her under her pleated Sunday skirt … with the barriers, she could push these thoughts out from her mind and resist.
This time however, something was altogether different. All the childlike voices of hesitation and fear and uncertainty were erased by a giant jumbo-jet, packed to the brim with fuel and passengers and cargo, thundering full-speed through the no fly zones of her right hemisphere and into one of the great skyscraper structures that guarded the left. The collision was inevitable: most of the petrol was already quickly burning up the wing tips in a midnight bonfire. Instead of the usual process of delivering herself a quick half-orgasm, her whole body and mind resisted and stalled up. Instead of feeling vaguely relieving, her vaginal lips felt like an inferno into uncharted tropical territory, a deathly hot and tingling climate. There, alone in her vast marble en-suite bathroom with the open-plan shower pummeling her fragile body with almighty aqua-jets of warm water behind the locked door, all her fantasies lunged towards the front of her mind at once, a vulgar and yet intensely stimulating cavalcade of mini-hallucinations.
As she pushed her body back towards the water jet behind her, she imagined him taking her and thrusting his fingers deep into her wetness. He was tall, stronger than her, his muscles able to control her every movement. She didn’t see his face, but she knew it was beautiful. And she could feel his breath gently on her neck, his mouth moving further down to her nipples, sucking them.
Her parents would never hear her scream. It irked her considerably: was she screaming out of pleasure or fear? It felt like gluttony, but a good, God-fearing gluttony … a metastasis of body and mind in the prism where the overcast mid-afternoon of perjury meets heaven’s bright city lights.
Or was it entirely against her will? For as she desperately conjured the image of him pressed against her, and then deep inside her as his fingers slid easily out of her, lubricated as never before, she thought she could feel the tip of something deep inside her.
She pushed herself harder now against the water jets, barely able to breathe or speak. Hers was a psychological asphyxiation: a culmination of chemical events flying back and forth in an electric storm. All within a fourteen-year-old body!
Finally, as her whole living, breathing soul caved into every perverse turn her powerful mind could exert over her gentle alabaster body, she screamed, sung, shuddered: “Oh God, Oh Chris-s-s-t!! Hail Ma-a-ary full of grace! Aleeeluuuujahhh!!!”
Her knees softened in an instant and she collapsed against the cold marble floor, her entire being broken into and yet strangely, released as never before.
For whether what was happening to her felt like a real American death or just a little French death, a salvation of the mind or a burning of the soul, this here was a confession; made by herself and received by herself.
Ω
I didn’t know her name or where she was from, or if we’d have anything in common at all, or let alone whether it was right or wrong to want her in the way that I did, but none of that stopped me from wanting her so desperately or repeating over in my head with even more intensity and exaggeration the very thoughts that had occupied it exactly
one week before. I had noticed her seven days ago, here in Church, on the day I was supposed to be resting, according to the fairly-tale wisdom of minus-seven thousand century shamans, but still something in my gut had stirred while I felt a slick wetness overcome my clit which had then, as it did now, half-accidentally rubbed up against my panties pressed on the hardwood of my chair’s ledge.
She was sat the row in front of me in her silk-cotton pleated navy-and-green skirt with her black tights thinly covering her tender calves and narrow thighs, her ashen-brown hair falling in curls around her faded pink-and-white striped button shirt which clung to her firm C-size breasts. She looked so nonchalant, her face the face of an angel perhaps at most a few years older than I, and I thought how so much more perfect and seemingly innocent and beautiful she was than was my own fourteen-year-old figure, as she went about minding her own business (so I thought) as I too wished to mind it.
I thought, as prospective lovers forever will (at least at first): does she touch herself when she gets home from Church? Does she, as did I for the first time last weekend, slam her door shut hurriedly once she’s home in the privacy of her bedroom and lean against it and thrust her fingers in a total fumble into the moistness of her panties uncontrollably, and in both denial and desperate need give herself the almightiest climax there on her clit within minutes by just lightly rubbing it in soft circles?
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 3