He was instantly excited, but he came down fast. “Does she—know about me?”
“No. We thought you should be the one to tell her. It’s a hurdle you’ve already faced, and she must now.”
He nodded. “How is she?”
“Well, she is as fit as she will ever be. There is no trace of the old paralysis, but she had extensive internal injuries. One of the bullets that struck the Bishop passed through into her right hand at an odd angle, and she’s got only limited control of the hand and she’s lost two middle fingers on it. Her scars aren’t disfiguring, but they dwarf yours. She broke bones in her hip and pelvic region when she fell—repairable, but because of the time lost she’ll always walk a bit stiffly. She claims that these are small prices to pay for having full muscular control, but we know it’s bothering her. Of course, she’ll need continuing physical therapy and medication for a while, as will you.”
“And her hair’s white, too? I been thinking of a dye job now that I have enough to matter, but I’ve let it slide.”
Dobbs sighed. “No. Uh—she wasn’t quite as fortunate as you. She was on the lower end of the stone and got more of the heat blast. She has no hair at all, and they say that none will ever grow there. They’ve tried transplants from others and some artificial business, but none of it took. She’s done small eyebrows with a liner or somesuch, but she won’t abide a wig. She says it’s part of her penance and she wants to be seen just like that.”
He nodded. “That sounds normal. Does she remember anything?”
“All of it, until that last night. They put her into some sort of trance state. She has occasional visions, but nothing more, and the visions are disjointed and distorted and make little sense. She knows what happened, though. The only clear thoughts she has is someone pushing her onto the rock and then the screams and the heat, and she says that, during that time, Bishop Whitely came and talked to her. You can see the state she’s in.”
“Well, maybe,” he responded, remembering his own visitation.
“She’s been burdened by tremendous guilt, as if everything that happened and everyone who died was on her own head. It’s taken a lot of work on the part of psychiatrists here, all Jesuits, of course, to get her back this far. She’s always been a mystic of sorts, and while she’s quite normal in most ways, she’s the Angelique who’s been through all this. She puts on a brave front, but deep down she’s scared to death.”
“When do we go?”
“As soon as you get dressed.”
He put on an old pair of jeans and a tee shirt, rejecting the hospital garb for such an occasion, and followed Dobbs. They had kept her in the opposite end of the wing from him.
A middle aged man in the black suit and clerical collar of his profession met them and shook hands with MacDonald. “I’m Father LaMarche, from Montreal,” he said. “Glad to meet you. I’ve heard quite a lot about you.” He paused a moment. “She wants to see you alone. I concure, but I think we ought to have an understanding first.”
“Go ahead.”
“She considers herself married to you. Even though it was by an Anglican cleric and wasn’t consummated or legally registered, you’ll never convince her that anything Bishop Whitely did wasn’t with God’s will. He must have been quite a man.”
He nodded. “He was. Uh—you know it’ll never be consummated?”
“Yes, but break it to her gently. I don’t know what it will do to her, and she’s come so very far.” He hesitated a moment. “Her theology has also become, shall we say, radically unorthodox, despite her background and my best efforts. Be prepared there, too.”
He nodded. “My theology’s gone a little around the bend, too, Father. Don’t worry. Can I see her now?”
“Yes, go on in. Just—take it slow. Be gentle.”
He could never be otherwise with Angelique.
They had cleared out a small visitor’s room for them. It was glass enclosed and looked out on the beach and the sea. It had a number of plants and several padded chairs and one sofa. She stood there, wearing a silk robe of blue which had a hood to cover all of her head but her face. She was looking out at the sea, but she turned when he entered and he saw her face, the same beautiful face he’d seen on her when they had first met so long ago on Allenby Island. Her eyelashes, at least, had grown out, and she had put on lipstick and drawn fine brow lines with an eyebrow pencil that looked quite natural and attractive.
She smiled when she saw him. “Hello,” she said, her voice the same as it had been. “You look just as I expected you would. They told me you’d grown white hair. I think it looks very nice.”
He returned the smile but did not approach her. “Then I won’t dye it.”
“You like the robe? I seem to have gotten a taste for silk somehow, and I have the money to get what I want.”
“You sure do,” he responded, trying to be light. “All I got was an unlimited expense account.”
There was a certain tension on both their parts, each not sure how to really break their own secrets with the other.
“All that I have is yours,” she told him, “if you want it. This is a Commonwealth country. We could make it legal at a magistrate in no time. But you must—see me—first.” She pulled back the hood and undid the robe, letting it fall to the floor.
She had never stood more naked than she did there. The total absence of hair, particularly on her head, produced a startling effect, but she did not look like some horror. She had the head for it, and while she looked quite different, she was still somehow sensual and erotic. Her body was the same fine one she’d had before, although not the perfection it had been. Clearly she had been eating well. Still, her injuries were far more apparent that his. In spite of the unmarked face and good figure, she’d never be a photographer’s model.
“You’ve put on weight,” he noted softly.
She smiled, and the smile turned into a laugh, and she ran to him and hugged him and he hugged her back. She was overjoyed at his reaction, but she suddenly sensed a coolness in him, in his less than total embrace, and stepped back.
“Something is the matter. Something you are not telling me.”
“You lost your hair. I lost something—else.” Since it was public exposure time, he felt he might as well get it over with and undid his pants and let them fall to the floor.
She stood back and stared, and her jaw dropped a little. The physicians had done a perfect job. Aside from the growth of some pubic hair, which he hadn’t expected, his looked just like hers.
“Then—then it wasn’t a dream,” she whispered. “They really did it.”
He nodded and bent down and pulled his pants back up. “They really did.”
“Does it—work?”
“If you’re asking if I can get pregnant, the answer’s no. Otherwise, they tell me I’d feel just what you would.”
“You haven’t—tried it?”
“No. I’m Greg, and I’ll stay Greg.”
Suddenly she started to laugh. Concerned, he went over to her. “You all right? I know it’s a shock, but it was a shock to me, too.”
“No, no! I am just thinking that after all this, somehow we are both now virgins!”
He had to smile at that, no matter what the internal anguish.
She stopped, seeing that it hurt him, and hugged and kissed him, then picked up her robe once more and donned it, this time leaving the hood down. “I am sorry. Truly so,” she told him sincerely. “We two are not as far apart as all that. Much of me, inside, is now plastic. I, too, am barren.”
He looked at her, and found more pity for her than for him. He still was in pretty good shape and he’d had half a lifetime whole and free. She had never had that kind of chance. She had mobility and money now, but she would never know normalcy.
Up until now, she’d been open, confident, more extroverted than she’d ever been, but now she seemed small and weak once more. “I need you, Greg. I really do. My money will bring me fair weather friends and leeches, who
will say that they adore me until I am out of the room and they can laugh behind my back, but nothing else. They say you can leave any time? Be an out-patient almost anywhere?”
He stared at her. “Yeah, sure. I just haven’t had any place to go, and I couldn’t leave without seeing you.”
“Very well, then. I have all this money, and money talks. I am selling Magellan to a group headed by Doctor Bonner for a pittance. A mere four hundred million dollars—American, not Canadian—in a massive trust fund with the other inheritance. Half of it I will donate to various religious charities and to medical research. I do not know yet what I will do with the rest. But, I think if I wish to go, they cannot stop me.”
“I’ll go along with that. Where are you going?”
“We are going. First we are going to a magistrate who will waive all the technicalities because of who I am, and with whom you will not discuss your—injury. Then we are going to the finest hotel in Port of Spain and taking the grandest suite they offer.”
“Huh? Why—what?”
“You idiot! Did you think that would matter”? Did I fall in love with your organ or with you”? Once I was confused and silly on this matter, but I have learned so much about myself and the world now. Did not the Bishop, like the God he served, love us all far more than we deserve to be loved? And is it not love that makes us more than the animals the Dark Man claimed we were? It is lust that is from the animal. It is love which is the part of us that is from God.”
He wanted to do it, wanted to very badly, but he couldn’t bring himself to inflict it on her, particularly as the years went by.
“It—it just isn’t going to work, Angelique. I do have lusts, and I’m going to have a hard time dealing with them, even harder if I am always with you. Besides, I have no stomach for the rich life. I’d just get fat and lazy and vegetate, while you would want and deserve the glamor of the world. And eventually you would want what I can’t give you, and I’d want it, too. What would we do in that honeymoon suite? Have some kind of two way dildo sent up from the local sex shop?”
She stopped and frowned. “What is this ‘dildo?’ ”
He told her, and she laughed again. “That sounds interesting. By all means we must try it!” Suddenly the laugh faded, and she grew almost somber. I think you truly do not love me, then. Is it the money? I will give it all away. I have never had need of it before. Oui. I will give it away. We will start clean. And if your pride demands it, I will stay home and be the good little wife and clean and mend.”
“No, my pride doesn’t demand that. I just—can’t—see how it’ll work out.”
“Then I give it all away anyway. I return to Quebec and take my vows. Without you, without your support, your friendship, your love, the rest is meaningless.”
He grabbed her suddenly. “You’re really serious?”
“I am more than serious. I will do it. I will marry either you or Christ within the week.”
He sighed. “I guess you’ll have to marry me, then. But keep some of the money. We’re going to need competent security for the rest of our lives, I’m afraid, and that costs. Besides, if I ever needed to find a job, I couldn’t pass the physical.”
She smiled broadly and threw her arms around him.
“Come, Gregory Mac Donald! I will show you how serious I am, and how much you failed to learn through all this!”
Many on the staff and otherwise did not approve of it, but her chief psychiatrist thought it was the best thing for both of them and helped. When you’re rich, what you want comes to you, including a magistrate and a pre-filled out marriage license and all the rest. Arrangements were also quickly made to sneak them past the waiting press and off to a private, well secured resort for the very rich on an isolated stretch of the Grand Cayman Islands. There, in a luxury condominium overlooking the ocean, unobtrusively protected by a security system and staff he himself designed, they were finally able to feel a measure of peace and relaxation.
MacDonald pretty much was along for the ride. He was washed up as a lover and even as a good socialist, yet he found himself surprisingly happy. He remembered his files, and his ex-wife’s own evaluation, that he was the ultimate egocentric personality, and he realized with a start that he had changed far more than physically. He was no longer the sun, but a world in orbit around a different sun, that of Angelique. For the first time, he needed someone else to give him purpose and meaning, and it wasn’t a terrible condition at all.
And now a three-quarters moon was rising above a darkened sea, and as they stood hand in hand at the doors to the balcony of the luxury suite, they held hands and comtemplated their first really private moments together after all of this. In a sense, he’d been dreading, even putting off this moment, when they were alone together.
“Are you happy, my darling?” she asked him.
“Yes, in a crazy kind of way, I think I am. Something dear was taken from my body, but, the funny thing is, something else was added in my head, something that had always been missing but I hadn’t known it before. For the first time, I care about the victims.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. I think Bishop Whitely understood it, though. I think that’s what he was trying to tell me at the end.”
“He—came to you on the rock?”
“Yes. And you, too, I understand. You want to tell me what he said?’’
“He said—love, and faith, and sacrifice were costs, but that they were why, up to now, we’d always won. He said that someone who kept love in their heart and faith in God and man would find any sacrifice a mere trifle. He said that I was saved by faith and sacrifice, and that I had now to carry on the love against which Hell itself could not stand, and that if I looked within myself there was no problem I could not overcome.”
He kissed her, and that, at least, was the same, and he even felt a tingling sensation in the right area of the groin. She removed his clothing slowly, and then her own, and they embraced again, and hands felt each other’s strangely identical parts. The room was dark, except for the light from the moon and a few street lamps below.
And, suddenly, Angelique knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
She closed her eyes and whispered, not to him, “Unab sequabab ciemi!”
There was a sudden rush of warm air all about them, although the balcony door was mostly closed and the room was air conditioned. He felt the sudden presence of others in the air of the room and all around, but there was nothing he could see or sense, and he stiffened, not knowing quite what to expect.
“Father of all, angel of nature, spirits of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, harken, for the Mother has found her perfect lover,” she continued in the strange language of the Hapharsi. “Let that lover be filled with the soul of the he-lion and the bull, that I may be serviced and have release.’” It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real, but it sure felt real, and if anything, even bigger and better than it was. He felt a sudden surge of pure animal energy, and he made love to her in the way he wanted to through half the night.
And yet, when they awoke, late in the afternoon, they both were as they had been. There was no mistaking the reason for the radiance of her expression and the softness of her manner, and he, too, felt satisfied, and remembered it all clearly. He was sure that, somehow, he’d made love to her, as a whole man, over and over, for a longer and more satisfying period than he ever had before with a woman, and that all had been—well, normal.
She kissed him playfully. “Do you still worry, my love?”
“Yeah. Am I going nuts—or what?”
“Magic isn’t good, or evil, it just is,” she told him. “Like everything else in this world, it can be good or evil depending on who uses it and for what purpose. That goes for spells, and—computers.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Don’t start with the ‘buts,’ my love. The magic doesn’t work as well with ‘buts.’ And don’t be so afraid. There’s nothing to fear. They made me a Haph
arsi Mu’uhquah for their own evil ends, but make me one they did. It doesn’t matter what I look like or who I am—it’s there, particularly in the dark. The ancient priestesses, to preserve their virginity and thus their power, took female lovers, but most of them still craved, at least occasionally, what they could not have. Sometimes as the male, sometimes as the female, they had it better and more often than the tribe. That’s why they never succumbed to temptations of the bisexual flesh.”
“Then—it was an illusion?” He’d known it, but it had been so good, so real.
She shook her head in disgust. “After all we have been through, you and I, you can worry about what is real and what is illusion? The world is a magic place, my darling, if you wish it to be, if you believe that it is. Who is to say where reality ends and illusion begins? Who cares?”
Who cares indeed? “You know, I can still get that changeover. Go all the way. I think that’s what St. Cyr meant. It doesn’t matter to me any more what I look like, but I’d be perceived as normal by others. Me like that and you with a wig and we could go places and do things without a whole army of security people.”
“Oh, no. I will not give you a chance to be a voyeur in the ladies’ rooms of the world. I think you are perfect just the way you are, and I would be content right now if this, right here, went on forever. We have earned it. What I see in your eyes in more than enough of the world for me.”
He grabbed her, and held her close, and kissed her, and they were at it again without benefit of spells or special augmentation. She broke for air and laughed. “We forgot the dildo.”
“Who cares?” he retorted, and kissed her again.
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Document ID: fbd-113abd-aca6-bb4f-f98a-8b7f-49f9-f670f2
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Document creation date: 01.03.2011
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The Messiah Choice Page 37