The Fissure King

by Rachel Pollack

  None of that concerned Jack Shade on this late Saturday afternoon in early December. He was watching a house that stood by itself at the end of the street. There wasn't much to see, at least without a certain concentrated effort. Dark, its white paint and green trim chipped and faded, a few shingles gone from the roof, the front gutter hanging down at the corner, it looked like the bank had foreclosed on it during the crash and never got around to selling it.

  It was all a glam, of course. If he'd felt like really looking, Jack could have pierced the illusion to the fresh paint and lights. When it came down to it, glamours depended on people not knowing they were there. But why bother when Jack knew what it was, and who was inside?

  It had taken a bit of effort but Carolien Hounstra had helped him. She enjoyed it, speaking in whispers over the phone, calling him "Jack Spy," and wearing an honest-to-God trenchcoat when they met in Trader Joe's at Union Square.

  27 Beech Grove was a NYTAS safe house. Right now it was being used as a combination prison and one-person therapy center, and no doubt would continue so for months. The focus of all this effort and attention, the single prisoner/patient, was Juliana Strand.

  So, Jack had thought when Carolien had brought him the news. Dr. Canton was not above helping the Queen of Eyes after all, at least not if he didn't have to pick a fight with the Societé de Matin. The Deputy Head of Operations, the one who'd replaced André, and of course the Old Man of the Woods himself, had probably found some way to reward NYTAS (or Arthur personally) for helping to tie up loose ends to a failed coup. The Societé wouldn't have demanded punishment for Julie. It was André they cared about. And André's end, Jack knew, would not have been loose at all.

  As Jack stared at the house, he wondered what they would do, what combination of drugs, family therapy (was Margaret there now? Sarah?), lower-level journeying, brain leeches, or mud-puppet surrogates would be used to break down the configurations that probably had built up in Julie for years. He wondered how André had spotted her, what he'd done to bring out the paranoia, the lust for power, the rage. Jack would probably never know.

  Margarita Mariq had seen what was happening to her granddaughter. She'd seen the danger. But what she couldn't just see was how to save her. Oh, she could have gotten her away from André, locked her up, worked on her. But the configurations might have refused to unravel.

  Then the idea had come to her. Jack could only guess how desperate she must have been simply to consider it. Suppose she let Julie do it? Suppose she let her granddaughter find out just what it meant to kill her own mother. To become the Queen of Eyes and truly see what she'd done. Might the horror of it make her desperate to undo it? And then, if it could be reversed, if Mom and Grandma actually came back, would that open at least a small window of recovery?

  Jack was pretty sure Margaret hadn't told Sarah. He shook his head at the thought of what that reunion must have sounded like. According to Carolien, Margaret had taken steps to make sure nothing would happen to Sarah's body until after the weekend, at which point, of course, Sarah would have come back to life again. He laughed a moment, imagining what a job it must have been for COLE, the good old Committee Of Linear Explanation, to cover that one up at the funeral parlor.

  Serious again, he thought of the incredible risks Margaret had taken. The biggest risk was Jack himself. What if Sarah had never come to him? What if he'd never gone to the Risen Spirit Shelter, for Jeremy to spread his wings? Oh, Jack, I knew I could count on you.

  Jack knew it wasn't random chance he'd found the Queen. André himself would have set up the pattern to create a search, to bring in John Shade. Jack was pretty sure it was André who'd given Jack's card to Julie and told her to set it up where Mom could see it. But what André could never have guessed was that he himself was being led, as surely as he was leading Jack. How could he? Who would imagine a woman would arrange her own murder?

  Jack folded his arms and shook his head again. No matter how brutal a gangster André Matin was, no matter how ruthless—he was no match for a grandmother.

  Jack didn't really know how long he stood there, just staring at the house. How long would it take? Years? Maybe just months. And then Julie would get to go home, reunited with her resurrected mother and grandmother.

  And Layla Shade would still be dead. And Eugenia Shade would still be locked away in the Forest of Souls.

  Possessed or not, Julie Strand had murdered her mother in full consciousness. In cold blood, cold as the frozen Hudson. And then Mom comes back, and Julie gets fixed, and life for the Strand girls resumes its generational path of seeing.

  Genie Shade never meant to kill her mother. Oh, she'd liked the power the poltergeist gave her, the feeling that her mother couldn't control her. But on that day when the geist took over, and the knives flew all around the kitchen, that wasn't Genie. Not even the smallest part of her. But it made no difference, did it? Layla wasn't returning. And Jack still had no way to bring his daughter back.

  He discovered he was shaking, whether from anger or grief or just the damp December twilight, he couldn't tell. He was about to get in his car when a woman's voice behind him said "You come here often?"

  He turned and saw a tall thin woman in a dark green parka and green UGG boots. She'd left the parka hood down for her long black hair to bunch up around her shoulders. Jack said, "My first time. How about you? Are you a regular?"

  She shrugged. "I hope not. But she is my niece. Step-niece?"

  "Have you gone inside?"

  Slight smile. "That level of involvement I can do without."

  There was a pause. "You look different," Jack said.

  The smile again, a little stronger. "You're awake."

  Now Jack grinned back. "So I am."

  Another silence, and then the woman said, "You did a great thing, Jack."

  "Did I? I don't see that I had much choice. It was my fault she got killed." He paused a second, then said, "Even if it was her idea. Of course, I didn't know that at the time."

  "And if you did? If you'd found out right away, would it have made a difference?"

  "No."

  "You saved her, Jack. If she'd come back with no one to help her . . . She trusted you. And she was right."

  Trusted me, Jack thought. Enough to pull me into a family murder. Why? Because I knew what it felt like? But all he said was, "I don't know your name."

  "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, and for a second he thought she blushed. "I'm Elaynora."

  "Nice to meet you, Elaynora."

  "I feel like I've known you—" She took a breath. "I've never had the chance to thank you, Jack. For that time on the beach."

  "I didn't do anything."

  "You tried. My mother and I—we'd been having one of our difficult moments. And the fact that someone would just come forward like that—well, it meant a lot."

  "And your mother?"

  Elaynora smiled. "Not quite so happy."

  "So tell me, did she pull me into all this—" he waved a hand. "—to punish me?"

  "No, no. It was more the opposite. She knew she could trust you."

  "Huh. That's what she told me." He rolled his eyes. "Lucky me." To his surprise, they both laughed. He said, "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "Who's your father?"

  "Ah, of course. I could tell you his name but you wouldn't be able to pronounce it. I can hardly say it myself." She spoke a combination of clicks and whistles and liquid vowels.

  "See what you mean,' Jack said.

  She grinned. "I try to stick with Dad."

  "Smart move."

  "I came across his name on a list once. It was in a book of ethnology. The book described him as a minor sun deity of an extinct tribe."

  "Lost his gig, huh? That must be rough, when all your worshippers die out."

  "Now he operates an agency for dream hu
nters."

  "Is that what he did for the tribe?"

  "Kind of. They believed dreams come from the sun, so he made sure to supply them."

  "And now he hunts down dreams for his clients. Pay enough and you can get any dream you want."

  "Something like that."

  "And you join the hunt?" She smiled, but didn't answer. Jack said, "I'm guessing Mom's not too wild about all this."

  She shrugged. A tiny ripple of light moved off her shoulders and vanished in the growing dark. She said, "She considers it ‘disreputable.'"

  Jack laughed. "I'll bet. Families." He laughed again, and this time Elaynora joined him.

  "Happy families are all alike," she said.

  Jack finished the Anna Karenina line. "Unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way."

  "Good old Tolstoy. Do you know, he hired my father once? He needed some dream help to finish War and Peace."

  "Huh. I always thought there was something Traveler about him." Jack looked around. "Did you walk here?"

  "Yeah. I'm staying in the village."

  "Why don't I drive you back and buy you a drink? Are you allowed to drink alcohol?"

  "When I'm off duty."

  "And you're off duty now?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Good," Jack said. "Me too."

  Just before they got in the car, they each stopped a moment and looked once more at the house. Then they got in the Altima and Jack drove them back to the world.

  3

  Johnny Rev

  That was your black double. You aren’t who you think you are.

  —Flannery O’Connor, "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

  Prologue

  In his early years as a Traveler, Jack Shade, Rebel Jack, as people would later call him, studied with the legendary teacher known as Anatolie. He didn't really know her fame at the time, only that she was the one whose name he'd been given by the lion-tamer who'd first shown Carny Jack a glimpse of the Real World in the mouth of a lion.

  In the years Jack studied with Anatolie, she annoyed him as much as inspired him, not least because at something like five hundred pounds she did not get around much, and Jack sometimes thought he was more errand boy than apprentice. One day he went to see her in her fifth-floor walk-up on Bayard Street in Chinatown, and as usual had stopped in at the Lucky Star restaurant to pick up the order she'd called down when she knew he was coming. Most of the time Jack didn't really mind bringing her food, but that day he decided he'd had enough. It was time to tell her some hard truth. "Why don't you get a ground-floor apartment?" he said as he arranged the food on a tray big enough to go across her belly. "Or at least one of those lofts with an old freight elevator."

  "And why is that, Jack?" she asked softly, as her ancient bone chopsticks began to ferry har kow to her wide, flat face.

  Jack should have recognized that tone and backed off but he was feeling reckless. Years later, a dealer in the Ibis Casino would tell him, "You were always Johnny Danger back then. Or maybe just Jack Crazy."

  "So you can actually leave the house now and then," he told her. "Get out in the street. Experience picking up your own food."

  "Oh, Jack," she said, "you still think things are as they appear?" As she moved on to shredded pork and puffed tofu in ginger sauce, she said, in that same bland voice, "Perhaps you should go. You don't seem in the mood for a lesson."

  "Great," Jack said. "All this way just to drag your food upstairs."

  "Oh, by the way," she said as he was about to leave, "pay attention on the way home. You wouldn't want to miss anything." Jack made a noise and slammed the door.

  He was so annoyed he didn't notice anything strange until he was on Canal Street, heading for the No. 6 Subway, and a large woman in a bright red parka bumped into him. She was moving so fast, with heavy shopping bags in each hand like pendulum weights, she almost knocked Jack down. "Hey!" he yelled, and was about to add something very New York when he noticed the woman's gait and the set of her shoulders. "Anatolie?" he said, but not loud enough for her to hear him as she moved through the crowds of shoppers, tourists, and hucksters.

  It can't be, he told himself. Even if she could get herself up and dressed and downstairs without his help, how would she have had the time to catch up with him? Distracted, he found himself going past a knock-off shop, the kind of place with oversize, over-bling watches and fall-apart luggage out front, but fake Prada hidden in the back for the right sort of customer. A skinny Chinese man with greasy hair was pretending to flirt with a trio of white teenage girls from the suburbs in hopes they might buy his phony Pandora bracelets. Jack paid no attention until the man called out, "Rolex watch, Jack. Look just like real."

  Jack spun around, and in place of the Chinese hustler stood Anatolie, so large she filled the doorway. She held up the watch. "Good quality, Jack. No tell difference."

  Jack wasn't sure he could breathe. He turned to the three girls to ask if they too saw the large black woman, only to discover that their skin had darkened and their over-gelled bleached hair had snaked into long dreadlocks. All three nodded and smiled at him.

  Jack tried to escape into the crowd but it was no good. The old Chinese ladies with their net shopping bags filled with bok choy and tofu, the guys behind the fried-noodle stands, the homeless man pretending he had someplace to go, the art students with plastic bags from Pearl Paint—they were all her.

  He did his best not to look at anyone, at least not close enough to see them change, as he rushed back to Bayard Street. For just a second he considered picking up a bribe at Lucky Star, but was pretty sure he couldn't take it if cheerful, loud Mrs. Shen became a five-hundred-pound black woman with dreads that wound around her waist like that Norse serpent that holds together the world. So instead he just ran upstairs, burst into her apartment where of course she was still lying on her oversized, reinforced bed, empty takeout cartons all around her, and he begged her, "Make it stop. Please. I get it, I'm sorry, I'll never say you can't leave your apartment again. Please. You can't be everyone."

  She laced her hands across her belly. "Are you sure about that, Jack? Maybe there's just one person in the world, and we're all Duplicates." Jack stared at her, confused. Finally she smiled, and said, "You can go now. It's safe."

  He hesitated a moment, then left. All the way home everyone remained themselves, but even so, he stood a long time outside his door before he went inside. For what if his wife Layla's olive skin had turned dark brown, or eleven year old Eugenia had put on four hundred pounds?

  Now

  Jack Shade was walking down Lafayette Street, heading toward Canal, when the Momentary Storm hit. He was on his way to buy a stone frog from Mr. Suke (not his real name) as a present for Carolien Hounstra, Jack's colleague in the New York Travelers' Aid Society. Generous Jack, people called him, though usually not without a half-smile and a lifted eyebrow.

  Carolien collected frogs, had many shelves of them in her West Side apartment. Some were netsuke, others jade or malachite or onyx, and a few were so old it was hard to tell what they were. There was a story people liked to tell about Carolien's hobby, that an ancestor had been turned into a stone frog by some malevolent Traveler, or maybe a vindictive Power, and Carolien hoped to find him and turn him back. Others claimed it wasn't an ancestor but an older, or younger, brother, and the enactment had retroactively aged the carving to make it harder to find him. Still others claimed it was Carolien herself who'd stoned her brother—or maybe a lover who'd jilted her—and had done too good a job, so that when remorse set in she couldn't locate him. This last group consisted mostly of people whose advances Carolien had rejected. "The Dutch Ice Queen," some called her, a term which always made Jack laugh or shake his head.

  Jack doubted the truth of all these stories. It wasn't that he believed Carolien would not try to rescue a relative. He'd seen how she'd dropped her work at N
YTAS and everything else, including Jack, when her teenage cousin from Rotterdam had come to New York for a couple of weeks. No, it was just that people liked to make up stories about her. Six feet tall, 185 pounds, and very Dutch, with long blonde hair, large breasts, and a tendency to say or do whatever she wanted, she was a natural target. She didn't appear to notice but Jack thought that might be an act.

  If Jack doubted that Carolien had a relative who'd been turned into a frog, he strongly suspected that Mr. Suke was in fact a frog who'd been turned into a man. He just wasn't sure if the frog Suke had been alive or carved. Jack was wondering if he should outright ask him, and whether that might violate some code of privacy, when he felt something brush against his leg. He smiled, and looked down to see Ray, his reddish-gold spirit fox, moving his tail to get Jack's attention. No one could see Ray but Jack, so when he spoke he kept his voice low. "What is it, buddy? What do you want me to see?"

  Ray lifted his head to point his snout downtown, and Jack followed the line of sight to the helix-shaped tower of the new World Trade Center. As Jack watched, a dark cloud rolled over it, until all you could see was gray sky. Oh shit, Jack thought, not again. But then he heard someone to his left say, "Jesus, look at that," and someone else say, "You can't even see it," and Jack let out a breath. Not an omen, then, or at least not just for his eyes only.

  It would take a few minutes before he realized how wrong he was.

  As Jack and everyone else watched, the dark cloud poured towards them. Soon it began to rain, hard slashing drops that sent umbrellas and coat collars up, and a few people scrambling into doorways. Jack just stood there, squinting at the rain as if the drops might form a pattern. He looked down and Ray was still at his side, body rigid, tail straight out, telling Jack there was something in the rain. Something about Ray . . . his tail was wet! How could—

  A border storm! Half in this world, half in the Other. Shit, Jack thought. He didn't like border crossings, no one did. You could meet your mirror, your Traveler From The Other Side, and then things would get really tangled. Some people said that that was how Peter Midnight, all those years ago, had lost Manhattan to the Man in the Black Cravat.