Now that the sweepers were gone noises came from the houses and lawns around her. Someone—Gloria Rich, she thought—was shouting at her kids. Ron was saying some prayer or other, probably an apology for cutting his lawn. That reminded her, she should get the Kowski kid (she could never remember his name) to cut the grass. This time she’d make sure to pray the night before. Last week she’d forgotten entirely and half the lawn had withered while the other half got choked with weeds so that she’d had to give it a blood offering, not to mention five hours of yanking out crab-grass and laying down fertilizers.
Maybe she should move back to the city. It was Mike who’d wanted to move to Poughkeepsie in the first place. His home town. But what kind of work would she find in the city? She couldn’t imagine being a Server there. Probably get raped or mugged twice a day. Anyway, her mother would take a return to the city as proof that Jennie had finally decided not to run from her true calling in the arts. Like the time Jennie had dropped out of college and Beverley had filled the house with artists, hoping they would ‘shatter that bourgeois cocoon you’ve spun around yourself’, as Beverley put it.
She poured herself coffee while it was still lukewarm, then walked with it back to the bedroom for her sandals. A few gulps more and she grabbed her fake leather bag and was out of the door. In the driveway she made a face at the sticker on the back bumper. ‘Lightstorm must stay’ it read. She felt so stupid having that thing on her car. It was just…everybody at work was doing it and she didn’t want to look like a snob. Anyway, Lightstorm would leave in a day or two and she could take it off.
As Jennie got in the car a voice said, ‘Good morning.’ Jennie jumped before she recognised it as the computer that reminded her to fasten her seat belt or warned her when some Malignant One had lowered the oil pressure. But when did it ever wish her good morning? ‘Fair weather,’ the voice piped. ‘Temperature and barometric pressure both within acceptable limits. A lovely day for a journey.’ And when did it ever give weather reports?
‘Personification,’ she muttered. Some power or other had entered her car’s computer. Her goddamn car. To celebrate the Day of Truth.
‘Excuse me?’ the car said.
God, Jennie thought. I don’t need this. Pick on someone else. She remembered her college course in spiritual anthropology, ‘spanthro’ as everybody called it. Personification, the textbooks claimed, indicated an ongoing or immanent crisis. Jennie thought, I’ve already gone through a crisis. My husband annulled our marriage. Isn’t that enough?
The car said, ‘I’m pleased to report high levels of harmony between Earth and Sky. Fine indications for long trips or expeditions.’
Expedition. Was that a code word or something? She said, ‘Blessed powers, protect me. I swear a penance for all my sins.’
The car quoted, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single prayer.’
‘You idiot,’ Jennie said. ‘I’m not taking any journey. I just have to go around town.’ She started the engine. If they wanted to personify a crummy old car like hers…
‘I’m sorry,’ the dashboard said. ‘I just thought you should know.’
‘Shut up!’ Jennie shouted, then immediately added, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just want to get to the recital.’
The car didn’t answer. If the Visitor remained inside, it had decided to sulk. Jennie turned left onto Blessed Spirit Drive, then left again onto Heavenpath Road. It’s nothing, she tried to assure herself as the car wobbled down the street. Just a random charge ahead of the recital. Probably everyone in Poughkeepsie was suffering spontaneous eruptions, even complete occurrences. Because of Lightstorm. Someone with that much power coming to a place like Poughkeepsie. The valley couldn’t handle it. All the dormant patterns were rising up. Perfectly normal.
At the exit she pulled over for a moment. Beside the car stood the hive’s ‘celestial guardian’, supposedly a meteorite, but in fact a plain grey boulder. At the moment it lay under a blanket of sanctified aluminium foil, a shield to reflect evil away from the hive on this most important day of the year. Jennie wondered if she should get out and touch it, ask it to protect her. She was afraid to leave the car.
And something else. A few feet from the guardian a disc of green metal lay in the ground. A soul-map they called it, with a diagram of the streets etched into its raised surface. A promise of spiritual unity with all your neighbours. Just step on it and feel yourself joined to the hive. Jennie and Mike had stepped on it once. On their way to the Supermarket. And then Mike had left her.
After what seemed a long time Jennie put the car in gear and drove forward to the edge of the highway. The dashboard stayed silent. A moment later she was driving north on Route 9.
A couple of minutes later she turned off onto Spackenkill Road, empty of people yet alive with the spirit of celebration. On the left, silver faces decorated the high thorn bushes marking the entrance to the public labyrinth. On the right silk ropes bound together the guardians standing at the entrance to the private school where movie stars and New York Tellers sent their children. Further along, banners floated from the houses, and the trees displayed seven foot strips of paper with Allan Lightstorm’s name written thousands of times. Papier mâché dolls made in school art classes hung on screen doors, their arms straight out to welcome Lightstorm and his picture into their homes. Up the road the tombstones in the Dutchess County Tellers’ cemetery shone with blue and yellow paint.
Seeing all this preparation Jennie found herself half excited, half guilty that she herself had done so little. She hadn’t even decorated her house or put out any signs. She hadn’t even cleaned her house. Maybe the Visitor had come to remind her of her duties. But it was too late now. She’d have to go straight from work to the Mount. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jennie said.
A car passed her—there was almost no traffic, everyone was queuing up for a place—and the driver honked and waved at her. Jennie waved back. Turning up Cedar Avenue she tried to remember more of what she’d learned in spanthro about personification, about breakthroughs in general. There was so little, it was all so long ago. In fact, Jennie knew, she’d never learned much in the first place.
I would have made a good scholar, she told herself. If I’d just had the chance. She’d hoped to study True History, especially the Founders. That goal had held her for years, since childhood really, when her father had given her a copy of The Lives Of The Founders shortly before his death. A month after he’d died, when Jennie’d been walking with her head drooped forward, Janet Artwing’s face had appeared in the sidewalk on Hudson Street, in front of the Post Office, telling her not to cry for her father, saying Jimmy loved her and sent his blessing from the land of the dead. ‘Read the book,’ Janet Artwing told her. All through school, and high school, Jennie had assumed the Living World had chosen her for a scholar. She would dedicate her books to her father’s memory. And then, somehow, when she entered college, it had all fallen apart. She couldn’t concentrate, she kept sleeping late and missing classes, she even failed a basic course in her main subject. I just didn’t get any support, she told herself. If I’d had a little help, or encouragement, from my mother, or Mike…What was she thinking? She didn’t even meet Mike until she’d dropped out of school. She was working that temp. job at Bloomingdale’s the day she and Mike had met.
And as for her mother…Jennie knew very well what Beverley thought of Jennie’s hopes of scholarship. Mommy had expected (still expected, against all the evidence and Jennie’s insistence) that Jennifer would follow in her Mommy’s footsteps and become a musician. Or at least an artist or a writer. Never mind that Jennifer had gone to college. Never mind that she dropped out only to betray all sanity by getting a suburban husband, a suburban house, and a suburban job, and then, when she lost the first, keeping the other two. In Beverley’s eyes, it was all just ‘sleepwalking.’
Jennie drove along Cedar Avenue up to 376 where she turned right to the end of Raymond Avenue. She drove up Raymond Avenue, past Vassar
College and the primary Tellers’ residence, then past empty shops hung with banners and posters. Clothes boutiques lined the blocks near the college. Like many native Poughkeepsieites Jennie never shopped there. Today, all the window dressers’ models, male and female, bore Lightstorm’s face.
With no traffic to stop her Jennie drove straight up to Main Street and then right to the interchange that brought her onto Route 44 going east out of town. Even on the multi-lane road she saw almost no cars. When 44 changed back to a normal country highway she passed a group of teenagers on bicycles. They all wore sleeveless jackets with the number three on the back, a proclamation that they were eternal pilgrims on their third incarnation as a unified group. Jennie wondered why they weren’t at the Mount fighting for seats in that obnoxious way group pilgrims had of linking arms and trampling anyone who got in their way. Maybe they were going later. As a government registered unit they might have got the county SDA to order them reserved places. Like the hives.
Finally Jennie pulled her car into the gravelly parking lot of Mid-Hudson Energy’s administrative offices. She didn’t notice any cars from any of the other Servers. The few who were working besides herself had probably got their assignments and gone. Which meant that Maria had to wait for Jennie before she herself could go and queue up for a seat.
A large cardboard cut-out of Allan Lightstorm greeted her with a wave of its hinged arm as the glass door slid open into the building. Jennie punched her time card, then realised she wouldn’t be coming back at the end of the day and would have to write in her hours. She hurried down the corridor, past the mural of the Benign Ones who lived inside the Sun pouring their streams of burning elements onto a grinning Earth. In the servers’ staff room a couple of white plastic cups and some scattered sheets of paper were all that remained of the meeting.
Maria Canterbury, Jennie’s dispatcher, raised her eyebrows as she played with her single braid of hair. ‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve just washed up from the underworld.’
‘I’m late,’ Jennie said stupidly.
‘Late?’ Maria raised her hands in a show of surprise. ‘How could you possibly be late? My star Server. The others must have all gotten lost. Seduced by incubi and succubi lurking on the roads.’
‘Please,’ Jennie said. She could hear how close her voice sounded to tears. ‘Can I just get my list and go?’
Maria slid off her desk to come stand next to Jennie, who winced at the huge woman’s approach. A former weightlifter and wrestler, twice champion of Dutchess County sacred bench press, Maria moved like the great boulder that had rolled down Storm King Mountain to come and hear Jonathan Mask Of Wisdom. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘You sure about that?’
Jennie wished she had the nerve to tell her boss about her personified car. She said, ‘It’s nothing, Maria. You’ve got to get to the Recital.’
‘Bullshit. I’ll put on my tough face and everyone’ll get out of my way. Watch, put on the news tonight, you’ll see me sitting next to the mayor.’
Jennie smiled. ‘In your fluorescent sweatshirt?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. Now what’s wrong?’ Jennie shrugged. ‘Come on. I’m an old-fashioned boss. I’m in charge of my workers’ spiritual welfare.’
‘I don’t know,’ Jennie said. ‘Really. It’s just…I just feel so low lately.’
‘Have you been for a scan?’
‘A scan? No—no, I don’t need—I don’t need anything like that.’
‘Okay, then, how about a shrink?’
‘It’s nothing that serious. It’s just—I don’t know, I just can’t seem to get excited about anything…’
‘How about Lightstorm? Are you excited about that?’
‘I guess. I don’t know…’
There was silence for a moment, then Maria said, ‘Well, maybe Lightstorm’s not all they say he is. Not all he says he is.’ She laughed.
Softly Jennie said, ‘None of them are.’ Maria didn’t answer. Looking at the floor Jennie said, ‘I wouldn’t feel this way if the Tellers did what they’re supposed to do. People in the Days of Awe didn’t feel like this.’
‘I guess not. Maybe you need a holiday. You’ve got some time coming, haven’t you? You could go tomorrow, pack tonight after the Recital. I’ll get the others to cover for you.’
‘I’ve got no place to go.’
‘Go to the beach or something.’
‘I haven’t any money. Anyway, beach places get booked up for Truth week months in advance.’
‘Well, go and visit your mother or something.’
Jennie made a noise. ‘That’s just what I need.’
‘Well, you can just stay home and watch television. You need a rest.’
‘Can’t I just have my assignment?’
‘Forget your assignment. They’ll keep until tomorrow. You can get out to the Mount and wait for the Recital to start up.’
‘Please, Maria.’
Maria sighed, her breasts rising on her muscular chest. She reached into the pocket of her jeans for a sheet of yellow paper. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘there’s only a few but you’ll have to move fast. Don’t forget to log them.’
Jennie grabbed the list and rushed outside before Maria could show any more concern for her. In the parking lot she hesitated before touching the car. The Visitor had left apparently; she slid into the seat without any comments from the dashboard. She checked the card. Four services, none of them anywhere near each other. The price she paid for coming late.
‘Service’ meant tending to the guardians watching over Dutchess County’s energy system. There were hundreds of these protectors, the same as the many thousands scattered over the rest of the country, one for every neighbourhood, housing development, hospital, factory or shopping mall. The guardians lived in ‘husks,’ rectangular steel or bronze monoliths with the corners and edges rounded off. Ranging in height from five to eight feet the husks all bore a face on one side—horizontal diamonds with lines across them for the eyes, three vertical lines for the nose, a row of short vertical lines for the mouth. Jennie liked this face, liked the fact that no one had elaborated or decorated Arthur Sweetwind’s original design.
The back displayed a trio of etched drawings. The first showed the chaos after the Revolution, when the liberated electricity ran wild, blacking out, over charging, starting up factories and can-openers without permission. The second depicted Sweetwind (in beauty and truth lives his name forever) summoning the guardians from the invisible world. The last showed a city gleaming with light and humming with obedient energy.
The sides of the husks held double rows of small hooks for people to leave things for the guardians. Usually wrapped in silk and placed in small mesh bags these offerings might include newspaper clippings, vacation souvenirs, photos of friends and relatives (especially dead ones, for if it pleased them the guardians might pass along messages), chips of wood from a new house, or odd items that only the owner might understand—a broken shoelace, a singed dish towel, the cap from a shampoo bottle. Jennie and the other servers had also found sexual mementos, ranging from torn panties to ornate nipple clips. For the past week almost all the hooks contained signifiers of Allan Lightstorm. There were signed photos, newspaper articles, small beanbags with his face painted on them, copies of his official biography, and drawings and paintings of Lightstorm done on paper, wood, and stone. Those few hooks not given to the Teller held bags with requests. People asked the guardians (or maybe Lightstorm) for healing, for love, for the return of husbands and wives, for work or promotion, for passing grades in summer school.
When Jennie first started work she’d been shocked to discover that the Servers would sometimes take out such requests and read them. They would sit in the staff room and pass on the wilder things people had written. After a while Jennie thought she should try it. She didn’t want to sit there like an idiot while everyone traded stories. She’d chosen a long message only
to discover that the overlarge writing alternated between explicit descriptions of sexual torture and wild pleas to ‘drive the Malignant Ones out of my head.’ For a week Jennie had stayed at home, terrified to watch TV for fear of news bulletins about mass graves. Nothing had happened.
Jennie’s job required her first to wash down the husk with sanctified cleaning fluid. Then she adjusted the alignment. Buttons allowed the statue to turn on its base. Using instruments and a table of dates with alignment numbers Jennie made sure that the face looked in the direction of the rising sun. Finally she recited a company prayer of appreciation and burned a fake stock certificate made out to Arthur Sweetwind. Then she logged the place and the time and moved on to the next one.
It wasn’t a difficult job, certainly not an intellectual one. Jennie sometimes thought it beneath her—Mike had thought so. Yet whenever she told herself she should look for something else she never got beyond glancing at the want ads in the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Her first service brought her to Founders’ Street, despite its name a small road in the north of the city, near the Hospital of the Inner Spirit. It was a pretty area, with old two and three storey houses, and a lot of trees. Though the company had chosen the street because of the slight elevation compared to the surrounding area, they still had had to mount the husk on a metal frame tower to get it above the trees.
Jennie always liked this stop, especially in Summer. She liked climbing up and looking down at the branches, at the rooftops, the rich lawns with their precisely cut bushes. You could even see a glimpse of the river, a patch of silver among the green. She parked the car at the foot of the tower and grabbed her small bag of equipment from the seat next to her. She was about to get out when she decided she’d better take along her Allan Lightstorm cap to protect her head against the sun. She wasn’t sure she liked the cap. She’d got it the week before, when she and a couple of the other Servers had gone shopping one evening after work. It seemed, well, indecent almost, the way they’d superimposed Lightstorm’s face over the emblems of the Founders. ‘Old-fashioned,’ she accused herself and stuck the thing on her head.
Unquenchable Fire Page 4