Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  He said, ‘I will imagine something soft. And strong. And vast, vast as the inside of my body.’ A sea appeared round the base of the mountain. Waves beat at the rock, the sea shouted at the mountain. First Teller called the mountain Vision and the sea Chaos.

  The Teller climbed. The stone tore pieces of his skin. He said, ‘I will make something from these pieces of myself.’ A piece of skin dropped between his legs. A snake slithered over the rocks. It showed First Teller the best places for her hands and feet. Pieces of skin fell to either side. On the right ran a dog, on the left a cat. The dog barked and light leaped from his mouth to show the Teller the way. But when First Teller stopped, and closed her eyes, the cat breathed darkness over her body and First Teller slept.

  Blood dripped from First Teller’s wounds. Three drops rolled down the rock to the sea. The first became a dolphin, the second a shark, the third a crab with the secret of First Teller’s birth inscribed on its back. The crab dived. It dived to the bottom. First Teller never saw it again.

  First Teller said, ‘The air needs creatures, too.’ She breathed in all directions. The winds sprang out from their hiding places behind his teeth. He spat. A crow flew above his head.

  Finally he reached the summit. She stood on top of the mountain.

  First Teller closed his eyes. She closed her eyes. She pressed her hands against her eyes. She sat down. With the dog and cat on either side, with the snake around her feet, with the crow on his shoulder, he sat down and closed his eyes.

  He stayed inside. For longer than ten breaths of the universe he stayed behind his eyes. She travelled. She crossed the boundaries. She set down the landmarks, the names and the faces, he broke the fire and scattered the pieces. At the end, when all the places had crumbled, First Teller stood in a tunnel. The walls curved black overhead, and at the end shone a white door.

  In two steps the Teller reached the door. Both hands pulled it open. She stood at the bottom of Chaos. He breathed the water of the sea. One leap took him to the base of Vision. A second carried him to the peak.

  The dream Teller sat before the silent body. They examined each other’s faces, they touched the arms and the legs. When they made love they joined together.

  With a sweep of her arm First Teller spun out the sky. A stamp of his foot created the Earth. His right eye sprang from his face to become the Sun. Her left eye became the Moon. His thousand teeth became mountains, her million hairs the trees. Milk from her breasts formed the seas, saliva from his mouth the rivers and lakes. First Teller shouted. The skin opened and the bones lifted into the sky. They became the stars and planets. They copied the Sun and the Moon, they were small but they became large when they escaped the Earth.

  Finally the Teller gave his penis to the dog, her vulva to the cat. The cat set the female organ like a gate. The dog pried open the door. He opened it and creatures came through. They crawled or flew or swam. At the end a woman and a man fell through the gate. Someone had pushed them and they fell through the gate. The gate closed behind them.

  The world frightened them. The Sun burned them, the night froze them, the creatures around them shrieked and growled and hissed. The woman and the man held each other and tried to hide behind a rock. First Teller appeared to them. They saw his face in the sun, they heard her speak in the rain. ‘You are my children,’ she said. ‘I have made this world of dreams and you to celebrate it.’

  In this way First Teller created existence from her imagination. He created it from his body. It will not last. The creatures will die, our children will die. The light will grow tired, dust will cover it. The mountains will lie down, the rivers and seas will forget their places. They will drift apart into the grey air.

  From this weariness a new First Teller will awake. He will awake. She will touch herself. A new world will begin.

  3

  Jennifer Mazdan sat on a pink plastic folding chair in Gloria Rich’s living room. By her side, on a narrow metal stand, stood an empty coffee cup and a plate with a half eaten piece of Founder’s Cake. Jennie poked at the cake with her plastic fork. If only Gloria would buy the Sara Lee version instead of trying to bake her own. She examined the size of the remains, hoping she’d eaten enough so that Gloria wouldn’t ask if she was ill. Shifting in her chair Jennie made sure not to moan, or cry, or shout, or do any of the other things she wanted to do (such as going home), but instead look eager and attentive. Or at least not so depressed.

  Excerpt from THE LIVES OF THE FOUNDERS: Miguel Miracle Of The Green Earth

  After the liberation of Vera Cruz, Miracle Of The Green Earth (in beauty and truth lives his name forever) saw that the people needed to break with the past. He sent each one a dream in which a yellow dog whispered, ‘Break down the storehouses, burn the food, the world begins today.’ When the people woke up they piled all their food in the streets and burned it. Then they ran to destroy groceries, silos, even the crops waiting in the fields. When they had finished they stood swaying in the morning rain, listening to the wind blowing through their empty stomachs.

  At that moment a tribe of Malignant Ones, on the run from the Battle of Dallas, infected the people with a terrible hunger. The people shouted against the Founders. ‘We were better off as slaves,’ they cried. ‘At least then we had food. How can we sing without bread?’

  Sadly, the Founder shook his head at the weakness of the people. He stamped his foot and a chasm opened in the town’s main shopping street. When people climbed down to investigate they found pieces of cake neatly wrapped in green and white striped paper. The first bite took away their hunger, the second satisfied them completely, and the third sent joy flooding through their bodies.

  Months later, when the last cake was finally eaten, the Revolutionary Council of Vera Cruz wrote to Miracle Of The Green Earth, politely asking if he would please restock the chasm for them. They considered themselves entitled to this request because of the sincere efforts they had made to find every piece. The Founder answered only with a letter about the ‘honour of commercial realization’ and the nutritional value of stoneground bread. The people tore their clothes and lay on the ground, but they knew there was nothing they could do. They planted crops and imported food from nearby cities.

  Meanwhile, other communities, jealous of Vera Cruz, burned all their food supplies as well. They then sat down and waited for Miracle Of The Green Earth to rescue them. So many people died as a result of this and other attempts to repeat some saving event that the government issued Proclamation 29, banning the practice of ‘forcing the Founders.’

  Months later, when food once again filled the shelves of Vera Cruz’s kitchen, someone remembered the Founder’s instruction about ‘commercial realization.’ The city organized a contest for the closest replica to the wonderful cake that had saved them. A carpenter won the contest with a mixture of honey, nuts, and cocoa wrapped in green and white paper and boxed in a miniature coffin painted with a picture of Miguel Miracle Of The Green Earth, who had died the week before the competition.

  ‘Founder’s Cake’ they named it. We still eat it today.

  It wasn’t enough she’d missed the Recital, now she had to sit in Gloria’s living room (central air conditioning turned up too high as usual) and listen to everyone talk about it. All over the hive meetings like this were going on, each one representing a totem block. Jennie and the Riches lived in the Raccoon block, a designation originally revealed to the hive’s builder, Jack Abramowitz of the Abramowitz Construction Company, when he was praying for guidance for his bulldozers. According to Mr Abramowitz he’d laid out a plan of the hive and the different animals had all come up to leave their droppings on the appropriate spots on the map. Jennie was never sure what to make of this story, but whether it was true or not, her house belonged to the Raccoons.

  The kids all loved their totem. Every Hive Day, and at school Enactments, they would dress up in coonskin hats and long striped tails. For the adults, being a Raccoon meant serving mock coon pie (which Jennie d
etested) on official days, drinking spring water (which Jennie loved) one day a week, and rigging up the official Raccoon poster whenever the block association came to your house for a meeting. The poster, faded now from its original electric colours, showed a line drawing of a fat-bellied raccoon with exaggerated eyerings, a too-long tail that curled into a question mark, and roller skates strapped to his oversize hind paws. He stood upright with his armlike forelegs bent like a runner’s. In flowing pink script the name ‘Racy Raccoon’ appeared at the bottom.

  Originally the poster had come from the publicity department of a television show, but when the first families moved into the hive, Joanna Weston (now dead five years) had found the thing folded up among her daughter’s pile of comic books. ‘It’s an omen,’ Joanna told her husband. ‘We were meant to use it.’ The Riches now lived in the Weston house. Whenever the rota system brought the meeting to Gloria’s place she would say that the poster had ‘come home.’ ‘Don’t you think his smile gets bigger whenever he comes here?’ she’d said to someone just as Jennie was entering the house.

  The living room was crowded, filled with neighbours in folding chairs. Gloria and Al and Jim Browning sat on a grey velvet couch. In front of them a glass coffee table held the small silver tea service with which Gloria always served Al, as if he was a visiting dignitary. Endless knick-knacks and souvenir totems from family pilgrimages clogged the bookshelves above the television.

  Gloria leaned forward. ‘Jennifer,’ she said, ‘did you say something?’

  ‘No,’ Jennie said. ‘Nothing. It’s okay.’ She jabbed a piece of cake and stuck it in her mouth.

  ‘You’ve hardly said a word,’ Gloria went on. ‘You know everyone should contribute at a block meeting. Or don’t you feel that?’

  ‘I’ll say—what I experienced. Later.’ Jennie wondered, as she did so often, why she was so weak. Her mother would have put Gloria Rich in her place long ago. Her mother would have shrivelled Gloria into a tulip bulb and planted her in the sacred grove on top of the hill.

  Jim Browning said, ‘Leave her alone.’ He’d been speaking when Gloria interrupted. ‘She’ll speak when she wants.’

  Gloria said, ‘A block can’t work unless everyone contributes. Especially after a Recital. Especially after such an important one. Though of course they’re all important.’ She frowned, worried she might have said something improper. ‘The point is, we’re a spiritual family, not just a collection of houses. A spiritual being.’

  Next to Jennie, Karen D’arcy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. Jennie glanced at her. She was never sure what to make of Karen. Like Jennie, Karen lived alone, had done so since her divorce a couple of years before Jennie and Mike had entered the hive. Karen dressed up more than most women Jennie knew; even now, with everybody else in shorts and tank tops, Karen wore a fake-silk sleeveless blouse, a loose skirt of a soft blue and white cloud pattern, and high-heeled sandals. Jennie used to think Karen came round to make passes at Mike, but even with Mike gone Karen would sometimes drop in for coffee. Coffee and complaints about the men who were mistreating her. Jennie suspected that Karen saw her as a compatriot among all the happy families. Her disastrous love life sometimes seemed to Jennie a warning of what could happen to single women.

  ‘No, really—’ Gloria said, ‘Jennifer chose not to sit with her fellow Raccoons—’

  ‘She had to work,’ Karen said. ‘She couldn’t get there till late.’

  ‘I’m not condemning her. Not at all. It’s certainly not my place to condemn another Raccoon. I’m sure she can add to our experience.’

  Jennie’s voice came out louder than she planned. ‘I told you, I’ll speak later.’ She blushed at her own anger.

  Gloria sat back. ‘I didn’t mean anything,’ she said.

  ‘Can we go on?’ Jim asked.

  Karen whispered to Jennie, ‘Good shot.’ Jennie tried not to smile as she watched Karen pretend to sip her cold coffee. There was something very attractive about the way Karen’s black hair threatened to come loose from the sloppy twist she’d fastened with a wooden slide.

  Jim was saying, ‘Nobody’s claiming it wasn’t a powerful experience. If you ask me, it was a little too powerful. More like terrifying.’

  ‘Even terror has a place,’ Carol Blinker said. ‘Didn’t Joybirth say, “We swim in terror like a freezing sea”?’ Carol thought of herself as a scholar, though she mostly read popular histories from Reader’s Digest or Time-Life. Jennie had tried to talk to her a few times but had never got past Carol’s distrust of Jennie’s two and a half years of college.

  ‘Well maybe the Tellers swim in terror,’ Jim said, ‘but they don’t have to drown us in it.’

  Al Rich said, ‘Are you saying we should dictate to the Tellers what Pictures they choose and don’t choose for the Recitals? Is it our place to “tell the Tellers”?’ He smiled at the quotation, then puffed on his pipe. The bowl was carved into a likeness of Allan Lightstorm’s face; as the tobacco flared into life the Teller glowed with health and happiness. According to the manufacturer, each time you smoked the pipe you extended the Teller’s life span by ten seconds, twenty if you used sanctified tobacco from the SDA plantations in Virginia. Jennie was sure Al used sanctified tobacco.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Karen said, ‘I’ll bet his telling “The Place” upset you as much as the rest of us.’ While Karen may or may not have made passes at Mike, Al definitely made passes at Karen.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ he said, then smiled to show no hard feelings. ‘I’ll always receive with joy, and, I hope, genuine humility, whatever Picture the Tellers choose to give us. And not just Allan Lightstorm either. Who are we to criticise or rank the Tellers, let alone the Pictures?’

  Karen said, ‘Al, you wouldn’t know genuine humility if it ran up and spanked you.’

  Gloria reared up. ‘Karen!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Al said, laughing with everyone else, as if his day reading had said ‘disarm by rueful acknowledgement.’ He puffed on his pipe while his other hand boyishly pushed his wavy hair from his forehead.

  I’ve got to get out of here, Jennie thought. She considered locking herself in the bathroom, but she’d done that less than half an hour ago. Gloria watched that sort of thing. Once, at another meeting, she’d come knocking at the bathroom door to ask if Jennie was all right, and Jennie had rushed out, almost forgetting to flush the toilet.

  Marcy Carpenter, wearing shorts so tight her thighs ballooned out from them, leaned forward. ‘Getting back to what Al said, I think we do have a right. To criticise, I mean. Everyone knows we’ve asked for years for someone like Lightstorm. And we showed our appreciation, didn’t we? With all those parades and everything? He didn’t have to tell…that one. He could have told, I don’t know, “The Woman Who Walked On The Sun.” Everyone would have liked that.’

  ‘I’m sure they would have,’ Gloria said, ‘but that’s hardly our choice.’

  ‘Of course not. But—’ She stared down at her lap. ‘You know how you all felt. From the Picture, I mean. Sort of scared and a little sick? Well, I had my period—’

  ‘Marcy—’ Her husband Sam tried to take her hand, but she pushed it away.

  ‘Let me finish,’ she said. Everyone was looking at the floor, or their empty coffee cups, all but Jennie, who found herself staring at Marcy’s half crumpled face. ‘I had my period, and when—the end, you know—’

  Again Sam tried to break in. ‘Please, honey—’

  ‘Let me finish!’ she shouted. ‘When the lion—when she’s cut open, and, you know, the blood—I just—it was like—oh, shit.’ Unable to finish after all, she let Sam take her in his arms. They got up and walked to the door, not saying goodbye. Marcy tripped on Ron Wilson’s foot. ‘Goddamnit,’ she said. Someone snickered. As they were leaving, Sam turned, as if about to say something, then just gestured with his head. He was about to close the door when his wife slammed it. Jennie thought how she could have got away like that if only
she’d thought of it first.

  ‘You see?’ Jim Browning said. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  Karen said, ‘You sure don’t let a little sensitivity stop you, do you?’

  ‘There must have been other women, uh, like Marcy. And what about women who were actually pregnant? Wasn’t there something on the news a couple of years ago about some woman in Cleveland? She was expecting twins and went to the Recital where the Teller did “The Place.” She got such a shock the twins came out monsters and had to be put in that zoo or whatever it is they’ve got up in Boston.’

  Jennie missed the reactions to this information. Certain thoughts were nesting in her head. The Picture—some of the things it involved, a desert, a woman giving birth to monsters, her blood disfiguring the Earth—In some funny way they resembled pieces of Jennie’s dream. Wasn’t there a desert at the end of the dream somewhere? And didn’t her body crack open, with milk pouring out of her? The opposite. Her dream was the opposite of Li Ku’s Picture. In the story the woman’s blood kills the land, and in the dream Jennie’s milk—and her body falling apart—brought life. She remembered the coloured fish and the birds flying out of her womb. In some way, her dream answered the story. That’s why no one ever understood it, she thought. I hadn’t had my dream yet.

  Jennie whimpered. It was bad enough to think of her dream as somehow caused by Lightstorm’s telling, but an answer…‘The Place Inside’ was one of the Prime Pictures, not some little training story, but a Prime Picture. Found in the Days of Awe. By Li Ku Unquenchable Fire. Even the Living Masters, people like Allan Lightstorm and Greta Airsong, even they didn’t dare to change one single word. Or gesture. Or noise. Nothing. So how could Jennifer Mazdan, college failure, annulled marriage, shame of her mother, think that her dream could in any way—

  Jim Browning said, ‘You all know I’ve got a cousin who works in the main New Orleans hall.’

  ‘Really?’ Diane’s husband Mark said. ‘How come you never told us before?’