Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  ‘Very funny,’ Jim said. ‘I just bring him up because it gives me a little special insight none of the rest of you have.’

  ‘Sure,’ Karen said. ‘And a little special status too.’

  Jim said loudly, ‘According to Tommy, the Tellers themselves sometimes argue over “The Place.” And not just because no one likes to tell it. Some of them don’t really understand it.’ There was a silence; everyone seemed to look at the floor or around the room. ‘I mean, that Meaning. You know. Everyone knows it doesn’t make any sense.’ Again no one spoke. ‘Oh hell.’ Jim sat back. ‘You all know I’m right. You just don’t want to admit it.’

  Marjorie Kowski leaned forward. ‘What Jim said,’ she started timidly. ‘About the Meaning. And the Tellers.’

  ‘Maybe we should drop it,’ Ray put in.

  ‘Well, no,’ Marjorie went on, with a forcefulness unusual for her. She tended to prefer rumours to meetings. ‘This is our block. Shouldn’t we say whatever we think? We’re all Raccoons, aren’t we?’ No one argued. ‘Then shouldn’t we say whatever we think?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of suppression,’ Al said.

  ‘No?’ Karen asked.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s just that as Raccoons together we should all help each other to follow the correct ways.’

  Marjorie persisted. ‘But if Jim says even the Tellers talk about it—’

  Diane said, ‘That’s just what his cousin says.’

  Marjorie’s husband Arthur threw a few threatening glances around the room. ‘What’s the matter with you people, anyway? Is this a Raccoon meeting or not? If Marge wants to say something, let her. She’s not going to poison anyone.’

  Everyone looked at Marjorie, who looked at her hands gripping her paper coffee cup. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘this is actually something I’ve thought about before. Actually, I’ve thought about it for years.’

  Jennie felt embarrassed. Marjorie went on, ‘The first time I heard “The Place Inside” I was—twelve, I think. That’s right, because it was the Summer before my last Summer in camp. Anyway, I got very sick. My mother had to call in the healer. There wasn’t much he could do, because he couldn’t drive out what was hurting me since it was a Prime Picture. Well, I got better of course. You know how they say the Picture leaks out of your body and that’s why there’s got to be regular Recitals. But the thing was—Oh, I’m sorry…’ She’d gestured with her hand and some of the cold coffee had spilled on the rug. Now she put the cup down on the plastic stand between her and Mike, and began to dab at the spot with her napkin.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Gloria said, annoyed. She went to the kitchen for a rag.

  ‘Go on,’ Ray told Marjorie.

  Marjorie picked up the cup, quickly put it down again. Her hands seemed confused without the prop. She said, ‘Well, when my mother tried to comfort me, she thought it was the story that had upset me. The healer too. He said it had got trapped in my head and couldn’t travel down my nervous system and that’s why it hurt. But it wasn’t the story. It was the Meaning. I couldn’t—I couldn’t accept that it justified such, such horrible things.’

  Al said, ‘They shouldn’t need justification.’

  ‘Then why have a Meaning at all? I could have accepted that. If the Teller just said, okay, here it is, it’s horrible, but it doesn’t—But they don’t say that. They give us this, this Meaning, this lesson, that’s supposed to, to uplift us or something—And it doesn’t. It just doesn’t.’ She started to cry. Her husband put his arm around her.

  ‘God,’ Mark mumbled. ‘First Marcy, now her. Some Recital.’ His wife hissed at him to shut up.

  Anne Hatter, who with her girlfriend Jackie Schoenmaker was new on the block, said, ‘Didn’t the Meanings come later? I mean, after the Founders had already told all the Pictures?’

  Carrie Perkins said, ‘Yes, of course, but that doesn’t make them any less true. Remember, the Council of Guadeloupe made that its first pronouncement, that the Meanings constituted a revelation as true as the Pictures themselves. “Inseparable and indivisible” they called it.’

  Carrie’s statements often conveyed a schoolteacher quality. Older than most of the others, Carrie and her husband Marty had raised two kids, and when both boys had left home they’d taken in foster children captured from the kid gangs roaming the cities. People resented Carrie, and sometimes joked (when she wasn’t there) of expelling her from the hive on a charge of sanctimoniousness.

  As if Anne’s contribution had given her courage Jackie spoke up. A small round-faced woman, she was wearing a man’s long shirt as a dress belted with a plastic snake. ‘The Teller who first found the “The Place”, she was that really strange one.’

  ‘Well,’ Al said, and tried to blow a smoke ring, ‘you could use that expression. But I don’t think it’s really up to us to make judgements on the Founders.’

  Jackie sighed. ‘I’m sorry I said anything.’

  ‘Now, Jackie,’ Gloria said, ‘Al didn’t mean anything nasty. When you’ve been in the Raccoon block a little longer you’ll realize that.’

  Jackie flashed her girlfriend a look, as if to say, ‘This hive stuff was your idea. I wanted to join the Women’s World collective outside Wappingers Falls.’ She went on, ‘All I meant was it helps us accept how strange the story is when we think of the Teller. Li Ku Unquenchable Fire.’ She shuddered slightly. ‘She tied herself to that ferris wheel.’

  To herself Jennie quoted, ‘“And screamed in such a piercing voice that all the trees split in two and all the windows melted for five miles around the amusement park.”’

  ‘I still think,’ Al said, ‘and I don’t mean this personally, Jackie, that it’s not our job to judge the Founders.’ Jackie shrugged and sat back.

  It was funny, Jennie thought. They all hated it, but none of them wanted to say so right out, not even Marjorie or Jim.

  Mark Chek said, ‘Look, we’re not really getting anywhere. I don’t know about the rest of you loafers but I’ve got to get to work tomorrow.’

  A couple of people mumbled agreement. Anne Hatter gulped down her coffee. Jennie didn’t want to get up until someone else did. But just as Karen was getting to her feet Gloria said, ‘Now wait a moment.’ She smiled. ‘We’re all Raccoons here together, and I don’t think we should be so careless about each other’s needs.’

  ‘What?’ Karen said. ‘Get to the point, Gloria. We’re tired.’

  Gloria sipped her coffee. ‘Well, it’s just that we haven’t given Jennifer a chance to speak. We’ve all been talking so much she hasn’t got a word in.’

  Jim Browning made a noise.

  Al’s face formed some expression or other. He said, ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I think we owe Gloria a vote of thanks. I know I’d feel pretty low if I suddenly remembered we hadn’t given Jennifer a chance to say anything.’

  Karen said, ‘Jennie, you better tell them something or we’ll never get out of here.’

  All the lines Jennie had been rehearsing dropped from her mind. Looking straight at Gloria’s smirk she said, ‘I didn’t go to the Recital.’

  Gloria’s face twisted. Jim Browning said, ‘What the hell?’ and Karen made a low whistling noise.

  Mark Chek said, ‘Great. Now that’s settled we can all go home.’

  Carrie Perkins said, ‘This is not a time for jokes, Mark.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Gloria said. She looked about to cry.

  ‘It’s not all that difficult,’ Jennie told her. She was shaking, but exhilarated. ‘I didn’t go to the Recital. I fell asleep and missed the whole thing.’

  ‘You fell asleep?’ Al demanded. ‘Who gave you the right to sleep during a Day of Truth?’

  ‘Al,’ Gloria said. ‘Please.’

  Al must have thought his wife had grabbed him, because he shook his arm. Pointing his pipe hand at Jennie he said, ‘Do you mean to say you stayed in bed on Recital Day?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. As a matter of fact, I fell asleep by my
car. In the Artbird parking lot.’

  ‘And what about your duty to your block? Did you think of that before you decided you could use a nap?’

  ‘Come on, Al,’ Mark Chek said.

  Jennie crossed her arms. ‘No, I didn’t think of my duty. To the hive or anyone else. I was tired.’ Deeper and deeper, she thought. What would they do to her?

  ‘So you just snuggled up and took a nap?’

  ‘Actually I fell down in a big lump.’

  ‘No wonder we all got so—such little spirit. We were incomplete. We had a big chunk missing from our block consciousness. We finally get a Living Master here and you decided you’d rather catch up on your goddamn sleep. No wonder Marcy got so upset.’

  Jennie said, ‘Don’t you blame me for everything. You know damn well what’s bothering you. It’s that story. You’re furious at Allan Lightstorm. You wish he’d stayed down on Fifth Avenue. But you’re too chicken to say so. And you’re just angry at me because I managed to escape the whole thing.’ She stood up, trying to be graceful, but knocking over her coffee cup. ‘Shit,’ she muttered, and headed for the door.

  Gloria cut her off. For a moment they danced back and forth, Jennie trying to get around her hostess, Gloria sidestepping to block her. Finally Jennie stood still. ‘Gloria, what do you want?’

  ‘You can’t leave like this.’

  ‘I’m only going home, Gloria.’

  ‘You’re a Raccoon.’

  ‘Do you want me to wear my hat to bed? As a penance?’

  ‘The hive loves you.’ Jennie pushed her aside and stepped out the door. As she walked along the flagstone path to the driveway she heard Gloria calling after her, ‘We’re not just a bunch of houses. We’re an organism. We love you, Jennifer.’

  And then Al’s voice booming over her. ‘You’re not going to shit on us and get away with it. We’ll strip you from the hive. You bitch.’

  4

  SOME THINGS THAT HAPPENED AT THAT TIME…

  In the town of Rhinebeck, New York that summer, at the Dutchess County Fair, a group of stunt pilots went up in their Old World bi-planes for the annual antique air show. But instead of twenty minutes of mock dogfights the planes flew for seven hours in the pattern of a figure eight tilted on its side. People on the ground saw faces in the two circles, a man on the right, a woman on the left. The woman told the man stories, and the man laughed.

  In Brooklyn a mugger waited inside the hallway of a building for an old woman he’d robbed and beaten twice before. But when he grabbed her shoulders to throw her against the mailboxes he couldn’t move her, he couldn’t even turn her round. And when he tried to let go his hands stuck to her body. She turned her head, and fire filled her face. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ she said. The mugger’s hands came loose and he knelt down to beg forgiveness.

  Outside Central Park one evening two women from Cleveland, Ohio stepped into a hansom cab for a romantic ride under the Moon. When the driver jerked the reins the horse turned his head and began to speak to them. He told them of the Old World, when people were as empty as forgotten dresses hanging in the closet. He told them how the buildings wept with joy at the coming of the Revolution, and he described how the slaves of the mounted police threw off their owners and pounded down Broadway to greet Ingrid Burningsnake at the Public Theatre. ‘Soon,’ he said, ‘we will march again, in the name of Courageous Wisdom.’

  After the horse had finished his recital the women rushed from the cab, no longer interested in a ride through the park. They paid the driver (who demanded triple the normal cost of a journey) and then gathered up a lump of the horse’s manure. They took it home to Cleveland, where they kept it for the rest of their lives at the foot of their bed in a goldplated box.

  At the 14th Street subway in New York City a group of people were waiting for a delayed train when they saw smoke coming out of the tunnel. They’d been waiting for almost twenty minutes and were getting very angry—angry at the missed appointments, angry at the smell of hot uncirculated air, angry at their own decisions not to walk or take taxis—when they saw the smoke and cried out in disgust at yet another tunnel fire, the fifth one that month. A moment later, before they had even turned to go they saw that the smoke did not come from the tunnel walls but from a train that slid into the station with flames spitting out its windows and clouds rolling up its sides.

  There was no time to run. They pressed back but the smoke rolled down their throats. Instead of burning they felt only a gentle warmth, like late Spring, and instead of choking they discovered they could breathe more deeply than ever before, as if the smoke had dissolved plugs that had stopped them up all their lives.

  They looked and saw that the fire had vanished, leaving the train gleaming brightly. When they stepped inside, the fans—overhead fans with mahogany blades—hummed a song of welcome. When they sat down, the red leather seats sighed with happiness. The train took them wherever they wanted to go, and when they arrived they found they were just on time, even those who thought they were late. People smiled at them, and shook their hands, and said how much they loved them. And everything they ate tasted delicious.

  For two weeks after the recital Jennie avoided her neighbours. She was sure they hated her. She was sure they blamed her for everything. They probably blamed her for Allan Lightstorm driving back to New York as soon as he’d done his purification. For two weeks Jennie ate in a diner after her services, then went to the movies or out drinking with some of the women from work. On the Wednesday after the Recital she went with Marilyn Birdan, another Server, to a male strip show, a weekly event held in a bar in Red Oaks Mill. The main attraction—the programme leaflet described him as a doctrinal student from the hermitage outside Wappingers Falls—wore a mask with Arthur Sweetwind’s picture painted on it. While Mar and the other women stuffed five dollar bills into the band of Sweetwind’s jock strap Jennie had to struggle not to avert her eyes. She hated being a prude, but somehow it didn’t seem right.

  The weekend was the hardest. She had to force herself to go out or she wouldn’t have had any food in the house. She knew she mustn’t keep doing this. If she continued to hide she’d end up scared to look out of the window. ‘If you don’t face them,’ she wrote carefully in her Mid-Hudson Energy assignment pad, ‘they’ll blame you for everything.’

  She remembered the awful months after her annulment, when she never went out except to work or shop. At first, she would watch TV at night, then she found herself afraid to turn it on, in case somebody would hear it and come and knock at the door. And then, after a while, she didn’t even read, because someone might see the light and realize she was home. At the worst point, the night that made her realize she had to force herself out, Karen D’arcy had come to see her, and Jennie found herself lying on the floor holding her breath, even after Karen had left, just in case Karen had only pretended to leave but was really waiting for Jennie to expose herself.

  She knew she couldn’t let that happen again. What would her mother do, she wondered, but she couldn’t imagine Beverley living in a hive in the first place. Or sleeping through the Day of Truth. Confrontation, she decided. She needed to confront them.

  The second Saturday after the block meeting Jennie was sitting in the dinette in a green and pink house dress, staring at her coffee, when she looked out of the side window at Gloria’s place and saw Gloria talking with Karen D’arcy and Joan Bergin, one of the Squirrels from Sacred Mystery Drive. This is it, she told herself, and before she could change her mind she threw on a sleeveless yellow sunsuit and rushed outside.

  ‘Hi,’ she said a little too soon.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Gloria said, a little too rapidly, ‘Good morning, Jennifer. You’re up early, aren’t you?’

  ‘You’re up, why shouldn’t I be?’ Karen grinned at her.

  ‘I didn’t mean—I just mean—I thought you didn’t—I thought you slept late on Saturdays.’

  ‘I don’t sleep through everything,’ Jenni
e said. Good, she thought. Good. Her panic was starting to subside.

  Karen unfolded her arms from across the bib of her overalls to push a lock of hair back from her forehead. ‘We were talking about the universal subject. Lawns.’

  Jennie wished her laugh sounded more natural. ‘I’m afraid I’m not exactly an expert on that,’ she said. ‘Look at that mess.’ She gestured with her hand. ‘I think I’ve surrendered. I’m settling for a nice crop of weeds.’ She felt ashamed for a moment, imagining her mother overhearing this conversation.

  Gloria said, ‘It’s not your fault, Jennifer. We know what a rough time you’ve had the last few years. Still, it would be nice if you could mix some grass in with the rest. For the hive, I mean. It can be a little depressing, you know, to spend all those hours on your hands and knees, digging at roots, and then to look up—’

  Karen broke in, ‘I’m sure it’s the weather. All this mugginess is just right for crabgrass.’

  Gloria said, ‘You act like it’s not possible to grow a decent lawn. Look at that.’ She waved a hand at her green rise of neatly clipped grass. ‘It’s really just a matter of work and prayer, you know.’

  Jennie thought, You bitch. You saw me the other week breaking my back with those weeds. You even stood there and listened to me chanting during the fertiliser offering.

  Karen said, ‘Maybe your house is just blessed.’

  Gloria tried to appear thoughtful. ‘That is possible. Our block’s totem originally came from here, you know.’

  ‘If your place is blessed,’ Joan said, ‘I don’t know what mine must be. I can hardly get a crop of weeds. All I ever get is patches of brown earth. When the Squirrels meet at my place in Summer I tell them to come late so they won’t see my lawn. It’s so embarrassing.’

  ‘What kind of fertiliser do you use?’ Jennie asked.

  Joan laughed. ‘Everything.’

  Karen said, ‘What kind of Enactments have you done?’

  ‘Every kind I could think of. I drove poor Earl and Jimmy nuts one week waking them up at dawn every day for a Candle Parade round the house. And then—’ She looked around, as if someone might be eavesdropping, then leaned forward slightly. She whispered, ‘Then I made Earl go out one night—it was real late, so nobody would see—and, you know, do it on the grass. As an offering to the Mother.’ She giggled. ‘It took him ages. He said he couldn’t get it up for clover and Kentucky blue grass.’ She and Karen laughed while Jennie made a nervous noise and Gloria frowned. Joan added, ‘It didn’t work.’