‘Did they fly into the air?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s not much more. I just kept watching them. Except—well, I felt so good. I mean, part of me did. A part I couldn’t control. Mostly I couldn’t stand to look at it, all those people eating my daughter. There was even that cheesecake with the chocolate flakes. But a part of me—I can’t describe it. Just—like everything poured out of me. It was like I’d kept…kept all this pain and anger bottled up inside and now it had all drained away.’
‘How long did this glorious feeling last?’
‘Please don’t get angry. It was a vision. How could I control what I felt? As soon as it ended and I realised how horrible it was I started screaming. All these people crowded around, including Alice, who has that dress shop, you know, and I didn’t even recognise her. A couple of cops from the precinct house came and helped me back home. Then someone from the SDA came and gave me a check-up. He said they’d never seen anyone with such a low level. Almost no placement at all. He gave me a prescription for sanctified meat, fresh killed from the mountains, and I had to send Mark to pick it up for me. I could hardly move, let alone eat.’ Jennie said nothing. Her mother went on, ‘I lay in bed for two days, just thinking about it. I couldn’t even practise or do my drawing or anything.’
‘I’m honoured.’
‘Please don’t hide behind sarcasm. What do you think it means?’
‘How should I know? It was your vision. I’m sorry. I’m just upset.’
‘Do you know what I think? I think it means you’ve got tremendous potential and if you don’t use it it will tear you apart. You can’t run from yourself, Jen.’
‘For God’s sake, will you knock off the propaganda?’
‘Can you think of a better explanation? Why do you think the vision came to me? And not you? Because I could give it the proper interpretation.’ Jennie didn’t answer. ‘Jen?’ Beverley said. ‘Are you there?’
‘Look, Mom, I can’t tell you what I think it means. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.’
‘All right. And think about coming home. And think about your potential.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No. Just be careful.’
‘Sure. I’ll watch out for black cats in delis.’
‘I love you, Jen.’
‘I love you too. I’d like to hang up now, okay?’
‘Call me when you’ve thought about these things.’
‘I’ll call you when I’ve got something to say. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’ll call in a few days.’
‘Goodbye, Jen.’
‘Goodbye, Mom.’ Jen placed the phone gently on the box.
She sat down in a dinette chair. Why didn’t her mother just keep it to herself? From the bedroom a game show blared on the television. Jennie had been watching a soap opera when the phone had rung. She thought, What do they want from me? and couldn’t think of who ‘they’ might be. She said out loud, ‘I just want a normal life.’
Maybe she should go see a Speaker. Throw some stones or mix up some cards or something and have it all explained to her.
She got up and walked into the bedroom to shut off the television. Her back hurt and she moved heavily. It wouldn’t work. The speaker wouldn’t see anything. It was just like NORA. No one could tell her anything. She was cut off.
She went into the living room, where she stood looking out of the picture window. Everything looked so normal. Kids playing on the street, a couple of girls on bikes. Alice Kowski was shifting the rocks that bordered the flower patch beside her front door. Down the block Jim Browning was taping a rag doll to his front door. Probably meant to symbolize some gratitude Enactment. She remembered Karen D’arcy saying something about Jim getting promoted.
Jennie gestured at the air with her hand. It all looked so normal. Jim Browning didn’t get calls from his mother about people eating him in a deli. Alice Kowski didn’t fall asleep on the Day of Truth. ‘I just want to be normal,’ Jennie said.
The mail van rolled up. The postman shoved something in Jennie’s box and drove on. She walked out of the house to the road. Junk mail. Advertisements, bills, requests for money from charities she’d never heard of. The Holy Digest informed her she may have already won $25,000 and all expenses paid on a pilgrimage to Hawaii. At least her mail was normal. She grabbed the Poughkeepsie Journal from the tubular paper box and headed back to the house.
Jennie glanced at the headlines as she walked up the driveway. With one foot on the step she stopped. An article on the bottom of the page announced that a hook Enactment would take place at the Plaza of the Saints on the Main Mall. By tradition the newspaper didn’t give the name of the hooker or describe what favour the Devoted Ones had done for him that he should want to hang himself in payment. The way the article was worded Jennie got the impression she was supposed to know. Poughkeepsie politics, she thought. Maybe it was Jim Browning, giving thanks for his promotion. She laughed.
Jennie knew it didn’t matter who was doing it. What counted was the access state. Suspended in the air by wires attached to fishhooks in his back and legs the hooker answered questions with the metaphoric assurance of someone siphoning off information from the Living World. A hooker meant problems solved, advice to the lovelorn, hope for the sick and jobless. All around general help and information. And if anyone needed help—and information—it was Jennie Mazdan.
12:45, the article said. There’d be a mob, Jennie knew. Even if the hooker could tell her anything she probably wouldn’t get close enough to ask. She went back in the house and told herself she should forget it, make some lunch. Instead, she went to the dinette for her pocketbook and sunglasses.
In her car, driving up Academy Street and then Blessed Path Road towards the parking lot, Jennie wondered why she was going to see a hooker when she didn’t think a professional Oracle could tell her anything. Maybe because of the professional part, she thought. Or maybe she wanted to go to someone who’d been in trouble and got through it.
There were no places left in the parking lot. Jennie thought she’d have to give up and go home but she found a space—illegal, but people were even parking on lawns—in a school parking lot by White Street. She hurried back to the mall. By the time Jennie got there a large crowd had gathered. In Poughkeepsie, most hangings took place, not on the aptly named Hooker Avenue, but here in the ‘Plaza of the Saints’, where brass statues of five of the Founders (you couldn’t tell which ones without looking at the name plates) surrounded a sputtering fountain. Concrete benches for weary shoppers formed a circle around the statues. In fact, most shoppers, and most shops, had deserted Main Street for the highway malls and mini-malls. The few people who came into town—for the camera store, or the sacred costume shop, or the Joybirth Pizza Parlour (a copy of the Washington restaurant where Alexander Joybirth ate twelve pepperoni pizzas and announced he’d consumed the zodiac), usually avoided the benches, leaving them to drunks and addicts. Now and then, for political campaigns, or parades, or hangings, the city cleaned the statues, chased away the vagrants, and hung a few coloured streamers on poles around the fountain.
Today a large crowd had spread up and down the mall from the ring of Founders. People stood on wooden benches, others shouted at them to get down, children climbed on their parents’ shoulders. Here and there Jennie saw adults or teenagers wearing masks representing Ferocious Ones, with bulging eyes and fanged teeth. It was the custom to taunt a hooker, at least until the trance took hold. Jennie stood on tiptoe and tried to look towards the centre. She could see the gallows they would use for the hanging, a pre-fabricated metal L. If she squinted she could make out some of the pictures and quotations decorating the side. Wires ran from the gallows arm down to a few feet above the ground, where the hooks moved slightly in the breeze.
Jennie turned to an elderly man in a linen suit. ‘Who is it?’ she asked, but the man only rolled his eyes and turned a
way.
‘Don’t you know?’ a woman said. ‘It’s Mary Landis.’ She added, ‘Sticky Landis.’ A few people laughed.
Someone mock-scolded, ‘Now, now, she was acquitted, you know.’ The laughter got louder.
A man said, ‘Obviously a miracle.’
‘Of course,’ the first woman said. ‘Why else do you think she’s offering herself?’
As Jennie attempted to sidle a bit closer she wondered if it mattered whether or not the hooker sincerely wanted to atone for something. Maybe the power came impersonally. From the action and not the goal.
When the FBI arrested Mary Landis, vice-president of the Poughkeepsie Bird of Light Company, no one expected her to avoid a long prison term. Embezzlement, extortion, bribery of public officials, industrial espionage, even illegal advertising seemed to guarantee a forced penance that would keep her on her knees lighting candles the shape of the Founders for years to come. The Poughkeepsie Journal even ran a report that Landis had kept a harem of teenage boys in a trailer off Camelot Road, south of the city. No one took this last charge seriously, though it brought some TV people up from New York; the State stuck to what it considered a sure case.
The very magnitude of Landis’s crimes gave her her defence. Describing her actions as ‘obscene beyond the point of greed’ the defence argued for Malignant possession. A jealous colleague, a competitor, or an ex-lover must have called down a Being to infect her soul. Besides creating a plausible line of argument the approach allowed the Defence to usurp the Prosecution’s privilege of luridly describing all of Mary Landis’s crimes. The jurors began to lean forward like pets waiting for dinner. So did the Judge.
When the verdict came in ‘Not guilty’ Mary Landis appeared on a local breakfast radio show to announce she would give an offering, her ‘fee’ as she put it, to the Benign One who had guided the jurors to the truth. Most people expected a donation, or a decorous pilgrimage (the Poughkeepsie Journal suggested a trip to the thieves’ sanctuary in Nevada). Some thought she might do a ‘shame Enactment’ dressed as the Being who supposedly had possessed her (various non-accredited Speakers and card and coin Workers offered to track down the demon). Instead, Mary Landis had decided, as she later told Newsweek, ‘to hang myself before the people my possessed soul victimised.’
Jennie had pushed and slid nearly to the front when a noise from the back excited the crowd. Barefoot, dressed in a torn tunic of purple suede, her hair knitted into braids with a miniature totem at the end of each one, Mary Landis came stumbling along a path cleared through the mob. People jeered at her or poked her with sticks. Some threw crumpled papers listing her crimes.
‘I think she’s overdoing it,’ said a woman near Jennie. A man said, ‘Reminds me of Allan Lightstorm.’
A shout signalled the end of the procession. Now Landis stood still while the attendants ripped off her clothes and then began slapping her with globs of mud flecked with yellow glitter. Despite Jennie’s worries a sharp thrill pricked her at the sight of this remnant from the Days Of Awe. In the Revolution’s early days a contingent of Barefoot Workers, the zealots who first recognised and followed the Tellers, found themselves chased by the secular government to the shores of a swamp in Tennessee. Panic began to spread among the Workers, especially those who had just ‘broken the blood’—given up their families for the truth. Refusing to move, the Founder, Marion Firetongue, stood at the swamp’s edge with her eyes half closed as a sign she’d gone ‘travelling.’ Only when the Workers could hear the yelps of the hounds did Firetongue ‘return to her face’ as the saying goes. She smiled at the frantic crowd. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I will tell you a story.’ The veterans sat down, ignoring the approaching dogs as well as the complaints of the newer members. Soon the new ones too slipped into the rapture that marked the Time of Fanatics.
When they emerged the landscape had changed. Behind them, instead of scraggly woods, loomed a wall of rock, from the top of which barked a pack of outraged dogs and confused police. In front of them, instead of the swamp, stretched a field of mud. Still talking, Firetongue stood up and began to stroll across it. The Workers followed as the police emptied their guns into the ooze. Years later, when the government built the Marion Firetongue University Complex, they discovered that the mud could dull the pain of a hanging or one of the other ‘hard’ enactments.
Unfortunately for Mary Landis the original mud was mostly gone by now; what was left was so diluted that Jennie doubted it would help much against the hooks. She hoped Sticky Landis was doing this at least partly from devotion. Cynicism didn’t seem like much of an anaesthetic.
When the attendants finished with Mary she looked like a child’s clay sculpture of a woman. A moment later they scraped bare the spots for the hooks. A cold feeling settled in Jennie’s groin as the silver fishhooks drifted down and then out of sight. Soon a cheer spread out from the centre of the crowd as the body tilted horizontal, then lifted into the air. There were four hooks, two along the spine, one in each thigh. Jennie could see little triangles of skin pulled up through the mud. Though no wires raised the arms Mary Landis held them stiffly out to the sides. With her head up she looked a little like a comic book superhero on the way to a rescue.
The questions began while they were still hoisting her up the gallows. Questions about marriage, jobs, children’s futures or health, which house to buy, where to go on vacation. There were so many, all of them shouted, with everyone crowding forward, that Jennie just stood there, not even sure what she wanted to ask. Has some power possessed me? Is some agent using me? Did someone make my husband leave me? Most of the hooker’s ‘clients’ waved scarves or flags decorated with pictures of Tellers or public shrines or maybe their personal totems. Supposedly, bright colours could penetrate the trance and make sure the hooker heard your particular question. Jennie had forgotten to bring anything. Stupidly she let the crowd push her backward as they shoved to shout their questions and listen for the hooker’s sing-song voice.
‘From the spring in your legs to the knife in your heart.’ (This to a teenage girl who asked if her friend really loved her.) ‘Low, low the water flows, the Sun sings from beneath the bed.’ (Advice on buying a house.) ‘Seven rows of snakes crawl on the tabletop. Show them your face, they will bite out your eyes.’ (A man had asked if someone was after his job.)
Through the crowd people passed out cards or leaflets advertising guaranteed accurate explanations. Some of these touts wore costumes, others had attached flags or pennants to their painted bodies. People used to set up stalls at hook hangings until the competition had become so aggressive the government had banned on-site interpretations.
Only once did someone not accept the cryptic answer. ‘Will my son get well?’ a woman asked, and the mud face squeaked at her, ‘The softest bones snap in the cold. A warm tongue licks off the dirt.’
‘I don’t understand,’ the woman said. ‘Will he be all right? Am I supposed to do something? Is that what you mean?’
The hooker said, ‘A warm tongue—’ and stopped, as if she realised she was repeating herself.
The woman’s husband tried to lead her away, but she waved him off. ‘I don’t understand,’ she pleaded. ‘Can’t you just explain?’ But people were shouting her down or pushing her aside. Finally a policeman threatened to arrest her and she left.
An hour passed, with Jennie still buried in the press of people, and enough questions in front of her to keep the hooker going for a week. She knew she would hate herself if she didn’t at least try. But everybody else sounded so certain, with such simple questions. The noise broke only once. A woman, a girl really, had called ‘Should I become a Teller?’ and the hooker answered, ‘Dead mouths cannot talk to a living tongue.’ For a moment shock moved through the crowd. Jennie thought, It’s true. Everyone knows it. They’re all dead mouths. But then a man asked ‘Will my wife come back to me?’ and the carnival continued.
When the attendants got up from the benches to begin lowering the hooker,
Jennie still hadn’t moved. People pushed each other, even trying to climb on each other’s shoulders as they babbled their questions in the last seconds of the enactment. Disgusted with herself, Jennie wished she’d stayed home. The stiff body, its arms and legs still extended, began its slow descent. Jennie thought, she couldn’t have helped me anyway, I don’t even know what to ask. She decided to leave and try to get to her car before the crush.
And instead startled herself as much as anyone when her voice boomed over the cries of the petitioners. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Everyone turned and stared at her—or so it seemed to Jennie. Why did she have to do that? Why didn’t she just stay home? The hooker wasn’t even answering.
But she did answer. In a voice suddenly deep and cavernous the mudwoman chanted, ‘A fish is swimming in your womb. Your uterus is boiling with colour. A fish is swimming in your womb. The dawn is boiling with colour. A fish is swimming—’
‘Stop it!’ Jennie screamed, then turned and pushed people wildly out of the way, even some who had already stepped aside. A man tried to give her a card; she slapped his arm. And behind her the voice droned on. ‘A fish is swimming in your mud. The Earth is boiling with colour. A fish is swimming in your waters, the sky is boiling with colour. A fish is swimming in your womb—’
7
A Part of a version of THE TALE OF HE WHO RUNS AWAY
He named the mask ‘the head of his father’ and placed it on his shoulders. He began to run, moving like a hot wind across the pebbles and soil. He came to a village and scooped up rocks to announce his coming. Every stone split a skull or caved in a chest, and when he reached the houses he began to use his hands, so that even after everyone lay dead he clutched at the air for victims, while his feet shuffled like an infant dancing in the slippery street.
Finally he tripped and the mask dropped off him into the torn belly of an old man. The boy stared around him. Who were these strange faces? What were all these strange buildings? Where was his house? All around him a harsh whistling sounded, the arguments of the dead as they tried to establish some rule of place on their way to the new world.
Unquenchable Fire Page 10