Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe you should. Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do, and I know how awful the police can be, but this guy could go after someone else.’ Jennie said nothing. ‘Just think about it, okay? I’ll go with you if you want.’ A moment later, she added, ‘Do you want to talk about it? Where did it happen?’

  ‘At one of my services. One of the guardians.’ Worse and worse.

  ‘The bastard. The goddam bastard. At a sacred site.’

  ‘Look, Karen can we not—’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Really.’ She jumped up. ‘You want more coffee?’ Karen took the mugs into the kitchen. When she returned, Jennie had bent even further forward with her hands clasped between her knees. She took the mug and murmured her thanks without looking up.

  Karen said, ‘There’s one thing. Whether or not you go to the cops. Have you done a banishment?’

  Jennie shook her head.

  ‘Yeah, I thought maybe…Look, Jennie, I know you don’t want to even think about it. But a banishment will help. That’s what the Enactment is for. To clear the rape out of you. A rape—a rape upsets everything. It invades—Someone like that, he just leaks garbage. You’ve got to clean it all out of you.’ Jennie said nothing. ‘The women’s centre can do the enactment with you.’ Shit, Jennie thought, I could have called the women’s centre for the name of the clinic. Karen went on, ‘It won’t hurt, and they won’t ask you any questions.’

  Jennie said, ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. The banishment works only on the rape. Not the foetus. You’ve got to do it, Jennie. It’ll help the abortion.’

  That’s what that idiot doctor said, Jennie thought. Different enactment, same stupid idea.

  ‘In fact,’ Karen said, ‘even if you wanted to keep the child the banishment would help that too. Purify it.’

  ‘I’m not keeping it. I don’t want it.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I didn’t mean you should keep it. I sure as hell wouldn’t. I just meant—I just think you should do the Enactment.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Don’t think about it. Do it. Do you want me to go with you?’

  ‘No. No, I’ll—look, can’t you just tell me where to go for the abortion?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Will you promise me you’ll go to the women’s centre?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘It’s on Teller Street. It’s called the Centre of the Unquenchable Fire. You know, after Li Ku.’

  Jennie made a face. ‘That’s right,’ she said. Why couldn’t she remember it? For a moment they were both silent, thinking of the Great Abortion, in the last days of the Old World. A thousand women had gathered on an island to pray for the Army of the Saints. When they arrived, they burned all their clothes, refusing to wear anything made in Old World factories. The secular government decided to take revenge on these women, using their nakedness as an excuse for sending in an army of police. When the women became pregnant from the mass rape they prayed for guidance. One of them fell over with a vision that a great flame had burned up a tree, releasing a wave of perfume from a rock hidden in the trunk. Because of this vision they went all together to see Li Ku Unquenchable Fire (in beauty and truth lives her name forever). The Founder told them a picture—it was not recorded which one—and then she touched the women’s bellies and released the foetuses from their imprisonment.

  After the women had returned to their island Li Ku stayed in the place she called the Home of the Non-born. When she returned she reported that the foetuses lived in their own stories, considering their existence far superior to the world they called ‘the land of decay’.

  As so often the thought of a Founder (even Li Ku) lifted the women out of their personal swamps. They sighed—simultaneously—then laughed. Karen looked at Jennie, then took her hand. ‘Funny,’ Karen said after a moment, ‘that Li Ku should have been the one to do the abortion.’

  ‘Why is that funny?’

  ‘She found “The Place Inside”. And if anyone ever needed an abortion it was She-Who-Runs-Away.’

  Jennie slid loose her hand. She anchored it on the mug of tepid coffee.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen said.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I said something wrong, I guess. Mentioning the Picture. That was really stupid. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jennie said. ‘Look, um, thanks. For helping.’

  ‘I didn’t do very much.’

  ‘You gave me the name. For some reason I couldn’t think of it.’

  ‘Maybe because you haven’t done the banishment.’

  ‘Please, Karen.’

  ‘Remember, you promised me.’ Looking at Jennie a sadness filled Karen. She wished Li Ku would come back. The Tellers just didn’t burn like they used to. There was nobody left. Nobody who could make you melt.

  Jennie said, ‘I hope things work out. With that guy Jack.’

  Karen shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal. Either he’ll call or he won’t. I’d probably be better off if he didn’t.’

  They stood for a moment, then Jennie said, ‘Well, I better be going.’ At the door she turned and hugged Karen, a kind of payment.

  ‘I’ll come round,’ Karen said. ‘And if Gloria or any of the others bother you, you tell me. I can handle those creeps.’ Jennie nodded and left.

  The next day Jennie took a vacation day, then called the Centre of the Unquenchable Fire whose receptionist informed her they did not give consultative appointments by telephone. Women who made appointments on the phone, she said, often ‘forgot’ when the time came. She managed to imply that Jennie belonged to this weak-willed community. ‘I’ll come in this afternoon,’ Jennie said, trying to inject some of her mother’s absolute conviction into her voice.

  ‘Whenever you like,’ the receptionist said.

  Teller Avenue ran across the city, from the Mid-Hudson Bridge to the triangle of highways leading into the hills and toward Connecticut. Without thinking, Jennie expected to find the clinic near the river end, among the slightly shabby homes, the ageing apartment houses and small office buildings. Instead, she found herself driving through the midday traffic into the realm of one and two storey houses with small but neat lawns and bright porches. The clinic itself occupied a modernist rectangle of wood and frosted glass. A long narrow lawn, free of weeds, set the clinic somewhat behind the woodframe houses on either side of it. Above the dark red door Jennie could see a small painting, but she couldn’t make out the details. Probably the Great Abortion, or some other marvel of the clinic’s patron.

  She parked the car across the street and got out to stare at the building. Was she doing the right thing? Maybe Karen and the doctor were right, maybe she should do some Enactment or other before taking any definite steps. What would she think about the whole thing years from now? Would she regret denying the dream—the Agency? Not finding out its plans for her? And yet, the thought of that…that fish swimming around inside her…The thought that they could just commandeer her body, like—like some truck carrying soldiers to the front…

  Hesitantly she crossed the street, only to stop again on the far sidewalk. A young woman in jeans and a flowery blouse stepped quietly from the red door. As she passed Jennie she smiled and said, ‘Go on. They’re really very nice.’

  Jennie nodded and took a step onto the flagstone pathway that cut through the lawn to the house.

  A bush blocked her way. About three feet high, its tangled branches and sharp thorns sprawled across the stones. She frowned at it, then stepped onto the grass to walk around it. Two steps to the side, and she turned forward again. Another bush filled the space in front of her. Sweat erupted on Jennie’s face. For several seconds she looked from one bush to the other. Then she fixed her eyes on the open space to the right of the bush. She sidestepped until she could see a bare lawn and beyond it the building, where a couple of people now stood in the open doorway. Jennie held her breath and stepped forward.

  A tree
blocked her. Fat and low, its thick old branches stretched more horizontally than vertically. Around the hump of its roots grew yellow flowers and spiked grass. A squirrel glanced at Jennie then ran down the trunk in front of her feet. She screamed, out of frustrated rage as much as fear, and sprinted to the left.

  She cut around so fast she couldn’t stop when she saw the trellis hung with a prickly vine. The tiny thorns raised little welts on her face and up and down her arms. She began to cry. A blur of noise answered her from the house. Through the trellis Jennie could see a group of people in the doorway, all women, some in lab. coats, one or two in hospital gowns. Someone called, ‘Come on.’ But no one came to get her.

  She got up and walked all the way to the edge of the lawn where a low picket fence marked the border with the house next door. When she looked at the clinic she could make out the painting above the door: Li Ku on her ferris wheel. Jennie stared at the painting as if she expected it to glow or move. She only saw faded wood, here and there chipped by bad weather over many years. She took a deep breath and stepped forward. The saggy old willow that blocked her looked as if it had stood there for years. At the base lay a battered doll in a polka dot dress.

  Jennie got down on the ground to lay both hands on the grass. ‘Please,’ she told the Earth. ‘Let me go by. Please. They shouldn’t have picked me. I’m no good for this sort of thing.’

  ‘Miss,’ said a voice behind her! ‘Could you tell us what’s happening here?’ Jennie looked over her shoulder to see a woman in a pink blouse and yellow skirt bending over her with a microphone attached to a bag at her waist. A few feet away stood another woman, in jeans and a sweat shirt, with a small video camera mounted on her shoulder. By the kerb a man lounged against a truck marked ‘WPKP Action Now News.’

  The woman with the microphone said, ‘What is your name, please? Are you trying to go inside?’ Jennie looked from her to the people in the doorways. ‘Did you come for an abortion? Can you give us a statement?’ The woman with the camera was panning the house and the bushes.

  Jennie got to her feet and the camera swung back to her. She looked at the woman with the microphone. ‘Walk ahead of me,’ she ordered, and gestured at the open space next to the willow tree.

  The newswoman stared into the camera. ‘I’ve just been asked to precede the anonymous visitor into the Centre of the Unquenchable Fire. Will more trees spring up? I don’t know.’ Gingerly she took a step, then another. The camerawoman hovered behind her. The woman said, ‘I seem to have passed the barrier.’

  Jennie stepped after her. A large bush stood between her and the reporter. Small red berries gleamed among its shiny leaves. Behind Jennie the camerawoman whispered, ‘Beautiful. Come on, lady, do another one.’ The reporter stood on tiptoe to make sure her face and shoulders would appear above the bush. ‘There you see it,’ she said. ‘The Great Mother herself in a militant action against one woman’s abortion.’ She cut around the bush to stick the mike in Jennie’s face again. ‘Did you expect this to happen?’ she said. ‘Can you give us a statement?’

  Jennie turned and walked back to her car, followed by the reporter who tried to get between Jennie and the car door. While Jennie pushed the woman aside and fumbled with her key, an old skinny dog shook itself awake from its post under the car. It growled at the camerawoman who scowled at Jennie, as if to accuse her of playing unfairly. When Jennie had climbed inside the car the dog pissed once against the front wheel, then shuffled a few feet away to crouch down on the sidewalk.

  Jennie didn’t hear the Action News woman’s final questions. As she drove away, a car with a couple of men, one of them with two cameras around his neck, nearly slammed into her as it spun sideways to block the road. She kept going, driving over someone’s lawn while the car and the television van ended up blocking each other. They have no right, Jennie thought. She hoped Karen wouldn’t see her on television. Or Gloria. Or Maria. No right.

  Late that night, when Jennie finally fell asleep, she dreamed she lay on an operating table with a group of women holding open her legs. One of them spread Jennie’s vaginal lips and a tree sprang into the air. Its branches broke open the roof of her house and stretched into a blue sky. Higher and higher the tree grew until the dreamer found herself climbing the trunk, looking down on the curve of the Earth. Villages sprang up in the branches, cities, whole planets. Jennie kept climbing until all around her she could see the stars. Creatures climbed alongside her. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear them moving up the trunk. But when she looked down, at the base of the tree, she saw a dead woman, her skin as grey as stone.

  THE THREE SISTERS: A training Picture, told, with some unauthorised revisions, by Valerie Mazdan shortly before her expulsion from the New York College of Tellers:

  Long before the world became so crowded there lived three sisters, Lily, Asti, and a third. One day when they were young their mother left them, setting sail in a small boat out past the waves that washed their green island. For many years they lay in the sun, or watched the coral grow, or called down storms to excite the sea. One afternoon Lily ran with Asti to a high hill in the centre of the island. They dove down into a pool where they stayed for hours. When they surfaced they were lovers. Centuries long they rolled across the sky, locked in each other’s arms and legs. Their sweat mingled and flowed into the sea as warm currents. Caressing the continents the currents ended the ice age that had claimed the world since the sisters’ mother had sailed away in her black boat.

  All this time the third sister sat on a stone bench behind their house and watched the lovers. The wilder Lily and Asti got the more she stared at them, her eyes unblinking, her lips slightly narrowed.

  One morning Lily woke up to find the bed empty beside her. When she went outside she discovered her two sisters side by side on the porch of their house. The third sister said, ‘We have to choose.’

  Lily yawned. ‘Choose what?’

  ‘Our domains. Our territory.’ And she quoted an old song their mother had taught them. ‘One for the Earth, one for the Sky, and one for the Land of the Dead.’

  Lily rubbed her eyes. Then she laughed and took Asti’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. To her amazement Asti pulled away.

  ‘She’s right,’ Asti said. ‘They need us.’

  ‘Who needs us?’

  ‘Our children. The world. We’ve got to become the mothers now.’

  The three sisters went to a restaurant on a pine-scattered cliff overlooking a lake. There they played a game with nine copper coins thrown at the wall. The game went on for a week—you can still see the marks all over the restaurant—and when it ended the third sister had won.

  Lily ran outside. Asti sat on a kitchen stool and stared at her knees. While Asti wondered what their mother would think of them, the third sister leaned back in the restaurant owner’s captain’s chair and considered the possibilities. The Sky would give her a lot of room and a good deal of power; but it was all so empty. The Earth was crowded enough but nothing ever stayed in one place. The third sister knew, or at least believed, that she would love all her creatures in whatever domain she chose for herself. If she ruled the Earth she would have to watch her children snapped away into the warehouses of death before they even learned to recognize her. She knew that Lily and Asti considered her hard, but she believed herself secretly weak, and she feared that if she ran the Earth she wouldn’t schedule enough disease and war.

  But the dead—the dead never leave. She thought of room after room of frozen bodies, the walls and floors covered with layer on layer of bodies, so thick that even if you could reach all the way to the bottom it would still take the lifetime of a star to touch your fingertips to the earliest residents. She imagined their mother arriving some day; the thought made her smile.

  Therefore, when Asti asked her, please, would she choose something, the third sister stared out the window a moment, then said, ‘I choose the Underworld.’ Asti’s mouth fell open. She knocked over a table as she ran outside to te
ll Lily.

  Lily laughed and kissed her sister. The two girls nearly brought down the restaurant with their shouts of joy as they ran up the path. When they got inside, the third sister had already gone.

  The other two choices went very easily. Lily considered the Earth too much work and was glad to take the Sky, while Asti secretly calculated that as Lady of Earth she could take time off to walk along the seabed and search for an ancient woman who had left her daughters.

  So at last the three sisters separated. At first Asti did search the sea. She even mounted grand expeditions, officially to look for lost continents. She never found a thing. After a while she managed to bog herself down with enough bureaucratic mechanisms—tides, climates, volcanic scheduling, radioactive decay—that she could tell herself it wasn’t really her fault that she’d given up looking.

  Lily played. She stretched herself thin enough to roll in the dust between the galaxies, she squeezed herself so tight she jerked gravity out of its compulsions. Now and then, when she would admit to boredom at the same games over and over, she would visit Earth and try to persuade Asti to take a holiday. More and more, however, Asti refused to leave her desk, even for an evening. ‘I’m their mother now,’ she told Lily. ‘They depend on me.’

  And the third sister—Lady of a Thousand Names, as one of her assistants called her—she took to walking endlessly along the cold corridors of her house. Now and then she stopped and stared into the faces embedded in the walls, or pressed her fingers to the mouths or eyes. Never did she get back the slightest recognition.

  She wasn’t alone. She could always find her assistants lounging in the staff rooms. They sat around card tables and made up lists, or they traded stories about ‘appointments in Las Vegas’ and other tricks they played on their ‘clients.’ But the third sister could never stand their tone of voice, or the way they leaned back with their hands behind their heads, or the gaudy costumes most of them affected (strings of skulls, belts made out of teeth and fingernails, leather dresses dripping blood). Most of all she couldn’t stand the way they all fell silent the moment she entered the room, the way they stared at her. She knew very well that they could run the place without her.