Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  ‘Then you didn’t see it?’

  ‘No. What was on?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it, either.’

  ‘Jennie, what’s this about?’ There was a silence as Jennie tried to think of an answer, then Karen said, ‘Are you all right? Should I come over?’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. I just—I just thought maybe they’d run something about…’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘About the guy?’

  It took a moment before Jennie realised Karen meant the rapist who’d attacked Jennie on the Day of Truth. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Maybe someone else. Or something.’

  ‘Do you have some reason—’

  ‘No. No, I was just wondering.’

  ‘Maybe you should go to the police. It’s not too late. I’ll go with you.’

  ‘Come on, Karen, it’s more than two months.’

  ‘You know, Jennie, your real problem is that you just can’t handle it. I’ll bet you haven’t done that Enactment yet.’ Silence. ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh Jennie, you must. That’s what’s keeping you from going to the clinic’

  She knows, Jennie thought, then realised she’d already told Karen that she hadn’t gone. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  ‘I wish you would just do the banishment. It’s so important. It’ll free you from all the garbage.’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Jennie said.

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jennie said.

  ‘If you need any help or anything, just call.’

  ‘Thanks, Karen. Bye.’

  ‘Bye, Jennie. And don’t worry. It’ll all be fine. Do the banishment.’

  ‘Goodbye. Thanks.’

  As soon as Jennie had hung up she wished she was still talking. How long could it be before people found out? What would happen when the TV made her a star? Would they track her down? Run her picture with the caption, ‘Do you know this woman?’ She imagined the mayor or the city manager (or whoever had arranged the Allan Lightstorm circus) using Jennie to ‘put Poughkeepsie in the minds of the public’ as the mayor had said about the Teller’s visit. Maybe they’d arrange performances, with children or high school students acting out the roles of trees and bushes springing from the lawn to block someone whose shoulders proudly wore a papier mâché mask made from a model of Jennifer Mazdan’s head. She had a brief vision of her mother offering to bring a band to play a suite self-composed in her daughter’s honour.

  Jennie counted that night as one of the worst she’d ever endured, on a level with Mike’s leaving her, or the night before the annulment hearings, or even the night after her father died so many years before. Her thoughts became a slosh of helplessness, painless methods of suicide, rage against her mother, the baby, and God, terror at her blasphemous thoughts, memories of Recitals she’d attended, and anger at the Tellers’ failure to ‘clean it all out’ as she put it to herself.

  But as it always does, the night passed. Praise Our Mother for her blessed gift, gravity, and all such institutions that keep our lives bound in safe monotony. Sometime towards the dawn Jennie thought she heard a soft voice, rather reedy, singing to her. Must be the birds, she thought, with their insensitive cheerfulness. But it sounded so—human, though with a strange, distant quality. The sound, very faint, calmed her and she felt her muscles slipping loose from the net of tension that held her awake. Consciousness washed off her and she fell asleep smiling.

  Sometime in mid-morning a kid playing ‘catch’ threw the ball wide over his friend’s head so that it banged against the front of Jennie’s house, just below the bedroom window. Jennie woke with the thought that she was late for work and Maria would scream at her, the bitch. Then she remembered the television people. Could she just stay home without phoning? If she killed herself it wouldn’t matter if she lost her job.

  Jennie wobbled to the phone, staying as sleepy as possible so her voice would sound sick. Ridiculous. She could just make some reference to the failed abortion. By now the paper would have it. That would cover anyone who missed the TV report. But when she reached Maria the supervisor only said, ‘Ms Mazdan. How nice to hear from you. Where are you? Puerto Rico?’

  ‘I’m home,’ Jennie said stupidly.

  ‘Lovely,’ Maria said. ‘Maybe you could drop in on us sometime. When you’re in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘Can I have the day off?’ Jennie said, instantly annoyed that she lacked the courage to report herself sick.

  ‘Of course, of course. Funny, though, I seem to remember you took yesterday off as well. We’ve got a custom here at Mid-Hudson. Now and then we like to announce our vacation days before we actually take them. It helps a little in arranging schedules.’

  ‘Uhh, Maria, could I have the rest of the week?’

  ‘Of course. Painting your house?’

  ‘No, I’ve, uh, got something to think about.’

  ‘To think about.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fine, Jennifer, fine. And here’s something else to think about. You report for work, next Monday, 8 o’clock sharp, or I’ll kick your tits halfway to Wappingers Falls. Got that?’

  Jennie said ‘Sure,’ as if Maria had asked her to pick up a bottle of milk on the way to the office.

  ‘Goodbye, Jennie,’ Maria said, and hung up.

  Jennie put the phone back on the hook. Scratching herself she went back to the bedroom and put on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans before she pulled open the curtains to wince at the bright day.

  The paper. The paper should be there. She ran outside without shoes and grabbed the Poughkeepsie Journal from the box. Instead of a bewildered Jennifer Mazdan standing outside the Centre of the Unquenchable Fire, the front page photo showed the President walking with the Chinese Premier alongside the pool fronting the Founders’ Memorial. Jennie flipped through the pages. Nothing in the first section, nothing in the second…

  No, there, page thirteen. ‘Clinic Gets New Foliage.’ With a picture of the willow tree, the article described the new ‘beautification programme’ at the abortion clinic. Jennie read the article twice. Was it a cover-up? Was the station keeping the story for itself? She read the piece a third time. It didn’t actually say the city had provided the new trees. It just implied—

  The Agency. The Agency had stopped the story. They didn’t want her to become a star. How? What did they do? Threats? Send some Benign One—maybe they just wiped clean the tape and let the TV people draw their own conclusions. Jennie was almost as angry as she was relieved. They had no right to manage her life. Arrange all the details. A twinge of nausea stirred her and she made a face, as if to scare it away. It went. If only they’d take someone else. Gloria. She’d give them Gloria. Let Gloria’s womb boil with colour. She’d love it.

  I’m not like that, she thought. I’m not like Gloria. Or my mother. I want my own life. If only she could call some number and complain. Back in the house she opened the front curtains. In the street Gloria’s older boy, Al, Jr. was bending over a baseball bat with the Gotowski boy from down the block. A car waited for them to get out of the way. With a Boy Scout knife Al Jr. pricked his finger then dropped a little blood on the thick end of the bat. While the car honked at them the two boys covered their eyes and said a short prayer.

  Jennie frowned. You didn’t do that, make blood offerings in public like that. They could at least have waited for the car to pass. They were just flaunting themselves. God, what the hell difference did it make? ‘Damn,’ she said out loud as the wildness from the night before began to rise in her again. The nausea came up to join it, and Jennie thought how she wanted to scream, it was all so miserable. But then that faint singing came again, so cold and faraway, like a bird flying over a field of ice. Jennie moaned. Why couldn’t they have taken Gloria? It would have been so much better. Somehow, though, she no longer cared as much, not right now. The singing continued, and Jennie smiled.

  Outside, Al Jr. and Bobby Gotowski lo
oked up, as if they thought someone had called them. They shrugged and walked to the side of the road. The driver, so impatient a moment ago, now hesitated slightly before he drove his shiny blue car around the corner, in the direction of the Sun.

  THE NON EXISTENT MARRIAGE OF JENNIFER MAZDAN AND MICHAEL GOLD

  1

  Jennifer Mazdan dropped out of college in her junior year, after failing an exam in her major, True History. The exam paper had asked her to delineate ‘the redemptive significance’ of Jaleen Heart of the World’s exorcism of the Pentagon. Alternatively, Jennie could have identified ‘structural similarities and functional differences’ between the creation of New Chicago after the northern war, and the Revolution’s official starting point, the Parade of the Animals in Anaheim, California, when children in animal masks (mostly ducks and mice) ran through the streets burning the offices of the secular government.

  Since Jennie couldn’t see any connections at all between the two events she decided to answer the first question. For most of the two hours she stared at her paper or pretended to make notes in case the proctor was watching her. Finally she wrote down a clumsy retelling of the exorcism, describing how cracks appeared in the walls, and muddy coloured birds flew out of the computers which then issued proclamations of their loyalty to the Revolution. When Jennie got her paper back Dr Hadauer (‘hate-hour’ his students called him) had written, ‘Very naive, shows no serious thought on subject. True History is a little bit more than The Lives Of The Founders. I question your aptitude for this study. F!’

  For the next two days Jennie cut her exams and spent her time in her bed wrapped in a quilt (a present from her room-mate’s mother) and reading The Lives. She loved this book, not just the text and pictures but this very copy, with all its bent and torn pages, its orange juice and coffee stains, the drops of blood she’d sprinkled from her fingertips when she was thirteen. Her father had given her this book on her sixth birthday, long before she could read all the words, let alone understand the stories. When he died, six months later, Jennie began sleeping with the book inside her nightgown against her chest. Later she decided a Benign One must have guided her father the day he bought the book for her while she was still so young.

  Two days later, at her room-mate’s insistence, Jennie went to see her faculty adviser. The interview didn’t last long. An underweight art instructor who fidgeted with the locks of his attaché case, Dr Lindholm wanted to go home and scrub his skin with a hard brush and cold water. The penance would prepare him for an Enactment that night at the faculty club, one designed to provoke his chairman to offer him tenure for the following year.

  They talked for several minutes, and then Jennie said, ‘I don’t know, maybe I don’t belong here.’

  ‘Well,’ Dr Lindholm said, ‘lots of students do drop out, take a leave of absence.’ He asked how her parents would react.

  ‘My mother. My father’s dead.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It happened a long time ago. A Malignant One killed him during the Revolution Day parade. It leaped down his throat while he was singing and wrapped itself around his heart.’

  Dr Lindholm pushed back from the desk. An awful omen, he thought, to have a student tell him a story like that just before his tenure Enactment. He squinted at her, as if she herself was a Ferocious One disguised as a student. He imagined her mouth opening in a wide grin to show huge teeth, sharp and blinding white. He squeezed shut his eyes for a moment. In control again he said, ‘And how would your mother react?’

  ‘Okay, I guess. She didn’t want me to go to college anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She wanted me to be a musician. Or a painter.’

  ‘What? Do you play something? Or paint?’

  ‘I’ve tried. My mother plays the saxophone. A lot of her friends paint.’

  ‘I see. I’ll tell you what, Ms Mazdan. Why don’t you go home, go to your dorm, and think it over. Then if you decide you can’t, you need a leave, come back to me and I’ll sign the papers.’

  Jennie shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Fine then. Well, if that’s all then—’

  Jennie got up, clumsily holding her coat and canvas bag against her chest. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll bring you those papers.’ She shuffled to the door. But then instead of leaving she turned round. ‘Sometimes—’

  ‘Ms Mazdan, I do have my work.’

  ‘Sometimes I get this really funny feeling. Like I can never do anything I really want, or even know what I want, because something’s taken hold of me. And it makes me do things for its own reasons and not for anything to do with me. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll pass.’

  Jennie stood there a moment. Finally she turned and left. As she walked down the hall she could hear behind her Dr Lindholm chanting. As if delivered from danger, he was reciting the names of the Founders. ‘Alexander Joybirth, Mohandas Quark, Danielle Book Of The People, Maryanna Split Sky, Jan Willem Singing Rock, Li Ku Unquenchable Fire…’

  Excerpt from THE CONSECRATION OF A BOOK, Enactment performed on a child’s thirteenth birthday, in honour of The Lives Of The Founders:

  When lifting a glass to your mouth, or a fork to your mouth, or when finished dressing in the morning, or when throwing a ball at the opening of a game, or when beginning or ending the construction of a house, or when beginning or ending the writing of a book, or when leaving work at the end of the day, or when burning dead leaves, or when burying a parent or a sibling or a child, or a pet, or when swimming in the direction of the sunset, it is proper to say,

  WE REMEMBER THE FOUNDERS.

  For several weeks Jennie walked around the city or stayed in her room watching television. One day, during one of her walks, it began to snow. She took refuge in a temp, office, where she filled out a form. Two weeks later a phone call woke her up at 8:30 to send her off to the Sacred Rainbow Costume Distributors to help put together orders for the coming equinox parades. After several weeks Jennie moved on to consumer surveys in department stores, and after that a long stint processing personal ads for an intellectual newspaper.

  The Summer passed. Jennie tried to think about returning to college. Autumn came and went and she stayed with her agency.

  On March 9, twelve days before the officially designated Anniversary of Creation, Jennie reported to work at Bloomingdale’s, her current assignment. For a week she’d been dressing in a silver smock and mask, and offering female customers a free squirt of ‘New Moon perfume—to release your Hidden Wonders.’ The job tired her but she liked watching all the rich women from behind her mask—a little like one-way glass—and she liked standing in front of the famous ‘endless road’ escalator. But when she arrived, her supervisor told her that a group of purificationists had smashed the guardian husks along the escalator railing and the police had cordoned off that whole wing of the building.

  ‘Well, what should I do?’ Jennie said.

  Her supervisor lifted her eyes to the images of paradise painted on the ceiling. ‘How should I know? I’ve got enough troubles without doubling as an Oracle.’

  Jennie took the IRT subway down to Astor Place where she transferred to the crosstown bus. When she reached her mother’s street she stayed on until the last stop, then walked across the highway to the wooden pier sticking out into the river. Years ago, Jennie used to come here after school. She’d sit on the wooden benches, reading a book or just staring at the old black freighter docked on the side of the pier. She liked to imagine she could see the secular mayor and his gang in their pilgrim disguises trying to escape the Revolution, and the wall of water that kept their ship from moving. According to The Lives Of The Founders, when the world runs down, and the Unchained Mother breaks the curve of the night, then the Founders will return and board this boat to travel among the stories until a new First Teller creates the universe. According to the book they will come as ‘bones without flesh’ which is why the proper term for a
skeleton is a ‘refugee’, in honour of the Founders and their final journey.

  For a while Jennie stood at the edge of the pier, looking at the Freighter, or else across the river at the eternal clouds covering the Broken City. When she turned to leave she bumped into a man standing with his hands in his pockets. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not much of a day for sightseeing’ he said, casually moving to block her from getting past him.

  Jennie made herself look up and smile at the plain face and thick brown hair of a man in his late twenties. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and smiled back at her.

  ‘Thank you?’

  He laughed at her confusion. ‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I guess so,’ she said, furious at her awkwardness. He was okaylooking. He had wide shoulders, though not too thick, not like those guys who worked out all the time. His nose was a bit large. But his mouth was nice.

  ‘I don’t know this area,’ he said. ‘You know a good place?’

  ‘There’s lots of coffee shops.’

  ‘Just as long as it’s not full of artists trying to show off.’

  Jennie laughed louder than she had in months.

  Sitting for hours in the Glowood Diner, in a red vinyl booth under a picture of Mirando Glowwood’s ‘Miracle of the Chocolates’ (for two quarters in a slot a lump of chocolate would pop onto the table from a hole in the painted hand), Jennie found herself babbling about the last year. While Michael Gold told her about his crummy apartment, or his job as a messenger, or his ambitions, Jennie kept interrupting him, going on about temp work, about her mother, about school, about The Lives. Only once did she step out of the rush of laughter and history. She asked Mike if he often came to look at the black freighter.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve never gone there before in my life.’

  She stiffened. ‘Are you just saying that?’

  ‘Why would I say that? Look, I’m a messenger, right? Usually around this time of day I’m so busy running around town I wouldn’t have time to look at the freighter if the Founders themselves came marching on board.’