‘Then what happened?’
‘I don’t know, it was kind of crazy. I delivered an envelope to someone on Gate Street. Private delivery. Huge apartment. Real chandeliers. Well, this guy there told me my boss had called and I should call back. It seems everything was screwed up downtown. Some procession had come through with sweepers, pronouncers, the whole works. They were opening some grand jury investigation. Insider trading or something. Anyway, he told me not to bother coming back, just take the afternoon off.’ He shrugged. ‘And that’s it.’
‘But what made you go there? What made you stand right in that place?’
He raised his hands. ‘I’ll trace my movements for you, officer. From Gate Street I walked over to the river. Don’t know why. Yes, I do. They were digging up the sewers and Gate Street stank, and I wanted some fresh air. As fresh as you can get in this city. As for my standing behind you, that, I’m afraid, was cold hard calculation.’
‘But don’t you see what a coincidence it all is?’
‘What coincidence? I told you I did it deliberately.’
‘Once you saw me, sure.’ He laughed, and she blushed. She tossed her head, as if to fling off the distraction. ‘I mean, before that. The procession, the sewers…And I should be working now too.’
‘Well, so what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked at her fingers playing with a wrapped cube of sugar. Why did she have to meet someone and sound such an idiot? She said, ‘Sometimes I get this feeling—like something wants to use me.’
‘Use you for what?’
‘I don’t know. It’s—it’s like something gets hold of me and makes me do things. Nothing scary. Or even special. But as if it’s manoeuvring me.’
‘Manoeuvring you? For what?’
‘I don’t know. Into position. Or something.’ She wondered if her weirdness or her dumbness would drive him away faster.
‘Have you gone to a healer?’
She shook her head. How she wished she had never started this. ‘No, it’s not possession. I know it’s not.’
‘Do you get this feeling often?’
‘No. No, I only really got it once before, in college. When I left. It just seemed like—like whatever reasons I had for going home, that wasn’t why I left. I left because something wanted me out of there. Wanted me home.’
‘And now it wanted you to meet me?’
She blushed again, then giggled. ‘I guess it sounds pretty silly.’
‘Silly? Look, if these clever manipulators lined me up to meet you maybe I should give them an offering. Here.’ He placed an ash tray in the centre of the table. He waved his hand in the air. ‘Got a consecrated knife? I could scrape some skin off my thumb and burn it right now. Pay my debts.’
She laughed. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘People will see.’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that? It never hurts to show some visible respect for invisible forces.’
That was how Jennifer Mazdan met Michael Gold. She began to see him every week, then twice a week, then three or four times. The feeling of manipulation evaporated in the excitement of getting to know him. She would not understand it until years later, in a hive kitchen in Mike’s hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York. And by then, Mike was gone.
2
Despite their different childhoods Jennie and Mike shared a great deal. Like her, his father had died, though only a couple of years before. And his mother was strange, just like Beverley—well, hardly just, but she’d left her family when Mike was ten, joining a bus load of pilgrims to New Orleans. There she signed away her civil rights to become a ‘Faceless Worker’ serving the Tellers. ‘You know about the New Orleans halls, don’t you?’ Mike asked, and Jennie looked away. Mike said, ‘Yeah, I guess you do.’ When Mike was fourteen a TV report about the ‘body paths’ showed, for just a moment, the former Ann Gold, naked except for a snakeskin belt hung with plants, miniature daggers, and carved animals. For the next two weeks Mr Gold’s hardware store was full of customers, most of whom kept watching him from the side while pretending to look at hammers and saws. And Mike had dropped out of college, just like Jennie. Well, almost just, for while Jennie had blown away like a fallen leaf, Mike had left deliberately, even performing a severance Enactment at the school’s main gate. For several years he’d worked in the store with his father and his uncle, but a year or so after his father’s death he’d decided he wanted something more. He came to New York, and even if the only job he could get was as a messenger, at least he was on Wall Street.
The day Jennie told her mother about Mike Beverley was rehearsing for a solo performance of her ‘Just A Housewife Suite.’ The whole time they talked, sitting on mats in the rehearsal room under a photo of Jaleen Heart-Of-The-World, Beverley either popped the keys of her saxophone, or else fiddled with silverware, frying pans, or huge clumps of steel wool held together with rubber bands.
The conversation seemed to slide around an impenetrable bubble. When Jennie described Mike’s job as a Wall Street messenger Beverley laughed. When Jennie said that Mike hoped eventually to become a commodities trader, Beverley laughed louder. As Jennie got up to leave her mother asked if Mr Gold could get her a tickertape machine, if they still used that sort of thing. She wanted to try the essentially male sound as a counter against the female rattle of dishes and clothespegs.
A week after Jennie’s declaration to her mother Jennie and Mike went to the Maryanna Split Sky Clinic north of 14th Street near Unity Square. They’d been lovers for a couple of months but Jennie had resisted the formal step of going for pills or a device. That had left them with the only form of birth control that didn’t require a sacred Enactment—Mohandas Quark condoms. Jennie knew that Mike hated the things. He hated the sensation and he hated the idea. She didn’t tell him that she secretly liked the thought that Quark was penetrating her along with her boyfriend. Mike became more and more irritable, finally shouting one night that he didn’t like ‘sharing my cock with another man.’
‘It’s not some other man,’ she said. ‘It’s a Founder.’
His laugh made her wince. ‘Well, I still don’t like it. You ever read those stories of some man who puts on a quarkskin and it grafts itself onto his prick? I don’t want anyone taking me over. Not even a Founder.’
‘I’m sure that would never happen to you.’
‘You sound like you’d like it.’
She was silent briefly, then she said, ‘Well, who wouldn’t?’
He kissed her, holding her face as if he expected her to dodge. ‘I think you mean that. Sometimes, Jennie—sometimes you really scare me. You’re weird. You know that? You’re a lot weirder than your mother. Do you know that?’
At the clinic Mike surprised, and in a way, disappointed Jennie by taking a full and solemn part in the ceremony of fitting her diaphragm. Afterwards, sitting in the park, she accused him of putting on a show for the tattooed nurses.
‘Sometimes you’ve got to put on a show,’ he said.
‘What? You’re not admitting—’
He laughed. ‘I don’t mean because they were women.’
‘And naked. No, of course not.’
‘Naked? They were covered with pictures. They looked like subway trains. “Flowing muscles of truth.” Isn’t that the phrase?’
‘Since when have you cared about truth?’
‘I care as much as most people. Especially when someone’s looking.’ He put his arm round her.
‘Mike,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t feel anything in the mystery—why did you do it? The man doesn’t have to take part.’
He shrugged. ‘People expect it.’
‘What people?’
‘Everyone. Society. If you don’t take part in things like that people look at you strange. And talk about you.’
‘But is that all there is? It wasn’t like that in the old days.’
Mike said, ‘You mean the Time of Fanatics?’
‘I guess so. The Days of Awe.’
He shook his
head. ‘I don’t understand you. I don’t understand anyone who looks back on that and thinks it was great. When I was a kid just hearing about it scared me. I remember once—I must have been about nine—we had this teacher, Ms Bowen. She started telling us all this stuff one day, I don’t even remember any details, but that night I was playing when suddenly I got really scared. Crying wildly, couldn’t breathe—’
‘How horrible. Oh, poor little Mike.’
‘God knows how long it took my folks to figure out what I was screaming about. I just remember them telling me how the Time of Fanatics was over and was never coming back. They had to tell me about ten times before it sunk in.’
She kissed him. ‘Poor little sweetie.’
‘It’s okay. I survived.’ He moved his hands along her shoulders and down her back. ‘Let’s go home and try out your new transporter.’ Jennie hugged him and they got up from the bench.
Jennie and Mike got married exactly a year and five months after they first met. From the moment the engagement was announced, three months ahead of the date, Mike and Beverley began to argue over the wedding. Beverley wanted a ‘contemporary recreation’ of ‘Dustfather and Mothersnake’, the Prime Picture Ingrid Burning Snake had told at the mass wedding held after the liberation of New York. She wanted to hold the event in her own house, planning to rope off the street and fill it with giant terra cotta dolls signifying the characters in the picture. She wanted Mike and Jennie to go up on the roof and throw down more dolls to smash them on the pavement, a ‘direct incarnation’ as she called it, of Dustfather’s dismemberment. She wanted tapes played on loudspeakers all through the house and even in the street. Some of the tapes would recite the tale, but out of synch, with each other, producing an outward chaos, while subconsciously the Picture would ‘drench’ the participants. Other tapes (she never got around to specifying how many tape decks she would need) would blast each other with instruments, cars, trucks, thunder, recorded earthquakes, and wrecking machines (to represent Mothersnake’s revenge on the city after her husband’s death). The noises would slowly build ‘to a density of sorrow’ until the moment of Dustfather’s song in the nursery. Then everything would stop until a single electronic voice emerged from the destruction.
Mike, on the other hand, wanted a traditional wedding, held in a hall, with Burning-snake’s picture recited by a local Teller (he suggested importing his family’s neighbourhood Teller from Poughkeepsie). He wanted himself and the bride painted in simple, literal images of the key moments. He wanted groups of children in giant gold-painted cardboard boxes equipped with horns and ratchets for the children to chase away the Hooded Man whenever his name was mentioned.
Beverley said, ‘If you want literalness so much, if you really want a traditional wedding, maybe you and Jen should act out the Picture. Literally. We can hold a lottery to see which of the guests gets to help Jennie cut off your—’
‘Mother!’ Jennie shouted.
Mike said, ‘Why bother with a lottery? I’m sure you’d rig it so you would win. Maybe you should go and sharpen the knife you used on all your husbands.’
‘Mike,’ Jennie said, ‘please stop.’
The arguments went on for weeks, with Beverley and Mike each making their own arrangements in defiant ignorance of the other.
Jennie refused to discuss her wedding with either of them. ‘Just let me know who wins,’ she told Mike. ‘Okay?’
‘You’ve got to stand up to her sometime.’
‘I don’t want to stand up to her. She’s my mother. And I don’t want to stand up to you either.’
In the end, Mike’s cousin Sophie had a meeting with Jim Pepper, Beverley’s current lover, and the two negotiated a compromise. The wedding would take place in Beverley’s house, but with a traditional Telling. Mike’s family could provide the Teller but Beverley was to compose a march for the beginning and a fanfare for the end. Both compositions, however, would use only acoustic instruments and no tapes. The children would sit in traditional boxes and would be responsible for noise at the appropriate moments. Beverley, however, could supply their noisemakers, an opportunity which helped to deflate any anger or disappointment. They kept the idea of giant dolls, but only two of them, one for Dustfather and one for Mothersnake. Rather than smashing them, Mike and Jennie would crawl inside them for the last stage of the ceremony. ‘How literal,’ Beverley said. ‘How completely literal. Mike must be thrilled.’
After the announcement of the truce Jennie went to her room where she sat on the floor facing a small copper statue on a wooden stand. The statue was of a faceless woman standing with her feet together and her arms crossed over her breasts. Jennie had received the statue on her thirteenth birthday in a ‘joining’ Enactment held in the local Picture Hall on Christopher Street. Now she crossed her own arms on her chest and bowed her head. ‘I thank you, Devoted One, for your devotion. I thank you for rescuing me from my mother and my husband. I know that nothing I have done deserves your precious intervention.’
Six weeks before the wedding Mike entered the East Side Hospital of the Inner Spirit, where a healer in a black hood circumcised him. The hospital invited Jennie to take part by laying gloved hands on her anaesthetised fiancé. She refused, allowing Mike and the hospital administrators to think it was squeamishness. In fact, a strange longing had taken hold of her. She had found herself wishing for a genuine Enactment, the kind they used to hold in the Time of Fanatics, when the bride would actually circumcise her husband and throw the foreskin from the roof. She tried to banish the idea—it was unsafe and barbaric, not to mention ruining the wedding night—but it kept coming back, entering her thoughts at odd moments. She found herself wondering if a gust of wind—‘Mothersnake’s shout’ they used to call it—would lift the foreskin into the sky.
The wedding went smoothly, at least as smoothly as Jennie could expect. They used Beverley’s rehearsal studio, the largest, and emptiest, room in the house. Throughout the ceremony and the party Mike’s family tended to huddle together at one side of the room. By unspoken agreement Beverley’s guests surrendered one wall to them, and once they saw that no one would accost them, the Gold family and friends relaxed. After the ceremony a few even tried dancing to the bizarre music pounding them on all sides. Jennie did her best to divide her time equally between the two sides, propelled from one to the other by a seesaw of guilt.
Mike’s uncle paid for their honeymoon. Mike had told Jennie he wanted to surprise her, and kept secret their destination until they checked in at the airport. Jennie guessed he just wanted to forestall another battle with her mother. She could have told him Beverley wouldn’t care. They flew to Bermuda, and a beachfront hotel full of newlyweds drinking champagne, and dancing, and blushing or laughing at the clumsy innuendos of the comics in the nightclub. When they got back they found postcards from Beverley, who’d gone on a pilgrimage to the messenger towers in the Arizona desert.
3
On their last afternoon in Bermuda, Mike and Jennie rented mopeds and puttered along the cliff road leading to St George. Halfway there, in the middle of the road, Jennie jerked to a stop. Mike shouted and ran his moped up the steep embankment. Then he shook himself loose and shouted at his wife, ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you nuts?’ Jennie didn’t answer. She stood in the road, her head slightly to the side, her hands up near her mouth. ‘Darling?’ Mike called. ‘What are you doing?’ He jumped down.
‘Don’t you hear it?’ Jennie said.
Mike led Jennie to the side, then picked up her moped and leaned it against a tree. ‘You can’t just stand in the road’ he said.
She waved a hand. ‘Shh.’
Now Mike heard it too, a rumble, no, a moan, like someone chanting from deep in the belly. His skin prickled. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘We’re getting out of here.’
Jennie fluttered loose from his grip. ‘Where’s it coming from?’ she said. She walked back in the road, where a car swerved around her. She paid no attention, but a moment later
continued to the narrow shoulder between the road and the cliff edge. ‘Mike!’ she called. ‘Honey, come here. Come here.’
He went and stood about a foot behind her. ‘Don’t stand so close,’ he said. ‘And don’t bend over like that.’
‘Look,’ Jennie said.
Mike squatted down to lean forward on his hands and knees. About seventy feet below them the shoreline curled in to form a small inaccessible beach of sand and stones and weeds. In between the cliff wall and the water stood a semi-circle of five upright stones, each about four feet tall. And in front of them, right at the water’s edge, stood a man. He was wearing some sort of animal skin hung with bright coloured feathers, bones, pieces of metal, and large beads. Long, thin slivers of wood ran through his ears, his wrists, and his ankles. Paint and clumps of mud covered his exposed skin, while some sort of heavy black grease coated his long matted hair. He stood with his arms out, like a scarecrow. The wind rocked him back and forth, and the waves slapped his legs. His moan continued to fill the ground under Mike and Jennie.
‘A precursor,’ Jennie whispered. ‘Oh, Michael, a precursor. How fabulous. I wonder when—he might be from thousands of years ago.’ And where was it from? Local? Did Bermuda have precursors? She’d read the island’s ‘True History’ at the hotel but she couldn’t remember. Anyway, a displacement could come from anywhere. Siberia was supposed to have had a lot of them. South America too. Actually, almost everywhere. For some places it was just further back in time. They had all sorts of Names, she knew. Shamans, medicine men, sorcerers, prophets—all of them yearning for the Revolution centuries before it actually happened. Only a few managed to propel themselves through time. Or maybe they all did, but only a few modern people could see them.
Jennie didn’t care. ‘How fabulous,’ she said again. ‘It’s a sign, honey. For our marriage.’
Mike whispered, ‘It’s some jerk who should have stayed in his own time zone.’ He darted a glance at his wife, but she hadn’t heard. She hummed softly. He waited a minute, then said, ‘Maybe we should go. He could stay down there for hours, days even.’ He couldn’t tell if she was listening. He said, ‘That duty-free shop will close.’
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