She turned her head, then snapped her eyes back to the swaying figure below. ‘Dutyfree? Are you out of your mind? You want to go and buy perfume when there’s a precursor down there?’ Mike sat down on the ground.
For several minutes they watched the beach, while occasional cars whined behind them. Slowly the sky darkened, and the wind rose. ‘It’s going to storm,’ Mike said. ‘We better go back.’ His wife ignored him. He stood up, grabbed her arm. ‘Will you come on?’ he said. ‘I don’t want you getting sick on our honeymoon.’
Jennie pulled loose so sharply she nearly lost her balance.
‘I’m going,’ Mike said loudly. ‘You do what you want.’ He stamped across the road and got on his moped. He wished it was a real motorcycle so he could gun the motor instead of having to pedal downhill to get it started. As soon as he turned the first curve he found the sun shining and the wind gone. He didn’t look back.
When Jennie returned, hours later, Mike was lying on the bed, reading a book. She closed the door and sat down on an armchair with her legs out and her arms dangling over the sides. Behind her the sound of the sea came in over the balcony. ‘Honey,’ Jennie said, ‘It was so beautiful. You should have stayed.’ He said nothing. ‘The waves kept rolling at him, and all these birds, crows or ravens or something, they started circling his head and diving at his face—’
Mike made a noise. ‘You find that beautiful?’
‘Yes, it was like—like they were cleaning him off—’
‘You could use a cleaning off yourself. You’re filthy.’
She laughed. ‘Dirty but horny.’ She began taking off her clothes. Mike said, ‘What do you think you’re doing.’
Still in her underwear she sat down next to him and began rubbing her arms and legs and hips against his side. ‘Knock it off,’ he said as he moved across the bed.
‘Come on, hubby,’ she cooed, ‘it’s fucky, fucky time.’ She leaned over. Her splayed fingers slalomed down his chest while her lips made kiss noises at his face.
‘Like hell it is,’ he said, and pushed her away.
‘Hey,’ Jennie whined. She leaned back to cross her arms over her chest. ‘Some honeymoon.’
‘I just don’t get excited by my wife acting like some cheap whore.’
‘Okay. How does an expensive whore act?’
‘Very funny.’
‘Oh, come on, Mike, we saw a precursor today.’
‘And he sure got you worked up, didn’t he?’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that? That’s what a vision is supposed to do, isn’t it? Do you know how rare it is to see a precursor? And especially at such an important moment. This is the beginning of our life together. It’s an omen, Mike. I want to celebrate.’
‘Spare me the lecture. All I know is, you never get this horny just for me. Maybe I should dress up in animal skins with feathers through my nose.’
‘That sounds great.’ She tried to swing onto him but he shoved her away.
‘Some honeymoon,’ Jennie said. She stood up. ‘I’m taking a shower.’ When she’d locked the bathroom and started the water Mike shouted, ‘Don’t you go pouting on our last night.’
Later, after they’d eaten among the palm trees in the dining room, Mike took Jennie to the hotel’s Island Ballroom. There he stroked his wife’s shoulders and whispered how much he loved her. Later still, while they made love, Jennie tried to remember the way she’d heated up when the birds flew round the precursor’s face and the ocean soaked his legs. And still later, a sleeping Mike dreamed that a trio of Malignant Ones, women with thick vaginal lips and breasts like thunder, slapped mud on his face and dressed him in feathers and slivers of bone. A Benign One, in the form of a park commissioner, set him at the edge of a beach. ‘There,’ he said happily, ‘now you can count the waves until the Revolution comes.’
4
For over a year Mike and Jennie lived in Mike’s studio apartment on 22nd Street. More and more, Mike began to complain about New York. Life was unnatural there, the city crushed anyone who just wanted a normal life. They began to spend more weekends in Poughkeepsie, more recital and Enactment days. They would stay with Mike’s uncle, or with his cousin Carl. Mike would laugh loudly and breathe deeply, as if to demonstrate how the clean air of Dutchess County liberated the body and the soul. For their second Rising of the Light as a married couple, they went to stay with Uncle Jake. On the morning after the solstice, with Uncle Jake sleeping off the post-enactment party, and Aunt Alice in the kitchen stuffing the turkey, Mike told Jennie he had made a decision. They were moving to Poughkeepsie.
Jennie said, ‘But I thought you said there were no opportunities in Poughkeepsie.’
‘I was wrong, okay? Opportunity is where you make it.’
Jennie dreaded telling her mother about this plan to manufacture opportunity in Poughkeepsie. She went alone, in the afternoon. To Jennie’s surprise, Beverley took the news with hardly a pause in her rehearsal (she was practising animal noises on the alto clarinet).
‘Mom,’ Jennie said, ‘I’m moving eighty miles upstate. Don’t you care? Doesn’t that upset you?’ The clarinet barked. ‘Stop that,’ Jennie said loudly. ‘Put that thing down.’
Beverley’s eyebrows jumped. She smiled sweetly as she laid the instrument on a plastic table. ‘Do you want me to act the possessive mother?’
‘I want you to show some interest. I am your only child, remember? And I’m not doing anything you want. Doesn’t that bother you?’
Beverley put an arm around her daughter. ‘Jen,’ she said. ‘As long as you stay asleep what difference does it make if you snooze here in my house or in a cabin in Alaska?’
‘Sleep?’ Jennie pulled away. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘When you wake up—and I don’t know when that will be, but I do know it will happen—it won’t matter where you are. You’ll find your way. That’s the marvel of a sleepwalker.’
Mike and Jennie moved to Poughkeepsie in late January. Jennie tried not to get upset at the chilly prefab house Mike had rented north of town, off Pendell Road. It was only to get them settled, he assured her as she stood in the living room with her coat buttoned, and stared at the worn carpet, the greasy-looking flowered wallpaper. They could start looking for their own house right away, he promised, while he and Uncle Jake unloaded the van Mike had hired. Anyway, Mike said, it was better than that tiny overpriced apartment they’d left in New York. At least it was a whole house.
Not quite true to his promise Mike put off looking for a house for several months, insisting his new job as manager of a branch office of a local travel agency took all his time. He did, however, get Jennie her own car, an old Plymouth Duster, its faded gold paint merging into rust on the fenders and doors. Despite violent vacuuming and a whole day with the door open to winter breezes the car always smelled dirty. ‘Dusty the Duster,’ Jennie called it. She dreamed of riding over the tops of skyscrapers on her bald white-walls. It was Mike who suggested she look for a job. She should meet people, get out of the house. Maybe she could temp, again. But Poughkeepsie only had two temp, agencies, and they expected more skills and experience than Jennie could offer. Half-heartedly she tried lingerie shops, pet stores, and offices, until one afternoon in late Spring she fell asleep in the parking lot of the Breathless Spirit Shopping Mall, with her head on Dusty’s steering wheel. She dreamed of running through the great public labyrinth in Washington, down white hallways smelling of the sea, until she emerged into a garden before a huge rock covered with mud. She scraped the mud away to reveal a round face flooded with light. When she woke up she went into a coffee shop and asked for a phone book. She looked up the address of the administrative offices of the Mid-Hudson Energy Board, thanked the cashier in the coffee shop, and drove to the offices on Route 44, where she applied for a job as a guardian Server. On her application, in the space for ‘previous experience’ she described her dream. She was hired immediately.
While Jennie learned to clean husks, Mike
grew more and more passionate about his own work. Each morning he would get up just before dawn and take out a sheet of sanctified paper (made from old cloth collected from the Tellers’ residences and sold in packs of twenty five in spiritual supply stores). With his Cross pen (a present from Jennie the last solstice) he would draw a stick picture of himself and label it ‘Managing Director of the Journeys of Truth Travel Agency’. Standing naked in the living room he would wait for the sunrise (on cloudy days checking his Bermuda-bought duty-free watch for accuracy), then rub the picture round his chest and face and between his legs before finally burning it with one of the phosphorus matches sold with the paper. He never mentioned these Enactments to Jennie. Lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, she could see him tiptoe about the dark house. Once, she needed to pee so badly she could almost weep, but she made sure to wait a good minute after Mike was back in bed before she allowed herself to get up.
Shortly after Jennie began her job Mike announced that the time had come for them to look for a house. He apologised for putting it off so long, and Jennie had to tell him it didn’t matter. She found herself faking what seemed the proper level of enthusiasm. It worried Jennie that she didn’t get more excited as they travelled about looking at homes and talking to real estate agents.
After several weeks of houses too small, too old, or too expensive, the agent suggested they look at a hive house. He did it so casually, and Mike responded with such a studied manner of someone pondering a new idea that Jennie was sure they’d arranged the performance ahead of time. ‘What do you think?’ Mike said. ‘It’s worth a look, huh? I’ll bet you’ve never even been in a hive.’ He seemed to be bracing himself.
‘I don’t know,’ Jennie said. ‘I guess we can look at it.’ She thought she caught a flicker of disgust pass over Mike’s face; she wished she’d realised she should react more forcefully.
Jennie told her mother about the hive over the telephone. She called late, after Mike had fallen asleep watching the Tonight show. Beverley laughed with what sounded like genuine delight. She suggested that Jennie paint a slash of red across the door so she could recognise the house. She then suggested Jennie paint a slash of red around Mike’s cock, so she could recognise her husband. She added that a permanent marking would be more efficient, and that she knew someone on Christopher Street who was doing the most delicate work in genital scar designs, and she would pay if Michael wanted…Jennie said she had to go to the all-night supermarket and said goodbye to her mother.
They drove to Glowwood Hive, where Jennie felt like someone in a play who’s forgotten the climax as well as her own lines. She watched Mike discuss the house’s construction, she checked for outlets and closet space, they stood together in the bare living room with the estate agent and talked about shopping, taxes, enactment facilities, and walking distance to the local kindergarten.
Only when they’d signed the preliminary papers did Jennie find out they had to visit a ‘touchstone.’ Mike explained it in a booth in the Italian restaurant down by the river, where they’d gone for a celebration meal. Every six months, all the hive adults gathered, all of them wearing some token of their blocks (this was the first time Jennie had heard of blocks as well, but she thought she shouldn’t interrupt). Each person would then cast a labelled stone from his or her front lawn into a wooden drum made from the first tree cut down to clear the land (actually, the agent had confessed to Mike, the drum had been bought in New York). The previous touchstone would then emerge, blindfolded, to spin the drum and open a slot which would allow one stone to fall out. Whoever owned that rock became the new touchstone.
Jennie only half-listened, fascinated by the way Mike wouldn’t look at her while he talked, but only stared at his lasagne as if it represented an answer from an oracle. He stopped speaking, but when she didn’t say anything he went on to describe the holy office. The ‘stone’, as they called him, lived in a special house in the centre of the hive, in the hive’s sacred grove, a circle of trees on top of a hill. All the hives had sacred groves, Mike said, just as they all had stones. The stone couldn’t leave the grove, but he could sit outside among the trees. And it was only for six months. When the lottery had selected the new stone (‘Just a kind of bingo’ Mike said), a committee chained him—not real chains, just plastic, to symbolise his service to his neighbours. Then they led the stone up the hill, past two rows of people, one of them throwing flowers, the other flailing the stone—gently, Mike emphasized—with leafy branches.
During this speech Mike kept stopping and starting, as if compelled to tell everything. She found his honesty touching, the more so since it appeared unwilling. It took her a moment to realise it when he’d finally finished. She said, ‘But what is a touchstone? What does the touchstone do?’
Nothing really, Mike said. ‘He’s supposed to symbolise the unity of the hive. That’s all. He just lives there. The house represents the sacred dimension or something. Access to the Living World. You know more about that stuff than me.’
It suddenly occurred to Jennie that Mike was afraid she would refuse to move because of the touchstone. And why. She asked, ‘Will I have to go live in this grove for six months?’
‘Only if your stone comes up. Chances are you’ll never have to do it at all. Anyway,’ he added quickly, ‘they exempt you for the first two terms. So you’ve got over a year before you even have to think about it.’
‘And we have to go and see this person?’
‘It’s just a formality. Just a ceremony.’
He poured them each a glass of Beaujolais. Grinning, he leaned forward to kiss her lightly on the lips. ‘Let’s do an offering,’ he said. ‘For us and our new home.’
Jennie laughed. ‘Right here?’
‘Sure. We can do it real quiet. No one’ll notice us.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a velvet case.
Excited, Jennie said, ‘What’s that?’
Mike grinned. ‘I figured that this special occasion deserved a better offering pin than that crummy steel thing. Come on, open it.’
Gently she clicked open the top. ‘Mike,’ she said, ‘It’s beautiful. Oh, honey.’ She leaned forward so suddenly her breast knocked over the wine bottle. Mike caught it, though he was laughing so hard he almost knocked it over himself. Inside the case rested a gold needle, three inches long, with a lapis lazuli handle the shape of a bird’s head. ‘It must have cost a fortune,’ Jennie said.
Mike’s smile looked like it could break his face. ‘It wasn’t cheap,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have it for the rest of our lives.’
‘Can we really do it right now?’ Jennie whispered.
‘Why not? We’re private enough here. There was even a court ruling about it once. That a table in a restaurant was seen as a spiritual entity—’
‘You first,’ she said, and handed him the case.
‘Are you sure?’ he said. She nodded. Mike sterilised the needle in a thin vial of alcohol. He held up his left index finger. With a jab of the pin he pricked the tip, and when a drop of blood oozed out he shook it into his wife’s glass. The drop vanished into the wine. ‘For our new home,’ he said.
Jennie yelped as she jabbed herself, then started giggling in embarrassment. She squeezed her finger to make a drop of blood emerge. ‘For our new home,’ she said as she shook the drop loose into Mike’s wine. They touched glasses, then brought them to their lips. Together they said, ‘We Remember the Founders,’ and then drank as much of the wine as they could swallow in one gulp.
That night, they made love more slowly and rhythmically than for weeks. In the middle Mike jumped up and came back with the pin. In two quick jabs he’d drawn blood from both her breasts. A moment later his own thighs were bleeding, and then he climbed up to mingle the offerings. As Mike ran a trail of blood down to her groin Jennie moaned and rolled her head. ‘Blessed spirit,’ she whispered, and wrapped her legs around her husband’s back. ‘Blessed, blessed spirit.’
The estate agent made an appointment for
them on a Saturday afternoon. ‘Good luck,’ he told them and winked. ‘I’ll be waiting for you back here with the papers.’
The sacred grove, a ring of five trees, didn’t look much like the entrance to another world. A small wooden platform contained a plaster-of-Paris ideal hive family: father and mother arm-in-arm, a boy and a girl and a dog dancing in a circle.
The house itself looked like any of the hive houses except for a mural that ran around the walls. A figure, probably Mirando Glowwood, the hive’s patron, raised his arms and shouted as trees and boulders leaped into the air. In another part Devoted Ones (for some reason the artist had depicted them as winged and riding in an aeroplane) dropped gifts on a crowd of residents. The gifts included roast turkeys, refrigerators, and washing machines. They reminded Jennie of a game show on television.
The touchstone that half-year was a retired carpenter named Jack Adlebury. When Jennie and Mike entered the living room they saw Adlebury crouched down with his back to them. He wore nothing but sweat-stained boxer shorts and sneakers without socks. On a stool next to him lay a wooden mask with a ‘joy face’ painted on it: overwide smile, big eyes, round cheeks.
A small man, about five foot five, with thin arms and legs, Adlebury’s shoulders rippled slightly as he sanded a chair with an electric sander. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘I just gotta finish this.’ Whatever furniture the room originally had had was gone, replaced by Adlebury’s tools as well as timber, and all the chairs, tables, and cabinets he’d made since his installation. The place stank of stain and varnish. ‘Almost done,’ he called. ‘Just a bit more. There.’ He clicked off the sander and set it down on the sawdust-coated floor.
Adlebury sat back on his heels and wiped his forehead with an arm covered in sawdust. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
Unquenchable Fire Page 17