Mothersnake pulled down the power lines, she gathered the wires into a whip and beat the city until a hurricane of electricity scorched all the buildings. But when the committee dared to look up our ancestor was gone.
Mothersnake disguised herself as an old woman. She rubbed clay all over her body to thicken it and hide its light. She moved into a building in the centre of town, under a huge sign that flashed all night long, ‘Mothersnake, forgive your children.’ She took a job as a nurse in a hospital and when the doctors attached bottles of food to people’s arms Mothersnake spat into the liquid. Her hatred swelled the sick bodies until they burst in their beds, giving off a smell that drenched the sheets. When a woman gave birth Mothersnake scratched a mark on the baby’s face so that the mother became sick every time she looked at it.
Still it was not enough. In her dark room under the sign, Mothersnake took bits of wood and stone and glass and feathers. Carefully she constructed dreams which flew across the city and into the mouths of her sleeping children. When morning came, the dreamers gathered together in the park. They announced the Unity Party Church of Ultimate Salvation. They dressed in red shirts and black boots, they marched with gold and red banners to city hall. When they chased away the mayor and the city council, they ordered a camp built outside the city, with high fences and towers filled with guns, and giant ovens to burn the people the Unity Church selected in its weekly lotteries.
Seven years the terror continued. Mothersnake no longer needed to mark the babies, for none of them dared to leave the womb, but closed their hearts inside their mother’s bodies. Then one day, in the hospital, Mothersnake heard the other nurses talk about a baby, the first baby they’d seen in twenty-two months.
Mothersnake hurried to the nursery. Her fingernail was already sharpened. But when she opened the door she heard singing. It had been a long time since anyone had dared to sing in the city. Mothersnake stood there, her fists clenched, her teeth gleaming with the urge to slice through the infant’s neck. The song grew louder, the walls of the nursery shook like a frightened cat.
Mothersnake fell to her knees, her nurse’s uniform burst into flames, the clay disguising her body cracked and fell to the floor. It was him, it was his voice, it was him, it was Dustfather, he’d come back for her, it was him.
But when she ran to the child she discovered its mouth closed, its throat still, its eyes a bright yellow and coated with images from Dustfather’s song. It wasn’t the baby singing, but something black and shrivelled that hung around its neck. Mothersnake looked closer, she saw a severed finger all curled and shrunken. She tore the red silk cord binding the finger to the child and held it up. The song grew louder and the walls of the nursery split down the middle. Mothersnake pressed the finger to her forehead and when she took it away the bone had straightened, the old skin had turned to ash that blew away in the wind of Mothersnake’s exultation. ‘He’s alive,’ she whispered, and the sound boomed through the streets like an avalanche. ‘He’s alive!’
Piece after piece they recovered. An old man had found that first finger while digging for clean water in his daughter’s backyard. Now the Parks Department tore up all the streets, they sent squads of unemployed students to rip down the walls and tear up the foundations. Slowly they put the puzzle back together. The police cordoned off the middle of the island. The Fire Department burnt down the buildings to make room for the reconstruction. Doctors and art teachers argued over proper placement while teams of engineers directed the crane operators who lowered the pieces into position.
Piece by piece they put him back together. All except one. That precious part of our ancestor, that pump that had filled his sister with the milk of the stars, that single organ was never found by all the searchers.
Only the Hooded Man knew what had happened to it. He had changed to a rat to follow it along the sewer, to a jellyfish to follow it through the sea. A dozen times he had tried to bite or sting it, but whenever he approached it it began to sing and a wave of terror carried the Hooded Man away from it.
The organ washed up on an island in the southern sea. A group of fisherwomen lived there, women who had left their homes years before to avoid the cold men their families had chosen for them. When they found Dustfather’s organ some of them had spent so many years away from men they could no longer remember what this strange thing was that changed shape and leaped into the air. Some of them, however, could still recognise it, and they told the others. The women passed it around. Soon they were all pregnant. Eighteen months later those who remembered how such things used to work worried that too much time had passed. But the others didn’t care. They happily patted each other’s bellies and curled into giant balls to roll down the hill together into the waves. Finally they gave birth to a tribe of girls with dark green skin and golden eyes that could make a rock weep just by looking at it.
Once they’d given birth the women gathered together to decide what to do with Dustfather. Some of them suggested returning it to the sea; the songs it sang every sunrise made them long for a distant city they’d never seen. They might have done it if the Hooded Man had not disguised himself as a butterfly to flutter about from ear to ear, whispering that if they released the life-giver it would generate an army of men with iron hands and stone feet to smash their island and kidnap their daughters. So the women dug a pit, they buried our father in a carved chest filled with flowers and leaves.
Mothersnake howled with rage. She had tried everything, she had gone through every house searching through the cabinets and under the mattresses, she had placed ads in newspapers and magazines: ‘Woman seeks precious remnant of husband. Reward for all information.’ Nothing. While the Hooded Man danced alone in his cell in the abandoned prison Mothersnake began to look hungrily at all the people lined up behind the police barricades to watch the reconstruction.
The city councillors noticed the way Mothersnake’s lips parted as she watched the boys and girls who brought her baskets of flowers. They saw the gleam of her teeth. They called a meeting, they met behind the carousel.
The next morning all the young men gathered in the meadow ringed with brown stones. These were the same stones the Hooded Man had once vomited from his belly while Mothersnake danced around him with her skirts held up. The men lifted their penises, they stretched the foreskins. The women crawled along the grass with volcanic knives held in their teeth. In a great flash of darkness the knives slashed down, the men shouted with joy.
The substitutes cannot last. In the furnace of our mother the assembled foreskins curl and break away from each other. Over and over again our ancient father must restore himself. For without him to calm her, Mothersnake will devour us. And so, all weddings, this wedding, all weddings must end with the black knife, the fall of the blade, the foreskin carried to the roof of the hall at midnight and thrown into the wind. The wind carries it to our ancestors, they will join it to the others surrendered over the years. In love all men become their father, in love they enter the warmth of their mother.
And on the wedding night, when the wife has helped her husband to the bed covered in flowers, he will sing to her, he will sing the wordless melody Dustfather sang to Mothersnake in the nursery. With the song he becomes our father. Wounded, her father enters her.
Again, and again, and again, the broken circle joins together.
9
For several weeks after her failed abortion Jennie managed not to think about the foetus that had barged its way into her womb. The nausea had receded, as if it had made its point and was now content to leave her alone. Either her breasts no longer hurt as much, or she had become used to the tingling pain. If she put on her underwear before looking in the mirror she could avoid seeing the enlarged nipples or the line that was starting to appear between her belly button and her pubic hair. Her stomach stayed flat—well, not entirely, but she was sure any swelling came more from water retention that anything…more serious. She seemed to just want to drink all the time. Some days she would ge
t through a whole Thermos of coffee before lunch.
She did make sure to keep herself busy. Movies after work, the annual company picnic, neighbourhood barbecues on the weekends. She avoided Karen. She avoided her mother. She worked hard, checking every alignment twice so that she usually finished the day late, and very tired.
Meanwhile, the world rolled along, like a barrel with Jennie sealed inside it. The government brought out its new economic plan to bring down inflation. The President appeared on television looking her most innocent, her most transported by divine inspiration, under a huge portrait of Rebecca Rainbow. No one paid much attention.
Auto accidents in the mid-Hudson valley declined in the first two weeks of September by seventy-five per cent. The state police could give no explanation for this surge of safe driving. The Dutchess County sheriff’s office, however, described it as a sign of heavenly sanction brought on by Sheriff Lauren’s programme of compulsory prayer and once-a-week fasting for all deputies.
In Boston, Massachusetts, a men’s secret society, the Teeth of the Tiger, performed ‘Insulting the Lady’, one of the five forbidden Enactments. Dressed in masks and rags they chased women off the streets, battering them with huge rubber phalluses. The action went on for nearly two hours, with the knowledge (and according to some, participation) of the local police. At the end, two teenage girls, sisters, were dragged from their houses and raped. Feminists marched through Boston and other cities along the east coast. Ms. magazine described the event as a ‘degeneration into the evil shadow of the Old World.’ The mayor of Boston declared Teeth of the Tiger an illegal organisation, and promised a full investigation.
Allan Lightstorm made the cover of Time once again. He announced his retirement at the height of his career, saying only that he planned a pilgrimage ‘to the centre of the voice.’ His head Teller, Judith Whitelight, confirmed that Lightstorm had found himself under great spiritual pressure the last months. The mayor of Poughkeepsie wrote to Time that Lightstorm planned to settle along the Hudson after his journeys. A columnist with the New York Times hinted that Lightstorm had rebelled against the hypocrisy of the modern Tellers. She cited a ‘rumour’ that Lightstorm had stood on the roof of the Fifth Avenue Hall with his arms out like Adrienne Birth-of-Beauty on her sky-scraper and shouted down the Founder’s 3rd Proposition: ‘Hypocrisy is the lock that bolts shut the door.’ The New York College of Tellers issued an immediate denial of any tensions or dissatisfaction. Privately the College President threatened to ‘subsume’ the paper’s advertisers into his Tellers’ Pictures, promising to place them in ‘unfortunate’ contexts. The paper printed the columnist’s apology on the front page.
In Anaheim, California (‘Navel of the Revolution’) a riot broke out at the Anaheim Rainbow Mall. A group of twenty-two women, some naked, some wearing cloaks made of black feathers, ran into the department stores and dress boutiques, tearing clothes and kicking over the models in the windows. Before the police could arrive another fifty or so women had joined them, stripping naked and battling their husbands or friends who tried to stop them. Arrested and brought before the court the original twenty-two claimed ‘diminished responsibility due to ecstasy’ induced by two weeks of dancing and chanting in honour of the Chained Mother on a hilltop overlooking the mall. The mall distributor testified he had heard them on his way to work but hadn’t petitioned for their removal. Sales had fallen in recent months and he’d hoped the chanting would induce a Devoted One to bless the mall.
Jennie knew about none of these things. She’d stopped reading the paper and only watched the news on television so she would know what people were talking about. Whenever something about the Tellers came on she found herself getting up to wash the dishes or set out her clothes for the following morning.
Shortly after the Day of Isolation, September 21, a low front brought enough rain for the county government and the Tellers’s Halls to declare the following Sunday Earth Day. For most of the week Jennie considered staying home. She wasn’t sure why. She told herself she just didn’t feel like going. On Friday evening Karen D’arcy came tapping at her screen door, suggesting they go together on Sunday. Jennie could hardly look at Karen. She knew Karen hadn’t forgotten Jennie’s refusal to do the banishment. Now Jennie bent forward on her couch, turning a dish of chocolate cake with both hands. ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘You want me to pick you up?’
‘I’ll come and get you,’ Karen said quickly. ‘If that’s okay.’
Jennie shrugged. There was silence for a moment, then Karen hugged her. When Jennie didn’t respond Karen stood up. ‘I guess I better go sit home like a good romantic jerk,’ she said. ‘You know who might call.’ Jennie had no idea who but she nodded. ‘See you Sunday,’ Karen said, and let herself out.
By tradition the Tellers didn’t take part in Earth Day. No sweepers would come through the neighbourhoods, there were no special guests or parades or statues. Earth Day was a ‘private’ Enactment, one held by the people and not their deliverers.
With the mass facilities of Recital Mount unavailable, the county designated various sites as ‘celebratory centres.’ The centre for Glowwood Hive was a hillside in Marion Firetongue County Park overlooking the Hudson. For four days teams of high school students uprooted whatever wild grass had grown at the bottom of the hill, then laid down narrow planks along the hillside as makeshift seats for the adults who would watch the parade of children fling themselves in the mud.
Squeezed in between Karen and Mike Chek Jennie remembered how she used to love this Enactment as a little girl. With no park nearby the neighbourhood would reserve a spot in the Palisades National Park across the river. The journey always took longer than the celebration itself, but Jennie never minded, at least not while her father was alive. She remembered sitting in the car in her tree spirit costume, leaves painted on her face, twigs sticking up from her shoulders, while Jimmy sang to her and Beverley winced under the onslaught of popular music. Finally they would arrive, and Jennie would run from the parking lot to where marshals were organising the children. Then came the parade, the chanting, the roll in the mud. Sometimes, Jennie would get so excited from the costumes and the shouting, she could almost hear the Earth rumble faintly back at her.
Sometimes. Almost. Faintly. In the Days of Awe the Earth, freed by the Founders from the gag tied on her thousands of years ago, used to roar up at the children and the adults watching them. The noise was so powerful it could blast the children right out of their bodies to flutter around the fields until the Devoted Ones could show them the way home again. Jennie had seen old newsreels of boys’ and girls’ bodies stacked up in bunk beds waiting for their residents to return.
It shocked Jennie when the Shouting of the Names began, shocked her because after all the Earth Days she’d attended she’d completely forgotten this calling on the Mother to bless the community. All around her people had taken out chains of beads, some as elaborate as jade or even pearls, others just wooden lumps, and now they’d begun to finger them as they shouted out the thirty Names of the Earth’s attributes. How could she forget this? She didn’t even have her beads; she remembered now that she’d thrown them in a drawer the day after her failed abortion attempt.
With her hands together and her fingers moving as if she was manipulating a set of beads too small to notice (‘tiny rubies’ she could tell people—a family heirloom) Jennie joined her voice to the roar of the hive. And then she stopped. Very deliberately she stuck her hands in her pockets and held up her head with her lips pressed together. Next to her Karen kept glancing sideways. And Carrie Perkins behind her—Jennie could hear the outrage in her voice. Screw ’em, Jennie thought. Screw every one of them.
On the way home, in Karen’s car, neither of them said much as they waited to leave the parking lot. Without any children to pick up they were one of the first to go, but there was still a long queue ahead of them. Jennie yawned. She noticed Karen’s eyes darting to her, and she wondered what she’d done this time. N
o hand on the mouth. Pregnant women covered their mouths when they yawned, making sure no Malignant Ones slipped inside to attack the baby. She shook her head. Let them try. If anyone needed protection it wasn’t the baby.
She slumped down in the seat and watched the windscreen wipers. Occasionally her body jerked like a marionette as Karen would charge the car forward, then brake to a sharp stop inches from the car in front of her.
The jerking movement reminded her of something. She couldn’t place it at first. She focused on the movement, the thought of strings, a puppet—‘This is for you, little puppet.’ She had it. Her father. The day he gave her her copy of The Lives. She saw him as a thin man, with a narrow moustache and straight blond hair. In her mind he wore blue-striped seersucker pants and a loose matching vest over an open-necked white shirt. Jennie didn’t know if he actually had dressed that way the day he gave her the book. She knew those clothes from a photo she used to look at years after his death, when she was a teenager. She would hold the picture and stare at it, sometimes talk to it, tell it what she had done that day, or what was happening in school. In the picture Jimmy Mazdan was running up Mothersnake Hill in Central Park with his daughter mounted on his shoulders and her arms wrapped so tight around her daddy’s head she could never figure out how he could see. ‘The Jimmy and Jennie show.’
Karen’s car jumped like a frog touched by an electric prod. Jennie said, ‘Can’t you drive a little more smoothly?’ She blushed, too embarrassed to apologise. Slightly nauseous, she opened the window but closed it again when the rain leapt at her face.
‘Sorry,’ Karen said, ‘it’s the traffic’ Silence again. Karen turned on the radio, then turned it off again. ‘Did you like the Enactment?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ Jennie said. ‘It was great.’
‘Jennie,’ Karen said, ‘can I ask you something?’
Jennie turned her head towards the window so Karen wouldn’t see her grit her teeth. ‘Sure,’ she said.
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