Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  The woman lifted her head and fixed her eyes on Jennie. Without thinking, Jennie stepped sideways, out of sight, then hurried across the street. As she stepped off the kerb she heard a man say, ‘You can’t stay here. Do you understand? You’ve got to move.’

  On West Fourth Street Jennie passed some German tourists trying to decide between a Cuban or an Italian restaurant. She walked on, past a card store and a second hand clothing boutique. She told herself she should be thinking about Mike, thinking about what she should do. She stopped in front of the basement display window of the Pounding Heart sacred sex shop. Along with the usual sanctified whips (made from bulls sacrificed in the Parade of the Blind in Dallas on the winter solstice), and gold and silver chains, the shop was featuring a special display: blessed enema bags, their gleaming black rubber adorned with gold insignias, stories of purification through flood, and even the face of Irina Speakeagle, who first told the Picture of Dark Mother chained at the bottom of the sea.

  Jennie moved away when she noticed some man watching her while pretending to look in the window. Again she headed west, towards Sheridan Square. At the next corner a man was going through a garbage pail. He wore only a corduroy jacket over a T-shirt and torn pants. He was wearing sandals and no socks. When he found something in the garbage he would stuff it in a plastic bag or else slip it into a jacket pocket. Jennie took a step closer. There was something wrong with his back, she saw, for he couldn’t stand upright even when he paused from searching. Now she saw bumps on his neck and on his hands, hard bonelike things, that made it impossible for him to lift his head completely or straighten his fingers.

  Jennie thought, He doesn’t deserve this. No one could possibly deserve this.

  The man looked up. Before he could speak to her Jennie turned left onto Jones Street. Known mostly for an African restaurant and a bookstore that sponsored the kind of readings where Beverley was likely to accompany the poet, Jones Street was crowded today with a group of well-dressed people holding umbrellas.

  When she came closer she realised it was a funeral. The men and women in the centre of the loose circle held their umbrellas over the corpse of a child lying in its varnished box. The coloured ribbons tied about the boy’s body and draped over the sides of the coffin reminded Jennie of her father’s funeral, with her grandmother explaining how the Benign Ones would catch hold of the ribbons and carry ‘Daddy’ safely to the land of the dead. As the crowd on Jones Street bent forward to begin their ‘lamentations of departure’ Jennie walked around them to reach Bleecker.

  The Agency. The Agency wanted her to learn about real suffering. As if her pain didn’t mean anything. As if she was being uppity to complain about losing her husband. But it wasn’t just Mike. It was her whole life. They’d taken her over. And what about those people? Did they lose their son just so Jennie Mazdan could be put in her place? Couldn’t the Agency see how wrong that was?

  She knew she should head north, that was the quickest way to her mother’s house where she could dry out. Instead she walked south, back towards Sixth Avenue. She stopped for a moment to look through the window of The Benevolent Tongue, the famous restaurant where Jan Willem Singing Rock performed the ceremony known as ‘eating the ancestor.’ Inside, a group of people sat on velvet cushions around an open space in the blue carpeted floor. Soon the staff would bring out the body, various foods formed into a sculpture of a human being, each finger a different spiced meat, the mouth and eyes dripping with sauces. Jennie made a noise. The original ancestor was made of minced meat, vegetables, and bread sticks. The people who took part sang afterwards for three days and nights in a stream of languages. These people here, with their silverware designed by Tiffany’s, and their souvenir bibs with Singing Rock’s picture on them, they looked excited enough, but with the kind of excitement that came from doing something their tourist book had labelled ‘an absolute must during your stay in the Eternal Apple.’ Inside, a couple noticed Jennie looking at them and laughed. Jennie walked away.

  She passed Leroy Street. At Carmine Street she realised she’d better turn left or she’d end up back at Houston. She noticed she was limping slightly, trying to walk on her heels and spare her toes, swollen from the damp. She wished she could sit somewhere and take off her shoes. At the intersection with Bedford Street she stopped, uncertain whether to turn, or continue past Seventh Avenue to Hudson. She liked Carmine Street. With its hardware stores and cheap Indian restaurants it was shabbier but more interesting than the residential streets surrounding it. Across Bedford Street, on the other side of Carmine Street, she could see some tourists looking at the pictures and mandalas in front of The Ancient Drum, the nightclub that pretended to guide its visitors on a journey through the Deep Worlds.

  Jennie turned right onto Bedford Street and found herself before the ground floor window of a small apartment building, the kind that survived because the landlord couldn’t think of how to get rid of his rent-stabilised tenants and remodel the building. She looked through the window at a group of people who took no notice of her. In the centre of the room, in an old manually cranked hospital bed, lay an elderly woman. Near total paralysis and emaciation made it difficult to guess her age, but a second woman, who called the first ‘Mamma,’ looked about fifty-five. The old woman had been sick a long time, Jennie thought. The room looked arranged for an invalid, with trays on either side of the bed and chairs set around it for visitors. Facing the bed, photos of adults and children surrounded a small television. Only one photo resembled the woman herself, and that one, a picture with a man in front of a suburban house, also showed a car in a model from over twenty years ago. The television was on—a game show—but no one was watching.

  Apparently the woman could move only her head and her right hand, but neither of those would stay under her control. The head turned from side to side, like somebody saying ‘No,’ over and over, while the hand grabbed weakly at the air. Occasionally, the daughter, who sat beside the bed, would hold the hand down, but she always released it a few seconds later.

  A third woman in the room appeared to be the mother’s nurse, though she wore ordinary clothes, including large hoop earrings and a gold necklace. In her right hand she held a bottle of red and green capsules, while the left (‘the healing hand’) kept trying to insert a capsule into her patient’s mouth. Each time the capsule passed the lips the woman spat it out again. ‘We’ve got to take our pills,’ the nurse said. (Jennie wondered, for just a moment, how she could hear them through the closed window.) ‘Be a good girl. Will you be a good girl?’ She tried again and again but the old woman kept spitting the pill onto her chest.

  ‘Please, Mamma,’ the daughter said. ‘You know what happens if you don’t take your pills. Don’t you remember how swollen you got? Remember how you had to go to the hospital?’

  The woman’s mouth opened and closed several times, as if she was gulping for air, but she apparently was saying something, for her daughter leaned closer. A moment later the daughter sat back, then turned her head and wiped her eyes. She turned back to say, ‘That’s not true, Mamma. You know you don’t want that.’ Looking up at the nurse she said, as if her mother couldn’t hear her when she spoke to someone else, ‘Every time she says that I just—I can’t stand it.’

  The nurse said, ‘Take your pill like a good girl, and I’ll give you your dinner.’ She put down the bottle and held up a spoonful of some mashed vegetable. ‘It’s still hot,’ she said. ‘If you’re a good girl you can have it while it’s still hot.’

  Jennie couldn’t breathe. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. But before she could leave, the doorbell in the apartment rang and Jennie stood and waited while the nurse went to answer it. She returned with another woman, middle aged and still wearing a dripping raincoat.

  ‘I’ve been robbed,’ the woman said. ‘Thank God you’re here. Oh damn, damn, I’ve been robbed. Everything’s gone. Everything. They tore all my clothes, they just cut everything, everything they couldn’t take. T
he whole collection, it’s all ruined, the whole…What am I going to do? Janet, what am I going to do?’ The nurse took her in her arms, while behind them the old woman’s head continued to turn from side to side.

  Jennie looked down at her belly. ‘Sing for them,’ she pleaded. Her womb stayed silent. ‘Why won’t you sing for them?’ Nothing. She walked away, half staggering. ‘It’s too much,’ she said. ‘We don’t deserve this. None of us could possibly deserve this. It’s all wrong.’

  Just before Seventh Avenue a group of about fifteen children gathered about her. Around each of their eyes Jennie could see gold lines, like the radiance surrounding the eyes of the doll she carried stuffed in her bag. Their teeth shone with light as they said all together. ‘Excuse me Miss, where do babies come from?’ Jennie ran around them to Seventh Avenue.

  And there she was standing when a large metal object came rolling down the road and knocked her to the ground.

  Jennie never actually saw the ferris wheel. Nor did she see the woman lashed spreadeagled to the hub, turning cartwheels above the street as the wheel rolled down Seventh Avenue. She did glimpse an instant of fire. Later, when the witnesses and the cops and the man from the SDA told her what had happened, she realised that the fire must have come from the hair and the hands and the feet, for according to her teachers in college, those were the parts that perpetually gave themselves, ‘burning but not consumed’, sacrificing their integrity to maintain the flames of Li Ku Unquenchable Fire, whose name and spirit, as the Book tells us, live in truth and beauty forever.

  At the time the wheel hit her—a glancing blow—Jennie knew only an instant of pain, and at the same time a flash of wild delight that somehow mingled with all the sorrow of the world. Then she fell into a deep sleep, disturbed only by a dream of climbing a stone stairway on her hands and knees.

  She awoke to see a black cloud just above her body. She laughed, recognising it as an umbrella, held by a tall woman in a brown leather jacket. The jacket reminded her of Marilyn Birdan and then of Mike. ‘Don’t get up,’ the woman said, and Jennie realised she was lying in the street, with a blanket over her and a plastic cloth under her to protect her from the wet. She stared at the woman until she spotted the police badge, and then she looked around. Quite a crowd had gathered, thirty or forty people most of them standing about eight feet away from her, behind a line of wooden horses.

  ‘What happened?’ Jennie asked, and several people laughed.

  ‘An Occurrence,’ the lady cop said. She must have been over six feet tall, with thick blonde curls that made it impossible for her to wear a cop hat.

  ‘An Occurrence,’ Jennie repeated. ‘Which one?’

  For a moment no one said anything, and then another cop, a man, told her, ‘The Ferris Wheel.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Jennie said, ‘what else?’

  Lady cop told her, ‘It’s still a genuine Occurrence. One of the five official ones. You know, just as good as holes in the hand or any of the others. You’ll go down in the records.’

  Jennie said, ‘I want to get up.’

  ‘Hang on,’ the man cop told her, ‘We’ve got to keep you here for the SDA people.’

  ‘The SDA can go to hell,’ Jennie said, and the people around her tried to hide their shock. Jennie started to get up but the cops held her down. She closed her eyes and waited. People called out to her, asking her to bless them.

  Finally, a man from the West Village Spiritual Development Agency arrived. He passed various instruments over Jennie’s body, wrote down bits of information, took depositions from witnesses, and gave Jennie several forms to fill out and return within seven days. Then the lady cop helped her to her feet, while the crowds applauded until the male cop chased them away.

  The cops offered to escort Jennie home, but she sent them off. They left her leaning against a drugstore window on Seventh Avenue. Tired, she wanted to close her eyes, but every time she did she just saw that old woman spitting out her pills.

  Hunger opened inside her. The SDA man had asked if she was hungry; he’d looked a little surprised when she’d said no. Jennie walked until she spotted someone standing in the rain with one of those pushcarts selling chocolate chip cookies and ice cream wafers. An odd thing to sell, she thought, so late in the year. She crossed the road. Horns sounded behind her.

  ‘What would you like?’ the vendor said. A young man, he wore a white denim jacket over an open-necked shirt and tight jeans. Neither the cold nor the rain seemed to bother him. His sodden clothes and the water dripping down his head didn’t stop him from smiling at Jennie as if he’d waited for her all day.

  About to ask for a half-pound of chocolate chip cookies Jennie looked up from the cart to his face. Something about it—she squinted. If she looked quickly his face appeared bland, like the eager faces on those awful revelationist realism paintings, but when she tried to look more closely she couldn’t seem to focus on it. The features kept slipping away from her. As if she was chasing it. Smiling, it floated in front of her, as if she only needed to look from the right angle to see it as it really was.

  ‘What would you like?’ he repeated.

  ‘Help me,’ Jennie said. He nodded but said nothing. ‘I wanted my husband back. I just wanted my husband. And they’re punishing me for it. Showing me things. Telling me my pain doesn’t count. It’s not—not big enough. But it does count. My suffering is as real as anyone else’s. But all those people—I never wanted…I didn’t want…’ Her hands began to wave in the air.

  He caught the wrists. ‘No one is punishing you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes they are—I didn’t want to see those people.’

  ‘There are some things you can only know by knowing.’

  ‘But what if I don’t want to? And what about them? What about that woman? She just wanted to die. And instead it was that little boy. They don’t deserve that.’

  ‘Suffering is not a punishment.’

  ‘Then why is it there? We don’t deserve it.’

  ‘Suffering exists for its own sake.’

  ‘No.’ She tried to pull loose her hands. ‘It’s not right.’

  Still holding her wrists he said, ‘Listen to me, Jennifer.’ Jennie fell silent. ‘There are only two things in the world. Suffering and ecstasy. Do you understand?’

  Jennie began to shake. Her chest tightened and she couldn’t seem to get any air past her mouth. She knew what she should do. Nod, and accept the information. Try to understand the message. All she had to do was say ‘yes’. But if she did that she was saying ‘yes’ to all their manipulation, to everything they’d done to her and to all the others.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No. Oh God, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. That’s not right.’ The shaking stopped. She could breathe again. ‘There’s pleasure,’ she said. ‘And hope.’ He said nothing. ‘And love. What about love?’

  ‘Love is a form of suffering.’

  ‘Suffering. Not ecstasy?’

  ‘Love belongs to the tomb world. Without death love is meaningless. But ecstasy has no purpose. It obliterates love.’

  Jennie thought of her father lying in his coffin, streaming with ribbons. She thought of her mother practising hour after hour as if Jennie no longer existed. And she thought of the annulment demanding that she cut Mike loose from even her memories. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said, then blushed. ‘Please forgive me, but you’re wrong. Love—love is what won’t let go. What remains when everything else is taken away. The part that won’t give in. Love is the answer to suffering.’

  ‘And if I tell you there is no answer?’

  ‘What do you mean? I thought you said ecstasy is the answer.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you said—you called them the two poles—’

  ‘I said that only those two things exist.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re not letting me understand.’

  ‘You don’t let yourself understand. Listen to me, Jennifer. There are no answers, no solutions. Love—a
nd pleasure and hope and fear and desire—they all belong to suffering. But ecstasy exists apart from suffering. They exist apart and at the same time. They exist together in the same place.’

  ‘They don’t connect?’

  ‘They connect totally. The life of one becomes the road to the other.’

  ‘Then they do answer each other. Ecstasy justifies suffering.’

  ‘No. The opposite. By its own reality, ecstasy makes people see that suffering is real. And without purpose. Ecstasy is a light that illuminates pain.’

  Jennie was silent a moment. She looked down at the wet street. When she looked up again she said, ‘Those people. That dead boy. And the old woman. Were they put there because of me?’ He said nothing. ‘Did that woman lie there all those years because of me? So I could see and learn about suffering?’ Silence. ‘So I’d be ready for all your explanations? Answer me!’

  ‘You believe the tumour crushed her brain for your sake. And the thought is crushing you. Be relieved, Jennifer Mazdan. Her suffering exists only for itself.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He said nothing. ‘I don’t know. There’s an Agency—’ She paused, expecting him to interrupt her, but he just waited. ‘There’s an Agency that uses people. It just uses people for what it wants to do. And it doesn’t care, it doesn’t understand the cost. Do you know what I mean?’ Again he said nothing. ‘It can use that woman. It doesn’t care what happens to her. If it thinks I need to see something like that, it can crush her life, it can keep squeezing her for twenty years just to make her ready for when I come stupidly walking down Bedford Street. That’s what’s wrong with it. It doesn’t understand the cost.’ She pulled loose her hands. ‘You said she didn’t suffer because of me. But are you sure? Are you sure?’

  ‘Do you think the Agency needs to create suffering? Do you think it cannot find enough examples on any street you might choose to travel?’