Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  Late that night whoops of laughter from the hairdresser’s apartment jerked Jennie awake. ‘Damn it,’ she said, and sat up, all set to bang her shoe on the floor. Then she remembered what night it was. For nearly a minute she sat there on the edge of the bed, itching in the reborn heat. At last she got up and went to run a bath. In the street people were honking their horns and singing. Jennie sat on the toilet and waited for the water to fill up the bathtub.

  She should have accepted her mother’s invitation to come ‘home’ for the holiday. She shrugged. Too late now. She stared at the water as the beat of an electric bass pounded in the walls.

  21

  Maria sent Jennie home on a Thursday, the sixth work day in a row Jennie had arrived late for the morning prayers and assignments. ‘Take off,’ she told Jennie, ‘I’m putting you on maternity leave.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jennie asked. ‘The baby’s not due for two months yet.’

  Maria shrugged. ‘What the hell, I can always make it sick leave.’

  ‘I don’t want to be sick.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what you want.’

  ‘Maria, I can do the work. I just have trouble getting going in the morning.’

  ‘And getting back at night. You think I don’t know how late you come in? I see your goddamn time card. And I give you the easiest routes.’

  ‘But I want to work. I can do it.’

  ‘Come on, you look like shit.’ Maria rubbed her braid between her fingers. ‘Look, I had this dream a couple of nights ago. Weird stuff, all about collecting urine samples in old milk cartons, and then the President coming down in a helicopter and telling me I did it all wrong. Anyway, I went and got the dream done, down at the OA, and you know what NORA said? She said I’m ignoring a responsibility. So I looked around and you’re it. You’re the only ignored responsibility I could find.’

  ‘It’s the Agency,’ Jennie said. ‘It must want me out of here for some reason.’

  ‘Do me a favour, don’t start that agency stuff, okay? Look, I’m not going to change my mind. So go home and relax.’

  ‘Relax.’ With a grunt Jennie picked up her bag from the front row of wooden chairs. ‘What should I do, go home and paint the nursery?’

  ‘You could try praying for a good delivery.’

  ‘Sure. That’s just what I’ll do.’

  Back in her car Jennie made a face as she squeezed her stomach under the wheel. She wished she could move the seat back further, but she already had trouble reaching the pedals. On the way home she stopped at the mall for some groceries. All up and down the aisles people were looking at her, working out how much time she had. By the time Jennie reached the checkout counter she was so angry she nearly broke a bottle of juice slamming it down on the counter.

  Back in her apartment Jennie told herself, It’s almost over. Less than two months. And then it’s done. Finished. She was crouching down with a paper towel to scoop some rotten radishes from the vegetable bin when it suddenly struck her—nothing would finish but the pregnancy. She would have a baby in two months time, and unless the Agency somehow arranged to take care of it, she would end up stuck with it. The idea, and the fact that it had never occurred to her before, struck Jennie so forcibly that the air glittered in front of her. Grabbing the edge of the refrigerator she kept herself from falling backward until she could go sit down on one of the wooden chairs.

  ‘I’ll be stuck with it,’ she said. And then another thought came to her. ‘It’s my baby. It’s going to be my child.’ She laughed at her own astonishment. Whatever the Agency had done to put it there, the baby was growing in her body. It belonged to her. Her baby.

  That night Jennie found herself unable to fall asleep. No position seemed comfortable; on her stomach impossible, on her back too weighed down, on either side too unbalanced. She alternately crunched and fluffed the pillows, she tried reading, she tried more blankets, then less, nothing worked. The two or three times she thought she might drop off she kept thinking she had to pee and by the time she got back in bed she was awake again. Just as she thought she should give up and go watch television, the baby began to sing to her.

  A flash of anger gave way almost instantly to eager relaxation. Her arms and legs lay loose as doughy lumps lying on the bed. She smiled. This was her child singing to her. There was no reason to fight it. Not any more. It was her child. And then even her smile drained out of her face, and she eased into deep sleep.

  Outside, in the street and in the neighbouring houses, people saw a light flare up in a window on the fourth floor of 221 Cannon Street. It started in one room but soon spread to the other windows, and then the whole building. Calls came in to the Fire Department. Though the firemen connected their hoses they somehow couldn’t bring themselves to start pumping the water. Meanwhile, those firemen who most recently had received a blessing against smoke inhalation ran through the building with their axes riding on their shoulders. They found all the doors unlocked and all the inhabitants asleep. In the fire room itself, there were no flames and the air was so cool it massaged their windpipes and lungs. None of them, however, could bear to look at the sleeping woman. The light around her body shone as brightly as that burst that once struck down a certain federal judge named Li Ku on the road to Cincinnati.

  When the light subsided, the firemen left, and after them the crowd. All of them encountered a great reluctance in themselves to tell anyone what they had seen. A television crew had come, as well as reporters from the Poughkeepsie Journal, but when they developed their films and ran their tapes they found them ruined, the same as with similar crews at the town abortion clinic some five months before. Somehow, the lack of any pictures induced the journalists to report the event as a minor incident, giving no details, either as to the woman’s name or the street where she lived.

  A report did go to the Dutchess County SDA, where it swam through the bureaucracy to reach a certain Flying Squad investigator. Sitting in her office with her chair back and her wingtip shoes on the desk, she glanced at the one page account and threw it on a pile. She picked it up again to look through the jargon for the name of the woman. ‘Sonofabitch,’ she said, and wrote a long note at the bottom of the page.

  The report never entered the files. For no reason she could name she folded it very carefully and placed it in her wallet. That evening, on the way home, she stopped at a spiritual supply shop, where she bought a small relic case made of sanctified steel, with a silver neck-chain. In her apartment she took out the offering pin her parents had given her when she’d finished her training. With a single drop of blood she bonded herself to the report, and then she placed it in the case and the case around her neck. There it remained for the rest of her life. When she died and the curious undertakers opened the case they found only ashes that blew into the air as soon as a curious finger tried to touch them.

  A piece of the Story of SHE WHO RUNS AWAY

  Mr President left the Bleached House in the same disguise she had worn the night she found her husband pumping dust into the sky. She wore the same clothes, but she no longer had to battle her beauty. The sun had evaporated the layers of her splendour. No longer did she need a coating of kitchen grease to persuade the clothes to stay against her body. No longer did the sight of her exposed face cause stone to sweat with anxiety.

  As quickly as her mismatched legs would move her she made her way through the city towards the suburb where she had seen the lion. Along the way she passed a sleeping lizard, a huge beast over six feet long. The creature had lain there since before the Sacred President had built his city. The first construction teams had tried to move it, but when all their cranes and pulleys broke they’d raised the city around it, so that in some places the Democratic City of God was known as the City of the Lizard.

  That night, the creature raised its thick eyelids and hissed at the passing woman. She heard a voice hidden in the sound and knew that she had received her new name, to wear until the day of her death, when all e
arthly names are blown away in the storms that forever border the circles of the dead. She Who Runs Away. It’s not true, she thought. She was running to her husband. Together they would return and crush their enemies. Together they would build a world better in all ways than this decaying monstrosity.

  When She Who Runs Away reached the suburb she found the lion waiting for her. She limped towards him, but before she could touch him, he ran. He stopped several hundred feet away from her. Crouched down, he waited until she came within a few feet and then he once again loped out of reach. In this way he led her away from the city and into the flatlands she had dreaded for so many years. Each night, when she could no longer stand but must fall asleep on the ground, the lion would lie down just beyond the length of her arm. When she woke up she would find food beside her, a freshly killed animal or bird. And beyond that, the lion, waiting.

  Then one day they came to a hilly country, filled with stunted trees, half completed government offices, and abandoned machines decaying into stone. Here, on slanted ground, she could stand upright again for the first time since she had left her house. Though she could move more quickly she kept to her earlier pace, and though she no longer felt tired she mimed exhaustion at the usual time of day. When she lay down, the lion came to join her.

  She leaped on him. She flung her arms around his neck and rolled across his body. When she slid under him he pinned her shoulders and legs to the ground. They locked together for three days until the heat of their bodies split the Earth under the woman’s back and she fell into a damp crevice. When she climbed out again the lion was gone.

  22

  Enactment For ‘Consecrating a Baby to Serve the Blessed Spirit’

  If the mother, during or before pregnancy, receives a true message that she must surrender her child to the powers, and if the message is confirmed by a speaker, she must tell this to the midwives during the pre-natal consultations. When the mother’s time comes the team of three midwives brings with them a fourth, who wears a faceless mask and does not take part in the birth, but waits at the foot of the bed.

  After the birth, when the three active midwives have cleaned the baby and properly disposed of the afterbirth, they take positions around the head and the sides of the mother’s bed, and then all four wait for the first feeding. This feeding establishes the baby in the world, for it is dangerous to attempt a consecration while the child still remains partly in the land of origins. After the feeding, the midwives take the baby from the mother and lay it on a blanket, on the consecration table if the birth takes place in a hospital or, if at home, on a clean tabletop, preferably wood, and preferably with squared corners. With a compass they arrange the table so that the baby’s head points north.

  The fourth midwife takes from its case a wooden wand carved from the heart of a tree in one of the national forests. Each of the four presses the wand to her forehead and her lips. When the wand has returned to the faceless midwife she uses it to draw a double spiral in the air above the child. The midwife on the right holds up her hands, palms up. She says, ‘I give this child to the sun,’ and flings up her arms. The midwife on the left repeats the action, saying, ‘I give this child to the moon.’ The midwife at the head says, ‘I give this child to the wind,’ and finally the midwife at the feet, the faceless midwife, raises her arms and cries, ‘I give this child to the sea of dreams.’

  In this way they open the vertical axis, from the great above to the great below, for the child to discover the gift, forever offered yet forever rejected by those who live only in the flat world of hunger and appeasement.

  Jennie was in Sears buying some electrical tape to repair a lamp when something hardened inside her. It started in her lower abdomen and spread throughout her groin, like a body builder flexing his back. Carefully, in more fear than pain, she made her way out of the store to the Bagel Nosh restaurant. By the time she eased herself into a chair her uterus—she knew it was the uterus, she knew that much—had loosened up again. It couldn’t be labour, she thought. She wasn’t ready yet. It was weeks too soon. When the waitress came Jennie ordered a Founder’s Delight, the cream cheese and anchovy bagel that Irina Speakeagle supposedly ate whenever she visited New York.

  The contractions didn’t return until the next day, and by that time Jennie had searched through the books on pregnancy she’d bought weeks before and stacked on the floor beside her bed. She recognised the pains now as preliminary contractions, the uterus getting itself in shape. Nothing to worry about. They hardly even hurt. According to all the books, the real thing would hurt much more than any of these feeble exercises.

  And suddenly it occurred to her, after so many months, that without midwives or doctors, without friends, she’d have to deliver the baby herself.

  She tried to remember the name of the midwife agency the doctor had recommended. Something Blood or something. Maybe she still had the card somewhere. Maybe she could find it in the phone book. What would they say if she called them so late? She could always just go to the hospital. But she didn’t even have a doctor.

  And then she sat up, as straight as she could. No, she thought. This wasn’t like other pregnancies. This baby wasn’t like other babies. With a glance at her belly, she said, ‘You’ll take care of us, won’t you? We don’t need any outsiders.’

  The foetus didn’t answer.

  On the evening of March 20, the day before the vernal equinox, a sudden storm struck the mid-Hudson valley, knocking down telephone lines and TV antennas. At Recital Mount north of town, and at the local Picture Halls around Poughkeepsie, the wooden huts built to celebrate Spring collapsed under the weight of snow and ice. At some of the Halls the doors blew open, drenching the Tellers rehearsing their processions from the entranceway to the altar.

  At Cannon Street Jennifer Mazdan, wearing only a bathrobe, fell asleep a little after ten. For more than two days she’d felt occasional twinges of pain, not enough to commandeer her attention. At a quarter past midnight on March 21, she woke up to discover a contraction shaking her body. When she looked between her legs she saw that a small amount of mucous had leaked out to stain her robe and the chair. Her labour had begun. She had no idea what to do.

  The midwives broke into Jennie’s house sometime in the early morning. It wasn’t difficult. Jennie had not bothered to put the chain bolt on, and one of the wives had spent twenty years as a burglar before a Devoted One, in the form of a parole officer, had laid a hand on her shoulder and suggested she put herself in the service of moving babies from the darkness to the light. They broke in and they took a look at Jennie’s feeble preparations, her plastic washbasins, her stack of towels, her pile of books beside the bed, and one of them, a heavy woman with curly red hair and a slight limp, began clearing the area around the bed, while the other two, the burglar and a skinny man whose long hands and feet stuck out from his yellow overalls, began carrying in and setting up equipment.

  Jennie’s reactions bounced between outrage, relief, betrayal. For hours she’d lain on her bed, getting up only to go to the toilet, reading all her books, trying out different postures and movements, practising breathing techniques she knew she should have practised for weeks, and fighting off panic each time another contraction swept away all her belated study. She knew that she couldn’t do it all herself. Once—early—she’d grabbed the phone to call her mother. But the phone was dead, knocked out by the storm.

  The thing, was, Jennie still didn’t expect she would have to do it all herself. The baby would take care of it. She just had to wait, just hang on through the pain and terror, just until the singing started. But the hours had gone by and her womb had stayed silent.

  And so, when the scratching at the lock heralded not thieves (‘Go away!’ she’d shouted, ‘I’ll call the police. Go away or you’ll be struck down. This house is protected by God’) but midwives, Jennie’s outrage could hardly hold its own against her relief. Someone had come for her. Help had come. And yet, they were outsiders. They belonged to—the oth
er side, the Tellers.

  The midwives set up machines, laid out instruments, washed her and dressed her in a hospital gown, turned up the heat and the lights, all the time chanting Jaleen Heart of the World’s birth story (the model for all births) in a sing-song call and response that made them sound like one person raising and lowering her voice.

  Jennie looked from one to the other. The big one, with the limp and the red hair, wore the mask of the beautiful woman. The man represented the hag while the burglar, a small woman with a lined neck and whitish blotches on the back of her hands, was the young girl. They all wore overalls over pink sweatshirts. On each overall’s left front pocket, embroidered over a picture of Heart of the World, appeared the words, ‘Holy Blood Birthing.’

  ‘How’d you find me?’ Jennie asked. ‘Who told you?’