Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  Jennie closed her eyes. The faces vanished. In their place Jennie saw waves, the sea, the water parting. A woman was rising from the sea, her head back, the arms out like a dancer. Her feet touched the bottom of the world, her face rose above the sky, while all about her body pieces of broken chains fell off in the cascading water.

  Jennie’s eyes snapped open. She stared at the cookie vendor. ‘Just a little more,’ he told her. ‘It’s almost done.’

  He doesn’t know, Jennie thought. He didn’t see. She laughed loudly.

  There were two of them, a male and a female, and they clawed their way free of their mother like athletes in a competition. She Who Runs Away saw only a glimpse before the blood carried her out of her body. She took that glimpse with her, and when the guides took her to her room in the Mansions of the Dead, she saw the image of her children floating on the walls. Lions’ heads; thick hands with claws for fingers; human bodies with muscles like stone.

  Jennie felt a weight placed on her and she knew the midwives had laid the baby on her belly to give it a chance to adjust to the outside before they cut it loose from the cord connecting it to its home. She’d have to look, she knew, she couldn’t keep her head turned away any longer.

  For an instant Jennie wasn’t sure what she was seeing. It looked so dark. Then she smiled and reached out a hand to take it. She realised now what she’d expected: a perfectly formed miniature adult, with a light shining round it and a hand raised in sanctification to all those who had assisted in its birth. Instead she saw a wrinkled baby, head like a soggy melon, useless arms, all of it covered in blood and mucous.

  It’s normal, she thought to herself. Oh God, it’s normal. It’s a normal baby and it’s mine. It’s my child.

  The midwives were telling her something, some phrase they wanted her to say. She paid no attention, only reached for her baby. ‘You’ve got to welcome it,’ the redhead told her. ‘Just repeat after me.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ the cookie vendor assured the midwives. ‘She’ll be fine. I promise you.’ The midwives backed away from the bed, one of them almost tripping over Allan Lightstorm who was still kneeling on the floor. With a confused stare he looked from the baby to the mother, as if he’d been expecting something that hadn’t happened.

  Jennie turned the baby over and saw it was a girl. A daughter. Her daughter. When she held it to her chest, the bag with Li Ku’s skin pressed between them. ‘Li Ku is the truth,’ that woman had told her. But Jennie Mazdan was also the truth. Love was the truth.

  One of the midwives, the Daughter, tugged gently at the baby. Jennie held on. ‘We’ll give it right back,’ the burglar said. ‘I promise. We’ve just got to cut the cord and chase away the Malignant Ones.’

  Chase away? Jennie allowed them to lift her daughter. She thought back to her books and remembered that the midwives hit the baby’s bottom to jar loose any Ferocious Ones attracted by the smell of a helpless human. To herself she thought, They’re going to hurt you, my darling, but don’t worry. I’ll make you feel all better. The man, the Grandmother, held the child up by the ankle. The Daughter slapped her.

  Instead of a cry the baby laughed. It opened its eyes and looked at Jennie, and its laughter bounced off the walls and out of the windows to the street where people stopped their cars to listen to it. In the house the midwives tilted back their heads like people greeting the sun after a month of rain.

  The buttons on Allan Lightstorm’s shirt fell to the floor. He looked down at the shirt, then up at the cookie vendor. ‘What do I do?’ he said. There was no answer. He tightened his face up, concentrating. Then he took off the shirt and clumsily draped it over the baby. The Daughter adjusted the shirt, wrapping the child in it before handing her back to Jennie.

  Jennie paid no attention to any of them. For in the sound of that laughter, she knew her daughter would never be hers. The child might live with her, accept her love, her milk, and later on her advice and teaching. But the child would never belong to her. The cookie vendor said, ‘Does any child belong to its mother?’ but Jennie wasn’t listening. She was thinking of her daughter, how one day the girl would kiss Jennie’s forehead, or smile, or something, and say, ‘It’s time for me to leave. I have my work to do.’

  The blood spread out over miles, a thin slick covering the earth. Wherever it touched, the plants withered, the people and animals fell dead, the rivers dried up, the stones crumbled into dust? Only the man-lions could live there, sometimes raiding the outside world for victims, at other times devouring each other or their own children.

  The people built walls around the emptiness. They told each other that some day a redeemer would come, one who with power and courage would go behind the wall to lay hands on the ground and draw the curse from it. The rivers would flow again, and the man-lions would shed their claws and teeth. But no redeemer ever came. In time they gave the desert a name, and except when the enemy attacked some village or farm they did their best never to think about it. The name they called it was ‘The Place Inside’.

  It made no difference. As soon as she held her daughter again, Jennie knew that. However long they had together, she would love her child and take care of her. For as long as possible she would protect her daughter against the knowledge of who she was and why she had come into the world. ‘I love you,’ she said, and kissed the face and the shoulders, and the soft belly before she hugged the child to her breasts. ‘You’re my daughter and I love you.’

  Everything that needs to be known is known.

  scientist speaking on the BBC

  Nihilism is not the last word. The last word is imagination.

  Peter Bien

  THE LIVES OF THE FOUNDERS

  Allan Magruder lived for a time at the Young Men’s Truth Association on South Avenue in Poughkeepsie. Eventually the residence committee kicked him out for refusing to attend any enactments. For several years he travelled from place to place, working in factories, on farms, and now and then as a faceless Worker in some of the smaller Picture Halls. He did not enter public knowledge again until some fifteen years later, when he turned up in New Chicago, dressed in silver clothes with a rainbow coloured band round his forehead, to start the movement later known as Neo-Fanaticism.

  The three midwives resigned from the Holy Blood Birthing Agency and registered with the government as collective pilgrims, eligible for a monthly aid allowance. Instead of travelling anywhere, they moved into an apartment down the street from Jennie Mazdan and her daughter Valerie. From there they watched and followed Jennie, taking pictures of her with a telephoto lens, and sometimes sorting through her garbage for what they called ‘relics.’ At first Jennie tried to stop them, but after a while she decided to ignore them.

  Jennie’s mother Beverley surprised Jennie by not marking her granddaughter’s birth with so much as an anthem. Instead she took the train to Poughkeepsie (the first time she’d ever done so) to take care of Jennie and the new baby. On Valerie’s fifth birthday Grandma gave her a toy saxophone, with real keys and a plastic reed. When Jennie and Beverley began shouting at each other, Valerie played a short melody of such perfect yearning that Beverley became frightened and tried to shake it out of her head. Valerie handed the saxophone to her. ‘You take it, Grandma,’ she said. ‘Mommy doesn’t like it.’

  Valerie Mazdan lived with her mother for seventeen years. She attended Heart of the World Primary School on Noxon Street and Singing Rock High School, where she played hockey and basketball. One day during her senior year she cut her afternoon classes, and on the corner of Grubb Street and Worrall Avenue, she met a man selling chocolate chip cookies. Several weeks later she applied for entrance to the College of Tellers in New York City.

  Jennifer Mazdan lived on Cannon Street until the mock-funeral held on the day her daughter ‘went up’ as the expression has it, to College. That same night she moved to her mother’s house on Hudson Street in New York. On the day of Valerie’s first major appearance, the day Valerie told Li Ku’s Picture �
��The Woman Who Ran Away’, Jennie stood in the back of the crowd. That night she opened an old cardboard box she’d kept for years. It contained a white silk shirt and a small metal box with a piece of dried skin inside. She took them down to the river where the black freighter waited for the Founders to return and sail away from the world. Jennie threw her treasures into the water. She said, ‘I won’t say thank you, because it’s not what I feel. But I know she’s needed and you did give us longer than I expected. So I guess it’s a fair deal.’

  Back in the house Beverley was listening to an excited reporter describe the Telling at the College. ‘Jen,’ she shouted, ‘Jen, come here. Come here. You’ve got to hear this.’

  Jennie went upstairs and lay down on her bed. From the night table she took a photo of Valerie and held it to her chest. She smiled, and a moment later she fell asleep.

  We remember the Founders.