You’re fine, Ted. Not precisely what Esme said, but close. It was an odd combination of sounds, which honored his suffering even while casually pointing a finger beyond it.
No, I’m not fine, he insisted, again not in words but out of the chaos of sound and fury clouded around him. He wandered lost and tear-stricken through endless brakes and gullies, not sure thereafter when his rage boiled away and the dull ache of emptiness took over, Novocain wearing off and nothing but raw red nerves exposed to the air.
*****
Sarah was surrounded by so much love—Tom superfluous at this point and pretty much out of it with his beautiful sobbing; her companion soothing and cooing on the opposite side; Laura Keeshan, whose professional, personable manner she’d grown to admire and who now sat on a stool intently readying to catch her baby; and the baby itself, a bond so integral and intimate about to be replaced by new bonding, a face, vivid eyes, the strong suck of a mouth. But quite literally above all, Sarah fixed on the drifting lowering laze of the stork, its bundle once opaque now translucent and veering swiftly toward transparent. The bird’s gaze, so glossy and vacant in an actual stork, warmed with love when it met hers—a look that kept Sarah intact during the maelstrom of birth.
Inside the dim mirror, her child’s head emerged. One glistening blue shoulder slipped free, then the other. A nurse reached in with a bulb syringe to suction the mucus from its nose and mouth. “There, there, little one,” the doctor said, gently stroking the baby as she eased it out. “Time to be born. Time to breathe.” And the stork swept in close and dipped down, the fragile veil of gauze about its burden breaking up like parting mist so that the bare white beauty drifted down and melded with Sarah’s baby on its first inhalation. “It’s a girl,” the doctor said.
She wailed. Amy wailed. Sarah couldn’t believe the joy that flooded her as the tiny body was held up between her open thighs, so small in Laura Keeshan’s gloved hands, her blue skin beginning to flush with pink. Dimly she was also aware that her baby’s halting cries, as if borne on a magic breeze, had puffed against the stork and transformed it into a robed old man, a Merlin. She took him in now, a doppelganger in some weird and wonderful way for her baby. He glowed, his head angled forward slightly as if he were listening to the Apgar scores being dictated, the snip of the cord, the rustle of cloth as they swaddled his charge and laid her in her mother’s arms.
Miraculous, Sarah’s angel said, her voice husky with awe.
“Oh, yes,” said Sarah as Amy’s bleared eyes locked on her eyes and her tiny lips O’d around the soft ruddy spike of Sarah’s left nipple, gumming and sucking for milk. The nurses and Doctor Keeshan were busy below, but Sarah took in only the small circle that was Tom leaning in to touch his daughter’s hand, Tom’s cherubic guardian beaming over his shoulder as if it were a cotton billow, Merlin freshly wise at her bedside and nearly touching her companion, and the strange warm wonderful connection taking place between Amy and her, where mouth met nipple.
*****
“Sweet Jesus,” Luke said, “look at their angels, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!” It amazed him. In his pre-broadcast walk through the square with Joydrop, he had noticed of course the patina of blessedness which lay upon those they passed, the sweet resonance every word and deed took on. But as he and Denzel Wexler had been swept along through the crowd, the drain-swirl of companions murmuring excitedly above, Luke had no idea that their presence was capable of sanctifying for public display acts which until now had been confined to the privacy of the bedroom. And yet here it was. Mouthings outlawed in many states, even between consenting spouses, were now revealed in all their splendor—not a lascivious spectacle, nothing that lowered men and women to the level of the beast, and surely no act that, in all its glory, need be limited, at all times and in all places, to private venues. Clancy marveled at its beauty, a warm buzz in his ear; but above all, the canopy formed by the mayor’s and her mate’s angels, gleaming and swirling in perfect ellipsoidal energy exchange, sang its paean unceasing to the miracle of fleshly love. And from the delight on the faces around him, it was apparent that shock and shame and condemnation were swiftly yielding to new perceptions.
“Let’s keep the camera on the loving foursome, but I want to get some reaction from these good people about me. You, ma’am,” he said to an elderly lady in a flowered hat, whose smile broke across the powder lines that etched the downdraw of her mouth, “what do you make of this?”
“Astounding’s all I can say. I want so much to think it’s filthy and an abomination, but Alice here—” thumbing over her bony organdy shoulder at a ravishing raven-haired sylph “—melts my dinosaur notions and makes me soar right through them. It saddens me, what my Ben and I missed out on; but what a joy it is to witness the pleasure shared by these two young people.”
She gabbled on but Luke lost the beginning of it when Clive broke in: “Atlanta’s cut us off, Luke.”
Uh-oh, Clancy commented.
“—why, you can almost feel their happiness in your own bones. It’s exciting, don’t you think?”
Luke’s voice went on though his thoughts were frantic in his head. “Yes, thank you, ma’am. And you are—?”
“Missus. Alma. Pritchard.” An increase in volume, as if his mike were a hearing aid. In the distance, the van door slid open. Maya stepped down and walked over to Joydrop at the edge of the square.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pritchard.”
Don’t lose it, Luke.
“You’re very welcome, I’m sure.”
He glimpsed Denzel at the camera, unaware of anything amiss. There was polite applause to his right. A toddler squatted near one corner of the mayoral blanket, elbows on knees, chin on fisted hands, his attention rapt. “And you sir,” he said, bringing his mike into the cluster of folks beside him, not sure who yet, he never did that, he always knew whom he was addressing before he spoke. He saw it at the end of his hand. The mike had moved. Luke had barely started his question, whatever it was going to be, and the mike had moved away from his face.
“Cut it, Luke,” Clive said. “We’ve got dead air.”
Be of good cheer. This can surely be fixed.
He babbled on, pulling the mike back to his mouth. A few eager subjects peered from the crowd. It was simply a matter of picking the best one, asking the right question, then opening yourself to draw out, with grace and respect, the perfect answer. No problem. Not a talent just anyone possessed. No need to sweat it. So he bobbled once; hey, they’d forgive him the occasional trespass.
A hand rested on his shoulder.
He turned, saw Joydrop’s somber face through the gems of her guardian, embraced her and accepted her embrace all in one gesture, the mike pressed like a black mace against her right thigh. His head was swirling and his body ached with an inexpressible need to cry, but he held fiercely to Joydrop Heartline as if she were his one salvation, aromas of loveliness rushing in to soothe him.
*****
The afternoon was waning. Harold could sense that in a few moments families would begin to pack up their picnic baskets, dump their refuse, rustle up and billow out their blankets for folding, and head for home. Was a shame, the fiasco regarding the Petrakis broadcast—technical glitch, from what he could gather, failed satellite link or some-such—but he hoped enough of their miracle had got through to put Auroville on the map and, more importantly, to set the benighted world on a long overdue course toward truth and enlightenment.
“I love you, Harold.” Her Honor, the mayor, brought her lovely face close up, a half-moon it was so near, one smiling eye darting happily left and right before she came in for the kiss. He breathed her ocean loveliness.
“Love you too, sweets,” he said, one hand resting on her naked hip. He pressed his thumb in, let it go and saw the white-on-red impression flare and vanish. “Someone is the least bit sunburned, I think.”
“I suppose we ought to get dressed.”
“I suppose we ought to have gotten dressed hours
ago. But I’m glad we didn’t.” They shared a laugh. He’d been the first to shuck his clothing, with Caroline’s approval, around one. Thea had swiftly followed, no one batting an eye, except it be one of approval. What would’ve been an act of indecency and public exposure a week before seemed, and rightly so, to be perfectly natural. A few folks here and there went along. Carver Haskell and Mindy Rutherford did so, closer to the gazebo in the shade of the tall oak, a proud packed woman and her blissfully happy though still feeble man. A high school kid with a chubby rump and dark bristles on his upper lip took to meandering everywhere in his defiant birthday suit, his angel bemused behind him in downward beam. And then there was the beauteous object of his infatuation, sweet lovely Dawn Fleischer, her all-over tan hinting that the weekend rumors touted by Thea and her friends were true.
Folks had lingered to congratulate and thank them for their act of revelation, a whole host at first, then dribs and drabs as the hours wore on. But always Dawn kept at a distance, caught up with friends or sitting naked with her parents and Ken Jefferson’s family, as fully relaxed about her nudity as could be—though Harold sometimes caught her looking their way. Now she approached, hair cropped close about her head, small pert perfect breasts before her like a dream, a vaguely Polynesian cast to her face. Above her a fleece-faced youth, muscled and woolly, floated. Strung wooden beads, two inches worth, hung from her earlobes.
“Dawn, hello,” offered Thea, the pinch long vanished from her voice. Blooming had been good to her.
“Hello,” Dawn said, kneeling and resting her hands on her thighs. Her rounded buttocks touched the baby-wrinkle of her heels. “Hello, Harold.” She offered him her slim hand, which he took and then released.
Coconuts and pineapple, offered Caroline.
Dawn looked amused and puzzled at him.
“What she means,” he said, “is that while Thea and I were making love and everyone began to crowd in, when Thea finally freed up my nose, all of the aromas that had been temporarily overshadowed came rushing in. It was amazing. I nearly came right then.”
“It’s his sense of smell,” Thea explained.
“Heightened by the blooming. I’ve yet to find anyone else so affected but it sure hit me that way. But as I was lying here, breathing in the sweet smell of mortality, the sweetest flower in the whole bouquet of amazing odors struck me like a concentration of coconuts and pineapple, though I couldn’t see who it was. Off in that direction though, and clearly it was you.”
Dawn’s guardian chimed in. Nice compliment. The man is smitten, I’d say.
Dawn gave him a wry take. “Jeez, let’s be frank, why don’t we?” To Harold: “Did you hear that?”
Harold laughed, Thea joining in. “Yes and it’s true. Boy, I never thought I’d ever feel right about mentioning it to you, let alone with Thea sitting beside me—not that I think for one moment it could ever be reciprocated.”
Thea laid her hand on Dawn’s arm, then released it, a confidence about to be imparted. “That’s just like Harold to wimp out, he’s always been so shy and yielding. I must say I amaze myself. There’s been all this clutter forever in my head and I never knew it was there. Private nudity, private sex, cleaving only to one partner. Where did such bizarre notions of human behavior come from?”
Dawn allowed as how the ban against nudity certainly made no sense to her, indeed that America as a whole was clothing-obsessed. Her happiest childhood memory, or one of them anyway, had been running naked through sprinklers when she was two or three. “At school, I had a boyfriend who took me around to the hot springs in southern Oregon. I was shy at first but it was mostly couples and old folks surprisingly, lots of transplanted Europeans whose ways at beaches are a lot freer than ours.” As she spoke, making eye contact with Thea much of the time, Harold eased back, head propped on one hand, and drank in the delicacy of her body. It was not a sexual once-over, though desire hummed always in the background. No, it was much more a case of realizing how beautifully unique Dawn was, and how much of a total statement of personality the undraped body became, and how deeply into talking—one might say severed—heads the culture was. As lovely as he’d thought Dawn previous to this moment, more lovely by half she’d become in taking off her clothes—her delicate hands gesturing as her torso shifted and her breasts agreed, the unfettered expanse of skin from knees up thighs to hips, the soft combed look of Dawn’s private hair skirling up like chestnut flames from the nexus where her thighs met the tan plane of her belly. All of these, integral, of a piece, increased his love for her. “So anyway, when I returned to Auroville to teach, I discovered a number of like-minded souls in Placer County, regular folks—you’d recognize quite a few of them, Thea—and I wondered if maybe you might want to join us Saturday for a potluck and hot-tubbing at a local home.”
Habit began to speak. “I don’t know—”
“Oh, Harold. Of course we would.”
“You know,” he said, feeling a surge of confidence, “Thea’s right. We’re honored at your offer and we accept. Just let us know when and where and we’ll be there.”
She rose, smiling. “I’ll call you tomorrow with the details.” The pink of her vulva showed for a moment, not a tease, just a fact. There were no private parts at all, none, no special fetish attached to this body part or that but rather he desired Dawn entirely and was content not to have that desire fulfilled.
Thea’s angel, the stunning image of her younger self, whispered one word, but it was loud enough for Harold and Dawn to hear: Luscious.
“I ought to be embarrassed,” admitted Thea, “but I’m not. You’re a beautiful woman, Dawn.”
Dawn shrugged and laughed, the child she’d once been breaking through. Then she shook and held Harold’s hand, did the same to Thea, holding her eyes perhaps a fraction longer than she did his. She waved and walked away, the perfect and unaffected sway of her hips stirring him.
Good God, he though he heard Caroline say, but then he realized the voice had been Thea’s.
10. Bubbleburst
Sex and cigarettes drove Mike DeSario upstairs with Patti Singer.
Or rather the hope of sex, fast fading from the look she gave him and the shake of his steel angel’s head; and, once she’d made known her attraction to Len Frome and he’d surprised himself by accepting it, the need for a smoke in lieu of sexual release. El Cid bugged the shit out of him for lighting up, until Mike finally said, “So help me kick the habit” and his silver surfer replied, I will. For the moment, it stilled a craving; that was all that mattered.
Patti plumped some pillows on the bed and settled in, her face to the dead TV screen. Why doesn’t she turn the thing on, he wondered, and then remembered his rule, silly in retrospect, that nobody controlled his TV but him. He grabbed the remote and fired it up.
The DeSario family had been a part of the vanguard of those leaving the town square, a spontaneous exodus that began just after four. It’d been weird having this famous TV guy come over to their blanket round about one, knowing him and Mom had hung out together in high school. He had gripped Mike’s hand, looking him solidly in the eye as if to say, You could have been my son. Poor bozo really had nothing to say. He just babbled at Mom mostly for a while until his guardian said She’s older and that spun everyone into an embarrassed round of joking which lifted the famed Luke Petrakis off his knees and onward. He’d avoided them during the broadcast, though he veered close several times in the opening minutes, and in the car, after Dad splurged for ice cream, it had been a topic of conversation whether or not the camera—before the uplink had been lost—might have caught them in the background.
Mike flipped through the trash, painted hands showing Zircon necklaces, Oprah’s grin, Phil’s frown under closing credits. He checked the CNN channels, wondering as always why they needed two, but the wooden-faced man and the lady with the notable lips were into a few moments of fluff and isn’t-this-precious before the top of the hour and gave no sign that miracles were afoot in California.
Resuming his remote hurtle—liquid roping in slo-mo over ice, shrinking real estate agents, McLaughlin grilling someone off-camera like a cobra in love with its own hood, the Movie Classics guy in mid-pause, Go-see-Cal, Paula Poundstone slouched on a stool, a piece on the Interstate Killer’s latest grizzly massacre in Nebraska, then back around to single digits.
Theme music, upbeat but significant, trumpeted over a familiar logo, the announcer had his say, and then fade-in on the aging pretty-boy. “Good evening,” he said, while a superimposed square upright bled in to show a smiling Luke Petrakis in torso above his name. “Famed CNN personality Luke Petrakis dealt his career a major blow this afternoon in Auroville, California, when his on-the-spot coverage of a town gone mad devolved into an X-rated display of raunch and depravity. Judith Kinkaid has our report.”
That’s not it, hold on. The deep voice of his angel underscored the weak protest of Patti’s, and Patti herself chimed in, “Wait a minute, what—?”
Mike shushed them.
“CNN officials are tight-lipped about the details of today’s media outrage.” The reporter, a blonde whose top button was buttoned, wore her disapproval in the shadowed curves between her cheeks and mouth. “It all began as an exploration of mass psychosis—with Petrakis adopting, as he has done before, his subjects’ skew on reality—but it quickly became something else entirely.”
“Mikey,” Patti whined, “what is she saying?”
“Shut it!” said Mike.
Kinder, Michael.
“You too, buddy.” He took a deep drag, let it out, a nervous blink to one eye. On the tube, the blond reporter spoke over a picture of Luke, muted, talking and gesturing behind him as the camera pulled back to reveal the bright clothing and beaming face of his angel, the same creature who had floated behind him on his visit to their blanket. Yet clearly from the blonde’s comments, she couldn’t see him; and now that Mike considered it, there was something different about the angel’s image on video, almost as if he were more solid than a video image ought to be, a buzz in his brain when Mike focused on him.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 20