by Miriam Sagan
“I wish I had a marble,” Michael said. “Isn’t this just like the Guggenheim Museum?”
“I like the Guggenheim.”
“You know, Rania…”
“Ummm…”
“If we ever get out of here…”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“Well, when we do, we could be like, I mean, I’d like to go out with you; you could be my girlfriend or something.”
He reminded me of my first boyfriend in the fourth grade. I snapped, “Michael! I’ve been to bed with you! I lost my virginity to you! I’ve run away from home with you! I certainly do hope we’re going out.”
“So it’s official?”
I stuck my tongue out at him, but he looked so hurt that I rushed to say, “Sure, that would be nice. I could come into the city and we could go to the movies.”
Michael warmed up. “And sometimes my parents go away for the weekend and leave me alone in the apartment.”
“And I could come over and we could, you know…”
“Do it,” said Michael. I giggled.
We continued to make our way up the ramp.
The incline was gentle, and I didn’t get dizzy unless I looked over the edge. Climbing Babylon was climbing up the inside of a chambered nautilus, a maze, a ziggurat, a slice of pyramid. Or as Michael had accurately observed, it was a lot like walking up the ramps at the Guggenheim Museum. It seemed to be much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Surely that decrepit warehouse by the East River could not contain all this.
We walked slowly upward, but the ceiling seemed as far away as ever. From a mosaic on the inside wall, a smiling sun and grinning moon looked down.
CHAPTER 22
Mary Rose
MARY ROSE WALKED FOR HOURS along the rutted road into the Desert Fathers Monastery and stayed for four years. The people at the ranch had been kind but insistent that the only place which could possibly conform to Petra Rae’s instructions was the Benedictine monastery that sat firmly in a bend along the Chama River.
Mary Rose did not object, consider, or plan. She was, after all, a crazy person and murderer without a job, a family, or a place to go. So she walked. Snow and rain regularly destroyed the grade of the dirt road. It took all day to get there, and the soles of her cheap flat boots were literally worn away. She walked the last half mile barefoot on the dried caliche mud.
Desert Fathers Monastery was a small cluster of adobe buildings including cells for the monks, a guesthouse around the courtyard, greenhouses, chapel. When Mary Rose appeared, the monks asked no questions but gave her soup. It was a good soup, full of barley and carrots. There were almost a dozen bearded brothers living there, dressed in denim cassocks and black belts. They were young and old, and their abbot was a vigorous ex-plumber from Santa Fe. Brother Xavier, an old man with a scraggly white beard, was the resident hermit. He looked like anyone’s idea of a saint, and he lived alone in a hut.
The monks did not question Mary Rose; they put her to work. She baked, she weeded, she made up beds for the guests. She learned to drive a tractor, to clean a septic line, to give a haircut, to brew beer, split wood, roof, weld, and do a bit of electrical wiring. And she sewed black buttons onto work shirts and a blue velvet altar cloth covered in accurate golden constellations.
The Chama River ran green and wide. Coyotes came out at dusk, and families of deer. Mary Rose had a small cabin to herself, not much more than a pallet on a built-in ledge, a wooden floor, and a broom to sweep it clean. She kept it bare with no curtains in the windows, no wildflowers in a jam jar.
Seasons came and went. In heavy rain, the road was impassable. One balmy summer’s day, Brother Xavier was trout fishing on the far side of the river, dressed only in a loin cloth. A thunderstorm upstream swelled a tiny flash flood, a mini-tidal wave swept the river, and Brother Xavier along with it. Stark naked, he surprised two middle-aged nun retreatants as he emerged dripping like Jonah, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Mary Rose often worked with the abbot, who puttered obsessively about the place. “I want to tell you something,” she told him. He was not her confessor, nor was she Catholic. But she faithfully kept the hours of the day with the community, rising before dawn, chanting the psalms to a plain guitar.
“Pass me that widget,” said the abbot.
“I killed a woman,” said Mary Rose, “and I took her child.”
“Smaller wrench,” said the abbot.
“This one?”
“And the file, please.”
She passed it.
“You killed somebody?”
“I wanted to have a baby,” said Mary Rose. “But I couldn’t. So I killed this pregnant lady and took the baby, but then the police came, and the father, and they took her back.”
“Mary Rose,” said the abbot severely, “you’re not the first woman in this world to lose a child. Do you have a forty-watt bulb over there?”
The angel babies were long dead and turned to topsoil. Mary Rose was still a youngish woman, tanned and fit. One morning when she awoke, she realized she was no longer a crazy person. It was a cloudless day. Mary Rose made apple pies for dinner.
She lived with the monks for another year and then took her inheritance plus interest out of the account. She bought herself a trailer and a piece of land across the Rio Grande gorge to the east, in the hamlet of Pilar.
CHAPTER 23
AFTER THE NEXT TURN, doors of all shapes and sizes appeared in the left-hand wall. There was an enormous triangular green one, a yellow one so small only a child could get through. On a few of these were chalk Xs, like something out of the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Finally, Michael couldn’t resist. He turned the knob of a medium-sized lime green door and we peered inside. There on a mattress under a bare bulb a man and a woman were fucking. They both had long fair hair and she was sitting on top of him with her ass spread towards us. Quickly, Michael closed the door as we backed away.
We kept on walking.
“You try a door,” he said.
But I bypassed the next few, even the black door with the live monarch butterfly resting on it. And I resisted the door with the zebra stripes that gave off a soft ultraviolet glow. But then we passed a door as pink, plastic, translucent, and pearly as a bracelet for sale on MacDougal Street, or those little pill or bug boxes I admired at Azuma’s Japanese-style head shop. I put my hand to the knob.
The door swung open without resistance. Inside we were met by what appeared to be a forest of strips of frosty plastic hanging from the ceiling. The strips were so thick there was nothing visible between them. The light was dim with flashes of pale green, fuchsia, mauve. I pushed through the swinging forest until I came to an opening, a clearing in the wood. In it stood a startling fetish, carved, and bristling with nails. I looked at it for a moment and then we drifted again in the translucent sea. Strange noises called to us—a hummingbird, a cough— but vanished if we turned in their direction. Nothing seemed to have any meaning here. I was relieved when my hand hit the back wall of the place and forced me to turn around and go slowly among the flashing lights, back to the door.
Outside, the corridor was warm and quiet. But I was getting worried. “How are we ever going to find the right door?” I asked.
Michael just shook his head, and a few steps later, he pointed. The ramp had split in two. One corridor led away to the left, one to the right.
“I guess we stay left,” he said.
“Why? It could easily be on the right.”
“But the girl on the floor said…”
“Just because she kissed you doesn’t mean she’s right,” I snapped.
“Fuck this,” said Michael. “I’m just trying to think. She said second to last door on the left so we should go left.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. A left hand door could still be on the right side, you know.”
“Don’t quibble.”
“I’m not quibbling. I’m just examining the logica
l possibilities and I think…”
“Then go right,” he said.
“What?”
“You go right. I’ll go left. Then we’ll meet at the top and whoever discovers anything can tell the other.”
“Okay.” I didn’t like it all, but I didn’t have a better idea.
“Bye,” said Michael, and he took off to the left. He didn’t kiss me or anything.
“Bye,” I muttered to his back. Then I made my way up the right hand ramp.
Now, the doors were blank. They had no labels or decorations. And they were numerous; there was one every few feet. As I climbed, I became increasingly worried. What if I was missing something? Michael wasn’t here to help me. I couldn’t help it; I pushed at the nearest door and it opened.
Inside, there was darkness. I heard the very gentle sound of water lapping, like the edge of a pond. Suddenly firefly lights seemed to glow and then resolved into a kind of dusky light. The room was filled with a pool of water. I went up to the edge, which was defined like the edge of a swimming pool, and looked into its depths.
I looked at it for a long while. Gradually, images began to form. I saw mountains, clear and jagged against a turquoise sky. Snow sat on the peaks. Below, the forest was evergreen. I saw a trailer in a clearing and a black dove sitting on the branch of a stunted pine. A woman came out of the trailer brushing fair hair off her face. She’d aged since the newspaper clipping. She glanced briefly at the mountains and then carried a laundry basket to the line.
The scene melted away, and a different one came clear. I saw my real mother. Maybe she wasn’t really dead. She was sitting in a cafe in a dusty border town full of dogs. A red bottle of ketchup sat before her on a brightly flowered oilcloth. She was drinking a glass of beer. She carried a pack of Spanish Lotto cards for luck. She lay them out on the table. She pulled up a green palm tree, then La Luna—a moon with a nose—La Rosa, and then La Sandia, a red seedy melon which was also the name of mountains at sunset.
She lay out El Mundo, the card of a man carrying the world. At Rockefeller Center, there was a statue of Atlas, the Titan, staggering under the weight of the globe. El Mundo was a deranged moving man who lifted up the whole blue ball and stomped off to somewhere else. My mother thought of the ice skaters on the rink in Rockefeller Center, the tunes of Christmas carols, and hot chocolate in a thick mug. Then she pulled up La Muerte, death as a skeleton with a scythe.
I backed away from the pool and left the room. I closed the door behind me, and went on. The next door was plain and unadorned too, but my hand went to the knob. I walked in and found myself by the East River. It appeared I had exited Babylon. The river lay before me, oily and serene, at what looked like dawn. A pink light in the east brightened a glimmer on the water.
I walked for a bit along a stone esplanade, and then sat down on a park bench. I looked out over the water. The islands of the river lay low, some with incinerator chimneys billowing smoke, some with electric power plants flashing. But there were also small green ones, uninhabited, mysterious. And one with a decrepit mansion, light reflecting off its few remaining windows. It had probably been something like a hospital for the criminally insane, now fallen into ruin.
Behind me, the stone wall was cool and quiet. I noticed a lion’s head set in it, once brass, now green. The lion had a ring in his mouth. A gentle breeze stirred off the water. A small rowboat, painted a gay yellow, floated towards me so purposefully it might have had a motor. But it didn’t. Two oars lay on the stern. The little boat came aground, and without thinking I tied it to the ring in the lion’s mouth. I knew that I could get on board and that it would take me to the island. But I couldn’t; I had to find Monique. But the island looked so restful, I’d go there and lie down, I’d go there and sleep. I shook myself as if trying to wake up and walked back into Babylon.
The next door was small and I had to duck a bit to enter it. Inside was a beautiful woman sitting in an arm chair, nursing a baby. Her dark hair fell over the child. She looked up at me and said, “Go away. We don’t want you here.”
I closed the door, close to tears.
Enough, I told myself sharply. Just find Monique. But this was the last door in the corridor in any case. The passage swung to the left now, and I could see it must join with the fork that Michael had taken. There were two more doors before the corridor narrowed to a point and joined the ceiling. The second to last door was obviously the one I had been looking for. The door was painted scarlet, not much taller than I was, and stenciled on it in bold black letters were the words: QUEEN OF THE GYPSIES.
And standing next to it was Michael. “You found your way okay?” he asked.
No thanks to you, I said silently. But I was relieved to see him.
“You open it,” I told Michael.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“She’s not my friend, Rania. She’s yours. I’m just along for the ride, remember?”
“Oh, please! Just give it a try.”
But when he tried, the door would not budge. He turned the knob rapidly both left and right, but nothing happened. “It’s locked.”
As soon as I put my hand to the door, it swung open as gently as a screen door in a summer breeze.
“Go on,” said Michael.
I stepped in.
There was an impression of vast space, more cave than room, more cavern than cave, cold air, motionless. My feet hit a floor of uneven granite rock. When I looked up, I saw a sky full of stars, not the pale winter stars above Manhattan, but a desert sky, cold and clear, dark unreachable reaches of space bursting with those suns burning out of control.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness. Some distance away a small bonfire was burning, warm and orange. We went towards it. By the smoky light, I could make out a crowd of people clustered around what looked like a yellow Gypsy wagon. The van was festooned with garlands of faded purple flowers and strung with Japanese lanterns.
From what I could see, the people looked different from those gyrating down in Babylon. There was no gauze or sequins or Indian cotton. They wore outdoor clothes, leather jackets and pants, spiky hair and thick gloves with the fingers cut off, or outfits of tough denim covered in constellations of silver studs.
They were not dancing. At least they were not swaying in the gentle free-for-all of the dance floor of Babylon, fathoms below us. Rather, they were beating out rhythms with their boots. A blond woman dressed in a black bustier and leather miniskirt picked up a microphone from a stand. The microphone wasn’t even plugged in, the electrical cord just dangling. Still, it gave an electronic buzz and came on.
Then I saw the pit. It was a few feet away, but even in the gloom I could make it out. It was a real pit in the earth, a few hundred feet square, crammed full of people dancing. They were crushed together—spiky hair, shaved heads, spikes, and nose rings gyrating as one. A boy came to the edge of the pit. He had acne on his half shaved head and a worried look as he peered down. “Go!” a friend of his shouted, almost pushing him. He teetered on the edge and then fell. The dancers either parted or caught him. I could see him struggle to his feet.
And the woman began to sing. Her voice was soft and low, calling, talking about lullaby and the way a child needs her mother in the middle of the night, talking about the way the sea follows the moon, and how all the shells and fish and mermaids follow the tide, about how trees grow in two directions, particularly about the tap root that grows down, down. Then a little wail picked up, dry wind out of the desert, then a hush like an oasis, and then she began to really sing, the song of a traveler going down a lonely road. The singing made me want to cry, it made me hungry, it made me want to jump on Michael, and it made me want to go home.
Then the beat picked up. It got wilder, lower, and the voices of the band came over the woman’s voice, harsh, demanding, one, two, three, four, one two, three, four, a lot of bass line and a meaner drum than I’d ever heard. The woman’s voice soared, but this wasn’t swe
et. People were dancing in the crowd.
“Fuck!” I heard a girl next to me yell. Her arm was bleeding, torn by the spike on a wristband of a boy next to her. “Fuck you,” she said, but he just turned away.
“I want to go in the pit,” said Michael.
“No way!”
“I wanna jump!”
“Michael, you gotta stay with me,” I hissed. Because I had just realized something. When I looked the singer full in the face, I knew who she was.
Monique was still singing, her voice gone all husky and atonal. Underneath the tight black clothes, though, it was just Monique.
I pushed through the crowd and up to the microphone stand. I forced the microphone roughly out of her hand. I thought I was going to kiss her, but I wasn’t. Instead, I slapped her as hard as I could across the face. It felt good to hit Monique.
“Monique!”
She turned away a tearless face.
“Where have you been?”
She said nothing, not even my name.
“I’ve been looking for you, just looking and looking. I’ve been worried, so worried.”
Still nothing.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
This time when she didn’t respond I lifted my hand to hit her again. But she caught it softly in her own, and just said: “Rania.”
“Where have you been?”
“Here,” she said. “I’ve been here.”
“And where the fuck is here?”
“You know. Babylon.”
“And where the fuck is that?”
Monique picked up the microphone. Then she began to sing. Her voice was purple, evening and rain. I couldn’t remember what her voice had been like before, that night at the beach before we were grounded, or all those other nights at her mother’s house. Had her voice been higher then, thinner, or was it the same voice? Monique held the microphone close to her mouth, lips almost kissing the rough screen.