Trapped in her far corner, Anthea waited for Blake to say something.
“There sure are a lot of cookbooks,” he said.
“I think she liked entertaining quite a bit.”
“I think she did. I really think she did. So you’re sure you’ll have time for the Temple work? It’s not like the database, there’s a bit of a rush.”
“Yeah. It’ll be okay.”
“They’re going to want photographs. They say they want other material, but it’s always photographs when it comes down to it. Some portraits. Exteriors maybe. And some captions. They’ll want captions. Next week?”
“Okay.”
“Great! Let’s have something for next Wednesday, 5 PM.” Then Blake looked down and said, “Your shoelace is untied.”
He was gone and Anthea was alone in the low-ceilinged room, wondering why she’d been given an assignment for which she had no obvious affinity, and in which she had shown no interest, especially since Brynn had been talking about the Temple Project since the beginning. The Institute hadn’t done culturally relevant work in living memory, so people who cared about their mandate, like Brynn did, were pretty excited about a return to public history. The Project would reclaim one of the city’s early vaudeville theatres from the wreckage of the eastside, preserving local arts history and developing a new venue with the texture of age, something precious and unusual in their youthful city. Or that’s what the memo said. Of course, Anthea liked the theatre, had visited it a few times, but now she would have to contribute, and while a handful of photographs and some captions didn’t seem like much, the thought of synthesizing nuggets of historical interest made her cranky.
She reread the original memo describing the Temple Theatre Project, then spent an hour with the old catalogue, leafing through typescripts on soft paper dating back to the first years of the Institute. They tore under her fingers if she wasn’t careful, like the pages of old Life magazines, and left the same patina on her skin. After that, she requisitioned a key and walked down the stairs to the basement, then the sub-basement and Rm 023 with its stiff lock. The room was small and lit by fluorescent squares in the ceiling. Anthea shut the door behind her, then sat down on the room’s single chair and pulled a box toward her, scuffing the dust that bloomed on its lid.
She should be working. Before her sat the box she had marred with her fingerprints; to Anthea’s eyes it seemed to have been unsorted since the early days of the Institute. She started a list, which was pretty much all she knew how to do at the Institute:
1. One (1) program from one of Mrs. Kilgour’s interminable musical evenings, introducing the Misses Fladd, who will play Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” for harp and piano, and including a recitation by Mr. Stephen Noyes.
2. Two (2) pieces of sheet music: “Oh Do Not Ask! Oh Do Not Weep!” by Francis Harold Fleming, America’s Armless Baritone; “Wrap Me Up In My Tarpaulin Jacket,” Traditional Air, arranged by Hubert Bentley.
3. One (1) photograph of Mrs. Kilgour dressed like a prima donna, including spangles and ostrich feathers.
4. One (1) dried, brownish-pink rosebud.
5. Three (3) black beetles, dead.
6. One (1) photograph of a man in a tight collar, the name Mr. L. Manley, tenor in yellow typescript on the back.
7. Seventeen (17) programmes for other ladies’ Artistic Evenings (1910–1915).
Number 6 stopped Anthea briefly, on account of Mr. L. Manley, tenor’s Valentino eyes. But then she looked at 2 and 1, and she couldn’t think what to do with them, so she sat beside the box, all its contents around her, for five minutes. Brynn would know what to do. Brynn would have a new spreadsheet already tied into her database, keyworded, its cells slowly colonized by tidy chunks of information. Anthea thought about throwing out the beetles and the rosebud, but how long had they been there? They might be pre-war.
Holding items 5 and 4 in her left hand, she thought about Jasmine’s Prophet with his acolyte and his drum, and how he might know what had happened.
She considered repacking the box. Then she said, “Fuck,” and flicked Mr. L. Manley, tenor into the air where he cartwheeled and fell in a far corner, with the beetles. He missed the box she’d aimed him at. She’d never been able to do it with hockey cards either, even though her brother Max kept telling her it was all in the wrist, and tried to teach her on too-hot summer afternoons in elementary school. But then, if Jasmine’s Prophet had returned to the city, Jasmine might too. At the very least it meant that if he was found she could ask questions. Someone could ask questions. There were questions.
She picked up the next photograph in the pile—of Mr. L. Manley, tenor and Mrs. Kilgour, this time—and held it, thinking of everything Jasmine had ever tried to explain to her about the infinite, invisible threads that link all events into a unity of human action and experience, and about how those subtle associations made prophecy possible, and magic. They were called correspondences, and what people called spells was just the exercise of esoteric knowledge regarding the interconnectivity of all reality. She closed her eyes and said, “If this one hits the box, that’s a sign.”
It did not hit the box. She picked up the next one.
“Okay, actually, this one is the sign.”
This one landed near the corner with the open box she’d been aiming at, though not in it. She dropped off the chair to sit cross-legged on the floor and thought about percentages—if more landed in the corner than didn’t, that was a sign, allowing the subtle forces of Jasmine’s cosmology the opportunity to act over a number of trials. Working on the flick of the wrist, though, she emptied the box of photographs and lost track of which spot meant what, and what the sign was, anyway.
When Jasmine walked away, did she find it, the thing she wanted? Did she get where she was going?
The next box down was wooden and older and smaller than the others, and had a torn paper label printed with the logo “OV” in an Art Nouveau font. It was the one she needed: inside there were shellac 78s stored edgewise in brown paper sleeves. No pictures in this one, which ended the little oracle in the corner, though for a moment she considered that 78s would fly straighter, like Frisbees. She pulled one out and read the label, published by some Kilgour Coal subsidiary called “The Orphic Voice.” The aria was from Massenet’s Le Cid, “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père,” performed by Mr. Liam Manley and the Orphic Quartet.
Anthea checked her watch. It was ten. She lay down then on the only scrap of floor the overstuffed room afforded. Consider your situation, she thought: vaulted in at the bottom of the bottom, in with the junk drawers of a crazy dead coal baroness, and Jasmine. And Jasmine’s Prophet, who was back and carried a drum over his left hip.
But what was it Jasmine’s Prophet had over girls, who were the only acolytes around him? Never men. Never, Anthea guessed, women either. His congregation was distinctly girlish. The one with the blonde dreadlocks she’d seen that morning wasn’t at all like Jasmine on first glance—Jasmine avoided white girls in dreads—but they shared some quality Anthea could not describe, something pliant, something that looked like “yes.”
If Jasmine didn’t want to be found it was one thing, but if she was out there, lost. If she was. If she.
LIKE HARRY HOUDINI
Anthea spent the rest of the morning in Rm 023 flicking photographs into the corners and then picking them up again. Her aim improved. That afternoon she left work early, but did not join the others on that West Side patio they all liked. On her way out, Brynn asked what Blake wanted when he kept her back after the meeting, and Anthea wondered why Brynn cared whether she worked on the Database or the Biography or the Temple Project. All she said, though, was that it was just more work and then she smiled and said, “Take her easy today, hit her hard tomorrow,” which was something her father used to say when he didn’t want to talk about it.
She returned to the intersection where she’d seen them, him with his drum and the dreadlocked blonde. She sat at one of the little tables outs
ide the Starbucks and watched the street for an hour. She watched fratboys, and men in suits, and sharply dressed girls from Hong Kong, and skateboarders, and kids who could be K-pop stars, and handsome shaggy men who looked like artists. She watched construction workers and backpackers and barefoot old men with long, grizzled ponytails. She watched skinny eastside lesbians on bicycles, and elderly women in dust-coloured pantyhose and orthopedic oxfords. He did not return.
Though she admitted it was unlikely she would see him that day— this was not his neighbourhood, after all—she didn’t really want to go home just then, not if the squirrels had started fighting again in her attic. Instead, she found a new thrift shop a few blocks from her apartment, already congested with pilled sheets and matted plushies. Inside she knelt down to dig through a Canadian Club box full of someone’s high-school mix tapes: 91 Party Mix. Dance Hits 89. Party Party Grad 92! A bloom spread over her fingers, from someone else’s dust mites, gorged on someone else’s skin.
As she rubbed at the dust on her fingers, she recognized handwriting and the faded collage of one cover, half-hidden in the box. She dug around, and when she found it, she thought of Jasmine’s crappy car stereo from years ago, the one that still only took cassette tapes. And how the speaker on the right cut in and out, so when they listened to bittersweet pop from the ’60s and ’70s she only got Simon or just Garfunkel. At that moment she realized that she had never heard all of Pet Sounds. The tape she held was covered with pictures of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, dating from Jas’s temporary collage period, all those afternoons when she cut classes and sat on the floor of her darkened dorm room, leafing through back issues of Vogue and Spin and Entertainment Weekly. Jas had called that one the SadGirlMix, and they had listened to it in the car while they cruised around the city on summer afternoons in first and second year.
Anthea crawled through other boxes, looking for the MadGirl-, the FuckMeNow-Mix, which she would also know by their carefully themed collages and their familiar playlists. There might even be other things— the books, the clothes, the costume jewellery—a scattered stratum-of-Jas in second-hand stores across the city.
Had she possessed even a rumour of etheric sensitivity, Anthea might have recognized that she was the subject of a haunting, one that operated not only through dreams, but by way of the objects around her, the words spoken in earshot, the birds that flew through the sky overhead, the Caucasian man, apprx. 30 yrs, she saw crossing at a busy intersection beside a blonde girl who was like Jas, but not Jas. She must have felt something, all the same, because she found herself wishing she and Jasmine had made one of those pacts people make about death, where you arrange a signal to prove that the dear departed persists in another, subtler form. The winter before, Anthea had heard that Harry Houdini made one with his wife, and had meant to mention that to Jas, but by then it was too late, and Jasmine didn’t listen much anymore. Of course Jasmine might’ve made such arrangements with someone else: she had always remarked on Anthea’s psychic opacity. Or possibly Jas had been bombarding her for months with the arcane communications of the dead: changing how blossoms fell from a cherry tree, or giving her significant dreams. Possibly Jasmine was not dead.
She bought the SadGirlMix for a quarter and left the store thinking of him, again, and how he used to stand on street corners with a sign that read “fRee ReiKi” and correct the clouded auras of Saturday afternoon shoppers, or 5 PM commuters.
He had been doing these guerrilla initiations—clarifying and attuning auras even when people ignored his sign—the first time Jasmine took her to see the new guy. Literally see him, it turned out, and not speak. Jasmine led her to a corner and told her to watch across the street, where a blondish man stood barefoot, seeming to preach, though there wasn’t a crowd. They were too far away to hear, but Jasmine said it was prayer, the real kind, spontaneous and inexplicable. As they watched, a girl stopped in front of him, and he began what Jasmine called his real work, the subtle manipulation of bodies that he called initiation. He had initiated thousands—literally thousands, Jasmine said, thousands!—and it would be even more, when things were counted, because any one attunement could ripple outward from the point of encounter like a wave of salvation. He never knew where it might subside, only trusted to the Veiled Father to guide his hand, and set a spark moving in the darkness. That was why he liked to do stealth initiations for whole crowds at the International Airport, Jas explained. The ripples go even further that way; they fly.
“He’s so thin,” Anthea said. “Does he get enough to eat?”
“Sometimes. Most of the time.” Jas was still, and then in a mutter, “It’s about energies, you know. He does it all on these subtle energies.”
Anthea had thought of saying something about him having Christly abs like starving desert prophets get, but she found she couldn’t. Instead she said, “Mm-hm?”
Jas kept talking, looking at him rather than Anthea: “And it works, that’s what’s so good for me—I see it working in him and through him. He lays on hands, too, you know, though he doesn’t need to. People pay him for that sometimes.”
“Okay. Yeah. But what does he believe?”
“It’s complex,” she said. “It’s really complicated. When I really get it and I really know what I’m talking about, I’ll tell you. I promise.” They kept standing there watching him until Anthea shuffled and cleared her throat. Jasmine glanced at her. “You want to go? You can go. I don’t mind.”
“No. Yeah. But. Do you want to go for a tea?”
“I think maybe I’ll just stay a bit longer.” After the words stopped, her lips still moved, but Anthea couldn’t make out what she said and had to look away. It was her turn to speak too quickly, not liking Jasmine’s opaque, prayerful face.
“Okay, but we could take him with us? I could buy him a cup of tea? Or coffee? Would coffee be better? Shade grown coffee? There’s that fair trade place with the spelt scones. And organic. Stuff.”
Across the street Jasmine’s lovely Prophet finished his work and kissed the girl on her forehead. They stood close together for a long time. He released her, but she dawdled, diffident, looking up at him through her lashes.
Jasmine said nothing. Then she did: “Don’t worry about it.”
Yes, something strange happening even then, that goosebumped the skin down Anthea’s spine, even though this wasn’t the first time Jas had gone looking for answers. When they first met, Jasmine had carried her tarot cards everywhere, then she had talked incessantly about Joseph Campbell and tried to use him in all her term papers, then the same with the White Goddess thing, and then Wicca and I Ching and Kab-balah, and she still followed The Aquarian Centre, which was apparently compatible with this new Gnostic-street-reiki.
But rather than thinking about the cold that crept beneath her skin, Anthea just kept talking, because she was embarrassed, and because she wanted to just go and drink coffee and talk about anything in the world but that man across the street. Since she’d just started on the Kilgour Domestic Archive, she said, “I’ve been working on some Edwardian stuff. To do with social conditions.” She didn’t mention that it was social conditions as expressed by household accounts, or really just the sauces chosen by Mrs. Kilgour for family dinners, 1901-1909. Mrs. Kilgour liked hollandaise. She had wanted to tell Jas that. There had been a time when she and Jasmine would have talked about it, and at the end of their conversation gone looking for one of those restaurants that still served instant hollandaise on their frozen spring vegetable medley, and imagined Mrs. Kilgour in her dining room.
“Institute?” Jasmine said, and for a moment Anthea thought she would say more, but her eyes were still turned on her Prophet. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, but it sounds like a distraction from what’s real. We shouldn’t be so attached to the things we can see. We should release,” Jasmine stared at him another long moment, “the corporeal hallucination.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“That means the material world.”
“Yeah, I gathered. But maybe they do good work, too?” Jasmine smiled. She looked sweet and sad. Anthea really didn’t like it when Jasmine looked sweet and sad, so she kept talking, though her voice squeaked slightly: “But I kind of want some coffee?” What she wanted was to not be there, watching Jasmine watch her Prophet as he mumbled and prayed on the other side of the street, and caressed the aura of a fair-haired girl who looked up at him, her face an open flower beneath his hands. Anthea crossed her arms over her chest.
“You know, you really don’t have to stay. I’ll talk to you later. I’ll call you.”
Anthea withdrew, an apology on her lips, though she said nothing. It was stupid that she wanted to apologize. As she made her way to a coffee shop, she thought about how once Jasmine had been a big Andrew Lloyd Webber fan, and she hadn’t even been embarrassed to admit it until she lived on campus in first year. How she’d silently thrown out all her original cast recordings and the Cats poster, but once when they were together in the car, “Starlight Express” came on the radio and she sang along good and loud. Anthea hadn’t said anything, but she’d noticed. She’d liked that Jas knew all the words and that for a moment she hadn’t been embarrassed.
That day came to be an event horizon in Anthea’s memory. In the beginning she had assumed the Prophet was just another of the temporary infatuations which constituted Jasmine’s spiritual education, which looked a bit like this:
List of Places Jasmine Looked for Answers:
1. Auras
2. Automatic Writing
3. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968.
4. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With The Wolves. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
5. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Creative Age Press, 1948.
6. I Ching: the Book of Changes. Translated by James Legg. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964.
The Paradise Engine Page 2