by Jill Wolfson
At femalefury.net, I learn about an all-girl third wave proto-punk band, based in Athens, Georgia, that’s now defunct. Discography: 1986: Debut album: “The Furies Rise.” The title track and another cut, Born from the Balls of Uranus, received strong airplay on college radio stations and the band toured (small clubs and campuses) until disbanding due to personality and artistic clashes. Rumors persist that the group is planning a comeback. They maintain a small but passionate cult following. It’s too bad they broke up. I wonder if I can find a video or their CD.
There’s lots more. Furies. Infuriated. Furious. I stroke He-Cat’s fur as my printer spits out everything I can find. I want to be prepared for tomorrow, our first scheduled practice session, even though we haven’t figured out a place to meet yet.
The lair of the Leech is obviously out of the question. When I call Stephanie, she complains that her parents work at home a lot. Alix says no way are we meeting at her place. No explanation why, and she’s cagey about it. I get the sense that she’s embarrassed about where she lives.
“You want me. You need me,” Raymond says with a clogged nose when he volunteers to host what he is calling The Great Power Shift. “To your gathering I will bring a healthy skepticism, a runny nose, and a mom who will serve her world-famous triple ginger cookies.”
* * *
So that’s how we wind up at Raymond’s house the next day after school. When we step inside the front door, a cascading scale of violin notes from upstairs greets us. Raymond must be feeling better. His mom makes a special point of giving me a big hug and asking how I am. She does that every time she sees me, and I’m getting used to it. It’s not phony at all. Then she hands me a plate of cookies and leads us to Raymond’s room. She blows each of us an individual kiss before shutting the bedroom door behind her.
“Gawd, I just love my mom,” Raymond says. He’s propped up in bed, pillows fluffed, violin at his side, and wearing his favorite pjs with the retro cowboy pattern. I notice Alix and Stephanie exchanging glances. That’s one more thing we have in common: none of us has ever publicly declared love for our mom, and not because it’s an uncool thing to do but because we don’t have moms like Raymond’s. I’d give anything to have a parent who feels about me like she feels about him. She gets a kick out of Raymond being Raymond, exactly the way he is. You can just tell that she doesn’t want to change a thing about him.
Sneeze. Cough. Raymond doesn’t waste another minute before getting down to business. “My research on the matter in question,” he announces. “There’s a lot to be said for being home sick. School can definitely get in the way of an education.” He opens a computer file and reads, “Those Who Walk in Darkness, blah-blah-blah. Alecto, Tisiphone, Megaera.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Alix reaches for one of Raymond’s stuffed animals, a cross between a bear and a chicken, and puts it behind her head as a pillow.
“Hold on, Ms. Patience. I have more. Female deities of vengeance and anger. Horrible to look at. Blood dripping from their eyes. Snakes in their hair. What they lack in good cheekbones they make up in horrendous BO.”
“Hey!” I protest.
Raymond mimes giving me a reassuring hug, and then explains that the horrible part is only one aspect of the Furies’ image. Artists and playwrights throughout history sometimes portray them as gorgeous temptresses, a trio of luscious-smelling goddesses.
“That’s more like it,” I say.
“And what personalities! Sheer determination. Without mercy, they punish all crime. They mess with your mind. They leave no foul deed unavenged. They are”—he picks up his violin and plays a dramatic, high-pitched da-da-da-da—“the Furies.”
I add an interesting tidbit from my own research. “Furies, as in furious. And infuriated. Derived from—”
“Enough grammar.” Alix is on her third cookie. “I don’t care what they call them or why. I wanna know if it’s true about us. What can we do and when can we start doing it?”
“If we can do anything,” Stephanie emphasizes. “I obviously want it to be true, but I’m not totally sold.”
Alix, chomping into ginger cookie number four, fans her mouth: “Spicy! Compliments to the chef. Anyway, we’ll never know anything if we sit around like a bunch of motor mouths.”
Raymond agrees. “Despite my proclivity for blabbing, I’m in full accord. Let’s turn to the scientific method, and commence the Great Power Shift experiment.”
He nods with extreme seriousness in my direction. I take it as the signal to begin reading from Ambrosia’s recommended exercises. “Practice number one. Start small. A bug perhaps, some worthless member of a particularly despicable subspecies whose minuscule size is in inverse proportion to the amount of irritation and pain it causes.”
“In plain English?” Alix asks.
“A flea,” I say.
“Or a dung beetle,” Alix suggests.
Stephanie looks unhappy. “I value all creatures large and small. Each and every one has a role to play in the environment. Without the dung beetle, there would be—”
Alix interrupts by grabbing the paper from my hand. For someone who’s submerged in water so much, her nails are incredibly dirty. She squints like she’s reading the fine print at the end of a legal document. “Tell any friend of the dung beetle that sometimes something has to be sacrificed for the greater good. Tell her that by doing one little experiment on a stupid bug that nobody will ever miss, she might discover her power to save an endangered llama or even the whole planet.”
Stephanie lunges for the paper, misses. “Where does it say that? It doesn’t say that.”
“Naw, it doesn’t,” Alix confesses. “But let’s say you can save only one thing, an endangered llama or a flea. Which lives?”
“Llamas aren’t endangered.”
Alix hurls the stuffed animal at Stephanie. “You know what I mean! Would you sacrifice Mr. Itchy Welt Maker to save Never Hurt Anyone Little Llama?”
Stephanie thinks hard. She’s running her tongue along her braces. “This is tough. It’s not just about one bug. It’s a whole moral and political question about power.”
“Give me a break.” Alix groans. She notices an ant crawling on the nightstand. “How about that?” With the tip of her fingernail, she nudges it to the center of the table. “One stupid little ant,” Alix insists. “We don’t even know what’s going to happen to it.”
“Probably nothing, right?” Stephanie nods a reluctant okay, and Alix pumps her fist in triumph. Raymond volunteers to read the directions so the rest of us can concentrate. Ambrosia’s paper doesn’t say to lock the bedroom door, but we do it anyway. It doesn’t say to sit next to each other, but the three of us move closer to the table, the sleeves of our shirts touching. We’re ready. This is it. Raymond reads Ambrosia’s directions:
“Step one: Isolate the victim. Step two: Follow the victim’s movement. Put all your hate on it. Then double that hate. Triple it.”
Honestly, I don’t start out feeling any special hate for the ant, definitely not the double-triple variety. There are plenty of things in life that deserve to be hated, but how do you hate an ant? Still, I decide that I want to try this, and that means putting aside any resistance and not listening to my doubts. I want to give it my all.
If you feel your mind softening or taking pity, don’t listen to it.
So I don’t. As indifference comes to the surface, I replace it with contempt. As sympathy for the ant arises in my mind, I dash it away. It’s like setting a radio in my head to station HATE. I turn down the volume on acceptance and crank up the blame. I think of picnics ruined and food wasted. I imagine ants crawling all over me, their filthy feet and disgusting segmented bodies. Someone has to take revenge on them. Ants would take over the world if we didn’t.
It turns out that hardening my mind—moving it in the direction of judging, despising, detesting—is a lot easier than I thought it would be. It’s a snap. Once I let go and give it permission, I feel myse
lf go there naturally.
Step three, step four. I follow the sound of Raymond’s voice until his words lose focus, just as my vision does.
That’s when I hear a hint of static, far away but moving closer, deeper, louder, and, embedded in the chaotic sound, I can pick out a melody. It’s the tune. Notes rising and falling. I hear a voice join in, and it’s strong and clear, and it takes a while before I realize that it’s my own voice. The others are humming, too. There are words now with the song.
Our binding dance. The malignant music unfolding the terror.
I know that I haven’t moved from Raymond’s bedroom, but I also know that I’m somewhere else, somewhere I’ve never been before.
In.
Deep in.
But not alone.
In. With them. My others.
Their voices, the swirl of their hair against my arms, legs, and face.
I need them. We need each other.
To do what we were born to do. To move things to our will. To punish. To control.
My hair. It has come undone, the strands twisting with other hair, twisting with our voices, with the music, to create an inescapable net.
We trap the target.
We spin him with confusion and delirium.
We never touch. We never push.
And yet …
And yet …
Two words reach in and yank me back to the surface of somewhere.
Out.
Raymond’s bedroom. I touch my hair, surprised to find it still clipped back and braided, tight against my scalp, under control.
The two words are “Holy crappola!” and Raymond is yelling them over and over. “Holy crappola! Look at this. The ant is going nuts.”
We lean in and watch the bug. It runs left, stops short, then runs right. Then it begins moving in tighter and tighter circles, as if all its instincts have been short-circuited.
“So it’s true,” I say.
“I’m convinced. I’ve seen enough.” Stephanie hugs the stuffed animal to her chest. I know she’s feeling badly about the ant, but there’s also a conflicted look on her face. She’s fighting it, but it’s winning. Like me, like Alix, she’s proud of what we just did. And I know that also like me, she’s wondering what else we can do. And to whom? How far can this thing go?
Alix slams her palm on the table, crushing the ant, putting it out of its misery.
Raymond tunes up his violin. His slack jaw and dim eyes tell me that he’s slipped into deep concentration. He plays the tune that he heard the three of us singing. The nine notes played twelve times, the malignant music, the binding dance.
12
Nine notes in their binding song. Nine notes repeated twelve times. One hundred and eight in the melody. Three digits—108—that add up to 9, the product of three 3s.
Divide 108 by 3 to get 36; 3 plus 6, another 9. Another 3 to that ordained third power.
I bow to the malicious music.
You are expecting your stasimon, the curtain down between acts, the promise of clarity and comment. And here I am, your guide, going off on wild, arithmetic tangents.
What I want to say is this: I sure know how to pick ’em. Don’t you adore those three lovely, ugly girls? I do.
How quickly they learn. I’m thrilled to see the light come on behind their eyes as they begin to understand their capabilities. The way they got into that ant’s brain, twisted and tweaked it. They taught it a lesson: There is no escape from the terrors of the mind. Brava!
Let me reiterate where we stand at this point in time. And yes, it is only a matter of time.
Alix. Alecto. I hardly have to tempt her. Her fury has been so fine-tuned by others for so long. I ought to send her parents—and her parents’ parents and even her parents’ parents’ parents—fruit baskets for instilling in her so much animosity toward humankind.
And Stephanie, Tisiphone, sheer delight. We can thank so many for shooting down her earnest, peaceful attempts to bring about change. She’s a product of the whole world with its endless greed, materialism, lies, and unabashed self-interest. The warlords and presidents of countries; the lying media and corrupt priests; the insatiable real estate developers and corporate polluters; the autocrats, plutocrats, and bureaucrats; the fascists, communists, and every other ist—there’s no end to those who deserve my utmost and sincere thanks for creating Tisiphone. I could give them all hugs.
Which brings me to Megaera—quiet, still-developing Meg—with the potential to have the most fury of all. Abused by both individual and society, cast aside by parent and the system’s so-called parent substitute. Look what the human race is doing to her.
She is my third, the one I have been waiting for.
But she’s got this one blessing—a curse, in my view—that she manages to keep things in perspective. Damn her open heart and mind. Damn her optimism, the way it dilutes her well-deserved anger. I must get those moccasins off her feet, not allow her to walk the proverbial mile in someone else’s shoes.
I must keep her away from that meddlesome goddess of justice disguised in teacher’s clothing. You know who I mean.
Plus there’s her little friend, Raymond. He’s a question mark. Will I have to do something to keep that interfering ray of light from fiddling sunshine notes into her ear?
Three plus one is four, and four is not an acceptable number. Never four. Never two. It’s always three.
SECOND STASIMON, THE BOOK OF FURIOUS
13
With one less ant in the world, we leave Raymond’s house. Alix, Stephanie, and I decide to walk the long way home through downtown. We could talk for the next month nonstop and not get everything said and sorted out. What happened? What exactly did we do to the ant? How did we do it? Can we do it again? Can we do it any time we want? Whom can we do it to? We need so many answers and I’m not even sure we have the right questions.
I zip my hoodie and shove my hands into the pockets. It’s not raining for once and it feels more like the usual October weather in this part of California, warm in the day but chilly as soon as the sun sets. Alix takes a black knitted watch cap—basic headgear for surfers—out of the back pocket of her baggy, low-slung jeans and pulls it hard over her ears. Stephanie buttons up her cardigan, which is worn thin at the elbows. Between the bells on her belt and the metal beads threaded into her dreadlocks, she makes music as she walks. She’s dominating the conversation.
“Let’s each pick our top candidate, the number one person who deserves a lesson from us. Can we call what we do a lesson? Lesson sounds so professional. I’ll start.” Pause. “It was in the news today. There’s this coal company in West Virginia that thinks the Clean Water Act doesn’t apply to it. The boss dumps chemicals into the town water supply. And that gives people cancer and kidney damage. Little kids get open wounds, just from taking baths. I’ll show you the pictures. They’re awful.”
It’s a big joke at school how easy it is to make Stephanie cry. Mention a toxic spill or an endangered species halfway around the world, and boo-hoo-hoo. I overheard the Double Ds in the bathroom say that they think it’s all a big phony act, and that Stephanie only pretends to be oh so sensitive because it’s the only way a geek like her can get any attention. They would say something cruel and shallow like that. Stephanie sniffs, and even though I’m not looking at her directly, I know there are tears.
“You really feel for those people, don’t you?” I ask.
She stops so suddenly that we almost collide, and she puts herself right in my face. “How can you not care? How can anyone not feel?” She starts walking again, picking up the pace. Alix and I take giant steps to keep up with her. “What can someone our age do about it? About anything? Write letters? Hold a fund-raiser bake sale? Make speeches in class that everyone makes fun of? Try to tell the truth in a blog that nobody reads? I can’t even vote. I have no power. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Until now,” Alix says.
Stephanie perks up, remembers. “That’s righ
t. Now I finally have power.”
“We have power,” Alix emphasizes.
“Power that we can use to undo the injustices in the world. To make things right and fair.”
“Right for us, too,” Alix points out.
We turn the corner and get hit by a mind-blowing sight. The moon. It’s low on the horizon but full and huge, vibrating white and sharp around the edges. It’s like a cutout moon taking up a whole section of dark construction-paper sky. I stare at it with awe. Stephanie asks Alix whom she would put first on her list to teach a lesson. Alix mumbles a name.
“You want to punish someone named Simon?” I ask.
She turns on me so fast that I stumble backward. She shouts in my face, the Ps popping. “Not punish him! Punish anyone who lays a finger on him, anyone who gives him any shit or takes advantage when I’m not around to stand up for him.”
Stephanie unclips her stainless-steel water bottle from the side of her backpack, takes a drink. “Who’s Simon?”
“My brother. He’s nineteen, but he’s like a little brother. He’s … um, retarded.”
A disapproving groan from Stephanie. “Alix, the word retarded is a derogatory term. You mean developmentally different.”
“Whatever. I’ll tell you who’s different. The rest of the world. Simon’s awesome. Except for how dumb people treat him.”
Stephanie passes her the water bottle, and as I watch Alix throw back her head and guzzle, I realize that even though she’s not afraid to hurl herself into fifteen-foot waves, even though she’s got a scary reputation for not putting up with anything from anyone, when it comes to her brother—and other things that I don’t know about yet—Alix feels helpless and frustrated, too.