Temporary Agency, page 19
Alison was moving up and down my body, making herself liquid as she spread her fingers wide and slithered them down my arms, my breasts, slamming her thighs into mine, pushing me up against the railing. ‘She said she’d protect us. All the stuff I brought, the stuff from Annie—’ I realized suddenly that I’d dropped the bag. I knew I should look for it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop touching Alison. I didn’t need it, I told myself. Margaret Tunnel Light would protect us.
Alison was touching my breasts through my clothes, rubbing my nipples with the flattened palms of her hands. At the same time, she kept grimacing, crunching her face, as if in pain. Several times she opened her mouth, with no sound, until finally she burst out, ‘That goddamn music.’ For the first time since Alison had shown up, I heard the song, the shrill whine of the Choir of Angels.
7
‘It’s all right,’ I told her, only vaguely conscious of how absurd the statement was. I was kissing her, sliding down and rubbing against her. I knew I should take her away, cover her ears, but all I could do was kiss them, biting her ears and then all over her face while I pushed her back against the railing. Near me, someone was vomiting convulsively while someone else squatted underneath him.
I started pulling at Alison’s clothes, unable to remember how they came off and getting lost in the fabric, or scraping the zipper of her windbreaker across my tongue and then my breasts. Alison was doing something, she was crying for some reason. I wanted to lick the tears for the salt, but couldn’t move my mouth from her clothes, her skin, where they met…
Someone slammed against me. A woman of about seventy was trying to get at the window, through the window, trying to reach the song. There were children hanging on her, a very young boy and girl literally holding on to her arms, which she waved about as she butted her head against the plate glass, so that the children almost flapped in the air like flags.
Get out of here, I thought. We had to get out of there. But my bag was gone. I needed my bag from Annie-O. ‘Help me find my bag!’ I shouted at Alison, who began pushing people aside to reach the floor, where people were rolling around or else touching and hitting each other. Somehow we found it, two women had it, they were rubbing the leather against their bodies, laughing as they pushed it up against their breasts from below. Now they were opening it, taking out one rock, or cord, or fabric at a time in order to taste it or rub it in their hair. I thought Alison and I would have to fight them for it, but when we pushed them aside they laughed and immediately took to pushing each other and then whoever was next to them, laughing and pushing and then kicking as hard as they could.
I grabbed a dress I’d gotten from Annie. ‘Put this on,’ I ordered Alison. ‘Over your clothes.’ I didn’t dare undress or let Alison expose any more of her skin. The sight of it burned, I could see it crackling, small licks of flame flaring on her face and arms. The dress was a ‘relic’ charged with the energy of outlaw enactments Annie and her cross-sisters had done in caves, computer centres and anonymous hotel rooms. While Alison put it on, I chose my own relic, a strand of heavy blue beads on a red silk cord. Annie and her relics had power because of who Annie was, and because of the blessing work she and her women had done over decades. But she had special power for Alison and me because she’d done everything without the help of the SDA or Bright Beings.
There were pots of red mud in each bag, one clay jar for each of us to smear on our faces, necks and hands. It made me think of Timmerman and his mud-covered escorts, but it cooled me and weighed me down, as if it covered my whole body, turning me into one of those cave statues, all breasts and hips, you sometimes see in museums for precursors of the Revolution.
The bag contained things I didn’t understand—a can opener, a railway ticket from England, torn pieces of what looked like a medical report, a gold-headed hammer—and other things that made a little more sense, like a cracked pomegranate, a comb in the shape of a bird with outstretched wings, a mirror set into a small wooden bowl, a tiny bow and arrow, and a claw from some animal. Most important was a small leather pouch filled with folded photographs and dirt. Annie’s soul memories. I’d asked her why she was taking such a chance lending me these things and all she would do was put on her tough voice and tell me, ‘Let’s just say I don’t like Devoted Ones. Okay?’ adding, ‘Anyway, us humans got to stick together.’
The bulk of the bag was in rocks, which, like the mud Annie had brought back from enactments done in wilderness power places around the world. Alison started to take them out, but I raised my heavy mud hand to stop her. I pointed to the ground, then waved my hand, signalling ‘Not here’. She nodded and I led her through the thick press of people, moving ponderously, mudpeople through a world of fire.
Moving through the flashes of ecstasy exploding all around us, I suddenly felt like an enemy of the Revolution, of human freedom—a thief, a traitor, someone who would be hated throughout history for bringing history back from the dead. Desire and the endless body had killed history and now Alison and I were going to murder desire, cover it with mud.
All around us people had abandoned their bodies to live forever in the body of smells, of faceless tongues and teeth, of skin spread so wide it became invisible. Others were sending roots down through the cracked floors, down through the Manhattan granite, lines from their penises and vaginas to draw up the juices of the Earth, while Alison and I became drier and drier, our dead mud bodies about to wither into dust.
I didn’t even realize I was turning back until Alison gripped my arm. She pulled me along like some lost child, at whatever cost to herself, past the souvenir stands where people were shoving plaster models of Rebecca Rainbow into their groins, or jabbing themselves with gold leather openers, or masturbating each other with silver statues of the bulls and bears slaughtered by Rainbow’s followers on the day the Founder reopened the Stock Exchange. We moved past the video question and answer machines, now torn from their slots, until finally I smashed up against a wall and realized there was nobody there, we’d come around the corner to the row of elevators connecting the gallery and the street and had tumbled into silence.
Without a word we set out the stones from the bag. They were small mostly, about palm size, and marked with lines across their softly curved female surfaces. We set them in a loose circle, then filled the circle with Annie’s emblems of humanity. In the centre we made a small fire, not of flash powder, but only pieces of paper, newsprint, letters, even junk mail and old receipts or cancelled cheques, all of it mixed with flowers and weeds plucked from Miracle Park. With the fire some of the weight lifted off me.
I took out a silver jar from the bottom of the bag. The jar held dirt, and as I held it up I thought I could see Alison smile underneath her mud mask. The two of us had made this particular relic together, travelling out to the Forbidden Beach for sand, then setting it out on the floor of my apartment where we squatted down and pissed on it until we could form a brown paste.
Alison and I clapped our hands together to shake off some of the mud. It was the first time either of us had made a sound and I found myself crying at the discovery that sound was still possible, even without the Song of the Blessed. The next part was the hardest, for it meant tempting ourselves with a leap into Tunnel Light’s world. We each reached into the jar with our left hands, while unbuttoning each other’s blouses with our right.
We smeared the paste on each other’s breasts, bellies, thighs and finally genitals. Instead of the hurricane I’d feared, a softness settled over us. ‘I love you,’ I said, and Alison repeated it back at me, as the heated mud on our faces cracked and fell in chunks onto the edge of the fire. We reached across for each other’s hands, rocking on our heels slightly, hearing the distant hum of terror and desire.
‘Ready?’ Alison said.
‘I hope so.’
For the past two days, while Alison had battled on the telephone, I had studied how to do a Summoning—the formulas, the props, the preparations. In the end, I had had to discard everything. Whoever had done the original research and development, it all belonged now to the SDA. Finally, I remembered Adrienne Birth-of-Beauty’s Fifteenth Proposition—‘There are no rules except discovery. There is no tradition except invention.’
I stripped off what remained of my clothes. ‘Paint me?’ I said. Alison spat into the ashes from the fire, then scooped up a small amount to mix into the paste with more spit. She held up her left forefinger and kissed it, looking at me as we both remembered how that finger had lifted my whole body early in the morning, before she’d gotten back on the phones and I’d left her to go to the disaster.
Eyes closed, I let her paint an enactment face on me, the lines and concentric circles a summary of both our lives—initiation markings, family scar designs we’d shown each other, words of power from our deep journeys, images from the screen we’d painted on our first night together. When she’d finished, I reached into my bag for the amulet the SDA had given me as well as a small glass pot containing dried menstrual blood from my first period. With Annie’s hammer I smashed the amulet, then used the pieces to form a small circle inside the larger one. Using the powdered blood my left middle finger drew two stick figures, one outside the outer circle, the other in the centre, with a line running between them.
When we’d planned the Summoning, Alison and I had spent half an hour deciding what designation we should use for our target. What name would reach her? Finally, Alison convinced me that for a Bright Being, as for humanity, reality consisted of whatever identity she was inhabiting right now.
My finger wrote Margaret Tunnel Light’s name in menstrual blood and spit. ‘Blessed Being,’ I said, ‘we ask your entry into this circle of our lives. We thank you now and forever for all the gifts you have given us and will give us.’ I said it three times.
There was nothing else to do. If I’d brought flash powder I could have rounded off the ceremonial part, but we’d decided to stay with our own tools. And so we waited, just squatting, while I thought of the people below, of Paul, of Alison and me.
Behind me an elevator door opened. When I turned around Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23 was walking towards me.
‘It’s time,’ she said. ‘You understand. I’m pleased that you have called me.’ The elevator door behind her stayed open.
I stood up. ‘No,’ I said. ‘We understand that what you are doing must stop.’
She smiled, allowing her teeth to flare for an instant, overwhelming the fluorescent lights of the hallway. ‘Do you think you can compel me?’ she asked. ‘With your Summoning?’ I said nothing. ‘I came to show you,’ Margaret Tunnel Light said. ‘To show you how much I respect you and love you.’
‘You have to stop,’ I told her. ‘I know you want to give us something. And you think it’s good for us. But we can’t—we’re not ready for it.’
She ignored me. ‘I have let you taste the food I can give you. The two of you together. And I have let you go so that you will know that I love you and will never harm you.’
‘You just don’t understand what you’re doing to them. Or why. You’ve been tricked. Used by human beings who don’t care about anything except destroying Alexander Timmerman.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ she said. ‘Human schemes do not interest me. But I will never harm Alexander.’
‘If you destroy his cause you destroy him. You’ve got to understand that. What you’re doing today is destroying everything he cares about. Everything he loves.’
She looked very young suddenly, with her deep black-ringed eyes, her short hair. ‘Child,’ she said. ‘I cannot harm him. Or any human being. I simply cannot. The nature of my nature is devotion.’
‘No!’ I shouted at her. Alison touched my arm, but I pushed her away. ‘You’re not a Devoted One. You’re Malignant. You killed my cousin. Paul Cabot. Paul Cabot. You killed him. Set your snakes on him.’
She said, ‘Something has disturbed you. There are enemies. Let me inside and I will free you.’
I took a step backwards and spit on the floor. My left hand slashed at the air. ‘I forbid you to enter me.’
‘Why do you insist on this? I’ve never hurt you. I’ve never touched any Paul Cabot.’
‘Your name,’ I said, ‘is Lisa Black Dust 7.’
‘You know very well my designation.’
‘Now. Now you’re Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23. But you were Lisa Black Dust 7 first. You ran a service in an office building. An agency for Malignant Ones who worked for the government. Paul worked there. In that building. And you ate him. Why won’t you remember?’
She shook her head. ‘No. This is your sickness. False stories about me will not help you, Ellen.’
Rubbing my hands together, I removed as much as I could of the paint and paste, then wiped the marks from my face. The Being said, ‘What are you doing?’ When I glanced at Alison she was looking at me with narrowed eyes, concentrating. She nodded slightly and I realized once again how much I loved her.
‘I’m exposing myself,’ I said to Tunnel Light. ‘Can you read humans? Can you tell when a human is telling the truth? When a human knows the truth?’ I opened my arms. ‘I want you to read me.’
She stepped close to look at my face. When she touched my cheek, I forced myself not to jump back. Her fingers felt—ordinary. Soft, and a little cold. She moved her fingers around my cheeks, my ears, underneath my jaw, and then held them for a while on the side of my neck.
She dropped her arms finally and stepped back. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I know my purpose. I know my function.’
‘They brought you back. To serve their purpose. Arthur Channing and his crooked friends who didn’t want Alexander Timmerman investigating the banking system. They couldn’t use a Malignant One since Timmerman would just protect himself. So they let you change to Benign and sent you in to destroy him, his organization. That was your real purpose.’
She shook her head. She looked like a child, scared and confused. ‘But if I still can help? What does it matter if a human scheme brought me here? My purpose remains true. Why should—’
Down the hall an elevator door had opened and now three men in tubular masks were moving towards us. Two of the men held guns, the third carried a spray gun attached by hose to a heavy canister covered in markings and tied round with sanctified nylon cord hung with beads. Demon breaker.
One of the men said, ‘Ellen Pierson, Alison Birkett, you’re under arrest. Turn around and face the wall.’
Tunnel Light said, ‘These women are under my protection. I cannot allow—’
The agent in the middle was raising the nozzle. ‘Ferocious One,’ he said, ‘I beg you—’
I shoved Tunnel Light aside before he could spray her. Grabbing Alison’s hand, I pushed the Being into the elevator she’d left open behind her. ‘Paul!’ I shouted. ‘Close the door. Hurry.’ I screamed as a bullet hit the wall behind us and ricocheted around the chamber. But then the door was closed and we were moving downwards. ‘Paul,’ I said. ‘Take us between floors. And disable the other elevators.’
I turned Maggie Tunnel Light to face the steel column at the front of the elevator. Confused, she didn’t resist. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘This is what you did to him. You killed him. And then the government and the Bright Beings stuck him here, in elevators.’
Whether the others saw or not, I don’t know—I’ve never asked Alison—but to me, Paul’s face appeared in the air at the top of the column, in front of the jewels and hair. He looked just as I remembered him from that last day, only—not so scared, more peaceful. ‘I love you,’ I whispered, but I knew I couldn’t stay looking at him. Right now, our Friend had to get my attention.
She was changing, moving in and out of a different form, taller, with a fuller body. Lisa Black Dust 7, I thought. She’s changing back to the Ferocious One. I opened my mouth to tell Paul to get us out of there, take us downstairs, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even lift my arm to signal him. Next to me, Alison was pressed back against the wall, struggling against whatever invisible arm held her there.
The Being leaned forward with her mouth open, smiling like a delighted five year old. ‘Ellen Pierson,’ she said, as if thrilled to see me again. ‘Are you ready for me to eat you?’
I backed away, reaching for Alison.
And then Alison and I fell down as Black Dust 7 vanished, taking the pressure with her. Margaret Tunnel Light stood there again, weeping in the dim light of the elevator. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to feed you. That’s all. I just wanted to feed you.’
Exhausted finally, I couldn’t answer, just sat there watching her cry. Alison stood up and walked to her. ‘We can’t take your food,’ she said. I don’t think I’d ever heard such kindness in her voice, not even when she was holding me after Paul’s death. ‘Humans can only feed each other. I know you tried, but it’s just part of our nature. We long for you to help us and feed us, but in the end our love for each other is the only food we can eat. I’m sorry. Really. I wish it was different. For all of us as well as for you.’
Margaret Light-At-The-End-Of-Tunnel 23 dropped her head. She began to rock back and forth, with her arms wrapped around her chest. I stood up and took Alison’s hand.
The Being straightened. She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them again, her face calm. Turning to me, she said, ‘Please ask your cousin to take us downstairs.’
I glanced at Alison who nodded. ‘Paul,’ I said. The elevator moved. When we touched the ground floor, Tunnel Light said, ‘Bury your faces in your bodies.’ It took us a moment to realize what she meant, but when the door opened Alison and I had safely pressed our eyes into each other’s shoulders as a flash of light filled the corridor. When we stepped out of the elevator five or six men and women were on the ground, groaning or pulling off their tube masks to press their hands against their eyes. Ignoring them, we followed Tunnel Light, who had already moved through the lobby and onto the trading floor.
