Temporary Agency

1

So there it is. Paul and Alison and me. And of course, Lisa Black Dust 7. Last night, I got out that old manuscript. It took me a while to find it. I’d buried it pretty well and for a few minutes I even thought I must have thrown it out. But no, there it was, along with my high school yearbook, the photo from my senior tattoo initiation—and that damn Time magazine cover. Alison Birkett, frozen in time, just like the corpse of Rebecca Rainbow under glass in the New York Stock Exchange.

I sat down and read it through, and I guess I didn’t cringe more than fifty or sixty times. What the hell, like I said back then, I was just a kid, right? Me and Alison. Shit. I can remember it so sharply, sitting there in her office, just about levitating with excitement. When I decided to write all this down, everything that’s just happened, I thought I probably should go back over the old stuff and edit it. Do a little cleaning up with the added wisdom of ten more years stuck on the planet. But now that I’ve read it, I think I’ll just leave it like it is. Somehow, I feel I owe it to Paul not to change anything, to keep the feelings the way they were when I wrote them down. And maybe I also owe it to Alison. I’m not sure about that. I don’t think I’m ever sure of anything when it comes to me and Alison Birkett.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Or maybe I’m just scared. I was going to start with the rally in Miracle Park, but maybe the real beginning was earlier, when Joan Monteil and I went to a Bead Woman for a Speaking at the start of our “relationship”. It was Joan’s idea. After several weeks of Joan hanging around, bringing me cute little toys, inviting me to openings and play readings, telling me how great I looked in whatever I happened to wear (I considered trying on more and more bizarre outfits, such as covering myself in bandages, or Victorian dresses stapled all over with baseball cards, just to see what she would say), when I finally gave in and went to bed with her, she was so overwhelmed she insisted we go see an SDA certified Speaker the very next day.

I didn’t want to tell Joan what I thought of SDA certifications. Or Bead Workers, for that matter. But that was no criticism of her. I didn’t talk about stuff like that with anyone. So there was Joan, sitting on the edge of her wooden chair with red and yellow beads caught in her hair from where the woman poured them over her head, and me doing my best to stare out at 7th Avenue through all the ancestral statues, offering stones and other junk hung in the window, and wishing I could shake out the beads still stuck in my hair, without that SDA certified malpractitioner scolding me for “pruning the Tree of the Ancients” when suddenly the woman grabs my shoulders in her certified hands and kisses me on my forehead and above my heart.

“What are you doing?” I shouted, and jumped back so hard I almost upped the damn tree right out of its roots.

The Speaker only smiled happily at me, but Joan said, “Ellen! Don’t you know what that was? That was the Kiss of the Beloved.”

“I know that.”

“Well,” Joan burbled on, “it means something really wonderful has come into your life.” Her voice didn’t leave any doubt as to what she considered was the well spring of the divine beneficence. As for myself, I don’t think I cared much what the source of my good fortune might be (at least I was pretty sure it wasn’t Joan Monteil). I just wanted to leave. “I don’t need any fresh wonders,” I said. “My life is fine the way it is.”

The Speaker looked at me ponderously for a moment, trying for professional significance I guess, then back down at the various coloured beads scattered on the tabletop’s ornate grid. “Look,” she said, and stuck a finger out towards two large beads, one gold, one black, each resting on the borderline between sections of the grid. “Sister Night and Sister Bright are swimming towards each other. And look, here’s an underground river bursting into the day.” She pointed to a wavy line of blue beads near the centre of the table, where a painting of the Sun appeared.

“I said I’m fine, okay?” I said. “The Supreme Court ruled you can’t do this. It violates privacy for a Speaker to give unsolicited predictions. Harrison vs. Truesource Center of Revelations.”

Joan’s eyes widened even further at this new revelation of my resources. Ellen Pierson—artist, seducer and legal scholar. Any more excitement and Joan’s eyes would pop out, like fresh beads to disturb the reading.

The Speaker said quietly, “A bad judgement, though of course predicted by those of us in the profession. It will not stand long. Free speech will take precedence. At any rate, may I remind you that you did indeed seek me for a consultation. I did not come banging on your door at six in the morning.”

I told her, “Well now I’m withdrawing my authorization.”

The Speaker said, “Why are you wearing protection?”

I jerked my glance down to where my hand was touching the medallion I still wore underneath my shirt. I let my hand drop. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The Bead Woman closed her eyes and grimaced slightly, as if squinting inside herself for some gem of knowledge lying in a jumble of prophetic images. She opened her eyes to look at me warily. “You have a chip in your body,” she said, with a touch of amazement. I glanced at the doorway, wondering if it contained hidden scanners which would have reported such information to her before she came out to meet us.

“Wow,” Joan said, “a chip?”

“Forget it,” I told her. “It’s dead.”

“But what’s it for? Are you a spy or something?”

“It’s a family heirloom,” I said. Leaning over, I shook the remaining beads loose from my hair.

The Speaker said, “I’m afraid it’s too late to force-alter the configurations.”

“I’m not trying to alter anything,” I told her. “I’m trying to leave.” As I strode out Joan came scurrying after me.

“Ellen?” she said. “Honey?” I think I growled. “What’s wrong? I thought it sounded great. What she said, I mean.”

I stopped in front of a chilli parlour, by a sign promising that every bowl of chilli was blessed by the spirit remnants of dead Native precursors. “Joan,” I said, trying to sound vaguely warm and promising, “I need some time alone. I hope you can understand that.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, of course.” I hurried away before she could change her mind.

When I got home I sat down in the old wingback chair, pink with little white flowers, I’d somehow managed to get all the way from my parents’ house to my minimal (not minimalist) apartment overlooking 2nd Avenue. Somehow, I found myself sad, like I wanted to cry and couldn’t think of why. I tried to make myself excited, amused, angry about Joan, but none of these got me anywhere. Looking around the room I noticed Nora and Toby, the stuffed totem animals who had come with me (and the chair) from Long Island to the city. Plump little lions, they sat on their hind legs on top of the bookcase my carpenter friend Sharon had made for me during our brief affair. Toby and Nora were pressing their front paws together in a Circle of Invocation. I watched them for a while, telling myself I could see, or at least sense, the energy passing between them, rising and falling with the beating of the Earth. I loved my two seven-inch friends. I hadn’t kept very many relics from my childhood. Most of my childhood tools of power now lay in a sanctified remembrance box in the family shrine down in the rec room of my folks’ house. I smiled, remembering how I’d cried during my puberty rites when the Teller had used her red cord to transfer the power into more appropriate, more adult, vessels. But not Nora and Toby. They were staying with me and that was that.

I walked over to them, smiling, and stroked their soft golden backs. “What do you think, girls?” I said. “Is my underground river about to burst into the light of day?” I didn’t dare pick them up. The river of tears would burst its underground banks.

This is ridiculous, I told myself. She predicted something good. What was I so upset about? I needed something to do. I decided to call my friend Harry and tell him about how I’d surrendered to Joan. If I hadn’t given up the idea of “best friends” when I was fourteen, Harry Astin would have been it.

Harry edits a weekly newspaper for the metalworking “community”, as they like to call themselves, a job which allows him to use journalist jargon, run occasional pieces on “alchemy in the modern world” and stay alive while he assembles found poetry out of speeches by prominent Tellers spliced with headlines from newspaper tabloids, an art which twice has brought him close to charges of blasphemy. Harry dresses in a style he calls “Barney’s drag”, after an expensive clothing store. Though he never actually buys anything there, Harry visits Barney’s often. He claims he once saw Martin Greenflower, the head of the New York College of Tellers and a prime source of material for Harry, blessing a rack of suits, probably in exchange for a kickback, or maybe a flattering dummy in Barney’s yearly Rising of the Light window display.

“Ellen!” Harry said in his exaggerated Southern drawl. I could just see him waving his “prosthetic cigarette” at the air. Harry’s cigarette is one of those things I love about him. Originally part of a kit to help people stop smoking, the plastic glows red on one end when you suck on the other. Harry uses it as a prop to go with his swept-back blond hair and his pinstripe suits. “I was just planning on asking the Benign Ones to guide my finger as I dialled you. What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Speaking to you, darling,” I said. “Begging the Beings to lift me from my wearisome life.” Harry and I talked like that sometimes. Sorry.

“Wonderful. Then you can take my arm and stroll with me to Miracle Park. Alexander Timmerman has announced an enactment and no doubt stirring speech for three o’clock.”

“Great,” I said, meaning it. “Is Glorybe coming?” Harry’s girlfriend was named Gloria Roberta Feinstein, but ever since the first time they had made love Harry had called her “Glorybe”.

“No,” Harry said, “my dimmed Glory sits chained to her research module.”

“All the more reason for her to hear Timmerman speak on Liberation in the Age of Reform.”

It feels strange to write about Timmerman in such a casual way. People reading this may not have heard of my part in everything that happened, but they sure will remember Great Brother Alex. Back then, however, he was only an occasional curiosity on the evening news.

Harry and I met in front of the Spiritual Supply shop on 9th Street by 1st Avenue. Harry was wearing a light blue suit and a red and black striped tie. As I approached, Harry took a fake puff on his cigarette, held between two stiff fingers like a victory salute, then drew his hand away to blow imaginary smoke at me. It was only when he gave me the blue Timmerman button that I realized he was wearing one himself. He must have chosen the suit for the button to blend with the material.

Walking to the rally we saw pictures and totem statues of Alexander Timmerman in many of the store windows. A dress store featured a mannequin with Timmerman’s head, including a pretty good copy of his famous headdress, a beaded cap going down over the eyes and nose with multi-coloured beads in the shape of a bird across the forehead, and actual feathers coming down over the nose for the tail. Other than the mask, the dummy wore a sequin-splattered crepe de chine dress which matched the headdress nicely, but would have looked awful on Timmerman’s squat weightlifter’s body. A few doors down, an old bakery run by a mixture of Chinese and Russian immigrants proudly displayed a poppyseed almond cake in the shape of a man spreadeagled (or else doing jumping jacks), which Harry described as “Brother Alex leaping to our rescue”.

As we approached the rally in Miracle Park (full name, Miguel Miracle of the Green Earth Recreational Area, but no one ever calls it that), we could hear loudspeakers blaring Timmerman’s anthem, Touching The Future, with its never-ending refrain, “If not now, when? If not here, where? And if not us, who? If not us, who?” Harry said, “One almost expects to see a chorus line of owls.” Closer to the park, the crowd looked to be about a few hundred people—a mixture of students, yuppies on their lunch break (or out of work), a few drug dealers, some old Eastern Europeans, scattered tourists, and of course, the homeless, whose collective title always makes them sound like a tribe even when they’re not.

Miracle Park was a homeless haven despite all the efforts of the police to exorcise them. In the early morning you could see middle-aged men and women and runaway kids curled up on the benches under the small shell which was supposed to be for bands but never was. I remember once when I couldn’t sleep, going down to the park and seeing two kids with shaved heads and torn shirts which looked like they came from one of those paramilitary academies, like the Latterday Army of the Saints. The kids were holding a pair of thin foam mattresses, rolled up as if they were too precious to stretch them out on the dewy ground, and they were whispering and giggling, with the park lamps lighting up tattoos from homecoming enactments on the top of their heads. I stood there and thought how they weren’t much older than I had been when all that stuff happened. When Paul got taken. And I remember thinking, now here I was, Paul’s age. Except I would get older and Paul would stay the same, forever. I just about ran from the park, with the kids laughing behind me, probably thinking I was some straight who wanted to do an offering of protection against losing her home and finding herself in the tribe.

So there would have been homeless in Miracle Park no matter what. But in fact, Timmerman rallies always drew homeless people, from his first speeches back in New Chicago. Maybe you remember how the police tried to chase them off, and Timmerman shouted at the cops to “let my brothers and sisters touch the living fire of hope.” That line, and the footage of the shabby people reaching up to the stage to touch the Beautiful Ones, the famous still photo of a gnarled diseased hand in a tattered glove reaching up for perfect fingers, these more than anything, were what made Timmerman famous.

Timmerman’s detractors—“professional cynics” he called them—claimed that the blessing of the homeless at his rallies was stage-managed, a fake. They pointed out how few homeless people actually showed up, and implied that Timmerman’s “operatives” spread the word on the street that crowds would not be welcome and the drunks and crazies especially should just stay away. I don’t know. Until I got involved, I didn’t care enough to investigate. Then later, things just got too complicated.

It was true that that day Harry and I didn’t see more than fifty or sixty homeless people in the small crowd. They’d set up a shrine, though, off on the side. Not a bad job. They’d made a frame with pieces of wood and pipe and some crates and cardboard boxes. They’d decorated it with scraps of paper, bird feathers, bottle caps and a couple of rolls of toilet paper draped as streamers. Marker-drawn pictures of Miguel Miracle of the Green Earth (plus a couple of Rebecca Rainbow, for prosperity, and even one of Li Ku Unquenchable Fire, maybe for defiance), some drawn on paper bags or sheets of newspapers, were thumbtacked to the frame. Some had sayings and invocations, in English, Spanish or Russian, written over the eyes and mouth. In the shrine’s centre, on a little wooden platform, stood a sanctified dollhouse. Judging from the broken pieces and the stains, the enactors probably found it on the street. Probably some stockbroker decided to get a fancier model in the hopes of moving up to a townhouse, and had thrown away the spirit aid which had brought him to where he was now. I wondered if a model home kept its certified SDA sanctification if you found it on the street. I wondered if an SDA sanctification meant anything even when you got it right from the store.

The homeless people who’d made the shrine didn’t seem to share my doubts. They’d drawn arrows outside the shrine to the open room in the centre, which they’d filled with representations, some of them actual dolls (a few looked old enough to have survived since childhood) and some just twigs or cardboard cutouts. I imagined the ceremony, maybe late at night, with all the park people chanting together as they marched their proxies from the cold outdoors into the spiritual warmth of the dollhouse. Around the outside of the whole shrine I noticed the blackened dust left over after burning a large amount of flash powder. You never saw that at home when I was growing up. Any time we did a family enactment my mother got out the vacuum cleaner almost before we’d finished the chants and gestures for “sealing the future”. I think that Mom believed that leaving a mess destroyed the power of the enactment.

Amid the ashes in the park I saw small deposits of unburned powder. Probably got wet, I thought, until it occurred to me that maybe they pissed on it. Some people believe that urine around the border of a shrine truly raises it to the level of true ground. Separates it from its entanglement in everyday reality. My mother preferred vacuum cleaners.

Standing there, I remembered something I’d seen once. It was right after Paul’s ascent to guardianship (yes, I know the usual term is “elevation”, but I don’t think that would go too well in this instance). Right after I stopped seeing Alison. I had gotten that feeling I sometimes got those days, that I couldn’t breathe in my parents’ house. It was late at night, and I put on some clothes and rushed outside. Once beyond the door my lungs started to work again, but I hurried away, just in case my father should wake up (I had just read how Malignant Ones sometimes provoked a man’s prostate to compel him to piss in the middle of the night).

So I went for a walk, nervous that the police might spot me and shoo me back. But instead of a cop car trolling the development, I heard a kind of low growl, and when I came around the corner (Stairway-Joining-Heaven-and-Earth Drive) I saw something very strange, even after what had gone on over the past months. Three naked women, their bodies and faces streaked with mud (or maybe shit) were squatting in the road, humming or chanting, and urinating on some kind of white maze they’d drawn on the blacktop. In the centre of the maze lay a doll made of glass and carved crystal. I couldn’t tell the women’s ages. Their bodies looked lumpy, either from muscle or fat. When I first saw them I thought of nothing but, how could they get away with that on the North Shore of Long Island? And then sadness, or maybe shame, took hold of me as I thought of the puny enactments I had done for Paul, never even naked, let alone peeing in the street, and no wonder nothing I’d done had ever worked.

Then I became scared. Maybe they weren’t women at all. Maybe Lisa’s friends had come to get me. Grabbing hold of my talisman, I prayed that the chips in me were broadcasting to the right places while I recited my personal formula. They did turn and look at me. But instead of showing their teeth, like Lisa Black Dust 7, they just smiled. And—I’m not sure of this part, because it feels like I dreamed it or something—they blew kisses at me. What I am sure of is the sweet smell of flowers and the feeling of safety, so powerful I felt like I could howl and cry all night long. I didn’t. What I did was run. I ran home as fast as I could.

I did my best to push the whole thing out of my mind. I used schoolwork, TV, gossip, and even an obnoxious boy named Johnny Olden, who believed he was in love with me. I thought about it, sometimes. Like when I had to pee. And once, during a Girls’ Enactment after gym class, I found myself wondering what Ms Cohen would do if I dropped my shorts and peed at the foot of the Virginity Guardian. In a few weeks, however, I banished it so successfully I didn’t think of it again. Until that day in Miracle Park.

Harry saved me from brooding. Puffing on his pc, he said, “If this circus doesn’t take off soon, perhaps we could sue Alexander in Consumer’s Court.” I grinned, thinking of Timmerman as the first defendant in the special legal system he himself was proposing.

“He’s a strange mixture, isn’t he?” I said.

“As long as he amuses,” Harry said.

“No, really. Sometimes he acts like he wants to bring back the Revolution, and other times he just spends all his energy on food labels, mattress fillings, and windshield wipers.”

“Maybe his mother told him that genius lies in the details.”

Finally, the blaring music stopped. Everyone turned to the van parked at the end of the enactment area. Either Timmerman’s divine Helpers or some clever lighting system was making the snakes glow and the sunwheel spin. “They’re hypnotizing us,” Harry said. “The next time we go into a voting booth, we’ll all start clucking like chickens.” Someone behind us shushed him. He blew imaginary smoke into the air.

A man and a woman came out of the van and started circling the stage area, making wide sweeping gestures with their arms. They were caked in mud, giving their bodies a look of ancient grey deserts. Harry whispered to me, “Let’s hope it doesn’t start raining before they complete their performance.” This time, I shushed him. On top of the mud the men and women had pasted (I guess) dollar bills, advertising circulars, street handouts for discos and discount stores, and pictures of smiling women holding their breasts with 900 numbers across the nipples.

When they’d completed their circle, they stepped back to stand a little way apart facing the audience. With a loud grunt they crashed their hands together like cymbals—and burst into flames. All over their bodies the paper and mud were burning, while the two stood impassively, their hands clasped and their heads bent forward, like the people you sometimes see in government office buildings, hired to promote a spiritual atmosphere. Except these people were on fire.

I admit I gasped with everyone else, except Harry who kept his cool. “Think they’ll give me a light?” he said, holding up his pc, but I was straining to look through the cheering whistling crowd to see if I could spot the flame-proof bodysuit and the gas jets underneath the mud. Behind me someone said proudly, “How about that? That’s better than those horses he used in Boston. Only in New York, huh?”

The crowd cheered again, for there was Alex Timmerman, stepping through the double pillars of consumer fire, dressed, as always, in his enactment mask and a grey business suit. While the flames died down on his escorts, leaving them a mess of melting mud, Timmerman launched into his speech, an incongruous array of charges of corruption against government, corporations, and lobbyists, lacing it all with sensible proposals. He spoke of resanctifying our daily lives, of ways in which packagers drain divine nutrients from the food we eat, of banks and lawyers and congressmen in “a black hole of greed, sucking in money and information, never to be seen again”. He talked of raising up our sexual selves to levels of selfless love and power. In short, he was all over the map. There was a curious excitement about the speech, as if everything he said was something you’d once thought about for yourself. But if the crowd was excited it wasn’t because of Timmerman’s ideas or proposals. Speech-making wasn’t what they had come for.

How does someone get one, let alone two, Devoted Ones to act as his private agents of benediction? Getting Malignant Ones to work for you isn’t all that difficult. Gluttons that they are, they’ll arrange your partner’s death, or your boyfriend’s slavish devotion, or maybe just some premature promotions in your career, all in exchange for the thrill of tasting human nastiness and degradation. But you can’t hire Benign Ones at your local temp agency. “The Devoted Ones lift you gently, the Ferocious Ones knock you down with a club.” Usually, if a Benign One appears at all in someone’s life it does so briefly, at a time of crisis, and mostly in disguise, like the taxi driver who showed up at just the right moment to rescue Ingrid Burning Snake from the sec police in the early days of the Revolution. Or they counteract some Malignant intervention, like the waitress who tripped and spilled coffee on the supposed travelling salesman who was hypnotizing Governor Chichester to keep her from reaching the presidential debate studio.

So how did Timmerman manage it? Fasting? Enactments in dark caves, or the desert, to purify his purpose, “expunging self from the equation of his actions”? Or did the Devoted Ones, his “choir of angels” as the press called them, attach themselves to his campaign for their own inscrutable purposes?

Two figures walked out from the audience and turned to stand alongside Alex Timmerman. “Oh my God!” a woman in front of me shrieked. “He was standing right next to me. I could have touched him!” They appeared as a man and a woman, though as far as anyone knew the categories didn’t mean anything to Bright Beings. Just shells of appearance. The man wore a suit, grey like Timmerman’s, with a red tie loosened at the neck. The woman wore a skirt and blouse and running shoes, like those office workers who keep their high heels in their desks (I found myself wondering if she’d modelled herself after women seen only in the street). Their faces and hands gleamed with a light that first flickered, then gleamed in intensity, as if they’d turned up a rheostat. At the same time, their faces drained of expression until they looked like mannequins in a department store.

With a roar that made me wince, the crowd all chanted together, “Devoted Ones, we thank you for your devotion. We know that nothing we have done deserves your precious intervention.” And then they began to push forward, everyone hoping to touch the Spirits, palm to palm, finger to finger. It was all I could do to stay upright.

The only other person not moving was Harry. “You’re not fighting to be blessed,” I told him.

He shrugged gently. “I might tear my suit.” He didn’t ask my excuse.

I stopped paying attention to Harry or the Benign Ones and their would-be recipients because of someone else who had caught my eye. A woman stood a few feet behind Timmerman, her arms crossed, her body bent slightly backwards as if she was leaning against an invisible tree. Short, about five feet three inches, with completely black hair, straight, combed forward in front and cut short on the sides, she looked like someone I might have met at The Unfertilized Egg, my favourite cruising bar. She was wearing a loose black turtleneck tucked into close-fitting black jeans with a wide silver belt and dark red cowboy boots. She’d put the boots on over the pants’ legs, which in the Egg would have signalled a fem, or at least not a butch. Her thick makeup would have made the point more loudly. She’d done her eyes in heavy black liner, giving them a deep hollow look. Either she was naturally pale or had made her face up white, with no blusher, but dark red lipstick.

She was just standing there, just watching the crowd and the Benign Ones working the audience like an auctioneer at an estate sale. But something about her made me forget the noise and the pushing, Timmerman’s crowing about “the life and truth of the people”, even Froggy 1 and Froggy 2 (don’t ask me why I called Our Devoted Friends that, maybe from the way they hopped back and forth in front of the mob). “Harry?” I said. He made a noise. “Who’s that? Behind Timmerman.”

“Timmerman’s publicist?” he said. “His downtown liaison? His polltaker and sacred performance artist?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Finally, marshals came out to escort the divine guests away from the crowd. Though a few people shouted that they hadn’t had their turn, that it wasn’t fair and what about their rights, Timmerman quieted them down through platitudes about spreading the power through devoted humans. Or maybe it wasn’t such a platitude. The people who’d been touched seemed compelled to touch others. They kept putting their hands on each other, or hugging, or rubbing against each other, sliding and lifting, sometimes kissing, sometimes moving their hands along each other’s backs or thighs. It was sexual and very overt, yet very innocent, as if…as if nothing was expected to come of it. Most of our touching, even necking, locks into a context of messages, like “This is going to lead to screwing”, or “This is not going to lead to screwing”, or “Now we have a real relationship”, or “Not this time, or the next, but the time after that.”

These people reminded me of the three-year-old son of a friend of mine, who after I’d taken a shower and was wearing his mother’s bathrobe, came up and put a hand straight on my crotch, saying, “What you got there?” There was no message in the touching, just the excitement of contact. And yet, there was an intensity, a kind of burning under the surface, that was both exciting and frightening.

Mostly they touched each other, and it didn’t matter if it was a student, or a yuppie, or some homeless kid whose clothes and body stank. They just wanted to touch, to kiss. But they also reached out to those who hadn’t received the blessing, and while some drew back, others laughed, a little embarrassed, but joined in, like housewives finding themselves in a group sex enactment and discovering that once they’ve got the paint and the little bells on, and slashed their clothes, and set the cakes on fire, and started faceless screwing, that they like it and why have they never done this before?

And it wasn’t just people they touched. A few of them would stroke or rub against the trees, even kissing the branches, the way you might kiss down the length of your lover’s arm. One person was sliding her body along the length of a park bench. Another bent down to reach for a squirrel. When the squirrel ran away from him, he just made circles on the blacktop with his hands spread wide, as if to take in as much surface as possible.

Harry said something about Timmerman and brotherhood, but I wasn’t listening. I felt strange watching them. There weren’t really that many; maybe twenty or thirty who’d actually received the touch. “Something’s going on,” I thought. I remember those words, the sentence forming in my mind. And then I looked at the woman standing behind Timmerman. She hadn’t moved, she just stood there, with her black-rimmed eyes looking vaguely across the crowd. For a moment I thought she was looking at me. I jerked my head back, closed my eyes and opened them again. Her gaze had shifted.

Timmerman was talking about human liberation and economics, citing statistics and trends along with his slogans, and it really did seem like people were listening, paying attention. Not noticing all that touching, all those people rubbing against each other, against lamp posts and garbage cans. I felt clumsy, like I had too many arms and legs and no idea where to put them. Two women, very tall, wearing nylon wigs, were passing money back and forth, sliding it against parts of their bodies and laughing, not just the official sexual parts, though certainly those too, but elbows, behind the knees, around the wrists, the small of the back, touching everywhere like a whip drawn slowly back and never cracked…

I’ve got to get out of here, I thought. Somewhere soft where I could think. Soft? I thought of Harry, but instead of telling him we had to go I just imagined the cold tip of his prosthetic cigarette climbing slowly up my spine. In the front of the crowd a man had taken off his shirt and jacket and was sliding his necktie all over his upper body. A child had turned the jacket inside out and put it on, hugging the fabric against herself. Everyone was smiling, moaning, while Alex Timmerman told them about consumer fraud and children’s spirit vocalizations, leveraged buyouts and sacred agonies of democratic change. I wanted to look at Harry and didn’t dare, certain he would slide against me and start pulling my hair, slowly pulling my head back…

And then the voice came. “Ellen?” it said. “Ellen Pierson?”

She might as well have shoved me, as hard as she could. I felt grateful and angry, grateful she’d pulled me loose from Timmerman’s cadres, furious that it had to be her, that it wasn’t Harry, or just my own will. Why hadn’t I left? Why couldn’t I have stayed home? Or gone off with Joan? How did I look? Could she have been anything? Was I sweating? Would she see it in my face if I turned around? Could I just walk away, maybe move into the crowd, as if I needed to hear Timmerman more clearly? Maybe I could abandon dignity and run like hell.

I turned around. My relief astonished me when I saw she didn’t look old. A few more lines but hardly any grey hairs. More casual clothes than years ago—a blue silk zipper jacket over a pale yellow blouse and pleated pants belted with a gold weave cloth belt. Her hair looked softer, not as chic as I remembered (though how could I trust my fourteen-year-old just-a-kid sensibility?). Cut fairly short, brushed back along the sides. And her figure hadn’t changed, no sloppiness or sagging. Probably worked out in a gym, I thought, and could hardly believe my own nastiness. I didn’t dare think what I looked like. I’d sure as hell changed a lot more in the last thirteen years than she had.

“Alison,” I said. “Hello.” Silence. Behind me, the loudspeakers blared Timmerman speaking about hospitals and spiritual malpractice. I could hear laughter and drawn-out sighs and knew that the blessed were still touching each other and everything else they could reach. It no longer mattered much (except that I discovered I wanted to talk about it with her, get her opinion).

Harry’s hand waving his pc stopped me from trying to think of something to say. “Oh,” I said. “Um, Harry, this is Alison Birkett. Alison, this is Harry Astin.” I added, “Alison’s an old friend. Of my family.” I didn’t know why I said that, only that I didn’t dare look at her for fear I would start blushing.

Harry bowed slightly. I had no idea if the name had registered. I’d never told Harry about my brief time as a celebrity, my “fifteen minutes in the centre of the story” as people say. I’d thought about telling him. If anyone, it would have been Harry. But then I always decided that if he didn’t know about Paul and everything else, I didn’t want to pop my bubble of a normal life. But Harry still might have known Alison Birkett’s name. For that matter he might have known my whole history and just respected my reticence.

He sucked on his pc until it glowed and then waved it grandly towards Timmerman and the crowd. When I looked I noticed that the woman with the black ringed eyes had left. Harry said, “Quite a party.”

Alison said, “Indeed it is, Mr Astin.”

Smiling, with what he called his “toothy charm” Harry asked, “Are you a sister, Ms Birkett? Or just a tourist, like Ellen and me?”

With a somewhat thinner smile back she said, “Oh, I’m definitely a visitor and not a partaker. Though maybe a little more than a tourist. I seem to have attended quite a few of Mr Timmerman’s rallies lately.” Something about the comment, or the voice, sent a small shock through me.

Harry said, “So 1 gather the choir of angels has not sung to you?”

Alison’s smile opened wider. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid I haven’t sought the divine touch. And what about you? You’re not seizing your chance to gaze into paradise?”

Harry waved his cigarette. “I’m sure Ellen will tell you I have enough trouble seeing my own face in the mirror.”

None of us said anything for a moment, while behind me Timmerman seemed to be finishing his speech. Finally, Alison said, “You look wonderful, Ellen. How have you been?”

“Fine.”

“I’m really glad to hear that. It’s been almost ten years, hasn’t it?”

“Seven,” I said. Silence again. Neither of us was going to mention our last meeting when I marched into her office and demanded she show me how to deactivate the chips stuck in my body. I would take my chances, I told her. I didn’t want her or the SDA watching over me.

Harry said, “Well, I guess I better return to my work, such as it is.”

When Harry had left, Alison said, “I’m glad I ran into you, Ellen.”

“Are you?”

She ignored my rudeness. “May I buy you a cup of coffee? Now that I see you, I realize there’s something I would like to discuss with you.”

“Sure,” I said. As we left the park I glanced back at the remains of the rally. The woman was back, talking now to Timmerman who stood holding his helmet under his arm, like some ghost carrying his chopped-off head as he wanders the streets.

We didn’t say much as we walked. I asked about her practice and she said she’d been limiting it to private civil cases. She asked, “What sort of work did you pursue? Or do you mind my asking? I can withdraw the question.”

“Of course not,” I said. I considered lying to see how she’d react, but couldn’t think of anything fast enough. “I’m a graphic artist,” I said. “Advertising logos, political posters, sometimes even my own pictures.” She asked some questions about my work, about individual style and commercial demands, grades of materials, working to deadlines, how much was done by computer, copyright and trademark issues. They were reasonable questions, much better than my terse answers.

“What did you think of that shrine?” she asked. “The one in the park.”

I shrugged. “I assumed some homeless people made it.”

“That was my guess. I liked it. It seemed more creative than those huge expensive things put up in Central Park every summer.”

“Then it’s good you got to see it,” I said. “The Park Police’ll probably make them take it down after the rally.”

“Yes, of course. I wonder,” she said. “I wonder if it helps them. The homeless people, I mean. I wonder if their devotion to Alexander Timmerman helps them.”

“Well,” I said, “His Benevolent Friends certainly seem to make them feel happy. At least while they’re around.”

“Yes. Yes, you got that impression, didn’t you?”

We went to the Rogue Elephant, one of those East Village coffee shops in what used to be basement apartments, where everything is brown walls, wooden tables, wrought-iron chairs, loud music, and lots of people talking about texts, landlords, relationships and recent sessions with their inner healers. We sat down at the back, next to a board with hooks for keys to the toilets.

When I’d ordered cappuccino and Alison had ordered mint tea, she said to me, “I really am glad to see you.” I wanted to say, “Then isn’t this your lucky day?” but managed to stop myself. She said, “You look so much like yourself, Ellen. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but I can’t think of how else to put it.”

“And you hardly look a day older yourself,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

Our drinks came. We reached into the bowl of Founder’s Dust next to the sugar and chemical sweeteners, and sprinkled a few grains over the mugs. Having transformed the liquids from dead pieces of plant soaked in water into food, we each said a silent sanctification before we lifted them to our mouths. My sanctification was quite simple really. Something like, “Get me through this without screaming or crying. Please.”

After I’d sipped my coffee I leaned back and said, “So how did you find me, Alison? Credit checks? Tapping into Sacred Revenue Service computer files? Or did you have detectives triangulating reports of my whereabouts?”

She smiled. “Much simpler, I’m afraid. It was the chip. Not mine, the SDA’s. I know you deactivated both of them, but all SDA chips give off a lifelong tracer signal on the original frequency.”

Sonofabitch, I thought to myself. Just let your government get its claws on you. I wondered if the Speaker had picked the signal up on a scanner. I said, “Leave it to our guardians never to pass up an opportunity.”

“Precisely,” Alison Birkett said, and smiled at me.

I knew I should have been angry that she’d played a game on me, stage-managing our coincidental meeting. But somehow, I just felt, well, proud that I’d seen through her. And that I knew she’d expected me to. As if she’d set the game up for both of us and invited me to join in with her. But if I felt that, I certainly wasn’t going to let her know that I did.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and grabbed the key to the ladies’ room from above my head. When I got inside the tiny cracked cubicle I took a deep breath, then squinted into the foggy chipped mirror. Do you ever find yourself wanting to impress someone and thinking, “Why do I care?” This was Alison Birkett, the woman who’d promised to protect my cousin and then let the snakes get him. The woman who said we’d roast the SDA until they shrivelled up and then sold Paul out for guardian of goddamn elevators. Ms “Just leave it to me, Ms Pierson.” Ms “You and me together, Ellen, we’ll take on the whole United States Government and the Living World.” Shit.

I splashed some water on my hands and ran them through my hair, hoping the damp would spring some curl back to life. Damn beauty parlour, I thought. They’d promised me that the perm was not only all natural but charged with the energy of Mirando Glowwood, who’d been a hairdresser before his Awakening as a Founder.

I found a lipstick in my jeans pocket, drew a line on each cheek and rubbed them smooth, then did my lips, after which I blotted and rubbed most of it off, so the colour wouldn’t stand out too much. At least, I thought, I’ve still got my “strong nose and high energy cheekbones”, as my ex, Elinor, used to say.

Back at the table, Alison sat with hands folded on the tabletop, firm enough to keep the table from floating away should the Founders return and cancel gravity, like they did in the battle of New Chicago. She smiled at me, looking so happy to see me, as if we’d only drifted apart due to our busy schedules. Probably I was imagining it, but it looked to me like she’d combed her hair.

I sat down and sipped the cappuccino. Making my voice stern, I said, “So why did you want to see me?”

“There’s something going on,” she said. “Something with Timmerman. And it’s nasty.”

“Nasty how?” I had visions of stern mistresses in bird helmets running spanking parlours for government officials at Consumer Liberation headquarters.

“At least one death,” Alison said. “One I know of.”

“A death?” I repeated.

“Last month, in Seattle, a man named Jack Chikowsky was trampled to death by a group of about ten people, apparently in a highly charged state of sexual ecstasy. According to witnesses, the victim was a willing participant, having stripped naked and covered himself with mud before lying on the ground in front of the dancers. Police reports state that none of the group knew Chikowsky or even each other. Nor did they exactly remember what they had done.”

“Well,” I said, “at least he died happy.”

Alison said, “Jack Chikowsky was a friend of mine, Ellen. He and I lived together for a while when we were both in law school. We’d stayed friends ever since.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, looking down at the table. And then I couldn’t help myself. Taking a sip of my coffee, I said, “At least it wasn’t like he was your cousin or something.”

Alison sighed. She looked down at the table, more hurt, or maybe embarrassed, than angry.

Goddamn you, I thought. You expect me to be perfect? “I’m sorry,” I told her. “It was a cheap shot. And I’m sorry your friend died.”

“There’s more,” she said. “I’d been hearing about Timmerman for some time. I probably should tell you that I haven’t…involved myself in anything controversial for some time now. About eight years. So I was not investigating Timmerman. Not at all. And yet, some of my sources had kept contact with me. And they were telling me of incidents, primarily at Timmerman’s rallies. People’s rational consciousnesses permanently vacating their bodies. People hospitalized for sexual obsessions with inanimate objects. Marriages broken up by sexual acts later deemed intolerable. In Boston six months ago, three teenage girls left the rally, went to a nearby mall and cut up some poor man buying an anniversary present—a nightgown—for his wife.”

I leaned back. I could feel a tingling along my arms and legs. “Why has none of this got into the papers?”

“Good question. When I first heard the stories I wondered about that, but frankly, I didn’t really care. Since Jack died, I’ve been thinking about that a great deal.”

I thought, I’ll bet you have. I remembered all the days and nights I’d spent thinking of nothing but Paul, and how those snakes could have gotten to him when the SDA had promised to protect him.

Alison was saying, “I began to investigate.” She smiled. “Despite my eight-year hiatus, some habits are hard to break. I began with that question. I spoke to people from the papers, the networks. Some of the incidents they knew about, some they’d never even heard of. In each case, however, a decision was made somewhere along the line to suppress the story. Often, it seems, without any conscious connection to the previous cases. Mary Howell, at the LA Times, seemed genuinely surprised and upset when I pointed out to her that she had decided against Timmerman stories on three separate occasions. I suggested to her that she print the story now. ‘Emerging pattern, disturbing questions.’ She promised me she would think about it. Think about it? Of course, nothing has been printed.”

“Do you think she was being straight with you? Maybe the government is clamping a lid on it.”

“Of course I thought about that. But I couldn’t find any trace of government interference. And why would the government want to protect Alexander Timmerman? He certainly doesn’t represent business as usual, which is generally the government’s first priority.”

I said, “The rally today didn’t have anything like riots, or orgies.”

“No, no, it doesn’t happen every time. Still, you must have noticed the intense sexual energy among the people who were blessed.”

I nodded, closing my eyes. I leaned back and thought about all the people touching each other, touching the trees, park benches, stones, anything they could get their bodies against. Alison said, “It wasn’t like that at the beginning. I’ve looked at TV footage of the early rallies. The people who received the blessing most often just stood there and cried. At the most, they would hug each other. Somewhere it changed.”

I said, “Timmerman has Devoted Ones working for him. Could they be acting directly on the news media?”

“Possibly. And possibly it’s a combination. When I started digging deeper, I caught the scent of some sort of government involvement, just not in the manner of actual censorship.”

“There was someone else at the rally,” I said. “When the Beings were reaching out to bless the audience and everyone was hopping up and down, there was this woman at the back. Small, dressed all in black, with black hair. She didn’t join the show but there was something about her. One moment she was just there, and then a little later she was gone.”

Alison shook her head very slightly and smiled. “Her name,” she said, “is Margaret Light-at-the-end-of-the-Tunnel 23. She appeared out of the Living World in August of last year and immediately reported with the Spiritual Development Agency as a companion-protector for Alexander Timmerman.”

I was trying to remember anything else about the woman—the Benign One, I should say—when someone called my name. I looked up and two of my friends, Kathy and Sharon, were coming towards me. “Hi, gorgeous,” Sharon said in her chirpy voice, “preparing for your life of leisure again?”

“Just grabbing it wherever I can get it,” I said. Reflexively I took off my glasses, then instantly regretted it. Just in time I stopped myself from jerking them back on again.

Kathy glanced at Alison, then looked past her at me and raised a plucked eyebrow. I said, “Kathy Patterson, Sharon Cianetta, Alison Birkett.” To my surprise, I found myself wondering if I’d done that correctly, if you say the older person’s name last or first. “Alison’s an old friend,” I said, and noticed Kathy’s smirk on “old”. Extremely tall—six feet three inches—Kathy grew up embarrassed and ashamed of sticking out above all the boys, let alone the girls, until one day she got a good haircut, put on some makeup and a short skirt, and discovered she was beautiful. Now she spends half her time looking in mirrors and the other half designing software for a cosmetics company—except when she’s gossiping about her friends.

Kathy said, “Guess who we saw together on 4th Street?” She paused, then announced, “Jocelyn and Rebecca.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Does this mean they’ll stop trying to divide all their friends for restaging the Revolution?”

“It means more than that, sugar,” Kathy said. She turned to Sharon. “Do you want to tell her?”

In style, Sharon looks a little like a junior Kathy, though in fact she’s a year older, a head shorter and a size plumper. She told me, “They were standing in front of that jewellery store, you know, the one with the wedding rings, and holding hands and making noises like cute little animals.”

“My God,” I said, laughing. “The tragic breakup of the ages founders on the rock of salvation. Do you think they’ll send out announcements? Or maybe letters of apology for all the agony they’ve caused the rest of us.”

“Speaking of salvation and agony,” Kathy said, “I happened to call Joan Monteil just a few short minutes ago.”

“Oh, did you now?” I said. “And what did sweet little Joanie have to say for herself?”

“Oh, not much.” Kathy paused. “She did have quite a lot to say about you, though.”

“Really,” I said. “I may have to have a little chat myself with Ms Monteil.”

Kathy said, “I think she wants to bring you into her kindergarten class for show and tell.” She patted my cheek. “Cheer up, darling, at least she’s cute.”

Sharon said, “Maybe the two of you could double with Jocelyn and Rebecca.”

“Or we could all buy a house on Staten Island,” I said. “Look, Sweetie, I’d love to have the two of you torment me all afternoon, but I have some things to discuss with Alison.”

After the two of them had exchanged “Nice to meet you’s” with Alison and wandered off to the smoking section, Alison sat back, looking at me like someone who’s discovered an extra piece in a finished jigsaw puzzle. She said, “Do you always remove your glasses when your friends come in?”

I shrugged. “It helps with the image.”

“Image?”

“You know what they say. Girls don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses. I believe that was proposition 23 from Adrienne Birth-of-Beauty’s Shout From The Skyscraper. If not, it should have been.”

“You could wear contact lenses,” she said, and I thought, Great Mother Agony, is this why she tracked me down after ten years? But then she raised an eyebrow and her voice, in perfect imitation of Kathy, and said, “That way you could see who was making the passes. You could avoid robbing the kindergarten.”

I felt oddly like an adolescent who’s just discovered that Mommy knows all those dirty words she and her friends use to show how tough they are. I said, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“No, you’re right. Why did I want to see you? I suppose I wanted your take on Timmerman. I’m too close to it. Because of Jack. And my investigators—well, they’re good at research, not analysis.”

“So you thought of me.”

She paused. “Yes.”

“What do your sources say?”

“Very little. Just that Timmerman seems to have the Living World on his side and no one wants to touch him.”

“And the police?”

“I spoke with them after Jack died. They implied that Jack had entered voluntarily into a perilous state, and that since his death had resulted from contact with Benign Ones, they must consider it beneficial. They gave it the official verdict, ‘Death by ecstasy.’ ”

“In other words,” I said, “he died happy.”

“Exactly.”

“There’s something,” I said, “something just…wrong about all this. I mean, besides the obvious. Something that doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. Ellen, if you’re willing, I would like to have you come to my office where I could show you my files. Perhaps you might catch something I’ve missed.” She added quickly, “If you’d rather not, just say so.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe if you could give me a few days, let me think about it.”

“Yes, of course.” Suddenly she was looking down at her empty teacup. “And Ellen…whatever you decide, it’s good to see you again.”

“Yeah, well, thanks,” I said, then thought, come on El, give it a break. “I better get back to work,” I said. “Procrastination is its own reward, but it doesn’t pay the rent.” I caught the waitress’s eye.

“Shall I walk you back?” Alison said.

“Sure. I mean, thanks.”

In the street, it struck me that there was a time when nothing would have thrilled me more than walking side by side with Alison Birkett, having her consult me on an important case. To my surprise, I found myself wanting to cry. When we reached the lobby of my building, I told her, “I’d invite you up for tea, but it’s the sixth floor and the elevator’s broken.”

“That’s fine,” she said, just as a whirring noise signalled the arrival of the elevator from upstairs.

Though Alison pretended not to notice, I waved a hand and said, “I lied. The fact is, I just don’t like elevators.”

2

Absolutely not, I told myself. No way was I going to involve myself in some pet conspiracy project of Alison Birkett. So her friend got mashed by a mob. Maybe she could get him a gig as guardian of water coolers. She’s good at that. If I did some checking, I told myself, it wasn’t for her. I was just curious. I certainly wasn’t going to go to her office and read any of her files. But what harm would it do, just for curiosity, to do some private enquiries into Great Brother Alex and his pet Devoted Ones? And besides, I needed to keep away from the house and the telephone. Now that she’d broken the ice (smashed it was more like it), Ms Birkett could take it into her head to call me at any moment. Or worse, Joan Monteil might call. I could screen my calls, but I hated jumping every time the phone rang, then waiting nervously through the next four rings and the outgoing message before whoever it was would come on the line.

So the next morning I set out for the library, where for three days I scanned through old magazines and newspapers for articles on Alexander Timmerman and his Consumer Liberation organization. I didn’t expect any scandals or revelations. If Alison said none of the disturbing events had gotten into the newspapers I believed her. On that level I was sure she knew what she was doing. I just wanted a sense of what Timmerman was about, the kind of issues he was raising, what legal actions, if any, he’d taken against corporations or the government, what impact the Choir of Angels was having beyond raising the spiritual (read sexual) temperature at his rallies. And I wanted to see what articles had appeared on Timmerman’s dark-haired Friend, whom I was already calling in my mind, “Maggie Tunnel Light”.

About the last, not much. In fact, very little appeared on the Benign Ones at all. Spiritweek had an article in the “US Sanctification” section on Consumer Liberation, reporting that a third Devoted One had joined the “campaign to revitalize America” as Timmerman’s press person put it. There was, of course, no picture of Maggie. I remember hearing once that someone had invented a computer-linked camera that could create an “enhanced definition” image of a Bright Being. Supposedly, the SDA had slapped a restraining order on the inventor and the camera never got produced. The article did run a photo of Timmerman in his mask and grey suit, with surges of light behind him, a trick I knew I could duplicate on my computer any time I wanted. The text said precious little. Timmerman and his aides described their “profound gratitude” that the Living World was supporting their campaign to “fulfil the promise of the Revolution on all levels of society”. At the same time, they insisted that they had not sought out Margaret at all, but rather that she had approached them, appearing in their office, “in a vapour of love”, just after their yearly convention. According to the article, Ms Light would not “interact” directly with the public—no blessings in other words—but would help the inner staff “direct our spiritual resources to the massive tasks lying before us”.

As for the other two—Albert Comfort the Children 6 and Jeannette Benevolent Fire 31—Timmerman had not exactly summoned them either, not in the formal sense of an operation to secure a Benign One for personal service. According to the official Consumer Liberation line, Timmerman had suffered some personal trauma or other (they were coy about just what had happened, which probably meant sexual rejection) and had set out on a pilgrimage to the ruins of the nuclear power plant along the Hudson River. Either from accident or from deliberately coating himself in hot ash, Alexander came close to death, only to be healed by the sudden manifestation of Albert and Jeannette, who removed his burns and gave him his “true face” (the helmet mask) as a sign of service.

I wondered how much of this puff story to believe. As flattering as it was to Timmerman, it somehow rang true with my own sense of the Happy Twins (my term for them). There was something simple minded about them, as if, like so many Devoted Ones, they just wanted to help humanity lift itself from pain. In one of the articles, Timmerman’s press manager hinted that Albert and Jeannette were really one entity who appeared in two forms because of humanity’s “expectations of gender”.

Very little appeared beyond these official accounts. The Times ran a feature on the Devoted Ones in Timmerman’s campaign, and more broadly on the place of the Living World in contemporary society, “two generations after the Revolution”. Like so many Times articles, it managed to sound deep without saying much of anything. The Washington Post and The Miami Herald of Power and a few other papers ran editorials. None of them said much of anything, though the Post warned of the need for humans to “make the tough decisions in the clear light of day”.

More interesting to me was a sense of the campaign itself—what Timmerman was trying to achieve. I’m not sure what I expected to find, maybe a lot of high rhetoric without any content or follow-up. And maybe, considering what I’d seen and what Alison had told me, I expected sexual imagery to inflate his speeches. The fact is, Timmerman actually said very little about sex. His speeches, especially in recent weeks, were indeed spiced with “liberating all levels, including the intimate teachings of the Spirit”, and other elegances. But mostly he stayed with the issues that had launched him—consumer safety, corporate fraud, government protection of insurance companies and other industrial monopolies. To my further surprise, his cadres had shown themselves to be remarkably effective, winning a range of battles, either through the courts or through boycotts, organized letter writing, depossession enactments and other direct actions.

Timmerman had begun his career with a highly publicized attack on Sacred Motors, charging that the hood totem for their Nightleopard car failed to establish soul configurations for safe journeys. In fact, Timmerman demonstrated, the supposed guardian did nothing at all and might as well not have been there.

Timmerman’s headdress made its first appearance during the Sacred Motors’ campaign when he began doing daily protection enactments outside corporate headquarters, enactments which attracted more and more people as news reports surfaced of Nightleopard accidents on deserted roads in clear weather, or new cars breaking down or catching fire. Without his enactments, Timmerman claimed, the disasters would have been more frequent and worse. Nevertheless, SM managed to get a court order forcing him to stop. Refusing, Timmerman went to jail, but a higher court ruled that the mass enactments were a collection of “individual spiritual events” rather than an organized ceremony, which meant that SM would have needed restraining orders against every single person holding up a placard, or burning flash powder on pictures of SM’s CEO, or moving dummies in radio-controlled models of Nightleopard cars. Finally, the company gave up and released the records of the work done to draw up proper sanctification for the car before release to general sales. Two weeks later the car was withdrawn.

While none of Timmerman’s later cases had attracted that much publicity, his workers, known as “the barefoot lawyers” for their fanaticism, had scored a run of large and small successes, taking on everything from soup companies to federal bureaucracies. As I skimmed the press reports, I noticed all the hard work behind Timmerman’s rhetoric, the nuts and bolts and research and carefully built legal challenges that had made a registered sanctified letter from Consumer Liberation a terrifying sight for any executive or government official.

When the stories approached the present, say the past six months, something else emerged. I began to pick up a shift in emphasis from manufactured products and insurance companies to the banking system. There were charges and actions against specific banks, accusations of corruption, mismanagement, bad loans and even bribes, but more and more Timmerman had begun to attack the structure as a whole, claiming that the laws themselves undermined the national economy through leveraged buyouts financed by unregulated banks, manipulated stock investments using information about paper loans and “a suicidal breakdown of the necessary barriers between the people who lend the money and the people who spend it”. There were rumours that Timmerman was planning to sue the Spiritual Development Agency for permission to lead an enactment in the Stock Exchange, by the body of Rebecca Rainbow, creator of the modern banking system in the chaos after the Revolution.

All this took me some three days to scrape together. I could have spent weeks reading everything, but I just wanted an outline, a silhouette, of Timmerman and his organization. My real target was still the Choir of Angels, and in particular my pet fascination, the Friend lurking in the background, Margaret 23. And about her, I could get no fix at all.

After three days, I found myself slouched in a library chair, my hands jammed into the pockets of my baggy jeans, as I growled at a stack of magazines. What was it about Tunnel Light? What was she doing there? Alison would know something, or at least have the resources for me to find out. I snarled once more at the magazines, and then began gathering them together to return them to their bins.

I headed home and booted up the computer. When I was learning to work graphics programs, I taught myself some other tricks as well. Ways of breaking into files, cracking codes, all that good stuff. For a while, it meant hanging around with some extremely obnoxious boys, but once I got the feel of it I could continue on my own. At the time, I told myself it was just something to do, a game, and besides, if some people could do such things, why shouldn’t I be one of them? Now, watching the screen, I wondered just why investigatory skills had been so important to me.

I was about to try some routines, pick my way into a few locked boxes, when I suddenly stopped and stared at the screen. Don’t be paranoid, I scolded myself. No one’s watching you. And besides, you know how to stay anonymous, right? That is the point, isn’t it? But I still turned off the machine.

Two hours later, I had checked into a hotel in midtown, the kind of place Mid-Westerners check into after saving up for their trip to the big city to see some skyscrapers and Broadway musicals. Claiming my cousin was going to join me, I rented two adjoining rooms with a connecting door. After paying cash up front, so I wouldn’t have to use a credit card or my real name, I carried my suitcases up the stairs to the rooms and got to work. The rooms were lousy of course, no view other than the back of an office building and a loud banging from some nearby service room. Young single women have got to be the absolute bottom of the connector pole in the hotel managers’ guide to life. Still, I was only planning to stay for a few minutes, so it hardly mattered. All that really counted was that the hotel was large enough that you could dial the rooms directly, without having to go through a human-operated switchboard.

I bowed to the room guardian, a cute little thing on a table between the two beds, and scattered some rock salt, fresh basil and cookie crumbs taken from my own house around the base of the husk, which took the form of a matronly woman holding a bowl. Asking for a blessing for privacy and selfless purpose, I poured some whisky into the bowl, then sucked it up with a straw and spat it out onto the floor. Then I got to work.

From my suitcases I took out one of the two computers and a pair of modems. I hooked up the computer and one of the modems to the telephone in the first room and then the second modem to the telephone in my “cousin’s” room, finally running some cheap telephone cable (bought in Radio Temple in the Village) between the two modems. I only had to tell myself about twenty times, “Better paranoid than sorry.” Before leaving the rooms I set up a door switch with burglar tape, so that anyone opening either door would automatically shut off both phone lines.

Carrying my second suitcase, a carryon bag, I got a room in a hotel a few blocks away. There I unpacked the other computer and the last modem. When I’d connected them to the phone I was finally ready to start. I called the first hotel room, the one with the computer, and used that phone to call room 2. With room 2 as the number of record I called a value-added network, one of those companies which channels your local call into long-distance modem connections. And through that, I made my first real call to the offices of Consumer Liberation.

Back when I was getting past the lower levels of hacking I had the great fortune to pick up a woman one night who knew one of the masters, Annie-O, a genuine cross-gendered computer outlaw. I’m not sure what it is about computers and gender people, maybe something to do with changing realities. But it’s certainly true that people like Annie can slide into locked programs the same way they slide from one gender to another. There was something else about Annie-O that made it unforgettable to meet her. She was an enactment master, a woman of power, having led her sisters across gender and spirit barriers over many years. Annie let me apprentice myself to her, and though we both knew I would never really find my way in the virtual worlds (“It’s your clinging to a fixed gender,” Annie would tell me), I did learn enough for operations like breaking into Consumer Liberation.

Basically, I set up a dummy program which imitated their own, so that someone who tried to hook into them would get me asking “Password, please?” and think it was them. Mr Legitimate Caller dutifully typed in the password, at which point I hung up. This brought him back to the real program, asking “Password, please?” He no doubt assumed he’d typed wrong the first time, entered the password and thought no more of it. Only now, I knew the magic words as well. Thanks, Annie.

Only—there wasn’t all that much to learn breaking into CL. Oh, if I’d been some insurance flunky I might have checked out their secret plans for enactments against malpractice fraud. Or I might have run up lists of planned rallies and other trivia. But as for secret goals and agendas, there just didn’t seem to be any. Consumer Liberation in private wasn’t all that different than their public image.

The Devoted Ones did not seem to figure much in the daily running of the organization. Everyone appeared grateful for the recognition bestowed on them by the Living World, not least because it impressed the public and drew people to their rallies. But the people who ran the organization, “Timmerman’s Tigers”, as Spiritweek called them, were all lawyers and cared more about investigations and legal actions than mass blessings.

Maggie Tunnel Light hardly existed in CL’s files. In my quick search I found only seven references to her, none of them of any significance. What was she doing there? She didn’t work with the Tigers. She appeared to work directly with Timmerman. But how? Why was she there?

I did confirm one of my intuitions. I ran a check on the number of files for particular issues. In the past year, more and more resources had gone into one subject—banking. One of Timmerman’s chief lawyer hot shots, Samuel Jervis, appeared almost obsessed by what he called in a memo “the deep structural rot in the edifice of American banking”. While the subject had only crept into Timmerman’s speeches, the Tigers were pursuing it ferociously, gathering and analyzing masses of information, setting up task forces—bank failures, massive loan defaults, overnight millionaires, government coziness with bank directors and corporate raiders. It wasn’t possible even to begin following it all, other than to get a sense of how maddening it was for the Tigers. Jervis’s most recent memos talked of needing a “focus”, some particular revelation that could get people’s attention long enough to make them see what was happening.

Feeling dissatisfied, I backed out of Consumer Liberation’s database. Now for the big guys, I thought. Time to break into the SDA.

The Spiritual Development Agency was of a totally different order than Consumer Liberation. No cute dummy program was going to get me SDA passwords. However, I had something better. A phone number. Annie-O and her people considered what they did to be a sacred obligation, opening tunnels between the virtual world and the physical. For Annie, secrets threatened the flow of spirit energy between the worlds, and so they dedicated themselves to cracking open the walls as soon as the government tried to seal them up again. It wasn’t enough just to break the secrets, they had to share them. They couldn’t publish them, but they could make them available to anyone whom they’d invited into their network. I’m not sure what it was that Annie saw in me, a fixed gender person after all, but when she gave me the phone number for “the list” it was all I could do to keep from crying. I knew the kind of trust it meant.

I left the hotel and went to a diner with a pay phone in the back by the toilets. It had been two years since I’d tried the number. Now, holding the horn in one hand and a quarter in the other, I found myself scared that the number I had was no longer any good, that I’d come to a dead end, and scared most of all that it meant so much to me. I wasn’t just doing it for myself, I knew. I wanted to impress Alison. I wanted to march into her office with some answers, tell her to go to hell, and then march out again. And something else. The more I looked at this Timmerman thing, at what was happening at his rallies, at this Margaret 23 who didn’t seem to be doing anything, the more I just knew that there was something wrong here. Something that needed to reach the light. I jammed the quarter in and punched the number.

A computer voice told me, “Please state the name of the organization and sub-branch, if applicable. You have seven seconds.”

“Spiritual Development Agency”, I said. “Registration and function of Benign Ones to specific parties.”

There was a pause and then the voice came back with a five-word phrase. A moment later, the line went dead. A small smile grew to half my face as I put the phone back on the hook. “All right, you bastards,” I whispered. “I’m going to get inside you.”

Back to the hotel room. More nerves as I got my lines running again and moved my way into the SDA. As I took a breath before using the pass phrase, I sprinkled the keyboard and monitor with a few extra grains of my personal mix of spirit powder, given to me by my parents’ Teller on my inner ecology name day after my first period. I typed in the phrase and a moment later the screen came alive with instructions, and I knew the files lay open for me.

I started with the Happy Twins, Albert and Jeannette, just as a check. I didn’t learn anything new, though I have to say I wasn’t expecting to. It was Maggie Tunnel Light I was really after. First I verified the few facts I knew, her appearance last year, her immediate registration as a Benign Agent for—and this surprised me slightly—not Consumer Liberation, as the Twins had done, but Alexander Timmerman. Timmerman, I thought. Why Timmerman personally?

I went on to explore just what it was Margaret 23 did for Timmerman. And here the SDA files didn’t seem to help any more than the newspapers. “Advice.” “Support.” “Encouragement.” What did that mean? What did she do? And why didn’t her file say what she did?

Okay, I thought. She’s Timmerman’s personal agent. Let’s go back to the beginning of his connection. I asked the SDA computer to give me an account of the Summoning, when Timmerman drew her out of the Living World to do whatever it was she did for him.

I stared at the screen. “No reference.” In some way, I was phrasing the question wrong. But why? It seemed straightforward enough. I decided to backtrack, start with the basics again. I asked it when Timmerman summoned her. “No reference.” I shook my head. The damn machine just gave me the date, only a few minutes before. I began to wonder if some Malignant virus had invaded the SDA systems. A nice idea, I decided, but couldn’t it have waited until after I got what I needed? But no, Malignant Ones in a system usually filled the screen with gibberish. I was just asking the wrong questions.

I slapped the table. Maybe Timmerman hadn’t summoned her. Maybe she’d arrived spontaneously, with an urgent need to attach herself to Timmerman. Usually, I thought, free agent Beings didn’t belong to any particular human or cause, but I was hardly an expert. So I asked the computer if Tunnel Light had entered our world on her own. No.

I said out loud, “Well then, someone must have summoned her.” And then I laughed. Of course. It didn’t have to be Timmerman himself. It could have been one of the Tigers, maybe an enactment specialist. I typed in, “Who summoned Margaret Light-At-The-End-Of-The-Tunnel 23?”

The screen told me, “Carolyn Park-Wu.” I sat back and made a face. From all the reading I’d done, I was pretty sure I knew the names of all of Timmerman’s inner circle. Who was Carolyn Park-Wu? Some cousin or sister-in-law? I asked about her relationship to Timmerman. No reference. Great, I thought. Terrific. Someone with no relationship to Timmerman summons a Bright Being to act as his personal agent, for no particular purpose.

Feeling giddy, I asked what purpose Park-Wu stated when she registered the Summoning. The giddiness left immediately and I found myself shaking. “National Security Sanctification,” the screen read, and for the first time I realized that this was serious, this was not a game. The SDA was the organization which issued security sanctifications. And now they were slapping one on their own files?

Leaving the machine on—I didn’t want to take a chance on losing the contact—I went down to the hotel lobby and called Alison’s office. “This is Ellen Pierson,” I said in my best no-nonsense voice. “I need to speak to Ms Birkett, immediately.”

She came on right away, with a catch in her voice as she said, “Ellen? Hello. I’m glad you called.” Somewhere it struck me that she’d been afraid she wouldn’t hear from me, and I wondered what exactly that meant. But I had no time to think about it.

“Alison,” I said, “is this still a protected line?”

There was a pause, and then she said, “Yes. Registered with the government—”

“I don’t care about that. Do you know it’s safe?”

“I was about to say that it’s swept daily, by the best in the business.”

“Okay,” I said, “then I need you to check on a name for me.”

“Sure,” she told me. “Let me get a pen. Okay. Go ahead.”

“The name is Carolyn Park-Wu.”

In the brief silence, I felt like I could see her mind starting to click. She said, “I don’t need to check. I can tell you right now. Carolyn Park-Wu is a senior staff aide for Arthur Channing.”

The shaking was back. I said, “Senator Arthur Channing?”

“That’s right.”

“Head of the Senate Finance Committee?”

“Yes. Ellen, what have you found?”

To myself, I whispered, “Holy shit.” Out loud I only said, “Alison, we need to talk. Can we meet somewhere?” She suggested a hotel by Glowwood Sanctuary, the private park off 19th Street. When we hung up, I stood for a moment by the telephone, my hand still holding on to the receiver. Why did I do that, I thought. Why? I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to get involved in her damned schemes. This was serious. This was the SDA and now the Senate. I thought, maybe I should call her back.

Instead, I went up to the room and sat staring at the screen. Shut it down, I told myself. Get out, now. Instead, I typed another question. Alison has since said that this question marks what she calls my special talent. When I told her I had no idea what made me ask it, what, if anything, I was looking for, she just laughed and said that that was the point. The question was, “Has the Bright Being Margaret Light-At-The-End-Of-The-Tunnel 23 ever appeared in any other configurations?”

“National Security Sanctification” came the answer, and this time the shaking was uncontrollable.

3

Before going to see Alison, I washed my hair and changed to a pair of tight black jeans and an oversized white shirt I’d bought on sale the day before. Ridiculous, I told myself as I cut a small hole in the shirt, below the spare button, for the Living World to infuse the fabric. Why was I still trying to impress her? I didn’t even like her. It reminded me of when I was in high school and used to visit my Aunt Sylvia. I could never stand Sylvia, her big word condescension towards my mother, her pleated blouse and proper black pumps, her comments that I “really could look very nice” if I “just made a serious effort”. And yet, every time I went to see her I would try to show her, even if negatively, by wearing or saying something outrageous. It’s just like Aunt Sylvia, I told myself, putting on eyeliner and lipstick. Sure. Right.

When I arrived at the hotel bar, Alison was already there, sitting upright in a red leather chair by a small round table to the side of the polished bar. She smiled as she waved me over. She was wearing a dark blue blazer and skirt, a soft cream-coloured shirt with large black buttons and flat open-toed black sandals. She had a chunky silver bracelet on her right wrist and a plain watch with a black leather strap on the left. She’d clipped her hair back on the sides, showing off small web-like earrings set with clusters of tiny blue stones. Like me, she was wearing lipstick and subtle eye makeup (except my eyes were not so subtle). I don’t think I’d ever seen her looking so fem before. Or so pretty.

“I’m afraid you’re seeing me in my court incarnation,” she said. “I feel like some comic-book character. Trial Lady.”

“I hope you charmed the judge,” I said.

She took a sip of her drink. “I imagine I did. I won.” She looked up at me and grinned.

She was drinking whisky with ice, which is usually my drink when I want to get serious. When the waiter came, I ordered a pina colada, a drink I usually can’t stand. “How is your friend Harry?” Alison asked me.

“I haven’t seen him since the rally.” To myself, I thought I would be damned if I was going to make small talk with her.

“I liked him,” she said. “He seemed like someone who knows how to think.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.”

Finally the waiter came and set down my absurd frothy drink. I took a sip and made a face. For a moment I thought Alison was grinning at me, but when I looked she was leaning forward with her hands clasped. “You’ve been doing some digging,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “Timmerman is being set up. Margaret Tunnel Light—” She didn’t react to the condensed name. “—is a plant.” I paused, but she said nothing. So I told her about Consumer Liberation’s exploration of banking and the fact that MTL came from Park-Wu. “Obviously, there’s a lot that’s still unexplained, but I’m convinced that Great Brother Alex’s new Friend is not there to help him.”

“Are you saying she’s Malignant and not Benign?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. If the SDA calls her Benign, I think we have to trust that designation. These were their own files, not for general publication.”

Alison sat up straight and closed her eyes. One finger pressed her lips, as if she was telling herself not to speak. I thought I knew what she was going to say and I was readying myself to tell her it was none of her business how I got my information. Instead, when she opened her eyes, she said, “She could just be a spy. A means of checking up on what Timmerman is doing. So Channing wouldn’t be made to look foolish by some sudden revelations.”

“Possibly. Only, couldn’t they just infiltrate some human into the organization? It just seems to me a Benign One as a spy would be hard to control.”

Alison said, “That would hold as well for some sort of plot against Timmerman. More so, since Channing would be asking the Being to act against its client.”

“Its official client. It could be working entirely for Channing. Or Park-Wu.”

“The problem,” Alison said, “is still persuading a Devoted One to act in a duplicitous manner. I don’t claim to be an expert in this field, I’m afraid I’ve spent more time dealing with Ferocious Ones, but from what I know of Benign Ones, having to act as an enemy, or a spy for that matter, would seem to set up a very painful contradiction.”

“Even if Channing convinced Tunnel Light that Timmerman was evil in some way? And that it would be serving humanity by helping to destroy him?”

Alison sat back and took a sip of her drink. I thought I noticed her glance at my untouched colada and had to fight an impulse to force some down. She said, “It all comes back to Tunnel Light’s function. Which, as you point out, the SDA files seem to avoid delineating. Why is she there? What is she doing?” I said nothing. “And there’s still the question of the…outbreaks at Timmerman’s rallies. What connection could they possibly have with banking?”

“Alison—” I said. She stopped talking. “Look, I dug into this stuff, because, because it interested me. I was just curious to see what I could find out. But I’m not going to continue. I’ve got my own things to do, okay?”

Alison said, “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry, Ellen. I didn’t mean to presume anything. I suppose I just got excited. I realize it’s my issue.”

I stood up. “It’s probably best if I just go.”

Looking up at me, she seemed suddenly sad, or maybe frightened. I discovered a desire to reach out and stroke her cheek. She said, “Yes, of course. Thank you, Ellen. Thank you for your help.” I picked up the blue and grey knapsack I use for a purse. “Ellen?” Alison said. I looked at her. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you in some way. That was not my intention.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” I said. As I left, I thought to myself, why do I have to be so hard on her? And then, why am I feeling like some goddamn villain?

When I got home I began to clear my desk of all the letters and other junk that had accumulated over the past three days while I was playing investigator. Several times I thought of calling Harry to see if his sharp eye could help me make sense of what was happening. I even rehearsed starting the conversation, something like “You’ve got an admirer. Remember that friend of mine we met in Miracle Park?” But I didn’t want to tell him about my electronic b and e, or about Timmerman, let alone how I first came to know Ms Birkett. So I decided instead I should just get to work.

I might have dropped the whole thing if not for a visit from the federal government. They were waiting for me in my apartment two days later when I came home from the art supply store on 3rd Avenue. Three of them, two men and a woman. They must have heard me opening the door and stayed silent, because I had no idea anyone was there, until I came round the hallway into my living room/workroom. When I came in, they stood, very politely, as if their mothers had trained them in etiquette, which I suppose was the case, since fed agents supposedly speak of the agency as Mother Truth, and hold fire and mud enactments to bond to Her for life.

Of course, I tried to run as soon as I saw them. This was New York, after all. But one of them, the woman, held up her badge and told me, “It’s all right, Ms Pierson. SBI. We just want to talk with you.” Goddamnit, I thought, why can’t they be thieves?

They reminded me a little of the SDA operatives back when I was a kid. They were wearing masks, though not of animals. These were cylindrical, smooth, with faces painted on a surface that looked like old-fashioned printed circuits. Little lights set into the plastic (I assumed it was plastic) flickered on and off in patterns either random or beyond my ability to follow. But then, I wasn’t in much of a mood for concentrating. Instead of the SDA’s overalls, they wore clothes my Aunt Sylvia might have approved of—brown suits for the men, a knee-length long-sleeved dress with buttons down the front for the woman. Instead of paintings at the crotch, their clothes held mirrors, both there and on their shoes. On the right side of the neck, and on their wrists disappearing up their arms, I could see enactment scars, jagged lines alternating in different directions. Just under the left ear was a brand, something that looked like a simplified version of the badge the woman had shown me. I’m not sure what spiritual bonding the brands and scars served, but they did make it easier to believe these guys were really agents; an imposter would have to be a real perfectionist to bodyalter just for a stunt.

“Why don’t we all sit down?” the woman said. Keeping my eyes on her, I sat on the canvas director’s chair Harry had given me for my birthday.

Speaking in a high nasal voice that made me wonder if he might be a drag king, one of the men told me, “We’ve come here, Ms Pierson, as a kind of favour.” How nice, I thought. “Your government is concerned that you seem to be involving yourself in matters that really have nothing to do with you. And which could lead to very serious consequences.” I said nothing.

After a moment, the other man said, “We’re sure you realize, Ms Pierson, that tapping into government files is a federal offence, punishable by up to twenty-five years in prison.”

Goddamnit, I thought, so much for playing motels and modems. But then it struck me—if they really had caught me, if they had any evidence, why weren’t they taking me away? So maybe they were drawing some conclusions. But how? Alison, I thought. They’ve got people following her, recording her conversations. I wondered if we would have been safer in her office.

On cue, the first man said, “Your government is concerned about your involvement with Ms Alison Birkett.”

They seemed to expect me to say something, so I put in, “I’m not involved with her. She’s just someone I know. I saw her recently for the first time in, I don’t know, ten years.”

The woman said, “Then perhaps a break of another ten years would be a wise idea.”

The second man said, “As you will remember, Ms Pierson, your previous involvement with Ms Birkett did not end happily.”

I thought, you sonofabitch, Alison didn’t kill Paul, you did. You and your pet Malignant Ones. You and your goddamn cover-ups.

The first man put in, “Your government would not like to see another tragedy. It would make sense, Ms Pierson, to keep away from Ms Birkett.”

I said, “Well, I wasn’t planning to see her again.”

They stood up, so I did too. The woman said, “And please. No more tricks with off-limits information.” When I said nothing they left.

Alone again, I sank down in a chair, only to bolt up and grab the flash powder and some feathers and rock salt from the altar in the bedroom. Opening the door, I scattered the salt all about the threshold, outside and in, and then on the floor around the chairs they’d been sitting in. I sprinkled the flash powder over the salt and set it off, waving the feathers in large sweeps through the air and calling out “Seal all openings of this house my body from anger and pollution, from the one who whispers and the one who screams, from the one who hammers and the one who cuts, from all enemies and liars and unnatural death. Yes!”

When I’d finished and sat down again, I discovered I was crying. For some reason I thought of those bastards calling Alison “Ms Birkett” and I promised myself I would never think of her that way again.

What was I going to do? Should I warn her? How? If I called her, or went to see her, or even mailed her a letter, they could find out about it. I could send one of those paste-up jobs, with words cut out from the newspaper. Or maybe I could follow her from a distance, and when she went to a Chinese restaurant bribe the waiter to slip a warning into the fortune cookie for the ceremony at the end of the meal. I laughed. Something Annie-O once said to me came into my mind. “You’ve got to remember, Ellen, this is the end of secrets. Anyone can find out anything. If you’ve got something to hide, learn to hide in front of things instead of behind them.”

I stood up and grabbed my knapsack purse. As I was heading downstairs a thought came into my mind, a replay. “Alison didn’t kill Paul. The government did.”

I ended up walking to her office, getting madder and madder as I pumped my way through the streets, until when I got to her building I burst in the door and strode up to the doorman and demanded, “Where’s the stairs?” It took a phone call to “Ms Birkett” (I wanted to shout at him not to call her that) to get him to unlock the door to the stairwell.

Alison was at the door to her office when I made it to the tenth floor (stopping on the eighth to catch my breath). “Ellen,” she said, “what is it? Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Let’s go inside.” Briefly, I thought of going somewhere else to avoid any ears in the walls, but at least this place was swept. Daily, she said. That hotel certainly hadn’t protected us. Thinking of Annie-O’s advice, I sat down in the leather chair alongside the desk. “I’ve had a visit,” I said.

When I had told her what had happened, she bent her head forward and rested it in her hands. When she lifted it again, she looked scared. “Ellen…” she said, and stopped. She took a deep breath. “I’ve gotten you into something I never should have gotten you into. Damnit, I should have just left you alone.”

“It sounds like they’re after you much more than me.”

“That doesn’t matter. I can protect myself. Connections, remember?”

I’m not sure why I was being so reasonable, why I wasn’t more scared, but I said, “Well, then, extend them to me.”

“Yes, of course,” Alison said. “I already have. At one level, I’m sure they just wanted to scare you. The fact is, Ellen, they can’t actually touch you without buying themselves more trouble than it’s worth. Especially when they’d just be doing someone else’s dirty work.”

“Great,” I said. “Then why are you worried?”

“The government…the government is not the point. Ellen, look, I’ve got to confess something. I didn’t just look you up to get your opinion. I…I wanted to see you. To see what you were like. See who you’d become. I’m afraid I used this Timmerman investigation as an excuse, and I guess a hook, to get involved with you. And to get you involved with me. Damnit.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, and knew I was lying. “Why did you want to get involved with me?”

“You had…you stayed in my mind. As the time went by, I found myself thinking about you. Not all the time. Every now and then, at odd moments, something would just make me think of you. And I’d think how much time had passed.”

Softly, I said, “How I wasn’t a child any more?”

“Yes.” She said nothing for a moment, only looked at me. Some of the strength had come back into her face. She said, “And then the thing with Timmerman happened. With Jack.”

“And that gave you your golden opportunity.”

Instead of getting angry, she shook her head slightly and smiled. “I guess that’s true, in a way. Not deliberately, God knows. Jack was killed and I was devastated. And furious. Once again, someone, it’s still not clear to me who, was chewing up people’s lives, hurting and killing people close to me.”

“Which naturally led you to think of me.”

She took a breath. “Naturally, or not, I certainly thought of you. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Ellen, it was all mixed up. I wanted to see you, I wanted your help, I wanted to know—”

“How I’d turned out?” She nodded. “How your experiment in hero worship had developed.”

“I never asked you to worship me. I never even asked to be your hero. If anyone was experimenting, it was you.”

“I was a kid, Alison. Kids are supposed to experiment.”

“God, don’t you think I know that?”

There was a pause, and then I said, “And now you found yourself thinking of me.”

“Yes.”

“And you wanted me back in your life?”

“Yes.”

I said, “So that’s how it works. Set them up when they’re young, then come back and harvest them ten years later.”

“Your family came to me, Ellen. I didn’t spot you and put some sort of claws into you. I never treated you as some sort of prey.”

“But you didn’t discourage me, either.” She looked down and shook her head. “You let me hang around like a puppydog, thinking you were the greatest thing since the Revolution.”

“I’m sorry, Ellen. You’re right. I should have been more conscious.”

“Don’t you think you should find a better means to do these things? I mean, first my cousin gets killed and now your friend. The next time you want to set up some little girl, then come back for her thirteen years later, maybe you can do it without anybody getting murdered.”

Her eyes narrowed and her hands clenched, and for a second I really thought she was going to hit me. When she spoke, however, she only said, “Do you really believe that that’s what happened, Ellen? That I just saw that mess with the SDA as an excuse to go after a little girl? I cared about you because you were special, Ellen. When I found myself thinking about you these past months, don’t you think I asked myself the same questions you’re asking now? Don’t you think I looked at what I was doing, what I had done back then? I did my best then, Ellen. I tried as hard as I knew how to help you and your family. I failed. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else I can do about it.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t put so much energy into giving me little compliments and having me come panting round your desk—”

“No. I won’t accept that. I did my absolute best on that case. I put all my energy into it. And while I liked seeing you, I didn’t make some special effort to lure you into my world. You wanted to enter it. Should I have barred the way? Should I have refused to treat you as a friend?”

“Damnit,” I said, “I was only fourteen.”

“Don’t you think I knew that?”

“You knew fucking everything. Except how to save Paul.”

“Is it really Paul you care about, Ellen? Is that why you hate me? Or was it just that I turned out not to be perfect?”

It wasn’t Alison who killed Paul. It was the government. I shook my head, flinging away the thought. I said, “That must have been as big a surprise to you as it was to me. God, Alison, you were the most conceited person I’d ever met.”

She looked surprised for a moment, then burst out laughing. “And you’re still the smartest. Is it so surprising that I wanted to see you again?”

No, I thought. I’m not getting caught up in this. “Good,” I said. “So you’ve seen me. And so has the government.”

She sighed. “Yes. Ellen…I’ll…I’ll let them know that you’re out of it. That you have nothing to do with any of this. I’ll tell them how I pulled you in. And…that I’m withdrawing from any investigations.”

“Sure,” I said. “You got what you were after, didn’t you? You got to see me. Congratulations. So what if your friend’s dead or Timmerman’s being set up? The hell with them. You got me to come up to your office, that’s all that really matters.”

She didn’t answer. “Look,” I said, “I’m going. I came to warn you and I’ve done that, so great. If ten years from now you can’t resist seeing me, maybe you can call me on the phone? Not wait for some Bright Being to kill somebody?” Before she could challenge me, I made my grand exit, marching out without bothering to close the door.

Over the next few days I did my best to get back to work, to seeing my friends. I made a date with Joan—“a nice uncomplicated lay” I promised myself—went to a film festival with Harry and Glorybe, assured my parents I’d come home for my cousin’s daughter’s Eighth Day piercing enactment, had lunch with a neighbourhood Teller who wanted me to design a poster for a Rising of the Light street festival, and on and on. Whenever I found myself thinking of Alison I made sure to growl and say out loud, “Goddamn bitch”. If I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of her I just put on the radio or else got up and chanted the names of the Founders.

My government gave no signs of any further interest in me.

Four nights after my meeting with Alison, Alexander Timmerman came on a talk show. Though I told myself it was the last thing I needed to see, I found myself in front of the TV at 5 o’clock, instead of my drawing board. Timmerman looked relaxed, sitting there with his mask alongside him on the couch, talking about his work, about the gratitude and humility he felt that the powers of the Living World had chosen to bless him and his followers with their Gifts. I listened with my fist clenched, telling the screen, “You jerk. You don’t know what you’re doing. They’re setting you up. Don’t worry about the twins, it’s Tunnel Light who really counts. You idiot.”

When the show ended, I sat staring at the commercials as a fragment of my shouting match with Alison ran through my mind. “Jack was killed,” Alison had said, and, “Once again someone was chewing up people’s lives.” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, another. On the TV, the news had come on with some cheerful young man telling us all about somebody’s vision in a city council meeting and how it had led to the mayor announcing a pilgrimage to the Forbidden Beach on Long Island. I used the announcer’s voice as an alpha prayer machine, draining all the content from the sounds to let them smooth out my brain waves. Someone was chewing up people’s lives. Paul and Jack and Alison and I thrown together. She didn’t just use this as an excuse. There was a power in this. Bringing us together. Paul and Jack.

I made a noise and opened my eyes. “Shit,” I said. Instead of an answer, another image had come into my mind. The computer screen just before I’d switched it off in that motel. The answer of “National Security Sanctification” when I’d asked about any previous configurations for Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23. I grabbed the phone, then put it down. Ridiculous, I told myself. If they’re tapping anybody they’re tapping her, protected line or not. But I still went out into the street for a pay phone. Illusions of comfort.

She answered the phone herself. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m not calling to get back into anything, but I wanted to let you know about something I forgot to tell you. When I was doing my own checking.” Trying not to admit to any tampering I managed to let her know what had happened. “I don’t know what it means,” I said, “but it’s stayed in my mind. So I’m giving it to you to get it out of me. Okay?” She thanked me, managed to convey for whoever was listening that I wasn’t involved and then we hung up. For a moment I stood there with my hand on the phone, until I noticed a woman behind me shifting her weight from one side to another as she made faces at the air. I sighed and went home.

The following night was my date with Joan. As the evening approached, I found myself wishing I could just order in some pizza and keep working. Instead, I told myself it was good for me to see her (I thought of my mother saying, “You should get involved with people your own age” and answered her “Joan Monteil and I will never be the same age as long as we live.”) and made myself wash my hair and put on fresh jeans and a black cowgirl shirt with pearl buttonsnaps. And of course I left my glasses off. We all need to keep up our personal traditions.

Joan came in bubbling about a dream she’d had in which the two of us had gone down in separate submarines on some government mission to locate a Stone of Becoming for the president to give to the Emperor of Japan. As soon as she’d woken up, Joan had rushed to the Canal Street branch of the National Oneiric Registration Agency to run the dream through their computers. She showed me the printout. According to NORA, dreams of “psychic and/or transformational artifacts or natural objects given or received as gifts” correlated with a high percentage of submitted dreams for the previous three-day period from people who described themselves as “establishing or deepening a profound interpersonal relationship”.

I changed the subject to where we would go for dinner. It wasn’t just that I’d never dreamed of Joan, nor even that I could hardly imagine myself doing so. What really made me feel like a creep was the fact that Joan couldn’t see that I just didn’t feel about her the way she felt about me. She made it so easy to use her it became really difficult.

I did my best, though. I went out with her for curry, smiling and saying “uh huh” while she told me about problems with her mother, putting her off as gently as I could when she suggested we go back to the Speaker for an update on the inner truth of our relationship. After an evening of this, I considered that I had earned a good workout in bed.

Joan had a way of completely surrendering her body to me, offering herself up as if I was her spirit guide and could draw entry gates all over her body for the Living World to fill her with light. Her openness to me was what I liked best about her, at least sexually—the way she would close her eyes and purr when I kissed her, or moan softly as I moved my tongue and fingertips slowly over her nipples, as if she would be happy for me to do just that for hours and hours, but then, when I would move my fingers down the middle of her body, from the forehead, over the closed eyes and the nose, feeling out the lips and the neck, moving sideways once more over the breasts, when I would move my hand like an animal on a warm mudslide, over the sweat of her vulva and into her lips, she would shriek in a way I never would have thought possible from her.

That night I was determined. I was going to make the evening a true landmark for the Revolution. I did pretty well, too, going through three surgical gloves and a good two feet of dental damming clingwrap. Joan did her part as well, surprising me with a gift from Sisters Under The Skin, a women’s sex shop near the 5th Avenue Teller’s Hall. The gift was a two-part resonating guardian, something I’d seen but never tried. The rubber-sheathed penetrator was in the shape of a fish-tailed woman with arms folded over her breasts and long hair in waves all the way down her back. The resonator took the form of a bird-headed woman, standing with her chest pushed forward and her arms raised high in an arc. According to the instructions, circuitry in the penetrator picked up the energy of orgasm and broadcast it to its sister who then gave off a voice-like hum, modulating its pitch and volume as the quality of the orgasm changed.

I moved the penetrator into Joan without telling her so that she jumped at first, then settled back again, squirming into the mattress as if to get really comfortable, eyes closed, a happy smile on her face. Moving the fish woman in and out at different speeds or at different levels of force, I discovered I could change the bird song, creating weird melodies and even yelps, perfectly matching Joan’s own ragged cries and shouts. Without realizing it I started singing along, crying out or humming as if there were resonators hidden in my brain and throat.

When Joan finished, however, when the bird woman finally stopped even her subliminal whispers, and Joan tried to start on me—I discovered I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want her hands in me, or her lips against my breasts, or any part of what she wanted to give me. I pushed her away as gently as I could, saying something like, “I’m sorry, sweetie. I really liked making love to you, but it’s kind of drained me.” She tried to joke about restoring me to life with her magic kiss, but I only turned away as she moved towards my mouth. “Look,” I said, sitting up. “I think I’m just worried about my work. It’s not you. It’s just really hard for me to let go when I’m stuck with a deadline.”

I did get some work done when Joan went home, as if to save my honour. But I really didn’t care any more for work than I did for having Joan use me as a sounding device for bird-headed women. I kept thinking I should call Harry and ask him what I should do about Joan. Only, then I would have to tell him why I couldn’t focus on her and that meant telling him about Alison, and worse, about Timmerman. So for the rest of the evening I found ways to procrastinate until it became time to go to sleep.

The next morning I was sitting on my black swivel chair in front of my drawing board, drinking green tea and feeling like now I really did need to get something done, when the doorbell rang. I thought, “Shit, she’s come back to tell me of some dream she’s had and how NORA wants to invite us to Founders’ City to meet the president.” But I knew it wasn’t Joan. I could feel the other side of that door the way the bird lady could feel her fish sister’s ecstasy. “Hello, Alison,” I said as I opened the door.

She was wearing jeans and running shoes and a black warm-up jacket over a purple T-shirt. Her hair looked wild, as if she’d been running and hadn’t had a chance to comb it, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup or earrings. I realized I’d always seen her with earrings. Around her neck she wore a brass cylinder on a black silken cord. I guessed that the hollow cylinder contained a statement of spiritual intent along with tiny ceremonial relics of key points in her life and any blessed objects from her own visions and enactments. In other words, protection. “May I come in?” she said. I nodded and stepped away from the door.

Alison stood facing me. I expected her to look around, perhaps to comment about how the room reflected who I was, or maybe concealed it. Instead, she just looked at me. I was about to remind her that she was the one who’d come to see me and maybe she could indicate why, when she said, “It’s her.”

My hand flattened against my own protection, still worn around my neck. “I don’t understand,” I said, though of course I did, I’d known all along, from the first moment seeing her standing there, behind Timmerman, watching the crowd while the Happy Twins blessed them into a frenzy. There was a power in this. Bringing us all together.

“Margaret Tunnel Light,” Alison said. “She’s Lisa Black Dust 7!”

I think I started making some kind of noises, because Alison came towards me with her hands out, as if to comfort me. I jerked a hand up, like a traffic cop and she stopped immediately. With my other hand still pressed against my chest, I sat down on the chair by the drawing board. My breath wasn’t working right, the in and out didn’t seem in the normal order, but I managed to ask her, “How did you find out?”

She pointed vaguely at the walls and I realized she couldn’t say, it was illegal. More tampering. “Sources,” she just said. “I approached it from a different angle. The Tellers instead of the SDA.”

I nodded. Bending over, I did my best to take in a deep breath. When I straightened up, I said, “They told us they would banish her. Send her back to the Living World. Goddamn bastards.”

Alison sat down on a wooden chair a few inches away from me. The closeness sent a kind of shock through me. She said, “Technically, they did banish her. Reconfiguration requires that they break her down first. Technically, she’s not the same.”

“Shit,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you Maggie was a goddamn Malignant One? Didn’t I fucking say that?”

Alison sighed. “I don’t think so. I think they reconfigured her into a Benign One. I think that was the deal that allowed her to stay here in our world. That she break herself down and transform into benevolence.”

I shouted, “Benevolence? Then what the hell is she doing there in Timmerman’s organization? You know she’s a plant.”

“Yes, I know,” Alison said. “I still don’t understand it.”

“Shit,” I said. I jerked the medallion from my neck and threw it across the room. “Shit! They’re going to get Timmerman the way they got Paul. They’re going to kill him, and it will all be for nothing, for some stupid fucking cover-up. And they’ll give him some stupid pathetic appointment, guardian of bumper stickers or something. Oh, goddamnit.” I was crying. I couldn’t decide if I should stop.

Alison leaned forward and put her arms around me. I nearly screamed at her, that it was all her fault, why couldn’t she leave us all alone. But I didn’t. Rolling my chair closer, I let her hold me, feeling safer than I’d ever felt with the SDA, while I cried into her neck. Later, I told Alison that the smartest thing she ever did was not to say anything at that moment. When I told her that, she grinned at me and said, “I know.”

I cried for about thirty seconds and then started to pull away, but when Alison didn’t let go I started to cry again. I thought of the last time she’d hugged me, after Paul’s death. But I knew this was different.

Stopping finally, I dug a tissue from my pants and blew my nose. This time Alison loosened her hold and I sat up. I sat facing her, with my arms still draped around her back. I just kept looking at her, looking at the shape of her face, the placement of her eyes, her nose, her mouth like they were some sort of constellation, the texture of her face some kind of map. Then I bent forward, pulling her close again, and kissed her.

It didn’t last long, but it had almost twenty years behind it. We separated, then hugged again, not at all like thirteen years ago, and then I took a chance and looked at her. It felt like a chance, as if she might look at me in some wrong way and ruin everything and I would have to hate her again. But she only sat very still, her arms around me, her face solemn, the eyes glistening as if she too might start to cry. I had the awful thought that she might apologize again, or tell me she didn’t want to take advantage of me. When she spoke, however, it was only after her face changed to a smile. “You took your glasses off,” she said.

I shrugged. “They got all dirty from crying.”

She nodded. “Can we go sit on the couch?” she said.

Holding her hand, I led her the few feet across the room. I kissed her again, without holding on too tightly, so that I could feel the gentle pressure of her breasts against mine. We kissed longer this time, still gently, not even using our tongues, and I thought it might be possible to melt into orgasm just from kissing.

But there was something else I had to take care of. I pulled away again and when I looked at her she was waiting for me, so that I knew I could say what had to be said. “I want to go after them.”

She nodded. “Yes. I know. You realize we might not get them? This is the government, after all.”

“I understand that. I just want to try. At least that.”

Alison said, “This is hard for me, Ellen. I have to let go of feeling responsible for you. Feeling…feeling that I lured you into a trap.”

“Using yourself as bait?”

She ran her fingertips down the side of my face. “I suppose so,” she said. “Or maybe I used you as bait for yourself. And for me.”

I told her, “This is a choice I’m making, Alison. I’m making it right now, without manipulation or coercion. I want to do this. If you refuse, I’ll do whatever I can on my own.”

She shook her head. “I don’t refuse,” she said.

We started kissing again. I moved my fingertips down her back, between her shoulder-blades. When I reached the innermost part of the curve at the base of her spine I pressed sharply, and her body arched as she gasped. She looked at me in surprise and then began kissing me all over my face, very fast at first, then slowly, spending a long time moving her lips along my eyebrows and around the edges of my cheeks before finally returning to my mouth.

Once more, I pushed her away. “There’s something else,” I said. “No deals. No letting them off the hook.”

She grunted, shook her head. “Did anyone ever tell you,” she said, “that you’re one hell of a tough negotiator?”

I laughed. “I mean it, Alison. No backroom arrangements.”

She took in a deep breath, let it out explosively. “Give me a moment,” she said. She bent her head down with her eyes closed and pressed her hands against her thighs. At first I thought she was angry, but then I realized she was separating herself from me, making sure that the answer she gave didn’t come from desire. I was wondering if I should put my glasses back on when she looked up. “All right,” she said. “No deals. Whatever we find we do our best to expose. You should know, Ellen, that we might not get very far. Arthur Channing is a serious man and there are even more serious men behind him.”

I said, “I understand that.”

“I’m not entirely sure what we can do. To be honest, I’m not sure how long we’ll last. I hope that I have enough dirt on enough people in enough safe places to keep us alive and out of prison. But if we make enough trouble we might just tip the balance against us.”

“At least we’re going to try.”

“At least that.”

I said, “And at least we’re not hiding from each other.”

She smiled. “I feel like we should recite the Blessing of the Saved.”

“Later,” I told her.

She held out her hands, palms up. I went past them, into her arms. If I’d had my glasses on, I would have tossed them away.

4

How do you start a love affair with someone you’ve been in love with for most of your life? How do you begin when you didn’t even meet her for the first five years you loved her, when for another four you couldn’t admit that such a feeling could live in you, and then for the next ten you tried to drive it out entirely? What do you say, what do you do, when you find out that she’s in love with you! Do you forget all this history and pretend you’ve just met? Do you thank—someone (we couldn’t thank the Benign Ones, not any more, so whom?) for twisting the world to grant your life’s yearning? Do you wonder if she’s tricked you, if she set this whole thing up, all those years ago? Do you wonder if you’ve set her up? If you don’t know who to thank, who do you blame?

I realized, that first night Alison and I spent together, that I actually knew almost nothing about her. I could still run down a list of her most famous cases, at least the ones up until thirteen years ago. And I knew the shape of her face, the curl of her hair, the movement of her hands, her shoulders, her head as she spoke, the way she leaned forward when excited, or rocked back slightly when thinking, or especially calculating. But I didn’t know about her growing up, or what she did when she was hanging out with her friends, or who those friends were, if she went to professional parties with lawyers or played softball with a group of women she’d known from her high school menstrual initiation classes.

The crescent initiation scar on her left wrist—I remembered seeing it years ago, but I didn’t know how she got it. She had a tattoo as well, on her left hip, a blindfolded woman dancing on a purple flower. Where did she get it? Why? How long had she had it? Did it come from her bar enactment when she became a lawyer? Or something I knew nothing about? Maybe she’d gone skiing once and got caught in an avalanche, and after the dogs found her and the mountain crews nursed her back to health she inscribed the tattoo in a ceremony of recognition. I could have asked her; she would have told me, I’m sure. But I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to know.

I didn’t even know if she’d always been a lesbian, if she’d been a lesbian when I first met her. I didn’t know when and how she’d come out, if she’d run away from home when she was seventeen to be initiated in a Women’s World community outside Columbus, Ohio (I knew where she’d grown up, where she’d gone to school), or if she dated men, a few or a lot, gotten married, maybe had children (the idea of children horrified me; an ex-husband I could handle, but not children), and one day left with a fellow lawyer, the two of them going on pilgrimage to a woman’s beach where they washed themselves free of their former lives.

At one point, in the middle of licking her thigh actually, I suddenly thought of her friend Jack. What did it mean when she said they “lived together for a while” (see, I remembered her exact words, I would have been a good lawyer after all)? Did she mean lived together or just shared an apartment? I wanted to stop, put her thigh on hold, and ask all about Jack. But even apart from the issue of stopping, how could I ask about Jack who got himself killed? Who had brought us together, the way Paul had brought us together?

And I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to stop ever. I wanted to lick her thighs, her hips, the creases of her legs meeting her groin, the folds of her lips, her clitoris, her wonderful shy clitoris and the never-ending wetness inside her. I wanted to do everything I’d never allowed myself to think about, not with Alison Birkett, the hero-villain of my childhood. I wanted to go on and on, to have her kiss my face, my neck, my shoulders and down to my breasts, with her hand deep inside me the whole time, gently rocking, the fingers moving in waves. I didn’t want to think that she had longed for these things as much as I had, that she had thought about them, wondering what I looked like, how I had “turned out”, who I’d become, did I even like girls, and what would she have done if I hadn’t? (In the middle of all these thoughts I realized that I trusted her, I never questioned it when she said that she had kept away from me all those ten years, hadn’t checked up on me.) And I didn’t want to think that maybe she’d even planned for all of this, meticulous ethical behaviour or not. Planned how I didn’t know, but I didn’t want even to look at the idea.

We did stop of course, time and again, to talk, to ask each other about our lives, to laugh—at one point I said something to her about her casual elegance and she threw back her head, laughing really loudly, then told me how the first time she’d gone out looking for me she’d tried on five or six outfits before settling on the “casual” combination I’d finally seen. We stopped to eat (I called out for vegetable dumplings and shrimp in black bean sauce, and then Alison took the phone and talked the restaurant owner into having his delivery boy stop at a liquor store for a bottle of champagne). We stopped for Alison to look at some of my work and for me to ask about some of her cases.

We didn’t talk about what had brought us together. About Lisa Black Dust Tunnel Light, or Senator Channing, or the men and women in the tubular masks.

The hours got confused, speeding up or slowing down of their own accord. But it was nearly midnight and we had stopped once again to drink orange juice, when I knew it was time to get us past some of the traps that could bite us at any moment. I knew it was time because Alison had said something about pouring a stream of juice down my body and licking it up and I found myself shocked. Just a little, but enough to know I had to make a jump and she had to make it with me.

I stood up from the tiny table in my tiny kitchen. “Alison,” I said, amazed at how nervous I was with this woman who had so recently been climbing inside my body, “I would like to do an enactment with you.”

She stood up as well. Her face became grave and I panicked that I had done the wrong thing. But then she took off the purple satin robe I’d given her to wear (a present from an ex-lover, but I didn’t feel she had to know that; she was wearing it open, draping the sides of her breasts) and inclined her head towards me in the way of someone accepting a spirit obligation. She held out her hand, palm up, for me to take it. Briefly, I thought of just pulling her to me and kissing her, but I knew I had to follow through on what I’d said. To proclaim an obligation and then abandon it is like slicing through a tenuous web that has only begun to take shape. So hand in hand and walking slightly apart, we marched into the bedroom, this time heading not to the bed, but to the screened-off part of the room where I had set up my true life altar.

The enactment was slow and graceful. Before I could move aside the screen, Alison insisted on touching it, spreading wide her fingers as she traced the paintings of the night sky and the waves, touching the beads and feathers and ribbons, carefully reading (she moved her lips) the texts I’d copied from Ingrid Burning Snake and Maryanna Split Sky and Li Ku Unquenchable Fire, while touching their photos, taped with shiny black Founder’s Tape to the centre of the screen.

A pot of finger paste lay in front of the screen. Alison pointed to it and I nodded. Her designs were simple, abstract swirls for the most part, but I liked that she used both hands, and especially that she allowed herself to paint over some of my designs, even touching the photos of the Founders with dots of paint, as if to acknowledge that the place of “Ellen alone” was about to change, that I had invited her to change it. “All right,” she said finally, and let me accordion the screen aside.

For years I’d been collecting and making materials to use in some special enactment, when I would know it really counted. I had no idea what it would be (well, at first I thought I would do it when I met Mr Right, but I soon gave that up), only that I didn’t entirely trust anything from the SDA, and at some point I would want my own ingredients. Now I kneeled by a large wooden box covered in sea shells and small pebbles I’d pasted on, one by one, over a couple of years. When I opened the lock (a gold-plated lion, with the key sliding into its roaring mouth) and lifted the lid, I could almost hear a whisper of voices, excited at being called to action.

Before Alison could enter I needed to lay out a true ground. For this I used a rope made of strips of cloth torn from the clothes I’d worn at different primary enactments throughout my childhood, starting with the feathered blanket the midwives had given me for my rising into my newborn body. My mother had given me all these things when I’d left home to go to college. I’m sure she’d have approved of me putting them safely in a chest—but not ripped to pieces. With the rope I set out the lines of a true ground on the floor, careful to keep it curved at all points for the female body.

Within this field I laid down a silk scarf, golden and turquoise, for the Sun and the Sea, the light of knowledge shining on the sullen mysteries of the soul. Broken pieces of chains held down the silk, a sign of liberation for Chained Mother, held prisoner at the bottom of the ocean.

Next came a “standing announcement”, a metal pole I’d made, with branches hung with downward pointing triangles. The triangles were made of red velvet on wire frames, decorated with yellow and indigo ribbons. In the centre the largest triangle was a double layer of black velvet, with a space between the layers for a small revolving light and a tape loop. The light shone through a gauzy red vertical strip down the centre of the triangle. On the outside of this strip I’d pasted folds of pink satin to suggest labia. The tape loop, set up on a miniaturized cassette player (another boon from Radio Temple), consisted of women moaning in soft joy. A single wire fed electricity to both the light and the tape. The wire plugged into one of two sockets in the apartment officially sanctified to receive sacred current. So I guess I couldn’t escape SDA involvement after all.

When I turned on the tape and the light Alison grinned at me. I could see she wanted to say something, or maybe even do something inspired by the moaning triangle, but she kept silent, allowing me to go ahead. There were several other things to set out, including a small fan which plugged into the other half of the sacred socket. I’d painted the four blades of the fan with dots, concentric circles, mouths and my handprint. Before I set it going I asked Alison to dip her hand in the black paste and place her print over mine. When I turned on the switch the blades moved around slowly, just enough to billow the cloth.

The final participants didn’t come from the box, but from my shelf of permanent house guardians above the regular altar. These were three clay statues, rough images of women I’d made from mud collected after a storm on a song journey I’d made in the Adirondack mountains shortly after I left college. I’d painted them in thick globs of paste, one yellow, one red and one black. I set them on the floor in a row, but when I straightened up Alison bent down before the guardians to remove the protection from around her neck and slip it over the head of the one in the middle, the black. I touched her shoulder and looked at her as she stood up. I think I was crying, I’m not even sure. This small silver and gold cylinder was refuge, the place where she kept the external bodies of her real self. She had made herself naked for me, willing to start over, and she had shown me that that was the point of what we were doing, to allow ourselves a new beginning, naked and fresh. We had to offer the relationship we used to have, because we could not just build on that, and at the same time we had to cherish it, even the people who had died in the making of it.

I was about to invite Alison into the circle with me when she held up a hand, the one still dark with paste from the handprint, and darted into the kitchen, coming back with an apple and a knife. I smiled and nodded at her and then we entered together.

I closed my eyes and took a breath as I always do when I enter an opening to the Living World. The fan blew on my legs and I could smell a sharpness in the air as I breathed deeply, taking life and Alison into my blood. When I opened my eyes she was looking at me. We kissed each other and moved our hands in slow loose waves up and down each other’s bodies, lowering ourselves until we were kneeling on the silk floor, our bodies pressed together. The revolving light moved on and off her face, searching her out, while the number of women moaning on the tape seemed to increase with every turn of the loop.

With my hands I guided Alison to lie down on the ground, where I stroked her in one long movement from her forehead to her toes, sweeping off all the strains and residues she’d brought with her from the outside. Speaking very softly I told her the story of Maryanna Split Sky, how the day after the Parade of the Animals in Pasadena, the masked children’s riot that sparked the Revolution, Split Sky lay down naked in the main street of her town, offering her body as an opening to the Living World so that the Revolution might truly begin. I repeated for her that story we all know, how when the police came a wind blew them back, and when the TV people tried to badger her their cameras broke, how her body glowed like molten rock, like the Earth in its infancy, and how the sky filled with grey clouds, becoming like stone, weighing people down to their knees, until Maryanna shouted and the stone sky split open with light and rain, all at the same time.

Alison pulled me down on top of her and we began to make love, sliding up and down each other’s bodies, sometimes lifted into the air by the breath of the fan, sometimes as heavy as the three clay women who watched over us. When we sat up again, Alison took the apple and the knife, her own enactment knife I saw, a small brass blade with a handle the shape of a tortoise. I realized I didn’t know where she’d got it, what meaning the tortoise held for her, if it represented some secret society of lawyers, or an encounter with a slow-moving helper on some private adventure in the woods somewhere or maybe a sanctified zoo or refuge. And I realized too that it didn’t matter, she would tell me, I would learn all these things.

Alison cut the apple across the middle, revealing the five-pointed star in each half. As we sat twined around each other like strands of DNA, eating our stars, the moaning on the tape changed to laughter and the fan began to sing, while Alison and I and the three clay ladies all hummed happily along.

5

Alison and I met with Alexander Timmerman four days later. It had taken us that long to get through the layers of bureaucrats, hangers-on and probably government spies and obstructionists just to talk to him and persuade him that we had something to tell him. During the whole process I had to remind myself about twenty times that the government would find out whatever it wanted to about our negotiations, so we might as well not try to hide them.

Timmerman met us in a large living room style office, with grey chairs and a couch facing twentieth-floor corner windows overlooking lower Manhattan. Appearing slightly smaller up close than on a platform, Timmerman gestured at the room with his hand, as if to make it disappear in some political stage trick. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said. “The PR people tell me I have to live up to my status.” He offered us spring water from a plain glass pitcher, pouring it into glasses with the logo for Consumer Liberation.

“I have to confess something,” he said. “I’ve been feeling secretly giddy ever since Martin—my secretary—told me that Alison Birkett wanted to see me. I still remember the way you forced the government’s hand on the Pentagon possession. It was one of the things that eventually inspired me to give up corporate law and seek guidance on what service the Living World wanted me to perform.” He didn’t mention Alison’s later accusation of Malignant temp agencies under contract to the White House. In gratitude, I stopped myself from asking if he’d framed any pictures of her from Time magazine.

When Alison had thanked him and shown her interest in his work by citing a couple of his lesser-known triumphs, he turned to me, said how pleased he was to meet me and asked if I was part of Ms Birkett’s firm. I disappointed him, and Alison added that “Ms Pierson and I work on special projects together.”

Alison laid it out for him, only leaving out her personal connection to Jack Chikowsky, the way we’d found out about Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23’s connection to Arthur Channing and our knowledge of her previous incarnation. We’d discussed that last point for some time, wondering if we might need it to shock Timmerman into recognizing that he was being set up. Finally, we decided that it raised too many issues of our own involvement.

Timmerman listened carefully, sometimes with his head down, sometimes looking sharply at Alison or me. Pretty soon it became clear that he did not want to hear what we were telling him. When Alison told him about Jack, and about the other incidents, he nodded and said how tragic that was and how he’d asked the Twins (he didn’t call them that) to channel their blessings into more gentle manifestations. When we suggested that these events suggested some sort of conspiracy, he smiled and asked, “A conspiracy to do what? Make people feel happy? I’m very sorry if occasionally some people have had trouble handling their own joy, but I find it hard to accept that an ecstatic blessing can be a plot. If anything, the problems simply show how much people need the experience, so that it would not come as such a shock to their starved systems.” I asked him if it didn’t strike him as odd that none of this got into the press. He said, “That sounds more like people caring about our cause than people wanting to hurt us.”

We had to do some dodging of our own, for Timmerman seemed more concerned about what we knew about the banking issue than any of the subjects we wanted to raise. For a while, he and Alison danced around each other, struggling over whose agenda would dominate the discussion—his to find out what we knew of Channing’s banking connections, Alison’s to focus on the Being summoned by Carolyn Park-Wu. After a few minutes, Alison convinced him that we had not concerned ourselves with the details of his investigations, only the fact that he clearly was on to something, and that it was Arthur Channing who had sent Tunnel Light to him.

“Of course we knew that our Friend came to us from Senator Channing,” he told us. “And we are not naive, believe me, not after all our campaigns. If Senator Channing is hoping to influence us away from our investigations by bringing Margaret to us, then he is certainly naive and can expect a few shocks. But I suspect you know that, or have guessed.”

“May I ask a question?” I said. I could still put on innocence when I needed it, and was still young enough to make it work. “What exactly does Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23 do for you?”

“She gives us support,” he said. “She strengthens us to do what we need to do. I realize that may sound a little vague to you, but if you’ve ever experienced the presence of a Bright Being in your life, you will understand that strength is not a vague or empty concept at all. Not at all.”

I said, “How can you know that she is not doing something to you that you can’t detect? Something that will weaken your work rather than support it?”

“Because she’s Benign, Ms Pierson. Don’t you think we had her checked? And not by the SDA, either. She cannot help but look after our best interests.”

It was right around then that Maggie Tunnel Light came in and joined us.

With her heavily made up eyes, her pale skin and black hair, she looked much the same as she had in Miracle Park, except that she wore no lipstick and this time she was all in white, a shapeless tunic over straight-legged white pants. Only her sandals were coloured, the same shade of soft green as the office carpet, giving her a look of some albino flower rising from the grass. “I am Alexander’s Friend,” she said, and sat down beside him on the couch.

I couldn’t help myself. Hardly knowing I was saying it I half whispered, “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know that—”

I didn’t get any further. I’m not sure if I stopped because I was shaking too hard to speak, or because of Maggie’s reaction. She sat back, wincing as if I’d slapped her, and said to Timmerman, her voice breaking slightly, “Alexander, what is she doing?”

Timmerman said, “Ms Pierson! This is a Benevolent Being, an emissary,” but neither Alison nor I paid him any attention. We looked at each other, each of us thinking the same thing. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t realize she’s ever been anything else.

Now that I’d stopped, the Being had regained her composure. She touched Timmerman’s shoulder, saying, “It’s all right. I will help them.”

Later, Alison and I talked about those next moments. The terrible thing was we knew what was happening, what she was doing, and there was no way we could stop it. A sweetness was opening inside us, a feeling that all the restrictions that clamped us so tightly were falling away, that we could really breathe for the first time in our lives, everything could open up to its full size, all the broken pieces were flowing together. We were in love, wasn’t that enough, why did we need to worry about anything else? When it passed, after about fifteen seconds, I discovered myself sweating, staring at the floor with my hands clenched.

I discovered I had lowered my head. When I looked up, Tunnel Light was leaning back with her hands pressed together in her lap and Timmerman had his arms crossed. “Do you see?” he said. “Is there any doubt as to her intentions?”

She turned to him. “Alexander,” she said, “maybe I should speak to them.”

“Of course,” he said, and stood up. “Ms Birkett,” he said, “I really do feel honoured. And I appreciate your and Ms Pierson’s concern. Honestly. But believe me, it’s misplaced. We do know what we’re doing. Trust us.” He held out his hand and we stood up to shake it.

The three of us remained on our feet after Timmerman left. There was a moment of silence, punctured only by my own noisy breathing which I couldn’t seem to get under control, and then Alison said, “Whatever you’re going to do to us, I want you to know that it doesn’t matter. You can make us feel, or think, what you want right now, but it will wear off. And we will keep pushing, I promise you that.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I don’t want to control you. I came here to help.”

I could feel myself yearning to believe her, to just drop everything and go off with Alison. We could go back to my apartment, switch on the blessing fan and let its breezes stir the waters in us as we lay in the bed. I made myself think of Paul, of the snakes in the elevator. “Help us how?” I said.

She took a half step forward. “You are frightened that I have come to harm Alexander. To sabotage his work. But I tell you that his work does not concern me. I help him in any way I can, but that is not why I am here.” She seemed to be looking only at me; when I asked Alison later, she had felt the same thing. Tunnel Light said, “Human beings are starving. Your souls need a special kind of nourishment, the release of ecstasy found in sexual expression. I tell you this freely. I have come here to help humans fulfil their sexual hunger. Are you shocked? You should not be. You yourselves know this. You have let yourselves taste a small portion of what is possible for you.”

Alison’s hand took hold of mine; or maybe it was the other way around. She was shaking as she held on tightly to me. The Being went on, “Humans starve themselves because of their fear. You live in a culture which teaches you to lock yourselves away from your bodies and everything that can release them. My purpose here is simple. I only want to help you overcome your own starvation.”

Alison said, “Your kind of food is killing people. It’s too strong.”

Tunnel Light nodded. “I accept that we have made mistakes. Sometimes we have acted too quickly. That will change. But we will not change our purpose.”

“Why Timmerman?” I asked. “Why not, oh, the Congress? Or the Revolutionary Republican Party?”

“Alexander seeks liberation,” she said. “He seeks many different forms of liberation, many of which do not concern us. However, he includes among these the liberation of sexual expression. And he provides a way for the Beings to touch the people who come to his rallies. They come just for that touch. We give them something to hold within them, like a quick-spreading virus, one that heals instead of hurts. It is possibly a small thing, but it helps, if only in a small way.”

Alison said, “Do you know how you came to Timmerman in the first place?”

She shrugged. The motion was small, delicate. “Carolyn Park-Wu summoned me.”

“And gave you your purpose?”

Tunnel Light shook her head. “She dedicated me to Alexander. For that I am grateful to her, whatever her own motives were. My purpose is my own.”

I thought, which means that they built the purpose into the configuration itself. She can’t be dissuaded. It’s part of her nature.

Alison said, “And you know that Park-Wu works for Arthur Channing, and that your Alexander is investigating Channing?”

“Of course. I told you, those issues do not concern me. And I have told you that I will do nothing to hurt Alexander. Whatever plan Park-Wu may have expected me to fulfil, I will disappoint her. I do not serve Carolyn Park-Wu, I serve Alexander Timmerman. Why won’t you accept that?”

I thought, because we know who you really are. But she didn’t. All the way down, she believed in herself as Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23. Could they have planted some sort of suggestion in her, ready to turn her back into Lisa Black Dust 7 at the right moment?

I said, “Suppose a Malignant One could take your place with Timmerman. Maybe Channing has some method to dislodge you now that Timmerman trusts you. What could it do?”

Her face crinkled and she looked in genuine pain. “That cannot happen,” she said.

“Humour me. You want to protect him, don’t you? If Channing has some scheme, shouldn’t we try to anticipate it? What could a Malignant One do to him? In your position.”

“Stop it!” she shouted, and I jumped back, my face scalded, my chest feeling like something had smashed into it.

Alison put her arms around me. Her body felt a little shaky, but she managed to keep her shoulders back as she looked at Tunnel Light. “Please forgive her,” she said. “She doesn’t understand that you can hurt.” To me she said, “You can’t ask her to do that. Anticipate what a Ferocious One might do or plan. Thinking like the enemy is too painful for her.”

The pressure on my chest relaxed and I got myself upright. The enemy stood with her feet together and her hands clasped below her waist. She said, “Be calm. I will not harm Alexander. It is not possible for me to do so. Nor will I allow anyone else to harm him. Alexander is safe.”

Alison and I didn’t speak all the way down the stairs from Timmerman’s office. When we reached the street, I started to say something until Alison put a hand on my arm. “Not yet,” she said. A few blocks from Timmerman’s office stood a Teller’s Hall, one of those huge stone and stained-glass buildings from before the Revolution, a “church” as it was called, converted to sacred space by Marion Firetongue, so that a statue of the Founder now stood just inside the doorway. We stepped into the dark open space, lit only by the daylight from the high windows. With our arms crossed over our chests and our hands on our shoulders, we touched our heads to the sides of the statue.

“Guard us and conceal us,” we said. “Shield us and seal us from all alien presences.” Alison sighed as she stood up. “Well,” she said, “I guess we’re about as safe from interference as we’re going to get.”

Whatever the building’s interior used to be had long since vanished when the Faceless Workers came and cleansed the city in the Time of Fanatics after the Revolution. Now, the great open space of the main hall had been transformed into a replica of the garden where the mysterious “Uncle Jeffrey” had sat talking to Firetongue over five days and nights, persuading her to “break the blood”—leave her family—and join the Army of the Saints. In the middle of the floor computer-animated statues of Firetongue and Jeffrey sat on a bench under a stone tree. They moved their heads side to side, constantly whispering. Alison and I sat on wooden chairs by a pair of small potted bushes off in the corner, ready at last for our own whispering.

The fact is, there wasn’t all that much to say. I suggested to Alison my idea of a pre-programmed switch at the right moment, Lisa Black Dust 7 re-emerging to destroy Timmerman. Alison said, “I just don’t see how they could do that. You can’t just…hypnotize a Bright Being. For one thing, they don’t have brains.”

“I feel like I don’t either, at the moment. Look. Park-Wu summons the Being, sends her off to Timmerman, not as a servant of Channing or Park-Wu herself, but as a genuine helper for Timmerman. Which means that Tunnel Light can’t hurt him. Or even let anyone else hurt him. She can only help. And yet, we know that Timmerman’s on the verge of exposing Channing. And there must be a reason why they chose a reconfigured Black Dust 7. I will not believe that that is just some accident.”

She held my hand. “I’ve gotten rusty at this, I’m afraid. In the old days I would have known better than to go to Timmerman without all the facts. That was stupid. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not doing any better,” I said. “You know, Alison, it’s a good thing you really didn’t just want to see me for help on this Timmerman thing. You would have gone away pretty fed up.”

She grinned at me. “I have to admit, I’m glad my hidden agenda was the one that got satisfied.” She stood up, still holding my hands. “Come on,” she said. “We’re probably as safe outside as in here.”

We stood in the doorway, where I winced at the sun, the noise of the traffic and people. Looking at Alison, I wished I could kiss her, starting at the eyebrows and working my way down. She said, “I’m just afraid things are coming to a head sooner than we know how to react. My guess is that Timmerman’s about ready to move.”

I said, “We could try to find out what he’s planning. What Channing’s involvement is.”

She shrugged. “Then all we’d know is what Timmerman knows. We need to find out what he doesn’t know. What Margaret-Lisa is going to do to him.”

“I wonder,” I said. Alison looked at me, waiting. “I wonder if Tunnel Light herself knows what she’s going to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, maybe I’m fixated on this switch idea, but if she’s really sincere—and you tell me she has no choice—then somehow she’s going to do something to him without knowing she’s doing it.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe…maybe she’ll stop him if he veers away from what she considers important. She obviously doesn’t consider Channing of any significance. Maybe she’s somehow…programmed in some way, to force Timmerman away from banking and back to sex.”

Alison was frowning, trying to assess what I was suggesting. She looked delicious and I found myself wanting to force her away from banking. She said, “How would she force him? She can’t hurt him.”

“She could sabotage what he’s doing. That wouldn’t hurt him.”

She shook her head. “I still doubt it. Maybe I’m slightly fixated myself, but my understanding is that the compulsion to serve Timmerman would lead her to help him further his plans.”

“Even if it went against her plans?”

She tilted her head to the side, unconsciously causing her hair to fall slightly away from her face, into the sun. Straightening up, she said, “I’ll have to think about that. Maybe I can check on your idea about programming. Is it possible to dedicate a Bright Being in such a way that it reacts automatically to a specific situation?”

Feeling not very confident, I said, “And I’ll try to think about what exactly they might want to programme her to do.”

There was a pause, and then Alison said, “Would you like to come over tonight?” There was something very sweet about her hesitancy, her caution about any assumptions. I said, “Of course.”

She stroked my cheek. I closed my eyes and made some kind of purring noise. “How about dinner?” Alison said. “I’ll cook. My cooking doesn’t go much beyond roast chicken and yoghurt salad, but if you say nice things to me I’ll try for some potato pancakes.”

“I’ll start right now,” I said, and whispered suggestions of niceness in her ear. “How about eight?” I asked. “I think I need some time just to sit. Try to see whatever it is I’m not seeing.”

Alison quoted Adrienne Birth-of-Beauty, the Fifth Proposition from her Shout From the Skyscraper. “See what there is to see. Hear what there is to hear. Touch whatever you touch. Speak the thing you must speak.”

“If I knew what it was,” I said, “I’d be happy to speak it.”

But it wasn’t Alison or even Birth-of-Beauty who opened me to what was there. It was Joan Monteil.

When the bell rang, around four that afternoon, my first thought was that my government had returned, wanting to tell me I shouldn’t be hanging out in Teller Halls with Alison Birkett. But then I realized that the tube-faced people used their own keys, so I decided to ask over the intercom who it was. The usual indistinguishable scratchy voice came back. “It’s me. It’s Joan Monteil. Joan? You know. Ellen? Let me in. There’s so much…Let me in.”

Wishing I hadn’t answered, I buzzed her through. I didn’t want to face Joan right now. Every day since that first night with Alison I’d woken up thinking that I had to call Joan, tell her I couldn’t see her any more, tell her I was sorry if I’d hurt her. The usual. Words that sound like a lie even when they’re true. And every time other things came first. Timmerman was more urgent. Alison was more deserving.

The doorbell rang. And rang. And rang. Joan was pressing it over and over, like some enactment prayer buzzer summoning people back into their bodies. When I opened the door she came rushing in, full of cheer. “Ellen,” she said, in an odd breathy voice. “Oh, Ellen, it’s…it’s just so wonderful to see you.” There was something strange about the way she looked, too. It took me a moment to realize just what it was. She had on very heavy makeup, but it wasn’t like she’d put it on too thickly, it was more as if there were layers, as if she’d carefully done herself up, then decided she wasn’t satisfied and did it all over again, except without removing the earlier layer. And then again. Her hair had a kind of matted overstyled look, yet disorganized, as if there too she couldn’t seem to decide and just kept adding more and more gel, or spray, every time she decided to change it. As she talked, she moved around the apartment in a nervous dance, even pirouetting, with movements that tried to be graceful or provocative, but ended up as too abrupt, off balance. She had a habit of moving her fingers on her body, down her cheek, or along her thigh. She was dressed all in black, wearing stretch jeans and a T-shirt. I could only watch, confused and a little frightened. Now and then, she would come towards me, leaning forward, or putting out a hand to stroke my face. Without thinking, I pulled away from her.

“I dreamed about you,” she said. “It was so incredible. I was eating. Fruit. Or soup? And everything was hot. All over me. I just wanted to climb into it. Stir it with my breasts. Isn’t that great? Have you ever done that? Oh, you’ve done everything. I know. And you were in the dream. Part of the mirror. Did I tell you about the mirror? It was so dark, but you were breathing, I could hear you whisper to me, you were just whispering over and over and over, the same thing, how much you wanted me, and we could sink into the mirror. With the moon.” She came very close and began to move her fingernails across the top of my chest.

I lifted her hand away. “Listen, Joan,” I started, but she wasn’t listening.

“I took it down to NORA,” she said. “I thought they should have it. To match it. With all the others. I know there’s others, there has to be. All over. That’s what she said. How we all deserve it. But not you, of course. I mean, not you in other people’s dreams.” She giggled. “Of course, you deserve it. You more than anyone.” She was touching things, running her hand along a lamp pole, or sliding an eraser between her palms, or moving her finger along a picture frame and then touching her lips. It reminded me of something.

“I’ve been meaning to call you—” I tried.

“Meaning!” she said. “That’s exactly what that bitch at NORA said. Mean, mean, mean, mean. What does it mean? Does it mean? I told her I know what it means, I just wanted to give it to her. Like you.”

The phone rang. Joan grunted, then opened her mouth into a wide O and made heavy breathing noises while I grabbed the phone and half shouted, “Hello?”

Harry Astin’s voice said, “Well hi, Ellen. Glorybe and I were wondering—”

“Harry,” I said, “get over here. Right now.” The moment I put the phone down Joan took it away from me, lifting the whole thing up and swinging her leg over the wire like someone getting onto a horse. She began to move the wire around her thighs and back and forth in her crotch, then rubbed the entire phone in large circles over her belly. “Have you ever done this? Have you done this? Oh, stupid. Of course. You’re Ellen. You’re Ellen. You’ve done everything.”

“Joan,” I said, “let’s sit down.”

She threw the phone on the floor, laughing as the bell sounded. “What?” she said. “What should we sit on?” She came towards me suddenly and began to move her leg up and down against mine. I stepped back and she followed me, then abruptly stopped to pick up a silver turtle guardian my mother had given me and rub it around the front of her body, making soft laughing noises as she did it.

That was when I realized what she reminded me of. The people at Alexander Timmerman’s rally, the ones who’d received the blessing and couldn’t stop touching things. I tried to think of any Timmerman events Joan might have attended, but I knew he hadn’t done anything public, certainly not in this area, since the park.

“Joan,” I said, “listen to me. I need you to tell me if you’ve—”

“Tell, tell, tell,” Joan chanted. She laughed. “I won’t tell if you won’t tell. Do you fuck and tell? Do you like to tell?” She began to march around the room, picking things up, rubbing them against her body, offering them to me, dropping them, sliding against other objects, pictures, the walls, the corners of desks or the backs of chairs.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I tried to tell her, but she wasn’t interested. She came at me, dashing forward, just touching her fingers all over me, whatever she could reach, sometimes sliding the whole hand, other times jabbing me with her fingertips or scratching me with her nails. “Stop it,” I tried to tell her. Any time I backed up she pursued me, pushing me backwards, until I found myself against the wall, where Joan began first to kiss me, any place she could reach, and then to bite, small jabs with her teeth. She was making animal noises, not real ones, but the kind of cute sounds children learn in kindergarten songs.

I pushed her away, harder than I thought, so that she fell back against the desk. When she recovered her balance she leaned forward, hands on her knees, and shouted at me. “What do you want? Do you want me to fuck you? Fuck you? Fuck you? Like your lawyer bitch? Is that the idea? I’ll do it, I’ll do whatever you like, I’ll fuck you so hard you’ll split right open and everything will spill out, just like you did to me.”

“Joan!” I said. “You’ve got to listen to me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

She laughed, rubbing circles on her crotch. “Lawyer talk, counsellor? Why don’t you take me? Don’t you want it? It’s free. No billable hours.”

I darted around her, managed to reach my altar, where I grabbed hold of the three guardians, the ones I’d set out for my enactment with Alison, along with the can of flash powder and a box of sanctified matches. I wanted more tools, but there was no time and it was just so hard to think straight.

I tried to set the guardians out in a triangle enclosing Joan and I, but I should have known it was hopeless. As soon as I set them up she kicked them over. “What are you going to do?” she said. “Buy me off with your sluts?” She picked up the one painted black and rubbed it over her breasts, then between her legs. “Oh,” she said, as if surprised. “This is just like her, isn’t it? Has she been here? Is she going to come through the wall? Are the walls going to come?” She laughed, then pushed the statue hard at her crotch. “Right through the fucking walls,” she said.

“Joan,” I said, “she’s not your friend. Please believe me. Anything you get from her is not a gift. She’s the enemy, Joan. The enemy. You’ve got to get her out of you.”

She flung the guardian at me, or maybe just at the wall, since if she was throwing it at me, she missed by more than a foot. The clay husk shattered and I could feel the spirit who’d been living inside it hover in the air, confused, and then drift away. I wanted to cry, but there was no time. I could invite her back later, or properly say goodbye.

Joan was going through my night table, throwing things on the floor. I began to lay down the flash powder, trying to do it without her noticing. It wasn’t difficult. She had found what she was looking for, the penetrator-resonator set she’d given me, and now was moving the penetrator around her face with one hand, while she hung on to its bird-headed sister with the other. “Let’s make it sing,” she said. “Can we make it sing now? Sing?” She began to hum in imitation of the bird while continuing to move the fish woman all over her body.

The flash of the powder going off made her cry out and drop the resonator on the floor. She shook her head, then yelped as if I’d hurt her when I set off another pile of powder. “Ellen?” she said. “Why are you…let’s sing. Let’s make everything…She told me you were hungry. She told me we could both feed on her, feed on her.”

I set off another flash and then reached around her for the feathers and salt I’d used after the tube people had left. I threw the salt on her and began waving the feathers, trying to think what I needed to say. I don’t remember exactly, but it went something like “Powers of protection and harmony, empty this woman, clean her of invasion and pollution. Send all Malignant and Benign Beings away from her. Seal her and…” I couldn’t say “bless her” because that’s what Benign Ones are supposed to do. And she had been blessed. Lamely, I said, “Seal her and free her.”

Joan grabbed a feather out of my hand. When she moved it over my face I turned my head. Dropping it, she began to shake her head. “Ellen?” she said. “Don’t you…Ellen, this is…is it her? Is it her? I’ve got so much, so much, I dreamed about us—” She stopped, turned her head. The doorbell was ringing.

“Harry,” I said, opening it. “Oh God, thank you for getting here.”

It took Harry and I an hour to cool Joan down enough to take her to a clinic of the Inner Spirit, over on Avenue C. Harry was wonderful. He just took her hands and started to dance around the apartment with her, a kind of cheerful square dance skipping and loping, the whole time telling her a stream of gossip about office politics and his upstairs neighbour. When suddenly her knees gave way and she fell down, he sat beside her and began whispering to her, getting her finally to close her eyes and lean against him while I got my mid-winter initiation cloak to put over her in case she went into shock.

Harry wanted to take her to a hospital, but I told him we couldn’t go anywhere with SDA connections. He didn’t argue. At the clinic a Ragged Healer received Joan, waving me away when I tried to tell her what the problem was. The healer, a woman I think, wore a mask of ribbons and strings of beads that covered much of her face. The beads were money, I knew, legal tender in the spirit worlds where she would travel to bring back the scattered pieces of Joan’s soul. On her robe, a heavy shapeless mass of unbleached cotton, fur strips and plastic panels, she carried, among all her other equipment, a small computer screen showing exchange rates for spirit currencies. Several other screens showed images of the room itself, but oddly distorted, either broken down into dots, or with narrow tunnel vision, or filled with pulsating colours. Harry later suggested to me that these might be animal perceptions of the world, the viewpoints of her various animal spirit helpers and fellow travellers. The robe also held keys, bells, a saw and hammer, a miniature flashlight, a hand-sized pinball machine, a fish-shaped water gun, a box of classroom chalk, a group of very small dolls on a metal ring, goggles, eyeglasses with eyes painted on them, and several cans of 35 mm film without a camera. When we formally gave Joan to her care, she handed us several business cards, each with some sort of prophetic image—a volcano exploding, a snake licking a flower, birds eating a carcass—and words in some incomprehensible script.

To my surprise, the healer, who couldn’t have been more than five feet six inches, picked Joan up in her arms, all the while murmuring to her, and carried her to the centre of the room, where she set her down in a jewelled circle. With the various chalk she drew a series of concentric circles around Joan, representations of the various worlds she would travel through to reach Joan: the Earth, the Sky, the Sun, Moon and Stars, the Land of the Dead, and the worlds of her various spirit helpers. The rounded corners of the room glowed with wavy lines of neon light, a physical picture of the Living World.

Harry pulled me away from the doorway as the healer began swaying back and forth and singing very softly—snatches of old songs, I think, particularly “Oh Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home”.

“Let’s go, sweetie,” Harry said to me.

“Shouldn’t we make sure it’s really helping?” I whispered.

“We’ll just get in the way. Maybe suck something up ourselves. Or cause a backlash. And you know it can take hours. Or days.” I let him lead me away, only looking back briefly at the healer shining her flashlight towards the ceiling as she moved her head from side to side.

In the street, Harry put an arm around me and stroked my cheek. “She’ll be fine,” he said.

Moving away from him, I sighed and shook my head. “Thanks,” I told him. “I don’t know…I just—” I took a deep breath. “That was my fault, Harry. She’s in all that spirit shit because of me.”

He took out his prosthetic cigarette from the pocket of his striped blazer. He tilted back his head to blow pretend smoke. “Are you going to stop having sex with people because of the danger of possession? Ellen, Ellen, I find it hard to envision you turning your clothes inside out and joining a chastity support group.”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Then what? Your insincerity? The fact that you were using her? Don’t you think she was using you? Perhaps one should not speak ill of the possessed, but Joan Monteil is an emotional masturbator.”

I took his arm and began moving him down the street. “Harry,” I said, “let’s go get some coffee. I need to talk with you.”

“A conversation with you is always a delight.”

I laughed. “Thanks. The thing is, it’s kind of dangerous. What happened to Joan—it didn’t happen because of the sex. That was part of it, but it involves a lot more. I’m scared, Harry. Scared for me, and…”

“Your old family friend. Alison Birkett, wasn’t it?”

I stopped. “You sonofabitch,” I said, laughing. “Did you just remember her from that time on the street, or—”

He smiled at me, radiantly. Harry can do a great radiance. “Darling,” he said, “I knew who you were when I first met you. It was very thrilling, let me tell you. Ellen Pierson! I thought to myself. You were a hero of mine when I was a teenager.”

“You never said anything.”

He waved the hand with the cigarette. “You didn’t seem very eager to discuss it.”

I looked down. “Yeah. Thanks, Harry.” Raising my head again, I said, “But then you know the kind of thing that can happen around me and Alison. I don’t want you hurt, Harry.”

“Well,” he said, “I suspect you did not take Joan into your deepest confidence and that did not seem to protect her. So if I’m going to be in danger, I might as well know why.” He tilted his head back to blow imaginary smoke. “Besides, what would life be without adventure?”

We went to a pita parlour on Avenue A, where Harry ordered hummus and I had coffee. I told him everything, or at least everything about Timmerman, ending with, “I know the answer is right there, and I just feel so stupid that I can’t see what’s going to happen.”

Harry called the waitress as she went by and ordered tea and halvah. When the woman had gone, he leaned forward. “Maybe you’re a trifle fixated,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you see this Margaret Tunnel Light and all you can think of is the Ferocious One who killed your cousin. So even though you accept that she will not directly harm Timmerman, you still assume that she will in some way attack him.” I thought of how I’d said to Alison that maybe Tunnel Light would do something to Timmerman without knowing what she was doing and how I’d assumed that meant a kind of programming. Harry went on, “The point is this, Ellen. You know that Timmerman is being set up. Played for a patsy. But maybe Ms Light is being set up as well. Maybe they’ve taken this rather impressionable Bright Being and are playing her for a patsy as much as Timmerman.”

I leaned back and put a hand over my face, closing my eyes. I could hear the waitress setting down Harry’s halvah, but I paid no attention. I was remembering the Being telling Alison and me, “Alexander is safe”. But what of Consumer Liberation? What of his plans? Channing didn’t care about Timmerman personally, he cared about the plan to expose the banking system. I’d been assuming that Tunnel Light would have to betray her trust. But suppose she did something with all her good intentions and with no intent at all to harm Timmerman—but that was the effect? Did she think she was harming Joan? Did she possess Joan and send her to me to attack me? It struck me that Maggie Tunnel Light probably thought she was helping us. Showing us the potential of her gifts to humanity. She was insane, I realized. I didn’t know if you could use such terms for a Bright Being, but I thought how I could come up with few things scarier than an insane Devoted One.

“Alexander is safe,” she’d said. And something else. “It is possibly a small thing.” The blessings, the frenzied arousal. These were possibly a small thing. What if she wanted to do something bigger? Some act of sexual liberation so overwhelming, so dramatic, it finally would make it into the newspapers and all the television stations. Suppose she was waiting for the proper moment. Some moment when all attention was focused on Timmerman.

I opened my eyes. “Harry,” I said, “she could do something horrible and think she was helping humanity. She could ‘aid’ Timmerman in such a way that she tore him to pieces. And if she ‘helped’ him enough no one would ever listen to him again.” I felt a kind of awe for the simplicity of it. I’d been looking for tricks and surprises, but in fact the whole thing just hinged on the single-minded stupidity of divine benevolence.

I took hold of Harry’s hands. “Sweetheart,” I said, “I’ve got to go speak to Alison. I can’t tell you how much I thank you. For Joan, for being so smart, for just helping me face these things. For letting me keep my secrets. I can’t tell you how good you are to me.”

Harry leaned back and smiled happily. With his pc in the corner of his mouth, he sucked in air, then blew it out. “I will assume the check,” he said. “You go see your friend. Glorybe and I will stand proudly on the sidelines while you overthrow the government.”

“I wish I could just laugh at that,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek.

There was a phone in the back, between the men’s and women’s toilets. I found myself looking around to make sure no one was nearby, then realized how meaningless that was. They could be following me, they could have microphones everywhere, including this phone line, they could masquerade as anybody. I wasn’t even sure who “they” were. The government? Devoted Ones? Malignant Ones? It seemed to me that we could hope for two things. If the government wanted to get rid of us they could do so at any time, whatever systems Alison had set up. So probably they did not take us seriously. And as for the Bright Beings, well, I had to hope that Channing couldn’t bring in any Malignant Ones without confusing their Benign Friends. And that the Benign Ones would not directly try to harm us. Against their nature. I just prayed to all of my guardians that they wouldn’t try to help us, the way they’d tried to help Joan.

When I announced myself to Alison’s secretary she told me, “Oh, Ms Pierson. Thank you for calling. Ms Birkett has been trying to reach you.”

“Ellen,” Alison said when she came on the line. “You’ve heard the news.”

“No,” I said. “No. What news?”

“Timmerman’s ready to go public. He’s gotten permission to do an enactment in honour of Rebecca Rainbow inside the New York Stock Exchange. With a promise of live network television. This is where he makes his charges public, Ellen. I’m convinced of it.”

I said, “And this is where they destroy him.”

“What?”

“I know what they’re going to do,” I said. “I know exactly what they’re going to do. I just don’t know what the goddamn hell we can do to stop them.”

6

Standing in the visitors’ gallery above the trading floor, looking down through the thick glass, I was struck most by how crowded the stock market was. Not just the people, some of whom were frantically making deals and filling quotas in the final minutes before Timmerman and his entourage would enter, others of whom had given up all thought of business as they milled around, telling jokes, pounding drums covered in bills, eating sandwiches, or just standing alone or in groups, looking up towards Rebecca Rainbow’s body, suspended in her glass coffin above the business floor, or else towards the dark red bell in its glass cage, also high above the floor against the back wall. Beyond the dense and nervous crowd, equipment filled the room—clusters of phones on poles or in banks, spiritual supply posts where traders could find flash powder, paper enactment robes, representation dolls and other SDA-approved paraphernalia for last-minute help on some important deal, and especially the trading posts themselves.

There was something very animal-like about the trading posts. In the centre of each stood a huge dark box, painted over with spirit emblems for prosperity and containing the computer circuitry that linked all the deals. Thick poles containing cables rose from these boxes to join a maze of latticework just below the gold-embossed ceiling. Artbirds hung on thin wires from the latticework, a whole flock of the life-like bright birds, their voice circuits set for songs of wealth and harmony. Timmerman had wanted to set loose genuine pigeons so that Rainbow might speak through them but, according to Alison’s contacts, the SDA refused to disrupt the calculated songs of the artbirds.

From the central cable box, each trading post opened out in a figure eight of counterspace where the actual work got done. The counters too were packed with people and equipment. Above the counters double banks of video screens showed the various transactions. Smaller video monitors hung just over the heads of the crowd on the ends of metal poles which extended out and downwards from the larger videos. The poles looked like legs, giving the dozen or so trading posts the appearance of giant insects swarming over the floor, about to attack the humans, small and vulnerable beneath them.

Above it all, in the visitors’ gallery, squeezed in among the crowds swarming to watch Alexander Timmerman put on a show, I felt alone with myself despite the press of people. I’d brought my own special protection, a whole bag full of power objects given to me by Annie-O, who’d met me the day before in the Wild Refuge of Inner Wood Park at the northern tip of Manhattan. The bag was large—a leather satchel—and heavy from a group of rocks Annie had included. I held it against my chest while the room filled up behind me.

I thought of Alison, constantly on the phone, trying for the past three days to reach somebody, anyone who would listen to us and could somehow do something to stop what was going to happen. I thought of our efforts to reach Timmerman himself and the information from his staff that he had gone deep travelling and no one could bring him out of his meditations until the day of the enactment. And the clear message that they could hardly spare any time for absurd conspiracy theories of sabotaged enactments and manipulated Devoted Ones. So now I was here, by myself, with Alison still at her office, still trying to stop it any way she could, and I just knew she wouldn’t succeed, Timmerman would march or dance confidently into the trap. And I found myself just watching, a spectator like everyone around me.

Maybe my detachment came from all the waiting, with Timmerman not yet in the building and nothing happening other than a few exchange workers putting on masks or enactment robes over their colour-coded jackets. Or maybe it was my relief that I’d gotten through the moment I’d dreaded most of all—meeting Paul. Halfway down Broad Street on my way to the visitors’ entrance, I’d almost turned back when I’d realized I would have to take an elevator, that there was no way I could talk the tourist guides into unlocking the emergency stairs.

In the lobby as well, I’d just stood there, with my official visitor’s pass crunched in my hand, wondering what the point of my watching was if I couldn’t do anything, and why didn’t I just go home, and what would Alison say if I couldn’t face it. Finally, I told myself it was only the third floor, it wouldn’t take more than ten seconds. I waited until the car had filled up, then slipped in before the door closed.

The last time I’d ridden in an elevator, the day I’d decided that I would keep healthier if I just took the stairs everywhere, the building super—it was Harry’s apartment building, actually—had let the husk—Paul’s husk—run down. The nylon “hair” had mostly fallen off, the eye dots had rubbed out and kids had covered the pole itself with their own gang enactment signs. I remember how I’d wanted to trap that goddamn super in the elevator and bang his head against the door and scream at him, “That’s my cousin!” Instead, I’d just stopped riding in elevators.

Now, when I saw the polished steel, the actual jewels used for eyes, what looked like real human hair, I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or more enraged. Instead, I looked away, unable to let him see me. And then it was over and I was upstairs by the lobby outside the visitors’ gallery, and I didn’t have to worry about it again until the time came to go down.

Though the thick glass of the gallery made it impossible to actually hear anything down on the floor, the operators of the Exchange had set up loudspeakers for us to hear the enactment and Timmerman’s speech. Now someone had thrown the switch on the mikes, for suddenly a boom of noise filled the narrow corridor, people shouting or running, telephones ringing, prayer wheels spinning, drums with the sloppy rhythms of weekend spirit-travellers, strange popping noises I couldn’t identify…Several people in the gallery screamed, others held their ears. For me, it came like an alarm waking me from a kind of drugged state. Setting down the bag, I pressed my hands against the window, making sure no one could get between me and a clear view.

A voice announced that the closing bell would ring in five minutes. Those of us in the gallery all looked to the balcony with the cage for the bell that started and ended trading, and beside it the chair where the chairman would sit for the ringing. The chair was a wooden effigy of Rebecca Rainbow sitting on a large stone. Her torso and head formed the chair back, her arms stretched forward for arm rests, her lap would give the chairman his seat. From the literature given to visitors I knew that the eyes of the effigy looked directly at Rainbow herself, in her glass coffin, thirty-six feet above the floor.

On the floor no one looked up at the bell at all. They were all working the phones or computers, shouting at each other, running from one place to the next, gesturing with their hands—all but those who had stopped work ahead of time and now were gathered in small clusters, chanting and setting out representation dolls and other equipment for their own enactments before the main event. It struck me suddenly what they were doing—trying to ensure that when the time came for the Choir of Angels to bless a handful of traders, they would insert themselves into the company of the chosen.

I closed my eyes and put my hand over my face, not wanting to see. I felt like some Speaker who could see the whole event ahead of time. Right then I wished that Alison had left me alone that day in Miracle Park. I wished I could go back and change the sequence of events, so that I would not have to stand alone in that crowded room, waiting for a disaster. Someone touched my arm. I turned to see a man in a pale blue suit, holding out a white handkerchief with red stripes. “Here,” he said, “are you all right?”

Somehow, all I could think of was that I hadn’t met anyone who used handkerchiefs in about twenty years. “Thanks,” I said, taking hold of it. Before I could say I was fine or that I really hadn’t been crying he smiled at me, then turned and moved away again into the crowd. To my amazement I found myself crying after all. As I wiped the cloth against my face, I whispered, “Thank you. Whoever you are…thanks.”

As if someone had turned up a rheostat, the noise shrieked up another level. It took me a moment to realize that while people on the floor were getting in their last licks, everyone in the gallery had turned towards the balcony, where the chairman of the Exchange, dressed in a gold-leaf business suit, had sat down in his Rebecca Rainbow chair with a gloved hand poised over the button that would set off the bell. It was two hours before closing time and I thought how that alone should have persuaded Timmerman that someone was setting him up, that the coven who ran the Exchange would give up two full hours of trading to make room for this outsider’s “enactment of financial renewal”.

The blue finger of the glove came down and the bell sounded, a low gong followed immediately by a wild cawing and screeching of birds, the artbirds calling on the Living World to witness the end of trading. In the gallery, everyone around me applauded; down in the “snake pit” (Li Ku Unquenchable Fire’s term for the Exchange, on the one occasion she visited it), people kneeled or even fell to the floor, spreading out their arms and fingers to give back the sacred energy of finance built up over the course of the day.

More than I would have thought possible, I wished for Alison beside me. I knew she had to make that final try, those last phone calls. But I just wanted her holding my hand, standing with me, the only two people who knew what Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel was going to do to those suckers on the floor, all in the sincere yearning to liberate humanity.

Recorded voices mixed in with the continuing cries of the birds, as Timmerman’s theme sounded, distorted by the loudspeakers blaring it to the huge room. “If not now, when? If not here, where? And if not us, who?”

And then Great Brother Alex himself came in, entering through the doors on the side of the Exchange (carved in the shape of a giant mouth), flanked by security agents in wolf masks and bullet-proof vests (as if Timmerman had nothing to fear but bullets) and Timmerman’s own mud-covered assistants, a whole group of them this time. Are they all going to burst into flames? I wondered, remembering the stunt in Miracle Park. But this time Timmerman was the star all by himself. The others crouched down, transforming themselves into mounds of dirt, while Timmerman stood above them, wearing, as well as his bird headdress, a multi-layered paper robe, formed, as far as I could see, from a mixture of newsprint and notarized documents. One of the mudpeople must have set a match to the robe, for flames leapt up from below, to the cheers and whistles of the crowd. Timmerman seemed to step out of the thing while it was still burning still upright behind him, like some other identity he were leaving to its own destruction. He was wearing his trademark grey suit now, treated, I assumed, against fire, as were the mask and any exposed skin. I thought, so this is how they got you, you stupid bastard. You just couldn’t resist putting on a show.

The burn sacrifice had taken place in the centre of the floor and the crowd, with people just about climbing each other’s backs for a better view. Now, however, the wolfmen escorted Timmerman to a wooden platform towards the side, where he could stand above everybody. Microphones waited for his speech.

But first…

Just as in Miracle Park, they came out of the crowd, this time wearing the yellow blazers of brokers. Albert Comfort the Children 6 and Jeannette Benevolent Fire 31. And if the people in the park had fought each other to get closer, this crowd acted like rival hives of bees fighting over the carcass of some dead bull. You might have thought they could kill each other and expect the Benign Ones to reward them for their sincerity and dedication. Those who had given up trading to do enactments now waved the dolls or other tools they’d used. The others just shoved. Engrossed in their struggles, they didn’t even stop to call out the Formula. The people around me in the gallery did it for them.

While the other visitors shouted their gratitude, I stood there, my hands tight on the railing, my eyes fixed on the Happy Twins themselves. How? I wondered. How were they going to do it? What would they do to make this event, this “liberation” so much greater than all the others? Would they just count on the ferocity of the audience itself, or would they do something special to increase the voltage of their blessing?

It took me a moment to realize that the Twins were not actually touching anyone, but instead were just standing there, one on either side of Timmerman, while the wolf agents kept back the traders. They were going to have to do something else, the old touching wasn’t going to be enough, they couldn’t count on the TV cameras simply picking up the liberation of a few people, they wanted to reach everybody who was there, really send out a message. And the world had to see. That was the point. Looking down at the floor, I noticed that the TV cameras from the networks were unmanned, set up on signal-controlled rotating platforms. Had Channing warned them, told the news people, “Don’t put your crews on the floor, you’ll do better with cameras you can control from far away”?

TV. Videos. The small screens that came out on their insect arms from the larger monitors above the trading posts—they reached down to a height where anyone could touch them. That’s it, I thought. That’s how they can reach all of them, give them all the full dose without having to touch them. The Twins were holding microphones and whispering or maybe singing, crooning, into them. It was such a low hum, almost like a modulated feedback, except that I could feel it all through my spine, a tiny crackling at every nerve ending. All around me, the people in the gallery were gasping, or laughing, hugging each other in astonishment, or closing their eyes to sway from side to side.

Down on the floor, no one had shut their eyes. Instead they were grabbing at the videos, jumping up against them, kissing them. Some of them had cut themselves on the sharp corners of the monitors, but they weren’t feeling any pain. They just laughed and rubbed the blood on the screens, all over their clothes and faces, smearing it on the other people who were jumping up alongside them.

At last, I think, Timmerman was starting to understand what they were doing to him. For he was trying to speak, to give out his pronouncements, the revelations of scandal which he had planned as the main event, the denunciation of Arthur Channing and the bankers who’d systematically been robbing the American economy. Only no one was listening. They were all shouting and laughing, you could hardly hear Brother Alex at all, despite the giant loudspeakers hanging from the latticework of computer cables. I could see a kind of desperation in his body as he leaned forward, struggling for the attention of people who were beginning to touch, or lick, everything in sight—the phones, the desks, scraps of paper, any equipment they could rub against, or grab hold of, or climb up to slide their bodies on the smooth surfaces, the hard edges and corners.

Timmerman had to understand, I thought. He had to see finally what Alison and I had been trying to tell him. He could give his speech, he could fire his cannons against Arthur Channing and anyone else, he could submit the text, even the proof, to all the papers and television. But no one was listening. No one would listen ever again. All of Timmerman’s carefully researched findings of corruption and conspiracy in the national banking system would go unheard, drowned out in the astonishment and horror of Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23’s distorted vision of human liberation.

Here on the visitors’ gallery the blessing song was beginning to penetrate us. We couldn’t touch the videos like the people on the floor. We could only hear a secondary transmission of the Choir of Angels. But it was enough to bring some people rubbing up against the glass barrier, even pounding on it, as if they would smash through and leap down to where they could get the undiluted blessing. Others caressed each other or else the loudspeakers carrying up the noise from the trading floor.

Somebody—some guy in a baseball jacket—began to caress my shoulder. I shoved him, or maybe hit him, much harder than I intended as I shouted, “Get away from me!” A woman about my own age, in a leather jacket hung with about a hundred tiny dolls, told me, “That was incredible” as she tried to rub up against me. I did my best to control myself as I pushed her away. I wished I could shout something at them that would wake them up, something like, “Don’t let them do this to you!” but I knew it was no use.

And down below, in the pit, Timmerman was realizing the same thing. The wolfmen and the mudpeople were gone, melted into the mob, but no one was bothering Timmerman. He was standing on his makeshift podium, the microphone still in his hand, but now forgotten as he looked from side to side. Before him, his Friends were still singing in their strange needle-thin voices. Timmerman looked like he wanted to stop them yet didn’t dare. Or know how.

The broadcast cameras, which had been trained on Timmerman, had all turned now, panning the floor or focusing on some particular person or group. A lot of people had stripped off their clothes, or torn them, some leaving only shredded rags, though curiously the clerks, brokers, reporters and pages had mostly kept on their red, yellow, blue and turquoise jackets. And curiously, there was very little actual screwing going on, as if that would only narrow people’s choices and how could they stand to restrict themselves? They were sliding up and down each other’s bodies or even rubbing along the floor, they were climbing the insect arms to slam up against the much larger monitors which formed the insect bodies, laughing as they fell off against the floor, the counter, other bodies.

Just as in Miracle Park, I could see that three-year-old innocence in the way people moved against each other and every object they could reach. They were laughing all the time, even when they were moaning or shouting. Someone who had cut himself, probably on a monitor, lay twisting on the floor, offering his blood to whoever desired it. A whole pack of people kneeled or crouched over his body, while others tried to rub against him, but none of them looked at all aggressive or predatory. Just children playing.

Was I wrong? Even if Timmerman would suffer, would no one else get hurt? Was I just a hypocrite? Hadn’t I just spent the night with a woman old enough to be, well, not my mother, but at least my aunt? Near me, the man who had grabbed me was kissing the woman in the doll jacket. Why shouldn’t they do that? I felt suddenly like one of those people who stand on street corners wearing three overcoats and shouting about purifying the Revolution of “lust and concupiscence” whatever that is.

I shook my head, forcing myself to remember what Alison had told me about her friend Jack, or the other people, cut or trampled. To remember Joan. And yet, something in me kept insisting that I was the one who was wrong, or twisted, that I couldn’t just join in with everybody else. Maybe what happened to Joan was my fault. If I hadn’t rejected her that night we could have broken through the barriers that make love run down, that make orgasms dwindle to a flicker which blows out at the slightest distraction. We could have invited Harry, Alison, anyone we wanted, to feast with us, eating the food Margaret Tunnel Light was offering us. Instead, Joan ended up in the hospital. And here I was again, refusing, refusing.

A prickliness seized my skin, a jabbing all over my body that both hurt and excited me. I could see everything happening on the floor, small details in different places, all at the same time. At one trading station, people were pulling the machines apart, ripping the phones out and rubbing the electronic pieces all over their bodies, cutting themselves or burning their skin. Two women stood in torn clothes, taking turns clawing each other up and down their bodies, using a silver hand with the fingers extended.

I was right, I told myself. This is what I knew would happen. Me and Arthur Channing. What we knew that Margaret Tunnel Light didn’t. But I couldn’t make myself move or do anything, I just stood and watched. Watched as people grabbed the ceremonial oversized pens, the black lacquer and gold ones used for signing contracts, and jammed them into every hole in their bodies, or else stabbed themselves and each other with the gold points, injecting sanctified traders’ ink into their blood. Watched as people began biting each other, as five pages in their turquoise jackets took out ceremonial scarring knives and began drawing patterns on an elderly man who wept as he urinated in their faces. Someone climbed up one of the cable poles, possibly to try and reach the artbirds, or even Rebecca Rainbow herself. When he fell and broke his leg, a man and woman seized hold of his leg and began twisting it, as if to snap it right off. When it wouldn’t come loose they abandoned him to join a group who were rubbing themselves in some play money someone had pulled from behind a desk. Soon, I knew, people wouldn’t stop, not until they were tearing each other’s bodies and ripping out their insides to rub all over faces without skin or eyes. I knew this, I could see it as if it was already happening. But I couldn’t make myself move, not even to get myself out of danger.

Protection, I thought. Now. All the things in my bag that Annie-O had given me. I needed to layer myself or it would swallow me. But instead of emptying out the bag I just held it tightly against my body, as if the objects themselves could save me without having to commit myself to doing anything with them.

A voice said, “Nothing can harm you. I have given you my protection.” I didn’t even bother looking around me or at the loudspeakers. I just scanned the floor. It took me a moment to find her. She was standing on the podium, the platform where Timmerman had tried speaking. He was gone now. And on the platform, between the Twins, she stood there, serene in her black clothes, her harsh makeup.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t want you protecting me.” I gripped the bag even tighter. The rocks inside pressed into my chest.

My Friend looked up from the floor at me. “Are you ready to join them?”

“No!” I shouted at the window. The Being turned, walked away through the crowds. “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Can’t you understand you’re hurting them? They can’t eat what you’re feeding them.”

I couldn’t see her, but the voice told me, “They do what they need to do.”

“You’ve got to take it back,” I called. “Please. You’re just doing what Channing wanted you to do. Why can’t you understand that? You’re hurting Alexander.”

“No,” she said. “Alexander is safe. He has left the room and no one is harming him.”

“You’re harming him. You’re destroying his career.” No answer. “Don’t let them do this!” I yelled, but she was gone. And down on the floor, the Twins remained, singing without mikes now, just their hands cupped in front of their mouths.

I didn’t dare look around me. It wasn’t as strong here, but I still could hear choking laughter, people slammed against the glass, others thrown on the floor. The floor was slippery and it smelled. “Ellen,” a voice called to me. I didn’t move, just stood with my head pressed against the window. I’d closed my eyes. “Ellen,” the voice said again, as a hand grabbed my shoulder.

I swung the bag around as hard as I could, knocking the woman down onto a pile of shifting bodies.

Then I saw her, or maybe just part of her, like seeing an arm buried under a landslide. I don’t know any more, I can’t remember precisely what I saw. “Alison!” I cried, and reached down for her arm before they could suck her away from me. The people around her were one body, they were all mouth, and they wanted to swallow her. But I got her loose, jerking her to her feet with one hand, because I knew I couldn’t let go of the bag, it would vanish, Margaret Tunnel Light would steal it away from me.

“Ellen,” she called once again and held on to me, trying to squeeze me into her body, as if she could absorb me directly into her skin. “I tried to stop it,” she said. “I called everyone I knew. I told them everything, I begged them, just for a delay, just a couple of days, even a few hours if I could just talk to Timmerman. Ellen, they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t listen to anything. I felt like such an idiot. They can’t think. They can’t see it when I explain it to them. They can only see that she’s Benign, and how could a Benign One cause any harm? I explained it to them and they just wouldn’t listen.”

“I know,” I said. I was holding her, stroking her and touching her back, her shoulders, her hair. “It’s like she’s bitten them. Or injected some kind of narcotic into them.”

Alison kissed me, on the cheek, the neck, below my ear, my collar bone. Suddenly she made a noise, a grunt or a scream, and it took me a moment to realize she was staring through the window at the trading floor for the first time.

“It’s getting worse,” I told her, and held her tightly, stroking her body the whole time I was talking—the two things, the talking and touching, unconnected, as if different people were doing them. “It just keeps getting worse and worse, and nobody can stop it. They’re already clawing at each other, at everything they can reach. They’re not going to stop. I thought it was harmless, but it isn’t, it’s not.” I was kissing her now, kissing and then stopping to talk, back and forth, unable to stop either action. “She said we’re protected, you and I. Like she’s cast some Goddamn blanket over us.”

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.

You’ve probably seen something of what Alison and I found when we entered that room. For those who didn’t catch it on live television, the news programmes made sure to run the tapes several hundred times (with men in suits giving sombre warnings beforehand about the disturbing footage). But even if you saw the unedited live version, the bleeding bodies, the vomit and shit, the torn arms and ripped-open chests, the people naked or wearing layers of clothes, the people sitting and staring, the ones wandering or falling down, the cut and the dead, the ones lying face down on the floor, and all around them the smashed computers, the ripped-out wires and telephones, even if you saw all of it, the screen could never show what it was like to step into it. To climb over the bodies and feel limp hands brush against our legs, to step between the dead and the staring, watching out for live wires and glass and pieces of bodies. And the silence, the absence of any human noise, not even moans or weeping, so that the only things we could hear were the whisper of the cameras and the slight background hum of the loudspeakers, along with the cheerful whistle of the artbirds, still fluttering around Rebecca Rainbow’s impassive body. And the smell, that battering ram hit of emptied-out bodies, of come and blood and vomit, all mingled with burnt rubber and plastic, overlaid at the same time with a cloud of perfume, a smell of flowers as delicate as the song of the birds.

We didn’t go very far into the room. Harry and Glorybe told us later that one of the cameras focused on us for just a moment, but I never saw it on any of the broadcasts (though to be fair, I watched very few of them). We picked our way through the bodies for a few yards until we just stopped, holding hands and staring all around.

The Happy Twins were gone, along with Timmerman and his mudpeople. But Margaret 23 was there, in the middle of the room. She turned and saw us. “Go home,” she said. “This is finished.”

Instead of leaving, Alison and I turned to each other and without any discussion we placed our left hands over each other’s hearts and said, in slow rhythm, “The Blessing of the Saved. Open your heart to the Sun. Open your eyes to the Sky. Open your ears to the Sea. Deep love to the round Earth who has given us bodies. Deep love to the dead stars for their dust and their light. Deep love to our mothers and our fathers, for the gene patterns of our souls. Deep love to our mothers, for the blood homes of our first growth. We bless each other for the entrances into our bodies. We are women of dirt. We are women of bone. We are women of mucus. We are women of light. We are women of words. We are saved. We are blessed. We are saved.”

Our hands dropped to our sides, then once more found each other and we stepped through the bodies broken by ecstasy into each other’s arms.

8

The lobby of Paul’s old office building looked pretty much like it had on that last day, thirteen years ago, the dark wood panels, the brass knobs and fittings, the tiles with their soft colours filling the floor. For a while, I just stood there, staring down at the mosaic of the Army of the Saints, as if the Founders somehow could liberate me the way they’d liberated New Chicago. Finally, I just shrugged and stepped up to the row of elevators.

On the way over, I’d wondered if I’d remember which one it was. Now, there was no question in my mind. Not that it mattered, for before I could even press the button the correct door slid open. He was waiting for me. I took a look around to make sure no one was following me, but it was Saturday and the lobby was empty save for a few tourists who just wanted to photograph the floor. As soon as I stepped inside, the door slid shut behind me.

“Hello, Paul,” I said. The steel column shone for a moment and I ran my hand along it. It was a pretty nice one, not quite so extravagant as the one in the Stock Exchange, but polished, with real hair or a decent imitation. “Maybe we should go somewhere,” I said. The elevator rose so smoothly I could hardly detect the movement or just when it stopped, but I assumed we were between floors.

“Look,” I said, “I needed…I wanted to talk with you. I’m sorry. For staying away so long. It’s just…it’s just that it’s taken me a long time to understand some things.” I shook my head, trying to get all my thoughts into the right order. “I guess I avoided seeing you—coming here—or any of your other places—I just couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t want to think about it. But then—well, Alison came back. But you know that. If you can recognize me, you can probably recognize her as well.”

I stopped for a moment, as if he might want to reply, then realized how impossible that was and smiled. It was hard talking to someone who couldn’t answer, or show any recognition at all. But I still had to say it. “You know, I tried really hard to blame Alison. And if not her, then me. Or the government. Or the Living World. But I kept leaving someone out. You.

“Shit. I wish I could hug you. What I’m trying to say is, I wanted to see you as a victim. But I understand now, Paul. No one forced you into this elevator. You saw the snakes as clearly as I did. You were making a choice. Lisa Black Dust 7 had given you a taste of something and you decided you just didn’t want to give it up. Oh, Paul.” I half raised my arms, as if I really would wrap them around that steel house holding him. But the damn husk was just too thin. Too thin and too hard.

I said, “I love you, Paul. You made a choice. Desire over safety. I wish you hadn’t. But I’ve just got to accept that you did what you wanted to do. And that’s okay. It has to be. I love you.”

Sparks flew off the steel column and just for a second it seemed to double in size, with the jewels on top looking almost like eyes. But then the sparks died and Paul was gone again, leaving only a dull metal tube. “Goodbye,” I whispered. Maybe, I thought, he’d gone to some other elevator, where someone needed him more than I did. I pressed the button for “G”; in a moment, the door opened on the lobby.

Outside, I passed an open magazine kiosk with a portable television perched on a stool in the corner. A crowd of about thirty people stood pressed together, blocking the sidewalk as they tried to get a good view. Though I knew what they were watching I went and joined them, just to see it.

It was the news conference, of course. Alison, Timmerman and Margaret Light-At-The-End-Of-The-Tunnel 23. They were standing in a neat row, Alison in her blue silk suit, Timmerman without his mask, Tunnel Light in the same black outfit she’d worn in the park. Probably it was her skin, with nothing underneath it.

It was Alison’s turn to speak. Leaning towards the cluster of microphones, she was explaining the method by which Arthur Channing had manipulated the Devoted Ones. I couldn’t hear much. It didn’t matter. I just stood and watched her, Alison Birkett, and my body so filled with love, like helium, that I almost expected to float up into the air like Ingrid Burning Snake when she told the story of “The Empty Daughter”. Instead, a couple of teenage girls pushed me aside, trying to get a clearer view.

Maybe they’ll fall in love with her, I thought. Cut out her picture from magazines. Trying not to laugh, I turned from the crowd and headed on home, smiling happily as I thought of Alison’s body lying beside me.