Temporary Agency

by Rachel Pollack

Genres: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

When Ellen was fourteen, her cousin, Paul, angered a Malignant One, and he turned to Ellen for help. And then, when things had started to get out of hand, when the usual spells and charms didn't work, and when the usual agencies didn't want to know, she contacted Alison Birkett, the lawyer who specialised in demonic possession and corruption in the Spiritual Development Agency. And Ellen's life was changed... Temporary Agency is the follow-up to Rachel Pollack's acclaimed novel, Unquenchable Fire, winner of the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Set in the same strange America of Bright Beings, miracles and religious ritual, it is a fantasy of power and humour, love and pain.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 208

Sample

When I was fourteen, a cousin of mine angered a Malignant One. It was a big case, a genuine scandal. Maybe you remember it. At the time, when it all ended, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. But a couple of years have passed and I guess maybe it’s time to think about it again.

The Bright Being lived in the office building where my cousin Paul worked analyzing retail sales reports. I don’t know how she got there, really. We never did find that out. I don’t even know how long she was there. I mean, before Paul met her. Maybe she lived on that same spot long before the building went up. Maybe she even lived there for thousands of years, way before the Indians came. No one really knows how old the Beings are. Some people say – I read this in a book, actually – that the Bright Beings, the Malignant Ones and the Benign Ones, go back to the beginning of the universe. According to this Sacred Physics book, the Big Bang Story that broke open the cosmic ylem egg showered out the Beings along with all the quarks and tachyons and all the rest of them. The Beings came from a kind of impurity in the ylem, a sort of aesthetic flaw in the original story. So maybe the Ferocious One lived at that spot for millions of years, embedded in the granite of Manhattan Island, waiting for humans, for victims – like my poor cousin Paul.

Or maybe she never lived there at all until the building went up. Maybe the contractor summoned her, maybe he offered her space in her building in exchange for help in getting his contract bid accepted. I thought of this because of what happened later. And because of what happened with the Defense Department.

Even if you don’t remember Paul’s case, you’ll certainly remember the Pentagon scandal. How half the Defense Department turned out to be Malignant Ones and the other half paying them off. How a lot of people said the chairman of the joint chiefs himself was a Malignant One. That one never made it into the papers, but everyone heard about it.

And you probably remember Alison Birkett. It was the Pentagon scandal that made her famous, after all. Before that she was an unknown lawyer specializing in demonic possession. But then that peace group came to her with their suspicions of ‘preternatural harassment’, and she began to investigate, and to push. And she kept on investigating, and pushing, for something like five years, until suddenly the story was all over the papers and the TV, and everyone wanted to interview and photograph Alison Birkett. Remember the Time magazine cover? They shot her standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, wearing a sharp suit, with the wind blowing a few strands of hair across her face, and the word ‘Demonbreaker’ slashed across the bottom of the page.

I was just a kid then, but somehow Alison Birkett seemed really special to me. I watched the news every night on TV, hoping to see a feature about her. When one of the networks promised a special hour-long interview with her I begged my parents to let me stay up late that night. And I cut out the picture from Time and got a glass frame to preserve it and hang it over my desk.

I followed the scandal more closely than most adults, every detail. I still remember all the excitement, the new charges coming out every day in the paper. I remember the demonstrations, the peace groups in their rainbow robes and animal masks, chanting and waving those orange streamers in huge figure 8s as they marched on the Pentagon. And I remember the incredible excitement when the president ordered the Spiritual Development Agency to drive out the Ferocious Ones. They came in procession, with their twelve-foot banners and fluorescent masks, their drums and bells and electronic trumpets.

I was just a kid. I’d never seen anything like it. We all got off school, just like it was a national sacred-day, and I remember sitting in front of the TV all day long, watching ‘the big circus’, as my father called it. My mother went nuts trying to get me to eat, especially when they drew those huge lines out from the corners of the building, changing the Pentagon to a giant Pentagram. Wow, I thought, this is it, now it’s going to happen. And I was right, too. The TV blanked out the sound so we couldn’t hear the actual formulas the SDA chanted, but we could see the electric fire in the air as the Beings left the walls, only to get trapped in the triangles drawn on the outside of the building. And then when they did the banishment, and erased the lines, and declared the Pentagon ‘free and liberated’, I cheered and screamed and bounced up and down on the rug in front of the TV.

And I’ll never forget my father then, how much he shocked me when he said, ‘Oh, sure, right. And just in time for the commercials.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Listen, Honey,’ Daddy said, ‘our beloved Spiritual Development Agency puts on a good show, but don’t you believe everything they say.’

‘Mike!’ my mother shouted at him. ‘She’s only a child.’

I guess he realized he’d given me a little more cynicism than I could handle because he said to me, ‘I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Your daddy’s just shooting off his mouth.’

But the damage was done. ‘You’re lying,’ I screamed at him, and ran upstairs to my bedroom. There I took down the picture of Alison Birkett and looked at it while I cried. For a few seconds I hugged it, but then that seemed kind of dumb so I put it back on the wall.

I thought about all that stuff after everything that happened with Paul. I thought about the Pentagon, the things my father had said – and something else. Maybe if I’d done things differently, I could have helped Paul, really helped him. Maybe if I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d acted early enough, I could have really done something. Maybe if I’d remembered what my father had said, I wouldn’t have expected the SDA to take care of us. I was only fourteen, remember. You can make yourself feel pretty guilty when you’re fourteen.

Of course, none of us knew anything at all about this when Paul went to work at that building. And when he met that – woman – and got involved with her, he never suspected she was anything different than what she seemed. I mean, you hear about such things happening but you never think it’s going to happen to you. Romance with a Bright Being? Come on. It sounds like something out of supermarket magazines, right? ‘I lost my husband to a Malignant One’, or ‘Movie star’s new boyfriend a Ferocious One! Details inside!’

Maybe Paul should have guessed something, or at least been a little more careful. Because he did get a warning. When he first got the job he went to a Speaker for a divination. He went to a Bead Woman actually, one of those women who use coloured beads to make their predictions. He took me along. Paul and I were really close, despite his being ten years older than me. We were each an only child and we kind of thought of each other as brother and sister, especially after Paul’s folks died in a car crash during his last year of college.

So we went to this Bead Woman who said her blessings and threw out her beads on a silk scarf. Right in the centre lay a red bead with yellow bands, and all around it lay a circle of little black ones. And all the others had scattered to the edges of the cloth. Danger, the Speaker said. Danger and isolation. Paul asked what kind of danger, but she said she couldn’t tell because all the other beads had ‘retreated’. They talked about it and then Paul decided that since he’d asked about work it had to mean danger at his new job.

So Paul decided to do an environmental enactment for his workplace. I helped him. It was fun. We went down to the big spiritual supply centre on 34th Street and got some sacred paper (made from old clothes worn by the major New York storytellers), and some sanctified chalk and some great miniature office furniture (I loved the little fax machine; it was so cute), and some little plastic dolls to signify Paul and his co-workers, and finally a package of official SDA flash powder. Then we went downtown to Paul’s studio in the Village where he had what has got to be the smallest sanctuary you’ve ever seen (growing up in the suburbs can be pretty boring, but at least the houses all have decent-sized sanctuaries). We drew a circle on the floor for sacred ground and set up the office inside it. Then we labelled one of the dolls with Paul’s boss’s name and just wrote ‘co-worker’ on the others, and set them out. Next we took the biggest doll and wrote Paul’s name on it, including his official enactment name. While Paul marched the doll into the circle I moved the other dolls back and forth, as if they were all happy and excited about Paul’s joining the company. After that, we sang songs of harmony and success while Paul wrote out a few ‘positive realities’ on the sacred paper. Paul burned the paper on a silver enactment tray and then scattered the ashes on the dolls at their miniature computer desks. Finally, we sang a couple more songs, general all-purpose praise stuff, while we set off the flash powder in the silver bowl that went with the tray. And then Paul took me down to Chinatown for dim sum.

Well, we certainly had fun. And maybe it would have worked – if the danger had been coming from his office. But in fact it came from another office entirely, one down the hall near the restrooms.

Later on, the SDA questioned Paul pretty heavily about his early encounters with the Being. I’m sure they were trying to get themselves off the hook, in case we decided to go public after all about what she was doing there. And who her clients were. But Paul didn’t know or suspect anything when he first saw her. Why should he? As far as he knew, she ran a temp agency. He only went past her office at all because it was on the way to the men’s room. In fact, most of the time when he went past it the office was closed. And the few times the door stood open he just saw her on the phone, or entering stuff into a computer. He did notice her. But all he saw was a beautiful woman – long wavy red hair, smooth curves, violet eyes. She wore suits most of the time, he said, kind of severe no-nonsense, with skirts just above the knee.

Paul noticed her and so did all the other guys in his office. But as far as he could tell she took no notice at all of him or any of the others. Some of them called her ‘the Ice Queen’. (Why couldn’t she have decided to melt for one of them instead of my cousin Paul?) A couple of times, he said, he tried speaking to her at the elevator but never got anywhere. Once, he said, he was standing outside her open office (he didn’t say what he was doing there) when her phone rang, and after she’d answered it she got up and went over to close the door. Paul said when he saw her the next day in the lobby he felt himself blush but she just walked right past him.

So what changed her? What made her suddenly go after him, of all the men who worked there? Paul was always vague about this with me, sometimes saying he had no idea, other times hinting he knew something, but didn’t think it was important. I’ll have to guess, but I do have an idea.

What I guess is that Paul did something which made him more attractive. I think he did one of the forbidden enactments. Now, I don’t mean anything really nasty. Paul would never do anything violent. But just before the Being got interested in him, Paul went on a holiday – a hunting trip, he said. A packaged tour. And he got nervous whenever I tried asking for details. That wasn’t like Paul. From around when I was twelve he would always tell me pretty much everything. So I think he went off to one of those ‘lodges’ men go to, and I think he did something a little more serious than dolls and tiny office furniture. Something with a vow of secrecy, and maybe a couple of ‘service’ women wearing nothing but body paint and soft furry animal skins.

Men do these things to increase their potency. That’s what the magazines say, anyway. Whatever Paul did, it sure got the attention of the ‘lady’ down the hall. He walked past her office one day just after his trip. She was writing on a chart or something, Paul said, when suddenly she stopped, put down her pencil and looked up at him. Directly at him. She looked curious, he told me, as if she was seeing some interesting animal she’d never encountered before. I remember he laughed when he told me this, just a few days after it happened. Of course, that was before he knew what she was. But I didn’t laugh with him. It gave me the creeps, even then.

Paul said he was so startled he almost ran away. Instead, he did his best to smile at her, but she was already back at her work. So he forgot about her until that afternoon when he was waiting for the elevator to go home. He was just standing there, feeling tired, when he heard a voice behind him. The funny thing is, he never remembered what the voice said, just the way it made him feel. He found himself closing his eyes and smiling, and swaying back and forth slightly as if he was balancing himself against a strong wind. He opened his eyes and turned around, and there she was. She had her blazer draped over her arm and she was wearing a satiny blouse, pink, Paul said it was, and I bet it was open pretty far down, but Paul didn’t say that.

In fact, when he first told me about this fantastic woman he’d met he sounded so gushy I should have suspected something just from that. He told me how she touched his arm and all the tiredness left him, how it was like sitting on the grass and watching the river go by. Paul never talked about girls like that. Paul never talked about anything like that.

They went out for a drink, then dinner, to some place Lisa knew. That was the name she used, Lisa. Lisa Blackwell. Goddamn her.

When they said goodnight they kissed, and even though it went on for a while that’s all they did. And then she smiled at him, ‘like a kid’ Paul said, ‘like she was younger than you’, (‘Thanks a lot’ I told him, but he paid no attention) and it was okay, he said, it was okay they didn’t go any further, because he knew they would do so, maybe the next time or the time after.

I said, ‘You better make sure she gets a little older first’, but Paul was unstoppable. He just wanted to go on about how okay it all was.

They slept together a few nights later. The SDA investigators made a big fuss about this. Paul told me they asked him over and over what it felt like, didn’t he suspect anything? He just kept repeating to them that it was like sleeping with an ordinary woman. That wasn’t what he told me. At the time he went on and on with one soupy description after another. He even told me how he prayed that when I started sleeping with boys I would find something so perfect. I said, ‘Maybe you and Lisa can coach us.’ But he was beyond sarcasm.

If Paul’s ga-ga language didn’t make me suspicious something else should have. He didn’t want me to meet her. Now, I didn’t meet all of Paul’s girlfriends. I mean, it wasn’t like he submitted them to me for approval. But usually, whenever he got serious about someone he’d invite me for lunch or something, so we could all get to know each other. With Lisa he got all evasive whenever I asked to meet her. I don’t think he knew he was doing it. He kept saying how he’d told Lisa all about me and how she couldn’t wait to meet me. But it never worked out. He would promise, but always ‘next week’, or after a sales conference, or an out of town trip.

Finally, we did make a date. Paul and Lisa invited me to go with them to the Summer Drum ceremony in Central Park. I don’t know how many people reading this have ever been to the Central Park Drum. Most towns have a Summer Drum, but not like this one. Over one hundred thousand people come, many after days of deep mud retreats, so that all they’re wearing is globs of dried dirt. People dance, sometimes on one leg, people fly the most amazing kites (some nine levels high, each with its own guardian spirit), people throw sanctified Frisbees painted over with patterns of perfection, groups of three hundred people or more go deep travelling in meditation together, people lie on the grass and hum for hours … And then there are the drums, as many as seven thousand of them. The first time Paul took me I thought we’d all bounce up into the sky when the drums started.

Paul and I considered the Central Park Drum something special between the two of us (maybe because we had to fight so hard the first time to get my parents to let me go). When the second Thursday in June approached and Paul just talked about Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, I really felt like he just wanted to get rid of me. So it relieved me when he called to make a date to meet him and Lisa at Founder’s Circle on 59th Street before the start of the ceremony.

The thing is, I never made it. My mom drove me to the train station and I waited there, holding my little travelling enactment bag so I could join in with the collective part of the ceremony. And I waited. I waited ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, with all the commuters muttering about last straws, and robber baron prices, and the other drum followers checking their watches and saying blessings, until finally a garbled loudspeaker voice told us the train was cancelled. Fire on the tracks. Next train in two hours. Maybe. I called my mom and she offered to drive me into the city. I thanked her about twenty times, calling her ‘a true hero of the revolution’. She laughed and said she’d be right there.

Forty minutes later, she pulled into the train station. Roadblocks all up and down the highway, she said. Industrial action by the State Police who didn’t like the state budget crunch taking away their paid personal enactment days. So finally we set out, and in five minutes we had a flat tyre. No problem, . . .