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Synopsis
In an America where the miraculous is par for the course, where magic and myths are as real as shopping malls and television game shows, Jennifer Mazdan listens to the modern storytellers recite the tales of the Founders. But when strange things start to happen and Jennie becomes pregnant - from a dream - she enters a struggle which threatens her own life and causes her to question everything she has ever learned.
Release date: December 1, 2012
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
Print pages: 390
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Unquenchable Fire
Rachel Pollack
On the afternoon of the Day of Truth, eighty seven years after the Revolution, Jennifer Mazdan, a server for the Mid-Hudson Energy Board, fell asleep and underwent a strange dream, one not found anywhere in the catalogues. Jennifer hadn’t meant to sleep that afternoon. A respectable single woman who lived in a suburban hive development south of Poughkeepsie, some seventy miles north of New York City, she had planned to go to the recital and take her place among her neighbours. There she would listen to Allan Lightstorm, the great Picture Teller, recite one of the prime Pictures.
Like everyone else, Jennifer had passed the entire week in a state of high anticipation. It wasn’t every year that an Allan Lightstorm came to a town like Poughkeepsie. Usually the Living Masters stayed in the huge Picture Halls of the big cities, or travelled to the national parks for the major recitals. Lightstorm himself had been expected to speak that year in the massive stone and stained glass hall on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Usually Poughkeepsie had to make do on the Day of Truth with its own three or four more prominent Tellers. There was Dennis Lily, who could speak with great passion, yet often gave so much stress to the Inner Meaning that he raced right through the story itself. And then there was Alice Windfall, ‘poor Alice’ as people called her. Alice had shown great promise in her early years, ‘flying on wings of story’ as the saying goes, so that all who heard her on the day she came back from college found themselves drifting into the air, like so many bright-coloured balloons, to look down upon their bodies sitting on the hillsides with the stooped shoulders and pained expressions of their daily lives. But Alice never repeated that glorious moment. Maybe it was because of the scandal when Martin Magundo, the Town Comptroller, got his soul tangled up in the blades of a helicopter hired by German tourists to look down on the recital. Though an official inquiry cleared Alice completely, and Martin Magundo’s family lost their lawsuit against Alice and the New York College Of Tellers, poor Alice never did fulfil the early promise of her career. Now, years later, she had hardly kept her voice up. She still spoke on the important days; people went to hear her in the hope that the Living World might take pity on her and restore her powers. In fact, her voice often came out slurred and the rumour had spread that Alice got drunk before she had to appear in public.
Occasionally the mayor or the city manager would appeal to the New York College Of Tellers for a new Teller of somewhat more magnitude. The answer always came back that the College had to look after the whole state, had to weigh all the factors, and so on and so on. If a mayor decided to ask what factors sent the most talented Tellers to New York or Albany, he or she always received the same answer. A non-Teller, who judged things only by their rational surface, who never travelled into the heart of the Sun, or sat beside Chained Mother at the bottom of the sea, could hardly question the basis of the College’s judgement.
Once, Bob Gobi, fresh from his victory as the first non-Revolutionary Republic city manager in thirty years, asked the current Public Secretary, ‘And when’s the last time any Tellers did all those things?’ adding, ‘The real Tellers died off years ago and you know it as well as I do.’
The Secretary stood up from his desk. ‘If we refrain from exposing the spirit in its raw state,’ he told city manager Gobi, ‘we do so for our listeners’ well being, in respect of their weaknesses and fears.’
‘Sure,’ Gobi said, angry beyond all sense. ‘Don’t give me that shit. Everyone knows you “refrain” because you can’t. You don’t know how any more. The last true Teller died forty years ago.’
Unfortunately for Bob Gobi, whatever the current Tellers’ limitations, they could still work a simple curse. The next night, when Gobi got up to speak to the Town Council about plans to change the zoning laws, he opened his mouth and a frog came out to hop onto Joan Lafer’s left breast, and from there to the floor. Everyone laughed, but when Gobi again tried to speak and again a frog leaped out, people realised it was no prank. They began to back off, then to push for the door. When Gobi tried to shout at them to stop, a winged lizard flew out of his mouth to fly right into the shrieking face of the town secretary.
Five days later Gobi returned to the College Of Tellers on Madison Avenue. He had walked all the way from his ranch house on Poughkeepsie’s south side. He wore nothing but a black shirt with the sleeves ripped off, and a dirty towel from the Young Men’s Truth Association wrapped around his genitals and ass. When he came to the door he crawled through the entranceway beneath the pictures of the Founders until he came to the desk of the Secretary he’d seen the week before. The man smiled. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. Gobi looked at him. ‘Come on,’ the Secretary said. ‘Don’t be afraid. Tell me what you want.’
Gobi wondered if the man had lifted the curse. He opened his mouth and out came a dragonfly. ‘Very amusing,’ the Secretary said. ‘Now will you tell me your problem?’ Crying, Gobi signalled for paper and pencil. ‘No, no,’ the Secretary said. ‘No forms. We’re not that bureaucratic, whatever people say about us. Just tell me. Go ahead.’ Gobi’s thumb jerked at his closed mouth. The secretary made a show of going back to his work. ‘I have no time for charades,’ he said. ‘If you won’t say what’s on your mind, I’m very busy.’
Gobi crawled away, having forgotten to get back on his feet. He took a train (no ticket required for a pilgrim) to the edge of the Oceanfront Spirit Reserve, and according to the forest rangers was seen heading for the row of skulls on wooden poles that lined the Forbidden Beach. Many years later, during her own pilgrimage to the Beach to talk to the skulls, Valerie Mazdan met a bent old man who sat hugging himself amid a congress of frogs. She walked over to him and parted the carpet of hair that covered his face. He blinked in amazement, not so much at the sight of another human as at the sun, hidden by his hair for so long he vaguely thought of it as a story he’d heard as a child. ‘Who are you?’ Valerie said, kneeling down. The man shook his head. ‘You can tell me,’ coaxed Courageous Wisdom. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
A flash of anger made the man open his mouth. A butterfly flew out, circled once around his head, then vanished in the sunlight. Valerie nodded, somewhat like a doctor acknowledging symptoms. She touched his lips. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘who are you?’ The man thought to turn away from his tormentor but something held him. He opened his mouth wide, as if to expel a great bullfrog at her, but instead a croak came out, not unlike the sound a frog makes as it digests its dinner of flies. ‘G… G… Go…’
Valerie touched his shoulder. ‘You just need practice,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Ye… yes,’ the former city manager said. He ran off, terrified the woman would change her mind and bring back the curse. But Courageous Wisdom had already set off again to find the skulls of her predecessors. Bob Gobi walked out of the reserve and was picked up by the Suffolk County Sheriffs office, who took him to the local Hospital of the Inner Spirit. He stayed there for the rest of his life, working in the clinic for autistic children. The night he died a wave of frogs washed over the hospital, engulfing it in a storm of croaks. They vanished the next morning.
With Bob Gobi as an example subsequent officials never made much protest at the lack of a first class Picture Teller to ‘serve the greater Poughkeepsie community’ as the Poughkeepsie Journal editorials put it. Nevertheless, the people’s souls shrivelled listening to such weak voices as those of Alice Windfall or Dennis Lily or the many Tellers who spoke on minor Recital Days in the neighbourhood Picture Halls around the city. So when the Mid-Hudson College of Tellers (a branch of the New York authority) announced that Allan Lightstorm would come to speak at the recital, headlines filled front pages, and the local television station did specials on his life, his calling, his interpretation of the lesser Pictures, his private audiences with the President and foreign dignitaries.
The current mayor and town manager, fantasizing that some truly appreciative response would make Lightstorm see the advantages of permanent settlement in a smaller community, arranged for a devotional parade of children bearing three yard high banners to greet Lightstorm as he walked up the long path to the peak of Recital Mount. The banners were held up by ‘artbirds’, half genetic manipulation, half plastic, and one of Poughkeepsie’s two major products (the other was a thick yellow syrup that promised to revive freshly dead persons for a period of five to ten minutes). In electric colours the banners depicted the True History of the city of Poughkeepsie and the life story (exaggerated even beyond the exaggerations of official biography) of Allan Lightstorm.
As the Teller passed each banner a voice sounded from a speaker set on the ground beneath it. Explaining the Pictures, the voices told how Poughkeepsie’s original inhabitants – twelve foot giants whose skin changed colour according to the season – had carved the city out of huge cedar trees uprooted in a storm from Mexico and dropped beside the Hudson River. The city prospered until a thirty year drought, during which the people shrank to two foot seven, and the river cried every night in maudlin memory of its former might. One morning all the inhabitants went out to perform a rain enactment in the high school football stadium. With little confidence the townspeople chanted along the yard lines and sprinkled blood on the goalposts. At the same time Poughkeepsie’s wonderful cedars, fed up with constant thirst, all marched to the Traprock Quarry and Blasting Corporation on the edge of town and jumped into a gravelly pit. In this moment of despair, with the people’s homes destroyed and their ears battered by the river’s incessant self-pity, a multi-tiered UFO landed in the field of dandelions that would one day become Dutchess County Airport. The space beings, whom the banners depicted as shining foetuses with overlong fingers and toes, not only showed the people how to make rain seeds out of common flowers, but also demonstrated how to build modern houses, and even how to set up a government, complete with school systems, police force, and Spiritual Development Agency. When the True Revolution came, and the Army of the Saints sailed up the Hudson from New York they found Poughkeepsie more highly evolved than any of its neighbours.
The last part was actually a deliberate lie. In fact, Poughkeepsie, once the home of an old-style corporation called something like International Bureaucratic Mechanisms, resisted the revolution longer than any other part of New York State. Technophiles from as far away as Cincinnati and Santa Barbara came to Poughkeepsie to bolster the resistance to the ‘black tide of mud’, as one of their spokesmen put it. From Poughkeepsie they issued proclamations and spies, until at last they announced they had arranged with ‘loyalists’ (as they called the rejectionists in the old secular government) to smuggle several missiles with fusion warheads into their stronghold. Doomsday, they promised, would follow unless the Army of the Saints and all their followers renounced what the technophiles called ‘pseudomystical insanity.’
Now, the banners actually related this incident, perhaps out of embarrassment at the city’s tainted history. But they transferred the place to Newburgh on the other side of the river. And they then related how Allan Lightstorm, travelling in a one man boat, glided up the river to the woods just south of that city. From there, the banners declared, Lightstorm changed himself into a golden Great Dane and penetrated the rejectionist fortress. Around his neck, disguised as a dog licence, hung a metal plate inscribed with the Names of the Founders.
In full sight of a group of technophiles Lightstorm (so the speakers said) changed back into his human form. Holding the metal plate to his forehead he told the Secret Picture, a story of such power that no Teller has ever dared to repeat it. The techs fell to the ground and covered their heads with dirt. ‘Forgive us, Master,’ they said. ‘We didn’t know.’ Lightstorm raised them up and gave them each a broom. Chanting Light storm’s name, they swept the evil out of the missiles, and Newburgh (Poughkeepsie) belonged to the Revolution. Now, for many historians, the disarming marked the turning point of the war. But Allan Lightstorm, born fifty three years later, had nothing to do with it. Everyone knew that Mohandas Quark had done the disarming, just as everyone knew that he’d become a Fox Terrier, much less conspicuous than a Great Dane. What’s more, Lightstorm knew that everyone knew. Nevertheless, by attaching the incident to Lightstorm, the townspeople demonstrated what they called ‘proper respect’ for their eminent guest. Lightstorm himself expected nothing less. Some years later, Valerie Mazdan would denounce what she called ‘flattering an empty present with an exaggerated past.’ On that day of Jennifer Mazdan’s dream, however, people took it as normal that the major Tellers of their time should inherit the marvels of their predecessors.
The particular marvel chosen did make sense, for Lightstorm had copied his recital skin directly from that of Mohandas Quark. In great folds of multi-coloured satin Allan Lightstorm made his way up the hill towards the seat where he would fold his Mohandas Quark wings about his body and tell one of the prime Pictures proper for the Day of Truth.
If nothing else, Lightstorm was a master of gesture; as he climbed the hill, he swept his blue and gold skin first one way and then another, howling pain and joy, his voice so perfectly tuned that everyone who listened (and that included all of Poughkeepsie except for sad Jennifer Mazdan, asleep at the foot of an energy guardian) everyone felt the Earth must open up to release a flood of light that would wash them clean of fear and sorrow. Later – that night, the next day – a sense of frustration would set in as they discovered that the expected purge had never come, that in some way nothing lay beneath Lightstorm’s wondrous voice and gestures, so that the recital became a pie with a delicious crust and no filling. But in that moment of approach they listened with such anticipation that many thought their skins would evaporate into the sun.
He must stay, they told themselves. Why would he come if he didn’t plan to stay?
Actually, the impulse to go to Poughkeepsie wasn’t Allan Lightstorm’s at all, but came to him as a command from the Living World. One morning in June he left his residence, the building known as ‘the Palace’, across the street from the back of the Fifth Avenue Hall. He walked up 51st Street to Fifth, where he went into Valentino’s and ordered two white shirts with pearl buttons. From there he strolled up to Nat Sherman’s for a case of his favourite cigars. He was about to head back when he noticed a small crowd of people across the street in front of a spiritual aids bookshop. He crossed the road for a closer look.
A man in a purple tracksuit had spread a sheet of black plastic on the pavement. Around him stood men watching him move three metal shells about the cloth. One of the shells was painted gold, for the Sun, a second silver, for the Moon, and the last speckled blue, for the Stars. One of them, Lightstorm knew, would contain a steel ball, symbol of the Earth. As he moved the shells the man hopped them back and forth, shielding them with his waving hands so that it became harder and harder to know which one contained the ball. While Lightstorm watched, a man in a green shirt handed a coin to the man on the ground. Bending forward, greenshirt pointed at the Moon. The shellman lifted the silver dome. Empty. With an embarrassed grin greenshirt straightened up. The shellman showed the crowd the Earth – it lay under the Stars – and then he began again to shift the heavenly bodies.
Idiots, Lightstorm thought. He knew that even if someone guessed correctly he wouldn’t keep his winnings very long. A block or two away a so-called ‘heavenly rectifier’ would get a signal to follow the hero to some quiet corner and relieve him of his victory and anything else worthwhile in his pockets.
Lightstorm thought of going back. It was getting chilly out despite the bright sun. But he only stood there, watching the hands break up the sky. Odd that the man wasn’t talking. Nobody said anything. Lightstorm realised that no one on the street, no one passing or crossing the road, or selling pretzels or hot dogs or earrings, no one looking at shop windows or waiting in their cars for the light to change, no one made any noise at all. And then he realised he couldn’t hear the cars and buses. No engines, no horns, no squeals of brakes or tyres. He looked up and down the street. The traffic moved – silently. The crowds of people still flowed up and down the block, New Yorkers with that purposeful stride, tourists unsure of their steps. None of them made a sound, not their feet, not their bodies bumping into each other.
I’ve gone deaf, Lightstorm thought, I’ve gone deaf. But he knew the emptiness was not in his drums or neurons. It lay in the street, in the cars and the people. They looked frail, almost transparent. Even the huge buildings so beloved of tourists, you could put a hand, a finger, right through them. His sight slid up the garish front of Trump Tower. Something had emptied out the Sun. No heat remained in it, though it shone bright enough to hurt his eyes. He squinted. It wasn’t the heat that had left.
The stories are gone, thought Allan Lightstorm. Something had emptied all the stories, cleaned out the people, the city, even the sky and the Earth. He could stamp his foot and it would go right through the crust.
On the plastic the three shells stood in a row. Behind them the man in the track suit looked up at Lightstorm. When he smiled, his mouth opened so wide Lightstorm thought he could fall inside. A Malignant One. A Malignant One. Help me, Lightstorm prayed. He knew he should speak the ‘standard formula of recognition’ on encountering a Bright Being. ‘Ferocious One. I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your evil intervention.’ But his mouth wouldn’t work. He didn’t know if he could move his tongue.
The Malignant One waved a hand over the shells. Choose, he was saying. Choose the correct one and I will release you. Lightstorm bent forward. How could he know which one? He hadn’t even been watching. His hand moved to the Sun, then he pulled it back again. A wrong choice and he would never get it back. His hand shook as it moved closer. The Ferocious One grinned and nodded his head.
At that moment a woman tripped and fell on her hands and knees on the plastic. The shells scattered and the steel ball rolled free. ‘Oh shit,’ the woman said. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry.’ Lightstorm grabbed the steel ball and held it up in front of the shell man. For a moment the Being bared his teeth – yellow, as if stained with tobacco or smog – but before he could do anything the woman tripped again as she tried to get up. She fell against the Malignant One, knocking him back against the store window. He shoved her out of the way but it was too late. Lightstorm tossed the ball back at him and the noises, returned to the street. People were shouting, horns announced a traffic jam, a man selling jelly beans ridiculed someone who wanted to pay with a fifty dollar bill. As Lightstorm helped the woman to her feet the shell man gathered his plastic and his heavenly bodies and walked quickly down the block, away from a couple of cops in short sleeved shirts and baseball caps.
Lightstorm looked at his rescuer. A tall woman with wide shoulders, she stood an inch or two above Lightstorm in her high-heeled sandals. She wore pink sunglasses with blue lenses, a white skirt and a pink jacket, the kind worn by hairdressers or women demonstrating cosmetics. In one hand she carried a red plastic purse, in the other a small gold shopping bag with some Japanese name written in black brush strokes across the front, ‘Hey,’ she said in a thick New York accent, ‘I’m sorry if I messed up your game.’
Lightstorm laughed. He was about to thank her, maybe even offer to buy her a drink at Rebirth of the Spirit Plaza, when a light flared about her hair. It lasted only a moment and might have come from the sun catching the coating of henna. Lightstorm knew it wasn’t the sun. She wanted him to know who had come for him. Stepping backwards he said, ‘Devoted One, I thank you for your devotion. I know that nothing I have done deserves your precious intervention.’
The Bright Being nodded her head. In the same accent as before she said, ‘Gratitude is not enough.’
Lightstorm glanced quickly at the crowds, the syrupy flow of traffic. He wondered for an instant if he could jump into a taxi and make it to the safety of his residence. He said, ‘Do you want me to do a penance?’
‘We need your help,’ she said.
‘My help? What do you mean? Do you want me to make a contribution somewhere?’
The Benign One laughed. She laughed so loudly Lightstorm discovered he wanted to slap her and tell her to shut up. He stepped backwards. ‘Go to an Oracle,’ she told him. ‘Have the Speaker do an incubation. You’ll find out what it is you have to contribute.’ Still laughing, she turned and walked away.
Three days later Allan Lightstorm stepped onto the rooftop of the World Trade Center. A few hundred feet away the tower’s twin sister hosted a network of radar, television antennae, weather monitors, and government tracking devices. Here there were only rocks, earth, a few gnarled trees with blackened fruit, and a constant whispering.
Traditionally, Tellers disliked Speakers. Lightstorm made a face at the sight of the gangly woman sitting on her stone bench in the middle of a small circle of ugly trees. Beside the bench lay her guardian, a large lump of black stone, its surface dotted with pasted on bits of coloured glass. She sat with her legs apart, her elbows on her knees, her head bent forward as if she’d been drinking. She wore a baggy old smock and men’s torn shoes. She probably hadn’t washed or cut her hair since her appointment. He could see pebbles in her hair, even twigs. When he approached her, and the woman lifted her head he grunted at the deep lines cut into her cheeks. ‘Journey lines,’ the Speakers called them, one scar for each of her initiations.
The incubation lasted over an hour, extremely long for the Great Speaker, who sometimes saw thirty clients in a day. By the time it was halfway, Alan Lightstorm thought how he never knew he could hate someone with such a passion. He was sure that many of the things she made him do, the rolling around, the eating of filth, had nothing to do with gaining access, but only with humiliating him. If only he could have asked for a simple reading – sticks, fingernail cuttings, cards – instead of an incubation.
When the Speaker finally settled into it – rocking back and forth with her hands around her knees, the sound of her high-pitched singing made Lightstorm want to strangle her. Finally it stopped. Finally she looked up at him with her eyes clear, and Lightstorm knew she was ready to give her declaration. He expected some cryptic fragment, like ‘The dead geese fly backward’ or ‘Your mother’s tongue is broken.’ He would then take it down to the computer experts at the Spiritual Development Agency, and if he didn’t like the interpretation he could apply for a revision. Instead the woman grinned at him and said, ‘They want you to go to Poughkeepsie.’
Lightstorm said, ‘What?’
‘Poughkeepsie. They want you to recite there on the Day of Truth.’
‘Like hell I will. I’m telling the main Picture at the Fifth Avenue Hall that day, RTV is broadcasting it. Live.’
The woman started to laugh. ‘All right,’ Lightstorm said. ‘Fine. Poughkeepsie it is.’ He turned.
‘Something else,’ the woman said.
‘Great. What’s that?’
‘They want you to tell a certain Picture.’
All the way back to the hall he plotted his revenge against the Great Speaker, against the whole Association of Oracles and Speakers. Who did she think she was, ordering him to give up a satellite broadcast on the most important day of the year? If there was ever a faked declaration … More to the point, who did she think he was, some country amateur who would scurry off to do whatever some maniac Oracle told him? He was already plotting his moves – the people he would call, the line he would take – when he arrived at the Palace courtyard, and there, in the centre of the four marble circles, stood the woman in the pink jacket and the high-heeled sandals, still holding her plastic purse and her Japanese shopping bag.
Lightstorm took a step towards his benefactor. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘you can’t ask me to do this. I’m doing the main Picture.’ The woman said nothing. ‘Another recital. Choose another one. Founder’s Day. I’ll do Founder’s Day.’
She shook her head. ‘Please,’ Lightstorm said. ‘It’s not fair.’
She unbuttoned her jacket and light flowed from her body to warm Lightstorm’s face and chest. She stepped towards him and opened her arms. Lightstorm bent down so he could lay his head between her breasts. They were smooth and warm, and her arms around his shoulders lifted him from the growl of the city into a world of softness and love.
The next morning Lightstorm handed in his official withdrawal from the Fifth Avenue celebration of the Recital of Truth. That same afternoon he sent a letter to the Mid-Hudson College of Tellers requesting an invitation to appear as guest Teller for the city and the town of Poughkeepsie.
A part of a version of the Story of THE PLACE INSIDE, first found by Li Ku Unquenchable Fire (in beauty and truth lives her name forever).
(Hands covered in ash, the Teller reaches into the sack of winds and lifts out the Face Blackened By Fire, a charred wooden mask with the eyes and mouth rimmed in silver.)
I am the one who has taken a face
My fingers are birds, my fingers are beasts
My fingers are rocks and the water which lies on the rocks
My fingers are children
The dead, the living, and the never born
My fingers are sticks to beat away time
I am the one who has taken a face
I am the one who speaks
I speak in all the voices
I am the wife of the sun
The sister of the night
I speak from the beginning to the end
I leave nothing out
There once lived a boy, and his mother named him He Who Runs Away. He lived in a far country, a dry land open to the sun. This land lay beyond the Sea of Sorrows, where confused souls hang over the water. They are the souls of those who took a wrong turn, who did not pay attention when their guides were leading them to the land of the dead.
His ancestors came across the sea. Propelled by boredom, they set sail in boats covered with tar to prevent the stranded dead from eating the wood. They covered their bodies in nets to keep off the clouds of souls who flew at them like mosquitoes. They set sail, assuring each other that the Sea of Sorrows guarded the entrance to some lost paradise, a place where food of all cuisines fell into your mouth the moment you tilted back your head, where every few years you could clean, sparkle, and even reshape your body, like bringing your clothes to the laundry. Carrying their seeds and saplings and cows and pigs and dogs and cats and caged birds and baskets of snakes, and followed by rats and flies and cockroaches, they crossed the great water, their eyes painted over with images of palaces and winged children, their noses stuffed with flowers.
They made it over the sea and smashed their boats. For they thought they had found it – paradise. They were grinning and slapping each other on the back, when suddenly they remembered to wash the paint from their eyes. At their first sight of the brown rock many thought they must have left a residue of turpentine on their retinas. They scraped and scraped until the eyes fell out of their heads. Even now, if you pass the Sea of Sorrows to the Bitter Beach you will see masses of eyes staring up at you, to be appeased only with photographs and picture postcards of the lost world.
He Who Runs Away came out of his mother with his eyes open, all of them, even the ones behind the head, which most people leave safely closed until after death. He saw the world. He saw the cracked flatlands of his birth, he saw the hidden bridge back across the Sea of Sorrows, he saw the unspeakable green of the hill country, the grey teeth of the mountains, the holes covered by clouds. And having seen, he forgot.
He called himself Son Of A God.
He promised them his Father’s anger.
The children pinched and kicked him, they shrieked at him to call down Daddy God and destroy them. Three times He-Who-Runs-Away tried to fulfil the prophecy of his name. The children hunted him down, they dragged him back to his mother with his wrists and ankles tied together like a fox or a cat.
In his fifteenth year an earthquake ripped
Like everyone else, Jennifer had passed the entire week in a state of high anticipation. It wasn’t every year that an Allan Lightstorm came to a town like Poughkeepsie. Usually the Living Masters stayed in the huge Picture Halls of the big cities, or travelled to the national parks for the major recitals. Lightstorm himself had been expected to speak that year in the massive stone and stained glass hall on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Usually Poughkeepsie had to make do on the Day of Truth with its own three or four more prominent Tellers. There was Dennis Lily, who could speak with great passion, yet often gave so much stress to the Inner Meaning that he raced right through the story itself. And then there was Alice Windfall, ‘poor Alice’ as people called her. Alice had shown great promise in her early years, ‘flying on wings of story’ as the saying goes, so that all who heard her on the day she came back from college found themselves drifting into the air, like so many bright-coloured balloons, to look down upon their bodies sitting on the hillsides with the stooped shoulders and pained expressions of their daily lives. But Alice never repeated that glorious moment. Maybe it was because of the scandal when Martin Magundo, the Town Comptroller, got his soul tangled up in the blades of a helicopter hired by German tourists to look down on the recital. Though an official inquiry cleared Alice completely, and Martin Magundo’s family lost their lawsuit against Alice and the New York College Of Tellers, poor Alice never did fulfil the early promise of her career. Now, years later, she had hardly kept her voice up. She still spoke on the important days; people went to hear her in the hope that the Living World might take pity on her and restore her powers. In fact, her voice often came out slurred and the rumour had spread that Alice got drunk before she had to appear in public.
Occasionally the mayor or the city manager would appeal to the New York College Of Tellers for a new Teller of somewhat more magnitude. The answer always came back that the College had to look after the whole state, had to weigh all the factors, and so on and so on. If a mayor decided to ask what factors sent the most talented Tellers to New York or Albany, he or she always received the same answer. A non-Teller, who judged things only by their rational surface, who never travelled into the heart of the Sun, or sat beside Chained Mother at the bottom of the sea, could hardly question the basis of the College’s judgement.
Once, Bob Gobi, fresh from his victory as the first non-Revolutionary Republic city manager in thirty years, asked the current Public Secretary, ‘And when’s the last time any Tellers did all those things?’ adding, ‘The real Tellers died off years ago and you know it as well as I do.’
The Secretary stood up from his desk. ‘If we refrain from exposing the spirit in its raw state,’ he told city manager Gobi, ‘we do so for our listeners’ well being, in respect of their weaknesses and fears.’
‘Sure,’ Gobi said, angry beyond all sense. ‘Don’t give me that shit. Everyone knows you “refrain” because you can’t. You don’t know how any more. The last true Teller died forty years ago.’
Unfortunately for Bob Gobi, whatever the current Tellers’ limitations, they could still work a simple curse. The next night, when Gobi got up to speak to the Town Council about plans to change the zoning laws, he opened his mouth and a frog came out to hop onto Joan Lafer’s left breast, and from there to the floor. Everyone laughed, but when Gobi again tried to speak and again a frog leaped out, people realised it was no prank. They began to back off, then to push for the door. When Gobi tried to shout at them to stop, a winged lizard flew out of his mouth to fly right into the shrieking face of the town secretary.
Five days later Gobi returned to the College Of Tellers on Madison Avenue. He had walked all the way from his ranch house on Poughkeepsie’s south side. He wore nothing but a black shirt with the sleeves ripped off, and a dirty towel from the Young Men’s Truth Association wrapped around his genitals and ass. When he came to the door he crawled through the entranceway beneath the pictures of the Founders until he came to the desk of the Secretary he’d seen the week before. The man smiled. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. Gobi looked at him. ‘Come on,’ the Secretary said. ‘Don’t be afraid. Tell me what you want.’
Gobi wondered if the man had lifted the curse. He opened his mouth and out came a dragonfly. ‘Very amusing,’ the Secretary said. ‘Now will you tell me your problem?’ Crying, Gobi signalled for paper and pencil. ‘No, no,’ the Secretary said. ‘No forms. We’re not that bureaucratic, whatever people say about us. Just tell me. Go ahead.’ Gobi’s thumb jerked at his closed mouth. The secretary made a show of going back to his work. ‘I have no time for charades,’ he said. ‘If you won’t say what’s on your mind, I’m very busy.’
Gobi crawled away, having forgotten to get back on his feet. He took a train (no ticket required for a pilgrim) to the edge of the Oceanfront Spirit Reserve, and according to the forest rangers was seen heading for the row of skulls on wooden poles that lined the Forbidden Beach. Many years later, during her own pilgrimage to the Beach to talk to the skulls, Valerie Mazdan met a bent old man who sat hugging himself amid a congress of frogs. She walked over to him and parted the carpet of hair that covered his face. He blinked in amazement, not so much at the sight of another human as at the sun, hidden by his hair for so long he vaguely thought of it as a story he’d heard as a child. ‘Who are you?’ Valerie said, kneeling down. The man shook his head. ‘You can tell me,’ coaxed Courageous Wisdom. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
A flash of anger made the man open his mouth. A butterfly flew out, circled once around his head, then vanished in the sunlight. Valerie nodded, somewhat like a doctor acknowledging symptoms. She touched his lips. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘who are you?’ The man thought to turn away from his tormentor but something held him. He opened his mouth wide, as if to expel a great bullfrog at her, but instead a croak came out, not unlike the sound a frog makes as it digests its dinner of flies. ‘G… G… Go…’
Valerie touched his shoulder. ‘You just need practice,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Ye… yes,’ the former city manager said. He ran off, terrified the woman would change her mind and bring back the curse. But Courageous Wisdom had already set off again to find the skulls of her predecessors. Bob Gobi walked out of the reserve and was picked up by the Suffolk County Sheriffs office, who took him to the local Hospital of the Inner Spirit. He stayed there for the rest of his life, working in the clinic for autistic children. The night he died a wave of frogs washed over the hospital, engulfing it in a storm of croaks. They vanished the next morning.
With Bob Gobi as an example subsequent officials never made much protest at the lack of a first class Picture Teller to ‘serve the greater Poughkeepsie community’ as the Poughkeepsie Journal editorials put it. Nevertheless, the people’s souls shrivelled listening to such weak voices as those of Alice Windfall or Dennis Lily or the many Tellers who spoke on minor Recital Days in the neighbourhood Picture Halls around the city. So when the Mid-Hudson College of Tellers (a branch of the New York authority) announced that Allan Lightstorm would come to speak at the recital, headlines filled front pages, and the local television station did specials on his life, his calling, his interpretation of the lesser Pictures, his private audiences with the President and foreign dignitaries.
The current mayor and town manager, fantasizing that some truly appreciative response would make Lightstorm see the advantages of permanent settlement in a smaller community, arranged for a devotional parade of children bearing three yard high banners to greet Lightstorm as he walked up the long path to the peak of Recital Mount. The banners were held up by ‘artbirds’, half genetic manipulation, half plastic, and one of Poughkeepsie’s two major products (the other was a thick yellow syrup that promised to revive freshly dead persons for a period of five to ten minutes). In electric colours the banners depicted the True History of the city of Poughkeepsie and the life story (exaggerated even beyond the exaggerations of official biography) of Allan Lightstorm.
As the Teller passed each banner a voice sounded from a speaker set on the ground beneath it. Explaining the Pictures, the voices told how Poughkeepsie’s original inhabitants – twelve foot giants whose skin changed colour according to the season – had carved the city out of huge cedar trees uprooted in a storm from Mexico and dropped beside the Hudson River. The city prospered until a thirty year drought, during which the people shrank to two foot seven, and the river cried every night in maudlin memory of its former might. One morning all the inhabitants went out to perform a rain enactment in the high school football stadium. With little confidence the townspeople chanted along the yard lines and sprinkled blood on the goalposts. At the same time Poughkeepsie’s wonderful cedars, fed up with constant thirst, all marched to the Traprock Quarry and Blasting Corporation on the edge of town and jumped into a gravelly pit. In this moment of despair, with the people’s homes destroyed and their ears battered by the river’s incessant self-pity, a multi-tiered UFO landed in the field of dandelions that would one day become Dutchess County Airport. The space beings, whom the banners depicted as shining foetuses with overlong fingers and toes, not only showed the people how to make rain seeds out of common flowers, but also demonstrated how to build modern houses, and even how to set up a government, complete with school systems, police force, and Spiritual Development Agency. When the True Revolution came, and the Army of the Saints sailed up the Hudson from New York they found Poughkeepsie more highly evolved than any of its neighbours.
The last part was actually a deliberate lie. In fact, Poughkeepsie, once the home of an old-style corporation called something like International Bureaucratic Mechanisms, resisted the revolution longer than any other part of New York State. Technophiles from as far away as Cincinnati and Santa Barbara came to Poughkeepsie to bolster the resistance to the ‘black tide of mud’, as one of their spokesmen put it. From Poughkeepsie they issued proclamations and spies, until at last they announced they had arranged with ‘loyalists’ (as they called the rejectionists in the old secular government) to smuggle several missiles with fusion warheads into their stronghold. Doomsday, they promised, would follow unless the Army of the Saints and all their followers renounced what the technophiles called ‘pseudomystical insanity.’
Now, the banners actually related this incident, perhaps out of embarrassment at the city’s tainted history. But they transferred the place to Newburgh on the other side of the river. And they then related how Allan Lightstorm, travelling in a one man boat, glided up the river to the woods just south of that city. From there, the banners declared, Lightstorm changed himself into a golden Great Dane and penetrated the rejectionist fortress. Around his neck, disguised as a dog licence, hung a metal plate inscribed with the Names of the Founders.
In full sight of a group of technophiles Lightstorm (so the speakers said) changed back into his human form. Holding the metal plate to his forehead he told the Secret Picture, a story of such power that no Teller has ever dared to repeat it. The techs fell to the ground and covered their heads with dirt. ‘Forgive us, Master,’ they said. ‘We didn’t know.’ Lightstorm raised them up and gave them each a broom. Chanting Light storm’s name, they swept the evil out of the missiles, and Newburgh (Poughkeepsie) belonged to the Revolution. Now, for many historians, the disarming marked the turning point of the war. But Allan Lightstorm, born fifty three years later, had nothing to do with it. Everyone knew that Mohandas Quark had done the disarming, just as everyone knew that he’d become a Fox Terrier, much less conspicuous than a Great Dane. What’s more, Lightstorm knew that everyone knew. Nevertheless, by attaching the incident to Lightstorm, the townspeople demonstrated what they called ‘proper respect’ for their eminent guest. Lightstorm himself expected nothing less. Some years later, Valerie Mazdan would denounce what she called ‘flattering an empty present with an exaggerated past.’ On that day of Jennifer Mazdan’s dream, however, people took it as normal that the major Tellers of their time should inherit the marvels of their predecessors.
The particular marvel chosen did make sense, for Lightstorm had copied his recital skin directly from that of Mohandas Quark. In great folds of multi-coloured satin Allan Lightstorm made his way up the hill towards the seat where he would fold his Mohandas Quark wings about his body and tell one of the prime Pictures proper for the Day of Truth.
If nothing else, Lightstorm was a master of gesture; as he climbed the hill, he swept his blue and gold skin first one way and then another, howling pain and joy, his voice so perfectly tuned that everyone who listened (and that included all of Poughkeepsie except for sad Jennifer Mazdan, asleep at the foot of an energy guardian) everyone felt the Earth must open up to release a flood of light that would wash them clean of fear and sorrow. Later – that night, the next day – a sense of frustration would set in as they discovered that the expected purge had never come, that in some way nothing lay beneath Lightstorm’s wondrous voice and gestures, so that the recital became a pie with a delicious crust and no filling. But in that moment of approach they listened with such anticipation that many thought their skins would evaporate into the sun.
He must stay, they told themselves. Why would he come if he didn’t plan to stay?
Actually, the impulse to go to Poughkeepsie wasn’t Allan Lightstorm’s at all, but came to him as a command from the Living World. One morning in June he left his residence, the building known as ‘the Palace’, across the street from the back of the Fifth Avenue Hall. He walked up 51st Street to Fifth, where he went into Valentino’s and ordered two white shirts with pearl buttons. From there he strolled up to Nat Sherman’s for a case of his favourite cigars. He was about to head back when he noticed a small crowd of people across the street in front of a spiritual aids bookshop. He crossed the road for a closer look.
A man in a purple tracksuit had spread a sheet of black plastic on the pavement. Around him stood men watching him move three metal shells about the cloth. One of the shells was painted gold, for the Sun, a second silver, for the Moon, and the last speckled blue, for the Stars. One of them, Lightstorm knew, would contain a steel ball, symbol of the Earth. As he moved the shells the man hopped them back and forth, shielding them with his waving hands so that it became harder and harder to know which one contained the ball. While Lightstorm watched, a man in a green shirt handed a coin to the man on the ground. Bending forward, greenshirt pointed at the Moon. The shellman lifted the silver dome. Empty. With an embarrassed grin greenshirt straightened up. The shellman showed the crowd the Earth – it lay under the Stars – and then he began again to shift the heavenly bodies.
Idiots, Lightstorm thought. He knew that even if someone guessed correctly he wouldn’t keep his winnings very long. A block or two away a so-called ‘heavenly rectifier’ would get a signal to follow the hero to some quiet corner and relieve him of his victory and anything else worthwhile in his pockets.
Lightstorm thought of going back. It was getting chilly out despite the bright sun. But he only stood there, watching the hands break up the sky. Odd that the man wasn’t talking. Nobody said anything. Lightstorm realised that no one on the street, no one passing or crossing the road, or selling pretzels or hot dogs or earrings, no one looking at shop windows or waiting in their cars for the light to change, no one made any noise at all. And then he realised he couldn’t hear the cars and buses. No engines, no horns, no squeals of brakes or tyres. He looked up and down the street. The traffic moved – silently. The crowds of people still flowed up and down the block, New Yorkers with that purposeful stride, tourists unsure of their steps. None of them made a sound, not their feet, not their bodies bumping into each other.
I’ve gone deaf, Lightstorm thought, I’ve gone deaf. But he knew the emptiness was not in his drums or neurons. It lay in the street, in the cars and the people. They looked frail, almost transparent. Even the huge buildings so beloved of tourists, you could put a hand, a finger, right through them. His sight slid up the garish front of Trump Tower. Something had emptied out the Sun. No heat remained in it, though it shone bright enough to hurt his eyes. He squinted. It wasn’t the heat that had left.
The stories are gone, thought Allan Lightstorm. Something had emptied all the stories, cleaned out the people, the city, even the sky and the Earth. He could stamp his foot and it would go right through the crust.
On the plastic the three shells stood in a row. Behind them the man in the track suit looked up at Lightstorm. When he smiled, his mouth opened so wide Lightstorm thought he could fall inside. A Malignant One. A Malignant One. Help me, Lightstorm prayed. He knew he should speak the ‘standard formula of recognition’ on encountering a Bright Being. ‘Ferocious One. I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your evil intervention.’ But his mouth wouldn’t work. He didn’t know if he could move his tongue.
The Malignant One waved a hand over the shells. Choose, he was saying. Choose the correct one and I will release you. Lightstorm bent forward. How could he know which one? He hadn’t even been watching. His hand moved to the Sun, then he pulled it back again. A wrong choice and he would never get it back. His hand shook as it moved closer. The Ferocious One grinned and nodded his head.
At that moment a woman tripped and fell on her hands and knees on the plastic. The shells scattered and the steel ball rolled free. ‘Oh shit,’ the woman said. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry.’ Lightstorm grabbed the steel ball and held it up in front of the shell man. For a moment the Being bared his teeth – yellow, as if stained with tobacco or smog – but before he could do anything the woman tripped again as she tried to get up. She fell against the Malignant One, knocking him back against the store window. He shoved her out of the way but it was too late. Lightstorm tossed the ball back at him and the noises, returned to the street. People were shouting, horns announced a traffic jam, a man selling jelly beans ridiculed someone who wanted to pay with a fifty dollar bill. As Lightstorm helped the woman to her feet the shell man gathered his plastic and his heavenly bodies and walked quickly down the block, away from a couple of cops in short sleeved shirts and baseball caps.
Lightstorm looked at his rescuer. A tall woman with wide shoulders, she stood an inch or two above Lightstorm in her high-heeled sandals. She wore pink sunglasses with blue lenses, a white skirt and a pink jacket, the kind worn by hairdressers or women demonstrating cosmetics. In one hand she carried a red plastic purse, in the other a small gold shopping bag with some Japanese name written in black brush strokes across the front, ‘Hey,’ she said in a thick New York accent, ‘I’m sorry if I messed up your game.’
Lightstorm laughed. He was about to thank her, maybe even offer to buy her a drink at Rebirth of the Spirit Plaza, when a light flared about her hair. It lasted only a moment and might have come from the sun catching the coating of henna. Lightstorm knew it wasn’t the sun. She wanted him to know who had come for him. Stepping backwards he said, ‘Devoted One, I thank you for your devotion. I know that nothing I have done deserves your precious intervention.’
The Bright Being nodded her head. In the same accent as before she said, ‘Gratitude is not enough.’
Lightstorm glanced quickly at the crowds, the syrupy flow of traffic. He wondered for an instant if he could jump into a taxi and make it to the safety of his residence. He said, ‘Do you want me to do a penance?’
‘We need your help,’ she said.
‘My help? What do you mean? Do you want me to make a contribution somewhere?’
The Benign One laughed. She laughed so loudly Lightstorm discovered he wanted to slap her and tell her to shut up. He stepped backwards. ‘Go to an Oracle,’ she told him. ‘Have the Speaker do an incubation. You’ll find out what it is you have to contribute.’ Still laughing, she turned and walked away.
Three days later Allan Lightstorm stepped onto the rooftop of the World Trade Center. A few hundred feet away the tower’s twin sister hosted a network of radar, television antennae, weather monitors, and government tracking devices. Here there were only rocks, earth, a few gnarled trees with blackened fruit, and a constant whispering.
Traditionally, Tellers disliked Speakers. Lightstorm made a face at the sight of the gangly woman sitting on her stone bench in the middle of a small circle of ugly trees. Beside the bench lay her guardian, a large lump of black stone, its surface dotted with pasted on bits of coloured glass. She sat with her legs apart, her elbows on her knees, her head bent forward as if she’d been drinking. She wore a baggy old smock and men’s torn shoes. She probably hadn’t washed or cut her hair since her appointment. He could see pebbles in her hair, even twigs. When he approached her, and the woman lifted her head he grunted at the deep lines cut into her cheeks. ‘Journey lines,’ the Speakers called them, one scar for each of her initiations.
The incubation lasted over an hour, extremely long for the Great Speaker, who sometimes saw thirty clients in a day. By the time it was halfway, Alan Lightstorm thought how he never knew he could hate someone with such a passion. He was sure that many of the things she made him do, the rolling around, the eating of filth, had nothing to do with gaining access, but only with humiliating him. If only he could have asked for a simple reading – sticks, fingernail cuttings, cards – instead of an incubation.
When the Speaker finally settled into it – rocking back and forth with her hands around her knees, the sound of her high-pitched singing made Lightstorm want to strangle her. Finally it stopped. Finally she looked up at him with her eyes clear, and Lightstorm knew she was ready to give her declaration. He expected some cryptic fragment, like ‘The dead geese fly backward’ or ‘Your mother’s tongue is broken.’ He would then take it down to the computer experts at the Spiritual Development Agency, and if he didn’t like the interpretation he could apply for a revision. Instead the woman grinned at him and said, ‘They want you to go to Poughkeepsie.’
Lightstorm said, ‘What?’
‘Poughkeepsie. They want you to recite there on the Day of Truth.’
‘Like hell I will. I’m telling the main Picture at the Fifth Avenue Hall that day, RTV is broadcasting it. Live.’
The woman started to laugh. ‘All right,’ Lightstorm said. ‘Fine. Poughkeepsie it is.’ He turned.
‘Something else,’ the woman said.
‘Great. What’s that?’
‘They want you to tell a certain Picture.’
All the way back to the hall he plotted his revenge against the Great Speaker, against the whole Association of Oracles and Speakers. Who did she think she was, ordering him to give up a satellite broadcast on the most important day of the year? If there was ever a faked declaration … More to the point, who did she think he was, some country amateur who would scurry off to do whatever some maniac Oracle told him? He was already plotting his moves – the people he would call, the line he would take – when he arrived at the Palace courtyard, and there, in the centre of the four marble circles, stood the woman in the pink jacket and the high-heeled sandals, still holding her plastic purse and her Japanese shopping bag.
Lightstorm took a step towards his benefactor. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘you can’t ask me to do this. I’m doing the main Picture.’ The woman said nothing. ‘Another recital. Choose another one. Founder’s Day. I’ll do Founder’s Day.’
She shook her head. ‘Please,’ Lightstorm said. ‘It’s not fair.’
She unbuttoned her jacket and light flowed from her body to warm Lightstorm’s face and chest. She stepped towards him and opened her arms. Lightstorm bent down so he could lay his head between her breasts. They were smooth and warm, and her arms around his shoulders lifted him from the growl of the city into a world of softness and love.
The next morning Lightstorm handed in his official withdrawal from the Fifth Avenue celebration of the Recital of Truth. That same afternoon he sent a letter to the Mid-Hudson College of Tellers requesting an invitation to appear as guest Teller for the city and the town of Poughkeepsie.
A part of a version of the Story of THE PLACE INSIDE, first found by Li Ku Unquenchable Fire (in beauty and truth lives her name forever).
(Hands covered in ash, the Teller reaches into the sack of winds and lifts out the Face Blackened By Fire, a charred wooden mask with the eyes and mouth rimmed in silver.)
I am the one who has taken a face
My fingers are birds, my fingers are beasts
My fingers are rocks and the water which lies on the rocks
My fingers are children
The dead, the living, and the never born
My fingers are sticks to beat away time
I am the one who has taken a face
I am the one who speaks
I speak in all the voices
I am the wife of the sun
The sister of the night
I speak from the beginning to the end
I leave nothing out
There once lived a boy, and his mother named him He Who Runs Away. He lived in a far country, a dry land open to the sun. This land lay beyond the Sea of Sorrows, where confused souls hang over the water. They are the souls of those who took a wrong turn, who did not pay attention when their guides were leading them to the land of the dead.
His ancestors came across the sea. Propelled by boredom, they set sail in boats covered with tar to prevent the stranded dead from eating the wood. They covered their bodies in nets to keep off the clouds of souls who flew at them like mosquitoes. They set sail, assuring each other that the Sea of Sorrows guarded the entrance to some lost paradise, a place where food of all cuisines fell into your mouth the moment you tilted back your head, where every few years you could clean, sparkle, and even reshape your body, like bringing your clothes to the laundry. Carrying their seeds and saplings and cows and pigs and dogs and cats and caged birds and baskets of snakes, and followed by rats and flies and cockroaches, they crossed the great water, their eyes painted over with images of palaces and winged children, their noses stuffed with flowers.
They made it over the sea and smashed their boats. For they thought they had found it – paradise. They were grinning and slapping each other on the back, when suddenly they remembered to wash the paint from their eyes. At their first sight of the brown rock many thought they must have left a residue of turpentine on their retinas. They scraped and scraped until the eyes fell out of their heads. Even now, if you pass the Sea of Sorrows to the Bitter Beach you will see masses of eyes staring up at you, to be appeased only with photographs and picture postcards of the lost world.
He Who Runs Away came out of his mother with his eyes open, all of them, even the ones behind the head, which most people leave safely closed until after death. He saw the world. He saw the cracked flatlands of his birth, he saw the hidden bridge back across the Sea of Sorrows, he saw the unspeakable green of the hill country, the grey teeth of the mountains, the holes covered by clouds. And having seen, he forgot.
He called himself Son Of A God.
He promised them his Father’s anger.
The children pinched and kicked him, they shrieked at him to call down Daddy God and destroy them. Three times He-Who-Runs-Away tried to fulfil the prophecy of his name. The children hunted him down, they dragged him back to his mother with his wrists and ankles tied together like a fox or a cat.
In his fifteenth year an earthquake ripped
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