“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.