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.