She didn’t answer. “Look,” I said, “I’m going. I came to warn you and I’ve done that, so great. If ten years from now you can’t resist seeing me, maybe you can call me on the phone? Not wait for some Bright Being to kill somebody?” Before she could challenge me, I made my grand exit, marching out without bothering to close the door.
Over the next few days I did my best to get back to work, to seeing my friends. I made a date with Joan—“a nice uncomplicated lay” I promised myself—went to a film festival with Harry and Glorybe, assured my parents I’d come home for my cousin’s daughter’s Eighth Day piercing enactment, had lunch with a neighbourhood Teller who wanted me to design a poster for a Rising of the Light street festival, and on and on. Whenever I found myself thinking of Alison I made sure to growl and say out loud, “Goddamn bitch”. If I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of her I just put on the radio or else got up and chanted the names of the Founders.
My government gave no signs of any further interest in me.
Four nights after my meeting with Alison, Alexander Timmerman came on a talk show. Though I told myself it was the last thing I needed to see, I found myself in front of the TV at 5 o’clock, instead of my drawing board. Timmerman looked relaxed, sitting there with his mask alongside him on the couch, talking about his work, about the gratitude and humility he felt that the powers of the Living World had chosen to bless him and his followers with their Gifts. I listened with my fist clenched, telling the screen, “You jerk. You don’t know what you’re doing. They’re setting you up. Don’t worry about the twins, it’s Tunnel Light who really counts. You idiot.”
When the show ended, I sat staring at the commercials as a fragment of my shouting match with Alison ran through my mind. “Jack was killed,” Alison had said, and, “Once again someone was chewing up people’s lives.” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, another. On the TV, the news had come on with some cheerful young man telling us all about somebody’s vision in a city council meeting and how it had led to the mayor announcing a pilgrimage to the Forbidden Beach on Long Island. I used the announcer’s voice as an alpha prayer machine, draining all the content from the sounds to let them smooth out my brain waves. Someone was chewing up people’s lives. Paul and Jack and Alison and I thrown together. She didn’t just use this as an excuse. There was a power in this. Bringing us together. Paul and Jack.
I made a noise and opened my eyes. “Shit,” I said. Instead of an answer, another image had come into my mind. The computer screen just before I’d switched it off in that motel. The answer of “National Security Sanctification” when I’d asked about any previous configurations for Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23. I grabbed the phone, then put it down. Ridiculous, I told myself. If they’re tapping anybody they’re tapping her, protected line or not. But I still went out into the street for a pay phone. Illusions of comfort.
She answered the phone herself. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m not calling to get back into anything, but I wanted to let you know about something I forgot to tell you. When I was doing my own checking.” Trying not to admit to any tampering I managed to let her know what had happened. “I don’t know what it means,” I said, “but it’s stayed in my mind. So I’m giving it to you to get it out of me. Okay?” She thanked me, managed to convey for whoever was listening that I wasn’t involved and then we hung up. For a moment I stood there with my hand on the phone, until I noticed a woman behind me shifting her weight from one side to another as she made faces at the air. I sighed and went home.
The following night was my date with Joan. As the evening approached, I found myself wishing I could just order in some pizza and keep working. Instead, I told myself it was good for me to see her (I thought of my mother saying, “You should get involved with people your own age” and answered her “Joan Monteil and I will never be the same age as long as we live.”) and made myself wash my hair and put on fresh jeans and a black cowgirl shirt with pearl buttonsnaps. And of course I left my glasses off. We all need to keep up our personal traditions.
Joan came in bubbling about a dream she’d had in which the two of us had gone down in separate submarines on some government mission to locate a Stone of Becoming for the president to give to the Emperor of Japan. As soon as she’d woken up, Joan had rushed to the Canal Street branch of the National Oneiric Registration Agency to run the dream through their computers. She showed me the printout. According to NORA, dreams of “psychic and/or transformational artifacts or natural objects given or received as gifts” correlated with a high percentage of submitted dreams for the previous three-day period from people who described themselves as “establishing or deepening a profound interpersonal relationship”.
I changed the subject to where we would go for dinner. It wasn’t just that I’d never dreamed of Joan, nor even that I could hardly imagine myself doing so. What really made me feel like a creep was the fact that Joan couldn’t see that I just didn’t feel about her the way she felt about me. She made it so easy to use her it became really difficult.
I did my best, though. I went out with her for curry, smiling and saying “uh huh” while she told me about problems with her mother, putting her off as gently as I could when she suggested we go back to the Speaker for an update on the inner truth of our relationship. After an evening of this, I considered that I had earned a good workout in bed.
Joan had a way of completely surrendering her body to me, offering herself up as if I was her spirit guide and could draw entry gates all over her body for the Living World to fill her with light. Her openness to me was what I liked best about her, at least sexually—the way she would close her eyes and purr when I kissed her, or moan softly as I moved my tongue and fingertips slowly over her nipples, as if she would be happy for me to do just that for hours and hours, but then, when I would move my fingers down the middle of her body, from the forehead, over the closed eyes and the nose, feeling out the lips and the neck, moving sideways once more over the breasts, when I would move my hand like an animal on a warm mudslide, over the sweat of her vulva and into her lips, she would shriek in a way I never would have thought possible from her.
That night I was determined. I was going to make the evening a true landmark for the Revolution. I did pretty well, too, going through three surgical gloves and a good two feet of dental damming clingwrap. Joan did her part as well, surprising me with a gift from Sisters Under The Skin, a women’s sex shop near the 5th Avenue Teller’s Hall. The gift was a two-part resonating guardian, something I’d seen but never tried. The rubber-sheathed penetrator was in the shape of a fish-tailed woman with arms folded over her breasts and long hair in waves all the way down her back. The resonator took the form of a bird-headed woman, standing with her chest pushed forward and her arms raised high in an arc. According to the instructions, circuitry in the penetrator picked up the energy of orgasm and broadcast it to its sister who then gave off a voice-like hum, modulating its pitch and volume as the quality of the orgasm changed.
I moved the penetrator into Joan without telling her so that she jumped at first, then settled back again, squirming into the mattress as if to get really comfortable, eyes closed, a happy smile on her face. Moving the fish woman in and out at different speeds or at different levels of force, I discovered I could change the bird song, creating weird melodies and even yelps, perfectly matching Joan’s own ragged cries and shouts. Without realizing it I started singing along, crying out or humming as if there were resonators hidden in my brain and throat.