“I’ve been meaning to call you—” I tried.
“Meaning!” she said. “That’s exactly what that bitch at NORA said. Mean, mean, mean, mean. What does it mean? Does it mean? I told her I know what it means, I just wanted to give it to her. Like you.”
The phone rang. Joan grunted, then opened her mouth into a wide O and made heavy breathing noises while I grabbed the phone and half shouted, “Hello?”
Harry Astin’s voice said, “Well hi, Ellen. Glorybe and I were wondering—”
“Harry,” I said, “get over here. Right now.” The moment I put the phone down Joan took it away from me, lifting the whole thing up and swinging her leg over the wire like someone getting onto a horse. She began to move the wire around her thighs and back and forth in her crotch, then rubbed the entire phone in large circles over her belly. “Have you ever done this? Have you done this? Oh, stupid. Of course. You’re Ellen. You’re Ellen. You’ve done everything.”
“Joan,” I said, “let’s sit down.”
She threw the phone on the floor, laughing as the bell sounded. “What?” she said. “What should we sit on?” She came towards me suddenly and began to move her leg up and down against mine. I stepped back and she followed me, then abruptly stopped to pick up a silver turtle guardian my mother had given me and rub it around the front of her body, making soft laughing noises as she did it.
That was when I realized what she reminded me of. The people at Alexander Timmerman’s rally, the ones who’d received the blessing and couldn’t stop touching things. I tried to think of any Timmerman events Joan might have attended, but I knew he hadn’t done anything public, certainly not in this area, since the park.
“Joan,” I said, “listen to me. I need you to tell me if you’ve—”
“Tell, tell, tell,” Joan chanted. She laughed. “I won’t tell if you won’t tell. Do you fuck and tell? Do you like to tell?” She began to march around the room, picking things up, rubbing them against her body, offering them to me, dropping them, sliding against other objects, pictures, the walls, the corners of desks or the backs of chairs.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I tried to tell her, but she wasn’t interested. She came at me, dashing forward, just touching her fingers all over me, whatever she could reach, sometimes sliding the whole hand, other times jabbing me with her fingertips or scratching me with her nails. “Stop it,” I tried to tell her. Any time I backed up she pursued me, pushing me backwards, until I found myself against the wall, where Joan began first to kiss me, any place she could reach, and then to bite, small jabs with her teeth. She was making animal noises, not real ones, but the kind of cute sounds children learn in kindergarten songs.
I pushed her away, harder than I thought, so that she fell back against the desk. When she recovered her balance she leaned forward, hands on her knees, and shouted at me. “What do you want? Do you want me to fuck you? Fuck you? Fuck you? Like your lawyer bitch? Is that the idea? I’ll do it, I’ll do whatever you like, I’ll fuck you so hard you’ll split right open and everything will spill out, just like you did to me.”
“Joan!” I said. “You’ve got to listen to me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
She laughed, rubbing circles on her crotch. “Lawyer talk, counsellor? Why don’t you take me? Don’t you want it? It’s free. No billable hours.”
I darted around her, managed to reach my altar, where I grabbed hold of the three guardians, the ones I’d set out for my enactment with Alison, along with the can of flash powder and a box of sanctified matches. I wanted more tools, but there was no time and it was just so hard to think straight.
I tried to set the guardians out in a triangle enclosing Joan and I, but I should have known it was hopeless. As soon as I set them up she kicked them over. “What are you going to do?” she said. “Buy me off with your sluts?” She picked up the one painted black and rubbed it over her breasts, then between her legs. “Oh,” she said, as if surprised. “This is just like her, isn’t it? Has she been here? Is she going to come through the wall? Are the walls going to come?” She laughed, then pushed the statue hard at her crotch. “Right through the fucking walls,” she said.
“Joan,” I said, “she’s not your friend. Please believe me. Anything you get from her is not a gift. She’s the enemy, Joan. The enemy. You’ve got to get her out of you.”
She flung the guardian at me, or maybe just at the wall, since if she was throwing it at me, she missed by more than a foot. The clay husk shattered and I could feel the spirit who’d been living inside it hover in the air, confused, and then drift away. I wanted to cry, but there was no time. I could invite her back later, or properly say goodbye.
Joan was going through my night table, throwing things on the floor. I began to lay down the flash powder, trying to do it without her noticing. It wasn’t difficult. She had found what she was looking for, the penetrator-resonator set she’d given me, and now was moving the penetrator around her face with one hand, while she hung on to its bird-headed sister with the other. “Let’s make it sing,” she said. “Can we make it sing now? Sing?” She began to hum in imitation of the bird while continuing to move the fish woman all over her body.
The flash of the powder going off made her cry out and drop the resonator on the floor. She shook her head, then yelped as if I’d hurt her when I set off another pile of powder. “Ellen?” she said. “Why are you…let’s sing. Let’s make everything…She told me you were hungry. She told me we could both feed on her, feed on her.”
I set off another flash and then reached around her for the feathers and salt I’d used after the tube people had left. I threw the salt on her and began waving the feathers, trying to think what I needed to say. I don’t remember exactly, but it went something like “Powers of protection and harmony, empty this woman, clean her of invasion and pollution. Send all Malignant and Benign Beings away from her. Seal her and…” I couldn’t say “bless her” because that’s what Benign Ones are supposed to do. And she had been blessed. Lamely, I said, “Seal her and free her.”
Joan grabbed a feather out of my hand. When she moved it over my face I turned my head. Dropping it, she began to shake her head. “Ellen?” she said. “Don’t you…Ellen, this is…is it her? Is it her? I’ve got so much, so much, I dreamed about us—” She stopped, turned her head. The doorbell was ringing.
“Harry,” I said, opening it. “Oh God, thank you for getting here.”
It took Harry and I an hour to cool Joan down enough to take her to a clinic of the Inner Spirit, over on Avenue C. Harry was wonderful. He just took her hands and started to dance around the apartment with her, a kind of cheerful square dance skipping and loping, the whole time telling her a stream of gossip about office politics and his upstairs neighbour. When suddenly her knees gave way and she fell down, he sat beside her and began whispering to her, getting her finally to close her eyes and lean against him while I got my mid-winter initiation cloak to put over her in case she went into shock.
Harry wanted to take her to a hospital, but I told him we couldn’t go anywhere with SDA connections. He didn’t argue. At the clinic a Ragged Healer received Joan, waving me away when I tried to tell her what the problem was. The healer, a woman I think, wore a mask of ribbons and strings of beads that covered much of her face. The beads were money, I knew, legal tender in the spirit worlds where she would travel to bring back the scattered pieces of Joan’s soul. On her robe, a heavy shapeless mass of unbleached cotton, fur strips and plastic panels, she carried, among all her other equipment, a small computer screen showing exchange rates for spirit currencies. Several other screens showed images of the room itself, but oddly distorted, either broken down into dots, or with narrow tunnel vision, or filled with pulsating colours. Harry later suggested to me that these might be animal perceptions of the world, the viewpoints of her various animal spirit helpers and fellow travellers. The robe also held keys, bells, a saw and hammer, a miniature flashlight, a hand-sized pinball machine, a fish-shaped water gun, a box of classroom chalk, a group of very small dolls on a metal ring, goggles, eyeglasses with eyes painted on them, and several cans of 35 mm film without a camera. When we formally gave Joan to her care, she handed us several business cards, each with some sort of prophetic image—a volcano exploding, a snake licking a flower, birds eating a carcass—and words in some incomprehensible script.