Unquenchable Fire Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Salvador Dali’s Tarot

  A Practical Guide to Fortune Telling

  78 Degrees of Wisdom

  COPYRIGHT © 1988 by Rachel Pollack

  All rights reserved

  First published in Great Britain in 1988

  simultaneously in hardback and paperback by

  Century Hutchinson Ltd

  Brookmount House, 62-65 Chandos Place,

  London WC2N 4NW

  Century Hutchinson (Australia) Pty Ltd

  16-22 Church Street, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Victoria 3122

  Century Hutchinson (NZ) Ltd

  32-34 View Road, PO Box 40-086, Glenfield, Auckland 10

  Century Hutchinson (South Africa) Pty Ltd

  PO Box 337, Bergvlei 2012, South Africa

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Pollack, Rachel

  Unquenchable fire.

  I. Title

  823’914[F] PR6Ø66.037/

  ISBN: 0-7126-1950-X

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Mackays of Chatham

  Dedication

  For belief and help and everything else, this book is dedicated to Edith Katz.

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people who assisted in the writing of this book, most without even knowing it. I am indebted to them all, but especially to Ingrid Toth, for listening and for believing.

  Disclaimer

  Poughkeepsie, and New York City, and Wappingers Falls, etc. are real places, and some of the buildings or streets described in this book have their counterparts in the outside world. However, this book is a work of fiction, and nothing said about any of the locales implies anything whatsoever about the actual place. The characters have no counterparts at all in the outside world. Any resemblance to actual people or events would be entirely coincidental.

  And on the way I told a tale of such power that all who heard it had thoughts of repentance.

  —Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav

  God’s works are great. The greatest, however, is not his writing in the sky…God gave Far-li-mas the gift of telling tales in such a way that has never been equalled.

  —Joseph Campbell quoting Leo Frobenius quoting a Sudanese camel driver.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  THE NON EXISTENT MARRIAGE OF JENNIFER MAZDAN AND MICHAEL GOLD

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  WE REMEMBER THE FOUNDERS

  1

  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 Sheriff’s 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 towar
ds 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.