Unquenchable Fire Read online

  Idiots, Lightstorm thought. He knew that even if someone guessed correctly he wouldn’t keep his winnings very long. A block or two away a so-called ‘heavenly rectifier’ would get a signal to follow the hero to some quiet corner and relieve him of his victory and anything else worthwhile in his pockets.

  Lightstorm thought of going back. It was getting chilly out despite the bright sun. But he only stood there, watching the hands break up the sky. Odd that the man wasn’t talking. Nobody said anything. Lightstorm realised that no one on the street, no one passing or crossing the road, or selling pretzels or hot dogs or earrings, no one looking at shop windows or waiting in their cars for the light to change, no one made any noise at all. And then he realised he couldn’t hear the cars and buses. No engines, no horns, no squeals of brakes or tyres. He looked up and down the street. The traffic moved—silently. The crowds of people still flowed up and down the block, New Yorkers with that purposeful stride, tourists unsure of their steps. None of them made a sound, not their feet, not their bodies bumping into each other.

  I’ve gone deaf Lightstorm thought, I’ve gone deaf. But he knew the emptiness was not in his drums or neurons. It lay in the street, in the cars and the people. They looked frail, almost transparent. Even the huge buildings so beloved of tourists, you could put a hand, a finger, right through them. His sight slid up the garish front of Trump Tower. Something had emptied out the Sun. No heat remained in it, though it shone bright enough to hurt his eyes. He squinted. It wasn’t the heat that had left.

  The stories are gone, thought Allan Lightstorm. Something had emptied all the stories, cleaned out the people, the city, even the sky and the Earth. He could stamp his foot and it would go right through the crust.

  On the plastic the three shells stood in a row. Behind them the man in the track suit looked up at Lightstorm. When he smiled, his mouth opened so wide Lightstorm thought he could fall inside. A Malignant One. A Malignant One. Help me, Lightstorm prayed. He knew he should speak the ‘standard formula of recognition’ on encountering a Bright Being. ‘Ferocious One. I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your evil intervention.’ But his mouth wouldn’t work. He didn’t know if he could move his tongue.

  The Malignant One waved a hand over the shells. Choose, he was saying. Choose the correct one and I will release you. Lightstorm bent forward. How could he know which one? He hadn’t even been watching. His hand moved to the Sun, then he pulled it back again. A wrong choice and he would never get it back. His hand shook as it moved closer. The Ferocious One grinned and nodded his head.

  At that moment a woman tripped and fell on her hands and knees on the plastic. The shells scattered and the steel ball rolled free. ‘Oh shit,’ the woman said. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry.’ Lightstorm grabbed the steel ball and held it up in front of the shell man. For a moment the Being bared his teeth—yellow, as if stained with tobacco or smog—but before he could do anything the woman tripped again as she tried to get up. She fell against the Malignant One, knocking him back against the store window. He shoved her out of the way but it was too late. Lightstorm tossed the ball back at him and the noises, returned to the street. People were shouting, horns announced a traffic jam, a man selling jelly beans ridiculed someone who wanted to pay with a fifty dollar bill. As Lightstorm helped the woman to her feet the shell man gathered his plastic and his heavenly bodies and walked quickly down the block, away from a couple of cops in short sleeved shirts and baseball caps.

  Lightstorm looked at his rescuer. A tall woman with wide shoulders, she stood an inch or two above Lightstorm in her high-heeled sandals. She wore pink sunglasses with blue lenses, a white skirt and a pink jacket, the kind worn by hairdressers or women demonstrating cosmetics. In one hand she carried a red plastic purse, in the other a small gold shopping bag with some Japanese name written in black brush strokes across the front. ‘Hey,’ she said in a thick New York accent, ‘I’m sorry if I messed up your game.’

  Lightstorm laughed. He was about to thank her, maybe even offer to buy her a drink at Rebirth of the Spirit Plaza, when a light flared about her hair. It lasted only a moment and might have come from the sun catching the coating of henna. Lightstorm knew it wasn’t the sun. She wanted him to know who had come for him. Stepping backwards he said, ‘Devoted One, I thank you for your devotion. I know that nothing I have done deserves your precious intervention.’

  The Bright Being nodded her head. In the same accent as before she said, ‘Gratitude is not enough.’

  Lightstorm glanced quickly at the crowds, the syrupy flow of traffic. He wondered for an instant if he could jump into a taxi and make it to the safety of his residence. He said, ‘Do you want me to do a penance?’

  ‘We need your help,’ she said.

  ‘My help? What do you mean? Do you want me to make a contribution somewhere?’

  The Benign One laughed. She laughed so loudly Lightstorm discovered he wanted to slap her and tell her to shut up. He stepped backwards. ‘Go to an Oracle,’ she told him. ‘Have the Speaker do an incubation. You’ll find out what it is you have to contribute.’ Still laughing, she turned and walked away.

  Three days later Allan Lightstorm stepped onto the rooftop of the World Trade Center. A few hundred feet away the tower’s twin sister hosted a network of radar, television antennae, weather monitors, and government tracking devices. Here there were only rocks, earth, a few gnarled trees with blackened fruit, and a constant whispering.

  Traditionally, Tellers disliked Speakers. Lightstorm made a face at the sight of the gangly woman sitting on her stone bench in the middle of a small circle of ugly trees. Beside the bench lay her guardian, a large lump of black stone, its surface dotted with pasted on bits of coloured glass. She sat with her legs apart, her elbows on her knees, her head bent forward as if she’d been drinking. She wore a baggy old smock and men’s torn shoes. She probably hadn’t washed or cut her hair since her appointment. He could see pebbles in her hair, even twigs. When he approached her, and the woman lifted her head he grunted at the deep lines cut into her cheeks. ‘Journey lines,’ the Speakers called them, one scar for each of her initiations.

  The incubation lasted over an hour, extremely long for the Great Speaker, who sometimes saw thirty clients in a day. By the time it was halfway, Alan Lightstorm thought how he never knew he could hate someone with such a passion. He was sure that many of the things she made him do, the rolling around, the eating of filth, had nothing to do with gaining access, but only with humiliating him. If only he could have asked for a simple reading—sticks, fingernail cuttings, cards—instead of an incubation.

  When the Speaker finally settled into it—rocking back and forth with her hands around her knees, the sound of her high-pitched singing made Lightstorm want to strangle her. Finally it stopped. Finally she looked up at him with her eyes clear, and Lightstorm knew she was ready to give her declaration. He expected some cryptic fragment, like ‘The dead geese fly backward’ or ‘Your mother’s tongue is broken.’ He would then take it down to the computer experts at the Spiritual Development Agency, and if he didn’t like the interpretation he could apply for a revision. Instead the woman grinned at him and said, ‘They want you to go to Poughkeepsie.’

  Lightstorm said, ‘What?’

  ‘Poughkeepsie. They want you to recite there on the Day of Truth.’

  ‘Like hell I will. I’m telling the main Picture at the Fifth Avenue Hall that day, RTV is broadcasting it. Live.’

  The woman started to laugh. ‘All right,’ Lightstorm said. ‘Fine. Poughkeepsie it is.’ He turned.

  ‘Something else,’ the woman said.

  ‘Great. What’s that?’

  ‘They want you to tell a certain Picture.’

  All the way back to the hall he plotted his revenge against the Great Speaker, against the whole Association of Oracles and Speakers. Who did she think she was, ordering him to give up a satellite broadcast on the most important day of the year? If there was ev
er a faked declaration…More to the point, who did she think he was, some country amateur who would scurry off to do whatever some maniac Oracle told him? He was already plotting his moves—the people he would call, the line he would take—when he arrived at the Palace courtyard, and there, in the centre of the four marble circles, stood the woman in the pink jacket and the high-heeled sandals, still holding her plastic purse and her Japanese shopping bag.

  Lightstorm took a step towards his benefactor. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘you can’t ask me to do this. I’m doing the main Picture.’ The woman said nothing. ‘Another recital. Choose another one. Founder’s Day. I’ll do Founder’s Day.’

  She shook her head. ‘Please,’ Lightstorm said. ‘It’s not fair.’

  She unbuttoned her jacket and light flowed from her body to warm Lightstorm’s face and chest. She stepped towards him and opened her arms. Lightstorm bent down so he could lay his head between her breasts. They were smooth and warm, and her arms around his shoulders lifted him from the growl of the city into a world of softness and love.

  The next morning Lightstorm handed in his official withdrawal from the Fifth Avenue celebration of the Recital of Truth. That same afternoon he sent a letter to the Mid-Hudson College of Tellers requesting an invitation to appear as guest Teller for the city and the town of Poughkeepsie.

  A part of a version of the Story of THE PLACE INSIDE, first found by Li Ku Unquenchable Fire (in beauty and truth lives her name forever).

  (Hands covered in ash, the Teller reaches into the sack of winds and lifts out the Face Blackened By Fire, a charred wooden mask with the eyes and mouth rimmed in silver.)

  I am the one who has taken a face

  My fingers are birds, my fingers are beasts

  My fingers are rocks and the water which lies on the rocks

  My fingers are children

  The dead, the living, and the never born

  My fingers are sticks to beat away time

  I am the one who has taken a face

  I am the one who speaks

  I speak in all the voices

  I am the wife of the sun

  The sister of the night

  I speak from the beginning to the end

  I leave nothing out

  There once lived a boy, and his mother named him He Who Runs Away. He lived in a far country, a dry land open to the sun. This land lay beyond the Sea of Sorrows, where confused souls hang over the water. They are the souls of those who took a wrong turn, who did not pay attention when their guides were leading them to the land of the dead.

  His ancestors came across the sea. Propelled by boredom, they set sail in boats covered with tar to prevent the stranded dead from eating the wood. They covered their bodies in nets to keep off the clouds of souls who flew at them like mosquitoes. They set sail, assuring each other that the Sea of Sorrows guarded the entrance to some lost paradise, a place where food of all cuisines fell into your mouth the moment you tilted back your head, where every few years you could clean, sparkle, and even reshape your body, like bringing your clothes to the laundry. Carrying their seeds and saplings and cows and pigs and dogs and cats and caged birds and baskets of snakes, and followed by rats and flies and cockroaches, they crossed the great water, their eyes painted over with images of palaces and winged children, their noses stuffed with flowers.

  They made it over the sea and smashed their boats. For they thought they had found it—paradise. They were grinning and slapping each other on the back, when suddenly they remembered to wash the paint from their eyes. At their first sight of the brown rock many thought they must have left a residue of turpentine on their retinas. They scraped and scraped until the eyes fell out of their heads. Even now, if you pass the Sea of Sorrows to the Bitter Beach you will see masses of eyes staring up at you, to be appeased only with photographs and picture postcards of the lost world.

  He Who Runs Away came out of his mother with his eyes open, all of them, even the ones behind the head, which most people leave safely closed until after death. He saw the world. He saw the cracked flatlands of his birth, he saw the hidden bridge back across the Sea of Sorrows, he saw the unspeakable green of the hill country, the grey teeth of the mountains, the holes covered by clouds. And having seen, he forgot.

  He called himself Son Of A God.

  He promised them his Father’s anger.

  The children pinched and kicked him, they shrieked at him to call down Daddy God and destroy them. Three times He-Who-Runs-Away tried to fulfil the prophecy of his name. The children hunted him down, they dragged him back to his mother with his wrists and ankles tied together like a fox or a cat.

  In his fifteenth year an earthquake ripped open the ground. Houses leaped into the air like enraged grasshoppers, whole caravans tumbled into cracks (some emerged years later to discover highways paved with glass, towers for collecting moonlight to use on cloudy nights, and tax agents disguised as rocks on the sides of the roads). In the middle of the quake Son Of A God climbed on his mother’s roof. He shouted above the roar of the Earth, the screams of the people. His father had come, had come at last. His father would punish them for their monstrous sins and unspeakable rudeness. The people crowded through the storm of rock to bow down and beg the boy’s forgiveness, asking him please, please, would he send his father home again. The earthquake stopped. The people looked around, laughing and vomiting at the same time. Then they all picked up rocks and began to throw them at the boy. They would have killed him except for a fear that maybe, just, maybe, his father was teasing them and would return. So they drove him into the desert, where dust swirled in more shades of yellow, red, brown, black, and purple than any Eastern hill dweller, drenched in green, could ever imagine.

  Blinded and sick from the sun, his skin a mountain range of insect bites, the boy wandered for days until he came to a rock tower pitted with holes. Hundreds of coloured pebbles filled the pockmarks, stories left there by the birds and desert rats. Shivering with fever, half crying, half moaning with nausea, chills, and a rage as massive as the Moon, He Who Runs Away lay down in the shadow of the stone. He closed his eyes and shouted for death.

  But when he looked up, instead of Our Winged Mother Of Night, he saw before him a Visitor, an agent of the Living World. The being wore a mask half as high as the boy. Splinters of bone and strips of skin hung from the mask’s sides. The forehead was pasted with photographs of burning bodies. Flies filled the mouth.

  He Who Runs Away tried to crawl. A finger touched him at the back of his neck and his soul flew out his eyes. The next morning, when he returned to his body, he found the mask beside him.

  On most Recital Days the people of Poughkeepsie attended their various halls. They went to the row of glass and brick ‘moderns’ on Park Avenue. They went to converted Old World monuments, like the grey stone towers on Cannon Street, a block from the Blessed Path parking lot south of Main Street. They went to the garishly painted storefronts of the New Purity movement. For outdoor enactments, such as Earth Day, they went to parade grounds or the park by the YMTA or baseball fields. But on the Day of Truth, the summer solstice, the community gathered together in large groups. For on that day, according to doctrine, each person’s experience drew from all the others (in contrast to the Day of Isolation, the autumnal equinox, when each listener’s universe emptied of everyone but himself and the Teller). On the Day of Truth, when the city paraded its best Tellers, the majority of Poughkeepsie’s citizens attempted to squeeze together on the sides of Recital Mount, an artificial hill built after the Revolution by the Holy Recovery Agency, Rebecca Rainbow’s emergency response to the unemployment that grew with the collapse of the Old World economy. And this year, when Allan Lightstorm would speak and everyone wanted to attend (except, perhaps, some New Purity purists), the city had set up gates and guards to keep out anyone who could not show proof of local residence.

  Though some began lining up, with sleeping bags and tents, five days ahead, most people came early in the morning or
the night before, hoping to get a good spot in clear sight of the platform. For two or three days before, throughout the city and the surrounding town of Poughkeepsie, in wood or fieldstone houses, in brick apartment buildings, in trailer parks and welfare hotels, people marched in private processions, their bare feet burnt by the wax of candles held in front of them, their heads adorned with baseball caps covered in little metal tokens of the Founders. Alone or in small groups they prayed and did penance in the hope that some Devoted One would arrange a good seat for themselves and their families.

  The candles and the caps were not a local custom. Sold all over the country in spiritual aid stores they were a regular feature of the Day of Truth, said to bring blessings for the coming year. Most of the people in Jennie Mazdan’s hive had bought theirs at the special display counter Sears had set up in the South Hills mall. As an extra benefit, the caps sold locally all displayed portraits of Allan Lightstorm, with his signature in glittery letters.

  Not everybody came early or gave offerings for a good seat. Some, such as city officials, officers of the Spiritual Development Agency, executive officers of the Bird of Light Factory, and the Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Poughkeepsie’s three hospitals, had their seats guaranteed. Various groups could count on an automatic place as well, including the various hive housing developments outside the city. In Glowwood Hive, where Jennifer Mazdan had lived for over three years, people slept late and awoke with the smile that came from knowing that for at least one day the lower middle class families in their cheap identical houses shared a privilege denied to the doctors and lawyers in their expensive homes on Wilbur Boulevard and the south side of the city. By mid-morning, however, these people too had made their way through the traffic jams and the miles of official and impromptu parking to find their allotted places and wait, wait for the procession up the tiled path, wait for the glimpse of a voluminous costume, wait for the legendary voice to fill their hungry bodies.