King of Morning, Queen of Day (44 page)

Then she stalks out of the Glass Menagerie with the three piled cardboard boxes in her arms, and every head in every glass cubicle turns to follow her, and she does not acknowledge a single one of them.

The machine on the barrier of the QHPSL car park swallows her card and rewards her with the message CARD INVALIDATED.

She is too angry to settle in her home, too angry for any of the things that usually calm her—music, a bath with a whiskey, calisthenics, sword practice at the dojo, a walk in the garden, a talk with Mr. Antrobus. She wants to take her anger out into the city, pace it about in the streets like a panther on a leash. She wants people to see her anger, hear the air crackle as she passes by, feel its heat on their faces and hands.

She has not been to the city centre coffeehouse since her student days. Then it had been a place of dreams and plans and notions, of attempts at beginnings. That is why she is drawn again to its mahogany-panelled walls and whistling brass biggins and sooty stained-glass windows. A church for agnostics. The coffeehouse is busy; fragments of other lifelines carrying trays entangle briefly with her own. A small, birdlike lady with an English accent asks if she minds if she and her friends share her table. They’re down from the north for the day, where the friends she is visiting live. She likes Enye’s city very much. She thinks it is a magical place. Is she waiting for a friend? Enye says no, she hasn’t any friends. The bright, birdlike lady cannot believe that she does not have any friends. Enye says friends are fragile things—illusions of atmosphere, environment and lighting; like that! (click of the fingers) she has just lost the person she thought of as her best friend.

There is more than one star in heaven, says the birdlike lady and she smiles and it is as if she and Enye have been caught up together in a dazzling, audacious conspiracy.

She almost calls him that afternoon. Almost. But then the thought of his voice brings back to her all the things her life is easier without: his needs, his weaknesses, his clinging, his irritations and obscurities. Instead she goes to get her hair cut. One inch, all over. She roots through her apartment, collects any item of clothing that might possibly be suspect of Power Dressing, stuffs them into plastic garbage sacks, and drives the lot of them down to the nearest charity shop. The break has to be total. Total. Only one thing stops it from totality.

Such confusion of emotions on Saul’s face as he opens the door to her. Such confusion of emotions in her spirit as the door is opened to her; that, despite all those things her life is easier without, she is standing here in his tastefully decorated neo-Georgian hall with the early morning rain dripping onto his majolica floor tiles.

“My God,” he says, staring at where the hair in which he had so loved to bury his face used to be. “What have you done?”

She answers all the questions he asks her; he blusters and blows threats of litigations against the people who would do this to his Enye.

“Saul,” she says. “Do not be stupid. Understand that: I did it.”

Pressed close to the great, vital heat of his body beside hers in the bed, she slips out of the Thunderbirds T-shirt Saul has lent her, presses her tense, taut self against his slumbering mass, calls him with her tense, taut desperation to love with her. Afterward, she lies watching the motes of darkness coming and going across the plasterwork of his ceiling, as she has so many times before, listening on headphones to nighthawk radio playing Album-Oriented Rock. The break is made. Now she can walk on. They are playing an old song she used to like from her student days. She whispers the words in time to the music:
Slip-slidin’ away.

She had a weapon now, but no enemy. Ostensibly in defence of Mr. Antrobus’s cats, she patrolled, swords in sheaths, computer hooked to her belt, the laneway at the rear of the gardens, much to the surprise of other residents. (Who, of course, said nothing. What went on in
that
house was nobody’s business.) The Nimrod, whatever its form, or stage of metamorphosis, was gone from the immediate environment. After a local radio reported the destruction of a number of hen coops and pigeon lofts by an unidentified but large animal, she expanded the perimeter of her search to include that neighbourhood also. Her breath steaming in the January air; she willed her mythoconsciousness out into the night. Nothing.
Rien. Nada.
Not even the migrainous neural drumbeat she had learned to recognise as the touch of the Mygmus. She returned to the car, wrapped the swords in an old copy of the
Irish Times,
drove away through streets broad and narrow.

She could smell it as she locked the Citroen in the safe parking place among the towering industrial refuse bins. As she approached across the broken bottles and shredded plastic bags, the sensation left the purely subjective to become objective, external, tangible. Not the nausea of mythoconscious contact. Something other. More intimate. The pheromone of dread.

The darkness under the brick arch had a different shape, a different mass, a different timbre. And a new perfume: the smell of burning. Of cardboard and wood. Of the oily black combustion of plastics. Of scorched meat.
Flesh.

Reaching from the massed darkness into the light of the shunting yard floods was a pale shape. A hand.

She fled.

Twin headlights challenged her as she drove down the rutted grass laneway behind L’Esperanza Street. She shielded her eyes, stopped, stepped out of the Citroen. The twin beams dipped, extinguished. Through the blur of retinal afterimages she saw a blue Ford station wagon growl forward, softly, slowly, wheels crunching over the cinders and litter of the entry. It stopped, license plate touching Enye’s shins. Moonface stepped out.

“They hit us.”

“I know. I went there.”

“You did what?”

“There was something I had to tell you.”

“I suppose it was inevitable. Only we never expected… We never expected at all. Nothing we could do. Three of us got away—the ones who could move fast enough. I stole a car.” The Ford’s courtesy light clicked on; in the front seat was the Wolfwere, legs pulled up beneath her doggy-fashion, hands resting on the dash, doggy-fashion. In the back was Lami. Even with the backseat folded forward, there was barely enough room for her snake’s body. She looked Enye the look of accusation of a dreadful crime.

“They? More than the one Nimrod?”

“The Nimrod, and two others. And things…” Moonface’s face was scarred by sudden pain. By the yellow glow of the courtesy light Enye saw he was nursing a wound to his left arm. The grubby mandala-print sweat top was stained darkly, wetly.

“Things?”

“Things like you couldn’t even begin to believe,” Lami said.

“What are you going to do?” A heaviness fell upon Enye, the first exploratory testing of a burden of undeserved responsibility, unwarranted guilt that she knew would grow to the crushing mass of an entire world until it was discharged.

“Drive. Vanish.” Moonface raised his eyes to the unseen hills to the south of the city. “There’s a couple of hundred miles in the tank. That gives us a lot of country to lose ourselves in. It’ll be harder in the country, but we’ll work something. I’m sorry that your education should have ended before you were properly prepared.”

“We should never have started. If we’d minded our own business, Paul, Liane and Marcus might still be with us,” Lami hissed, and her voice was the voice of the snake within at last possessing the form of the snake without. Enye felt compelled to apologise.

“You’d rather we stayed this way forever?” Moonface said.

“You’d rather Paul, Liane, and Marcus were still alive?”

“We haven’t the time for this. Look.” Moonface held out his hand. In his palm was the transparent plastic envelope.

“I don’t need it. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve found a weapon.” Enye explained the events of Christmas past. The hand remained extended.

“You still need it. In this bag is the difference between fighting a rear guard action and taking it to the enemy. With this, you can be the hunter, not the hunted. With your swords, you can only destroy. With this, and your mythoconsciousness, you can heal. Take it. Take it!”

All the same, she hesitated. A thousand doubts, a thousand horrors, a thousand possible futures, radiated from the distance between their fingers.

“Take it.”

She snatched the plastic bag, thrust it down down down into a hip pocket. Headlight beams swayed and darted, gear boxes whined as she reversed out of the alleyway to permit the Ford station wagon exit. In the back window was a KRTP-FM Number Wun-4-Fun sticker. The car stopped window to window.

“Will I see you again?”

“Don’t look for us. You’re too dangerous. Lami was right. If we hadn’t involved ourselves with you, things might have been different. Or they might not. All I can promise you is that I hope someday a stranger will come up to you in the street. You’ll not recognise him, but he’ll recognise you. He’ll greet you like an old, old friend, like someone who has done him the greatest favour anyone could do. He may have a pretty woman with him. You’ll not recognise her, either. And they may have a dog.”

The stolen Ford drove off. Its engine echoed and reechoed down the red-brick streets until it was annihilated in the great night-voice of the city.

As she drove in to QHPSL the next morning, crawling through the city’s choked vascular system, the radio news reported that the Social Services were expressing concern over the increasing numbers of young people living on the streets following the deaths of three in a fire in their shelter. The police were not ruling out the possibility of violence between rival groups of street-dwellers; though the fire appeared to have been started by a camping gas stove, the bodies showed signs of having been gashed and lacerated. The two young men and the young woman in question had not been identified.

Shekinah.
The Radiant Presence of God.

It still looked like a year’s supply of toenail clippings and bleached pubic hair. An adhesive label held dog-Latin taxonomies and a list of instructions: one five ml. spoon this, two five ml. spoon that, infuse for so long in so many mls. water… She prepared the brew in her bamboo-handled Japanese teapot, poured a cup, and let cup and pot go cold while she sat staring at it, more afraid than she had ever been in her life. She reboiled the kettle. Emptied the pot. Brewed fresh. Poured a cup. It smelled of concentrated woodland. It tasted of light bulbs. She drank the cup down in one swallow and panicked at the irrevocability of her recklessness. When the cold panic had passed, she went to sit in her most comfortable chair for whatever was to happen. The chair was not comfortable; she was not comfortable. She felt she should be sitting in a special place, in a special posture, listening to special music, wearing special clothes. She contented herself to kneel on the rug in front of her rack of swords.

The Radiant Presence of God did not so much overwhelm her like the trumpet blasts of Apocalypse as steal upon her like a thief in the night. She could not say at what point she became aware that what she had been brought up to believe in as concrete and immutable was unravelling, dissolving to reveal a more intimate reality hidden within like an unborn child. It was always to be so, when she took the Shekinah. There should have been fear as her hands, her arms, her kneeling thighs, her body, the floor upon which she knelt, the walls that surrounded her, the roof that sheltered her, grew insubstantial and translucent. But in the Radiant Presence of God there is no fear, only awe and reverent joy, and she gasped aloud in wonder to see the concealed revealed in the tongues of fire, like the Fractal dragons of Chaos Theory that were her hands, or the young tree half summer green half afire that was her body, or the currents of many-coloured light, like oil on water, that flowed about the contours of her body through the walls and floors of her apartment.

She crossed to the window and looking Out, saw a city transformed. Light. Endless light. Primal light. With a cry, she turned away; too much, too soon. But she understood that what she saw no one else could see for the sight would have scorched their synapses and stamped the shape of that searing sight onto their molten, malleable bodies. She returned to the window, winced, gasped, tried to rub the ache of seeing too much out of her eyes, looked. Heard. Felt.

Out there, in the infinite degrees of complexity of spirals within spirals about spirals of the
ur
-city, was a malignancy, a darkness, an unfittedness that she felt as a nausea, as a tightness in her heart, a constriction in her breathing. She saw them like a cancer, heard their muttering voices like the voice of cancer if cancer were to have a voice; the voices of the fallen angels of the Mygmus.

Then she went out into the alleyways and industrial parks to hunt the hunter. The sky signs led her to a laneway that smelled of semen and grease between a convent school and a row of shops. The Nimrod was cramming garbage from ripped open plastic sacks into its maw. It looked up, startled. It had taken the semblance of a pig, some primeval myth memory from the very edge of human consciousness, some denizen of the psychic tundra below the breath of Ice Age glaciers. Curved tusks glinted skull-white in the neons of an all-night video shop. Yellow pig eyes shone with unalloyed hatred. She stood, back to the neon glow, swords held comfortably, easily in the attitude called “Open on All Eight Sides.” LEDs glowed at her waist.

“Hi. I’m back.”

The afterblast blinded her for several seconds. Scuzzballs of oily blue light caromed off the red brick walls and dented garbage bins. Voices from the flats above the shops were every-syllable clear, guttural, puzzled. Should they call the police, the gas board, the electricity board? What happened? Lights were coming on, windows opening.

Enye sheathed her swords and loped away through the web of intersecting alleys and back entries to the row of rusting corrugated iron garaging where she had left the Citroen.

She must be out of condition. She had not thought she could feel so bad after one day on the bike. Her thighs are so stiff and sore they can hardly carry her to the hot, deep, steaming, foaming bath and the glass of whiskey perched on the rim. Her inside leg feels like it measures at least three metres. She should have taken that guy with the long hair, what is he called? Elliot, yes, his advice and bought a proper pair of shorts with chamois gusset. She can kiss adieu to sex for at least the next six months. Even the thought of it makes her wince.