Woman On The Edge Of Time (25 page)

“Circulating luxuries pass through the libraries of each village—beautiful new objects get added and some things wear out or get damaged. Costumes, jewelry, vases, paintings, sculpture—some is always on loan to our village. And always
passing on. Some are for personal wearing, at feasts and rituals. Some are for enjoyment in the children’s house, the meetinghouse, the fooder, the labs, the diving gear factory. Outside as we walk around.”

“But you have to give them back. You don’t get to keep anything for yourself! It all belongs to the government?”

“We pass along the pleasure, Pepper and Salt. Think, for my birthday last year I wore a sable cloak like the Queen of the Night. I have worn emeralds and for a month a Michelangelo hung where I could see it every day. All the pleasure I can suck from these things I’ve had and pass on to pleasure others!”

Bolivar was about to be enclosed in a box. Quickly Jackrabbit leaped forward and was sealed in with him. The others laughed and called out. Jackrabbit and Bolivar embraced in the fictitious confines of the cell, the walls of luminous rope. Connie could feel that Luciente was not pleased. Jealousy like a damp wind, she could feel it. She was sad for Luciente. So they did feel jealousy here. Both young men were dressed alike, naked except for knee-length cloaks thrown back. Each had painted on his chest an elaborate flower, Jackrabbit’s a lush peony, Bolivar’s a trumpeting pale lily. Luciente forgot what she had been saying, forgot her bouncy explanations, and her eyes brooded on them twinned in the web, their slender bodies embracing naked under the rippled backs of the cloaks. Bolivar had been Jackrabbit’s lover long before Luciente; Bolivar was older than Jackrabbit but much younger than Luciente, who stood fingering the chiffon of her dress, clumsy before their straight, supple, lithe alikeness, feeling cast out from the luminous web of their play.

She took Luciente’s arm, as Luciente had so often seized hers, and pulled her firmly downhill in the other direction. “Show me more. So many people. Are they only from Mattapoisett and Cranberry?”

Luciente peered into her face, and her black eyes said she understood Connie’s kindness. Gently Luciente brushed her lips against hers. “No. It was a feast only for Cranberry and us—the dinner part. But the afternoon games were for everybody and this evening people are here from all the towns in Mouth-of-Mattapoisett. Whoever feels like partying with us.”

Feeling she had intruded on Luciente’s privacy, which she
could hardly avoid when they were linked, she wanted to give her friend a piece of her own life. “Tomorrow my niece Dolly is going to visit me for the first time since I been in.”

“Niece Dolly … Ah, person you protected from per seller in a situation of brutality and exploitation! I recall. You’re keening to see per?”

“Yes …”

“Good. Let love flow between you. You must forgive Dolly for betraying you, and Dolly must forgive you for trying to save per and failing, no?”

“I’m excited. She’s broken with Geraldo! I’m going to get her to work on springing me. Soon I’ll be free.”

“Free. Our ancestors said that was the most beautiful word in the language.” Luciente stopped to beg a swallow of wine from White Oak, wearing a long white tunic slit up the sides and toting a jug of red wine. “Connie! Tell me why it took so long for you lugs to get started? Grasp, it seems sometimes like you would put up with anything, anything at all, and pay for it through the teeth. How come you took so long to get together and start fighting for what was yours? It’s running easy to know smart looking backward, but it seems as if people fought hardest against those who had a little more than themselves or often a little less, instead of the lugs who got richer and richer.”

“Who can you hate like you hate your neighbor?” Connie reached for the wine.

“If I didn’t like my neighbors, I wouldn’t live with them.”

“We hate ourselves sometimes, Luciente, worse than we hate the rich. When did I ever meet a richie face to face? The closest I ever came to somebody with real power was when I was standing there in front of the judge who sentenced me. The people I’ve hated, the power they have is just power over
me.
Big deal, some power! Caseworkers, pimps, social workers.”

“Much I don’t comprehend that led to us,” Luciente said gently, arm around her waist as they bumped downhill. “But
not inevitably,
grasp? Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future. Do you grasp?” Luciente’s hand became iron on her ribs. Her voice was piercing and serious.

“But you exist.” She tried to laugh. “So it all worked out.”

“Maybe. Yours is a crux-time. Alternate universes coexist. Probabilities clash and possibilities wink out forever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re learning, how not?” Luciente stooped to peer into her face. “Our ancestor.”

“Me!” Connie hooted. “Honorable ancestor! Sure, pray to my ghost Don’t forget plenty of pork and chicken, for sacrifices!”

Four older people were playing violins and such together under a gathering of those cool floating lights. Others sprawled on the ground listening. Music older than she was.

“Beethoven,” Luciente offered. “Quartet in B Flat. The Grosse Fugue.”

“Claud’s friend Otis used to say that after the revolution, all their Kulchur would be burned in the streets and nobody would bother with all that stuff from Europe.”

“We enjoy no one culture, but many. Many arts. All with own inknowing, seeing, intents, beauties. Fasure some of what we inherit feels … closed, trivial, bloated with ego, posturings of lugs who had to attract rich patrons or corporate approval to survive … but much of it we have to love, Connie.”

Beyond the shimmer pool cast by the floating lights, real fireflies slow-blinked their lures on the soft air. At a giant maple a child stood with eyes closed, counting by fives to one hundred: hide-and-seek, a game ancient in her own childhood. Game she had loved as a child in hot dusty Texas streets. Rushing to hide, perhaps alone, perhaps with her best friend Lupe, whose two fat braids always hung before her dark, heart-shaped face. Waiting to be found. Suspense plucked at her with a quasi-sexual thrill as she waited, or as they waited together, giggling and clutched. The worst was not to be found, to go on waiting. The apparent purpose of the game (to hide so cleverly that no one would find you) giving way to the real purpose: to sneak in free. Perhaps, perhaps even better if Neftali, around whose sharp bronze face she had cast a secret ring of fire, was to find her. Yes, hide-and-seek wove into its ritual from generation to generation something of the hidden inner life of children. I’m going to run away from home and you won’t see me anymore! But come and search for me. The fear
they
would not care, would not come after. To be hidden away and then found
and brought joyfully out to the others. Yet afraid she lay hidden, her heart beating absurdly in the dust under the pickup truck. Who would come? What would they do?

The child turned from the tree and stood blinking into the darkness, hesitating on one foot. “It’s her!” Connie cried.

“My child, Dawn.” Luciente spoke softly in the shadows. “Let them play.”

The flimsy had a pelt and a furry tail. “Is she a squirrel?”

“Yes! Person has a fix on squirrels lately. Other children feed birds and try to build squirrelproof bird feeders. Dawn built a squirrel feeder.”

Dawn darted away into the bushes and a moment later they heard a squeal of discovery. Dawn came racing after a boy who streaked ahead of her toward the tree-safe. Just short of the tree, she launched a flying tackle and brought him down. “Got you!”

“She looks so delicate!”

“Well-coordinated. Good muscles. Fast reflexes. Dawn works hard at martial arts. You should have seen per fighting this afternoon.” Luciente’s excitement returned and she dragged Connie along a little too fast toward a game consisting of a large board with people on it instead of pieces. The game seemed quarrelsome and noisy, and debate raged over the players, whose faces were hidden by masks. They had just come to one edge of the painted board when Luciente’s kenner said, “New holi in meetinghouse. Name: Pageant of the Lost. Duration: one hour. Starts: on the hour in ten minutes.”

“That’s Jackrabbit’s new holi. And Bolivar’s. They worked on it all week.”

“Bolivar has stayed since Sappho died?”

“Basically Bolivar works as a spectacler. This is per village, but person’s gone more than here. Has to be on call for villages that want rituals, feasts, pageants. Bolivar’s quite good. When they work together, beautiful events result.” Luciente spoke with a stilted justice, carefully fair. “Jackrabbit does rituals alone sometimes, but mostly person works in graphic arts.” Arm in arm they strolled toward the meetinghouse, a building long and low like a loaf of bread.

Inside it was larger than she would have thought, for it was built into the hill. “For meetings we use only a part, so we are
more face to face. Walls can be dropped at any point. This is the biggest it gets.”

The rounded ceiling reminded her of the planetarium, the time she had taken Angie for the Easter show. Angie had been frightened of the dark and the stars that seemed to rush toward them and, crawling into her lap to bury her head, refused to look. Gradually Connie had aroused her curiosity and managed to get her to peep at the sparkling night sky of the ceiling. This ceiling too became a night sky with more purple in its black than the night they had just abandoned, with a pale moth-green moon rising in the south over one of the entrances. Slowly as people came wandering in to their seats, a different color moon rose majestically over each of the doors: white to the north, yellow to the east, red to the west, and green to the south. As the moons reached the zenith, the four of them began a stately dance to music welling up. Their shapes began to shift from round to oblong to crescent to wing-shaped like birds, images of dignified flight; now slow hopping courtship of the whooping cranes, extending their broad wings.

As the room filled and the doors shut, the cranes came down from the ceiling and became flesh—although she had learned that these vivid three-dimensional images were a mere trick of projectors and lights. A voice like a bird, a reedy voice, talked over the music about whooping cranes and faded into the music. The image broadened. One enormous crane filled it and then his head spread into clouds and his feet turned to water; little black and white dots came bobbing on the waves toward them, the Labrador duck. Last one shot in 1875 off Long Island.

The great vulture, the California condor glided on twelve-foot wingspan. The bald eagle screamed and carried fish home to stuff into the beaks of its huge fledglings, clumsy in the twiggy nest at the top of a dead pine. The grizzly stood at bay. The humpbacked whale rolled and dived and roamed the lightless depths, singing its epics improvised on the age-old patterns of its vast oral culture—was fired on by a factory ship and its warm flesh carved up on the spot for dog food. The last brown-skinned inhabitant of Tasmania was hunted down and shot on a rocky ledge. Her body smashed on the stark rocks, last of a unique and delicate, small-bodied branch of the human
family. Passenger pigeons darkened the sky with their fluttering passage, settled into trees that shone with them like soft blue and gray fruit, their cooing, the feathery warmth of their rosy and buff breasts filling the air. Alarmed, they startled into flight; the whistling of their thousands of wings beat the air to a wind that rustled the trees. They were shot, they were clubbed, they were taken by live decoy nailed through the feet to a perch, they were lumbered out of their homes, they were slaughtered and fed to livestock. Finally they were gone, the last female dying in a Cincinnati zoo. Ishi, last of the Yaqui of California, came out of the woods where he had lived alone, last of his hunted people, to a world where no soul spoke his language, and died in the Museum of Natural History. Archaic stone lions crouching in a row on wind-swept Delos, lions marching across the tiled walls of Babylon, gave way to the last of the Asian lions, sick, starving under the drought-parched tree in India. The lion’s body became the western prairies where General Sherman led an extermination campaign against Indians and buffalo together. Heaps of corpses rotted under the alkali sun. The wheat grew up through the bodies and the wind blew the land away in dust-storms that darkened the sky. Briefly they became bones flying and then the sky was empty as a skull.

The bones lay in the dust. Slowly they put out roots that sank deep in ravaged earth. Slowly the bones burgeoned into sprouting wands. The wands grew to a tree. The oak thrust its taproot deep and outstretched its massive boughs. The tree became a human couple embracing, man and woman. They clutched, they embraced, they wrestled, they strangled each other. Finally they passed into and through each other. Two androgynes stood: one lithe with black skin and blue eyes and red hair, who bent down to touch with her/his hands the earth; the other, stocky, with light brown skin and black hair and brown eyes, spread his/her arms wide to the trees and sky and a hawk perched on the wrist. A green and brown web flowed out from them and into them. They stood on the shoulder of a huge ant. Grapevines grew from their finger ends. Bees swarmed through the heads. The animal images felt real: they did not appear animations but living beings. The last image was water flowing, which became a crane flying.

The crane flew to the ceiling and slowly split into four moons that set in the four directions. The room lightened. She saw Dawn’s upturned face two rows away, watching the eastern moon go down. In their real future, she had been dead a hundred years or more; she was the dead who lived in them. Ancestor. Feeling remote from the moment, she fixed her eyes on Dawn’s wondering face. A terrible desire to hold that child’s body tantalized her flesh with the electrical itch of wanting. To touch her gently. Just once.