Besides, Lottie could understand the bitterness that drove her to lash out in all directions. Reverend Ribera was genuine. She achieved real contact only now and again, but when she did it was unmistakable. The spirits that laid hold on her were seldom gentle, and yet once they’d established their presence, the ridicule, the threats of aneurisms and financial ruin were replaced by mild, rambling descriptions of the other side. Instead of the usual abundance of counsels, the messages of these spirits were uncertain, tentative, even distressed and puzzled. They made little gestures of friendship and reconciliation, then skittered off, as though expecting to be refused. It was invariably during these visitations, when Reverend Ribera was so visibly not herself, that she would pronounce the secret word or mention the significant detail that proved her words weren’t just the spiritual outpourings of some vague elsewhere but unique communications from real, known people. The first message from Juan, for instance, had been “his” beyond any doubt, for Lottie had been able to return home and find the same words in one of the letters he’d written to her twelve years before:
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero. Es tan corto el amor, v es tan largo el olvido. Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos, mi alma no se content a con haberla perdido. Aunque este sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa, y estos sean los ultimos versos que yo le escribo.
The poem wasn’t Juan’s in the sense that he’d written it, though Lottie had never let him know that she’d known that. But even if the words came from someone else, the feelings had been his, and were his now more certainly than when he’d copied them into the letter. With all the poems there are in Spanish, how could Rev. Ribera have picked just that one? Unless Juan had been there that night. Unless he’d wanted to find some way to touch her so that she could believe that he had.
Later messages from Juan tended to be less other-directed and more a kind of spiritual autobiography. He described his progress from a plane of existence that was predominantly dark brown to a higher plane that was green, where he met his grandfather Rafael and a woman in a bridal gown, barely more than a girl, whose name came through as Rita or ’Nita. The ghostly bride seemed determined to make contact with Lottie, for she returned on several occasions, but Lottie was never able to see what the connection was between herself and this Rita or ’Nita. As Juan advanced to higher planes, it became harder to distinguish his tone from that of the other spirits. He alternated between wistfulness and hectoring. He wanted Lottie to lose weight. He wanted her to visit the Lighthalls. Finally it became clear to Lottie that Reverend Riber a had lost contact with Juan and was now only faking it. She stopped coming for the private meetings, and shortly thereafter Rafael and other distant relatives began to foresee all kinds of dangers in her path. A person that she trusted was going to betray her. She would lose large sums of money. There was, somewhere ahead, a fire, possibly only a symbolic fire but possibly it was real.
About the money they had been well-informed. By the first anniversary of Juan’s death the four thousand dollars had been reduced to a little more than four hundred.
It was easier than it might have been to say good-bye to Juan and the rest because she had begun to establish her own, more direct lines of communication with the other side. Off and on over the years Lottie had attended gospel meetings at the Day of Judgment Pentecostal Church, which met in a rented hall on Avenue A. She went there for the sake of the music and the excitement, not being deeply concerned about what seemed to draw in the majority of the others—the drama of sin and salvation. Lottie believed in sin in a general way, as a kind of condition or environment like clouds, but when she felt around inside herself for her own sins she drew a blank. The nearest she could approach to guilt was thinking about the ways she’d messed up Mickey’s and Amparo’s lives, and even this was a cause rather of discomfort than of out-and-out anguish.
Then one dreadful August night in ’25 (an inversion layer had been stifling the city for days, the air was unbreathable) Lottie had stood up in the middle of the prayer asking for spiritual gifts and begun to prophesy in tongues. It lasted only a moment the first time and Lottie wondered if it might not be just a simple case of heat prostration, but the next time it was much clearer. It began with a sense of constriction, of being covered and enclosed, and then another kind of force struggled against this and emerged through it.
“Like a fire?” Brother Cary had asked her.
She remembered Juan’s grandfather’s warning about a fire that might be symbolic or might be real.
It was utterly dependable. She spoke in tongues whenever she came to the Day of Judgment Pentecostal Church and at no time else. When she felt the clouds gathering about her, she would stand, no matter what else might be happening, a sermon, a baptizing, and the congregation would gather round her in a great circle, while Brother Cary held her and prayed for the fire to come down. When she felt it coming she would begin to tremble, but when it touched her she felt strong, and she spoke in a voice that was loud and clear with praise:
“Tralla goody ala troddy chaunt. Net nosse betnosse keyscope namallim. Zarbos ha zarbos myer, zarbos roldo teneview menevent. Daney, daney, daney sigs, daney sigs. Chonery ompolla rop!”
Or:
“Dabsa bobby nasa sana dubey. Lo fornival lo fier. Ompolla meny, leasiest mell. Woo—lubba dever ever onna. Woo—molit ule. Nok! Nok! Nok!”
Part V: Shrimp
27. Having Babies (2024)
Shrimp’s hangup was having babies—first the begetting, with the sperm; then the foetus growing inside her; finally the completed baby coming out. Since the Regents’ System had gone into effect it was a fairly widespread syndrome, compulsory contraception having hit many of the old myths and icons with hurricane force, but with Shrimp it took a special form. She had enough psychoanalysis to understand her perversion but she went on having babies anyhow.
Shrimp had been thirteen years old and still a virgin, when her mother had gone to the hospital to be injected with a new son. The operation had had a doubly supernatural quality—the sperm had come from a man five years dead and the result was so clearly intended to be a replacement for the son Mrs. Hanson had lost in the riot: Boz was Jimmie Tom reborn. So when Shrimp had fantasies of the syringe going up into her own womb, it was a ghost that filled her, and its name was incest. The fact that it had to be a woman who did it for her to get excited probably made it even more multiple incest.
The first two, Tiger and Thumper, had not presented any problems on the rational level. She could tell herself that millions of women did it, that it was the only ethical way for homosexuals to procreate, that the children themselves were happier and better off growing up in the country or wherever with professional attention, and so on through a dozen other rationalizations, including the best of all, money. Subsidized motherhood certainly beat the pittance she could get killing herself for Con Ed or the even deadlier fates she’d met after she’d been fired from that. Logically what could be better than to be paid for what you craved?