“No.”
There follows a silence that she apparently doesn’t intend to fill.
“Abi’s…” you begin, but can’t finish.
“Yes? Is she all right?”
Your voice catches. “Not really.”
“What happened?”
Picking up the phone, you think, wasn’t such a great idea. “I don’t know you.”
“Goddamn it! Tell me what happened!”
Hearing her curse is like hearing Tweety Bird getting salty with Sylvester—it’s almost funny.
“Who are you?” you ask.
“Is Abi dead?”
It’s a question you can’t resist. “Yes.”
A pause, and then: “Tell me what happened.”
You glance up to the ceiling and, as if that flat white surface were a poignant reminder of Abi, or just by lifting your head you disturbed a frail emotional balance, you burst into tears.
“Do you know how many people died tonight?” Mauve asks. “Nobody gives a fuck how bad you feel. If you cared about her, tell me what happened. It’s the only thing you can do for her now.”
Haltingly, you tell her, you hold nothing back, and when you’re done, in her teensy voice, like a diminutive hanging judge, she says, “She should have paralyzed you.”
“I wish she had.” Then, thinking about what Mauve said, you ask, “Why didn’t she?”
“Because she loved you, because she doesn’t like hurting people. Fucking jerk!” A second later she says, “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that. It’s not your fault.”
You don’t want to deny that.
“I have a…” Mauve begins, but you break in: “You said some people died tonight. How many?”
“A lot.”
“How many of them did I kill?”
“Don’t concern yourself with that. What you need to do now…”
You laugh. “Don’t concern myself?”
“You haven’t got time for guilt. Bottom’s got your scent now. It’ll find you again, you can count on it.”
Bottom, you say to yourself. Bottom dweller? Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom? Then you recall the sheet of paper that fell out of Sessions’s book. “What the hell is Bottom?”
After a second, she says, “The Bottom. Didn’t Abi explain it to you?”
“No. What is it?”
“Jesus.” After a pause she says, “You totally need protection. I want you to take the next plane you can catch to Cleveland.”
The next plane. For a moment you’re thinking astral plane, plane of existence.
“Call me after you’ve got a flight, and I’ll meet it,” Mauve says. “You have my number?”
You check caller ID. “Yeah.”
“Get out of the house now. Don’t pack. Don’t…”
“What about Abi…her body?”
“You don’t have time to worry about her. Just get out. You’re not going to be safe ’til you’re here.”
“You can protect me?”
“Yes.”
You’ve been flipping back and forth between despair and mild hysteria, but her saying this jams you up into full-blown hysteria. “Excuse me,” you say. “But it looks to me like you’re seriously fucking up here. There’s these guys with twisted spines, people are getting swallowed and spat out. It’s like you’re playing things by ear, you know? That didn’t work. Let’s try this. Oops! Lost her! Well, you better come to Oberlin and we’ll see what happens. How can you protect me when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing?”
“Okay,” Mauve says. “You have to keep it together or you’re not going to make it. This is not something we trained for, you understand? We didn’t study it in college. We found out something was happening that no one else noticed and there wasn’t time to educate the public. No time to build a consensus. Got it? We were just suddenly in the middle of the shit. We’ve had to learn on the job.”
“What’s the Bottom?” you ask again. “Are you talking about God?”
“If you don’t leave soon, you’re going to find out. I’ll explain when you get here. I can protect you. I may not always be able to, but I can protect you for a while.”
“Why? Why would you?”
“Because Abi would want me to. And because you’ve become a resource. I need another partner and you’ve been prepared…at least to an extent.”
The implication is that she intends to perform the ritual with you, or a similar ritual, and you tell her that you’re not interested in having sex with her.
“I’m not going to be your lover,” she says. “Don’t worry about that. Look at it as a job. An awful duty that might keep you alive.”
“So I’m supposed to come to Oberlin and what? Let you paralyze me?”
Angry, Mauve says, “I see why Abi didn’t tell you much—she’d have been explaining herself all the time. If you can put aside your skepticism, I won’t paralyze you. But if it needs to be done, you bet your ass I’ll do it. You’ll be taken care of, but you’re not going to be walking for a while.”
“How did your partner die?”
Silence.
“You had a partner, right? And something happened to him?” You wait for Mauve to comment and, when she does not, when all you hear from the receiver is silence, you ask, “Was it your fault or mine?”
“I’m done,” she says crisply. “You have a choice. Get out of the house or die. Catch a plane, don’t catch a plane. Absolutely up to you. I don’t really care. Give me a call if you’re coming.”
The bus to the airport is about a third full. At first you sit in the back, far away from everyone, but then you think that if anything happens, if the freeway, for instance, bursts asunder and a giant claw thrusts up from the Bottom to snag the bus, you wouldn’t stand a chance; so you move up to a seat with a window that pops out. Wearily, you rest your head against it. Transmitted through the glass, the sound of the tires on asphalt is amplified into a whiney high-pitched insect choir—like Alvin and the Chipmunks on helium—chanting Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, over and over. You don’t need your loss pounded home and you sit up. It’s funny, albeit not funny ha-ha, that you’re off to Oberlin to hook up with a woman who sounds like no less a ball-buster than Abi, off into the same mystery, the same basic relationship, because you don’t think Abi loved you, not in the way you loved her. And yet no matter how firm Mauve’s expression to the contrary, the Tantra involves emotion. You and Mauve will have to arrive at some emotional accord, no matter how impossible that seems at the moment. Unless she’s bringing you to Oberlin for the purpose of revenge, to wreck your health and torment you as payback for the people who died, one probably being her partner…you hate that word in context of relationships. It’s no less redolent of inequality than wife or indentured servant; it merely omits the modifier. Managing partner, junior or senior partner, sex partner, and so on. It makes juiceless and dry the concept of a life together, and it presents the idea that handing over your heart to another animal for safekeeping involves a rational decision.
Those thoughts, irrelevant as they are, provide a short vacation from even bleaker thoughts—when you return from it, you find your head’s in awful shape, full of tears, recriminations, regrets, and you rest it on the window glass again, preferring insect choirs commemorating your dead girlfriend to the alternative. The rhythm’s changed ever so slightly:
…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…
you kind of get into it, singing drowsily along under your breath, and that starts you thinking how she was when she wasn’t all deranged about the cause, she could be so damn funny—she had this dry sense of humor you often mistook for insult and you didn’t understand until later how clever what she said really was