“Tell me that name.”
“Alimantando.” And the greenperson reached out his hand and touched his finger to Dr. Alimantando’s and the hand was his own hand and he penetrated in a sparkle of green light to the heart of the mystery. The Ring of Time, the great Annulus within which all things circled, must heal itself of the wounds his toying with history had opened. Beyond the outer edge of the ring and at its hub flowed the miraculous which had broken into time to ensure that the greenpeople would come to be by making him his own creation. From eons hence one of the sons of the future would lead him by his bootstraps across the Great Desert: that greenperson was not the greenperson who now confronted him, for that greenperson was his future self. He now knew from whence the red chalk scrawl on his ceiling had come. He had given himself his own greatest desire and in doing so had embarked himself upon the green chronodynamic merry-go-round, which had at first taken him away from his destiny to be father of the greenpeople, but had in time brought him to this miraculous moment of genesis. The Great Annulus was healed and whole. The future was assured, the past immutable.
“Let it be,” said Dr. Alimantando.
Miraculous greenness flowed from the greenperson’s fingers into Dr. Alimantando. His hand turned green, his wrist, his arm. Dr. Alimantando cried out in alarm.
“There will be some pain,” said the greenperson. “There always is at birth.”
Dr. Alimantando tore at his clothing with ripe green fingers and it came away to reveal the green tide sweeping across his body. He fell to the ground with a wail, for even as the last trace of brown was washed from his outer form, the inner man was beginning to transform. Green blood surged through his veins, displacing the crude meat-red fluid. Hormonal glands squeezed and swelled into new shapes, organs twisted or shrivelled to the dictates of the alien functions of the green lycanthropy. Juices trickled, glands stirred, empty spaces collapsed inside him. Dr. Alimantando rolled and writhed on the floor tiles for time out of mind and then it was complete. The dawn light streamed through the window and by its sustaining light Dr. Alimantando explored his new body.
“You to me, me to you, we to we,” sang the greenperson. “Behold thy future self.” Greenperson stood before greenperson, twin statues of jade. “The future must preserve itself, the greenpeople must come to be, therefore the miraculous broke through and made you me. Now, are you coming with me? There’s an awful lot to do.”
“An awful lot,” agreed the greenperson.
“Indeed,” said the greenperson, and there was a sudden aroma of newmown hay and ancient redwood forest and fresh-turned soil after rain and wild garlic in the hedgerows of Deuteronomy, and in a single step the green men walked a million million years into the dreamtime.
At six minutes of six heavily pregnant Kwai Chen Pak Mandella (wife in name and not law, for there was no longer any law in Desolation Road capable of recognizing marriages) came knock knock knocking on the guestroom door with a tray of breakfast. Knock knock knock no answer knock knock knock no answer so she said to herself, he must still be asleep, and entered quietly to heave the tray by the bedside. The room was empty, the window open. Dust had blown onto the bed, which did not seem to have been slept in. On the floor the stranger’s clothes lay strewn and ripped, and among them the curious Kwai Chen Pak found a curious thing; a paper-thin silvery skin in the shape of a man, dry and scaly, flaking in her fingers, as if some strange desert snake had shed its skin and departed in the cold of the night.
69
It was raining the day they broke into the sealed house, the man and the two women; a weighty, penetrating rain, falling heavily from heaven, punishing the earth. Prior to that Tuesday it had not rained for three years. There was a dreadful smell in the sealed house, the smell of something that had begun to die years before but was not yet done dying. Thus Rael Mandella Jr. was prepared when he found the body in the chair by the fire though the shrivelled skin and bared teeth and staring, mummified eyes drove a little cry of fear from him. Hearing the small cry, Santa Ekatrina at once took Kwai Chen Pak back to the house, for if a corpse were to pass a pregnant woman, the child would assuredly be stillborn. So Rael Mandella Jr. carried the paperlight corpse from the sealed house on his own and all alone he dug a shallow grave in the puddingy soil of the town cemetery. The rain ran down his face and his neck and his bare arms and filled up the grave, and because there was no mayor and no priest to say the proper words he bent his head and said the consignatory sentences himself, in the pouring, drenching rain. When the grave was covered with puddingy soil, he hammered in a wooden headboard and painted on it the words “Genevieve Tenebrae: founder citizen of Desolation Road,” and because he did not know dates or places, he wrote the simple epitaph: “Dead by a broken heart.” Then he splashed back through the red mud to his hearth and wife and his soul was heavy because now there were only the Mandellas left.
Weaving by gaslight in her loomroom, Eva Mandella saw the end of time stretched across her tapestry frame. She tied off Genevieve Tenebrae’s lifethreads and wove them back into the ground. So few threads remained.
“Where do they lead, what is their future?” she asked the hissing gas jets. They knew and she knew, for both the gas jets and she had worked upon the tapestry of time too long for them not to know the shape of it, the cut of it, and that the form of what had been woven demanded the form the unwoven must take. The end of all things was approaching; all the threads led into the red dust and beyond that she could not see, for the future was not the future of Desolation Road. She wove fearful of that future under the hissing gas lamps and all the while the thread ran down to nothing through her fingers and the rain rained down.
For three days the rain rained as no rain had ever rained before, not even when The Hand sang one hundred and fifty thousand years of rain out of the dry, mocking sky. Rael Mandella watched the rain from each of the hacienda’s windows in turn. From those windows he saw the dashing rivers of rainwater swirl away the next season’s crops and it seemed to him that he heard the laughter of the Panarch in the heavy drops: divine syllables telling him that the future was not for Desolation Road. For three days it was so, then the grey clouds curled, the sun broke through the intestinal moilings, and a great wind from the south drove the rain before it and left the world steaming and vapouring in the fifteen-minutes-of-fifteen sun. That night, cries broke the meditative desert quiet: terrible, racking cries filled with fear and anguish, the cries of a woman in labour.
“Whish whish whish, easy there, little chicken-bones, little piece-of-themoon, let it come, let it come, come on….” Santa Ekatrina pleaded and Kwai Chen Pak, little chicken bones, little piece-of-the-moon; squeezed and huffed and let out another racking cry which sent Rael Jr., fretting in the parlour with his mystical grandmother, leaping up from his chair and reaching for the door handle. Toward dawn Santa Ekatrina turned that door handle and summoned her son into the birth room.
“It’s near now, but she’s very weak, poor child. Take her hand and give her all the strength you can.”
As the sky began to lighten scarlet and gold, Kwai Chen Pak’s eyes opened wide wide wide and her mouth stretched ohahoh big enough to swallow a world and she squeezed squeezed squeezed squeezed squeezed.
“Come on come on come on come on come on,” whispered Santa Ekatrina, and Rael Jr. closed his eyes because he could not bear to see what was happening to his wife but he gripped her hand as if he would never let it go again. “Come on come on come on come on come on,” then there was a gasping cry and Rael Jr. opened his eyes to see the ugly red squawling thing in his wife’s arms and the sheet was stained red and black with vile, evil female things.