Temporary Agency

Temporary Agency by Rachel Pollack

“I know an antidote more mighty than the woodcutters and I know a fine preventative against malignant attacks”

Homer, “Hymn to Demeter”

For Rachel Crosby

PART ONE Temporary Agency

1

When I was fourteen, a cousin of mine angered a Malignant One. It was a big case, a genuine scandal. Maybe you remember it. At the time, when it all ended, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. But a couple of years have passed and I guess maybe it’s time to think about it again.

The Bright Being lived in the office building where my cousin Paul worked analyzing retail sales reports. I don’t know how she got there, really. We never did find that out. I don’t even know how long she was there. I mean, before Paul met her. Maybe she lived on that same spot long before the building went up. Maybe she even lived there for thousands of years, way before the Indians came. No one really knows how old the Beings are. Some people say—I read this in a book, actually—that the Bright Beings, the Malignant Ones and the Benign Ones, go back to the beginning of the universe. According to this Sacred Physics book, the Big Bang Story that broke open the cosmic ylem egg showered out the Beings along with all the quarks and tachyons and all the rest of them. The Beings came from a kind of impurity in the ylem, a sort of aesthetic flaw in the original story. So maybe the Ferocious One lived at that spot for millions of years, embedded in the granite of Manhattan Island, waiting for humans, for victims—like my poor cousin Paul.

Or maybe she never lived there at all until the building went up. Maybe the contractor summoned her, maybe he offered her space in her building in exchange for help in getting his contract bid accepted. I thought of this because of what happened later. And because of what happened with the Defense Department.

Even if you don’t remember Paul’s case, you’ll certainly remember the Pentagon scandal. How half the Defense Department turned out to be Malignant Ones and the other half paying them off. How a lot of people said the chairman of the joint chiefs himself was a Malignant One. That one never made it into the papers, but everyone heard about it.

And you probably remember Alison Birkett. It was the Pentagon scandal that made her famous, after all. Before that she was an unknown lawyer specializing in demonic possession. But then that peace group came to her with their suspicions of “preternatural harassment”, and she began to investigate, and to push. And she kept on investigating, and pushing, for something like five years, until suddenly the story was all over the papers and the TV, and everyone wanted to interview and photograph Alison Birkett. Remember the Time magazine cover? They shot her standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, wearing a sharp suit, with the wind blowing a few strands of hair across her face, and the word “Demonbreaker” slashed across the bottom of the page.

I was just a kid then, but somehow Alison Birkett seemed really special to me. I watched the news every night on TV, hoping to see a feature about her. When one of the networks promised a special hour-long interview with her I begged my parents to let me stay up late that night. And I cut out the picture from Time and got a glass frame to preserve it and hang it over my desk.

I followed the scandal more closely than most adults, every detail. I still remember all the excitement, the new charges coming out every day in the paper. I remember the demonstrations, the peace groups in their rainbow robes and animal masks, chanting and waving those orange streamers in huge figure 8s as they marched on the Pentagon. And I remember the incredible excitement when the president ordered the Spiritual Development Agency to drive out the Ferocious Ones. They came in procession, with their twelve-foot banners and fluorescent masks, their drums and bells and electronic trumpets.

I was just a kid. I’d never seen anything like it. We all got off school, just like it was a national sacred-day, and I remember sitting in front of the TV all day long, watching “the big circus”, as my father called it. My mother went nuts trying to get me to eat, especially when they drew those huge lines out from the corners of the building, changing the Pentagon to a giant Pentagram. Wow, I thought, this is it, now it’s going to happen. And I was right, too. The TV blanked out the sound so we couldn’t hear the actual formulas the SDA chanted, but we could see the electric fire in the air as the Beings left the walls, only to get trapped in the triangles drawn on the outside of the building. And then when they did the banishment, and erased the lines, and declared the Pentagon “free and liberated”, I cheered and screamed and bounced up and down on the rug in front of the TV.

And I’ll never forget my father then, how much he shocked me when he said, “Oh, sure, right. And just in time for the commercials.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Listen, Honey,” Daddy said, “our beloved Spiritual Development Agency puts on a good show, but don’t you believe everything they say.”

“Mike!” my mother shouted at him. “She’s only a child.”

I guess he realized he’d given me a little more cynicism than I could handle because he said to me, “I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Your daddy’s just shooting off his mouth.”

But the damage was done. “You’re lying,” I screamed at him, and ran upstairs to my bedroom. There I took down the picture of Alison Birkett and looked at it while I cried. For a few seconds I hugged it, but then that seemed kind of dumb so I put it back on the wall.

I thought about all that stuff after everything that happened with Paul. I thought about the Pentagon, the things my father had said—and something else. Maybe if I’d done things differently, I could have helped Paul, really helped him. Maybe if I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d acted early enough, I could have really done something. Maybe if I’d remembered what my father had said, I wouldn’t have expected the SDA to take care of us. I was only fourteen, remember. You can make yourself feel pretty guilty when you’re fourteen.

Of course, none of us knew anything at all about this when Paul went to work at that building. And when he met that—woman—and got involved with her, he never suspected she was anything different than what she seemed. I mean, you hear about such things happening but you never think it’s going to happen to you. Romance with a Bright Being? Come on. It sounds like something out of supermarket magazines, right? “I lost my husband to a Malignant One”, or “Movie star’s new boyfriend a Ferocious One! Details inside!”

Maybe Paul should have guessed something, or at least been a little more careful. Because he did get a warning. When he first got the job he went to a Speaker for a divination. He went to a Bead Woman actually, one of those women who use coloured beads to make their predictions. He took me along. Paul and I were really close, despite his being ten years older than me. We were each an only child and we kind of thought of each other as brother and sister, especially after Paul’s folks died in a car crash during his last year of college.

So we went to this Bead Woman who said her blessings and threw out her beads on a silk scarf. Right in the centre lay a red bead with yellow bands, and all around it lay a circle of little black ones. And all the others had scattered to the edges of the cloth. Danger, the Speaker said. Danger and isolation. Paul asked what kind of danger, but she said she couldn’t tell because all the other beads had “retreated”. They talked about it and then Paul decided that since he’d asked about work it had to mean danger at his new job.