The bag contained things I didn’t understand—a can opener, a railway ticket from England, torn pieces of what looked like a medical report, a gold-headed hammer—and other things that made a little more sense, like a cracked pomegranate, a comb in the shape of a bird with outstretched wings, a mirror set into a small wooden bowl, a tiny bow and arrow, and a claw from some animal. Most important was a small leather pouch filled with folded photographs and dirt. Annie’s soul memories. I’d asked her why she was taking such a chance lending me these things and all she would do was put on her tough voice and tell me, “Let’s just say I don’t like Devoted Ones. Okay?” adding, “Anyway, us humans got to stick together.”
The bulk of the bag was in rocks, which, like the mud Annie had brought back from enactments done in wilderness power places around the world. Alison started to take them out, but I raised my heavy mud hand to stop her. I pointed to the ground, then waved my hand, signalling “Not here”. She nodded and I led her through the thick press of people, moving ponderously, mudpeople through a world of fire.
Moving through the flashes of ecstasy exploding all around us, I suddenly felt like an enemy of the Revolution, of human freedom—a thief, a traitor, someone who would be hated throughout history for bringing history back from the dead. Desire and the endless body had killed history and now Alison and I were going to murder desire, cover it with mud.
All around us people had abandoned their bodies to live forever in the body of smells, of faceless tongues and teeth, of skin spread so wide it became invisible. Others were sending roots down through the cracked floors, down through the Manhattan granite, lines from their penises and vaginas to draw up the juices of the Earth, while Alison and I became drier and drier, our dead mud bodies about to wither into dust.
I didn’t even realize I was turning back until Alison gripped my arm. She pulled me along like some lost child, at whatever cost to herself, past the souvenir stands where people were shoving plaster models of Rebecca Rainbow into their groins, or jabbing themselves with gold leather openers, or masturbating each other with silver statues of the bulls and bears slaughtered by Rainbow’s followers on the day the Founder reopened the Stock Exchange. We moved past the video question and answer machines, now torn from their slots, until finally I smashed up against a wall and realized there was nobody there, we’d come around the corner to the row of elevators connecting the gallery and the street and had tumbled into silence.
Without a word we set out the stones from the bag. They were small mostly, about palm size, and marked with lines across their softly curved female surfaces. We set them in a loose circle, then filled the circle with Annie’s emblems of humanity. In the centre we made a small fire, not of flash powder, but only pieces of paper, newsprint, letters, even junk mail and old receipts or cancelled cheques, all of it mixed with flowers and weeds plucked from Miracle Park. With the fire some of the weight lifted off me.
I took out a silver jar from the bottom of the bag. The jar held dirt, and as I held it up I thought I could see Alison smile underneath her mud mask. The two of us had made this particular relic together, travelling out to the Forbidden Beach for sand, then setting it out on the floor of my apartment where we squatted down and pissed on it until we could form a brown paste.
Alison and I clapped our hands together to shake off some of the mud. It was the first time either of us had made a sound and I found myself crying at the discovery that sound was still possible, even without the Song of the Blessed. The next part was the hardest, for it meant tempting ourselves with a leap into Tunnel Light’s world. We each reached into the jar with our left hands, while unbuttoning each other’s blouses with our right.
We smeared the paste on each other’s breasts, bellies, thighs and finally genitals. Instead of the hurricane I’d feared, a softness settled over us. “I love you,” I said, and Alison repeated it back at me, as the heated mud on our faces cracked and fell in chunks onto the edge of the fire. We reached across for each other’s hands, rocking on our heels slightly, hearing the distant hum of terror and desire.
“Ready?” Alison said.
“I hope so.”
For the past two days, while Alison had battled on the telephone, I had studied how to do a Summoning—the formulas, the props, the preparations. In the end, I had had to discard everything. Whoever had done the original research and development, it all belonged now to the SDA. Finally, I remembered Adrienne Birth-of-Beauty’s Fifteenth Proposition—“There are no rules except discovery. There is no tradition except invention.”
I stripped off what remained of my clothes. “Paint me?” I said. Alison spat into the ashes from the fire, then scooped up a small amount to mix into the paste with more spit. She held up her left forefinger and kissed it, looking at me as we both remembered how that finger had lifted my whole body early in the morning, before she’d gotten back on the phones and I’d left her to go to the disaster.
Eyes closed, I let her paint an enactment face on me, the lines and concentric circles a summary of both our lives—initiation markings, family scar designs we’d shown each other, words of power from our deep journeys, images from the screen we’d painted on our first night together. When she’d finished, I reached into my bag for the amulet the SDA had given me as well as a small glass pot containing dried menstrual blood from my first period. With Annie’s hammer I smashed the amulet, then used the pieces to form a small circle inside the larger one. Using the powdered blood my left middle finger drew two stick figures, one outside the outer circle, the other in the centre, with a line running between them.
When we’d planned the Summoning, Alison and I had spent half an hour deciding what designation we should use for our target. What name would reach her? Finally, Alison convinced me that for a Bright Being, as for humanity, reality consisted of whatever identity she was inhabiting right now.
My finger wrote Margaret Tunnel Light’s name in menstrual blood and spit. “Blessed Being,” I said, “we ask your entry into this circle of our lives. We thank you now and forever for all the gifts you have given us and will give us.” I said it three times.
There was nothing else to do. If I’d brought flash powder I could have rounded off the ceremonial part, but we’d decided to stay with our own tools. And so we waited, just squatting, while I thought of the people below, of Paul, of Alison and me.
Behind me an elevator door opened. When I turned around Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23 was walking towards me.
“It’s time,” she said. “You understand. I’m pleased that you have called me.” The elevator door behind her stayed open.
I stood up. “No,” I said. “We understand that what you are doing must stop.”
She smiled, allowing her teeth to flare for an instant, overwhelming the fluorescent lights of the hallway. “Do you think you can compel me?” she asked. “With your Summoning?” I said nothing. “I came to show you,” Margaret Tunnel Light said. “To show you how much I respect you and love you.”
“You have to stop,” I told her. “I know you want to give us something. And you think it’s good for us. But we can’t—we’re not ready for it.”
She ignored me. “I have let you taste the food I can give you. The two of you together. And I have let you go so that you will know that I love you and will never harm you.”
“You just don’t understand what you’re doing to them. Or why. You’ve been tricked. Used by human beings who don’t care about anything except destroying Alexander Timmerman.”
“I’ve told you before,” she said. “Human schemes do not interest me. But I will never harm Alexander.”