But the truth was as banal and everyday as the headlines of the Washington Post and the endless parade of silver-haired men frequenting new restaurants in the corridor between K Street and Georgetown, lobbyists and lawmakers trailing in their wake like remoras. And like everyone else I knew in the city, I just got used to it. My life never stopped, I had a few casual friends and occasionally lovers, and through it all I was lucky enough to have a fairly decent job and a nice place to live.
But I knew that my heart had gone to sleep at the Divine. When it woke nearly two decades later, I started to emerge from Ignoreland, just like everybody else. It was going to take a teenage riot to get me out of bed, but that’s just what I got.
CHAPTER 11
Ancient Voices
TO REACH THE ANTHROPOLOGY Department, you ascended a series of grand curving marble staircases, up through Plant Life and Vertebrates and Paleontology, past the enclaves of Man and the Higher Mammals, skirting the secret temples of Egyptology and the Ancient World and stopping short of Gems and Minerals and the breeding cells for the Living Coral Reef and the Insect Zoo. Each marble step held a shallow depression worn into the stone by more than a century of thoughtful treading by scientists and receptionists and cleaning personnel. Slender grooves showed where hundreds of fingers had absently traced the edge of the marble banisters; if you knew where to look you could see a faint rusty stain, like the shadow of a raven’s wing, that marked the exact spot where Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope had grappled during an argument concerning the use of the name Titanosaurus for an immense herbivore. The steps to Calvary or Mount Olympus could not have been more resonant with ancient secret power than those of the Museum of Natural History.
My office was on the south side of the building, overlooking the Mall. Each morning I walked down the long dim corridor, past Invertebrates and Arthropods and Ungulates (which had migrated here because of lack of space in Mammals), the Department of Worms (where department chief Vic Danhke had a sign on his door that read HEAD WORM), and so into the Department of Anthropology. The entire floor had a faint rainy scent, punctuated by occasional bursts of formaldehyde and the woodsy odor of the beetles Molly Merino used to clean the occasional shipment of tapir or wildebeest pelts. There were boxes and cartons and shelves everywhere, spiring up into the dark recesses of the ceiling, lit by dangling tubes of fluorescent lights and the occasional blinding nova of a halogen lamp trained upon a fragile human femur or mummy restoration-in-progress. Here and there the pale green light of a computer monitor glowed in the darkness, or you might glimpse the flickering opalescent lozenge of a laptop exiled with its curator to some dank corner.
Nothing looked as though it had been cleaned since at least the Bicentennial. An overzealous expedition by the building’s custodial crew had once resulted in the loss of a pipe used by the Yanomano to blow psychoactive residue into each other’s nostrils. Barry Hornick claimed his work on the Yanomano diorama was set back three weeks, and the entire South American Peoples division traced the late opening of their new gallery to this same housekeeping error. Since then, cleaning was done sporadically if at all. A rich yellowing patina covered everything, composed of bone dust and pollen and beeswax, varnish and plaster of Paris and the odorous cabbagey residue from the kim chee Robert Dvorkin bought at a little Korean place in Alexandria and ate every day for lunch. A fine silvery net of webs from the Insect Zoo’s runaway golden orb weavers hung from the rafters and kept the cockroach and silverfish population at bay. In the summer most office doors remained shut, not out of any burning need for privacy but because that was the only way to retain some slight breath of cool air from the museum’s balky central a/c system. The closed doors formed a kind of informal gallery of Gary Larson cartoons clipped from the Post, along with amusing postcards from colleagues in distant places (HAVING a GREAT TIME in CAIRO DIGGING UP some OLD FRIENDS! CHANUKAH GREETINGS from OLDUVAI GORGE!) and the occasional announcement of an honorary degree or new publication in Antiquities. In the fall, the doors flew open again so that the heat blasting from the museum’s ancient furnaces could find its way into cubbyholes full of carven masks and heaps of moldering newspapers and damp papier-mâché replicas of Breton menhirs.
In contrast to all this nearly Victorian splendor and decay, my office was compact and bright and sterile as a hypodermic needle. A sleek steel display case held video monitors and television sets and the assorted VCRs and incidental equipment necessary for running the archival videodisc system. A network of multicolored cables connected these to computers and still more monitors and CD ROMs on my desk. The desk itself was a battered wooden contraption tunneled with pigeonholes and drawers in varying states of disorder. It looked as uncomfortable with its glittering satellites as a dowager aunt with her skinhead niece, but I liked it. It had been my first desk at the museum, and had traveled with me from my first little cubicle next to the Department of Worms to what would probably be its final home here. My window had an unobstructed view of the brick turrets of the Castle across the Mall. On sunny days the ghostly sound of calliope music echoed up from the ancient carousel outside the Arts and Industries Building, and sometimes stray balloons tapped plaintively against the glass before drifting off to float above the Tidal Basin and the Pentagon.
After so many years, my job had become more of a PR position than anything else. New technicians handled the eternal sorting and cleaning and labeling of photos in the ever-expanding Larkin Collection. None of the actual production was done in-house, and three years earlier the museum had cut a deal with Jack “Jolly” Rogers of Winesap Computers to write, manufacture, and distribute the accompanying software for the system. The videodiscs weren’t exactly best-selling items, but we almost managed to break even. And it was a nice tax write-off for everyone concerned, since the museum, of course, was an educational not-for-profit institution, and good PR for Winesap.
Jack liked me. He’d grown up in Yonkers, dropped out of high school in his junior year to play around with the earliest generations of personal computers, writing accountability programs for the mainframes at ConEd. He’d made his first million while still a teenager. We were the same age, and the yawning rift between our income brackets was bridged by a mutual distaste for Republican politics and a fondness for cheap beer and noisy proto-punk music. Once or twice a year he dropped in on one of his lobbying circuits of Capitol Hill, and we’d sit around my office with a smuggled six-pack of PBR to reminisce about seeing the Ramones and the Cramps in high school gyms and lament the failure of great unknown bands like the Shades (once of Trenton) and D.C.’s own Velvet Monkeys.
“Kids today, they don’t know what it was like.” Jack shook his head, his thinning blond hair slipping from its ponytail. He wore Doc Martens and white painter’s pants and a faded blue T-shirt depicting Officer Joe Bolton and the Three Stooges. “They rip off someone else’s riffs and go on MTV and jump around and—”
He made a rude noise, then consoled himself with a mouthful of chicken vindaloo. It was the last day of June and we were sitting in my office, gazing out the window at the crowds below. That morning, there’d been a Senate hearing, something to do with the Communicopia Bill. Jack had blown in and out of the Senate chambers, making the appropriate noises for C-SPAN and the national news, then ducked over here to check up on things. “Hey, this is pretty good curry, huh?”
I nodded, my eyes watering. “No lie.”
Outside on the Mall a month-long carnival was in progress: the Aditi, the Festival of India, sponsored by the Museum and the Indian government and SOMA Software (publisher of the fabulously successful GEOQUEST! and a division of Winesap Computers, Inc.). For weeks workmen shouting in Hindi and Urdu and English had been constructing stages and booths, staking out tent sites and laying wooden walkways across the trampled yellowing grass. Now most of the Mall, from the old west wing of the National Gallery of Art all the way down to the Museum of American History, had been transformed into an idealized Indian village, like something from
a soundstage for Kim. Gaudy paisley pennants hung from booths selling wooden toys and puri, lime pickle and vegetable samosas and edible effigies of Durga with spun sugar skulls dangling from her neck. From a small tent echoed the eerie wavering cry of a bone flute, along with the shrill voices of children shouting in Hindi as they practiced their tumbling, clambering onto each other’s backs to form pyramids three- or four-high, then leaping off with outflung arms, graceful as flying squirrels. Even from here I could smell frying ghee and the overly sweet scents of jasmine incense and sandalwood, and hear an occasional burst of raga music from one of the wooden platform stages in front of the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden.
“Quite a little show you got on down there.” Jack stood and crossed to the window, holding his paper plate and spooning yellow rice into his mouth. “We should be drinking Pink Pelican beer. You ever had that, Sweeney? It’s all I drank when I was in Bombay last year, trying to get visas for those fire-eaters I told you about. Brewed from water from the sacred Ganges. Pink Pelican.” He sighed and shook his head. “Great stuff.”
“How long will you be in town, Jack?”
“I’ve got a four o’clock this afternoon from Dulles. Shareholders meeting in Bel Air tomorrow. Hey, any of those things get C-SPAN?” He pointed at the bank of video monitors, spilling sauce on his T-shirt. “I wanna see if I’m on yet.”
I put down my plate and slid my chair over to the steel display case. “Sure. Hang on—
I turned on the newest monitor we had, a thirty-two-inch HDRTV (Jack told me he had a two-inch Sony SuperHDR in his Range Rover). I fiddled with the remote, scanning through dozens of channels until I found the right one.
“Live Coverage of the House Subcommittee Hearings on Census Statistics and Postal Personnel,” read Jack in disgust. “They preempted me for that?”
“Maybe you were on live. Or maybe they’re saving it for tonight—”
“Nah. They bumped me, that’s all. Screw ’em. I’ll have Maggie Gibson loose her Stinkbomb virus on their system. Ever hear of that one? Replaces all your data with the screenplay of Ishtar.”
He cackled, then snatched the remote from my hand. “Give me that, let’s see what else is on—”
Random images flickered across the screen: Bugs Bunny, “Bonanza,” soaps, “Reading Rainbow,” vintage PeeWee, Windex, the Stephen King Network, what looked like a live broadcast of an assassination attempt on the president but turned out to be the new Slush video, Pepsi, Astroboy, Hoji Fries. It was impossible to tell what you were supposed to buy and what you were supposed to actually watch—Brando, Datsun, IBM—Jack made another rude sound—Donahue, McDonald’s, “Mormon Matters,” Sally, Oprah, Geraldo, Angelica—
Angelica?
“Stop!” I shouted. The screen froze on “This Old House.”
“Here in Lubec, Maine,” Bob Vila was saying as he tapped a coil of glittering blue foil, “you need an R-value of + 47 to provide even the most basic insulation—”
“This?” said Jack in disbelief.
“No! Go back—wherever you were a second ago—no, slow it down, I can’t—There! That’s it, stop!”
“Opal Purlstein?” Jack was incredulous. “You watch Opal Purlstein?”
On the screen, talk show hostess Opal Purlstein was curled at one end of her cozy aubergine couch, staring raptly at this afternoon’s guest.
“…when you think of it, it’s really just a return to the natural world order. In the grand scheme of things, the last few thousand years of history—well, let’s be overly generous, and say the last ten thousand years—why, in geologic time, that’s nothing! Just a blip—”
Opal nodded earnestly. At the other end of the couch, a stunning bronze-haired woman in an elegant crimson sheath extended her hand, delicately spreading her fingers as though they were the petals of some rare desert flower.
“—pfff! That’s all,” the woman said in a lilting voice. She looked as out of place on Opal’s show as Brooke Astor at McDonald’s. “That’s what our civilization is worth.”
Opal nodded, wide-eyed, and the audience burst into applause. On the couch the bronze-haired woman smiled demurely. Behind her stood two raven-haired Amazons, easily topping six feet, their arms crossed on their chests. They were lean and muscular and lethal as a pair of cheetahs, and stared with oblique black eyes into the camera. Both wore sleeveless black tank tops; silver armillas shaped like serpents coiled around their biceps. Their hair was cropped short as a boxer’s, but the effect wasn’t butch so much as purely androgynous: their faces were too serene, their eyes as carefully made up as Angelica’s own. The girl on the left looked very young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her face for all its grim expression surprisingly childlike. Her partner had a tattoo of a crescent moon on her cheek.
“It is very important to understand this,” the bronze-haired woman said in a low, urgent voice. From the audience came murmurs and scattered clapping. “We are only trying to reclaim what originally belonged to us. We are only trying to bring back the world that was ours, the world that is ours.”
The audience roared. Opal opened her mouth, closed it again, and nodded. The bronze-haired woman turned so that she directly faced the camera, her eyes huge, almost imploring. Then she smiled, lifting her hands slightly to acknowledge the applause. From her ears dangled two delicate silver crescents; on the breast of her ruby sheath lay another silver crescent, dazzlingly bright where the spotlights struck it. Her hair was still long and thick and curling, its ruddy highlights silvered here and there as though touched with ice. A faint web of lines radiated from the corners of her eyes, and there were laugh lines around her mouth, as delicate as though drawn with a sumi brush. She didn’t look as Hasel Bright had described her in his letter: still a girl, young as when we had last seen her at the Orphic Lodge. But her eyes were the same as ever, that unnaturally brilliant emerald, and her smile could melt enough ice caps to cause major coastal flooding along the entire Eastern seaboard.
Letters flashed across the bottom of the screen.
ANGELICA FURIANO, AUTHOR.
“But I know her!” I leaned forward to stab at the screen. For a moment my finger pinned her there, then the station cut to a commercial. “That’s Angelica!”
Jack took another bite of chicken vindaloo and nodded. “Yeah, I know her. She was at my birthday party—did I tell you Erica threw a surprise party for me at Morton’s last year? A bunch of people came, like big Hollywood types. Tom Hanks, that woman with the hair. I mean, Erica knew everyone. Did you know Erica?” He shook his head remorsefully. “Kind of a kook, but boy, she had great legs. We’re not together anymore.”
“No, I mean I really know Angelica—we were at the Divine together, she was my best friend!”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “No kidding?”
“Really! She was—well, if you met her, you know what she’s like. We were best friends, before—well, before I left. I lost touch with her, I haven’t heard from her in, jeez, it must be nineteen or twenty years now.”
“I thought she said she went to some school in Italy, Rome or Florence or something.”
“That was later—I met her here, at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. We were both anthropology majors.” I continued to stare at the TV, shaking my head. “I can’t believe it—”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, that would be her—she was talking about some place she was at, in Sardinia or Sicily or somewhere like that, she had a villa there that was built above some tomb that’s three thousand years old. She married an Italian duke, Rinaldo somebody, Rinaldo Furiano, I guess, Erica knew him because he used to help produce Fellini’s early stuff and Erica is a very big Fellini fan. But he died, he was a lot older than she is. She’s very big on the West Coast. Your friend, I mean.” He pointed at the television with his fork.
“Big? Big for what?”
He shrugged. “Like this cult or something. Well, no, not a cult—she’s got this sort of self-help group, I guess it is. Only it
’s religious, kind of crackpot stuff but women out there just go crazy for it. Whoo-whoo at the moon, raise your consciousness, all that kind of shit. Plus she’s written all these books. Like what’s-her-name with the legs, you know. Shirley MacLaine.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No—she’s really popular. I think it’s a boatload of crap, all this New Age stuff. But Erica was totally into it, that’s how come she invited her to my surprise party. Geena Davis was there. Did I tell you I met Geena Davis? That girl could eat apples off the top of my head.”
The screen cut back to Opal and her guest.
“Let’s see what the audience has to say,” Opal announced. She stood and marched into the rows of seats, waving her cordless mike like it was a censer. On the couch Angelica uncurled her legs and smiled beguilingly at the camera. Behind her the two tall black-haired women shifted. Their arms rippled with muscle, smooth and powerful as anacondas. The one with the moon tattoo smiled slightly, her thin mouth opening to flash very white teeth.
“Who are they?”
“Oh, those are her bodyguards—”
“Bodyguards?”
Jack laughed. “Yeah, her Amazons, she calls ’em. Cloud and Kendra. They’re kickboxers. They were at the party too—”
“Angelica needs bodyguards?”
“Oh, sure,” said Jack. “She gets death threats all the time. Guys are always trying to jump her bones or else trying to cut her up. I gather her views are a little extreme—well, here, listen—”
“My name is Amanda Jeffries, from Port Lavaca, Texas,” a round-faced, heavyset woman was saying. “I was married for seventeen years to a man—”
Waking the Moon Page 30
