by Laurie Penny
Why do we do this? Why do we keep on picking up the phone?
Because religion is a necessary drug. It takes the pain away, for a while. A little candle to nurse in the chest cavity against the darkness. Except some of them burn too fiercely, and it eats them from within.
Only love comes close. Only love.
I loved a mad nun once, in Castile. He had come to the convent the way he was born, with a woman’s body, until he was bricked up in the wall of a convent, where he starved away his female aspect in secret. The nuns never found out. Only I saw him as he truly was, as a man entire.
He never left that cell. He was there to burn hard in solitude. The nuns had a system for this, and left a small opening at the bottom of the wall where they could push in water, ink, and dry black bread, which my lover fed to the birds.
He prayed and fasted on his knees until the bricks sliced through to the raw bone. He shaved his head and covered the walls with poetry.
I was all over it.
He did not seem at all surprised to see me when I appeared in his cell. I took the form of a woman at first, but I soon realized my mistake, and put on a man’s skin, tanned deeply from the sun my lover had not seen for years. I held his birdlike head in my hands, feeling the contours of his skull. His mouth opened and I fed him crumbs of passion.
He drew me a hundred times over. He called me the body of Christ, but wouldn’t let me fuck him. Instead I pushed into him with my fingers, reached deep into his cunt and beckoned, beckoned, as if I could coax him out to walk with me through the wall and into the world of light.
I thought I could keep him alive with my love.
His flesh withered and clung to the bones, and eventually those gave out, too, and he wasted further until all that was left was the heart, beating wildly on the floor of the cell, and a voice raised in fervor. He craved that holy passion so hard that it cannibalized him.
Wants versus needs.
I walked out through the wall and mourned for a century. Then I went back to work.
* * *
When I return to the cubicle, Gremory is spinning around to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in his desk chair. He gives me a thumbs-up.
Ten minutes to go before the end of the shift. This is the time when you hope to—well, you just hope that nobody calls with a problem you might actually be able to solve. So of course the line flashes.
“Hello, you’ve come through to the heavenly host, how can I help you today?”
“I’m trying to find my way to heaven.”
I appreciate directness at the end of the day. There’s an answer for this in the manual, filed under “Convenient Fictions.”
“That’s great,” I say. “You’ve come to the right place. The path to heaven is hard, but it starts within all of us. May I take your name, sir?”
“Benjamin— Sorry, is this the right number?”
The client’s voice is young, male, run through with booze and the lightest scent of self-loathing.
“You did say you were interested in getting to heaven, sir?”
“Yes, that’s right. I’ve been looking for it for an hour now.”
“Well, it’s wonderful that you’re making an effort, sir. Unfortunately, it usually takes longer than an hour to find one’s way to heaven. Many people spend entire lifetimes and more in the search.”
“It says on Google Maps that it’s just off Charing Cross Road.”
“I assure you, sir,” I say, “heaven cannot be accessed from the Charing Cross Road. May I ask how you came to God in the first place?”
“I’m not religious. I’m looking for Heaven. I’ve got a sound test there in twenty minutes. Look, I’m sorry, I really think I’ve got the wrong number. Sorry for wasting your time.”
“No, wait,” I say, because a thought has occurred to me. “Let me put you on hold for a second.”
I slam on the mute button and whisper across the cubicle at Gremory, “Is there a bar or a club called Heaven somewhere in London?”
Grem nods. “Oh, another one of those. I’ve got the address written down somewhere.”
He slides a Post-it across the desk. I unmute the caller.
“Thank you for holding, sir. You want to turn off down Villiers Street, toward the river, and it’s under the arches on your right.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Dead air.
“Well, uh,” says Benjamin, “I’m having trouble with this song I’m writing. It’s about love. Love and death. And anger. Love and death and anger.”
I sit up straight in my chair.
“Would you like to talk about it?” I say. “We could talk about it for a while.”
“It’s just that I’m afraid all the time,” he says, and his voice has receded to a trembling note, a quaver. “I’m afraid of the songs. I’m afraid of the songs I could make, and I’m afraid of not making them. It’s stupid.”
A meaty thud. He’s smashed his head against something, on purpose.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Please don’t do that. I can help.”
“Who are you?” asks Benjamin.
I can hear his heart, the broken-bird flutter of it. His breath on the line.
I have had so many names.
“I’m listening,” I say. “I’m listening.”
* * *
We’re not supposed to Worldwalk during the working week, so Gremory and I hang out on top of Centre Point, the dirty-white 1960s monstrosity that squats mantislike above Tottenham Court Road Tube Station.
“Best view in London,” says Gremory. “Mainly because it’s the only place you can’t see Centre Point. You want some of this?”
He’s sucking on a finger-joint stub of spliff, exhaling thick smoke that sweetens the traffic fumes rising from the street.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Seriously,” he says, “I’m not trying to pressure you, but I really think it’d be good for you to smoke this stuff occasionally. Chill you out a bit.”
“Really, I’m good with just coffee.” I love coffee. I particularly like it the way the fashion kids make it, in a goblet shaped like a breast with a picture of a heart frothed on top. I love all that stuff.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” says Gremory. He takes another deep draw and closes his eyes. “Of all the things I’m going to miss when they’re gone, I think a beer and a spliff round the back of a decent bar is right up there.”
Gremory once laid waste to an entire city-state in Sumer and made its rivers flow with gore. He’s calmed down a bit now, and I think he’s happier for it. I’m envious.
The last of the sun is dipping its sucked-sherbet into the sugary sky over Oxford Street. We watch it disappear.
“Mastodon are playing in Brixton tonight,” says Gremory, after a while. “You want to come?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I say. “I think I’ll head on back upstairs.”
“See, you say that, my friend,” says Grem, tapping out his spliff and tucking the end in the pocket of his denim jacket, “but you know and I know that you’re going to wait till I’m gone, then get all hopped up on Dexedrine and find something long-haired and broken to fuck you into oblivion.”
I don’t say anything. We all have our demons. Mine just knows me a bit too well.
“Hey,” he says, “no judge. Everyone’s got their poison. See you tomorrow. Stay cool.”
He flips me the two-horned finger salute and jumps off the roof, turning into a pigeon as he falls. Then he flaps away toward Brixton.
As soon as he’s gone, I go straight to Heaven.
* * *
Somewhere around the middle of the eighteenth century, I decided I should give up the tragic poets and doomed revolutionaries and, if I couldn’t abstain completely, at least settle down with someone relatively normal.
And so I married a country pastor.
He was surprised when I showed up in his study w
ith my shining eyes, naked as the day I was never born.
I thought we would at least have some shared interests. But he was one of those men of faith who looks away from the altar when he speaks his sermons, avoiding the eyes of an unwelcome houseguest.
We were married in the springtime. He preferred me in my women’s weeds, white and perfect as the shepherdesses in the pastoral paintings he would not allow in the house. He was good to me, in his way. He was gentle, and never beat me.
He would make love to me gingerly between his sheets, thrusting blindly in the dark, trying to touch as little of my body as possible. He said that that was God’s way. I tried to tell him that the God I knew was fire and passion and cared not at all about how humans choose to fuck.
In the mornings I would boil him a single egg and watch him crack the shell with his short nails, not damaging the hard white jelly at all, leaving a pure and perfect oval so sinless that he sometimes couldn’t bear to bite into it.
I thought it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t in love with him.
It did.
One night I came to him in my gown. So many layers in those days, especially in bed. I made my husband lie on top of the coverlet and lit the oil lamp.
Then I took everything off. Every stitch. He watched me while I stepped out of my gown, my night stays, dirty-white lace dropping to the floor. The bloomers; the ribbons in my hair.
Then I kept going. I took off my skin and hung it on a nail behind the door. I peeled away layers of flesh and bone until I stood there in my true form, burning and spinning, the rush in my ears so fierce I could hardly hear my husband scream.
Then I left him.
I hear he ended in a madhouse.
There are worse places.
* * *
You can’t just walk into Heaven. There’s a dress code, and a door charge, too, unless you’re on the guest list. We’re not allowed to handle money, so I slip into something that’ll let me walk straight in.
Black jeans. Black lipstick. Black heels. A tight black mesh top. Snow-white hair dipped in eggshell blue. Smooth skin, a whisper of something Asian in the eyes. Soft fat layered in the right places over rigid muscle.
God, I look fantastic.
The girl taking tickets has a pair of angel wings tattooed on her back. I tell her I’m with the band.
She looks me up and down and nods me in.
Inside Heaven, it’s all sweat and warm beer and the chill trails of cigarette smoke from the nicotine pen outside. There’s static in the air. The roadies have just finished setting up.
I get someone to buy me a Diet Coke at the bar, then lurk at the back, looking mysterious, while dying-robot music stutters frantic over a slow bass heartbeat. I like it.
I’m not fallen. I never fell. I’m just slumming it.
In the twenty minutes before the band, I send three creeps careening for the exit, muttering prayers they haven’t spoken since childhood.
Then the band comes on. Just a drummer, a keyboardist in a tight silver skirt, and him.
His eyes are large and blue and sad. His cheekbones were carved in marble by a crazed sculptor to drive women mad.
But I am not a woman. I’m something else.
A static whine.
Then it starts.
The words are all there, love and death and rage and the riot of fighting through fear to something more, something wholly human. But Benjamin sings like one of us. All ice and holy fire.
The crowd goes wild.
I wait for him in the alley after the show. When he sees me, he stops dead, his long coat falling around his shoulders.
I try to think of something profound to say.
“You were great,” I tell him, looking at my feet. The heels are hurting me. I danced all night.
“I know you from somewhere,” he says. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
He’s high on adrenaline, and drunk.
But not too drunk, not yet.
I smile, and hold out my hands.
* * *
I wake up on a dirty mattress somewhere on Caledonian Road. A train is rattling overhead. Pigeons vomiting in the walls. The smell of cheap coffee, bittersweet and black.
Benjamin is already up, already half-dressed. In the dawn light, his naked torso is smooth and translucent-pale, dusted with freckles. Eleven blond hairs sprout from his chest. I counted them all last night.
I’m going to count every freckle. Every scar. I’m going to number his days and open his heart and drink his passion and his pain. I’m going to tell him all the names of the stars so he can write them down in a song.
Benjamin places a mug of coffee in front of me and stares.
“I remember you now,” he says.
I sip my coffee and shake my head. “You must be thinking of someone else.”
“I do,” he says. “I remember. I called you. It was a mistake.”
My mouth is dry. “People call all the time,” I say. “It’s what people do.”
“No,” he says. “I mean, this was a mistake. I had a nice time. A really nice time. But I can’t give you what you want.”
He’s staring out the window at the fist of traffic groaning down the road toward Camden.
“You don’t want me to stay?”
He looks at me, right through my skin.
“I want you to stay,” he says, “but I need you to leave.”
Benjamin gives me twenty pounds for a taxi. I get out at Angel Station and stop at a pay phone which hasn’t been operational in years. I pick up the receiver and call the only number I know.
“Your prayer will be answered by the next available operative. Please note that we cannot take requests for miracles over the phone. Your orisons may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.”
“Hello, my name is Legion, how can I help you this morning?”
“Grem,” I say, “it’s me.”
“Where the fuck have you been?” Grem hisses down the line. Demons can really hiss. “You’re three hours late. Supervisor’s freaking out. Are you even coming in?”
“I—” I swallow hard. “I don’t think so. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow either. I don’t think I can do the job anymore.”
“Mate,” he says, “what happened? Are you okay?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, and my voice is thick and strange. “I don’t think I’ve been okay for a very long time.”
“Hold on,” says Grem.
I hold the line. I listen to the receiver. Dead air.
“Right,” says Grem, “You stay right where you are. I’m coming down to get you. Took the afternoon off. Family emergency. Want to go and get baked on Hampstead Heath?”
“Yeah,” I say, sniffing. “Yeah, I’d like that. Thanks, Grem.”
“Or we can hang out by the river or something. Whatever you want.”
“That sounds good, too.”
“Okay. Right. Get yourself a fancy coffee or something. Stay cool, okay? See you soon.”
Grem cuts the call.
I take a deep breath. My clothes are still sticky with last night’s sweat. It’ll wash away. Sex. Sweat. Hair. Skin. Wants versus needs. It all washes away.
I go into the coffee shop on the corner of Upper Street and order a latte from a white girl with an angular haircut and a tattoo that says “Made in China.”
The Number Of The Beast is playing on the speakers.
Grem’s right. It really is quite relaxing.
About the Author
Laurie Penny is a contributing editor and columnist for the New Statesman and a frequent writer on social justice, pop culture, gender issues, and digital politics for the Guardian, the New Inquiry, Salon, the Nation, Vice, the New York Times, and many other publications. Her blog Penny Red was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2010. In 2012, Britain’s Tatler magazine described as one of the top “100 people who matter.” Her most recent nonfiction book is Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2014). You can s
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Laurie Penny
Art copyright © 2016 by Yuko Shimizu
