Kate stopped as Cara pulled up alongside her. They looked at each other, then Kate said, “Don’t call me kid.”
Cara laughed. “Whatever you say.”
“Did she send you after me? Was she worried I’d get sick?”
“Mother’s always looking out for you. Don’t you know that?”
“Yes. I’m sure she is.” Kate began walking again.
Rolling alongside her, Cara said, “Want a lift?”
“No, thanks.”
They continued that way down the quiet street for nearly a minute before Cara said, “She misses you.”
“She knows where to find me. She knows where to find everybody.”
“Yeah, of course. But c’mon, Kate, she’s not going to push herself on you.”
“She pushes herself on everybody else, why not me?”
“Mother doesn’t interfere with people. She does her job. And if she didn’t, you couldn’t do yours.”
“Believe me,” Kate said, “I know that very well. I might have to find some honest work.”
“Is that what this is about? No one’s forcing you to do what you do. If you resent it so much, do something else.”
Kate stopped. Sighing, she turned to look at Cara, so young and strong, so exactly the same as the very first time Kate ever saw her. “I don’t resent my work,” she said. “I don’t even mind that she handed it to me as a gift. I really don’t. I think I’ve made something—something that helps people. And maybe the core of it came from her, but it’s still me.”
“Then what the hell is wrong? She loves you.”
Kate sighed again. To be loved by Mother Night. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”
They stayed that way for a while, then Cara said, “You sure I can’t give you a ride?” Kate nodded. Gently, Cara urged the black beast down the street. Watching it, Kate thought of all the times she’d ridden on it as a child, holding on to Cara’s waist, tracing the letters on the back of the jacket, even falling asleep with her face pressed against the leather.
She said softly, “Cara?” The motorcycle turned sideways and stopped. Kate thought how Laurie would never have heard her at that distance. When Cara turned to look at her, Kate said, “Will you give her a message for me? Thank her. For Alice Harmon.” Cara nodded. Tears began to form around the edge of Kate’s eyes. A sharp, cold breeze dispelled them. “Cara?” she said again. “Can I still have that ride?”
The performance began with slides and sound effects. Double projectors allowed the pictures to merge into each other, overlapping while the sounds rose and fell. First came the images of death, the decayed bodies, the gunshot victims, the ethereal old people and the children burning in napalm. A mixture of terror and beauty accompanied by a mix of voices, some shouting or screaming, some whispering, all but isolated phrases incomprehensible. Underneath it all, barely noticeable, ran the deep bass of a heartbeat (not a human heart; after weeks of experimentation, Kate had found that an elephant heart worked best). Slowly the pictures and the sounds began to change. The slides became darker, more abstract, until the bodies and blood merged into an image of a tunnel, dark dark red, leading to a pinpoint of light. The sounds moved from human cries to animal howls to wind and the crashing of rocks.
A steady switching of the slides created the illusion of the tunnel reaching toward the audience or, rather, of each watcher flying through the tunnel while the light became larger and brighter. The elephant heart began to thump louder and faster, becoming a boom agitating their bodies. While the tunnel and the light disturbed them, Kate knew they would cling to the idea of light. Virtually every one of them had read the comforting accounts of white light, beloved relatives, and angels reported by those who’d medically died and come back again.
Kate never spoke for the first minutes, preferring to let the agony of the dying crash through the audience’s complacency. Now, as the tunnel neared its end and the heartbeat shook their bodies, Kate spoke into the microphone. “However slowly death approaches, however varied it comes to us, it always arrives the same. In a flash.” The entire room exploded with light—light and a sharp crack like a mountain splitting apart. The light came from the screen, but also from flashbulbs Kate and Eleanor had concealed, at irregular intervals, all about the walls, the ceiling, even under the seats. Though Eleanor had worked on it with her, Kate was sure she heard Eleanor’s voice among the screams.
Now that she had them, she began to treat them more gently. When they could see again, they found the screen moving through images of color and dance—concentric circles pulsing with hundreds of bright dots; masked dancers, part human, part animal, sexual and ferocious; cave walls covered in red handprints; ruined temples shaped in the form of a woman’s body, with huge hips and breasts. The sounds became softer as well—whistling noises, both wind and human; bird songs; very distant sounds that might have been laughter or the shriek of some animal.
Kate began to talk about death. Death comes all at once, she said. It takes us across the boundary between everything we know and everything we do not know. Death is a thief, stealing our souls from our bodies, our very selves from the physical world we accept as reality. Death steals our souls and leaves behind memories. Illusions of love and anger. Simplifications of our lives.
And yet, if death steals us, it does not keep us. As a thief, death is a kind of Robin Hood, recklessly giving away everything it has taken. Death gives us away—to what? With images ranging from classical friezes to multicolored spirals, to a ray of light from the winter sunrise penetrating a stone mound, to a roomful of people on mats talking about their previous lives (the tape played all the voices at once), to children in skull headdresses and flowered necklaces polishing their great-grandparents’ bones before a picnic, Kate catalogued the many claims made for our fate after death. And all of it fantasies, she said. The dreams of the living. We know one thing, and one thing only, about death. Whether we want it or not, it enters our bodies. Lover or rapist, death will fill us and then it will empty us out.
Now, as she began to talk about allowing ourselves intimacy with death, Kate brought up the lights in the room, just enough for the audience to see her as she moved closer to them. Kate had asked Eleanor to seat people on cushions and low benches so that she could squat down with them, using her own posture and voice to suggest a shadow of death’s intimacy.
Though she’d done this set piece more times than she could recall, Kate still sweated and had trouble breathing an hour or so before starting. What if this time it didn’t work? What if she couldn’t crack open their comfort? Couldn’t shock them or pull them out of their world and into hers? And then, a few minutes into it, all her doubts would break apart as she herself followed the trail of the sounds and pictures. When she started this work, she needed to wait for the lights to come up and show her the faces before she would trust that she had them. Now she could feel their bond with her long before she saw it. Soon the questions would come, another kind of closeness. By the time the exercises began the next morning, they would sit down all primed to allow death into the room, into their fears and memories, into their bodies.
But this time as the lights rose, something about the room startled Kate, so that she missed a beat and almost broke the web of concentration holding her and her listeners together. Something—the room looked more crowded. They’d drawn about forty people for the weekend, but as Kate scanned the audience she guessed that another fifteen or so had slipped in during the slide show. She didn’t like that. First of all, Eleanor should have told her if they were opening the lecture, and second, they still should have closed the doors once the actual performance began. The newcomers all stayed in the back, where Kate couldn’t see their faces, something else she didn’t like.
Setting her annoyance into a pocket where she could retrieve it later, she went on speaking. Now she talked about dying stars, how they exploded gloriously, sending out fused molecules and dust which later would form into y
ounger stars and planets, and even living creatures. Like us, she said, all of us, formed from the light of exploding stars.
The newcomers all looked so shabby, she thought. Their clothes didn’t fit right or were torn, they looked like they hadn’t eaten in…Oh God, she realized, the dead. They were all dead. The dead had come to hear her speak.
She did this, Kate thought. She set them up to this. They all just sat there, some with their arms folded, some leaning against the back wall, just sitting there and staring at her.
Kate clenched her fists. Focus, she ordered herself. Concentrate. She realized that some of the living, the non-dead, were looking at her a little oddly. Deliberately, she returned her attention to them. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. What the dead think makes no difference, none. She wasn’t doing this for them. Intimacy with death, Kate thought, belongs to the living.
Much later, Kate was gently kissing Eleanor Hofstra’s shoulder when Eleanor said, “Tell me about your first love.”
Kate moved the kiss down to the top of Eleanor’s breast before she lay back and said, “Do you mean my first sexual partner?”
Eleanor touched a fingertip and then her tongue, briefly, to Kate’s nipple. Kate gasped and Eleanor laughed a little. They’d first lain down two hours ago. “Not sex,” Eleanor said. “Just the first person you loved. The one you had your first crush on.”
“When I was ten,” Kate said, “I spent all my time with a boy named Jimmy. Probably neither of us would have thought of it as a crush, but that’s really what it was. I didn’t want any other friends.”
Eleanor stroked her cheek. “That’s so sweet. Did the two of you, you know, experiment?”
“We tried kissing. I don’t think much else even occurred to us.”
“Funny. I can hardly imagine you with a boy.” Kate raised her eyebrows. Blushing, Eleanor said, “Oh, I don’t mean that you’re so overly butch, or dykey or anything. It’s just—just that you’re so good with a woman. This woman, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Kate said. She stroked Eleanor’s hair, then kissed her eyes. When she leaned back again, she said, “Actually, Jimmy was not your average boy. He wore dresses almost all the time. Our favorite game was dress-up.”
“Wow. Now that’s kinky. What did his parents say about it?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid. They were dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. That’s so sad. What happened to him? Did you keep in touch?”
Kate shook her head. “No. Unfortunately, Jimmy himself died just a couple of years after I met him.”
Eleanor lifted herself up slightly to touch Kate’s cheek. “You poor thing,” she said. “What a shock.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “It was.”
“Do you suppose that’s why you became so involved in death issues? Because you lost your friend Jimmy?”
Kate lay silent for a few minutes. Finally she said, “Maybe. Losing Jimmy—like that—shocked me very deeply.” She rolled onto her side and took Eleanor into her arms.
“Shouldn’t you get some sleep?” Eleanor said. “You’ve got to teach in six hours.”
“This is better than sleep,” Kate said, and began a slow kiss, softly pressing her lips to Eleanor’s mouth. Her fingernails traveled up the inside of Eleanor’s leg.
Two
The Spinning Bed
The summons came through the Godmother Foundation’s managing director, Hilda Mantero. Kate had just finished the Easter Extravaganza, her private term for her annual Spring Festival of mythic death and resurrection. The festival, which had grown to include theater, dance, puppet shows, and all-night performances as well as the original lectures and workshops, always exhausted Kate. Sometimes she traveled afterward, moving anonymously among the living. This year, however, she’d hardly seen her mother, and so she’d gone home and was sitting in the kitchen with Laurie, Louise, and Aggie, Louise’s lover, when Hilda called.
“Do you know who William Reed Evans is?” Hilda asked her.
“Of course. The painter. Willie Reed.”
Hilda laughed. “That’s right. I forgot they called him that. Well, his secretary just called, a man named Jason Haverwell. Evans is very sick. Haverwell tried to tell me what, but of course I stopped him. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with alcohol. The man’s a famous drunk.”
“If it helped him paint The Railroad at Dawn,” Kate said, “it’s worth it.”
There was a pause, and Kate could hear Hilda’s surprise over the phone. “I’m sure you’re right,” Hilda said finally. “Though right now Mr. Evans himself might not agree. They seem to have waited rather long to call you.”
“Don’t they all?”
“Yes, but in this case it really is the last minute. Haverwell says Evans can drop any day now. If you agree, they want to messenger you plane tickets for Friday.”
Kate glanced at her mother. Laurie was studiously looking at Louise and Aggie, but Kate could feel her worry. Phone calls from Hilda always frightened Laurie. Two days, Kate thought. She’d only arrived the day before. She said, “What do you think, Hilda?”
“I think that if you could help Willie Reed it would kick your work up a whole other level. Rich artists get rich by spreading their work in very rich circles. But I also think it could backfire. And I think he sounds like a goner.”
Kate smiled. Despite Hilda’s brilliance as a businesswoman, Kate valued her most for her cynicism. My conscience, Kate called her. She said, “Give me a recommendation.”
“Throw it on me, huh? Okay. If you want to take the gamble, I would go for it. We certainly didn’t make it this far by not taking chances.”
Kate nodded. With all her cynicism, Hilda never doubted Kate’s powers. They rarely spoke about it, and she never asked how, but she never doubted. Kate trusted her more than any living person she knew. “All right,” she said. “Tell him to send the tickets here, to my mother’s house.”
“Got it. Good luck, Kate.”
“Thanks.”
Kate hung up the phone and went over to touch her mother’s shoulder. She could feel the stiffness through the denim blazer. She said, “It looks like I’m going to have to go away for a couple of days. An emergency call. I’m really sorry.”
Laurie reached an arm around Kate’s waist. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s the kind of work you do.” She added, “Anyway, I promised Marcie I’d help her put up bookshelves. She’s moved again.”
Kate nodded. Marcie was one of her mother’s ex-girlfriends. Every couple of years Laurie would meet someone and they would date for a while, maybe go beyond that, and then decide—after six months, a year—that it wasn’t going anywhere and they would just do better as friends. Louise had told Kate once that she was the only one of Laurie’s friends who hadn’t had to serve an apprenticeship. She couldn’t decide, Louise said, if that was an honor or an insult.
“Thanks,” Kate said, and bent down further to put both arms around her mother for a hug. “I’ll come right back. I promise.”
The next afternoon Kate went downtown to a museum that housed a permanent collection of the works of William Reed Evans. From room to room she followed the forty years of his career—the early work, with lumps of black paint smeared over a brown canvas; the so-called Rage paintings, chaotic bursts of color struggling with darkness; the red canvases torn by machine-gun fire from across his studio. These various experiments gave way to the painting that had made him an international celebrity. The Railroad at Dawn occupied an entire wall in a room all by itself. The basic canvas mingled abstract shapes and lumps of paint with partial images that suggested decayed columns in a building, broken benches, train tracks penetrating a room like an act of rape. All of these somehow called forth both an old railroad station and a human body cut open and rotting. Overlaid on this basic image were more definite forms, both actual photographs and faces and scenes painted in photographic realism. Isolated from one another, they each depicted one of the many organized
slaughters that had punctuated Kate’s terrible century. Ovens to cook human beings, dead peasants piled high in a rice field, a burning child. The very center of the canvas contained a small white square, the subject of endless speculations as critics argued for hope, nihilism, peace, horror, madness, salvation…Evans had once told an interviewer (Evans was drunk at the time) that he’d included “that fucking square” to “give the masturbators something to do.”
Kate had seen the painting many times, the first when she was thirteen. Louise, who’d taken her to the museum, had tried to urge her away, but Kate had refused to move. She thought then, and she still thought, that The Railroad at Dawn was the second most terrifying thing she’d ever seen. It also was the most exciting, a fact which disturbed her for weeks until Mark said that we build our lives on terror, so what could possibly touch us more deeply?
On this day before meeting the painter himself (or what was left of him), Kate spent only ten minutes looking at the famous work. A class had assembled around it, and the teacher’s glib analysis annoyed her. Besides, she wanted to see the later pieces. In the past fifteen years, Evans had shocked his followers by painting literal scenes from children’s stories. Though many critics at first dismissed them as “illustrations,” the Familiars, as Evans called them, emerged as a major force in his work. With adults drawn as squat and ugly, and dark trees that groped at children “like a blind child molester” (as one critic put it), the paintings portrayed Evans’s horror at both history and human desire. Kate stayed longest by a painting of a deformed woman pushing a child at an oven that stood all alone in a dark woods. Unlike the gnarled quality of the characters and the trees, the oven looked factory tooled of smooth iron. Glimpses of barbed wire among the trees turned the woods into a camp. A yellow star lit up the child’s arm.
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