Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (3 page)

Here, many of the large sculptures were abstract, depicting ideas and emotions rather
than trying to look like copies of objects in the real world.  Some of them were low,
dark masses of granite, reminding her of the enormous graveyard behind Seth’s house
in Fallen Oak.  Others looked like colorful totem poles or twisted metals reaching
toward the sky.  In the galleries of Paris, Jenny had seen sculptures that included
all kinds of materials and found objects, and sometimes unusual lighting arrangements
or glowing images and words cast from a projector or television screen, multidimensional
art.

Jenny was getting ideas for new kinds of sculptures, things that would express the
love, guilt, and horror inside her.

Seth sidled up next to Jenny and took her silk-gloved hand nervously.  It was an odd
move for him.  They’d been intimate too long for him to be so uncomfortable approaching
her.

“Look,” he whispered.

Jenny followed his eyes to a tiered, sunken semicircle of concrete right on the river,
which offered three levels of seating.  Teenagers were using it to practice leaps
with their skateboards.  Two of them, a boy and girl, sat apart from the others, much
more interested in kissing than in streets sports.

“How old do you bet they are?” Seth whispered.

“Sixteen, seventeen.” Jenny shrugged. “Just kids.”

“We were kids like that, a long time ago.”

“Now we’ve reached the ancient age of twenty,” Jenny said. “Better make our reservations
at the nursing home.”

“I was thinking...” He squeezed her hand tight, which worried her a little. “Maybe
we should get married, Jenny.”

His unexpected words were like an electric shock to her heart.  She looked at him
in surprise, but finally she laughed. “Seth!  We can’t get married.”

“Why not?”

“For one,  people who are officially dead don’t usually have weddings,” Jenny pointed
out.

“That could be our theme.  A zombie wedding, Day of the Dead stuff everywhere...”

“Now you sound like Alexander.” Jenny heard herself say it, but immediately regretted
it.  Seth’s face hardened.

“Don’t ever say that.”

“I just meant, that was his decorating scheme...”

“Don’t ever say ‘Alexander’ to me.”

“What if I’m talking about Alexander the Great?  Or Alexandre Dumas?” Jenny tried
a smile to lighten things up.

“I ask you to marry me and you immediately mention him?  You don’t want to get married?”

“We can’t, Seth.  I mean, if we did that, we might as well send an invitation to the
Department of Homeland Security.”

“I’m not stupid, I know we couldn’t tell anyone.  It wouldn’t be that kind of wedding.”

“What kind would it be?  Our fake identities getting married?”  Jenny’s passport claimed
she was from Alsace.  Since nobody believed Seth could pass as French, he carried
a Canadian passport instead.

“I just think we should,” Seth said. “I wasn’t thinking about paperwork or anything.”

“It’s sweet of you, Seth.  The bond we have is so much more than marriage, though,
isn’t it?  Lifetime after lifetime, we can be together.  Even death won’t do us part. 
We don’t need some piece of paper from other people acknowledging that.”

“I’m not thinking about ‘lifetime after lifetime,’” Seth replied. “I don’t have all
these tons of crazy past-life memories like you.  For me, it’s just this life and
who we are today.”

“That’s all that matters, Seth.” She embraced him, resting her cheek against his warm
chest and looking up at him. “But we can’t have that normal life, with marriage. 
Or children.”

“Children?  Why not?”

Jenny felt like she’d been slapped.  She couldn’t believe he was even asking.  He
didn’t have all the past-life memories she did, but this one should have been obvious. 
She felt herself crumple as she answered the question.

“Because I can’t.  The pox.  The baby will miscarry, or it will die on the way out...just
like I killed my own mother, on the way out.  The babies are never immune.” In her
mind, a collection of extremely painful past-life memories sprung up, and she shoved
them back.  She felt heartsick. “Seth, you’re lucky you don’t remember much before
this lifetime.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I should have known.  I really
haven’t thought about kids one way or the other, so—”

“There’s only one way to think about them.  We can’t, ever.”

Seth took this in, looking out at the river again.  Jenny could see a mix of disappointment
and confusion on his face.

“That’s cool,” he finally said. “Who wants a bunch of kids, anyway?  I’d hate to bring
some poor little Jonathan Seth Barrett the Fifth into the world.  Screw my great-grandfather
and his overused name.  Screw Alexander.  I mean, you did, right?  You totally screwed
my great-grandfather.”

“It’s so gross when you put it that way.  He was reincarnated.”

“It’s gross any way you put it.  Or any
where
you put it,” Seth added, raising his eyebrows a couple of times.

Jenny elbowed him in the stomach, and he countered by tickling her ribs until she
stood up and escaped, squealing.  He ran to catch her, spun her back, kissed her under
a tall old linden tree, its heart-shaped leaves blazing with the fiery colors of their
slow autumn death.

Things would settle now, Jenny knew.  They would drop any talk of marriage and children,
continue on into
le Jardin des Plantes
, a sprawling 28-acre botanical garden that had been carefully developed over the
past four centuries.  Jenny particularly loved the old labyrinth maze and the garden
with hundreds of different breeds of roses.  She liked to pass close to the garden
of bees and birds, but she never walked through it out of fear that some friendly
feathered creature would land on her and die.

As they walked through the rich colors of the park, Jenny felt unsettled and a little
sick.  No bacteria or virus could survive the pox long enough to make her ill, but
the pox did nothing to protect her against worry, fear, and guilt.  She could feel
her stomach clenching.

The past year had been too good to believe, aside from the lack of any contact with
her father.  After she’d unleashed the pox on the mob in Fallen Oak, leaving hundreds
dead, her father didn’t seem to want much contact with her, anyway.

She and Seth were young, flush with money and living in one of the most beautiful
cities in the world, drinking in art and culture every day.  They had an apartment
only blocks from the Seine, in a district full of theaters and nightclubs.  They ate
masterfully prepared French meals and drank the best wines.

Life in Paris hadn’t exactly turned Seth into a poet, but he had his hobbies.  One
of them was volunteering at hospitals around the city, particularly children’s hospitals,
where he would spread his healing touch.  He didn’t do any dramatic mass healing that
would risk attention, but he helped them quietly.  He’d touched thousands by now,
making his anonymous, angelic way around Paris while she stayed in their apartment,
played records, and tried to create art. 

“Our life here is too good,” Jenny said. “It’s like riding a magic carpet.”

“What’s wrong with magic carpets?”

“There’s nothing holding them up.  The magic could stop anytime...and then you fall.”

Senator Junius Mayfield, of the great state of Tennessee, great-uncle of one officially
dead boy named Jonathan Seth Barrett IV, smoked a cigar as he reclined in an antique
Federal-style divan embellished with hand-tooled scrollwork and curving arms.  The
divan was from an age when Americans made things, Junius thought.  The timber had
probably been cut in Virginia and carved by a master craftsman, an American with the
skill and industry to do more than drool in front of some computer screen all day. 

The divan was like the senator: old, creaky, so far out of fashion as to be comical. 
Just waiting for the inevitable crack, the day it transformed from a valuable antique
into scrap wood.

Junius smoked his cigar and sipped a glass of fifty-year-old Scotch in the candle-lit
suite of a very exclusive hotel.  “Hotel” wasn’t the proper word for this establishment,
located in an old Greek Revival mansion just outside the District of Columbia, but
that was the polite word for it.

A well-endowed young lady with blond hair, pretty as a fashion model, was handcuffed
to one of the four high posters of the antique bed.  She wore bits of white ribbon
and lace in her hair, like a bride, and she had recently become topless.  She knelt
on the bed, still dressed in her lacy white panties and silk stockings.  The straps
of a leather scourge lashed across her backside, and she bounced forward against the
poster and cried out.

The scourge was wielded by a dark-haired woman in a black mask that hid her eyes,
black leather lingerie, and high stiletto heels.  Their costumes clearly divided into
them into good girl and bad girl, angel and devil.

“Please,” the blond girl in white lace begged. “Please, stop!”

The girl in the black mask gave her a cruel smile and lashed her again.

Junius himself would watch from the divan, too old to indulge himself like he used
to.  He was more of a watcher now.  Junius would take in this little tableau, then
straighten his tie and attend yet another fundraiser dinner, eating gray chicken while
pumping defense contractors for extra campaign cash.  From one whorehouse to another,
but Junius would be switching roles.

Same old, same old.

Junius watched quietly as the masked girl spanked the blond girl, against the blond’s
pretended struggles and protests.  The blond girl wriggled and screeched as her cheeks
were smacked red, and then the masked girl reached between her legs and stroked her. 
The blond girl’s head turned toward Junius as she cried out in pleasure, real or pretended.

The blow came from nowhere, striking Junius just behind his left eye.  He’d been kicked
by a horse once, as a boy on his father’s farm, and the feeling was similar.  This
kick might have been from an invisible ghost horse, something from an old Indian tale.

After it hit him, the world dimmed and half his body turned numb.  For a moment, all
Junius could see was the preacher at the scrapwood mountain church he’d attended with
his grandparents, a sweaty, bug-eyed man slapping the pulpit and shouting about fornication
and hellfire.  Then that faded, too, gone like a flash of lightning.

A thin, dark drop of blood crept out from his left nostril, making its gradual way
toward his dry, wrinkled lips. 

The esteemed gentleman from Tennessee slumped down in the divan, inch by inch.  The
candle-lit room grew darker and darker around him.

The two girls on the bed, caught up in their performance, didn’t notice anything strange
until he toppled out of the divan and crumpled to the floor.  The whiskey glass dropped
from his hand, sloshing  aged Scotch onto the 19th-century Khotan rug, followed by
his burning cigar.  He was vaguely aware of the sound of two shouting girls, and he
wasn’t aware of much after that.

Jenny was pregnant.

The little plastic stick from the home pregnancy test insisted it was true.  Since
this was the third kit she’d bought today, she was starting to believe them.  They
all came back the same:
oui
.  Pregnant.

She looked at herself in the mirror.  Pale little Jenny Mittens, murderer of hundreds. 
Thousands, if you counted past lives, and maybe it was more like tens of thousands. 
There was no way to know.  She had slain an army or two, brought down cities, wiped
out tribes to make way for empires.  Her kind had always seen the human world as a
kind of board game, like chess or Risk.  Most humans were pawns, dumb as animals,
to be conquered, killed, or ruled according to the turns of the game.

Jenny didn’t see things that way anymore, and neither did Seth.  They’d learned from
life after life of being human, feeling love and pain.  They’d let the fleshly experience
change their dark and ancient souls, something most of their kind chose to resist. 
For good reason, Jenny thought.  Love and compassion opened entire new avenues of
potential suffering.

She washed her hands in the big marble bowl sink, rubbing them again and again with
a jasmine-scented ball of soap.  She kept washing them long after any pee from the
pregnancy test was obviously rinsed away.  The steaming hot water provided a sensation
strong enough to distract her from the thoughts spinning inside her mind.

“I can’t be pregnant,” Jenny said to her reflection. “Right?”

Her blue eyes stared back at her.

“We know we can’t do this,” Jenny said.  She imagined herself speaking to that strange
primordial part of herself, her own soul, that had incarnated as human again and again.
“It won’t survive.  There’s nothing we can do.  So...no reason to tell Seth about
it, right?  This will just take care of itself, whether I want it to or not.  Right?”