Life (56 page)

Anna went out into the street. Someone in the coffee shop opposite Ramone’s building seemed to be staring at her. She walked quickly, wiping away tears. Everyone was staring. Was Ramone’s flat really furnished like a torture chamber? It couldn’t be. She was having a relapse, a return of her horrible symptoms. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, nowhere to hide.

“Anna?”

Someone was holding her by the shoulder. A large face peered into hers.

“It
is
Anna! Gee, what an amazing coincidence. Here I was sightseeing, I love this city don’t you, and suddenly I see Anna passing by! I had no idea you were in New York.”

Anna gasped. “Oh, hello, uh—” It was a name she had never been able to use easily, a name censored by defense mechanisms from before the dawn of time—

“LouLou,” the big face prompted her. “Remember me? Your husband’s Mom?”

“Oh. LouLou. Yes.” Anna looked around for her bag, which she had left somewhere. “What a coincidence. Are you here on holiday. I’m, umh, I’m sorry but I’m in a hurry—”

“I think I’d better take you home. You don’t look too good.”

“What…to Illinois?”

“Well, no. I don’t spend much time there now. Fact is, I’d have sold the house years ago if it wasn’t for Spence. Looks like you found me out. My secret life. Home is, well, you’ll see when you get there. There’s some people will be very glad to meet you—”

“I
really must go.”
Anna panicked and made a lunge for freedom. The hand on her shoulder stuck fast.

“Okay, you don’t have to meet anyone. Just come with me.”

The urge to treat mental dis-ease as physical illness, thought LouLou as she put her daughter-in-law to bed, is a very good one. She’d have liked to put Anna in a properly comforting sick room, airy and windowed, decorated in pale yellow, green, and white: because Spring is the time when we get better. The commune house being full to overflowing (they were negotiating the purchase of a neighboring property) she had to make do with an air-mattress in the former family room in the basement, which was also the home of Andreas’s drum-kit, several mildewed boxes of black vinyl record albums, some broken furniture, and a few other odds and ends. Still, it’s the thought that counts.

Anna had been given a hot bath with cypress oil and put into borrowed pjs that were clean and warm; the elflocks of her damp hair had been combed into order; she had been given a bowl of chicken soup (she hadn’t eaten more than a spoonful). All the proper things.

“You lie down and sleep. If you need to pee, there’s a little bathroom through that door by the cymbal stand. We’ll talk in the morning. Here’s the button for your bedside lamp. The connection is a wee bit flaky, but if you wiggle it around it works fine.”

Anna was distressed because in the bathroom upstairs, when she had been dressed only in a towel, she had glimpsed in the mirror the hair in her armpits. She was very conscious of the fact that her mother-in-law had seen this hair, which Anna didn’t shave often enough, but very little conscious of anything else. She struggled with her shame and transgression, until she remembered that she could switch off the light. The basement full of strange traps of steel and cable was plunged into utter, unrelieved blackness. No amount of wiggling would bring the light back. She lay still.

When she woke up, LouLou was sitting beside her.

“You want some herb tea?” She sounded exactly like her son.

Anna shook her head.

“How are you feeling?”

“A bit confused,” whispered Anna. “Can you explain anything?”

LouLou nodded. “Oookay…” She paused on this long drawn out reassurance, her big face calm. She was wearing her jet black hair combed straight back and braided at the nape of her neck, Indian squaw style, the same as when Anna first met her. Still wearing the same sort of clothes, a long multicolored Mother Hubbard smock with a fringed yoke, and feathers. Her very Spence-like features looked like undersized currants trying to push their way through the olive glaze on a large, smooth bun.

“Where shall I start?”

“Did you really run into me accidentally, yesterday? Was it yesterday?”

“It was yesterday. Well, yes and no. I’ve been watching Ramone’s place.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve been missing for three weeks, Anna. We knew you’d come to New York, we found your name on a flight. We could have traced you here, by your credit cards. But that would have risked the media people getting to know you’d disappeared: we didn’t want to get into that; we knew you wouldn’t like it. My no-good son said you had to be looking for Ramone Holyrod. She’s out of town, but the best clue I had was her address. So, I staked out the building,” she explained, with pardonable pride.

“Does Spence know you found me?”

“No, he does not. I’ve told him I now know that you are okay, and that I am on the case. Won’t do him any harm to sweat a little longer. I’m not going to tell him anything at all unless you want. D’you want to tell
me
where you’ve been? What you’ve been doing?”

“I don’t know… I think I was staying in a hotel on 42nd street. I thought I had Jake with me. Oh! Oh, God, I left him behind, anything could have happened—”

“Jake is fine. I talked to him yesterday. He just knows you’re away on a trip, he’s missing you but he’s okay.” Anna, who had shot upright, eyes starting in terror, fell back on her air-mattress pillow. LouLou refrained, with a mighty effort, from the questions that were on the edge of her tongue.

“D’you want for me to fix it so you can speak to him, without Spence knowing?”

“No,” said Anna softly.

She looked around. The rotting boxes, the smell of damp and cats, the odd assortment of paraphernalia, the windowless walls: she had woken into a scifi apocalypse, a bunker for survivors after the end of the world. How could she speak to Jake and not to Spence? She was astonished that LouLou had suggested such a thing. The ruthless
cosa nostra
of the female world could still shock her.

“Where am I?”

“Geographically? You’re in upstate New York, in a house in the woods by the Hudson river. Emotionally speaking, you’re among friends.” LouLou hesitated. “You might as well know the worst. Among followers.” She picked herself up. “My Goddess, I’ve been so proud of you, Anna. You would have been embarrassed to death, the amount of times I’ve boasted of our acquaintance. What we’re trying to do here is to find a way to live in the world that you’ve discovered, the future of the human race. At the moment we’re feeling real pleased with ourselves, because the big cover-up has collapsed, thanks to you. The conspiracy of silence is broken. But you can catch up on the world news later.”

Anna blinked at her dazedly. “Are you still a witch? I mean, last time I heard—?”

“Oh sure, I’m still a Wiccan and still practicing magic. You should know, Anna. Transferred Y doesn’t change anything important. We go on being the same people we were. I’ll bring you some breakfast. When you’ve eaten, you’ll feel stronger. Then, if you feel like it, you can come on upstairs and meet my other family.”

“Transferred Y?”

“Sure. What else is in the news?”

Anna lay staring at the ceiling in complete bewilderment.

She met the household. They were nine adults and three children, a boy of twelve and two youngsters of six and eight. The eight-year-old, whose name was Hilary, was the only true inter in this group, a child born with indeterminate sex organs. The others, of varied sexual orientation, confessed to being anatomically male or female, though Clarissa had been born ostensibly male. Those who could afford it had been typed, and one member knew that his sex-pair chromosomes bore no trace of the infection: but there was no stigma. They called themselves Transformationists.

They looked on Anna as a living saint.

“You are a prophet,” explained a Catholic nun called Dorothy, who shared the parenting role with LouLou. “For twenty years at least, there has been a Transformationist community and culture in the USA, and we have links with other groups all around the world. People in all walks of life, all kinds of people, have felt that the sexual divide was no longer working. We knew what was happening, we were
living it.
But you’ve given us a voice, Anna. You’ve given us—” Her eyes glowed— “a
rationale.
A scientific explanation.”

“But… You’re still a nun?”

“I’m in dispute with my bishop,” said Dorothy with dignity. “My Mother Superior understands. Didn’t the good Lord say,
that they all may be one, father, as you and I are one?
Wasn’t he born a man and lived the life of a woman, tending the sick, feeding the hungry, minding the children? I think the message is clear enough.”

Anna didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

I’ve founded a cargo cult.

She settled, in the end, for a smiling silence.

The Transformationists seemed content with this. They would tell her things: like, the rumor about group sex was a base libel, Transformationists were as moral as anyone, and it wasn’t true about the hormones either. There were no rules about taking hormones or not, or about orientation, or having a job or not having a job, or following any particular religion or occult practice. The only rule was to live together lovingly: part of which required that if you were a man you wore a dress, at least sometimes. And that was only a “rule” because nobody had to remind women to wear pants from time to time. She did not catch up with the world news, though she was welcome to do that. The cultists used their connectivity only to chat with other Transformationists and to watch certain treasured movies. She took her place in the cooking rota, her share of the household chores. She went with LouLou, in her big battered old car, to buy provisions and was surprised to find there was a town outside the commune house: buildings still standing, people going about their business. When she looked into the store windows, she was surprised to find she had a reflection.

She let it all go by. She felt that she was living a half-life, persisting as a statistical anomaly, fading into nothingness. Days passed. She ate, she slept, she did domestic work, she didn’t speak, and no one bothered her. One afternoon she was in the garden, picking bugs off the tomato plants with Clarissa. Clarissa suspected that Chelo, the unwed father of Hilary and hir little brother Paul, was still carrying on with the children’s mother, and that his girlfriend in the commune house didn’t know about it… It was a crying shame, because this girlfriend Ronan was a recovering alcoholic, a survivor of parental abuse and maybe incest. Clarissa was going to tell Dorothy: something had to be said—

“What do I do with the caterpillars?” asked Anna.

“Oh, get a rock and mash them. We don’t use pesticides, but you can’t leave ‘em for the birds; these days there just aren’t enough birds.”

Anna had come to the same conclusion at home. Get a rock and mash them; it was the only way. But cabbage white caterpillars were her downfall, so charming in their subtle tweeds, the fabric soft as velvet. She remembered, one day, she had decided she couldn’t bear to kill any more of them. She had Spence and Jake carry a jam jar full of remand prisoners through the house. Spence lined them up and pointed down the street. “Off you go, bugs. Go off and join the circus!” Jake, looking up at his daddy, wondering if this could be normal behavior, even for
his
nutty parents…