Beauty (13 page)

[We go on transmitting these urgencies, but they have not the volume of the constant music where she is; they cannot be heard above the traffic noises. There are so many distractions in the twentieth, she doesn 't hear us. If she would only decide to be a nun! I think possibly we could get through to a nun.]

NOVEMBER 15, 1991

Yesterday we had a special kind of event at school. The event was called "Career Days," and they had people from all kinds of jobs and professions come speak to us about their jobs. One of the men was our teacher's brother, an author, Barrymore Gryme, only he told us all to call him Barry. I've seen his books in the school library, but I've never read one. After the session, when the students were leaving the room, he asked me what my name was. I told him, Dorothy, because that's the name Bill and Janice and I had decided on, after my old friend Doll. We knew enough to realize I couldn't call myself Beauty, not in the twentieth.

"You don't belong in Kansas, do you?" he asked me with a funny smile.

I didn't know what to say, so I just smiled back.

"No, you're the Emerald City all over," he said. Then I knew he was talking about that movie with the singing girl and the straw man. The Yellow Brick Road one. I'd seen that in the twenty-first, about fifteen times.

"Not that Dorothy," I explained. "I was named after an old friend."

"Where do you live, old friend Dorothy?" he asked me. I didn't want to be rude, so I told him. When I got home that night, there were flowers for me in the living room, from him. Bill was puzzled, but Janice was furious.

"What have you been doing when you're supposed to be at school," she shouted at me. "What have you been up to?"

I guess my mouth dropped open, because Bill told her not to yell. When I saw his name on the tag with the flowers, I was just as puzzled as Bill was.

"I only said about six words to him," I said. "And there were lots of other people around."

"Where, around?" Janice demanded.

I told her, at Career Day, at school, that he was our teacher's brother, and after a while she believed it. When I told her his full name, then she was as puzzled as Bill.

Bill nodded, his mouth pursed up. Then he sat me down at the desk and made me write the man a nice note, saying thank you for the flowers but I'd sent them to a hospital, because I wasn't allowed to accept gifts from older men. Bill thought it was "appropriate."

NOVEMBER 17, 1991

I told Candy about the flowers I got from Barrymore Gryme. I said I couldn't understand why he'd do that, and she got bright red in the face and said, "Honestly, Dor, you're so dumb it's just unbelievable." And when I asked her why, she said look in the mirror for crysakes.

Well, I've known for a long time I'm beautiful, but that doesn't explain anything! He's too old for me, and I'm sure too young for him. Candy thinks I ought to have an affair with Barry Gryme.

I told her she was crazy.

She says just wait. Her aunt told her virginity gets to be more and more of a burden the older you get. She told Candy you get to the point where you don't decide whether you like someone enough to make love to them or not, you only get to the point of wondering whether they're good enough to give it up for. "Aunt Becky says you quit wondering when and start wondering if," Candy said.

Should I have an affair because of Candy's aunt?

[As if Israfel and I did not have enough to worry about already!

We were standing at the Pool, trying our best to get through to the twentieth, when Israfel remarked that, as our magic weakens, the power of the Dark Lord strengthens. I had known that, of course, though I had not let myself consider it deeply. Our departed brother took terror and pain as his portion. It was always a part of what we did. Magic is a perilous thing, and it has its horrifying aspects, but we have always worked with and around these aspects, not making them the focus of our art. The Dark Lord has taken these to the exclusion of all else. He works in pain and prurience, lust and death, ramifying these until they fill his whole canvas. Discontent with his own efforts, he selects minions among men to develop these themes further. Is Jaybee one of these? Is Barrymore Gryme?

Has this man been set upon her, like a hound set upon a hare? We have been so careful. We have done nothing to draw attention to her, letting it seem that she has done everything out of her own motivation, out of her own desires. She has left no magical trail behind, like the slime of a snail, for some inimical creature to follow. Surely, he can t know?

So I say to Israfel, and he to me, trying to convince ourselves.]

NOVEMBER 20, 1991

I got a Barry Gryme out of the school library and tried to read it. I read two hundred pages, then I had to quit because it scared me to death. Everything in it was hopeless and terrible. People kept being mutilated or eaten or destroyed. It was full of sex, too, but there was no pleasure in it. It was ... it was a lot like the horro-porn films in the twenty-first. If lots of people read things like this, there's something terribly, terribly wrong ...

CHRISTMAS MORNING 1991

Bill and Janice are still asleep. If I were home, I'd be in church, watching Father Raymond moving around at the altar, smelling the incense, hearing his voice with the Latin rolling out, seeing the candles flicker. I'm homesick. There's nothing to do about it, so I'm watching one of Bill's documentaries.

Water, gray and cold, with lights in it as bubbles, rising, bright shadows in the water and vast distances, with everything moving and shifting, so there is no up or down. Singing in the water. Deep, organ tones, one, then two together, then a third. Soft, hurting sounds.

Bill's voice, his deep voice, the one he uses when he does the narrations. "These are the last whales, and this is their last song. Though they are unaware of it, this pod of whales is the last of the great sea creatures to swim the seas of earth. Cells have been saved in the hope that some future time will allow their regeneration, though as things stand today such hope seems dim and distant."

The organ voices again. Incredibly sad. Jaybee's camera focuses on an eye set in a great wrinkled socket. The eye looks at me. Oh, there's knowing there. They know. They know they are the last. All these seas are their tears, they have wept them all. All the oceans of earth are made up of tears. Whale tears, elephant tears, the tears of forests, the tears of flowers, the tears of everything beautiful cried out to make oceans.

We come up. We fly up through the water, we rip through the surface scattering droplets in all directions, we skim over the waves like a flung spear, toward the farms, skeletons on the horizon, with huge blades rotating, with solar collectors like blinding sheets of white fire.

"Fidipur's farms," says Bill's voice. "Here, suspended over the deep, are the mighty wind- and sun-powered pumps that bring the cold harvest of the sea to the surface, where it is dried, powdered, and shipped to the great landside factories of Fidipur."

Ships going and coming, being loaded and leaving, zipping into the loading docks empty, one after the other, by the hundreds. Like beetles. Like wood beetles. Eating everything, all, until nothing is left.

Back across the water, down to the whales again, this time slowly, letting us see them. Their bones show through their flesh. Their eyes are deeply sunk. The thin calf nuzzles its mother hopelessly. There is no milk. They are starving. Fidipur has taken it all.

I'm crying. Janice is calling me to breakfast. I'm not hungry. It's Christmas, but beauty is dying. We're gobbling up the world. I don't ever want to be hungry again.

JUNE 1992

Graduation. At first I didn't think I'd go, but I did. Bill and Janice came, too. We all wore those silly hats and the rented gowns and paraded up to get a piece of paper which isn't even really our diploma. We'll get that later in the mail, after the office checks to see we don't owe any money or library fines or anything. So, big deal, I thought, that's over, so now what will I do?

I got a phone call from Barry Gryme. He wanted to know if I was old enough yet, and I told him no, I am only seventeen, and I don't go out with married men anyhow (Janice found out he was married), and he said he was divorced.

JULY 1992

I bought another one of Barry's books, to see if I could read it all the way through. I got about a hundred pages into it and then I had to stop.

I've seen people die. I saw the goldsmith Papa put in the dungeon, when he was almost dead. He had been my friend, and I saw him when they took him out, saw his bones showing through his skin, and the sores on him, and the places the rats had chewed him. I saw a thief whipped to death once. I've seen men hanged. It's horrible, seeing that, but not as horrible as this book, because in this book, you're supposed to
like
seeing it,
like
reading what happens to the people. You can tell the way it's written you're supposed to kind of lick it up, like something juicy.

[We tried again. She was in such a downcast mood, we thought she might hear us, but she didn't. I'm considering sending Puck through to her. She knows him, and possibly she could accept him without headlines resulting: CALIFORNIA GIRL SEES CREATURE FROM OUTER SPACE.

Israfel says be patient just a little longer. I have just about had it with Israfel!]

CHRISTMAS 1992

A letter came for me, from Jaybee. I'd almost succeeded in forgetting Jaybee. The letter was gibberish, but frightening gibberish, and it was illustrated with photographs.

At first I couldn't tell what the photographs were. They looked like abstract art, fascinating compositions, dark, light, black, white, with ribbons of red. Then I saw that the dark was shadow, the light a woman's breast, the ribbon of red ... well, it was blood, wasn't it? You could see the knife, the edge of it, making a design against the nipple. I began to make out what all of the photographs were, flesh, manacled flesh, cut flesh, an eye, half open, staring unbelievingly into the lens, lips which looked swollen with desire until you saw they were bitten half through.

If you turned them upside down, they were fascinating abstracts. Only when you looked at them closely could you see what was really happening. They were mostly pictures of one woman. Sometimes pictures of several. Well, I knew about that kind of thing. I'd taken a psychology course at school. Knowing about it didn't make it less sick, less hateful. I burned them. I didn't know what else to do!

The pictures somehow reminded me of Barry Gryme. Last month he called me to ask if now that I'd started college I was old enough to go out with him. I told him I didn't think I'd ever be old enough, and he laughed. He said he needed to know what I meant, would I just have coffee or a beer with him, so I said yes, I'd have a beer with him between classes the next day.

He showed up, which kind of surprised me. Seeing him sitting there, I tried to switch gears, tried not to be just a college girl, tried to be me, Beauty, someone who knew things he would never really know. He's not bad-looking. He is a charming, funny man. He's full of little jokes and amusing stories. Finally, he asked me what I've got against horror writers.

I said there was real horror in the world. Disease and starvation and torture. I said we needed to feel revulsion for these things, needed to be galvanized into action against them and against all poverty and pain and injustice, but that his books merely made us accustomed to horror, as a recreation.

He wasn't listening. He was looking at my face, at my shape, smiling a little smile to himself, his head cocked. He was thinking about going to bed with me.

I stopped talking. After a moment, he said, well, his books were popular; they made a lot of money, which bought a lot of nice things; people liked being scared to death, so why not?

One of the teachers came by just then and greeted him by name. Barry got up to go speak with him about some seminar he was doing.

I sat there, wondering why not. I knew there had to be a reason, but I couldn't say what it was. Maybe it was that I knew the world was going to end fairly soon and he didn't. All his horror was going to come true. Here people were, bustling around, speaking of the dangers, creating committees and movements to Save the Whales, Save the Forests, Save the Rain Forests, Save the Condor. How could
these
people become what I had seen? But they would.

They would become habituated to horror. They would read it, see films of it. They would soak it up. It would deaden the sense of terror they needed to stay alive. They would catch a kind of leprosy of the spirit, an inability to feel. I mean, I've seen some of that already. They had a terror they call the Holocaust, and because people are so determined it mustn't happen again, they keep banging on it and banging on it until people have stopped paying attention. The more you talk about it, the oftener you see it, the more it loses its power to shock, its power to disgust.

And in the end, unable to feel terror, mankind will go, we will all go down, down, down to happyland.

"Thank you very much for the drink," I said to him, when he returned to the table. "I'm sorry I couldn't explain better what I meant, but I don't believe you know what horror is."

He got a teasing smile on his face and reached for my hand. I whipped it back, as I would have whipped it from the hand of Death himself. He looked in my face and whitened at what he saw there. I was surprised that he, writing what he does, seemed not to have seen real terror before.

[Jaybee Veolante. Barrymore Gryme. Israfel reads and peers as I do and turns away, sickened. We have already sent Puck, telling him to stay out of sight. We tell ourselves not to panic, that these men may be merely men, not creatures of the Dark Lord, that they may be attracted to her for her physical beauty alone. Israfel has stopped telling me to be patient.]