Please Don't Go (37 page)

In line with the original Mesopotamian, Sumerian, and Babylonian myths (through ceramic reliefs and textual incantations in Assyrian scripts) that are the first evidence of a Lilith-esque character, the Lilith of Jewish-Rabbinical-Talmud folklore preys upon the children of Adam and Eve, as well as their later progeny. Accordingly, Jewish mothers are admonished to protect their children by placing Lilith-inspired amulets around their necks. Such idols were also given to pregnant women that needed protection from Lilith, since some believed she sought to steal their babies, direct from their wombs at the moment of birth. They believed that she hid in the shadows and awaited the child with a hungry appetite for maternal justice.

These amulets often bear the names of Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, the angels who were sent to fetch Lilith when she (supposedly) abandoned Adam. Rather than return to Adam, Lilith agreed to spare the lives of any children who wore such amulets, and in doing so acknowledged her existence in the world of Good, Evil, and Lilith. Nonetheless, God punished Lilith for abandoning Adam by killing one hundred of Lilith’s demon children (what would be her “genetic legacy,” born from her days in the throes of demonic passion at the Red Sea) every day. There are many associations made with amulets that say Lilith can transfer herself to these amulets, to either destroy or protect a child, depending upon her temperament. The logic then follows that if Lilith can transfer to an amulet, then she can transfer between human beings. The Jewish texts were aware of this possibility, but spoke of it with rarity. Were there any evidence of such an outcome, an observer would have surely turned their eyes from it and denied its existence.

Zephyr closed the book, staring at its dusty cover.

Lilith.

The name danced around Zephyr’s head and he thought at first of the Lilith Fair, the annual feminine empowerment festival that Jackie had displayed a poster from, dipped in flower power and tie dye. Lilith. The
succubus
. Like Aleesha, the unofficial Siren of Galway that had coaxed Charles Rattup into her sinful bed. Like Emily, her putrid creature of a daughter.

The dots, it seemed, were connecting and Zephyr found difficulty in suspending his previous disbelief. Given the span of time he had been betrothed to
her
(Lilith, was her name actually Lilith?), medieval Jewish lore of an alternative Garden of Eden did not seem as illogical as it may have once seemed. The whore, the succubus... Lilith. What was Rattup trying to convey to him? That
she
was Lilith, an ancient beast that had witnessed the dawn of man and spat upon that propspect?
No. He was explaining her
nature.
That she was an archetype that aligned with the mythological Lilith. But where did mythology end and reality begin, if there was even a morsel of truth to what Rattup had so implied in his bookshelf scavenger hunt?

Zephyr had grown up in a patriarchal world where men had the final say in the ways of humanity, though he did not subscribe to this belief himself. His parents had flipped towards a more conservative ideology in their later years, but as a young boy the liberal open-minded truths of equality and compassion had been implanted deep inside of him, the kind of viewpoint that was not shaken free like dirt from an old rug. In that, he had found Jackie, a girl of a similar mindset. Two peas in a pod. In his strides through adulthood, he had always supported the concept of “Lilith,” though now he wondered if he was being beaten with the opposite end of that stick. Sure, the world was a male-dominated structure of imprisonment and segregation, but so was
this.
This House of Rattup. This House of Zephyr. This House of Lilith, of Pain, of Turmoil, of Misery.

How would she respond if he addressed her as such? Would she recognize the reference as it aligned with her actions as a....
succubus
?

Her breath, as if on cue, tickled the back of his neck.

Lover.

“
You’re back. Busy day?” he asked without hiding his sarcasm, dropping the demonic book to the ground, eyeballing it, wondering if she had seen what he was reading. Zephyr’s skin prickled with electricity, tension frolicking beneath his exterior and the atmosphere about him.

The word
busy
does not suffice. What are you reading?

“
A book I once read as a boy, about a snake in a garden. I’m quite fond of it.”

I see.

Did she?

13.

An hour earlier in the day, Lana and Jackie had passed each other on the highway, driving in opposite directions, unknowing of the other’s presence. Had Jackie known that Lana was on the reverse direction of the highway, she may have considered veering over the grassy median of southern Maine and taking her enemy away from the equation of life (even with Zephyr now being a questionable factor in Jackie’s approaching future). Her vitriol for his holier-than-thou mother did not subside as she thought it would, and in fact it seemed to grow fatter and wider with every breath. When Lana’s name drifted through her mental gray matter, she wanted to spit on the ground as a gypsy would after a curse has been cast.

Lana sipped a coffee and pepped herself up for finding her boy. She was confident that she would track him down, unlike the sorry attempts made (supposedly—if she was not lying through her rotting teeth) by Jackie. When you needed a job done the right way, it was the place of any good mother to step in and take care of business. If you wanted a wishy-washy waste of time, thought Lana, then call on your son’s bitch girlfriend. Young adults no longer had any appreciation for hard work or thoroughness, forever consumed with their own personal satisfaction and cell phones. Lana lit a cigarette and smoked it with bitter puffs out her window, taking breaks between drags to slug lukewarm coffee down her throat.

Jackie, on the other side of the highway, pulled off, easing on to the ramp of an exit that had indicated the availability of an ATM machine. She had two more tolls to traverse and had not a cent to her name. In addition, there was no harm in stopping for a stretch of her legs.

She passed several restaurants and gas stations in a southern Maine town she could not properly identify, with no help from the total lack of signs. Jackie had always kept her meanderings and personal business to the northern half of the state, and the south was alien territory to her. On occasion, she would take a joy ride on a lazy Saturday and waste the better part of a day, driving in circles but never really committing any landmarks to memory.

A bank appeared to her left. She jerked the car into the parking lot. It wasn’t
her
bank, but it was
a
bank. She would have to pay fees from her own bank for betraying them, for cheating on such a prudent financial branch. She pictured herself back at her usual institution, explaining away this occurrence as one would apologize for sexual infidelity. “I didn’t mean it. It was a momentary lapse of reason.” This helped her to laugh. She hadn’t done much of that as of late, not since Zephyr had gone missing, and the guilt for abandoning the situation was troubling her to no end.
What was she doing?
Zephyr didn’t deserve this. Was this the end of them? Check back next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel. Jackie was riddled by her confusion, her emotions tangled like brambles about her stomach and chest.

The drive-up ATM machine had an out-of-order sign hung on it, so Jackie parked and went inside to do things the old fashioned way, like her forefathers.

“
I need to make a withdrawal, but this isn’t my bank,” she said to the blonde teller, speaking as if confessing to a priest. Jackie was a bit embarrassed for no apparent reason as she looked around for other tellers. It appeared that this one was working on her own. A small non-chain bank and times were tough. Her heart went out to places like this, smaller operations that struggled to make ends meet in a world dominated by corporate conglomerates with multi-billion dollar bottom lines. She suddenly didn’t mind the resultant bank fee of betrayal.

“
That won’t be a problem,” the teller said with a glowing stewardess’ smile, tilting her head to the side. “But... do you have your bank card with you? I can’t do anything without the card and a photo ID.”

Jackie opened her purse and withdrew a billfold that she kept her various membership, credit, and bank cards in. She rifled through, now unreasonably nervous that-
gasp-
she had left it behind. If so, she was very much screwed, since she wouldn’t be able to get to her grandmother’s house without a gas refill, let alone batting her eyes through the remainder of the tolls. “Fuck...” she mumbled and it felt like deja vu at the brim of her mind, similar to what had happened at the toll booth. Just as she was about to fall into her homemade pit of despair, she found her bank card, withdrawing it from its slot with a grin, picturing in her mind a glowing halo around the piece of plastic, God singing his praise of the debit-credit industry. “Here you go. Sorry about that,” she said, apologizing for her foul word slip.

“
Let me check on that for you,” the cheerful-to-a-fault girl replied, taking the card and walking down the line of tellers to a terminal out of Jackie’s line of sight. A moment later, she returned. “I’m sorry, it’s been declined, but we have a process for that. We’ll need to get you to sign a waiver.”

Confused, Jackie stared at the girl, observing her nameplate. “I’m sorry... Tonya. I don’t quite understand. I took out money last night. That card is
good
, I can guarantee it.”

“
I’m sorry, sweetie. There was a problem.”

Jackie shook her head. “And the problem
is
?”

“
Just a problem. A serious problem. We’ll need you to sign a waiver.”

“
I don’t want to sign a waiver. I can give you plenty of identification.”

“
You’ll have to sign a waiver. Because there was a problem.
A very serious problem
,” the plastic woman repeated, starting to sound like a scratchy broken record.

Snapping into an immediate rage that was not typical of her, Jackie envisioned her drilling a fat bloody hole directly through the woman; wanting so very much to have heat vision like Superman, to make the snide bitch spontaneously combust at her own willful thoughts. Sixty years ago, this woman would not have had a job such as this. Couldn’t she show a little tact, a bit of dignity for other women to witness and follow? Banker Barbie was a mole on the face of women everywhere. Chicks like her, thought Jackie, were the reason that women have never been taken as serious as the male half of the workplace, that they were- and still are- the laughing stock of a patriarchal society when the doors are closed, when the men are drinking their fine brandy and smoking Cuban cigars and talking about their latest hunting expeditions.

The bitch deserved to be baking blueberry pies for her ungrateful husband, as she would have been doing a half century earlier.

Jackie seethed, but held her composure, for it was a bank and banks had cameras. “A waiver for what? You’re not making any sense,” Jackie spat. At this seemingly harmless comment, the blonde teller’s face fell into a static hum of nothing. The cheerful facade had washed away beneath a dullness that came from being questioned by a lesser being. Her banking skills were being called into question and she did not appreciate it. There was a rapid depreciation in the teller’s attitude.

What was the goddamned problem? “I’d like to speak with your boss,” Jackie said, as she had heard many people in the past say just such words, but could have never pictured herself being that type of asshole, the kind of woman who would insist on speaking with management, with somebody of
greater importance
about a certain matter. But that was the game that Banker Barbie had decided to play with her. “Please,” she added.

“
If you’ll follow me into the back, I can take care of this. We can speak with my manager, if you’d like,” the teller replied. She smiled, and Jackie wanted to punch her in the teeth, but could not quite explain why. The woman had flipped a switch in Jackie that she had never known to be there. Had the teller really been
that
rude? A fragment of Jackie’s head-space informed the rest of her that no, the woman hadn’t been rude at all, that she was overreacting. She shook her head from side to side, resetting her brain back to the bitterness that she was fending off.

“
I’d like that,” Jackie snapped. In her mind, she tacked on to the end of her statement the word
bitch.
Between the teller and Lana, she had invoked the word more so in the past few days than she could ever recall in her previous life.

“
Right this way...” the woman insisted, opening a small swinging door at the end of the teller windows. “We’ll take good care of you, muffin pie.”

Jackie nodded, complying, and followed her into the back.

When she exited the bank, her transaction complete, Jackie used the back entrance, reserved for employees. She did not say a word to Banker Barbie as she left. She climbed into her car and drove away without any further fanfare, griping or otherwise. Jackie had forgotten about her grandmother altogether. Jackie had forgotten about a lot of things.