Authors: Elizabeth Hand
I put the last page of Hasel’s letter on the side table. There was one more page: a Xerox of two newspaper items, with arrows scrawled by Baby Joe. I didn’t want to read but of course I did.
What would you do, Joe?
It was a short article from the Charlottesville paper, about the death by drowning of a local attorney. The date was June 27.
“Tragic and almost inexplicable,” the paper said; he had been fishing in the Branch Creek near Crozet, and somehow had fallen into the stream and drowned in a few inches of muddy water. There was no evidence of foul play.
The other item was his obituary: Hasel Atkins Bright, attorney. Age 36, drowning accident; survived by his wife and two young daughters. In lieu of flowers, contributions could be made to a scholarship fund in Hasel’s name at the English Department of the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine.
So.
Hasel was dead, Oliver was dead. Baby Joe was drinking heavily but otherwise okay in New York. Annie was famous, and Angelica—unless one was to believe Hasel’s account of seeing her bathing in the Branch Creek near Crozet, Virginia—Angelica was still unaccounted for.
And me? At 38, I was a GS-11 and holding, just barely holding on.
Once, I’d dismissed Angelica’s account of the
Benandanti
as craziness. But during the years following my expulsion from the Divine, I often thought that she had been right. That whatever opportunity for change or expiation or revolution the dark goddess and Magda Kurtz and Angelica herself might have represented was now gone forever. The
Benandanti
had not relinquished their control over the world. They never would. If anything, their hold was stronger now than it ever had been. Fourteen years earlier, the day after the presidential inauguration, I stood at the entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro subway and watched as workmen hauled away the newspaper racks selling the
Atlanta Constitution
and
Village Voice
and
Mother Jones,
binding the flimsy metal-and-plastic machines in heavy link chains and dragging them down Pennsylvania Avenue to a waiting garbage truck. The next day, shiny new dispensers appeared, holding the
LA, Times
and
Wall Street Journal.
What Angelica had told me of the
Benandanti
made it all sound mystical and darkly glamorous, secret shamans ruling the world from behind a scrim of smoke and leaping flames.
But the truth was as banal and everyday as the headlines of the
Washington Post
and the endless parade of silver-haired men frequenting new restaurants in the corridor between K Street and Georgetown, lobbyists and lawmakers trailing in their wake like remoras. And like everyone else I knew in the city, I just got used to it. My life never stopped, I had a few casual friends and occasionally lovers, and through it all I was lucky enough to have a fairly decent job and a nice place to live.
But I knew that my heart had gone to sleep at the Divine. When it woke nearly two decades later, I started to emerge from Ignoreland, just like everybody else. It was going to take a teenage riot to get me out of bed, but that’s just what I got.
T
O REACH THE ANTHROPOLOGY
Department, you ascended a series of grand curving marble staircases, up through Plant Life and Vertebrates and Paleontology, past the enclaves of Man and the Higher Mammals, skirting the secret temples of Egyptology and the Ancient World and stopping short of Gems and Minerals and the breeding cells for the Living Coral Reef and the Insect Zoo. Each marble step held a shallow depression worn into the stone by more than a century of thoughtful treading by scientists and receptionists and cleaning personnel. Slender grooves showed where hundreds of fingers had absently traced the edge of the marble banisters; if you knew where to look you could see a faint rusty stain, like the shadow of a raven’s wing, that marked the exact spot where Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope had grappled during an argument concerning the use of the name
Titanosaurus
for an immense herbivore. The steps to Calvary or Mount Olympus could not have been more resonant with ancient secret power than those of the Museum of Natural History.
My office was on the south side of the building, overlooking the Mall. Each morning I walked down the long dim corridor, past Invertebrates and Arthropods and Ungulates (which had migrated here because of lack of space in Mammals), the Department of Worms (where department chief Vic Danhke had a sign on his door that read
HEAD WORM
),
and so into the Department of Anthropology. The entire floor had a faint rainy scent, punctuated by occasional bursts of formaldehyde and the woodsy odor of the beetles Molly Merino used to clean the occasional shipment of tapir or wildebeest pelts. There were boxes and cartons and shelves everywhere, spiring up into the dark recesses of the ceiling, lit by dangling tubes of fluorescent lights and the occasional blinding nova of a halogen lamp trained upon a fragile human femur or mummy restoration-in-progress. Here and there the pale green light of a computer monitor glowed in the darkness, or you might glimpse the flickering opalescent lozenge of a laptop exiled with its curator to some dank corner.
Nothing looked as though it had been cleaned since at least the Bicentennial. An overzealous expedition by the building’s custodial crew had once resulted in the loss of a pipe used by the Yanomano to blow psychoactive residue into each other’s nostrils. Barry Hornick claimed his work on the Yanomano diorama was set back three weeks, and the entire South American Peoples division traced the late opening of their new gallery to this same housekeeping error. Since then, cleaning was done sporadically if at all. A rich yellowing patina covered everything, composed of bone dust and pollen and beeswax, varnish and plaster of Paris and the odorous cabbagey residue from the
kim chee
Robert Dvorkin bought at a little Korean place in Alexandria and ate every day for lunch. A fine silvery net of webs from the Insect Zoo’s runaway golden orb weavers hung from the rafters and kept the cockroach and silverfish population at bay. In the summer most office doors remained shut, not out of any burning need for privacy but because that was the only way to retain some slight breath of cool air from the museum’s balky central a/c system. The closed doors formed a kind of informal gallery of Gary Larson cartoons clipped from the
Post,
along with amusing postcards from colleagues in distant places (HAVING a GREAT TIME in
CAIRO
DIGGING UP some
OLD FRIENDS!
CHANUKAH GREETINGS from OLDUVAI GORGE!) and the occasional announcement of an honorary degree or new publication in
Antiquities.
In the fall, the doors flew open again so that the heat blasting from the museum’s ancient furnaces could find its way into cubbyholes full of carven masks and heaps of moldering newspapers and damp
papier-mâché
replicas of Breton menhirs.
In contrast to all this nearly Victorian splendor and decay, my office was compact and bright and sterile as a hypodermic needle. A sleek steel display case held video monitors and television sets and the assorted VCRs and incidental equipment necessary for running the archival videodisc system. A network of multicolored cables connected these to computers and still more monitors and CD ROMs on my desk. The desk itself was a battered wooden contraption tunneled with pigeonholes and drawers in varying states of disorder. It looked as uncomfortable with its glittering satellites as a dowager aunt with her skinhead niece, but I liked it. It had been my first desk at the museum, and had traveled with me from my first little cubicle next to the Department of Worms to what would probably be its final home here. My window had an unobstructed view of the brick turrets of the Castle across the Mall. On sunny days the ghostly sound of calliope music echoed up from the ancient carousel outside the Arts and Industries Building, and sometimes stray balloons tapped plaintively against the glass before drifting off to float above the Tidal Basin and the Pentagon.
After so many years, my job had become more of a PR position than anything else. New technicians handled the eternal sorting and cleaning and labeling of photos in the ever-expanding Larkin Collection. None of the actual production was done in-house, and three years earlier the museum had cut a deal with Jack “Jolly” Rogers of Winesap Computers to write, manufacture, and distribute the accompanying software for the system. The videodiscs weren’t exactly best-selling items, but we almost managed to break even. And it was a nice tax write-off for everyone concerned, since the museum, of course, was an educational not-for-profit institution, and good PR for Winesap.
Jack liked me. He’d grown up in Yonkers, dropped out of high school in his junior year to play around with the earliest generations of personal computers, writing accountability programs for the mainframes at ConEd. He’d made his first million while still a teenager. We were the same age, and the yawning rift between our income brackets was bridged by a mutual distaste for Republican politics and a fondness for cheap beer and noisy proto-punk music. Once or twice a year he dropped in on one of his lobbying circuits of Capitol Hill, and we’d sit around my office with a smuggled six-pack of PBR to reminisce about seeing the Ramones and the Cramps in high school gyms and lament the failure of great unknown bands like the Shades (once of Trenton) and D.C.’s own Velvet Monkeys.
“Kids today, they don’t know what it was like.” Jack shook his head, his thinning blond hair slipping from its ponytail. He wore Doc Martens and white painter’s pants and a faded blue T-shirt depicting Officer Joe Bolton and the Three Stooges. “They rip off someone else’s riffs and go on MTV and jump around and—”
He made a rude noise, then consoled himself with a mouthful of chicken vindaloo. It was the last day of June and we were sitting in my office, gazing out the window at the crowds below. That morning, there’d been a Senate hearing, something to do with the Communicopia Bill. Jack had blown in and out of the Senate chambers, making the appropriate noises for C-SPAN and the national news, then ducked over here to check up on things. “Hey, this is pretty good curry, huh?”
I nodded, my eyes watering. “No lie.”
Outside on the Mall a month-long carnival was in progress: the Aditi, the Festival of India, sponsored by the Museum and the Indian government and SOMA Software (publisher of the fabulously successful GEOQUEST! and a division of Winesap Computers, Inc.). For weeks workmen shouting in Hindi and Urdu and English had been constructing stages and booths, staking out tent sites and laying wooden walkways across the trampled yellowing grass. Now most of the Mall, from the old west wing of the National Gallery of Art all the way down to the Museum of American History, had been transformed into an idealized Indian village, like something from a soundstage for Kim. Gaudy paisley pennants hung from booths selling wooden toys and
puri,
lime pickle and vegetable
samosas
and edible effigies of Durga with spun sugar skulls dangling from her neck. From a small tent echoed the eerie wavering cry of a bone flute, along with the shrill voices of children shouting in Hindi as they practiced their tumbling, clambering onto each other’s backs to form pyramids three- or four-high, then leaping off with outflung arms, graceful as flying squirrels. Even from here I could smell frying
ghee
and the overly sweet scents of jasmine incense and sandalwood, and hear an occasional burst of raga music from one of the wooden platform stages in front of the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden.
“Quite a little show you got on down there.” Jack stood and crossed to the window, holding his paper plate and spooning yellow rice into his mouth. “We should be drinking Pink Pelican beer. You ever had that, Sweeney? It’s all I drank when I was in Bombay last year, trying to get visas for those fire-eaters I told you about. Brewed from water from the sacred Ganges. Pink Pelican.” He sighed and shook his head. “Great stuff.”
“How long will you be in town, Jack?”
“I’ve got a four o’clock this afternoon from Dulles. Shareholders meeting in Bel Air tomorrow. Hey, any of those things get C-SPAN?” He pointed at the bank of video monitors, spilling sauce on his T-shirt. “I wanna see if I’m on yet.”
I put down my plate and slid my chair over to the steel display case. “Sure. Hang on—
I turned on the newest monitor we had, a thirty-two-inch HDRTV (Jack told me he had a two-inch Sony SuperHDR in his Range Rover). I fiddled with the remote, scanning through dozens of channels until I found the right one.
“Live Coverage of the House Subcommittee Hearings on Census Statistics and Postal Personnel,” read Jack in disgust. “They preempted me for
that?”
“Maybe you were on live. Or maybe they’re saving it for tonight—”
“Nah. They bumped me, that’s all. Screw ’em. I’ll have Maggie Gibson loose her Stinkbomb virus on their system. Ever hear of that one? Replaces all your data with the screenplay of
Ishtar.”
He cackled, then snatched the remote from my hand. “Give me that, let’s see what else is on—”
Random images flickered across the screen: Bugs Bunny, “Bonanza,” soaps, “Reading Rainbow,” vintage PeeWee, Windex, the Stephen King Network, what looked like a live broadcast of an assassination attempt on the president but turned out to be the new Slush video, Pepsi, Astroboy, Hoji Fries. It was impossible to tell what you were supposed to buy and what you were supposed to actually watch—Brando, Datsun, IBM—Jack made another rude sound—Donahue, McDonald’s, “Mormon Matters,” Sally, Oprah, Geraldo, Angelica—
Angelica?
“Stop!” I shouted. The screen froze on “This Old House.”
“Here in Lubec, Maine,” Bob Vila was saying as he tapped a coil of glittering blue foil, “you need an R-value of + 47 to provide even the most basic insulation—”
“This?” said Jack in disbelief.
“No! Go back—wherever you were a second ago—no, slow it down, I can’t—There! That’s it, stop!”
“Opal Purlstein?” Jack was incredulous. “You watch Opal Purlstein?”