“I’m a professional,” I say. “You can count on me.”
My reputation precedes me. I can’t tell what expression graces the face of the priest – if he really is a priest – on the other side of the confession booth lattice.
If I have one superpower, it must be my ability to readily and immediately accept the strangest situations without complaint.
The present: I’m dressed in widow’s black, and when I kneel before the confession booth, a veil falls across my face. “Father, I have come to confess,” I say. The shadow on the other side of the lattice inclines its head. “I’m about to commit a most grievous sin through nobody’s fault but my own.” The coded sequence of words that lets him know I’m one of them.”Tell me what I should do.”
Though of course I’m not really one of them, but they don’t know that. My private desire is to find my lover, the most powerful woman in the world, whose whereabouts are communicated to me in bits and pieces of fragmentary information that only the most cracked minds can correlate.
“I’ll tell you what sin to commit,” murmurs the Father through the lattice, in a manner indistinguishable from the general vague mumbling of the church’s insides. And he tells me about Marseilles, where a boat will take me to Egypt, to retrieve a document from a museum… A papyrus scroll in an obscure dialect of coptic…
I kiss the outstretched hand with its ring and rise from the velvet bench. On the way out I pass an old woman praying in the pews, the same old woman I passed on the way in… but now I see she’s not old at all, merely hunched over, and as I leave the church I perceive her in the corner of my eye, looking over her shoulder… an icy premonition follows me into the sunshine where the doors of the cathedral slam shut behind me and I walk onto the warm yellow plaza, where the pigeons scatter and fly at the sound of my clicking heels.
The past: “Trust me, I’m a professional,” I said to the diplomat. “I will deliver the results you want. I’m capable of doing this. I prepare for any situation. I satisfy the requirements.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I’m glad we understand each other.” The diplomat stood with his back to me, gazing through the high windows at the sun setting over the turgid Thames.
“Do we?” he said with a curiously arch look on his face.
“Do what?” I said because I’d zoned out.
“Do we understand each other?” he said, and flung down a single white ladies glove on the table.
Horror. Her glove. He knows. I thought I was the only one who remembered. Are there others? And where is the other glove?
My future: I hide inside the hollow sarcophagus as the lights go out, one by one, at the museum; ancient dust sticks in my nose. I peek from under the lid and watch the guards start leaving. But the moon streaming through the skylight allows me to see well, even in the dark. I sneak past the glass cabinets and into the archives… and almost think I hear the jackals barking.
I remember the last time I saw her, her hand slipping between my legs, the other pointing at the sky.
“Is there a word for a person who flits from identity to identity without caring much about the skin they cast off, like a snake? I always used to think of myself as a sort of lizard in a woman’s skin. I enjoyed being a diplomat’s wife, sure, in its way, but not enough to commit to the bit to such an extent as to not irredeemably fuck it up.
That is, if committing lesbian adultery salacious enough to trigger a nuclear war can be considered a fuck-up.”
D-DAY, DESTRUCTION DAY: The meltdown of every nuclear reactor, the energy net going black; all lightbulbs exploding at once; trucks, unsteerable, crashing off bridges; airplanes dropping into the sea like dead birds; panic in Moscow, panic in Beijing, panic at the Pentagon. Clocks run backwards; the planes rise out of the sea.
DIES IRAE: The day of wrath.
The moon cracks into two like a dinner plate.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: I PUT MY HAND ON HER HAND ON THE STEERING WHEEL. We cross state lines and drive into the desert, the other desert, the spring desert in bloom. Next gas station: 200 miles. And yet there is a house in the desert, for us to arrive at, a well to drink from. A gun is hanging on the wall, a gun and the horned skull of an animal. She lets her jacket fall from her shoulders, onto the floor…
EVERYWHERE AND ALL THE TIME, things happen, but not completely. The steering wheel, lacking your touch, remains unturned; the shot glasses do not slam down on the bar; the streets which you would cross remain uncrossed by you; forlorn, the cherry trees blossom and fade, unseen by you; and would-be-touched places on my body remain untouched – and perhaps it’s only I and these inanimate objects that sense it; me and your side of the bed, aware of your absence.
The past: Over the eaves of the houses in the Forbidden City a bright red sun rises. In the innermost basement I press my ear to the cold metal door of the vault. A clock is ticking… a matter of time. I sense my associates working away, their quick nimble hands, while the guards lay unconscious in the hallway, knocked out by a poison that’ll give them lovely dreams. Drooling onto the beautiful carpets…
My future: Lovely dreams. Reunion. “I always like to think about this,” I say to Irene in the dream.
“I like to think about this too,” she says, laughing and reaching both hands towards me. “As a matter of fact, I’m the one who’s dreaming it for us.”
A future: Degraded but not destroyed, we run an anonymous white van across the border with the fugitive gagged and duct taped in the back, hidden behind crates of bootleg DVDs, drugged and unconscious. We caught the man. We will deliver him and aim to satisfy. Yet the eyes of the heavy-set border guard, scanning us with boredom, suddenly catch on the scar that runs across the whole length of my partner’s face. “Step out of the car,” says the man, with his machine gun leaning on his shoulder. Every muscle in my body tenses in preparation for flight.
Moments later, I’m trapped inside a ventilation duct with my accomplice. She starts to bite her nails. “Don’t worry, I can do anything,” I say to her. “I’ll teach you to be professional, just like me.”
The past: “I’LL SEND YOU BACK TO OLD SHANGHAI.” He points his gun at me and I back up against the window. The streets are hundreds of meters below us, but the only thing running through my mind is the last phone call I had with you-know-who and my hand rises on its own accord to wipe a tear from my cheek. I’ve been very lonely, in a way, for a long time now. I’ll be the first to admit it.
“Scared to die, bitch?” the gunman hisses in Cantonese, completely misreading my emotions. The boss looks at him in exasperated embarrassment, but when he fires I have no choice but to take a leap of faith, backflipping through the window, and falling, falling backwards in a shower of broken glass… a difficult situation, but manageable, for a professional…
The present: The papyrus is in my hands, finally, fragile like insect wings. Cicadas chirp, jasmine makes itself known, and some miles away is the desert with its cupola of stars and long-sleeping sphinxes, but here is the city, with its street cries and honking cars, sounds streaming through the open tattered-curtained window into my cheap hotel room where the ochre yellow paint chips and peels off the wall. The raw dog bites on my legs itch and throb with pain under the bandages. I unroll the papyrus with gloved hands… although of course I’m not supposed to read it. My only job was to retrieve this object, not to interpret it… but my associates don’t know that I actually read Coptic pretty well as a result of my teenage incarceration in an Ethiopian Orthodox convent. They didn’t warn me about the dogs of the underworld. Out of ignorance, or on purpose?
They’ve nothing to fear from my reading this, anyway. Although it’s immediately obvious to me that the purported antiquity of this document is only a disguise for detailed plans for how to subvert North Korea’s forays into nuclear science – among many other things – such strategies don’t interest me, and barely register in my conscious mind. The signs I’m looking for are hidden deeper and must be read between the lines… a fly buzzes at my ear, insistent: one of those big juicy ones that leave throbbing red bites. I swat at it with my hand and stub my cigarette out into the hotel ashtray, shaped like a voluptuous woman in ancient Egyptian dress, where ash and fag-ends only half-cover the text REMEMBER ME? KISSES FROM CAIRO.
And yet, at the same time: Bethlehem will be free. We rush the citadel… always the same citadel…
always the same people rushing… but
AT TIMES: Doubt creeps in followed by despair. What if there are no more messages? What if what’s gone is truly irretrievable? Alone in this world and alone in all possible worlds. If that’s the case I’d rather disappear completely, myself, and wipe myself out of history, past, present, and future. Because each human being needs another one like herself.
THE MIRROR: Asking for guidance, I blow out the candle and study the signs in the wisps of smoke and they are not as fortuitous as I had hoped. My old enemy, the serpent, rises in the glass darkness. A bad sign. But why?
Much later: I lock eyes with the woman reading a newspaper on the patio of the café in Rome; her face half hidden by the newspaper, shaded by her wide-brimmed hat. I sit down at the table next to her, my back to her back, order a caffè corretto and open my own newspaper to the horse racing pages.
She says, in a voice that’s conversational but very quiet, “In about 55 minutes a small procession of nuns will come out of the church over there, come down the steps, and cross this plaza. There is one nun among these nuns, no different from the others, only the nails on her left hand are painted red. She’s the one.”
“I see,” I say and take a sip of my coffee.
“You will hang respectfully, discreetly behind, and when you see her take a detour, follow.”
“Understood.”
“By the way,” she says in her low, melodious voice, without turning back to look at me. “Don’t think we don’t know what you did in Cairo.” Coins clink on the table. By the time I turn around, she’s already walking away.
The future: I slip into my wetsuit and dive into the wreck. I’m a professional, I know what I’m doing, I remind myself. Slip into the cold water. Slip through the hole in the hull and haul my body into a pocket of air. The light of my water-proof, pressure-proof torch falls meekly against the rotting banisters, the cracking tiles, the death-trap corridors collapsing slowly under pressure. Somewhere, untouched by the water, a one hundred year old sea chart lies in wait… and I’m determined to find it. It might be the only sea chart unaffected by the “great delete” of 1948, where the Crocuta Islands were declared “illegal reality” and erased from maps and memories. Yet I know that if I only knew the coordinates I could visit them in my dreams. I alone will possess information that others would kill for. As I cross the cracking tiles of the sunken ballroom, haunted by the musty breath of drowned party ghosts, I contemplate the fact that forces of good and evil compete inside of me and admittedly they’re both strong — and yet I’m motivated only by a love so intense it verges on derangement.
There are footsteps in the dust. Has someone been in the wreck before me?
And are they here now?
Intolerable present: Remember Cairo? I’m writhing in my sweaty sheets; bugs crawl up the walls of the hotel room; the wounds sustained from dog bites, poorly disinfected, swell and throb, my legs grow hot as if with fever, brown blood stains the bed, my stench runs out of me like water. The bulb flickers and goes out. Only the desert stars and moon cast a light through the window and then there’s only window, no wall.
I find myself lying in the sand, between the paws of the sphinx, wet like a freshly licked kitten. “What happened?”
I have spat you out.
“You took me into your mouth???”
You’ve got real problems.
“It’s true I make rash decisions sometimes,” I say to the sphinx. Its shadow falls across me; the face of the sphinx only warm darkness. “And there were a few blunders this time. But I’m a professional. I know what I’m doing. You don’t need to worry about me.”
Do you remember the last time? Irene opens her eyes.
I shake my head.
There was something you were supposed to remember, about your lover who’s gone from this version of events.
My mouth feels dry. It’s hard to think. “There was something, wasn’t there?”
Wasn’t there?
“Wasn’t there?”
Again and again: … I enter the coordinates into my GPS and go east, through industrial areas and yards full of trailers where laundry hangs on clotheslines and black and white CRT TV sets mumble news stories in a sparking and buzzing language I don’t understand…
The beaded curtain rattles as I enter the mobile home at the dark forest edge of the trailer park.
A figure sits on the bed with their back to me watching TV. On the screen, a mushroom cloud rises.
I cock my gun, they turn.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: SHE PUTS HER HAND BETWEEN MY LEGS IN THE CAR. ON THE DESERT HORIZON A MUSHROOM CLOUD RISES
It’s like I always say: TRUST ME, I’M A PROFESSIONAL: Collaborating or all alone. I’m thief, scammer, prostitute, spy; actress, agent, politician, vagrant; street-seller, beggar, Qing Dynasty concubine; I’ve seen it all, I have been everything. There’s no one like me, never was, never will be, and still I’m only part of a long tradition of eccentric women with a hatred for boredom, wage labour, and the marriage bed. And a love of — well, of love, of —
MY LOVE: Nuclear fission, immeasurable power, pure energy. Destroyer of worlds.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: SHE PUTS HER HAND ON MY HAND ON THE STEERING WHEEL. We drive away from the nuclear testing site with a jar of radioactive sand held securely between my thighs. Inside the jar, new worlds are forming; new creatures spring into being, the spontaneous generation of life, universes multiplying, multi-headed, struggling to break out.
A
A A
ARM IN ARM, WE WILL WATCH WATCHED WATCH
THE MOON SPLIT INTO TWO.
AND THERE WAS NO PLACE FROM WHICH WE WERE ABSENT.
Text: Zola Gorgon
Image: Pierre-Louis Herold
Purgatory Magazine 