Siren is the story of a contemporary singer who is a genetic throwback to the Sirens of ancient Greece. Within her DNA is the song that will re-order the Universe, were she to discover it and, existentially, sing it. Harpies, Furies, and the Fates intercede, as does the goddess of love, Aphrodite, in a byzantine interplay of many mytholo gical characters navigating the modern world.
SERIES MANAGER
Start at the beginning, PRELUDE, “Odysseus.”
IV. The Healing Blows of the Februa
V. The Luminiferous Æther
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V
The Luminiferous Aether
“It was just awful, Mama,” Penny spoke softly, just loud enough so that her mother could hear her through her own labored breathing and the hiss of the oxygen flow. Her borrowed time had room to spare, thanks to the HēmEnsley that had been provided her so generously by the Extended Family Major Medical Plan of Ensley-Mix, Inc. It was truly lucky that Penny was employed there, for the old woman would have been dead for over a year by this time otherwise.
HēmEnsley was discovered by accident during the usual Research and Development explorations. Already established as a high-end lubricant, a team was studying the effects of applying sundry radicals, methyl groups, and the like in inventive ways along the course of the molecule itself. Highly efficient wasn’t good enough. The perfect lubricant, the researchers hoped, was only a new chemical bond away. They ultimately succeeded with one of the noble gases, allowing the permanent, unaltering, non-deteriorating molecule to ball, allowing it to slide effortlessly not only between metal parts, but even between strata of differing liquids, insulating them at the same time, making large terawatt batteries a reality. Depending on the strength or polarity of a second weak current, the KryptEnsley would allow selective exchange between the two strata of these new super batteries, making possible rheostatic power delivery, essential for lengthening the life of small batteries in our everyday life. Duracell would have been drained and dead sooner than Penny Stenton’s mother had not the President of the United States himself made a personal request of Peter Harper that he license the patent out. Conventional wisdom had it that it was a good thing for the President of the United States to owe a favor. Warren Buffet, who owned Duracell, was ipso facto beholden as well, and his estate would inherit the obligation.
Long before success with the noble gas application to Ensley, charged ions had been tried and discarded with volumes of notes for future applications derived even from the failures. Such was the nature of Ensley: It was a self-replicating product, in that everything applied to it generated spin-offs with uncanny fortuity. Company chemists felt the thrill of alchemy in this modern Ensley age. Peter Harper just couldn’t go wrong. He would succeed in finding the perfect lubricant, all the while failing on another idea that would happily overturn the battery industry, as well as the super-conductor industry and the refrigeration and insulation technologies.
And the medical world, too.
Because Ensley loved oxygen. When the researchers looped Ensley into a sphere, it snatched up oxygen in any medium. It did it twice as fast and twice as well as hemoglobin. And then it would let it go twice as easily. It had a high saturation co-efficient such that the receptor sites for the oxygen seemed to be more plentiful the more oxygen bound to it. Indeed, the oxygen itself took part in the oxygen receptor architecture. One could hold his breath for twenty minutes with an established, recommended amount of HēmEnsley in the bloodstream. Although it did have limitations, it did “cure” emphysema overnight, make saving one-pound babies a snap, and change forever athletics with the elimination of exertional dyspnea.
It was a good drug that was totally out of the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration. Thanks to the rescued Duracell people, the President was much obliged to find the right people to call to put the substance under the auspices of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, making it virtually unregulatable. Or at least, less so. The technicality that afforded it this protection was placing it in cigarettes, which eliminated the objectionable carbon monoxide side effect. HēmEnsley hated carbon monoxide, breaking it up and recombining it into carbon dioxide and oxygen. It hung out of the mouth of every smoking American, as well as hung out in the tailpipe of every American automobile sold after the discovery.
At HATO headquarters it was well known that for every liter of carbon monoxide dealt with on the end of a cigarette or end of a tailpipe, that three liters were spewed from the end of an Ensley-Mix, Inc. smokestack in Mexico. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of Ensley-seekers for personal or business reasons.
Two major groups of people had the recommended pint of HēmEnsley injected into their cardiovascular system. Those who had insurance to pay their way for the illnesses that demanded it and those rich enough to get it in this quantity just for their own unscrupulous needs. The current heavyweight champion of the world was easily trounced by his Ensley opponent in his very next fight. Elderly eccentric moguls enjoyed the adolescent lack of winding that strenuous activities such as skiing, tennis, and sex would normally guarantee. But it was a well-known fact that Peter Harper wouldn’t allow the stuff into his own bloodstream.
“I’m in good health,” he would say. “I don’t need it.”
Penny Stenton could not be so confident. She knew she still had a mother because of this artificial blood, although it was easy at times to take it for granted. And it didn’t concern her that HēmEnsley had a life span of 180 days, making her mother’s own life span a semiannual affair dependent on Penny’s employment. Nothing about a parent seemed temporary when she could look at, talk to, feel, and cry to her living, warm face. The status quo always made her feel her mother was a permanent being. 180 days at a time.
“She just forgot everything she had said two minutes earlier,” Penny said, catching her mother up on Rhea. “She’s joking with the doctor and then she’s an idiot all over again.”
“Penny, she’ll be alright. What better place to suffer seizures than in a hospital.” Penny was not comforted by the reassurance.
“Yeah, I guess what better place to die than a place that has a morgue.”
“Oh, Penny.”
“Really, Mama. Those doctors don’t know why she’s like that. And now I’m in a fix, because I needed her to—that is, I don’t know what to do about this...um...thing tomorrow.”
“Thing? What thing?” her mother asked her sternly. The old woman invoked her right to enforce the mother policy that no child should rock any boat, unless she approved. Her expression demanded Penny’s explanation.
“We’ve declared war on Ensley-Mix.”
“I’m sorry?” her mother asked, knowing her own life could be a casualty in such a war.
“We’ve declared war on the company—well, mainly its owner, Peter Harper,” Penny explained. Against Rhea’s advice, advice which would have contradicted the open relationship between this mother and this daughter, Penny admitted to the corporate virucide they had planned.
“We’re going to let loose a virus on the EnsleyNet.”
“Penny, what could they have done to make you this angry?” Mrs. Stenton asked. “You will do a lot of damage. Why do you want to do this to them?”
“They use women employees as call girls—that’s what made me so angry; that’s why I want to do a lot of damage to them.”
“Baby,” she said to her, putting her translucent-skin and ropy blue-veined hand on Penny’s forearm, “how do you know this?” The old woman’s mind whirred in her head even as Penny’s answer was forthcoming. She remembered a particular case she tried as a judge ten years before the emphysema had made her retire.
A law firm, McGuire, Lewis, Henderson, and McGuire, had set up appointments for a woman applicant who sought a position as a clerk. Her name was Blythe Taylor, an attractively disheveled girl in her mid-twenties. It turned out that she had to be interviewed by six different partners in the firm—all men. By the end of the day, the telephones were buzzing about the interviews, which had turned out to be nothing more than oral sex sessions instigated by the woman herself.
That was the defense, anyway, in Taylor versus McGuire, Lewis, Henderson, and McGuire et al. As it turned out, she had been off of her medication for some time before this choice of aberrant behavior had occurred to her. She had been the aggressor in each rendezvous, and each male partner of the firm had actually put up some token resistance.
The psychiatrists were convincing, however. The sexual episodes had reinforced her psychoses, it was alleged and accepted, and any sexual act prompted by a thought disorder, whether due to suspension of therapeutic medication or to alcohol inebriation, was to be considered nonconsensual sex. The verdict was that firm was at egregious fault. Blythe Taylor received not only damages and compensation, but Judge Stenton had insisted the firm hire her, if she would be willing. And thus justice would be done.
She was more than willing. Thinking straight, she took out her vindication by working hard for all of the partners, which didn’t set well with any of their spouses. Each of them resigned rather than risk their marriages. Not that the marriages survived anyway.
It had been a very controversial case, and Penny’s mother, Judge Stenton, had received a lot of fame as well as attention from it—not all of it pleasant. She was on the cover of Life magazine with the caption, “New Rules in the Battle of the Consensual Sexes.”
“I know they use women as call girls, Mama,” Penny answered, “because Rhea was taken down.”
“Rhea!” her mother said, surprised. “She’s so headstrong, so...so conniving. She a sharp girl. She wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Well, she was a little too conniving. She was trying to connive a relationship with the head of a company.”
“Head of Ensley-Mix?” the old woman asked. “You mean Peter Harper?”
“Mama, he used her for sex and then got rid of her.”
“He fired her?”
“No, just kicked her back to work. And then threatened to fire her.”
“I see.” The old woman paused a moment to catch her breath.
“So that’s why I need Rhea to get well before tomorrow,” Penny explained.
“Why tomorrow?” she asked, after her pause.
“Because Rhea’s been summoned again. Eleven A.M. sharp.”
“But she’s sick right now, my dear,” her mother argued in a whisper. “Oh,” she reflected with a disturbed look, “you don’t think what happened has anything to do with her condition, do you?”
Penny assumed a puzzled expression. “You know, I never thought of that before. This could be real psychiatric on her. All the guilt and shame. It would’ve made me crazy, I know.” Penny’s face hardened in anger even more.
Her mother’s color suddenly turned bad. But before Penny reached for the oxygen knob she realized it was only the anger in her, too. Waves of Taylor versus McGuire, Lewis, Henderson, and McGuire et al. welled inside the retired judge again after all of these years.
“And don’t worry, Mama. Even if I get caught, which won’t even come close to happening, they’ve got to give you your artificial blood. They wouldn’t just cut you off. You’d die.”
“I know!” the old woman exclaimed.
“No, Mama, think of the bad PR. I’d make sure of that. Turning off the lifeblood for a retired Federal Judge? Besides, they won’t even know who did it. It’s going to be piped into the system so fast and so wide that it’s going to be quite a mess for quite a while.”
“I don’t know, Penny,” she said to her, troubled, “big outfits like that have ways of tracking things down. Think of the bad PR, indeed—the daughter of a Federal Judge getting arrested.”
“Mama, Mr. Harper wants to have sex with Rhea. And with me, too—at the same time.”
“With you, too?” she asked Penny, astonished. Penny read her face differently now: Now things were different!
“On Thursday—tomorrow, Mama. Rhea and me and Peter Harper. That can’t happen.” Yes, now it was different. Curiously, she just smiled at her daughter.
It was a proud smile.
“I’ve always hated the expression, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right,’“ she said after a moment. “And I’m really conflicted about this. I’ve administered the law my entire life. How do you expect me to give this virus thing my blessing?”
“You’re not the Judge anymore,” Penny explained. “You’re just someone who administered the law your entire life, then when you were forced to retire, had the disability insurance challenges upheld in the insurance company’s favor by you’re their own friends on the bench and your pension whittled down by the governor to no more than unemployment checks. Your medical insurance dropped you, then after that made you weather an unending appeal process the outcome that they themselves will determine, if ever. How long’s it been? How many years now? Just to use your insurance—not that you could afford it anymore. Thank you very much, Judge Stenton.”
“Thanks to McGuire, Lewis, Henderson, and McGuire,” she said with resignation; she had long gotten over it, although Penny hadn’t. Nor had “the man,” unfortunately.
“Your reward was a substandard subsistence where you can’t even afford the stuff that keeps you alive.” Penny’s mother stewed in the rant that was absolutely dead on. She took a good look at her daughter, then slapped her hands on her thighs.
“I wish that I could be there when you fix things,” she told her.
“Well, we all know how illegal this is,” Penny announced, “which makes you the worst judge ever.”
“I’m not the judge anymore, honey. And I like it.”
Long before this day, a day when Penny and her mother enjoyed the thrills of self-righteous treachery, a boring and meticulous small Chinese-American man whose name was C. E. Lee worked his usual day in Research and Development at Ensley-St. Louis. What was unusual this day, however, is that at one point he had to recheck the figures that troubled him. C. E. Lee seldom, if ever, had to recheck his figures, but on this day his oxygenation dissociation curves had been way off in all of the tubes of his HēmEnsley that he was studying. Even more troubling, he was able to record a slight heat differential at the milliOsmolar level. He checked and rechecked every differing parameter that might affect the aliquots studied, for he knew how important this was. Somewhere, his experiment must have been corrupted. The steady state should have been more stable than what he was getting. He went through the steps of each measurement, searching for that one distorting parameter that skewed each curve warmer than it should be. That heat differential at the milliOsmolar level, he theorized, when extrapolated to the voluminous quantities that a whole pint in a living person could represent, would usher in a new age of spontaneous combustion of human beings.
“They’d go poof,” he said out loud in his frustration and astonishment. “Well, more like WHOOMP!” And it wouldn’t be a religious rapture or alien invasion, he thought, but a combination of HēmEnsley and some unknown difference in his experiment, an unknown aspect that might create an epidemic of auto-immolation. It would be very unpleasant.
It was not a simple problem. He lay in bed thinking about it night after night. He tip-toed into his lab each day, careful not to alter a thing, lest he change and forever eliminate the co-culprit.
My God, he thought, even the President has this stuff in him!
One morning, after numerous experiments had ruled out the ambient temperature of his lab as the problem, and after he had determined that it was not any change in humidity, he sat silently, becoming irritated by the worsening sound of a faltering air conditioner fan. When he left his bench to flip the circuit breaker that would turn off the heavy air conditioning, he was surprised on his return to see that the thermal variations had returned to a normal steady state.
Turning the ventilation back on, it only took a moment to set up the oscilloscope and record the sounds coming from the insulated shaft that led to the two tons of air conditioning overhead. Frozen upon the greenish round screen were what he identified as the complicated harmonics involved in the ambient sound. He noted them carefully in his notebook by identifying the different functions that made the consortium of waves. It was a simple matter of playing the recording back into a transducer that he had placed in each of his tubes, each one with an acoustic filter which would isolate each of the ten different frequencies he had identified. He would then see which tube fizzled to isolate the ignition frequency.
Nothing happened.
Now he realized it wasn’t just one frequency to hunt down, but it was a combination of frequencies and that would make it exponentially difficult. He feared it might even be a harmony or disharmony of three or more. Rather than test two then three and more at a time in 100, 1000 and more combinations respectively, he worked backwards—first with all ten—reading for the thermal instability, and then eliminating one frequency at a time. The first 4 eliminations did nothing. He eliminated the next frequency, leaving five. He crossed his fingers and played the HēmEnsley quintet. There was only a minor variation noted, so small as to be error. It wasn’t as statistically significant as his original findings. But it was something, after all. If he increased the volume of the frequencies and it did the same, then he figured it to be error. But if an increased were to augment the discrepancy, it was not a variation within error but the real deal.
He amplified it to fifteen decibels.
The resulting explosion sent innumerable glass slivers in all directions, many of which succeeded in blinding him in a tragic and painful accident that caused him to undergo several eye surgeries and plastic procedures over the ensuing months. He thanked God that he hadn’t turned the volume any higher, regretting his own complement of HēmEnsley , a pint he had qualified for as a Christmas bonus earlier.
Having lost his sight, it would be months before he could publish the results in the classified memoranda to the inner circle of Ensley-Mix itself.
Acoutostimulatory HēmEnsley Thermal Instability, an exhaustive paper, told of the present danger to anyone having the artificial oxygen-carrier in them. It described theoretical sources of the right sounds that could trigger an unexpected spontaneous combustion. It speculated on military applications as well. It even postulated its use in espionage, which caught the imagination of the people at Ensley-Mix who had the fewest telephone lines.
The large company was very good to C. E. Lee. He received the Extended Family Major Medical Benefit plan for life and several million dollars. It was unclear whether the money was in compensation for his tragedy or in gratitude to his discovery. The one thing that was clear to him was that he was separated from the company, what he had discovered was confidential, exclusively the property of Ensley-Mix, Inc., and he was forever forbidden to talk about it. The new millionaire felt this was appropriate, since Ensley-Mix owned this knowledge and they should therefore do what was appropriate with it. He felt sure that important information would be handled appropriately. He was assured that his discovery would get top priority so as to avert any tragedies.
Ten miles from where Penny and Judge Stenton were visiting each other in whispered conversation, and almost a thousand miles from where C. E. Lee was struck by lightning, as the hasty autopsy had concluded, Rhea slept in her hospital room, agape and with her eyes wide open. The atmosphere was perfectly still. There were no sounds at all. Any cognizant person would have been terrified by the stark inertia. Rhea’s breathing scarcely moved any air.
Since nothing is unstable, something was bound to happen.
In walked the luminous person, graceful yet confident in her stride. With her soft glow she stood at Rhea’s bedside, her shadow brighter than the dimly lit floor. Indeed, her glow cast its own softly luminous shadow, as if such creatures block out the darkness of the visible world. Rhea’s open but sleeping eyes adjusted, and the shadow over her was as a pane of glass letting sunlight into a darkened room. In the “shadows” were shapes of moving things. She saw herself in these shapes. She began to recognize others—Penny, Peter Harper, even Dr. Vincent. She looked keenly into the shadows and saw the future.
This glowing being who had entered both Rhea’s hospital room and now her life emanated warmth and well-being. To Rhea she was simply beautiful and beautiful, simply. She saw her visitor very clearly through her unblinking sleeping eyes.
“Who are you?” she asked the brightened caller.
“My sister Rhea, I am Phoebe.”
“Oh hello, Phoebe,” Rhea said sleepily.
“Rejoice, thou favored daughter of Heaven and Earth.”
“I can,” she said, “I can do that.” Rhea spoke expectantly. There was a pause as the incandescent Phoebe regarded her as enchanted. She finally spoke again.
“The sequence now is perfect, as you would well expect,” she said. Rhea listened attentively. She wasn’t frightened at all. In fact, she really did feel like a favored daughter. “Like all good things that don’t come to an end,” Phoebe went on, “it is a circle sure. Your tragic mother also is your niece. And now you carry two important items. His child you carry now.”
“Whose child?” Rhea asked. She knew she was sterile from the endometriosis she had suffered with for years. “I carry whose child? That’s really quite impossible.”
“Have you heard of the woman who has the child without the need for man?” Rhea tried feverishly to make sense out of the question.
“You mean the virgin birth of Christ? You mean the Son of God?”
The visitor just smiled. “You speak of those in non-aether, those of waves and speed. But we are of the luminiferous aether, hidden in the dark. We are those of the unseen. We are of the dark matter.” Rhea didn’t respond. She wondered if she were reliving some memory she had of Gabriel’s visit to the Blessed Mother. She was in her other world, though, so anything was possible—even if this Phoebe had come to announce that she would be the mother of the second coming of Christ!
Now she became frightened. How could this be? she asked herself. She wasn’t very religious—hadn’t been to church in years. Four years of Catholic high school was enough for her to stray. In fact, she seldom even thought about theological matters, caught up in the paganism of the twenty-first century. She now regretted her alienation from her church, for she could have used some solace during this very strange time.
Even scarier was the enigmatic answer involving dark matter, whatever that was. Dark matter? Was this devil talk? Certainly Phoebe was too kind-looking for that. Or was she deceptively kind-looking?
“The great one now is with you. Do you feel it?”
“I really don’t, no,” Rhea responded.
“If you looked into the aether you would. If you were in the dark you would. You would shine brightly.”
“You glow pretty good for being in the dark,” Rhea observed.
“That’s only because of your memory,” Phoebe explained.
“I’m sorry?” Rhea said.
“You have us in you. It’s very deep. It’s locked. It’s locked inside your memory, but it can be opened with four keys. You only have to see the keys. They need to glow with the dark as I do. You then can see them. It takes looking into yourself. You need the mirror that reflects the aether, too—reflects the dark matter.”
“I still don’t understand,” Rhea confessed. Phoebe only smiled again.
“Your world has finally found the mirror, and many persons have it. But, they do not have us in them, with four locks sealed in the memory. And they surely do not have the keys.”
“I’m sorry,” Rhea further protested, no closer to understanding.
“And you will find the keys, my sister. They’ll glow for you as plainly as I glow myself to you. Just listen. That is all you need to do. You’ll hear the sublime, singing to you from your memory. Look there and you will see the keys. You are now in the Sirenhood. You are of us and we’re in you. But he your child will fast belong to the aether. Your child will be of darkest matter, and he will glow for you.”
“I am confused,” Rhea admitted. “You talk of darkness, keys, and locks. You tell me now that I will have a child—from where?”
“Think of Hephaestus. He was not fathered. Strange possibilities are here among us all. Behold the beauty that he created. But what you carry is more burdensome than Pandora’s stowing, Hephaestus’s daughter’s stowing.”
“You mean this child?” Rhea asked.
“No,” answered Phoebe. “I said you carry two things. It’s the other thing. Your friend will use it tomorrow to spill the plagues onto your world.”
“Penny?”
“Penny Stenton, urged on by her mother.”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow...” Rhea wondered.
“Tomorrow just an hour before the center of the day.”
“That’s eleven. Oh God, eleven A.M. at Peter Harper’s appointment.”
“He is of us too, but he’ll never see anyone glow. He’ll never unlock his own memory.”
“But these plagues—tell me more,” Rhea implored her. “I don’t want any plagues.”
“To some they’re plagues, to others they’re blessings, bringing to union that which started out so separate. The foam will be mixed, finally. We will all have the beauty of Aphrodite. And your friend will bring it all to pass. And what is will be ready for what is to come from you. It is a beautiful and glorious completion of what started faultily. It’s taken this long to unfold and coalesce back to what should have been from the very beginning. The dichotomy was so irreconcilable so early, giving our paradox until now. Now the paradox will be resolved, the mystery unraveled. All will be smooth again, and we will all glow. Listen for the sublime. You will hear it.”
Rhea didn’t know at what point she drifted in and out from a normal sleeping pattern. But she ultimately felt herself in a closed-eye sleep. And of course there were no glowing people about. She would realize that even before waking, yet she remembered everything. And the more she recalled the conversation, the more another memory came creeping back in. It was an unwelcome memory of flagellation and beating wings and violation. She began to cry.
“Heart failure,” Holly Ray told the thin, nervously twitching man.
“Heart failure?” the man asked, as if to verify what he had heard.
“Yeah, that’s what I said all right—heart failure.”
“But I heard—” the thin, nervous man protested.
“I know what you heard. But it wasn’t an axe. It was an ice pick. Punctured his heart. It failed. Heart failure. Simple.”
“Oh,” the man understood, “heart failure. Like that guy run off the Expressway.”
“Heart failure,” Holly Ray clarified.
“Smashed thin as paper,” the man went on.
“And his heart just stopped,” Holly Ray finished for him. The thin man sank back into the rusty, squeaky desk chair. He was so light that when he leaned back, the chair did not gain any momentum worth rolling back for.
“So what can I do for you, Holly?” The man began to shake.
“What you so shaky for?” Holly asked him. “Oh, sorry, how long’s it been?”
“Two days,” the man responded. “Damn, like two years.”
“I know what you mean,” Holly commiserated. Holly sunk back on the other version of a rusty, squeaky chair in the room and tried to puff on his cigar which had long since burned out. “Remember that asshole who threatened the mayor a few years ago—was gonna put that hormone in the water supply an’ give everyone orgasms or some shit like that unless they cleaned up Lake Pontchartrain?”
“Sure do, Holly. Lake’s still filthy and I’m still waitin’ for my orgasm.” He laughed.
“Yeah, but didn’t he have some stupid name for his group? ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.,’ or ‘D.A.N.G.E.R.,’ or something, like out of a comic book?”
“‘T.A.R.G.E.T,’“ the man said.
“Yeah, ‘TARGET,’ Holly said, stroking one of his chins. “A real fruitcake. He did have some hormones, though. They caught him.”
“Thanks to you,” the man said.
“Well, you and I both know that no one should know that. I work behind the scenes, you know.”
“I know, I know, Holly.”
“And sometimes the law’s interest and a customer’s interest can come together sweet.”
“Like that guy, that ‘TARGET’ guy.”
“Yeah,” Holly Ray agreed, “like that ‘TARGET’ guy.”
“He had about forty or fifty holes in him when they got him, didn’t he?” the thin man asked.
“The man died of heart failure,” Holly remembered out loud, irritated that this man found it necessary to talk this way, even if it was just the two of them. “His partner in this scheme got away. Well, we let him go. Went to Colorado to start some John Denver Rocky Mountain High environmental thing or something.”
“Yeah, Holly, he just filtered back into the nature freaks’ fringe.”
“Yeah, maybe, but I’d like to rule this guy out first, just the same.”
“Why? What’s up? Is he back?”
“I don’t really know. But I got a cutesy name with an environmental mission from Gawd Almighty, with threats to go with it. He’s got to be ruled out first. Now what was that guy’s name?”
“I know his name. Know it exactly, because it’s exactly like my step-father’s name, the old bastard. Jenkins, Oswald Jenkins.”
“That’s right, Ozzie Jenkins. Crazy. The guy had orgasm on the brain, alright. The Krewe of Tucks asked him to put that stuff in the water the Saturday their Mardi Gras parade rolled, remember? Made it their whole parade theme.”
“Yeah, that was pretty funny.”
“Ozzie Jenkins,” Holly Ray said again. He picked up the heavy receiver of his black telephone and began to dial.
“Yeah,” he said, “get me Information in Denver.” And then he spoke to the thin, shaking man. “Can’t be too many Jenkins’ in Denver. It’s a big stupid Louisiana country name.”
“Hey, that’s my step-father’s name, too, the old, stupid bastard,” the thin man complained. “And who the hell are you calling? There’s no Information anymore.”
“Thank you,” Holly spoke into the phone again. Then to the thin man, “Library. Found out about a back number that ties them in with a 4-1-1 service. And I don’t even have a card.” Then back into the phone, “The home listing for Jenkins, Oswald.” Holly Ray tapped a pencil on the chipped Formica top of the desk, the pencil point long gone from previous countless drum solos. “Thanks,” he said to the phone, even though he was thanking a digital voice. He wrote the number down on the desk blotter. He had to jam the pencil hard into it so that the end of the pencil would be smashed down to some lead that could leave a trail.
“I gotta feelin’ ol’ Ozzie’s heart is in some need of evaluation. Wouldn’t take much to have it fail. A few phone calls, that’s all,” the thin man supposed.
“Shut up,” Holly Ray told the man, which he promptly did. Holly Ray began dialing again.
“You’re callin’ him?” the thin man asked.
“Gotta start somewhere, don’t we?” Holly Ray answered. “Hello, make I speak to Mr. Ozzie Jenkins?”
“Little Ozzie?” the woman’s voice asked.
“Uh, no, Big Ozzie, I guess.”
“Who is this?” the woman wanted to know.
“This is Publishers Clearinghouse, and I need him to claim his million dollars.” The thin man laughed into his hand.
“That’s a pretty sick joke, Mister,” the woman said angrily.
“Well, good,” Holly said. “So go get him on the line so he can give me a piece of his mind, will ya?”
“You won’t think you’re so fucking funny when I tell you he’s been dead for three years now!” the woman screamed.
“Oh,” Holly Ray said, pouting his mouth. “I’m so sorry. You’re right, it was just a bad joke. I’m an old pal of his. How’d he die?” The thin man raised his eyebrows.
“Someone ran him off of the freeway when he was out on his motorcycle,” the woman said, sniffling.
“That’s a damn shame,” Holly said, and then he hung up on her, sending an insensitive pulse toward her suffering at the speed of light.
“He’s dead?” the thin man asked.
“Pretty much,” Holly answered. “Heart failure.”
“You don’t say,” commented the thin man.
Jim Jameson, CEO at the New Orleans site of Ensley-Mix, Inc., knew well the thin, fidgety man at Holly Ray’s place. He didn’t like him, and if he had even known that Holly Ray had called him in for some information, Holly Ray’s own heart might have been suspect. The thin man use to work for Holly Ray while he worked for Jameson on the side with money diverted from security, double-dealing with both of them. His job for Holly Ray was to hang around sordid areas of interest and keep his ears open, while his job for Jameson was to bring packages here and there to serve the needs of the company. Holly Ray wouldn’t tell him why he needed certain information, and Jameson’s company certainly would disavow any knowledge of his employment or duties should the questions ever arise.
This is how Jameson had first connected with Holly Ray. The thin man was infiltrating some environmental group for Jameson, while he was hired through Holly Ray to put an eye on Jameson for the environmental group he was supposed to infiltrating. Holly Ray had suspected the problem with this thin man: instead of keeping his ears open, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. His emaciated frame implied that nothing was getting into that mouth, because too much was getting out. It wasn’t long before the conservation group discovered the thin man’s infiltration via Jameson and Jameson discovered the thin man was watching him for the conservation group. The unlikely connections were made, and Jameson met Holly Ray behind the fire exit of a multi-screen theater. No one knew what they had discussed, but it happened very quickly that the thin man was out. On all levels. That is when he began to drink. He couldn’t believe his heart was hanging in there all of that time after. He was frightened when he got the call from Holly Ray this time. He thought he would end up with heart failure for sure if he went into that run-down excuse for an office, and this contributed to his shakes. But Holly Ray called, and he obeyed. Pleasing Holly Ray was always a smart move.
The thin man knew all of the seminal members of New Orleans’ first radical environmental group. Holly Ray had never yet needed to tap his brain since the day his services were no longer needed, but he felt now would be a pretty good time to do so. And it was profitable, because it would have been days before he had come up with that name from some obscure file or some obscure memory in his brain. The man saved him a lot of busy work and they both knew it, so he was relieved that Holly Ray seemed to hold no hard feelings.
Oswald Jenkins had been in that first radical group. In fact, he had been of the very first splinter group to fragment off. And the thin man knew him well enough to call him Ozzie. Of course, Ozzie never guessed any connection between the thin man and his getting caught, along with his partner whose heart did not survive long after.
In the IBC building, Jameson thought about that partner now. He thought like a CEO, not like a gangster detective, so he would have never thought of any connection to the past. Holly pursued leads, while Jameson paid invisible people to take care of things gravely.
Dr. Vincent, Rhea’s doctor, had unknowingly cared for some heart failure victims of Holly Ray’s through the emergency room. Like Holly Ray, he dismissed them from his memory once they were no longer a concern. He walked the hall of Hotel Dieu Hospital now with probably a dozen of Holly Ray’s ghosts following behind him, but they would never concern him again, especially while he had to deal with the living.
“How’s my prettiest patient?” he asked Rhea that Wednesday morning. She was only dozing, so she smiled first and then slowly opened her eyes. When she did, she was relieved to see no incandescence on his part. As her lids rose, her eyes were already positioned right on track to his coordinates at her bedside.
“I’m fine.”
“Good,” he said, flipping through her chart.
“I’m weird, but I’m fine,” she added.
“Oh?” he said. “How do you mean?”
“I had this dream,” she said.
“Dreams are allowed,” he fired back with a smile of his own.
“I don’t know if this dream is allowed,” she said, laughing.
“How so? NC-17?” Rhea thought for a moment, as if it were important to describe it just right so as to convince him of her fear.
“An angel visits me.”
“An angel?” he asked.
“Yes. She’s beautiful, kind-looking. No halo or anything, but she’s lit up. She glows ever so softly. It’s warmth coming my way. She’s a friend.”
“Sounds like a nice dream to me so far,” Dr. Vincent said as he pulled up a chair for an extended visit. He checked his watch, frowned, but stayed seated anyway.
“Yes, I suppose it sounds nice. But I don’t know why she’s a friend. I mean, I don’t know this person. If I bumped into her at a supermarket, she’d be a stranger. And I’d surely run like hell if she were glowing.”
“But it’s a dream—out of your own head,” he reassured her. “That’s why she’s a friend.”
“She’s not out of anything in my head, I can assure you.”
“Why, Rhea?”
“Because she’s telling me things that I would never be able to even make up in even my wildest, make-no-sense dreams.”
“Hmm,” he intonated.
“Are you sure the pregnancy test was negative?”
“Well, unless you’re less than a week pregnant, then the negative result is accurate.” This sent a chill down Rhea’s spine. She had used a condom while with Peter Harper a few days earlier. He had insisted on it. In a silent, understood way. Of course he had insisted, even if he knew the intimate blood facts of every employee who worked there. Cody had told her that. The condom was an awkward affair, in keeping with the lunch motif. The bastard, she thought, probably wanted to make sure I couldn’t sink him with his DNA on my clothes. She supposed there was a chance that there could have been some breach in the technique. But she really wasn’t that concerned because of her endometriosis.
It had been quite a while since she had been sexually involved with someone anyway, which is probably why, when she found herself so star-struck with the mogul, she had fallen for Harper’s opportunity so easily.
Yet the dream seemed so emphatic that she was pregnant. How could that possibly be? she asked herself. Unless it was Ocypete, the winged consort who had metaphorically represented what Harper himself had done to her. Ocypete, fluttering above after her flagellation “opened her womb.” Yes, a metaphor. A dream. Nothing more.
“Are you concerned that you might be pregnant?” Dr. Vincent asked her.
“Oh, no. Not at all.” He seemed relieved. “I don’t know,” Rhea continued, “Phoebe had said—”
“Phoebe?”
“My friend.”
“I wasn’t aware you had any other visitors besides Penny.”
“No, my friend in the dream.”
“Oh, shiny Phoebe.”
“More like glowing,” Rhea clarified.
“Oh, yes. Tell me about Phoebe.”
“She said crazy things. Like was I aware of Hephaestus being born without being fathered?”
“Hephaestus? Hera’s son?”
“Hera?” Rhea asked him. “You’ve heard this stuff before?”
“It’s mythology,” he answered. “It isn’t crazy stuff. You’ve heard it somewhere before, too. Locked in there somewhere from some old college course. You’re wrong when you said it was stuff you never could have made up yourself. The seizure and the medicine unlocked it.”
“Unlocked!” Rhea exclaimed.
“Rhea, calm down,” he said to her, leaning forward so as to put his hand on her shoulder. She relaxed back into her bed.
“No, that’s what she said. I was in some way like this Hephaestus business—I was going to have a baby without a man. That’s crazy, huh?”
“Yeah, pretty crazy. Again, perfectly O.K. in a dream.”
“Or even more,” Rhea thought for a moment, “that I was blessed and I was favored. By the great one. And besides carrying some special child, I also had something that would release all of the troubles into the world.”
“Like Pandora.”
“Pandora! Yes, she talked about Pandora! How do you know so much about this stuff?”
“I’m the only doctor in America who loved the Latin they made us take. Took a lot of extra courses. In fact, I took a lot of mythology courses. Did you know that there’s a mythology textbook with a chapter in it I translated straight from Hesiod. Well, not straight from him. Actually, he was Greek 800 years B.C. I translated from a Latin translation of Hesiod.”
“Really!” Rhea said, very impressed.
“Really,” he agreed, also very impressed with himself.
“Must have paid a lot.”
“You don’t get rich from non-fiction, I’m afraid.”
“Too bad. So you know all about these things.”
“You know them pretty well yourself,” he complimented her.
“I guess I do. I had the same dream about five times last night.” She tried to remember any college course she had taken. “I don’t remember taking any classes in this, Dr. Vincent.” He softened his cocked eyebrows. His expression became wholly un-hospital-like. He regarded Rhea’s beauty.
“Call me Charles,” he offered. Rhea smiled. It was a victory of sorts.
“That would be nice, Charles.” He smiled all the more.
“You must have heard references somewhere. It’s all around us, you know. Planets are named for gods. Half of the Mardi Gras Krewes are based on Mythology. Even your name. Rhea is a Titaness, you know,” he informed her.
“Thanks a lot, Charles. Are you calling me an Amazon or something? Do the scabs make my ass look big?”
“No, the Titans and Titanesses were the first children of Heaven and Earth, that is, Uranus and Gaea. Rhea, as well as Cronus, Phoebe, and others.”
“You see?” Rhea interrupted. “Phoebe. She called me sister.”
“This is great. I can’t believe I’ve found someone else to talk mythology with after all of these years.”
“Not with me. I had one dream. I’m afraid you’ve had the only conversation about this you can have with me. Sorry.”
“Even so, to just talk about it. So much fun.” He paused, and his smiling face became neutral again in doctorly seriousness. “Especially someone so beautiful.” Rhea blushed. She raised the sheet to her shoulders, as if to protect herself. “I’m sorry,” he offered.
“Oh, no, please don’t be,” she hurriedly suggested. His smile came back. Now Rhea took a chance. “You don’t ever talk about this with your wife?” He shook his head on two levels, indicating that he not only didn’t talk about this with his wife, but he didn’t have a wife. “Or with your girlfriend?” He shook his head again in the two ways.
“Loving mythology is a lonely pastime,” he said suggestively.
“I’ll talk with you about it any time you want. I am talking with you about it now.”
“Good, Rhea. We’ll definitely talk some more. Tonight. I’ll pick you up about eight.”
“From here?” Rhea asked. Anywhere would have been acceptable with the likes of this striking man.
“No, not from here,” he said. “From home. You’ll have to give me the address.”
“I’m discharged?”
“I have no reason to keep you here. Your EEG in now normal. I stopped the medications when they didn’t seem to be doing any good, and you came out of it anyway.”
“I’m O.K.?” Rhea asked, not so sure.
“Well,” he said, scrunching his lips, “I don’t know about that. But you are lovely, I know that.”
“What if I have another seizure?”
“Here,” he said, handing her a prescription. “Take these three times a day for a while. If it doesn’t happen to you over the next few months, we might have you stop them.”
“That sounds good.” And with her worries completely relegated to another, Rhea lit up with the prospect of going home.
“Oh, another thing,” he said.
“Yes?” He was writing again on his prescription pad.
“Here’s the name of another neurologist.”
“I don’t get it. What would—”
“I’m not allowed to date my patients. Ethics.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Would you rather be my date or my patient?”
“If we have a terrible time, can I be your patient again?”
“Yes. And one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Stay away from that program.”
“The fractals? Yes, no problem there.” Rhea asked for his pen, and when he handed it to her she wrote down her address and phone number. Handing him back his pen with the address, she said, “I hope you’re not one of these doctors who get emergencies all of the time.”
“It happens,” he said.
“You’re not going to stand me up, are you?” He smiled at her.
“I’m off tonight.”
“Good. And Charles?”
“Yes?”
“What about work?”
“Take off the rest of the week,” he instructed her.
“No problem there, either,” she clapped. There was an awkward silence as she experienced an ironic anxiety: She wanted to get rid of him out so that she could get on with her day that would only bring him to her again. She also wanted to call Penny immediately. There was so much to tell her. She was dying to tell her about Charles.
She’s going to go crazy, Rhea thought. First Peter Harper—well, O.K., she sighed, that didn’t turn out all that well; then Dwayne—well, O.K., who knows how that turned out at all; but now, Charles Vincent, M.D.
And then there was Phoebe. She had to tell Penny not to invoke the virus. She wanted to think more on her dream and the two things she carried, one of which was Pandora’s Box.
Just like what Dwayne called it, she thought. It might not really wreck the world, but its implications should be considered. Of course there was the problem of the appointment at eleven tomorrow.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you tonight,” Dr. Vincent finally said.
“Can’t wait,” Rhea responded, all smiles. Dr. Vincent walked out of the room all stiff, as if his every move was being studied, as every move was.
I like tall men, Rhea thought.
Considerably shorter than Dr. Vincent was Dwayne Cody. Rhea wouldn’t naturally have thought of him at this moment except that he was at the door as Dr. Vincent was leaving. They danced.
“Oh, excuse me.”
“Oh, no, excuse me.”
“Certainly.”
“No, you go.”
It was awkward. Ultimately, Dwayne approached Rhea’s bed. She had wasted no time, already standing, leaning over a night bag that Penny had brought for her. She continued placing items into it, mostly things the hospital had provided—toothbrush, comb, and other related toiletries. She tossed her head back to regard Dwayne cheerfully.
“I heard what happened,” he said, overly serious.
“Relax, Dwayne,” she chirped.
“Relax? You had seizures. Can’t you die from those things?”
“I’m not going to die,” Rhea told him.
“Well that’s good,” he said. “Because I want to see you again.” Rhea stopped and turned to him.
“Dwayne, please, sit down.” She aimed him for the very chair Dr. Vincent had sat in and gave him a little push. He felt the chair’s warmth from the previous occupant and wondered. Rhea sat on her bed facing him. She caught him eyeing the dip of the hospital gown over her chest, and she clutched it together.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said, “I know what you’re probably going to say.”
“You do?”
“Well, not exactly, I guess. But it will most assuredly amount to something like we can be friends and what happened was a crazy twist of happenstance, a unique tangent in both of our lives. I see it on your face.”
“Thank you, Dwayne. That was so beautiful. I could never had said it so eloquently,” Rhea said in acceptance, saving her the trouble. He just looked at her. She studied him for signs of tears, for if tears would come she’d take it all back, even though it was his speech. She’d take it back and retreat somewhat so as to humor him long enough to let him down easy and just be friends.
But years of supervisory duties held him dry. Crying was a private thing for him, reserved for when he went to bed alone. Rhea remained silent, letting well enough pass. “You’re wonderful, Dwayne,” she finally said.
“I know. All my women think I’m wonderful when they’re not my women.”
“You’ll have women,” Rhea reassured him. “Lots of them.” She darted her eyes, then whispered, “You had me, didn’t you?”
“For one night,” he answered. “I wish I had known it would only be that night. I would have talked you into staying till dawn.” Rhea smiled. She stole a look over his shoulder, because this was not the type of conversation she would want Dr. Vincent to hear. It was bad enough she almost put him off with those questions about pregnancy.
“Oh, no, not at all,” she had told Dr. Vincent when he had asked her if she could possibly be pregnant. Except from Peter Harper and his rubber, she thought. And Dwayne Cody and his pink slip. Abstinent for over a year and then two men in one day. She consoled herself with the thought that it was really like one man in one day, because as it turned out she couldn’t have one without the other—and one somewhat undid the other. It was more like no men that day. They canceled each other out. And part of the cancellation sat across from her now. She knew he was having no fun being part of a cancellation now.
“So what did the doctor say? Was that him, the guy leaving?”
“Yes, that was Charles.” He flinched when she referred to him by a first name.
“Oh, I see.” He once again considered the warmth of the chair, and he found it repugnant.
“Please, Dwayne. Friends?” He resigned his pained expression.
“Of course,” he said with a forced smile. “Hey!” he suddenly blurted.
“What?”
“I have a job.”
“You do? Already?”
“It’s me, remember?”
“I’m not surprised. That’s great. What are you doing?”
“Biomedical. They grabbed me when they found out I was with Ensley-Mix. HēmEnsley and the rest of the stuff. I hope they didn’t give you any of that.”
“Of course they did, Dwayne. What do you think?”
“Well, never mind.”
“Why? Come on, tell me.”
“It would just frighten you. Look, I guess it’s not that bad. But let’s get you out of here.”
“Let’s,” she agreed, taking his arm and walking with him out of the room to head to the nurse’s station for her discharge. “I’ll know what you know about HēmEnsley before we get to the elevator,” she assured him.
*****
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Next week, Chapter V: The Luminiferous Aether