Song of Susannah dt-6 Read online

  She was asked for the first time what she’d had for lunch just before seeing this woman, and realized for the first time that she’d had a twentieth-century version of what Ebenezer Scrooge had eaten shortly before seeing his old (and long-dead) business partner: potatoes and roast beef. Not to mentionseveral blots of mustard.

  She forgot all about asking Officer Antassi if he’d like to go out to dinner with her.

  In fact, she threw him out of her office.

  Mitch Guttenberg poked his head in shortly thereafter. “Do they think they’ll be able to get your bag back, Tru—”

  “Get lost,” Trudy said without looking up. “Right now.”

  Guttenberg assessed her pallid cheeks and set jaw. Then he retired without saying another word.

  Three

  Trudy left work at four-forty-five, which was early for her. She walked back to the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, and although that ningly-tumb feeling began to work its way up her legs and into the pit of her stomach again as she approached Hammarskjöld Plaza, she never hesitated. She stood on the corner, ignoring both white WALK and red DON ’ T WALK. She turned in a tight little circle, almost like a ballet dancer, also ignoring her fellow Second Avenue-ites and being ignored in turn.

  “Right here,” she said. “It happened right here. I know it did. She asked me what size I was, and before I could answer—Iwould have answered, I would have told her what color my underwear was if she asked, I was in shock—before I could answer, she said…”

  Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll do.

  Well, no, she hadn’t quite finished that last part, but Trudy was sure that was what the woman had meant to say. Only then her face had changed. Like a comic getting ready to imitate Bill Clinton or Michael Jackson or maybe even George Clooney. And she’d asked for help. Asked for help and said her name was…what?

  “Susannah Dean,” Trudy said. “That was the name. I never told Officer Antassi.”

  Well, yeah, but fuck Officer Antassi. Officer Antassi with his bus shelters and little stores, justfuck him.

  That woman—Susannah Dean, Whoopi Goldberg, Coretta Scott King, whoever she was—thought she was pregnant. Thought she was inlabor.I’m almost sure of it. Did she look pregnant to you, Trudes?

  “No,” she said.

  On the uptown side of Forty-sixth, white WALK once again became red DON ’ T WALK. Trudy realized she was calming down. Something about just standing here, with 2 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on her right, was calming. Like a cool hand on a hot brow, or a soothing word that assured you that there was nothing, absolutelynothing to feel ningly-tumb about.

  She could hear a humming, she realized. A sweet humming sound.

  “That’s not humming,” she said as red DON ’ T WALK cycled back to white WALK one more time (she remembered a date in college once telling her the worst karmic disaster he could imagine would be coming back as a traffic light). “That’s not humming, that’ssinging. ”

  And then, right beside her—startling her but not frightening her—a man’s voice spoke. “That’s right,” he said. Trudy turned and saw a gentleman who looked to be in his early forties. “I come by here all the time, just to hear it. And I’ll tell you something, since we’re just ships passing in the night, so to speak—when I was a young man, I had the world’s most terrible case of acne. I think coming here cleared it up, somehow.”

  “You think standing on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth cleared up your acne,” she said.

  His smile, only a small one but very sweet, faltered a tiny bit. “I know it sounds crazy—”

  “I saw a woman appear out of nowhere right here,” Trudy said. “Three and a half hours ago, I saw this. When she showed up, she had no legs from the knees down. Then she grew the rest of em. So who’s crazy, my friend?”

  He was looking at her, wide-eyed, just some anonymous time-server in a suit with his tie pulled down at the end of the work-day. And yes, she could see the pits and shadows of old acne on his cheeks and forehead. “This is true?”

  She held up her right hand. “If I’m lyin, I’m dyin. Bitch stole my shoes.” She hesitated. “No, she wasn’t a bitch. I don’t believe she was a bitch. She was scared and she was barefooted and she thought she was in labor. I just wish I’d had time to give her my sneakers instead of my good goddam shoes.”

  The man was giving her a cautious look, and Trudy Damascus suddenly felt tired. She had an idea this was a look she was going to get used to. The sign said WALK again, and the man who’d spoken to her started across, swinging his briefcase.

  “Mister!”

  He didn’t stop walking, but did look back over his shoulder.

  “What used to be here, back when you used to stop by for acne treatments?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It was just a vacant lot behind a fence. I thought it would stop—that nice sound—when they built on the site, but it never did.”

  He gained the far curb. Walked off up Second Avenue. Trudy stood where she was, lost in thought.I thought it would stop, but it never did.

  “Now why would that be?” she asked, and turned to look more directly at 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza. The Black Tower. The humming was stronger now that she was concentrating on it. And sweeter. Not just one voice but many of them. Like a choir. Then it was gone. Disappeared as suddenly as the black woman had done the opposite.

  No it didn’t,Trudy thought.I just lost the knack of hearing it, that’s all. If I stood here long enough, I bet it would come back. Boy, this is nuts. I’mnuts.

  Did she believe that? The truth was that she did not. All at once the world seemed very thin to her, more an idea than an actual thing, and barely there at all. She had never felt less hard-headed in her life. What she felt was weak in her knees and sick to her stomach and on the verge of passing out.

  Four

  There was a little park on the other side of Second Avenue. In it was a fountain; nearby was a metal sculpture of a turtle, its shell gleaming wetly in the fountain’s spray. She cared nothing for fountains or sculptures, but there was also a bench.

  W ALK had come around again. Trudy tottered across Second Avenue, like a woman of eighty-three instead of thirty-eight, and sat down. She began to take long, slow breaths, and after three minutes or so felt a little better.

  Beside the bench was a trash receptacle with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on the side. Below this, in pink spray-paint, was an odd little graffito:See the TURTLE of enormous girth. Trudy saw the turtle, but didn’t think much of its girth; the sculpture was quite modest. She saw something else, as well: a copy of theNew York Times, rolled up as she always rolled hers, if she wanted to keep it a little longer and happened to have a bag to stow it in. Of course there were probably at least a million copies of that day’sTimes floating around Manhattan, but this one was hers. She knew it even before fishing it out of the litter basket and verifying what she knew by turning to the crossword, which she’d mostly completed over lunch, in her distinctive lilac-colored ink.

  She returned it to the litter basket and looked across Second Avenue to the place where her idea of how things worked had changed. Maybe forever.

  Took my shoes. Crossed the street and sat here by the turtle and put them on. Kept my bag but dumped theTimes.Why’d she want my bag? She didn’t have any shoes of her own to put in it.

  Trudy thought she knew. The woman had put her plates in it. A cop who got a look at those sharp edges might be curious about what you served on dishes that could cut your fingers off if you grabbed them in the wrong place.

  Okay, but then where did she go?

  There was a hotel down at the corner of First and Forty-sixth. Once it had been the U.N. Plaza. Trudy didn’t know what its name was now, and didn’t care. Nor did she want to go down there and ask if a black woman in jeans and a stained white shirt might have come in a few hours ago. She had a strong intuition that her version of Jacob Marley’s ghost had done just that, but here was an intuition
she didn’t want to follow up on. Better to let it go. The city was full of shoes, butsanity, one’ssanity —

  Better to head home, take a shower, and just…let it go. Except—

  “Something is wrong,” she said, and a man walking past on the sidewalk looked at her. She looked back defiantly. “Somewhere something isvery wrong. It’s—”

  Tippingwas the word that came to mind, but she would not say it. As if to say it would cause the tip to become a topple.

  It was a summer of bad dreams for Trudy Damascus. Some were about the woman who first appeared and thengrew. These were bad, but not the worst. In the worst ones she was in the dark, and terrible chimes were ringing, and she sensed something tipping further and further toward the point of no return.

  STAVE: Commala-come-key

  Can ya tell me what ya see?

  Is it ghosts or just the mirror

  That makes ya want to flee?

  RESPONSE: Commala-come-three!

  I beg ya, tell me!

  Is it ghosts or just your darker self

  That makes ya want to flee?

  4th Stanza: Susannah’s Dogan

  One

  Susannah’s memory had become distressingly spotty, unreliable, like the half-stripped transmission of an old car. She remembered the battle with the Wolves, and Mia waiting patiently while it went on…

  No, that wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair. Mia had been doing a lot more than waiting patiently. She had been cheering Susannah (and the others) on with her own warrior’s heart. Holding the labor in abeyance while her chap’s surrogate mother dealt death with her plates. Only the Wolves had turned out to be robots, so could you really say…

  Yes. Yes, you can. Because they were more than robots, much more, and we killed them. Rose up righteous and killed their asses.

  But that was neither here nor there, because it was over. And once it was, she had felt the labor coming back, and strong. She was going to have the kid at the side of the damn road if she didn’t look out; and there it would die, because it was hungry, Mia’s chap washongry, and…

  You got to help me!

  Mia. And impossible not to respond to that cry. Even while she felt Mia pushing her aside (as Roland had once pushed Detta Walker aside), it was impossible not to respond to that wild mother’s cry. Partly, Susannah supposed, because it washer body they shared, and the body had declared itself on behalf of the baby. Probably could not do otherwise. And so she had helped. She had done what Mia herself no longer could do, had stopped the labor a bit longer. Although that in itself would become dangerous to the chap (funny how that word insinuated itself into her thoughts, became her word as well as Mia’s word) if it was allowed to go on too long. She remembered a story some girl had told during a late-night hen party in the dorm at Columbia, half a dozen of them sitting around in their pj’s, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle of Wild Irish Rose—absolutelyverboten and therefore twice as sweet. The story had been about a girl their age on a long car-trip, a girl who’d been too embarrassed to tell her friends she needed a pee-stop. According to the story, the girl had suffered a ruptured bladder and died. It was the kind of tale you simultaneously thought was bullshit and believed absolutely. And this thing with the chap…thebaby …

  But whatever the danger, she’d been able to stop the labor. Because there were switches that could do that. Somewhere.

  (in the Dogan)

  Only the machinery in the Dogan had never been meant to do what she—they—

  (us we)

  were making it do. Eventually it would overload and

  (rupture)

  all the machines would catch fire, burn out. Alarms going off. Control panels and TV screens going dark. How long before that happened? Susannah didn’t know.

  She had a vague memory of taking her wheelchair out of a bucka waggon while the rest of them were distracted, celebrating their victory and mourning their dead. Climbing and lifting weren’t easy when you were legless from the knees down, but they weren’t as hard as some folks might believe, either. Certainly she was used to mundane obstacles—everything from getting on and off the toilet to getting books off a shelf that had once been easily accessible to her (there had been a step-stool for such chores in every room of her New York apartment). In any case, Mia had been insisting—had actually beendriving her, as a cowboy might drive a stray dogie. And so Susannah had hoisted herself into the bucka, had lowered the wheelchair down, and then had lowered herself neatly into it. Not quite as easy as rolling off a log, but far from the hardest chore she’d ever done since losing her last sixteen inches or so.

  The chair had taken her one last mile, maybe a little more (no legs for Mia, daughter of none, not in the Calla). Then it smashed into a spur of granite, spilling her out. Luckily, she had been able to break her fall with her arms, sparing her turbulent and unhappy belly.

  She remembered picking herself up—correction, she remembered Mia picking up Susannah Dean’s hijacked body—and working her way on up the path. She had only one other clear memory from the Calla side, and that was of trying to stop Mia from taking off the rawhide loop Susannah wore around her neck. A ring hung from it, a beautiful light ring that Eddie had made for her. When he’d seen it was too big (meaning it as a surprise, he hadn’t measured her finger), he had been disappointed and told her he’d make her another.

  You go on and do just that if you like,she’d said,but I’ll always wear this one.

  She had hung it around her neck, liking the way it felt between her breasts, and now here was this unknown woman, thisbitch, trying to take it off.

  Detta hadcome forward, struggling with Mia. Detta had had absolutely no success in trying to reassert control over Roland, but Mia was no Roland of Gilead. Mia’s hands dropped away from the rawhide. Her control wavered. When it did, Susannah felt another of those labor pains sweep through her, making her double over and groan.

  It has to come off!Mia shouted.Otherwise, they’ll have hisscent as well as yours! Your husband’s! You don’t want that, believe me!

  Who?Susannah had asked.Who are you talking about?

  Never mind—there’s no time. But if he comes after you—and I know you think he’ll try—they mustn’t have his scent! I’ll leave it here, where he’ll find it. Later, if ka wills, you may wear it again.

  Susannah had thought of telling her they could wash the ring off, wash Eddie’s smell off it, but she knew it wasn’t just a smell Mia was speaking of. It was a love-ring, and that scent would always remain.

  But for whom?

  The Wolves, she supposed. Thereal Wolves. The ones in New York. The vampires of whom Callahan had spoken, and the low men. Or was there something else? Something even worse?

  Help me!Mia cried, and again Susannah found that cry impossible to resist. The baby might or might not be Mia’s, and it might or might not be a monster, but her body wanted to have it. Her eyes wanted to see it, whatever it was, and her ears wanted to hear it cry, even if the cries were really snarls.

  She had taken the ring off, kissed it, and then dropped it at the foot of the path, where Eddie would surely see it. Because he would follow her at least this far, she knew it.

  Then what? She didn’t know. She thought she remembered riding on something most of the way up a steep path, surely the path which led to the Doorway Cave.

  Then, blackness.

  (not blackness)

  No, notcomplete blackness. There were blinking lights. The low glow of television screens that were, for the time being, projecting no pictures but only soft gray light. The faint hum of motors; the click of relays. This was

  (the Dogan Jake’s Dogan)

  some sort of control room. Maybe a place she had constructed herself, maybe her imagination’s version of a Quonset hut Jake had found on the west side of the River Whye.

  The next thing she remembered clearly was being back in New York. Her eyes were windows she looked through as Mia stole some poor terrified woman’s shoes.

&nbs
p; Susannahcame forward again, asking for help. She meant to go on, to tell the woman she needed to go to the hospital, needed a doctor, she was going to have a baby and something was wrong with it. Before she could get any of that out, another labor pain washed over her, this one monstrous, deeper than any pain she had ever felt in her life, worse even than the pain she’d felt after the loss of her lower legs. This, though—this—

  “Oh Christ,” she said, but Mia took over again before she could say anything else, telling Susannah that she had to make it stop, and telling the woman that if she whistled for any John Laws, she’d lose a pair of something a lot more valuable to her than shoes.

  Mia, listen to me,Susannah told her.I can stop it again—I thinkI can—but you have to help. You have to sit down. If you don’t settle for awhile, God Himself won’t be able to stop your labor from running its course. Do you understand? Do you hear me?

  Mia did. She stayed where she was for a moment, watching the woman from whom she’d stolen the shoes. Then, almost timidly, she asked a question:Where should I go?

  Susannah sensed that her kidnapper was for the first time becoming aware of the enormous city in which she now found herself, was finally seeing the surging schools of pedestrians, the floods of metal carriages (every third one, it seemed, painted a yellow so bright it almost screamed), and towers so high that on a cloudy day their tops would have been lost to view.

  Two women looked at an alien city through one set of eyes. Susannah knew it washer city, but in many ways, it no longer was. She’d left New York in 1964. How many years further along was this? Twenty? Thirty? Never mind, let it go. Now was not the time to worry about it.

  Their combined gaze settled on the little pocket park across the street. The labor pains had ceased for the time being, and when the sign over there said WALK, Trudy Damascus’s black woman (who didn’t look particularly pregnant) crossed, walking slowly but steadily.

  On the far side was a bench beside a fountain and a metal sculpture. Seeing the turtle comforted Susannah a little; it was as if Roland had left her this sign, what the gunslinger himself would have called a sigul.