But there are some exceptions that stay mostly constant. Some things stay mostly light-like loving. And some things stay mostly black-like killing.
And since you come to talk about a cure, I guess that means we’re talking about both. The cure is the trickiest kind. Because the calisaya cure is surely killing-but it can be about loving, too.
You’ve got to ask yourself a question, little missy-and try to find the answer in the deepest part of your soul.
If a second life resides within your own body, a life that has no choice whether to live or die on its own, do you have the right to make such a decision by proxy? Is that second life close enough to your own life that you can
It’s a question that only breeds more questions, for sure. After all, how can you know that the life of this child will not be a good one? How can a person know whether taking that life, before it’s even had a chance to show itself, might be a right thing or a wrong thing? Can the morality that God put in your heart even begin to decipher such a thing? Of course, this might smell like a question best put to God himself. And now we’re back to the beginning.
Because if what I say is close to true, then we’re here to answer God’s questions and not the other way around. And even if I’m wrong, well, do you think that God could even answer a question like that?
Hell, I don’t know. But I do know this:
God ain’t tellin’.
So the answering is left up to you, little sister. And when you make your answer then things do unfold, and then God might learn from the unfolding. And when God gets enough unfolding, then the unfolding might start to look like answers, and then, maybe, just maybe, from these answers he can make the next world a better one for every eternal soul that come back around.
But there you are with that little second life in your belly right in the here and now and wondering about a cure. Not even thinking about this world or the next. Stuck in a situation and wanting to know what to do. Right now, this very minute. And so you have a decision to make about killing-and it ain’t a decision with an obvious answer, nothing purely black or white about it, child.
The decision must be a hard one. And it must be answered very carefully. So you must draw on that thing that God gave you, the thing that God has never felt for himself; that thing about right and wrong. You must teach God from your own suffering. And you will suffer.
You only get to decide how.
So close your eyes and listen deep, little sister. Listen to the thump of that second life in your belly. Try to hear if it’s talking to you-and pay attention to what it has to say. And listen to your own heart, too. When you’ve pondered long enough, you come back here and see Doctor Jack again. If you’re still looking for a cure, then I will gladly oblige. And I’ll oblige just like so:
Your tea will be just as sweet, but it will have a bitter aftertaste and that taste will be calisaya. Typhus will make your bed and you will lie on it. Then you will be sick, as I have explained. The second life will come out of you, and then it will die. There will be pain for you and for the little one, too. Typhus will take good care of that baby, bring him to the river for nightswimmin’. And I will do my best to ease your suffering. It will be your saddest day. And there will be more sad days to follow.
If you go by that path, little sister, after listening to all the love in your heart, then you may take solace in knowing this one thing:
All life is eternal because all souls are eternal. Even little lives taken by calisaya tea. Little lives like that stay with you always, and sometimes even visit you in ways you don’t expect. That’s because even little lives come from the will of God, and there is a mysterious joy in that fact. For God is learning about love
It is never the other way around. Never has been and never will be. It’s the reason we are here on this earth, little sister. We are educating God.
With a pain that he could never feel.
Six-dollar stockings and she went through them like kindling, but the right had been hard earned and so the small luxury brought her no shame. Pretty little whore pulled up a stocking nice and slow; not for worry of runs, just for savoring the slide of silk against skin. It had been a long road to the sweet life of whoring at Arlington Hall.
Opportunities of employment for young girls in the Parish came down to whoring or factory and field work. Whoring paid better than the others-and wasn’t much dirtier all told-so the choice was bitter but obvious for pretty tan gals of color like Diphtheria Morningstar. So at the tender age of fifteen, Diphtheria had rented herself a crib on Marais Street and got busy.
When a gal is working the cribs, it means she rents a tiny room in a shotgun row house at the dirty inner crust of the district, puts out a red lantern and pays rent to a landlord who doubles as pimp. The room is so small that her bed must be narrow, so narrow that it can’t hold two unless one is on top of the other, which is the idea anyway. A bed, a stove for heat, a washstand and two lanterns; one regular and one red. The red one to draw in flies.
Most of her memories of that place were reduced to blur by now, but the wallpaper in that crib had remained etched in her brain with perfect clarity all these years. Still had dreams about that wallpaper. Curved burgundy lines joined by small x’s at the ends, making shapes that could pass for either edges of stormclouds or seagulls in flight or razor-wire fencing-depending on her mood and disposition. The paper itself was dingy yellow, curling brown towards the ceiling and warped from leaks. All the cribs had their leaks. “If it got no leak then it wouldn’t exactly be a crib,” Oscar the Pimp once told her by way of excuse for not fixing hers.
Money is short but steady in the cribs. This is the low budget world of whoring where sailors can have a go for a dollar or less, usually counted out in the form of nickels and dimes. “Crib-nickels” they called them-sailors rarely holding paper money in their pockets. The higher class bordellos of Basin Street are for the mid-to-high society men who want more than just to fuck; they want music and atmosphere and a woman’s tender touch (along with tender lies) before their britches come down. It’s the tenderness and music that costs extra-you can’t expect such fancy things for no combination of crib-nickels.
In the cribs, the pay is low and tenderness is dispensed at the whore’s discretion, but traffic is high and the nickels can really add up if a girl works long hours.
Five solid years in that crib on Marais.
Five years turning sheets over between customers because she didn’t have time to wash. Five years of watching other girls get sick, then die of flesh plague, wondering when her own turn might come up- hoping, on some days, that it might be sooner rather than later. Five years of being handled rough by sailors, listening to their nasty mouths and feeling their fists when they couldn’t get it hard after six months eating sea rations spiked with saltpetre. Five years wiping tears from the faces of women who had to decide between a “trick baby” and a visit to Doctor Jack for a “cure.” Five years of phony smiling, leaning half naked through a window saying, “C’mon pretty papa, come take a li’l nap with mama.” Drawing in flies. Needing their nickels. Hating their grins. Wishing them harm.
Sometimes doing harm.
During her time in the cribs, Diphtheria Morningstar had kept a knife under her mattress. Seven-inch blade with a four-inch wooden handle, a knife meant for gutting fish. Just in case, for self defense.
Diphtheria knew better than to use a blade simply because a john might give her a smack on the jaw or skip without paying. Oscar would turn her over to the cops quick as a whip for cutting a john over something so small. But if her life was in actual and immediate peril, well, that was a different matter. A pimp can’t make a red penny off a dead whore, and so Oscar tended towards sympathy regarding humanitarian plights that
