Waking the Moon

mother, they give him some tests and finally he gets a scholarship.”

He shook his head and giggled softly. ‘“Religious Studies.’ But, like, this is the only way we get to go to college, di ba, so who’s going to say no?”

I nodded as though this was all perfectly normal. “What’s your brother doing now?”

“He’s got this band, Euthanasia. They play at the Atlantis sometimes.” He sighed. “Me, I’m only here ’cause they gave me a full scholarship. Nobody gives scholarships to poets.”

He raised his eyes thoughtfully. “But what are you doing here, hija? How’d you hook up with those two?”

I shrugged, stabbed at the floor with the metal toe of one boot. “I don’t know. They just started talking to me in Warnick’s class.”

“Huh. Talking.”

Baby Joe looked disgusted, as though this was an obvious setup. But he said nothing more, only gazed through hooded eyes at the room in front of us.

I fell silent. I stared at my feet and wondered if I should cut my losses and just sneak out now. It seemed clear to everyone I met that I didn’t belong at this reception; didn’t belong with Angelica, and probably didn’t belong at the Divine. The three vodka tonics made me feel weepy and hopeless. I thought of my parents and how much it was costing them to send me here, how much they’d save if I returned home and commuted to SUNY Purchase. I thought of the classes I’d skipped, and the copy of The Golden Ass I wasn’t reading.

“Shit,” I said under my breath. I glanced up, hoping I might see Angelica, or maybe even Oliver. But there was only Baby Joe, smoking and brooding like an extra in a bad French movie. Angelica seemed to have disappeared, and Oliver, I was starting to suspect, wasn’t going to show at all.

So I turned back to the party going on without me; and who I saw was Professor Warnick. Amidst all that extravagant finery he looked absurdly small and demure in a pearl grey morning suit and striped ascot, his dark hair swept back from his face. He was watching the crowd with a bland expression, his blue eyes guarded but calm.

It was the figure standing behind him that made my neck prickle: the same extraordinarily tall figure I’d glimpsed outside of Reardon Hall that morning. Only now, instead of a simple cape, he wore robes that evoked some bizarre liturgy. Cloth of a purple so deep and rich it was almost black, but with a sheen that picked up the light and shot forth a phosphorescent glow. They swept about his emaciated form, cuffs and hem trimmed with golden ropes and cords and tassels. The effect should have been ludicrous, Duchess of Malfi meets Star Trek; but it wasn’t. It was terrifying.

“Hey, Baby Joe,” I said hoarsely.

My voice died in my throat as the figure turned. Its hooded face bobbed, like a blind hound trying to pick up a scent, and I shrank against the wall. I was ridiculously certain that he was looking for me. I recalled the figures in my room last night. This could have been one of them, only even more frightening, because no one else took any notice of him at all. He towered a good three heads above Professor Warnick—cadaverously thin, head weaving from side to side, the robes looped about his frame like winding sheets.

“Baby Joe,” I hissed, but still Baby Joe didn’t hear. He was staring absently into space, nodding in time to some private music. Between his fingers the cigarette had burned out. I started to reach for him, then stopped.

This was crazy. Whether it was the vodka or nerves or just bad vibes, I was acting like I’d lost my mind, or at least the part of it that should tell me how to behave at a party I’d crashed. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look up.

Professor Warnick and his companion were gone. In their place stood a group of boisterous undergraduates who seemed to have all just come from the same boozy pregame show. I glanced around, certain that I’d be able to find that towering emaciated figure; but it was gone. It might never have been there at all.

My fear faded into drunken ennui. I watched the laughing students and tried not to feel envious and stupid and headachy. Finally I turned to Baby Joe and asked, “So. You live in D.C?”

“Huh?” Baby Joe started, gazing in surprise at his dead cigarette and then looking suspiciously at the crowd. “Hey, hija—isn’t that Barbie Doll? Over there with that famous lady professor—?”

I turned. For a moment I glimpsed Angelica between waves of black tie and silk, her auburn hair shimmering. She was talking excitedly to a woman who kept glancing over her shoulder and motioning Angelica closer to her.

“Her?”

Baby Joe nodded. “Yeah—you know, that archaeologist. I forget her name.”

I tried to get a better look at the famous lady professor archaeologist. She was maybe in her forties, brown-haired and sexy in a scholarly kind of way. Not exactly pretty but interesting- looking, with intense dark eyes and a Mary Quant haircut and probably the same frosted lipstick she’d been wearing since grad school. The same minidress too: a sleeveless black-and-white sheath with big eyes on it. A little weird, but the sort of thing I could imagine an archaeologist might think was appropriate formal wear. Whoever she was, Angelica looked more excited than I’d seen her all day I thought of joining them, but another wave of partiers swept through and I lost sight of them.

“You want a drink, hija?” Baby Joe pulled at his shirt collar to expose where it had been repaired with black thread. “Sweeney? You look like you need one.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. Thanks.”

He started for the bar, pausing to stare at my T-shirt and boots. “Blue Cheer. Well, fuck me. Di ba, okay, maybe you’ll be okay…”

I walked with him, this time accepting the Pall Mall he offered me, and for good measure ordered two vodka tonics.

Magda Kurtz, the famous lady professor of European Archaeology, had come tonight against her better judgment. It meant canceling her flight back to the West Coast, which was an expensive indulgence, and now she wouldn’t get enough sleep, which was always annoying.

But mostly, it was dangerous. All summer she’d been playing fox and hounds with the Benandanti, tiptoeing around the Divine like the renegade student she still felt like. While her own students here treated her like the prophet of a new age, the other teachers were more circumspect. Distant, at best, like Balthazar Warnick—and why were so many of them at the Divine still men! You’d think they’d at least make some recruitment effort!—at worst, cavalier or disdainful or even suspicious of her work. So different from Berkeley, where her theories were already part of the core curriculum.

But then the Divine had always been like that—so far ahead of its time in many ways, positively medieval in others. The Anthropology Department especially seemed hardly to have changed at all since she’d left. Sometimes, she thought wryly, it seemed like it hadn’t changed since Malinowski’s day.

A lot of that was Balthazar’s doing, of course. He’d been the one to approve her summer term here—it had been his suggestion, in fact, and Magda still wasn’t sure why the invitation had come. But once offered the chance to return, she’d been surprised at how strong her feelings were for the place, how very much she wanted to be here again, even in the middle of the summer.

So Magda had come. She hadn’t been back since the disastrous Caril Kytur expedition. That was how they all still referred to it, even Magda herself. As in the words of the Washington Post article that had heralded her return this summer—

“…that disastrous Caril Kytur expedition from which, like a phoenix from the ashes, Magda Kurtz arose with her landmark theories of the matristic cultures of ancient Europe.”

Here at the Divine the students loved her. Professor Kurtz, with her wry, rather droll teaching style. And, of course, her theories, and her books—the trade paperback edition of Daughters of the Setting Sun had recently become a campus best-seller. And the legendary parties she held in her tower room on campus, where a few of the chosen would pass around Magda’s ancient ivory opium pipe with its embellishment of tiny grinning evil-eyed lions, and smoke opium—Real opium! from Nepal! She