Waking the Moon

Lucian Samosata: De Sea Syria

One of the texts listed in the handout that Balthazar Warnick had given us the first day of class, along with The Golden Ass and “The Bacchae” and “The Hymn to Demeter”—

DE SEA SYRIA/THE SYRIAN GODDESS: Evocative contemporaneous account of the ancient rites associated with the worship of Aphrodite/Astarte and the cult of Adonis in Phoenicia…

Gingerly I turned the pages. They seemed to be printed in Latin. When I reached the end of the book, a slip of loose-leaf fluttered out, covered front and back with Angelica’s fine cursive hand. I caught it and held it up to the light.

“There is another great sanctuary in Phoenicia, which the Sidonians possess,”

I read.

According to them it belongs to Astarte, but I think that Astarte is Selene. One of the priests, however, told me that it is a sanctuary of Europe… Zeus desired her since she was beautiful, he assumed the form of a bull, seized her, and carried the girl off with him to Crete…

I turned over the scrap of paper.

There is another form of sacrifice here. After putting a garland on the sacrificial animals, they hurl them down alive from the gateway and the animals die from the fall. Some even throw their children off the place, but not in the same manner as the animals…

“Gee, Angelica, that’s really nice.”

“Be careful!” Angelica picked up the volume, cradling it as though it had been a puppy. “It’s really old, and it doesn’t belong to me.”

“You can read Latin?” I asked sarcastically.

“Yes, Sweeney, I can read Latin. And Italian, and French.” She settled back on the bed. “Why haven’t you been to Warnick’s class all week?”

I felt like shouting, You know damn well why I haven’t been to class! Instead I just shrugged. “Listen, me and Oliver and Baby Joe are going down to the Cellar Door to see Patti Smith. You want to come?”

“I can’t. Professor Warnick lent me his own copy of that—”

She inclined her head toward the small leather-bound book. “—and I promised I’d give it back after class tomorrow.”

“Angelica! What are you—”

“Sweeney. Please.”

“Fine. Forget it.” I waited to see if she’d say anything else, if she’d bother looking up; but I had been dismissed. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”

She flipped through the pages of a monograph and nodded absently. “Tell Oliver to drop by after the show.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

I stalked outside, angry and embarrassed. To be commanded to carry a message to Oliver, as though I was nothing but her go-between! Still, I gave him the message. I’d do anything for Oliver, and almost anything for Angelica.

Each morning at a few minutes before nine, Oliver and I would escort her to Magic, Witchcraft and Religion. We’d walk to the foot of the Mound and watch Angelica stride up its path alone, her long legs flashing between the gauzy folds of a flowered skirt. Then we would turn away, and the real business of the day would begin.

We would go to the Shrine to drink more coffee and then wander around the gaudy chapels, occasionally pilfering the collection boxes for bus change. Sometime before noon we’d catch an 80 bus downtown. We’d get off at Dupont Circle, find a bench, and watch the boy hustlers at work. Oliver knew a lot of them from the bars; they’d wander over to bum cigarettes and tell us where to find the party that night, before sauntering off to lean on the hoods of big cars with diplomatic license tags and dark windows. As the afternoon wore on we’d head over to Meridian Hill Park. There Oliver would score marijuana or some very dubious acid from one of the starved-looking rastas—blottah barrels hemp two bucks too bucks—and then it would be time to head back to the Divine and figure out our evening agenda.

I would never have dared to do any of this on my own. But with Oliver I felt invulnerable. His beauty, his air of noblesse decharge, even his very obvious lack of judgment, seemed to protect us from the stunningly real dangers of the city. He’d lope through the city’s worst— and best—neighborhoods, his long hair streaming behind him, wearing his standard uniform of white button-down shirt and faded chinos and black wing tips with no socks, mad blue eyes agleam, arms waving as he told me some hair-raising story. And somehow we never got mugged, or arrested, or even lost. This despite the fact that much of the time Oliver was flying high and loose and pretty as a grinning dragon kite, tripping on acid or mushrooms or god knows what.

Though the truth was, I could never really tell if he was stoned or sober. With Oliver everything seemed strange. I think that in some bizarre way he could make strange things appear. A bald eagle landing in Lafayette Park to prey on feeding pigeons; a red fox skulking outside the entrance to a K Street law firm. Blind nuns, transsexual punks. An armless legless man on a skateboard who sang the Irish national anthem in a bone-freezing tenor, and then rolled a cigarette with his tongue and greeted us by name. It got so that if something peculiar didn’t happen on one of our outings, I’d feel disappointed and a little wary.

Nights we would take a Yellow Cab to Southeast and go dancing inside a warehouse where I was the only girl among hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys and men. When everyone spilled back outside at dawn, the same Yellow Cab would be waiting for us on the narrow dark street beneath the dusty trees of heaven. Cab Number 393, with its driver Handsome Brown, a former prizefighter who by that hour was as drunk as we were.

“Where to, children?” he’d rumble, his face filling the rearview mirror. Usually we’d go back to the Divine, to stagger off to bed. But some mornings Oliver would have him drive us to the Tidal Basin to watch the sun rise, or to some all-night place where we could sober up over bad coffee and greasy sausage sandwiches.

Some of these places weren’t safe, according to Handsome Brown; but “I’ll take care of things, my man.” And leaning over with one hand on the wheel, he’d pop open his glove compartment, to show us the gun in there—to show me, actually, Oliver usually choosing these cab rides to nap—and occasionally remove it and brandish it as he drove.

Through it all Oliver walked with me like my demon familiar. I got a weird buzz from going with him to the discos, where no one seemed to know I was a girl. Oliver usually seemed happy enough to forget. He knew I was in love with him. I told him, many times, when I was sloppy drunk, but he only grinned that crooked canine grin and threw his arm around me.

“Oh Sweeney. Why ask for the moon when we have the bars?” And he’d drag me to another club.

Angelica was in love with him too, of course. I knew that from the beginning. It seemed that there could be no way they wouldn’t end up together. Sometimes after dinner the two of them would rise from the dining hall table and go off alone. Or else Oliver and I might return from our evening’s debauch and he would walk me to my door, then continue, singing softly to himself, up the stairs to Angelica’s room. I would throw myself on my bed, feverish with jealousy and yearning and something else, something worse: the fear of having been befriended by mistake, of being found out as an impostor. I tried to console myself by thinking that, even if Angelica slept with Oliver, I understood him.

But now I know better. No one understood Oliver although Annie, perhaps, came closest.