Waking the Moon

electrical cord.

It was a sea urchin. Like the one Angelica had on her desk at the Divine, its swollen sides striated in shades of pale rose and lavender and white. A sea urchin lamp, actually—it had been fitted with a tiny Christmas-tree bulb. It glowed a wonderfully soft, twilit purple, like a globe representing some lost and secret place. There was a little card with it, of marbled paper, and Angelica’s swirling peacock blue handwriting.

For my darling Sweeney,

A Gift from the Sea—

With all my love,

Angelica

iii Lost Bells

FOUR YEARS LATER I graduated from college with a respectable grade point average and a bachelor’s degree in sociocultural anthropology. As if by magic, the week before my graduation I received a letter from Luciano di Rienzi. It was written on the same rich paper and with the same royal blue ink as his earlier missive, and in the same controlled yet flamboyant hand. Inside he congratulated me on my matriculation, and hoped that I would not think it presumptuous that he had contacted an old friend of his at the National Museum of Natural History, Dr. Robert Dvorkin, and informed him of my interest in native studies. Dr. Dvorkin had agreed to set up an interview with me at my earliest convenience. Mr. di Rienzi wished me well in all my endeavors and remained, with warm regards, Luciano di Rienzi. There was no mention of Angelica.

My job at the museum consisted of cataloging all the photographs in the Larkin Archives, a collection of fifty thousand photographic images dating from the late 1800s to the present. Pictures of Native Americans, of every tribe imaginable, recorded in every shade of sepia and ocher and grey and black and white, and every kind of image: old silver nitrate negs, Polaroids, daguerreotypes, official government photos, Brownie snapshots, Kodak slides, Hasselblad 8x11s, even a strip of Imax film taken from one of the space shuttles.

Actually, there were 63,492 photos, but no one knew that until I had finished logging every one. That took three years. I was very lucky to have a job in my discipline, any job. If I’d been an archaeologist, I might have fared better. As it was, I was an armchair anthropologist, as distant from the objects of my study as James Frazer had been from his. Destined (doomed, I secretly believed) to a lifetime career at the museum.

Over the years we acquired other photographic collections, all of which needed to be archived. I had no advanced degree, and no money to go to graduate school, and indeed no burning desire to do so. But Dr. Dvorkin was exceptionally kind to me, almost a surrogate uncle. I was certain that he was a Benandante, but I never dared to ask. If I had, I’m sure he would not have given me an answer.

And then another small bolt of lightning struck, in the form of a grant from the estate of Josepha Larkin, she of the 63,492 photos. There was a very new technology, almost completely untried, which utilized laser-read videodiscs as a means of storing archival information: fifty thousand still-frame images per side of a two-sided disc. Would the museum be interested in developing this technology as a method of storing and sharing its photographic collection?

Since there was no one in the federal jobs system who had the precise requirements for a Videodisc Project Manager, Cultural Anthropology, BA or MA required, the job fell to me. Almost overnight I got a promotion and a raise and my own office and my own telephone and even my own staff, consisting of one part-time employee who worked nights at Popeye’s. It wasn’t the fast track that everyone else was following in those years, but it was security, a paycheck every two weeks and a pension when I retired. And while I was pretty much doing the same job as before, there was that office, with a door that closed when I wanted to put my head on my desk and nap, and my name on the door in neat green letters. And most of the time, that seemed to be enough.

iv Saranbanda de la Muerta Oscura

YEARS WENT BY, MANY years. When I met Oliver I was only eighteen. At that age, privilege and latent schizophrenia can look an awful lot like genius. Now I was more than twice as old, and had made up for missing his funeral by attending many others. The plague years were upon us. I watched people I loved the and with each death something more of beauty drained away not only from the world but from me. I do not mean just that my life was lessened by their dying—though it was—or that I was not fortunate to be alive and grateful for it. I only mean that I had always felt that it was others who made me beautiful, by choosing to love me. This sounds like the sober admission of a dysfunctional woman, I know. But unless you had seen Oliver and Angelica together, laughing, or been as heartsick and lonely as I was when Oliver first greeted me that morning in Professor Warnick’s classroom: unless you had been me, enthralled but willing servitor, knowing I was unworthy of such friends, and so grateful to have been chosen—you could not know how I felt, how beautiful they were, how beautiful I was, on what a sweet bed we lay.

But now it was all to start anew. Finnegan begin again…

It was early morning of the first of May, a clear unseasonably cool morning for the city. I was hurrying from a cab to the sliding glass doors of the Emergency Room of Providence Hospital. A friend had gone into acute pulmonary distress, the last time it was to happen but I did not know that yet. I had not forgotten Oliver’s suicide, of course, but this hospital had long since become the scene of other dramas for me. I walked quickly to the ER doors with my head down, staring at the cracked concrete, the carnival detritus of shivered glass and metal. An ambulance was backing up from the doorway. Just outside the entrance a heavyset raw-faced woman was standing numbly, tears streaming down her cheeks. I did not want to look at her. So I looked down, tightening my grip on my briefcase. On the pavement were shattered crack vials and flattened cans, the ruby lens of a smashed headlight. You might have been able to trace the history of all the unfortunates inside of Providence, if you only knew where to look.

Then something else caught my eye. I hesitated, stopped, and bent to look more closely.

Overhead a metal awning thrust above the entrance to the Emergency Room, so that the rectangle of broken tarmac beneath stood in perpetual shade. There were small filthy pools of scummy water that never dried, and large black beetles with knobbed antennae that crawled across a liquefying red-and-white box from Popeye’s.

And there was something else as well: pushing up through a crack in the concrete, not frail or etiolated as one might have expected but strong, its stem thick around as my forefinger, its curved leaves the deep nitrogen- rich green of leaves that bask in the sun all day.

A flower. A hyacinth.

Not the bulbous heavy-scented bloom known as a hyacinth in this country, but Scilla non- scripta, the wood hyacindi, Homer’s huakinthos. Its blossoms so rich a violet-blue they seemed to have been cut and folded from velvet, their yellow stamens as vivid and startling as eyes glimpsed from between the lappets of a heavy cloak. An amazing thing! I knew they did not grow anywhere outside of the Mediterranean, and even there only in wild lonely places, crags and mountainsides sacred to Artemis and her twin Apollo, and to the memory of the slain lover who gave his name to the flower.

Impossible; but there it was. As I brought my face closer I could just barely discern beneath the scents of car fumes and creosote its fragrance: sweet but very very faint, as though borne to me across mountains and rivers and stony plains, across an entire ocean, across a night country whose steppes I had seen only once but never forgotten. As from a past that was not my own but was somehow laying claim to me from an unthinkable,