Waking the Moon

It’s all I drank when I was in Bombay last year, trying to get visas for those fire-eaters I told you about. Brewed from water from the sacred Ganges. Pink Pelican.” He sighed and shook his head. “Great stuff.”

“How long will you be in town, Jack?”

“I’ve got a four o’clock this afternoon from Dulles. Shareholders meeting in Bel Air tomorrow. Hey, any of those things get C-SPAN?” He pointed at the bank of video monitors, spilling sauce on his T-shirt. “I wanna see if I’m on yet.”

I put down my plate and slid my chair over to the steel display case. “Sure. Hang on—

I turned on the newest monitor we had, a thirty-two-inch HDRTV (Jack told me he had a two-inch Sony SuperHDR in his Range Rover). I fiddled with the remote, scanning through dozens of channels until I found the right one.

“Live Coverage of the House Subcommittee Hearings on Census Statistics and Postal Personnel,” read Jack in disgust. “They preempted me for that?”

“Maybe you were on live. Or maybe they’re saving it for tonight—”

“Nah. They bumped me, that’s all. Screw ’em. I’ll have Maggie Gibson loose her Stinkbomb virus on their system. Ever hear of that one? Replaces all your data with the screenplay of Ishtar.”

He cackled, then snatched the remote from my hand. “Give me that, let’s see what else is on—”

Random images flickered across the screen: Bugs Bunny, “Bonanza,” soaps, “Reading Rainbow,” vintage PeeWee, Windex, the Stephen King Network, what looked like a live broadcast of an assassination attempt on the president but turned out to be the new Slush video, Pepsi, Astroboy, Hoji Fries. It was impossible to tell what you were supposed to buy and what you were supposed to actually watch—Brando, Datsun, IBM—Jack made another rude sound—Donahue, McDonald’s, “Mormon Matters,” Sally, Oprah, Geraldo, Angelica—

Angelica?

“Stop!” I shouted. The screen froze on “This Old House.”

“Here in Lubec, Maine,” Bob Vila was saying as he tapped a coil of glittering blue foil, “you need an R-value of + 47 to provide even the most basic insulation—”

“This?” said Jack in disbelief.

“No! Go back—wherever you were a second ago—no, slow it down, I can’t—There! That’s it, stop!”

“Opal Purlstein?” Jack was incredulous. “You watch Opal Purlstein?”

On the screen, talk show hostess Opal Purlstein was curled at one end of her cozy aubergine couch, staring raptly at this afternoon’s guest.

“…when you think of it, it’s really just a return to the natural world order. In the grand scheme of things, the last few thousand years of history—well, let’s be overly generous, and say the last ten thousand years—why, in geologic time, that’s nothing! Just a blip—”

Opal nodded earnestly. At the other end of the couch, a stunning bronze-haired woman in an elegant crimson sheath extended her hand, delicately spreading her fingers as though they were the petals of some rare desert flower.

“—pfff! That’s all,” the woman said in a lilting voice. She looked as out of place on Opal’s show as Brooke Astor at McDonald’s. “That’s what our civilization is worth.”

Opal nodded, wide-eyed, and the audience burst into applause. On the couch the bronze-haired woman smiled demurely. Behind her stood two raven-haired Amazons, easily topping six feet, their arms crossed on their chests. They were lean and muscular and lethal as a pair of cheetahs, and stared with oblique black eyes into the camera. Both wore sleeveless black tank tops; silver armillas shaped like serpents coiled around their biceps. Their hair was cropped short as a boxer’s, but the effect wasn’t butch so much as purely androgynous: their faces were too serene, their eyes as carefully made up as Angelica’s own. The girl on the left looked very young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her face for all its grim expression surprisingly childlike. Her partner had a tattoo of a crescent moon on her cheek.

“It is very important to understand this,” the bronze-haired woman said in a low, urgent voice. From the audience came murmurs and scattered clapping. “We are only trying to reclaim what originally belonged to us. We are only trying to bring back the world that was ours, the world that is ours.”

The audience roared. Opal opened her mouth, closed it again, and nodded. The bronze-haired woman turned so that she directly faced the camera, her eyes huge, almost imploring. Then she smiled, lifting her hands slightly to acknowledge the applause. From her ears dangled two delicate silver crescents; on the breast of her ruby sheath lay another silver crescent, dazzlingly bright where the spotlights struck it. Her hair was still long and thick and curling, its ruddy highlights silvered here and there as though touched with ice. A faint web of lines radiated from the corners of her eyes, and there were laugh lines around her mouth, as delicate as though drawn with a sumi brush. She didn’t look as Hasel Bright had described her in his letter: still a girl, young as when we had last seen her at the Orphic Lodge. But her eyes were the same as ever, that unnaturally brilliant emerald, and her smile could melt enough ice caps to cause major coastal flooding along the entire Eastern seaboard.

Letters flashed across the bottom of the screen.

ANGELICA FURIANO, AUTHOR.

“But I know her!” I leaned forward to stab at the screen. For a moment my finger pinned her there, then the station cut to a commercial. “That’s Angelica!”

Jack took another bite of chicken vindaloo and nodded. “Yeah, I know her. She was at my birthday party— did I tell you Erica threw a surprise party for me at Morton’s last year? A bunch of people came, like big Hollywood types. Tom Hanks, that woman with the hair. I mean, Erica knew everyone. Did you know Erica?” He shook his head remorsefully. “Kind of a kook, but boy, she had great legs. We’re not together anymore.”

“No, I mean I really know Angelica—we were at the Divine together, she was my best friend!”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “No kidding?”

“Really! She was—well, if you met her, you know what she’s like. We were best friends, before—well, before I left. I lost touch with her, I haven’t heard from her in, jeez, it must be nineteen or twenty years now.”

“I thought she said she went to some school in Italy, Rome or Florence or something.”

“That was later—I met her here, at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. We were both anthropology majors.” I continued to stare at the TV, shaking my head. “I can’t believe it—”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, that would be her—she was talking about some place she was at, in Sardinia or Sicily or somewhere like that, she had a villa there that was built above some tomb that’s three thousand years old. She married an Italian duke, Rinaldo somebody, Rinaldo Furiano, I guess, Erica knew him because he used to help produce Fellini’s early stuff and Erica is a very big Fellini fan. But he died, he was a lot older than she is. She’s very big on the West Coast. Your friend, I mean.” He pointed at the television with his fork.

“Big? Big for what?”

He shrugged. “Like this cult or something. Well, no, not a cult—she’s got this sort of self-help group, I guess it is. Only it’s religious, kind of crackpot stuff but women out there just go crazy for it. Whoo- whoo at the moon, raise your consciousness, all that kind of shit. Plus she’s written all these books. Like what’s-her-name with the legs, you know. Shirley MacLaine.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No—she’s really popular. I think it’s a boatload of crap, all this New Age stuff. But Erica was totally into it, that’s how come she invited her to my surprise party. Geena Davis was there. Did I tell you I met Geena Davis? That girl could eat apples off the top of my head.”

The screen cut back to Opal and her guest.

“Let’s see what the audience has to say,” Opal announced. She stood and marched into the rows of seats, waving her cordless mike like it was a censer. On the couch Angelica uncurled her legs and smiled beguilingly at the camera. Behind her the two tall black-haired women shifted. Their arms rippled with muscle, smooth and