Beauty

the warrant, they looked at it in disbelief. They admitted that the money had been with them all those years. One of their young men sat down and figured what it was worth, millions and millions of dollars. I had to prove my right to it, as the direct descendent of the daughter of the Duke of Monfort and Westfaire, which, thanks to the seven-league boots and enough gold to oil palms here and there, I was able to do. Puck and Fenoderee helped, rather reluctantly, and only in past time. They didn’t have to come here to do it. I’m not sure they could have. But in former centuries they were able to forge parish registry entries and put false birth records among ancient files. Marriages which had never occurred were recorded. Baptisms were entered in faded ink in ancient books. Confirmation records were put there as well. And, above all, wills, passing the warrant down from generation to generation, seventeen generations in all, to the present day. To Catherine Monfort. I am an heiress. The people of the House of Levi have been considerably astonished, but they are standing behind their document, six centuries old or not.

I called Janice and offered to hire someone to look after Jaybee. Janice was so angry I could hear her voice shaking, which confirmed my suspicion that she wanted to make me responsible for Jaybee. She had transferred her dislike of Beauty—Dorothy—to this new person, me. In Janice’s world, there must always be a sinner who is paying for her sin while Janice watches and judges. Since she could no longer get at Dorothy, she wanted to get at me. I was Dorothy’s friend and therefore probably guilty of something. In the last analysis, it is probably her own sin she is forever expiating. I don’t know what sin that was. Perhaps neither does she.

It turned out, I didn’t need to hire someone to care for him. Within hours of the time I left the house on Wisdom Street, she had found another place for Jaybee.

I found an apartment in New York, and I am now on the board of directors of the International Environmental Crisis Committee, a group of very powerful persons dedicated to saving the world. They feel it is going to hell in a handbasket, and I know they’re right, though I can’t tell them how I know. Many of them have given millions of dollars to this effort, and so have I. I am privy to everything they are doing. They are attempting to put together a coalition of all environmental bodies, all the so-called liberal religious bodies who are more concerned with life than money, all people everywhere concerned with life on earth. We spend endless hours in meetings, trying to build coalitions, networks, trying to agree on lobbying strategies. We argue which candidates to support. I go to bed every night weary and yet unable to sleep. Grumpkin lies beside me and purrs, and eventually the sound of him lulls me into unconsciousness. Then I dream of the child named Elaine, and her mother, and the knife, and the sound of a mad voice singing “Down, down, down,” and I wake up again.

January 1994

 

Almost three hundred species of flora and fauna have gone extinct since I gave my first dollar to IECC. On the front page of the newspaper tonight is the announcement of a Mother of the Year Award, given to a mother of eleven children. I wonder what Father Raymond would say? Her eleven children can eat hamburger made from cows who were fed the ephemeral grass that comes after rainforest is cut and burned. They can breathe the already polluted air. They can look forward to growing up and having spaces of their own in the new prefabricated apartment houses now being built in Japan which give each renter one hundred fifty square feet. The article about the apartments says all the conveniences are built in. Bill’s apartment in the hive in the twenty-first had one hundred square feet. There isn’t far to go.

March 1994

 

Puck has been back several times, begging me to come home, each time more frantically. I might as well have gone. There is no point in my staying here. There was never any point. Carabosse must have known that. She knew it was too late. I felt I had to try.

We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women’s rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.

We worship the gobble-god. We burn forests in his name. We kill whales and dolphins in his name. We pave prairies in his name. We have retarded babies in his name. We sell drugs in his name. We set bombs in his name. We worship him everywhere. We call him by different titles and commit blasphemies in the name of worship.

We were given magic to use in creating wonder, and the gobble-god has sucked it dry. His followers reject mystery and madness and marvel. They cannot tolerate questions. They can believe any answer, no matter how false, so long as it is a certainty nailed firmly onto the cross of money. They yearn for the rapture to come, without knowing they have killed rapture forever. Fidipur is what is to come, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, will not forgive mankind for that.

LATER

I called