November 17, 1991
I told Candy about the flowers I got from Barrymore Gryme. I said I couldn’t understand why he’d do that, and she got bright red in the face and said, “Honestly, Dor, you’re so dumb it’s just unbelievable.” And when I asked her why, she said look in the mirror for crysakes.
Well, I’ve known for a long time I’m beautiful, but that doesn’t explain anything! He’s too old for me, and I’m sure too young for him. Candy thinks I ought to have an affair with Barry Gryme.
I told her she was crazy.
She says just wait. Her aunt told her virginity gets to be more and more of a burden the older you get. She told Candy you get to the point where you don’t decide whether you like someone enough to make love to them or not, you only get to the point of wondering whether they’re good enough to give it up for. “Aunt Becky says you quit wondering when and start wondering if,” Candy said.
Should I have an affair because of Candy’s aunt?
[As if Israfel and I did not have enough to worry about already!
We were standing at the Pool, trying our best to get through to the twentieth, when Israfel remarked that, as our magic weakens, the power of the Dark Lord strengthens. I had known that, of course, though I had not let myself consider it deeply. Our departed brother took terror and pain as his portion. It was always a part of what we did. Magic is a perilous thing, and it has its horrifying aspects, but we have always worked with and around these aspects, not making them the focus of our art. The Dark Lord has taken these to the exclusion of all else. He works in pain and prurience, lust and death, ramifying these until they fill his whole canvas. Discontent with his own efforts, he selects minions among men to develop these themes further. Is Jaybee one of these? Is Barrymore Gryme?
Has this man been set upon her, like a hound set upon a hare? We have been so careful. We have done nothing to draw attention to her, letting it seem that she has done everything out of her own motivation, out of her own desires. She has left no magical trail behind, like the slime of a snail, for some inimical creature to follow. Surely, he can’t know?
So I say to Israfel, and he to me, trying to convince ourselves.]
November 20, 1991
I got a Barry Gryme out of the school library and tried to read it. I read two hundred pages, then I had to quit because it scared me to death. Everything in it was hopeless and terrible. People kept being mutilated or eaten or destroyed. It was full of sex, too, but there was no pleasure in it. It was … it was a lot like the horro-porn films in the twenty-first. If lots of people read things like this, there’s something terribly, terribly wrong.…
Christmas Morning 1991
Bill and Janice are still asleep. If I were home, I’d be in church, watching Father Raymond moving around at the altar, smelling the incense, hearing his voice with the Latin rolling out, seeing the candles flicker. I’m homesick. There’s nothing to do about it, so I’m watching one of Bill’s documentaries.
Water, gray and cold, with lights in it as bubbles, rising, bright shadows in the water and vast distances, with everything moving and shifting, so there is no up or down. Singing in the water. Deep, organ tones, one, then two together, then a third. Soft, hurting sounds.
Bill’s voice, his deep voice, the one he uses when he does the narrations. “These are the last whales, and this is their last song. Though they are unaware of it, this pod of whales is the last of the great sea creatures to swim the seas of earth. Cells have been saved in the hope that some future time will allow their regeneration, though as things stand today such hope seems dim and distant.”
The organ voices again. Incredibly sad. Jaybee’s camera focuses on an eye set in a great wrinkled socket. The eye looks at me. Oh, there’s knowing there. They know. They know they are the last. All these seas are their tears, they have wept them all. All the oceans of earth are made up of tears. Whale tears, elephant tears, the tears of forests, the tears of flowers, the tears of everything beautiful cried out to make oceans.
We come up. We fly up through the water, we rip through the surface scattering droplets in all directions, we skim over the waves like a flung spear, toward the farms, skeletons on the horizon, with huge blades rotating, with solar collectors like blinding sheets of white fire.
“Fidipur’s farms,” says Bill’s voice. “Here, suspended over the deep, are the mighty wind- and sun-powered pumps that bring the cold harvest of the sea to the surface, where it is dried, powdered, and shipped to the great landside factories of Fidipur.”
Ships going and coming, being loaded and leaving, zipping into the loading docks empty, one after the other, by the hundreds. Like beetles. Like wood beetles. Eating everything, all, until nothing is left.
Back across the water, down to the whales again, this time slowly, letting us see them. Their bones show through their flesh. Their eyes are deeply sunk. The thin calf nuzzles its mother hopelessly. There is no milk. They are starving. Fidipur has taken it all.
I’m crying. Janice is calling me to breakfast. I’m not hungry. It’s Christmas, but beauty is dying. We’re gobbling up the world. I don’t ever want to be hungry again.
June 1992
Graduation. At first I didn’t think I’d go, but I did. Bill and Janice came, too. We all wore those silly hats and the rented gowns and paraded up to get a piece of paper which isn’t even really our
