The Malignant One

by Rachel Pollack

The Awakening

Susanna came awake slowly, momentarily stranded between the crumpled sheets of the narrow bed and the long road of her dreams. She groaned and rubbed her eyes, then stretched out flat.

Suddenly she jerked around to find the clock. What time was it? Was it late? Had she forgotten the alarm? Susanna stared several seconds at the small electric alarm clock before her foggy mind registered the time. 8:30. The alarm wasn't set to go off until 9:00. She clicked off the button and flopped back against the crunched up pillows. An extra half hour. She could lie in bed for a while before she had to get up and get ready for her appointment.

She lurched up to fling open the heavy brown curtains. Rain. Shit. You'd think the world could have spared her a little sunshine for such an important day. Her hand rubbed the horns of the small plastic window guardian, then she leaped back in bed, thinking sleepy thoughts about breakfast and what to wear.

Her mind shifted to remembering her dream. Wild. She'd been trying to get to her mother's funeral -- she was all excited because she'd see her brother James there -- and a huge snake had blocked the road. She remembered thinking the snake was a Malignant One, but it had turned out just the opposite. The snake was Benign. It had saved her from falling into a dark hole in the middle of the street.

Susanna closed her eyes for a moment. Was it a good sign to dream about a Benign One just before a job interview? Sleepily she recited the Standard Formula of Recognition. "Devoted One, I thank you for your devotion. I know that nothing I have done deserves your precious intervention."

She stretched under the covers. What would her mother say if Susanna told her about the dream funeral? Probably get all paranoid, accuse Susanna of trying to establish a reality configuration. She laughed, thinking she couldn't wait to tell James, she could call him after the interview.

James! How could she -- Susanna sat up. She must have sunk further into that dream than she realized, if it made her forget the road accident that had killed her brother two years ago.

* * *

Two years. She reached over to the wooden night table for the computer calendar in its little brass stand. September 15. What day was the accident? She couldn't remember, but the solar date didn't matter. Only the pattern date counted, and that depended -- She jabbed a button and the calendar's circuits linked themselves to the great computer "soup" under the Founder's Institute in New York. The calendar's small screen lit up with the current stage in the year's progression. "The Old Lady washes her face. Cold water touches her tongue."

"Shit," Susanna said, and hit her fist against the mattress. Her desire to lie in bed vanished, and she stood up. As she slipped on her red terry cloth bathrobe and rolled up the droopy sleeves, she wondered if the conjunction of James' death date and her appointment at Creative Comics signaled a failure configuration. The oracle down at the county offices had given her a good reading, but she knew such local oracles weren't rated very highly. She wished she'd gone to New York to see the Great Speaker on the roof of the World Trade Center.

Maybe she should do a basic joining and then a few personal words of transformation. Or maybe the opposite, a deep release exercise in order to cut the whole thing loose, the dream, the pattern --

Or could she be looking at the conjunction the wrong way? She turned on the shower to heat up the bathroom, then sat down to piss. She bent forward, hugging her chest and letting her head dropp down towards her knees. Maybe the conjunction signaled something positive. Not the death of her hopes but the death of her years as an isolated unknown. Maybe it meant she would get the job and enter a rebirth phase as a true artist. A woman of power.

She slid open the glass door and stepped into the shower, where the hot water carried off some of her anxieties. "Whenever you take a bath," her teacher had told her and teh other kids in spiritual training class, "imagine the power of the Founders washing away all your fears and worries." Susanna smiled. Good old Mr. Cleveland. She remembered the time he invited her and Sally Cohen up to the school roof to look at the shifting spirit patterns created by the network of satellites passing in front of the stars. Once there he'd tried to get the two girls to take off their clothes. "You've got to let your skin feed on the heavenly lights," he'd told them. Susanna laughed. She poked at her nipple, stiff in the needle spray of the shower. "The Old Lady washes her tits," she said, and laughed again.

* * *

The Journey

Susanna checked herself once more in the mirror. She could still take off the yellow blouse and multicolored pleated skirt, and put on, oh, her blue knit dress. It would look more sophisticated. But on the other hand, production managers could look sophisticated. An artist should look, what? Original? Sincere?

Enough. She glanced at the heap of clothes on the bed, then sat down to zip up her red boots. It's got to go well, she thought. It's got to. One more check in the mirror, a rub at a speck of mascara under her left eye, and then she was belting her plastic raincoat and mumbling various formulas for a safe transition from the internal world of her apartment to the shared universe of the street. In the living room she picked up her portfolio wrapped in double plastic bags. All her best drawings lay in there, both the traditional line scenes and her more recent experimental work.

In the early years after the Revolution comic books had experienced a creative torrent, partly because a number of the Founders had been admirers of old world comics. It was a time of experimentation, when artists and writers tried everything, panels that went on for pages, audible dialogue without pictures, tiny split brain drawings that made no sense until you pressed the two parts directly against your eyes. But as society settle down, as new institutions solidified, so comic books, and in fact, all the arts, had exchanged exploration for orthodoxy.

Susanna believed she could open up -- well, help open up this narrowness. She was twenty-eight, well past the usual age for beginning artists. She hadn't wasted her time, though. For ten years she'd worked alone on her drawings, not perfecting her style but going deeper into it. Her images bore a raw unfinished quality, prodding the mind to complete them. Often great blocks and smudges of color appeared between the panels, or even broke them up, like the hidden chaos of reality smashing its way into the illusion of everyday life.

Susanna believed in her work. Now she just had to get Carl Benton at Creative Comics to believe in it.

* * *

Outdoors, in the quiet suburban street of two-family houses and small apartment buildings, the rain pelted the few cars heading to or from town. Soggy leaves covered the sidewalk and lawns. Susanna started off for the bus stop, enjoying the pull in her muscles as she stretched her long legs. She was delighted that she didn't have to travel all the way to New York. In response to his yearly reading with the oracle Benton had moved his executive offices to Susanna's own small city. She wondered if she would have found the courage --

"Damn!" Susanna grunted in pain as she bent down to rub her twisted ankle. She glared at the beer can lying beside her. "Who put that thing here?" she said out loud. How could people just leave things lying on the sidewalk like that? She winced when she stood, but after a moment she found she could put enough weight on her foot to limp -- carefully -- along the street.

She turned the corner to the bus stop just in time to see the old green bus rumble away from the curb. "Hey!" she shouted. "Wait." She tried to run after it but gave it up after two painful steps.

Susanna sat down heavily on the wooden bench in the three-sided glass shelter. She snarled at the two-foot high concrete statue of a winged guardian in flight. All journeys re-enact the journey of the mind through the mysteries of creation. Anyway, that's what they taught you in school. "Why didn't you tell it to wait for me?" she said. The enameled eyes stared upwards at the heavy clouds.

She bent down to give her ankle another rub. She hadn't seriously sprained it; the pain was already fading. At least she could rest. Another bus would come in about fifteen minutes. Great, she thought, I give myself lots of extra time so now I get to sit here.The rain thickened. The wind drove great gusts of it down the road like refugees. Susanna found herself getting sleepy. She slumped down on the bench until her legs stuck out from the shelter. The rattle of the rain on her boots made her eyelids droop even further. So sleepy—How could anyone stay awake in such—The Old Lady washes—

She opened her eyes to see the doors of another bus sliding shut. She jumped up and knocked on the plastic window. For a moment the driver looked like he was going to ignore her, but then he shrugged theatrically and opened the doors.

"Thank you," Susanna said, climbing up the rubber steps.

Peevishly the driver told her, "I held them open for half a minute, you know." The doors began to wheeze shut again.

"Oh, wait a second," Susanna cried. "Wait. Please." She leaped off, trying to hold on to the bux so it couldn't get away. There, on the soaked and muddy sidewalk, lay her portfolio. She scooped it up and shook off the excess water.

"Hey, what's that?" the driver said. "Your wedding pictures?" He laughed loudly.

Susanna sat down in one of the hard plastic seats. Carefully she stripped off the outer bag from her precious cardboard folder. Okay. It was okay. She sagged back. If she'd ruined her drawings she would have assigned herself some wretched penance, like a pilgrimage to one of those cold caves in Virginia, where the only light came from the fluorescent skulls glued to the walls. But it was okay. She was safe.

* * *

On the way into town, Susanna stared out the window, watching the shopping centers and gas stations, the golf course and Public Labyrinth, float by in a haze of rain. Every few minutes she checked her watch. Plenty of time. She'd still be a little early.

Just past the city limits the bus slowed, and kept slowing until it was creeping along at less than five miles per hour. Susanna half stood to peer through the windshield at a long line of cars. "What's wrong?" she said loudly.

The driver didn't answer, but one of the other passengers called back, "It's patron day at the Civic Center. The TV said they're mounting a full-scale procession. Marches through the street, enactments, the whole thing."

"In this weather?" someone else said. "I hope they score another miracle. They deserve it."

The Civic Center had taken as its patron Janwillem Singing Rock, due to a marvel performed by the Founder on that very spot. Early in the Revolution the town's mayor, loyal to the secular government, had ordered the fire department to burn down an old apartment building whose residents had flown a banner supporting the insurrection. When the Army of Saints had taken the town and safely caged the mayor in an iron box, Janwillem Singing Rock came to visit the site of the fire. A few drops of coffee spilled from his cup and within minutes a great tree had grown, displaying in its bark the faces of the martyrs. The architects who designed the Civic Center cut down the tree, but used its wood for a twelve-foot statue of Singing Rock and his coffee cup.

Last year Susanna had joined the crowd watching the march of thirteen-year-old girls carrying a Styrofoam replica of the statue through the streets around the Center. Now, she only sat in her seat wishing they'd all go drown somewhere.

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