The Distributive Passions

I.

Damaged frames from the film “Universal History”

Dreamers

The images come unbidden, and mostly in dreams. The Absent Father, standing in attendance to Our Lady of the Shelter, making love to Our Lady of the Radar Array. Prophecies of or for La Femme, always to the tune of some Thomas Dolby song: “Radio Silence,” “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” “One of Our Submarines.” Windpower, switch off the mind and let the heart decide, what you were meant to be. If only it was that easy. He cobbles them together in the wee hours of the night, and in those hours, Gabe feels the Solly blood, strongly.

* * *

Meredith has always dreamed, as long as she can remember, dreams of strange places and strangely familiar people. There is one man in her dreams, more often than any of the others. Sometimes young, and sometimes older, though not so old as her father, who is not so very old, but is certainly no longer young. Meredith herself is no longer very young, though sometimes she feels like a newborn, faced with a world in which she has travelled so little, aside from her nightly excursions in dream, but which she feels pushing at her more and more. With the pushing comes a vague anxiety for the man in her dreams. This is strange, she thinks, as the man seldom does anything in her dreams. He sits and reads old books, some of which she thinks she recognizes, or works away at some fine business with tweezers, craft knives, photographs and scraps. She has walked with him in some sandy forest, and along some very rocky beach. Always he is alone, palpably so—except for the night where some dark and looming shape, a bear perhaps, paced along behind him as he walked a narrow, rutted mountain road, all unaware. Meredith feels she is, in some sense, his guardian angel, but never has she felt so impotent to guard than in the course of that long dream-journey.

Meredith always dreams, sometimes prophecies of world events and conflict, and these dreams at times come true.

* * *

Half a world away, Margaret, the Holy Wife, the one they call La Femme, checks her roots, and decides that tomorrow she will see her personal stylist. “Time to touch up the uniform,” she thinks. Once upon a time, the female aspect of the Messiah was expected to be dark of hair, eye, complexion, a bit swarthy even. Then came the revelation that God himself was one of those gentlemen who preferred blondes. Slightly before her time, that advance in the dogma, and, she suspected, most likely an innovation of Enfantin—the False Enfantin, she reminded herself—himself. She had her own reasons for preferring the imposture, her own reasons for continuing to fill a role which—she could finally, after all these years, be completely honest with herself—left her not only cold—as did her “husband,” the False Enfantin—but, increasingly, a bit nauseous.

So. A touch-up on the bleach job. The usual rounds, and the increasingly usual excuses to Him, as she took her lunch with an important group of potential patrons—matrons, she supposed, to be precise, rich old women sufficiently susceptible to His veneer of charm and her well-tuned routine to donate to the cause.

“The lost cause,” she thinks.