significant part of it. Nothing is ever just sex.
I loved a scientist, once, in Babylon, in the land between the two rivers. His beard was slight and his eyes were black and fronded with long, long lashes, and it was the eighth century after they killed the Nazarene, and he found me in a decorative jar in the market, where a witch whose son I had seduced kept me prisoner for a decade.
He took me home and broke the glass and out I blossomed, fully-formed and heavy-breasted, and he rushed for his notebooks.
He was tortured by the impulse to understand everything. A fatal condition in humans. He was full of rage at his own ignorance, and the more he eked out through his art and philosophy and mathematicsâwhich in those days were all part of the same disciplineâthe more he discovered he did not know, and the more that knowledge consumed him.
I loved him for it, and he resented me. Even in our bed, he resented me. His fingertips would outline my contours as if I were drawn on a manuscript, searching for the secrets of my substance.
It hurt him to love me because I was a door to the wisdom of eons that he couldnât unlock. I knew the names of all the stars, and I wouldnât tell them to him. I couldnât. It would have driven him mad, and he would have ended up wandering the streets with the beggars and the crazed soothsayers.
He told me that there were worse places to end.
He longed to know the names of the stars, the true names that they only tell each other, how they were born, the exact latitude of this or that red giant. I told him that I had walked on a star once and it was nothing special. After that he didnât fuck me for weeks.
He liked me in feathers, though. One morning I found that he had plucked out all the filoplumes on my left side and was dissolving them in acid, trying to determine what I was made of. So I took him walking on a star. He didnât like it as much as he thought he would.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
After lunch, I spend the afternoon answering calls from the Gulf of Mexico, where the summer storms are the worst theyâve been in a generation, just like they were last year. And the year before that.
The lines are going mad. Please protect my home. Please save my children from the water. Lord, let us get out in time. In your name, Amen.
I hate telling them no.
Those of us whose work is out in the world call the phone lines an easy job. I say, you try finding fifty different ways to tell people that all their prayers wonât save their home, their business, their kids. Try persuading those people to stay signed up to the long-term plan.
I donât like it when they shout at me, but I understand. Thatâs practically what weâre here for, to be shouted at. Weâre here to sit and take all that fury and frustration and tamp it down into something manageable. Angry people boil over with life, raging and raging. They fascinate me.
What I really dread are the quiet ones. The ones who say very little. Sometimes they cry very, very softly, hoping you wonât hear them, which just makes it worse.
They all get through to us eventually. Thatâs why itâs important to know where theyâre calling from. A Catholic with an urgent question about the propriety of cleaning consecrated wine off a good white carpet will get rankled if you quote the Koran by accident, and there you are and youâve just lost a repeat client.
So I talk to the flood victims in my gentlest voice for an average of ten minutes and twenty-three seconds each.
Then I have a nice chat with a nun in Bolivia who really just wants Jesus to tell her where sheâs left her glasses this time.
I tell her theyâre by the sink. Miniature miracles are allowed for those whoâve signed the lifetime plan. Nobody believes them anyway.
Then thereâs a Satanist kid in a hospital in Dallas, having his stomach pumped and calling on Lucifer and all his many minions to
I loved a scientist, once, in Babylon, in the land between the two rivers. His beard was slight and his eyes were black and fronded with long, long lashes, and it was the eighth century after they killed the Nazarene, and he found me in a decorative jar in the market, where a witch whose son I had seduced kept me prisoner for a decade.
He took me home and broke the glass and out I blossomed, fully-formed and heavy-breasted, and he rushed for his notebooks.
He was tortured by the impulse to understand everything. A fatal condition in humans. He was full of rage at his own ignorance, and the more he eked out through his art and philosophy and mathematicsâwhich in those days were all part of the same disciplineâthe more he discovered he did not know, and the more that knowledge consumed him.
I loved him for it, and he resented me. Even in our bed, he resented me. His fingertips would outline my contours as if I were drawn on a manuscript, searching for the secrets of my substance.
It hurt him to love me because I was a door to the wisdom of eons that he couldnât unlock. I knew the names of all the stars, and I wouldnât tell them to him. I couldnât. It would have driven him mad, and he would have ended up wandering the streets with the beggars and the crazed soothsayers.
He told me that there were worse places to end.
He longed to know the names of the stars, the true names that they only tell each other, how they were born, the exact latitude of this or that red giant. I told him that I had walked on a star once and it was nothing special. After that he didnât fuck me for weeks.
He liked me in feathers, though. One morning I found that he had plucked out all the filoplumes on my left side and was dissolving them in acid, trying to determine what I was made of. So I took him walking on a star. He didnât like it as much as he thought he would.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
After lunch, I spend the afternoon answering calls from the Gulf of Mexico, where the summer storms are the worst theyâve been in a generation, just like they were last year. And the year before that.
The lines are going mad. Please protect my home. Please save my children from the water. Lord, let us get out in time. In your name, Amen.
I hate telling them no.
Those of us whose work is out in the world call the phone lines an easy job. I say, you try finding fifty different ways to tell people that all their prayers wonât save their home, their business, their kids. Try persuading those people to stay signed up to the long-term plan.
I donât like it when they shout at me, but I understand. Thatâs practically what weâre here for, to be shouted at. Weâre here to sit and take all that fury and frustration and tamp it down into something manageable. Angry people boil over with life, raging and raging. They fascinate me.
What I really dread are the quiet ones. The ones who say very little. Sometimes they cry very, very softly, hoping you wonât hear them, which just makes it worse.
They all get through to us eventually. Thatâs why itâs important to know where theyâre calling from. A Catholic with an urgent question about the propriety of cleaning consecrated wine off a good white carpet will get rankled if you quote the Koran by accident, and there you are and youâve just lost a repeat client.
So I talk to the flood victims in my gentlest voice for an average of ten minutes and twenty-three seconds each.
Then I have a nice chat with a nun in Bolivia who really just wants Jesus to tell her where sheâs left her glasses this time.
I tell her theyâre by the sink. Miniature miracles are allowed for those whoâve signed the lifetime plan. Nobody believes them anyway.
Then thereâs a Satanist kid in a hospital in Dallas, having his stomach pumped and calling on Lucifer and all his many minions to
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