Original Sin 1.8 - Jamie's Incarnation

On a sunny afternoon, at the foot of a small hill, in a sprawling yard of green ocean-front property, a young girl paces angrily, fifty feet forward and fifty feet back. Her parents eye her nervously from the patio. Joan Lewis takes apathetic sips from a glass of ice-tea every ten seconds. Her husband, Derrick, nurses a glass of white wine.

"Why does she want us to call her Jamie?" Joan asks.

"How should I know?" Derrick says, exasperated, as Joan lets out a sigh. "I just can’t believe she’s up and walking around."

"It’s weird," Joan says, "She didn’t sound like our girl when we were driving home. She sounded like somebody else."

"Well hell, she had a grand mal seizure. Give her some time to recover."

"Of course I will!"

Both parents turn back to the yard where their child is stomping around, clearly lost in some intense inner-world.

"What in the hell is she so angry about?" Derrick murmurs to himself.

"The doctor said her brain was fried," Joan says in a shaky voice.

"He didn’t say that!"

"Well that’s all I could figure from the frigging medical jargon. I barely understood a word. And I don’t think you understood either. You’re a dentist, not a doctor."

Derrick lets out a peeved exhalation, turning away from his wife. "He wasn’t saying her brain was fried, I can tell you that. Her motor control is obviously functioning fine. And she was talking a lot in the car. In fact, she was talking in rather complex sentences if I recall."

"That’s what weirds me out," Joan says.

"Tiffany suffered a major shock to the system. Her brain is probably reorganizing itself. She may never be quite the same as she was. But she will recover." He subverts his surety by swallowing hard.

"Didn’t the CIA use electric shock machines to brainwash people in those experiments in the sixties?" Joan asks.

"No, none of that happened, it’s urban myth. You read too much of that conspiracy junk."

"So she’s going to be okay?"

"We lucked out honey. We’ll have our girl back. And we’re going to buy a lightning rod tomorrow, I promise."

Joan breathes out, then takes a long drink, finally seeming to enjoy it. Tiffany reaches the end of the yard again and stops to drop kick a tree trunk, letting out a high pitched grunt. She connects with the trunk but then stumbles on her other leg and falls, yelling in rage.

"Oh, baby!" Joan says, getting up from her chair in preparation for a run, but Derrick stops her with an arm.

"Leave her alone for now," he says. "Remember what happened last time we tried to talk to her."

Joan scowls but gets back in her chair to apathetically sip ice-tea.

Tiffany is pacing toward the ivy-covered shed through a well-trimmed lawn. She is deep in thought.

So God made me a girl. A FUCKING GIRL! The trickster bastard! Should have read the fine print.

She is a little girl. The hugeness of everything is awe-inspiring. She is apparently old enough to walk. And talk, although she clammed up fully after realizing how much she was creeping out her parents with her thirty-six year old speech patterns. Now they think she’s gone catatonic. How ingenious of God – a lightning bolt to enter this life. The trickster bastard. She storms across the grass, skirting the hill. She’d been kicking a soccer ball up that same hill when the lightning had struck. She’d discerned that from her parents but she has none of this person’s original memories.

God bless you Tiffany for disobeying your daddy and playing out in the storm, she thinks with a smile, not sure if she’s sarcastic or not. You gave me your life.

She doesn’t want to think about what happened to the original mind of this body but she can’t help wondering. Is the original Tiffany dead? Overwritten like a digital document? Ascendant to heaven on angel wings?

No, not heaven. You know the truth about heaven now.

There’s a quiet voice in her head. When she asks questions from an authority-seeking position, the instinctual response sounds a bit like God, but she can’t be sure she isn’t just talking to herself. There’s no gnosis anymore, no certainty, an odd, vacuous feeling – but here she is!

Don’t ask where Tiffany is.

But it’s bugging me.

Well then, know that I am willing to sacrifice one of my innocent children for one guilty Faustian.

Oh Christ. "God" was right, she shouldn’t have asked.

But a new emotion takes the baton from the gritty guilt: reverence of the force that is willing to move mountains for her, move minds out of the way for her, cosmic trickery, all for her. She’s chosen. She is protected and loved.

Well I don’t know about those last two.

She stops pacing as the anger ebbs away. She turns to face her new home, a very tasteful, white-trimmed one-story suburban estate, well landscaped. Her parents look back quizzically. She can hear seagulls on the shore beyond the hill and the engine of a car pulling out of the cul-de-sac behind the house. It’s all perfectly vivid. In fact it’s more real than anything she can remember. The reality of the situation hits her for the first time. She falls back against the hill, cackling on the grass with a jaw-breaking grin. It’s real! A new life! A fresh start! She hollers in joy, easily reaching a lofty pitch and startling her puzzled parents. She doesn’t care how worried they are in this moment of exaltation.

She gets back up, feeling out her new body for the first time. The pelvic smoothness is a strange sensation but she thinks she can get used to the lack of a dick. The biggest shock is the thousand little things she can’t name, the subtleties of another body adding up to a profoundly alien gestalt. Alien but human – a real live OTHER human, what luck to be able to experience the true shattering of the solipsist’s wall! This human seems somehow speedier than Tommy, possessing a quick metabolism which also quickens thought. There is an intriguing difference in the nervous system too: rich tactile sensations within narrower extremes. It seems this body handles pain better than Tommy, sorting it into more manageable categories.

I love you Tiffany!

The most noticeable novelties are those of childhood physique: the almost laughable smallness of the limbs, the low vantage, the oversized head. She runs a hand through her long brown hair admiring the texture. Then a flash of euphoria as she discovers Tiffany’s greatest gift: the total lack of little aches and pains and lethargy and atrophied muscles he’d taken for granted as Tommy. Those things had crept in gradually as he’d aged in the last life forcing him to acclimatize to decline, never consciously noticing the entropy but sinking into dull melancholy because of it – the intangible loss of youth. Now the pure baseline is back all at once. Boy, girl, what does it matter? It’s so fresh and so good!

Her angry pace has become a dizzying sprint. She runs around the yard, whooping, clapping her hands together and jumping for joy. One of her leaps puts her off kilter and she lands on the side of her foot, sending her sprawling. This time both her parents get out of their chairs and jog toward her. As she tumbles, she laughs at the stupidity of Tiffany’s limbs. They lack thirty years of muscle memory but she’ll get it back.

Her parents are catching up to her. They look very concerned. Tiffany rolls to her feet and runs right at them.

"I love you!" she says and slams into her mother, clasping her arms around the woman. Joan gasps, then hugs her back hard.

"Oh baby, I love you too," she says, sniffling. Both parents are smiling. Derrick breaks into relieved laughter, pries her off her mother and hugs her tight.

"How are you darling?" he says. "You were sounding strange in the car yesterday."

"Oh mom," Tiffany says. "Dad. Daddy… I, um… don’t feel like myself. I think something happened to my head after the lightning. I don’t remember too much."

"That’s okay Tiffany, you’re going to be fine," Joan says.

Tiffany smiles back sweetly and says: "I’m Jamie mommy. That’s my name now."

***

She’s looking in her bedroom mirror. There is enough space between Smurf stickers to make out her reflection. She strokes a clump of girly hair. Yep, I’m a Tiffany alright, she thinks. Sweet-faced little cutesy-pie with the outfits to match. But now is the time for her true self to take charge – not Tommy, but the emerging self, the one that is going to kick the ass of this incarnation. "Jamie", a gender-neutral title. It’ll do. Tommy always wanted to be James anyway. Jamie will be a suitable compromise. Jamie Lewis. Sounds nice. Funny that she’s got the same surname as before. She supposes she’ll keep it. Her parents have finally accepted her name change though it still weirds them out. They’re going to have to get used to a little weirdness now and then.

It’s been three weeks since the lightning and two weeks since her rapid recovery. She is settling in. Her parents have been helpful in filling her in on the details her "fried brain" is missing. She is the only child of a dentist and a receptionist in a fairly swanky Long Island home. It’s actually much nicer than his last parents’ leaky, bug-infested house, but it’s on the edge of unending suburban sprawl. There is nothing here like the woods Tommy had access to. But there is the ocean. And that ecstatic fresh feeling is still with her.

It’s a good thing the transition hadn’t gone the other way, Jamie thinks. That would be appalling, gaining Tommy’s whole collection of ailments at once! But the opposite is heavenly – a true fountain of youth!

But God hadn’t given her this as a gratuitous grace. The point was to make use of it.

I will, Jamie thinks, looking at her fresh face, expression hardening. I damn sure will. The responsibility to use the gift right. It’s an honor she won’t waste. And she feels capable this time. This body is an organic expression of capability. Can-do muscles, competent cartilage. She will not let God throw her for a loop, she’ll roll with being a woman. She’ll be a superwoman. A vessel is a vessel. Tommy had never been all that manly anyway.

And forget sex for now, that’s not for a while – sex is just an abstraction given the lack of hormones in this raw, five year old corpus. It’s surprising how powerful an abstraction it remains though, despite being severed from libido. Bringing Tommy’s mind here has also brought with it every intellectual scar and his paranoid conception of gonadal politics.

Jamie is sure the scars will heal quickly with Tiffany’s hyper-metabolism. This is the time for her to develop skills and strategize for the future. Can’t go wrong when you’re thinking three moves ahead. She thinks God must have allowed Tommy’s complex consciousness to inhabit Tiffany’s cranial tissue despite its smaller size, filling it out more fully. People only use ten percent of their brain normally, right? Tiffany’s head seems to be a fine fit. Her thinking is not in any way hindered – if anything it’s been clarified. She might be able to credit the body for that, at least partially. She can feel the purity of the bloodstream with every heartbeat. There’s something about this body that makes everything easy. Except athletic feats, her limbs still seem rather dumb.

"Dinner time!"

Her mom is calling her from the kitchen. Another microwaved meal with mom and dad. She wonders if they’ll be weirded out if she asks for mint tea to wash it down. What was it about the lightning bolt that made you crave mint tea? Derrick, what a question! She snickers and vows to ask anyway. She wants to see the look on their faces.

***

1987 is a strange year for the Lewis family of Long Island. What seems at first to be a senseless tragedy becomes the flowering of a precocious personality. It turns out that Jamie Lewis is indeed a prodigy, wise beyond her years, with an eerily prescient understanding of the world.

After a few days in kindergarten she is whisked away to the special wing of her private school and placed with the "special" kids. Upon attaining this rank, she decides to stop being obviously ahead of the curve and play along with their academic games. She wants to be smart but she doesn’t want to be a freak, and some of the math is actually challenging at this level.

She thinks God kept Tiffany’s brain as it was but reorganized the neurological connections to replicate Tommy’s consciousness. That was the trick and it was the same thing He’d done using His voice in the orchard, except this time it’s to a radical extent, a total transformation. Jamie deduces that the original Tiffany is either dead, or has morphed into the new personality. This smooth method of mental invasion has an added bonus: it allows Jamie to take advantage of the rapid learning Tiffany’s pre-adolescent brain is capable of. She is delighted to discover that the French language is assimilated with ease. She moves on to German in a month.

The novelty of the fresh feeling has worn off and she’s not distracted by it anymore. It simply makes daily life a hundred times more valuable and daily tasks a hundred times easier. She takes the vitality for granted now. She is learning all she can, and staying healthy. She pressures her mother to buy health food. She’s even brushing her teeth three times a day (of course Dr. Lewis will not hear of improper oral hygiene). She tends to avoid her school mates which worries her parents, but they are delighted at the rapport she’s developed with the adults around her. Jamie sometimes injects the expected cuteness into the surreal conversations since she knows they don’t really want to be on equal terms. It’s alright, she can wait. The game of skirting the line between her expected role as child and her potential role as oberfrau is endlessly entertaining.

Jamie has never known such optimism. Even Tommy’s childhood doesn’t compare. All light here is outer but it warms the inner void. God was my friend after all, she thinks. Benevolent and loving. Tough but fair. He steered me toward the good. He’s a voidful bastard but he’s goaded me into living while I can. Because I’m special. Thank God. As she settles into her new life, she thinks less and less about the deal.

***

"I’ve already told you, I’m not going to be studied like some animal in a zoo. Who knows why I changed? Who cares?"

"Alright, alright. I thought since you loved learning so much, you might be willing to contribute to the study of the mind. But if you don’t want to that’s your choice."

"Yes, I know."

This is the third time she’s had to make it explicit to her father that she’s not intent on submitting herself to scientific investigation. Her mother usually takes her side in this matter, but it seems Derrick’s been bringing her around to his idea of the importance of Jamie’s electricity-induced transformation. Jamie is nine years old and is barely trying to act like a child anymore.

"So, are you going to get to your piano practice after dinner?" Joan asks, salting her tofurky.

"Ah, I don’t need to practice today, I played a bunch yesterday. I want to take a walk, maybe pick up some licorice."

"What happened to eating healthy?" Joan asks. "You used to be obsessed with it."

"Hey, I’m into health, I just like licorice once in a while okay? Gimme a break."

"You know, we bought you that piano for Christmas because we expected you to use it," Derrick says.

"I am using it," Jamie says. Derrick’s definition of "using" it apparently doesn’t include improvisation, the philistine. But she’s sick of scales and arpeggios. She wants to do her own thing. Her teacher is technique-obsessed and drives her hard because she’s supposed to be a "prodigy". Mrs. Kaliszewski believes it’s time for her to get to the "next level", whatever that is. Jamie is more interested in art. She didn’t come back here to be a mindless technician. She is going to create masterpieces. Technique will come. But inspiration is right here, right now!

"Okay forget the licorice, I’ll play," she says, getting up from the table.

"Wait, you’re not even finished –"

"I’m inspired," Jamie says, and makes a beeline for the Clavinova in the living room. She’s had a slow, asocial month, the first thing resembling depression in her life as Jamie, but suddenly the optimism is back, along with inspiration’s flame. The shape of the masterpiece is emerging from the amniotic ocean. She hears the melody, brilliantly asymmetrical, in C sharp minor. How about that, the first masterpiece at age nine? Her hands hit the piano, falling on the right keys immediately. She loops the theme, both hands in unison, then both hands in thirds. Then it goes canonic and follows with steadily complexifying counterpoint. It is the sound of optimism, the potential in the prodigy’s path.

The theme intensifies. Jamie’s parents watch as she launches into an ecstasy of stumbling virtuosity, laughing at the wrong notes, the near-successful attempt at audacious sonic density, perhaps not perfect but who’d ever even try such a stunt? She continues upping the ante long after her parents have lapsed into slack-jawed confusion, even after she herself knows what she’s doing. It passes the point of coherency and enters what Jamie thinks of as alien jazz, the channeling of hyper-coherency, a stylistic revolution for future reference. Humanity will need to evolve to appreciate it.

She winds her way back to the theme she started with – Tiffany’s brain supports robust memory. The improvisation comes to a close with a simple restatement of the inspiration theme in C sharp minor and a serene hymnal cadence ending on a major chord. Jamie lets her hands drop, staring at the keys, stunned, almost frightened at what had come out of her. Amazing what a little inspiration and optimism will do for you.

"Hey was I recording?" she asks.

"How should I know?" Derrick answers.

She checks the Clavinova’s display screen.

"Shit! Why didn’t I record?"

"Language!" Joan scolds.

I just failed to record a masterpiece and you’re worried about my LANGUAGE? Well they didn’t get Stravinsky in 1906. Tommy didn’t get Gombe right away. And only the elite will understand hyper-coherency – if she can ever transcribe it. Well she’ll just have to remember it. Write it down! Right now, before it fades!

She’s been struggling with music theory (why the prodigy hasn’t absorbed it all in half a year is a mystery to Mrs. Kaliszewski) but she’s made incredible strides from where Tommy was in the understanding of notation. Her can-do spirit is strong. She rushes towards her room where the staff paper is.

"Wait, it’s your turn to do the dishes," her mother says as Jamie jogs past, feet pounding the hardwood floor. Her bedroom door slams shut seconds later.

***

Vera Kaliszewksi has cleaned up the notation errors in Jamie’s sloppy manuscript – there were many. But the piece is now presentable. Vera has several revisions to suggest but Jamie won’t hear of them. This time an argument is avoided. Vera has learned that it’s better not to butt heads with Jamie’s arrogance, especially since her parents have proven to be overprotective neurotics, easily manipulated by Jamie into telling her to back off. "We’re paying you to teach piano, not composition."

"I hope you’ll listen to me one day my dear," she tells Jamie as she stuffs the seventeen page manuscript into an envelope. "As talented as you are, you could be even better if you had a firmer grip on tradition. You must learn the rules before you break them. Still I must say, this is a fantastic debut. I’ve never heard anything like it from any of my students."

"Opus one," Jamie says with a smile.

The envelope is addressed to Continental Magazine, a glossy, educational, youth-oriented periodical. Jamie’s composition, Inspiration in C sharp minor is being sent to the music division of their annual "Young Achiever’s Contest". The winning entry will be performed at Carnegie Hall by the current critical darling of the classical piano world, Dmitri Scherbakov.

***

"The hell? I don’t believe this!"

Jamie is looking at the faces of the first, second, and third placers in the latest issue of Continental for Kids.

"That little gook won over me?!"

"Jamie! Where did you learn a word like that?" says Derrick.

"Sorry, I meant to say that little fuck!"

"Jamie Lewis, that is enough!" Joan says. "Go to your room!"

"How could I not even place? Goddamn judges. They’re probably all Yakuza."

She storms off to her bedroom and slams the door. She doesn’t know where the racial anger is coming from. She’s surprised and disgusted at its presence but it flows out of her. No, it’s not racial anger exactly. Just the stereotype of the smiling over-achieving Japanese boy. So bland and predictable. But her composition was supposed to subvert the predictable. It should have steamrolled over the mediocre crap that usually rises to the top of these stupid competitions.

She did get an honorable mention (as Tiffany Lewis) and an invitation for an interview in the magazine’s next issue. But no, she won’t appear in their shitty rag to answer condescending questions. That’s beneath her. She must maintain her dignity, that’s been part of the plan since the beginning. So what if it sours this minor celebrity? Honorable mention? That’s not honorable enough for her masterpiece. Let Scherbakov play Michael Wong’s Mozartian rip-off. She climbs out of her bedroom window and heads down the cul-de-sac. In these endless suburbs she must walk four miles to get to the nearest convenience store. But she could really go for some licorice right now.

***

"I was told you wrote a nasty letter to Continental," Vera says.

"Yeah well, they angered me," Jamie says. "I had to let them know. I don’t take any crap any more. I have an image to maintain."

"Ironic that your image has been permanently tarnished as a result of your trying to do whatever it took to keep it clean."

"Permanently tarnished? Think what you like. I don’t need your lessons anymore. I’ll be fine on my own. I quit."

It starts with the one deviation deemed justifiable. Then it snowballs. Things are going awry but it’s okay. Jamie is remembering the comforts of laziness and video games. There is no Nintendo in this universe, nor Sega, nor Sony, but Acusoft has got a nice game box on the market with cutting edge technology roughly equivalent to the Super Nintendo of Tommy’s adolescence, perhaps slightly better. She’s still developing academic skills but she needn’t be a workaholic. What good are skills with no leisure time? She can strike a balance.

And she’s discovered Chadwick’s licorice, a gourmet product, $9.99 for a bag of six curled sticks. She has to cross the burbs to get it and it’s costing all her allowance money but it’s so tasty. It was a strange taste at first, strange and compelling. Every bite since has been a deeper probe into the licorice world. It’s like all licorice before Chadwick’s was the planetary crust. Chadwick’s takes her to the core, radiant with the energy of buried alien artifacts. Sometimes she suspects the licorice itself is a subtle expression of dormant alien intelligence – hyper-coherency in licorice form. Nothing tastes remotely like it. And it’s inspiring – in the licorice reverie she can imagine the things she will become, manifestations of alien jazz. She will get to them. Later. She will strike a balance. There is room for licorice. What would life be without licorice?

***

"Hey licorice-head… what’s with all the candy? Are you hiding drugs in there?"

The taunter’s voice rings in her head all the way home from high school. She would distract herself with the beautiful black bite of Chadwick’s sticks but she’s all out and the nearest den is on the other side of town. When did school get so shitty, she wonders. Ah yes, it was the moment she decided it was time to be social and interact with her biological contemporaries. Bad idea. What a crappy day. And now she has to tell her parents she’s failing math and science. Whoopee.

"Hey, are you addicted to that shit? Is it your substitute for sex? Maybe your skin would look better if you didn’t eat so much of it, haha."

It’s guys like this that keep Jamie’s budding heterosexual instincts safely contained. She declares herself to be a lesbian but her "friends" think she’s creepy, even the surprisingly common dykes and bisexuals. Her features have hardened and her face has grown pallid. She shaved off Tiffany’s beautiful hair years ago and maintains the buzz cut. Tiffany’s dead as a doornail and life doesn’t seem to be working out so well in Jamie’s body anymore.

She thought it’d be easier being a member of the opposite sex. She thought she’d get a free ride but she’s hitting a wall. More and more her gender seems a joke that God played on her, a living mockery.

She walks through suburban wasteland eventually reaching the cul-de-sac that marks her home. This scene is starting to bore her. She hasn’t seen woods since… well since Tommy. Is there any forest in this part of the world or has it all been paved over? She enters the house through the back door hoping to avoid the parents but Derrick is in the kitchen on the phone. He puts it down and says: "I was just talking to the school. Seems you’re falling behind in your studies."

"Leave me alone dad, I’ve had a hard day."

"Tell me what’s happening in school," Derrick says in German. Jamie stares blankly.

"You’re getting rusty. You used to understand me most of the time. Are you forgetting your languages?"

"So what if I am?" Jamie says, "I’ve got better things to learn."

"You’re playing video games all day. What’s happened to you? You used to get perfect grades – in the special program! It’s like you’re not even trying anymore. I know you have the brains but you have to put in the work. How are you going to get into a good school if you don’t put in the work?"

"Maybe I don’t want an academic career did you ever think of that?"

"You think you’re going to get anywhere in life without college?"

"I’m a musician."

"It’s very nice that you play a little piano now and again, but really, we’re talking about a career here. You think I’m going to pay your bills for you when you’re an unemployed dropout?"

Jamie pauses. "No, I guess not," she says and leaves for her bedroom. Her old parents would have. She misses them. They were better than these wispy waspy people. They didn’t push their religion or their scholastic standards on her. Too bad Tommy had to flip out at school and leave them behind.

***

God doesn’t feel like a friend anymore. Jamie remembers the forest and the wood sprite, vaguely. The time before the forest is even vaguer. She can recall Candie’s laugh better than she remembers Tommy’s home where he once packed sod beside the garden. Lord how she misses Candie. What she wouldn’t give to hear her play one tune on her pipe. Sometimes she plays the Princess theme on the Clavinova but it’s not the same. She dreams about the orchard and the mansion. The Help Wanted sign. Maybe she could have helped someone there. She’s bloody useless here. She’s got a bit of respect but no one really likes her music and nobody thinks she’s good enough. She was a prodigy but now what? Now she’s a failure.

She’s taken to snapping her fingers again when she imagines fanciful ways of bringing

her lost world into the new one, but it’s a sad ritual. She knows she’s betrayed whatever spirit arose from the fingersnapping regime. She thinks maybe if she’d kept the faith those fingersnapping wishes might have come true one day, but the deals she’s made with the sprites and the Clowngod… She’s sold her spirit and drained her magic. She’s running on empty. Maybe she should have stayed at home with Scuffy, toughed out school, then gone on to a humble life of fingersnapping. At least she’d be anticipating heaven.

She’d set Scuffy aflame, sometimes that hurts more than anything. She wishes she could see Poetic Injustice again. It seems perfect for these times. If no one cares about her art she could at least get back to its fuck-off righteous roots. She tried to reproduce the manifesto once but failed. She spun off track like the Princess after being nailed with a turtle shell on Chocolate Island 2.

***

Jamie thinks it must be hard to break the parental love bond but she’s managed to do it. She’s worn them down. In the end, she was too Tommy for them.

No, it wasn’t Tommy that wore them down, Jamie thinks. It was that "new personality" God tried to cultivate. The optimist. She coasted for a while but when the going got rough she got to be a bit of a bitch.

Jamie leaves home in a drab outfit utterly lacking fashion sense. She carries her only possessions: three bags of Chadwick’s licorice, five hundred dollars, and a decent Timex watch, the last birthday present she’d gotten from her parents. She can’t bring herself to throw it away. She’ll keep it as a memento, tribute to the twelve years Joan and Derrick had raised her.

Sorry I stole your real daughter, she thinks, but this specific incarnation wasn’t my idea. Take it up with God, that trickster bastard.

Jamie takes a good look at the Long Island shore on a sunny summer evening. It’s a pleasant little place but it’s worn out its welcome. She probably won’t be back. She’s waiting for a bus to New York City. She’ll try again there. If she can make it there… well, who even cares? The only thing she’s basing her hopes on is Candie’s prophecy. The words seeped into her head last night, finally motivating her leave the house in which she was no longer wanted:

"The fairies will help you. If you seek it you will find it. I know because you have the manna."

Jamie has no idea what this means but it’s her only hope of survival in the urban jungle she’s about to enter. God’s gone. He’s left her to her own devices with a guaranteed void at the end of it all. But she’ll see what can still be squeezed out of this farcical second chance. Might as well pin her hopes on a fairy even if it seems she’s burned up all her magic.

Scuffy had been a good bargaining chip. She thinks she has another one: a baggie half full of orange powder she’d bought shortly before dropping out of school. She would never take drugs but she knows there are people for whom certain powders are worth plenty of money, maybe even licorice. She was told it was a "synthetic tryptamine", whatever that means.

***

"Thank you so much for the 4HO dahling, we haven’t been able to find any in months."

"No problem," Jamie tells her philanthropic benefactor, navigating carefully through the party-ravaged halls of the Jackson Tower’s forty-fifth floor ("the gayest number in New York" as it was known to the 72nd street crowd).

"Hey stick around, we’s just gettin’ warmed up," says a large husky black fairy. "We gonna rail this bag." His wings brush against Jamie’s back.

"Ah, leave me alone," she says. "I’m tired, I’ve got to sleep. I’m just glad I don’t have to work anymore."

"Work? You was workin’? Looked to me like you was standin’ round the lobby countin’ taxis. What kinda work that be?"

"Important secret government work I’m not at liberty to disclose."

The husky fairy laughs and says: "You a trip. Man, I betchoo’d be trippin balls if you took somma that 4HO."

"Nah, I’ve got a cold, I don’t feel so good. And I don’t take drugs. Except for this cold-remedy I’m on."

"Maybe you sick cause you eat nothin’ but that licorice. I knew a dude that was into that chatwick’s shit – he was messed up."

"Licorice has nothing to do with it."

"Ah Jamie," lisps a tall blond fairy, "so sorry to tell you but if you want to stay here you must party with us, at least occasionally. You’re becoming a bit of a drip."

"I don’t drink. I’ve never drank."

"Oh well, I guess it’s back out on the street with you. Bum’s rush." Several fairies turn their heads.

"Jesus, fine. Give me a drink."

What kind of life is this? Jamie asks herself. Well… an interesting one, whatever else it might be.

***

Jamie’s hand is bleeding but she doesn’t feel anything. She is yelling something though.

"I’M GOD, YOU FUCKING FAGGOTS! THIS IS MY TOWER! YOU ARE MY GUESTS! SO SHOW ME SOME…" She pauses to belch loudly, then finishes: "RESPECT!"

The blood seems to be connected to shards of glass from a shattered drink that now drips from the wall. There is a nondescript moment of human contact, a dull thump she barely feels and then she is tumbling down some stairs or something – luckily not too many and she’s back on her feet, barely.

"I AM THE SHERIFF OF MANHATTAN!" she screams. "I AM THE BUFFER AGAINST THE BLANK! YOU’RE ALL DEAD DON’T YOU KNOW THAT?" She’s not sure if the words are coming out right but she’s trying valiantly to make them understand. It seems important.

"YOU ARE MY CHILDREN AND YOU MUST LIVE YOUR LIVES FULLY FROM HERE ON OUT! I COMMAND YOU! IT’S ALL YOU’VE GOT!" She’s crying but she’s not sure why.

"We are living our lives fully you sad little shit!" someone yells from down the hall. Someone else mutters: "The bitch is creeping me out." Then there are hands on her. She’s being carried away to the elevator. She has nothing left to struggle with. She has nothing left to think with. So ends the short experiment in being the Sheriff of Manhattan.

***

A cold wet morning. A virgin hangover and no licorice. Jamie is lying in the gutter, three blocks from the Jackson Tower, head cradled in a pool of vomit. She gags and sits up. God! Surely not her vomit, she doesn’t puke!

What happened last night? She doesn’t know but she’s out of the fairy facilities. Somehow she knows she’s out for good. She remembers taking a drink and choking it down. She remembers taking a second. After that… no clue.

She makes a wobbly ascent with a groan and begins a meditation on whether there’s anything left to live for. Well, she was prudent enough to make a backup plan before taking up residence in the fairy condos. The plan involves using the doubled identkey her fairy hacker roommate had given her before she’d gotten kicked out. She can use it to draw from the Washington welfare spring. She can’t take much or it’ll trip alarms. But she’ll have enough to get by. But how will she pay for licorice?

Oh well, she’ll deal with that later. Right now she needs a place to lie down that isn’t the street. Would a room be asking too much? She sets off in search of a hotel, wiping as much of the crusting puke off her hair as she can manage in one motion. It needs cutting again, it’s starting to look like a perverse tangled version of Tiffany’s pretty mane.

The streets are filling up as rush hour approaches. Too many people. Urbanity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The woods worked as long as there were sprites. She fantasizes about going way back into the past. Not twenty years but two hundred. Maybe four hundred. New York four centuries ago, unspoiled land. The blank bastard, opining as it does more often these days, especially in the absence of licorice, tells her: The first trip didn’t work out, why should the next? Don’t get your hopes up.

Chadwick’s will shut you up, she tells it. Yes, a bit of licorice and she can dream of a pastoral New York, all for her. Sheriff Jamie of Pastoral New York, in the year of our lord, 1592. In C sharp minor. She laughs. God never told her to dream. That is her rebellion. She went back to her pathetic slacker ways. She hadn’t become the winner she’d resolved to be. But she’s become a new person, she thinks. Older, wiser, maybe even cynical. World-weary for sure. Has she fought her way this far to attain apathy-cool? It’s the best she can hope for. Fuck Tommy, fuck Tiffany, and fuck God. She’ll live on her own terms, not God’s fraudulent contract.

She remembers that before she can get a room she’ll have to find a ‘net café in which to use the hacker’s identkey and score some funds. No shortage of those places in Manhattan. There’s one right across the street. But just before she crosses, a poster on a postbox catches her eye:

Mung Williams
Carnegie Hall Debut
April 14, 2005, 8:30 pm

Chopin
Scriabin
Gombe
Williams

and featuring selections from
Continental’s "Young Achiever" Composer’s Contest ™ :

Jeremy Wynn
Nicole Vance
Sarah Grandberry
Tiffany Lewis

Jamie does a double take. Is her name really on there? Yes it is. But how? Then she feels the déjà-thread of the chronofluid tugging on her in strange ways. Not that damned liquid time again! Not when she’s somehow got her name on a poster for Carnegie Hall! Ah but where is this liquid time taking her? It’s taking her back to a place where she’s lined up outside…

***

"Oh Jesus am I back now?" Jamie gasps. "Please let me be back now."

"Uh, what?" says the muscular, ballcap-wearing dude.

Yes, she is back among the full-throated carnivores, waiting in line to see Mung Williams at Carnegie Hall with her old masterpiece inexplicably on the program. She’s finally caught up to the present, a jolt after so long in the ether of awkward memory.

Christ, I was only trying to take my mind off the blank! she thinks. I wasn’t trying to re-live my whole damn life! Once through that shit was enough. Twice was overdoing it. I’m sure as fuck not flashing back again!

Jamie checks her Timex. It says 8:53, but she remembers it’s running late. The line is barely moving. It’s going to be a packed house. She prays it won’t be sold out before she gets in. She doesn’t see any scalpers around.

"Isn’t it Mung X now?" someone says. Jamie catches fragments of conversation further up the line.

"Yeah that’s what I heard. He read brother Malcolm’s autobiography. It’s one of the few modern books that really resonates with him."

"Brother Malcolm?" An utterance of disgust. "Ya whigger. If you said that in their presence they’d bust a cap in yo ass, foo’."

"Like you know anything about black culture."

"Never said I did, fuckstick."

Jamie wishes for the end of their inane chatter but it continues with someone else piping in: "Hmmm… Mung X. Doesn’t really roll off the tongue so good, does it? Not a good ring to it."

"No it’s awkward, I agree."

"And unoriginal. Couldn’t he have come up with a less hackneyed political statement than changing his last name to X?"

"Give him a break, he's just learning our customs. I think it's pretty damn amazing that he at least understands the concept of a political statement."

God, shut up you morons, Jamie seethes. I just want to hear him play my piece and then… then I guess it’s time to meet the void God promised me.

Predictably the blank tells her that her suicide is a fantasy just like everything else she’s failed to accomplish. The blank will keep her life above it as a block. And without that block, there’d be nothing to mock, the blank’s favourite pass-time.

Shut up blank. I’m going to see Mung Williams play my masterpiece. That was no fantasy. It’s on paper. It’s the unholy fusion of optimism and loser philosophy that disgusted God. But I did it anyway, so fuck everyone. It’s good enough for Mung Williams. Carnegie will ring with my righteousness.

Jamie discovers that while she was lost in thought, the line had moved considerably. She now stands two heads from the box office. The propped-open glass door of the lobby is visible. Taped to it is a larger, fancier version of the poster that had drawn her here. This poster is not advertising the event as "Continental’s Young Achiever Composer’s Contest", but rather: The Scherbakov Young Composer’s Competition. Scherbakov, the great Russian pianist who had ended up playing Michael Wong’s piece of crap back when she was a striving prodigy. This new and improved poster advertises the Young Composer’s portion of the program as being the cream of 2005’s crop – so what the hell is her rejected fourteen-year-old piece doing on the list? Oh well, better late than never.

"Just one?" asks the woman in the ticket booth. Jamie has arrived! There may be a God and He may be a bastard but she is getting into Carnegie Hall tonight!

"Yes indeed," she says and lays all her licorice money onto the counter. She snaps up a ticket for a balcony seat. The woman in the box office then leans her head out of the window and yells: "Sorry folks, that was the last seat. We’re sold out!"

A collective moan rises to a crescendo among the considerable crowd that has entered the line behind Jamie. Angry voices punctuate the moan, some uttering threats. Nervously, the ticket lady slams the window shut. Some of the crowd is now turning their anger on Jamie. She curls her ticket into her fist and squeezes it tight.

"Hey, don’t hate me just cause I’m lucky!" she shouts to the frothing end of the line. Jamie sets off for the entrance as the more unhinged members begin to gibber with rage. Jamie turns around to flip them off, then makes a run for the lobby.

Inside is calm and civility. There is an air of excitement, but it’s tempered with aristocratic restraint. Light jazz wafts out of the ceiling sound system. Jamie shows her ticket to an usher and is directed to the staircase that allows access to the upper level. A perma-grin takes hold on her face. For the first time in years, licorice is a million miles from her mind. There is only sweet sweet anticipation.

***

9:00 on the digital face of the out-of-sync Timex and the curtains open. Jamie has settled into her balcony seat and is leaning over the rail, heart pounding. She has tuned out the assinine chatter of the adjacent concert-goers and is waiting for her savior. She is waiting for the one who will recapture her long-lost moment of optimism, a hammer-pattern of glory for piano strings, her fleeting triumph before washing up fully, a second failure in an expensive second life, before she turned to licorice to keep her dreams afloat. Those twelve years with the dentist and the receptionist, lavished with upper-middle class care and private education… maybe the waste will have been worth it for those ten minutes of inspiration… in C sharp minor. If her savior can do it justice – and why not – it is a night for miracles. Ungodly miracles. She feels it.

Mung Williams, unmistakable, the short figure with the strange gait emerges from the curtains. He is greeted with a chorus of murmers, gasps, even low tittering which slices into Jamie’s brain like nails on a chalkboard. A wave of excitement breaks through the hall and the cheers begin. Jamie is breathless.

Ah you’ve come, she thinks. Just like the poster said you would. He will start with Chopin according to the program. Kick some Chopin ass, an entrée, give me a taste of how you will deal with my masterpiece – are you up to the challenge Mung? Somehow I think you are.

Mung shuffles over to the nine-foot Steinway grand in the center of the stage. He is dressed in a black tuxedo, trying to maintain his dignity. Some would say he is struggling, being a chimpanzee.

***

They announced me as Mung Williams, he thinks as he approaches the piano bench. I told them several times, it’s Mung X now. Morons. Are they so incompetent they can’t get the program changed three weeks in advance, or do they enjoy upsetting me? No, focus, this is your Carnegie debut. These New Yorkers put a lot of stock in that. They’re waiting to see how you’ll deal with Chopin, they put a lot of stock in him too.

Mung pulls out the bench. Luckily, it’s been properly adjusted and when he sits down, his feet reach those silly three pedals. He should have been an organist, his dexterous feet get bored with nothing much to do but sustain and clear. Yes, he’ll sustain and clear like a good little Chopin recitalist. Give the people what they want. But when he gets to the new repertoire, the obscuranta he chose to round out the program – that "Inspiration" piece. Yes, he’ll give them what they didn’t know they wanted. It will be a test. He’ll see who passes. He’ll cultivate his own clique from those worthy. Tiffany Lewis… he’d like to meet the composer. She’d be all grown up now though and who knows where she is?

He lays his leathery fingers over the keys.