Ishtar Page 21

  She’d have known him anywhere, even though his piercing sapphire eyes had dulled. Even though his face had aged and she couldn’t see his back. The lion tattoo would be in place, she didn’t need to see it to know it.

  “Hey Tom,” she says, half smiling. Teasing. “How the fucking Hell have you been?”

  The man cocks his head, squinting in the dim green luminescence.

  “Anna,” she prompts him. “Anna Ishtar.”

  The name feels strange coming off her tongue. Back at Truckstop, nobody bothered much with surnames. She’d been plain Doctor Anna for so long.

  The skanks on the couch hurl daggers with their eyes. He’s still staring with his mouth half-hanging open.

  “We met at Glastonbury,” she says, not bothering to mask her irritation. “Dancing before the Pyramid stage. Remember?”

  She can literally see him strain to conjure images. The stone circle. A hundred and fifty thousand screaming fans.

  “You moved to Edinburgh,” she extrapolates. “I followed. And then we had that stupid, crazy fight.”

  He nods. One thing he can comprehend, clearly. A woman following him somewhere. The rest he seems unsure of and, quite frankly, so is she. Did she come to this country to escape him? What about all those years of tiny, insignificant moments, each one threaded together with the dedication of her longing. The hope that there’s somehow been a point to all of it.

  “Thomas, it’s Anna — your Anna. Don’t you remember? The Earth was green and you told me you loved me!”

  There’s a pregnant pause as he almost sees her. Tries to blink the bleakness from his eyes. Reaches out as if to remember...something, then it’s gone. He doesn’t know her. She’s going to have to show him the dove tattoo. She undoes her top button — a slow burlesque performance. Knowing that his women are watching, she pops another one, pretending to fumble. Playing out the tease. She shucks the shirt and turns so he can see her back. She already knows what’s going to happen and how much she hates him for it.

  “Venus!” he whispers. “Almighty goddess of my heart.”

  For a long, sweet moment she indulges the illusion that he might actually mean her. But as she turns to glimpse the light of madness in his eyes, she understands it’s not about her at all. Nor had it been the dove tattoo. He doesn’t even remember the dove. It’s the other one, that damned eight-point star. He’s been forewarned about it. His eyes are glazed and he’s babbling like the nuns. All this rubbish about his regal lady love which, quite clearly, isn’t her or the two old broads on the divan.

  No, he’s talking about her rival. The one that steals the space she’s supposed to own.

  “Who the fuck is Venus?” she asks. “The one who’s sucked up all the fondness in your heart?” He doesn’t mean the star. The star is in the Heavens, not cowering in a pain-filled bunker underground.

  He barks at the skanks and they scamper from his sight. So does the rest of the soldier guard that snapped at Anna’s heels all the way up the stone staircase.

  “I been waiting my whole life for you,” he says.

  Oh Thomas. My Lionheart.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off her as he walks to a wooden chest beside the divan. He bends, rummages inside, pulls out something shimmery and white, throws it for her to catch. A nightdress or an underslip — whatever the difference might once have been. The cleanest garment she’s touched in years. She slips it on, kicks her filthy trousers off. He’s still staring like he’s never seen a woman dress before.

  He’s holding a thick ribbon of blood-red satin. Coils it firmly around his palm, eyes locked with hers. She knows something’s wrong, but she can’t bear to move. Not now, she tells her psyche. Not when all my dreams are coming true.

  He moves. She thinks he’s going to kiss her, but in one swift movement he binds her wrists. Tight and strong. He’s done this before. Then he’s pushing her ahead of him out onto the rocky platform. A cheer goes up from the crowd below, thousands of starving salivating men all chanting Major! Major! Major! like they mean it.

  He raises his arms in a victory salute. The crowd shouts louder, more hysterical, more severe.

  “Venus walks amongst us!”

  She stands there in the underslip, dishevelled hair, wrists bound. Numb on the inside, because this man hasn’t got the first fucking clue who she is.

  “My name is Anna,” she says.

  He doesn’t hear her.

  “Venus!” he hollers and everybody screams.

  “Major! Major! Major!”

  Anna can hear chanting, too, but not the words they’re speaking. The sounds she hears are from an ancient time. One name uttered over and over and over.

  Ishtar...Ishtar...Ishtar...

  Her name.

  And then Major Thomas makes calming motions with his hands. Everybody’s shushing, waiting for what comes next. Will he let her speak? Or will he make some kind of statement in her supposed honour?

  Thomas speaks. “As one great man once said to another, success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. I know that I must fight for the mytho-political paradox. Inside the wire, we’re faced with a choice: either accept the presemioticist paradigm of reality or conclude that the task of the modern soldier is deconstruction, given that a regime change is the equivalent of a surgical strike.”

  Anna blinks. The cavern has fallen as silent as the grave. The men below are sucking this crap up like a sponge.

  “Ask not that the journey be easy, ask instead that the Mother of All Bombs be worth it. Reality forms part of the fatal flaw of narrativity. If I do not believe I can do a thing, I definitely can’t. So, I choose to believe, then act in accordance, regardless of potential collateral damage.”

  As the crowd goes wild with whooping and hollering, she stares at him sideways. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  He can’t hear her. He can’t hear anything but the stamping and shrieking and repeating of his own “Major! Major! Major!” bouncing off the slimy cavern walls. What’s left of his soul is a vacant space. Just a shell. She could rattle of magic memories to him for hours and he’d remember some of them, yes, he probably would. But for him, they’d been mere chance encounters. Places they went. Stuff they used to do. Like he’d done stuff and been places with a hundred other girls. Back when the world was lousy with supple, sweet young flesh.

  “What have you done with my friends?” she asks him coyly. The nuns had become her very dearest the minute they’d been taken away.

  He doesn’t answer, but she notes the unmistakable outline of his cock hardening in his pants. How many minutes will be wasted like this in pointless reverie? The audience has fallen to stamping and clapping. No rhythm to it this time. No heartbeat.

  He makes his victory sign again. “I answered the call,” he tells the air.

  Dear gods, is that a swagger in his stance?

  “What call might that have been?” she asks so innocently.

  Which imaginary government does he think he’s serving? Which hallucinatory flag hangs limply in the cavern’s flaccid air?

  For a moment he almost smiles, almost remembers, almost seems like a reasonable human being, after all. But then, like everything else she ever cared for, that spark of light is gone and she’s on her own, stumbling through the ruins of his incomprehension.

  “Reality may be used to reinforce class divisions unless it has gone to Blackwater. If dialectic materialism holds, we have to choose between constructivism and decapitation strike discourse!”

  She smiles at him sweetly.

  He nods and returns the favour. “Knew you’d see things my way, darlin’.”

  “Yes, Thomas, of course you did.”

  Anna lunges suddenly and shoves him off the platform. The crowd goes wild once more as he flails and tumbles. When he splats on the stone they leap upon him, tearing him limb from limb with hands and teeth. As chaos erupts, she makes a break for the narrow staircase, hands still bound before her like
a slave.

  Ragged wide-eyed soldiers leap out of her path. Spread below, the vista of Hell is just as it ought to be: a belching, bleeding catastrophe of pain.

  Halfway down, she glances up to check her options.

  ****

  Memories return in silvery shadowplay, gradually overwriting the last few decades’ harm and lies. Anna Ishtar has been stuck fast like a luckless bug in amber. Sleepwalking, locked in soulless repetition.

  The staircase flattens to a passage, winds its way along the crumbling rock face. Below, a sea of blood-red angry eyes. One by one their owners grasp their tools, gawp up at her, a chorus of gnashing teeth and salivation. Such a familiar feeling to it, this passing-by parade. She knows she’s been this way before, strutted her stuff before endless adoring admirers. Worshippers bowed on bended knees. Songs of praise back then, not heavy breathing. Her ankles had been ringed with bells, her hair braided thick with garlands.

  It’s the star tattoo protecting her — they choke when they catch sight of it. Trace a pointed symbol in the air. A ward against whatever. One simple talisman protecting her from a thousand harms. A mighty powerful queen you’ve got, this Venus, whoever she might be.

  Anna Ishtar can’t quite picture her, but she knows enough to hate. The bitch that stole her place in Thomas’s heart. Drove him crazy with unfathomable desires.

  The pathway leads her ever downwards, further, deep as death into the earth, then along a wide ledge built for heavy traffic. Rail tracks embedded in the living rock. Overhead, power cables dangle in silvery impotence. Then, all of a sudden, the space above her widens. Anna freezes at first sight of the queen.

  She’s beautiful, just as Thomas promised. Slim and chic and glowing like the dawn. Five hundred feet of gleaming chrome rocket; of course his Venus would turn out to be a big steel phallus. The world might have died, but not that much has changed. And there, etched on the rocket casing, an unmistakable eight-point star. Exactly the same as hers, down to the shading.

  Oh Venus, lovely Venus, so beautiful, yet flawed. Cock teaser, wallflower, debutante, Decameron, everything they’ve ever wanted all rolled into one. Whoever brought her here must have had a real good sense of humour, for, with no opening above her head, the beast remains stillborn. Can’t be launched, no matter what they do. She stands, abandoned like a naked store window mannequin in an age when stores and windows have long past.

  Major Thomas’s Venus is a dud. No machinery to arm her. The fool thought blood and poetry would be enough. There’s no way out, but it doesn’t matter. She won’t be going anywhere. But they will.

  She clambers up the gantry base, amazed that no one tries to stop her. Hooking her arms through tarnished wire, she has a better view. She can see things Thomas died never knowing about. Something’s wrong. Around her, men foam at the mouth; his workers drop like flies, they have a plague upon them. That stuff’s a lot more potent than I realized.

  The air stinks more than it did when she first got there. A sour reek, far worse than unbathed flesh. Now it’s Ishtar’s turn to say a prayer, small words of thanks to her lovely, lovely nuns who carried tiny passengers within their blood. Just a little pre-war special, something we girls cooked up through the night. En route to death, they’d served her well. Done what she required of them.

  But the nuns aren’t all dead. Three survive, shackled to the rocket’s portal. Daisy, Wattle and Anemone, pale ghosts of who they used to be. The fight’s gone out of them and the singing and the light. Ill-gotten, ill-used, robes stained with blood and vomit, yet somehow they still stand.

  Men push and shove each other as panic takes a hold below. Anger, too. Each man turns upon his brother, no holds barred. They fight with tools, with knives, with claws. Their cries infuse, meld to form the howling of a single beast.

  She’s wondering why no one’s shooting at her. Shots are being fired, but nothing seems to hit. Ancient weapons, lousy aims. Reluctance to fire a bullet at their Venus? Whatever. Not her problem. Good riddance to the masses. Not one amongst them is worth the trouble of saving.

  Not a one.

  And then, in a blinding flash it all comes flooding back. All she was. All she had ever been. The first one. The holy one. Monarch of a billion mothers, holy lover faded beneath artificial suns. Discarded by the animals who’d once named her sacred. Lulled into a false sense of humanity, tricked into delusions of humility and servitude.

  The monsters had fired upon her stillborn army, murdered her babies as they emerged still-dripping from the sea. Ever growing, yet they set the flames upon them, an expression of human unity unparalleled.

  You came together to kill my children and, in the process, killed yourselves. You burnt the Earth, scorched air, boiled water. Sent your soldiers scurrying for shelter. And here they are, decades later, burrowing like mutant cockroaches chewing their filthy way to freedom, bellies lined with gravel, minds completely shot. And all for what? Can you even recall reasons? Hatred of all I had to offer, despair at that which I could not?

  She’s given them everything they’d ever asked for. Sex and death and death and sex. Life and lust. Liberty and loss. Still not enough. Nothing was ever enough.

  Suddenly, she’s sick of the sight of them all. Poor dead Thomas. His men. All men. All history. Mankind itself and all the violence it has wrought. She can see no further point to any of it.

  Daisy chews the blood red bindings from Ishtar’s wrists. Once freed, the goddess hugs the three remaining nuns against her breast, quietens their whimpering with her steady beating heart. Poor little girls, so ragged and so broken. Look what this filthy world has done to you.

  Goddess Ishtar turns her back upon the crowd. She holds her palms up high, feels them glow with white-cold fire. Flames of creation and destruction. Places each hand against the rocket’s metal skin.

  “I told you I was the queen of Heaven. You dumb fucks really should have listened.”

  ****

  The end of the Age of Pisces. The dawn of a new age. Yeah, another one, though there hardly seems a point to it. She’s clocked time on various calendars, worn costumes as various gods: Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan, Hijri. A couple of other favourites. Time ended with the last of the cities, so who cares about the date? Who’s counting?

  Ishtar stands until the dust has settled, waits for the sky to dare to show its face. Where is Sirius? Her Dog Star, her best friend?

  “It’s not polite to keep a lady waiting!”

  But she waits.

  The Dog Star emerges when he’s good and ready. Bright as ever, winking through the storm.

  “My, didn’t you make a mess of things,” he tuts.

  “Shut the fuck up. It’s my world.”

  “That it is. That it is. So what you going to do with it now it’s broken?”

  Ishtar shrugs. She’s still rattling with righteous indignation and outrage. All her love, yet Thomas spat it right back in her face…

  It takes awhile to notice all the other stars are missing. Even Orion, the true shepherd, the Dog Star’s loyal friend. There’s only her and Sirius, just like in olden times.

  “To death and rebirth!” he toasts, raising an imaginary glass.

  “Indeed,” she answers, staring sadly out across scorched dirt.

  Just the two of them now and for all the years to come. She’s not quite sure what happened down in Thomas’s Underworld. An explosion, sure, but it’s not like the world hasn’t seen plenty of those. She and Sirius argue about it incessantly, back and forth, back and forth. Soon she’s lost track of continents as well as time. Without stars, it’s difficult to navigate. Difficult to hold a thought. More difficult to care.

  “So you reckon that fat guy was your boyfriend way back when?”

  “Kind of. Yeah, I think so. Maybe. Perhaps he was my husband. Or my brother. Or my son.”

  She’s brooding, so Sirius lets her think on it for a moment before he goes on. “But you waited thirty years to find the truth?”

  “Happens
to the best of us.” She nods.

  The weathered sentinel of Gengis still stands guard in his tower, keeping watch on the weary horizon. Turns out he was made of stone, after all.

  They walk a decade or two in contemplative silence. Miasma settles down on them like fog. Storms have swept the landscape barren, torn up anything that looked like grass. Even ghosts are fading from the world. She misses them much more than she misses people. Baby Nubian goats, she misses most.

  “I liked their ears and their funny little bleats,” she tells him, just to break the ever-awkward quiet.

  “Can’t quite see the attraction myself,” he replies.

  Storms rage fierce as dragon’s breath, tearing great chunks of crust from pole to pole. Fissures belch and fart sulphurous magma. Stepping between hot glaze, she barely feels it.

  “Sirius, do you think I might be dead?”

  He would have shrugged if he’d had shoulders. “Hard to say. Not much to compare life with now, is there?”

  “No,” she agrees. “There isn’t.”

  “You could always give them another chance.”

  “What for? The fuckers don’t deserve it.”

  Over time, their talk turns to other things, not just endless looping feedback of the past. As Thomas and her pride consign themselves to the substrata of mnemonic sediment, small black flowers start to push up through the cracks. Such hardy things, these little petals, sucking moisture from the bone-dry air. Shooting tendrils across the parched terrain, probing ever-gently for foothold.

  “Would you look at that!” says Sirius.

  “Shhhh,” she says. “I’m listening.”

  “Listening to what—” he starts, but stops midstream. He can hear it, too, the gentle trickling of water. Dribbles glistening over granite, piss-weak spittle gathering in pools. “I told you life would find a way,” he says after a time.