“So,” he says. “Tell me, Bilquis, how much just to suck my cock?”
“What you call me?”
“Bilquis,” he says, again. And then he sings, in a voice not made for singing, “You are an immaterial girl living in a material world.” There is something rehearsed about his words, as if he’s practiced this exchange in front of a mirror.
She stops smiling, and her face changes, becomes wiser, sharper, harder. “What do you want?”
“I told you. Sweet loving.”
“I’ll give you whatever you want,” she says. She needs to get out of the limo. It’s moving too fast for her to throw herself from the car, she figures, but she’ll do it if she can’t talk her way out of this. Whatever’s happening here, she doesn’t like it.
“What I want. Yes.” He pauses. His tongue runs over his lips. “I want a clean world. I want to own tomorrow. I want evolution, devolution, and revolution. I want to move our kind from the fringes of the slipstream to the higher ground of the mainstream. You people are underground. That’s wrong. We need to take the spotlight and shine. Front and center. You people have been so far underground for so long you’ve lost the use of your eyes.”
“My name’s Ayesha,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s another girl on that corner, her name’s Bilquis. We could go back to Sunset, you could have both of us ...”
“Oh, Bilquis,” he says, and he sighs, theatrically. “There’s only so much belief to go around. They’re reaching the end of what they can give us. The credibility gap.” And then he sings, once again, in his tuneless nasal voice, “You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.” The limo takes a corner too fast, and he tumbles across the seat into her. The driver of the car is hidden behind tinfecl glass. An irrational conviction strikes her, that nobody is driving the car, that the white limo is driving through Beverly Hills like Herbie the Love Bug, under its own power.
Then the John reaches out his hand and taps on the tinted glass.
The car slows, and before it has stopped moving Bilquis has pushed open the door and she half jumps, half falls out onto the blacktop. She’s on a hillside road. To the left of her is a steep hill, to the right is a sheer drop. She starts to run down the road.
The limo sits there, unmoving.
It starts to rain, and her high heels slip and twist beneath her. She kicks them off, and runs, soaked to the skin, looking for somewhere she can get off the road. She’s scared. She has power, true, but it’s hunger-magic, cunt-magic. It has kept her alive in this land for so long, but for everything else she uses her sharp eyes and her mind, her height and her presence.
There’s a metal guardrail at knee height on her right, to stop cars from tumbling over the side of the hill, “and now the rain is running down the hill road turning it into a river, and the soles of her feet have started to bleed.
The lights of L.A. are spread out in front of her, a twinkling electrical map of an imaginary kingdom, the heavens laid out right here on earth, and she knows that all she needs to be safe is to get off the road.
I am black but comely, she mouths to the night and the rain. lam the rose ofSharon, and the lily of the valleys. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for 1 am sick of love.
A fork of lightning bums greenly across the night sky. She loses her footing, slides several feet, skinning her leg and elbow, and she is getting to her feet when she sees the lights of the car descending the hill toward her. It’s coming down too fast for safety and she wonders whether to throw herself to the right, where it could crush her against the hillside, or the left, where she might tumble down the gully. She runs across the road, intending to push herself up the wet earth, to climb, when the white stretch limo comes fish-tailing down the slick hillside road, hell, it must be doing eighty, maybe even aquaplaning on the surface of the road, and she’s pushing her hands into a handful of weeds and earth, and she’s going to get up and away, she knows, when the wet earth crumbles and she tumbles back down onto the road.
The car hits her with an impact that crumples the grille and tosses her into the air like a glove puppet. She lands on the road behind the limo, and the impact shatters her pelvis, fractures her skull. Cold rainwater runs over her face.
She begins to curse her killer: curse him silently, as she cannot move her lips. She curses him in waking and in sleeping, in living and in death. She curses him as only someone who is half-demon on her father’s side can curse.
A car door slams. Someone approaches her. “You were an analog girl,” he sings again, tunelessly, “living in a digital world.” And then he says, “You fucking madonnas. All you fucking madonnas.” He walks away.
The car door slams.