Speaking in Tongues

By The Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

She shared a room with Celia, but she was always asleep, so she didn't have to dress in the bathroom. She looked over her physics notes for half an hour and then left at eight-fifteen so she could get a seat in the front.When she walked down the hall, she usually met Fiona coming out of her room. Fiona would be wearing her nightgown, a nightshirt really, that clung to her and was really hardly long enough to cover her decently. Her long red hair would be tangled around her head, and she would squint at Christine through a screen of hair out of contactless, bleary eyes, wave listlessly, and rasp, "Morning, Christine," as she shuffled disconsolately into the bathroom.

She didn't know why these morning encounters disconcerted her so. Perhaps because meeting another person destroyed the perfection of her solitude; maybe it was the first jarring note of the cacophony to come. Or perhaps the fact that it was Fiona that she met first bothered her. In any case, she always left the building troubled.

She didn't like to think about Fiona, because that recalled the fears that she had banished the night before. After a morning of prayer and contemplation and quiet joy, the painfully incongruous sight of Fiona in her nightgown would sound a discordant note that seemed to call up all the others, the phantoms that took strange, twisted shapes as they keened on the edges of her consciouness. So she tried to forget that she had seen Fiona, every morning as she walked across the courtyard of her dorm. And she often did.She spent the day in classrooms taking notes. She took very careful notes, because her memory was not very good. She had to write down everything as it was said. If she read it through three or four times later, it would stick in her head and she would be able to pass the tests; if not, she would miss questions. It was a great deal of work, but she was doing the best in physics and chemistry; her chemistry TA said she was always the best prepared in section. Brandon, who sat next to her, was always talking about her notebook. "Christ, Christine! How can you write that much at one session? Aren't you afraid someday your arm's going to seize up and you'll miss the second half?" She had, in fact, noticed that her arm got very tired halfway through, so she started writing a little slower.

Then she went back to the dorm. There was no place for her to go to daily service; there was no branch of her sect on campus. She had to be content with Christian Fellowship meetings every Wednesday night. Her mother had told her not to worship at all rather than go to a pagan church. But she prayed all the time, and God must know that if she could have gone to church, she would have, so it was all right.

She did work on the couch, only stopping to watch TV late at night. She liked the Honeymooners the best of all the late-night shows. The others came in fuzzy, except for Star Trek, which she didn't like. Even Jimmy Swaggart came in grainy, but sometimes she listened to him anyway.It was hard to concentrate, with Celia and Laura and Sarah there all the time. They sat in the common room with her, talking to her or each other or on the phone. It was very distracting. She had thought at first that she could get along with them all; they seemed so nice. Celia had smiled so warmly, and sounded so happy to meet her, happier than anyone had ever sounded. No one, until she got to college, had ever really smiled when they first met her. There was always that moment when the eyes said something nasty, and then they remembered to smile. It was because they were from the outside, and they didn't understand. But Celia had smiled so naturally...and Laura too, and Sarah. She had liked them all, at first.

Celia was a short, dark little woman with brown-black hair. She seemed to know everyone, and was always bringing friends from other dorms over to the room. Not even Sarah and Laura had friends in other dorms yet. But it was so easy to know Celia; she seemed to approach the world with her arms open. She was liked by everyone on their floor, even Fiona; and she was always ready to talk about anything. Christine remembered, long after she left college, the night she woke up trembling and sweating, fleeing the supernatural voices and tongues of flame that had peopled her dreams, to find that she was sitting up in bed with Celia's arms around her and her gentle voice whispering, "Shhh...it's all right, it was a dream...shhhh...you're here, you're here in your room with us and it's all right." She had held on to her for a few minutes, until she realized what had happened. Then she thanked her and let go.

Celia sat back on the bed. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I thought I'd stopped having the dreams."

"What are they...about? If you don't mind telling me."

"They...I guess they're about my family. When I was little."

"Did something happen to them?"

"No, no, just...oh, I don't know. Services used to frighten me, when I was little. They'd all get up and start speaking old languages and it frightened me."

"So that's what the dreams are about?" She nodded. "Jeez. It's understandable. Why did they do that, was it part of your religion?"

"It's in the Bible. When the apostles received the Spirit, they started speaking--"

"Yes I know, but why do you do it?"

"Because when you receive the spirit, that's how you preach the word, in tongues. That's how the true apostles have always done it."

"But what good does it do anyone if you can't understand it?"

"Those who have the Spirit understand."

"And you still have screaming nightmares."

"It's only because I didn't know. If I'd had the spirit, I'd have understood them. Now I know what they're doing, it's not frightening. It's beautiful. It's God speaking through them."

"You enjoy services now?"

She blinked; it was something she had never thought about. She needed them; she always went; they were never boring and she knew that she was always in awe of the ones who could stand up and speak in the ancient holy languages the word of God...but she couldn't say whether she really enjoyed them. "Yes, I do."

“Wow." She sat silent and studied her with a look that Christine couldn't read. "But doesn't it bother you, that you keep having nightmares about it?"

"Not all the time."

"Don't you want to know why you have them?" Celia pressed gently.

"I'm tired. Thanks for waking me, but I have to go to sleep now. I have a quiz tomorrow."

"Okay, Christine. Goodnight and sleep well."

Celia climbed back into the top bunk, and Christine prayed God for more faith and the end of the nightmares, and so fell asleep.

She had been so sad to find out about Celia. One Friday she and Eileen, the girl across the hall, had come home from an off-campus party. Christine was watching TV in her common room when she heard Fiona's voice in the hallway saying, "Ho there, my friends! Be ye coherent?"

Two separate giggles bubbled shrilly through the hallway, one easily distinguishable as Celia's. Christine got up to see what was going on.Fiona was leaning against the wall studying Eileen and Celia. "Oh, Fiona, you shoulda come, it was sooo much fun," Eileen slurred, picking at the threads on the ribbing of her dress. "Those drinks were so good. Do you know how good those drinks were?" She smiled crookedly and leaned shakily forward to peer at Fiona out of reddened eyes.

Fiona smiled and laughed. She had three different laughs; a deep throaty one, a stifled, hysterical giggle, and a sharp acrid laugh. She used the acrid one now, and answered, "I don't know, Eileen. How good were they?"

"They were SOOOOOOOOOO good," answered Celia, pitching forward and grabbing Fiona's shoulder for support, "They were sooooo good, that..." She couldn't finish the sentence, and she and Eileen looked at each other and laughed. Fiona laughed with them, looking on in a sort of astonished amusement. "They must have been pretty good, because you're pretty blitzed," she answered.

"PRETTY blitzed!" roared Celia. “Pretty blitzed! We're TOTALLY blitzed!"

"Glad to see you still actively pursuing self-awareness," Fiona laughed.

Celia giggled. "To thine own self be true." Eileen's boyfriend came up the stairs. Eileen went over to him, greeted him with a sloppy smile, and draped herself over him. He looked ruefully at Fiona."It's your fault, you took 'em," Fiona answered.

"Why do girls always get so drunk? I don't understand why they always get so wasted."

"Carl, look at your body weight. Look at her body weight. Look at your tolerance. Look at her tolerance."

"I never drank in high school. You know that? I never drank in high school," Eileen repeated loudly.

"I guess that must be it," Carl answered sadly.

"Take good care of her."

Eileen waved as he helped her down the hall. "Christ," he muttered. "Bout time you learned your limit."

"Huh?"

"Useless," he wailed, and they negotiated the steps down.

Celia lurched around and saw Christine. "Chris!" she cried. "Yer still up? 'S past your bedtime! Oh, but you're in your nightgown, so I guess it's okay."

Christine looked at herself and wanted to cover herself and retreat before Fiona's smile. But she stood firm. "Are you all right, Celia?"

"Oh, jest peachy," she slurred, and flopped down on the couch.

Fiona stood in the doorway. Her hair was pulled back, but hanging down in a tangle of disorderly curls in the back. Her green eyes were cool and blank, and she was smiling a controlled, secret smile at a joke only she understood. Christine was a little afraid of Fiona, though certianly Fiona had given her no reason to be. Perhaps it was the cutting laugh or the dry jokes Christine never seemed to get. She felt that her face was a mask, and that the eyes could not be trusted to reveal the spirit behind them. Whenever she spoke, there was a subtle undercurrent of meaning that she could sense, see through the words like a serpent twisting beneath the surface of the water, but not grasp, and it made her uneasy.

"You've been drinking, haven't you?" Christine scolded.

Celia faced her, her smile tight to hold in laughter. "Yes, Chris," she said sagely, nodding for emphasis. "Yes, I'm afraid I have."

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Fiona's face and the secret smile that lingered. "Polluting your body. Tsk, tsk."

Delighted to find an ally, however improbable, Christine plowed on. "Exactly! It's unhealthy. It's wrong."

"Unhealthy, maybe, but it isn't wrong," Celia slurred. The flush on her face was fading slightly, and a pallor began to creep through it.

"Of course it's wrong! Alcohol makes men act like beasts and that's wrong, God made us above the animals not so that we could lower ourselves back down to that state!"

"Christine..." The pallor on her face was beginning to deepen, and she had to frown with concentration to get the words out. "There's nothing wrong with it. It's fun. Sometimes."

"But it isn't right! The Bible says..." And she stopped because she couldn't specifically remember what the Bible said about drinking, though she knew it had to be in there somewhere. "Well, Reverend Bakker says it promotes fornication!"

A sound which could have been a laugh burst from Fiona, but was stifled. Celia stared at her and mumbled, "I don't understand how anyone with a mind can believe in him."

"Just because he made one mistake everyone condemns him!" she shouted, angrily jumping to her feet. "He's a man of God, can't you see that? Why does everyone laugh at him just because he's doing God's work!"

Celia looked up, genuinely astonished, and her face was gray. Fiona took a step closer.

"You all laugh at us because we know the true way and you don't, because you think we're stupid to follow God's word! What's so wrong about believing in God and letting him help you?"

Celia closed her eyes and began to heave in unnatural jerking motions. Christine backed away, instinctively wary. Fiona, after standing still a moment, hurried in and knelt by her. She lifted her up and draped an arm over her shoulders. "C'mon, the bathroom's ten feet away. You'll make it." Still heaving, Celia stumbled out of the room with her and they lurched into the bathroom. Christine followed, curious.When she entered, Fiona was standing outside one of the stalls, her hands on Celia's shoulders as she heaved. A horrible ripping, gushing noise rose from Celia's throat, and then came the sound of the vomit splattering into the toilet bowl. Her frame shook again as the noise was repeated.

"You see?" shouted Christine. "This is what happens!"

Neither one replied. Celia was still shaking, still spewing the brown, foul liquid into the toilet. Fiona was rubbing her shoulders, saying, "Okay, it looks like you've gone through breakfast and lunch, so this one should just about do it--hey! there's dinner, I recognize the greenbeans. You should be through. Feel better now?"

"How can you joke about this? This is terrible!" Celia, who had been going to be her friend, who she might have even saved, was stooping over a toilet, puking uncontrollably like a sick infant. She had been reduced by liquor to a blithering fool and thence to a bloated animal. She had defiled herself willingly. Christine's visions of long conversations, of a conversion, of finally being able to share her joy with someone, were lying in ruins, and Fiona was making horrible jokes that weren't funny at all, not even to Celia, whose gut constricted again as she opened her mouth to make a terrible gagging, choking noise as nothing came out.

"Shit, dry heaves," Fiona muttered. "Christine, do you know anything about what to do for dry heaves?"

"I don't know," she answered, fixing her with a cold stare of righteous anger. "No one I know drinks."

"Yeah, same with me, but there must be something we can do for her..."

"None of your friends drink?"

"Well, one of them did, but not around me...you want water, Celia? Do you think that'd help?"

Some vague, feeble sound floated from the depths.

"Do you have a cup?"

"No."

"Ah well." She turned to Celia, who was beginning to straighten up. "I'm going into my room to get my cup but I'll be right back. You just sit down and take it easy." She dragged a chair from the hall into the bathroom, sat her down in it, and left.

Celia's chin was covered in driblets of vomit and there were brown stains on her shirt and gobs of vile stuff in her hair. The whole room smelled rancid. Christine looked on the face that was dead-ash with exhaustion and pain, and shouted, "You shouldn't drink! It's wrong!"

"Not wrong..." Celia panted. "Just stupid."

"WRONG! IT'S WRONG!"

"Chris, leave me alone, I'm sick..."

"Well, that's your fault!"

"...most of it in the toilet, but there's some on the floor of the stall," she heard Fiona say as she came back with a cup,followed by Sarah.

"It makes God sad to see those He created in His image debase themselves like pigs!"

Fiona matter-of-factly filled the cup and held it to Celia's lips.

"Quaff," she ordered wryly. "It's the staff of life. And it'll save your mouth being boardlike tomorrow, as I understand it."

Celia drank slowly, in small sips, then sighed and tilted her head back. Sarah quietly took a washcloth and wiped Celia's face.

"You'll be okay, hon," Sarah said gently. "You'll be fine."

"God, I'm sorry, you guys," she moaned.

"It's all right, baby, you'll do the same for me," Sarah answered."And I'm sure you'd do the same for me," Fiona replied.

"But I can't," Celia wailed. "You don't ever get drunk, I'll be in your debt forever!"

"Don't worry about it."

"You feel like you can move?" Sarah asked. Celia nodded. "C'mon then, let's get you into bed."

Fiona rose, but Sarah said, "It's okay, I'll take care of it," and they left the bathroom.

Fiona wrung the washcloth out and started on the floor of the stall.

"What did she mean, you're never drunk?"

Fiona glanced at her. "I don't drink." She wiped away with infinite disgust. "It has something to do with this."

"Well, then, why didn't you say anything?"

"What good does a temperance lecture do someone who's sick? She didn't need a harangue, she needed someone to hold her head."

"But you know it's wrong. Why didn't you help me?"

"Wrong?" She wrung the cloth out in the sink, making a face as the brown-green water welled out of it. "It isn't wrong, particularly."

"If you don't think it's wrong, why don't you drink?"

"Because." She sighed. "For a lot of reasons. Because I never have. Because I don't know my tolerance level and I don't want to get sick. Because I hate the taste of every alcoholic beverage mankind has ever devised. Because I have a strange and ludicrous attachment to my present state as the lily-flower of purity and temperance. But mostly because I don't ever want to lose control over my own actions. That would suck."

Christine stared. She didn't understand this multiplication, the confusing proliferation of reasons. Wasn't it simpler to say, it is wrong, therefore I do not do it? Why did they always have to justify what they did in six different contradicting ways, when it was so much easier simply to look to God for the answer?

Fiona looked at the floor, s lammed the door shut, and threw the cloth into the sink. "That sucker's soaking," she said. "Goodnight, Christine, and an interesting one it has been. Sleep well."

She was gone, and Christine went back to bed. She prayed for Celia's soul, wishing that words did not sound so clumsy, so empty, so different from the living and ancient words the ones with the Spirit pronounced when they were speaking in tongues.

So Celia was out. She thought next that Sarah would be the one to listen and understand; Sarah was so gentle. She was the one who comforted her after her horrible evening with Fiona. She was a tall blonde with deep blue consoling eyes, and she could listen so patiently where Fiona had just laughed, and later, shouted.She had been sitting in the common room talking to Laura about God. Laura was Jewish, which Christine had always thought was a shame; she was so nice, and it was too bad that she should be doomed. But she was not necessarily damned; anyone could be saved if they heard the word of God. Her own mother had been Catholic before she had heard; now she was gifted with the Spirit. Christine always felt a swelling of pride when she saw her mother rise and open her mouth to let the beautiful ancient words out. It did not matter that she did not understand. Someday she would fully appreciate the joy of her mother's message. For now, it was enough to try, with her feeble human language, to explain God's grace to Laura.

Laura refused to hear her, politely but definitely. "I'm sorry, Christine, but I can't accept the idea. What sort of God would let his people suffer the way they do? You can't tell me that if a baby dies of starvation in Ethiopia it's right simply because they resisted the truth in the Word. You can't tell me that every suffering inflicted on every human is somehow justified. You can't seriously believe that life is just. And I don't want to worship a God who believes in making it unjust."

" But if you would only open yourself to the Word, you would understand it all--"

"I've heard the Word, Christine. Since I could speak there's been someone to shout the Word at me. Everyone seems to want me to believe what they believe. They figure if they can convince someone else of something it must be true."

"I know it's true; I'm trying to save you."

"What kind of God would fry me just because I don't believe in him? I tried to believe what my parents taught me; I wanted to believe it; I couldn't. And I certianly won't buy into your God. If God wants me to believe in him, then let him help me do it."

Fiona smiled slightly. "Throwing down the gauntlet."

"Exactly. Let him help save me, if I must be saved. Let him help me believe what I tried to believe. And if he isn't willing to do that, if ge doesn't care enough about me to try to help me believe in him, then I don't want to be counted among his followers."

"Interesting," Fiona said. "You're sort of putting yourself above--"

"But He is, you just aren't listening!"

"I--"

The phone rang, and she answered it. It was her boyfriend, and she kept talking.

Fiona looked at her. "You buy into what your parents taught you?"

"Do you?"

So Fiona told her about her beliefs. She told her that after she was confirmed as a Catholic she looked at her faith, and it broke into thousands of shards that she was just beginning to piece together again. What she came up with was a different image of Catholicism, one that kept the mystery and romance of the church she was born to but incorporated her own thoughts.

She said that she believed in God, not because the Bible told her to, but because it was inevitable. "When I pray--"

"Do you pray?"

"Sometimes. When I do--I cannot believe that it's wasted. I believe that when a tree falls in the forest in makes a sound, because there cannot be no one around to hear it. I believe that God hears all the trees fall, that he hears the prayers uttered in the dark, and of course..." She broke off and smiled faintly, laughing again at what no one else could see. "And, of course, he reads my journal."

"Journal?"

"I write. A lot. And no one ever reads it, except for me. So why do I do it? Because someone does read it. There's an audience. There's an audience, or my life is meaningless. And so I believe in God because it is absolutely necessary that I believe in the audience."

She found Fiona's faith more disturbing than Laura's atheism. "But it isn't the real God."

"How can you tell me what the real God is?"

"The real God doesn't need made-up reasons to justify his existence, just the Bible. The real God wouldn't make you draw up such a weird scheme--the God of the Bible inspires faith, not half-hearted justification!"

"I have faith in my God, just as you do in yours."

"There is only one God! You know what your problem is," she continued, warming to her task. "You were raised Catholic. The bible the Catholics use is wrong. It isn't the original version, the King James."

Fiona laughed. "The original version? Christine, the original version of the gospels was in Greek, then Latin, and it was centuries and centuries before King James decided to standardize the English version."

"But we use the King James version. He says it's the only one--"

"I use it too. Technically, I think we're supposed to use the Douay version, but the language in the King James is more beautiful."

"But it is the original one, it must be, he said so--"

"You're going to listen to a man whose wife has cut-glass chandeliers in her closets and wears more makeup than the Dallas Cowgirls?"

"All that money was got honestly!"

"Whether it was or not, doesn't the sight of a man pretending to be a religious leader, be he TV evangelist or archbishop, completely denying his creed by accumulating obscene amounts of wealth make you sick?"

"Why should that matter? He earned that money!"

"Why should it matter? He's supposed to be following the gospel. The man's salary could feed India for a year and inst ead it keeps his puppydog cool in the summertime. Jesus did say that if you really want to follow him you have to sell all you have and give it to the poor, it's harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, and all that, which he conveniently ignores."

"Where does it say that?"

Fiona gaped. "You read the bible, you know where it is."

"It isn't in there! The Bible says we should live like princes!"

"NOT ON EARTH!!"

Fiona was standing now, her hands clenched and her jaw set. "You're just like them, the housewives who knelt in church every Sunday and heard the readings and nodded and ignored them thoroughly, who convinced themselves that they worshipped God by putting five bucks in the collection basket and teaching me to love the creed they had stopped believing long ago! They were exactly like you and your millionaire Messiah, exactly. They gave me my faith by word, and then destroyed it with their careless handling. I have spent years trying to piece together something to fill the void they left in me. Don't count on being held to be holier than I in the last judgment. Because there has got to be a recompense for having the guts to face and try to fill the hollow center of your faith!"

The green eyes snapped, the orange hair that rimmed her face with flame danced as her head quivered in anger. A fraction later, her hands fluttered in half-apology and shame spread across the flushed face. She lowered her eyes for a moment, mumbled something, and strode quickly out of the room.

That was when Sarah had come, and she had comforted her. Christine told her all about how rude Fiona had been, how she had shouted at her and tried to make her feel stupid and ignorant when she wasn't. She knew the truth, the one truth, and no one realized it, no one understood that she was the one who held the keys to salvation, that she alone could save them. They all treated her like an infidel; Fiona had practically called her a pagan.

"I don't understand her, she gave all these insane reasons for what she calls her faith when you can never reason about faith. You just have to take it. And she made up this story about trees..."

"Fiona's strange," Sarah said. "She's a good person really, but she gets excited sometimes."

"She's so...so very strange."

"Maybe," Sarah shrugged. "But so's everybody."

"Do you believe in Christ?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Sarah smiled. "Don't you want to know why?"

"It's enough." She went off to prayers and bed.

The dreams had bothered her again that night; not bad enough to wake Celia, but bad. Fiona seemed to do that to her. The sight of that disheveled red-orange mop floating down the hall always jarred, and she tried to avoid her if she could. She was afraid of the images Fiona recalled in her, afraid of the sounds that made no sense.

She tried to understand Fiona's reasons, but they were cryptic. Why did she talk about an audience and her journal? What did writing have to do with God, did God read research papers? The idea was ludicrous. At the bottom of it all, she could not see why anything she had said should give anyone faith; the words were meaningless. It bothered her that she could not find the significance until she remembered that Fiona was Catholic. She was misguided then, and nothing she ever said would make sense. And she was cruel too, because she believed in a church that drank blood and ate flesh as part of the mass, even if it was only symbolic, and cruel because she cut down men of God with her sharp words. She was one of those who in other times murdered the prophets. Now all she could do was slander them, but the intent was the same. She was trying to destroy what she believed in, destroy the men she loved. Well, she wouldn't be able to do it. The Spirit was strong.

Sometimes she thought about Fiona when she was sitting alone in the room on Friday nights watching TV. Christine never went to parties; she was not interested in drunken debauchery. But Fiona didn't drink, and she went out. What was the difference? Why could Fiona go and not drink and not she? So as not to put yourself into temptation, came the answer. Avoid near occasions of sin. But why should she fall, she wasn't even really tempted to try it, she knew it was bad. Couldn't she just go and see what went on at the parties? No, it's wrong, came the answer. It is not for you. You are separate, you lead the straight and narrow life and are not to stray off the path. Fiona has strayed, and that is why she is evil, with ice in her eyes and a blade in her voice and a double meaning in her speech like the forked tongue of a serpent.

Sarah was good and gentle, and sometimes stayed to talk to her before she left at night. And she usually came back only a little drunk. Christine began to see that liquor could create a glow, could round the corners of life. It could make people softer, relaxed and happy, it could coat the sharp edges of their personalities and make them blunt. Celia had become a pig; she had had to forget about Celia. But Sarah just got sweeter. She came to hold Fiona's sobriety against her. It seemed that she was deliberately refusing to drink so that her edges could remain sharp and she could still cut.

The Friday night of the Tray debacle she talked to Fiona again. Her orange head appeared in the doorway like a foreboding cipher and she said, "Hi, Christine. Anyone home?"

"No, they're all out at a party somewhere."

"Yeah, probably Amy's. I went; it sucks. People are still there because they're too drunk to tell. Oh well." She turned to go out, then sighed. She put a hand on each side of the doorway, tilted her head to the ceiling, and cried, "ANOTHER FRIDAY NIGHT AT COLLEGE!! AND YEA, VERILY, I AM BORED EVEN UNTO SHITLESSNESS!!"

"Why do you talk like that?"

"Oh--reading too much Spenser, I guess. No," she interrupted herself suddenly, leaning against the side of the doorway. "No, it isn't that, I talked oddly long before Spenser. I guess I just like the sound. I like the old words, the forgotten ones. I like the way you can say something long or short, softly or harshly, poetic or vulgar or both. I like the way you don't always have to say, `I'm bored.' I like to play with words. And that's why I talk half like a knight of old and half like a streetwalker and like nothing anyone knows..." She stared into the air ahead of her. "I say what I think, without much editing. I try to make my speech an image of me, so people can see and understand. And if that means that I really am half Virgin Mary and half whore of Babylon, well, so be it..." Christine figeted uneasily, and Fiona looked at her. A spark of humor snapped across the dark hollow pupils. "You really don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?"

The pupils were wide and black in the dusk, and there was a golden rim on the inside of the yellow-flecked jade iris that she had never seen before. The voice was caressing and alomst gentle. She knew that she was being offered a key. If she consented, she could pass behind the glittering shell into her, pierce the smooth lake surface of the pupils and discover the mysteries in the depths. She could find the meaning."Oh, no, I see exactly what you're saying." Her voice quavered through the air like that of a peevish child, and she suddenly hated its sound.Fiona smiled, and the ice froze over the irises. "No, you don't. But it doesn't really matter. Good night." She walked down the hall, singing in a reedy tenor that hovered annoyingly close to the right notes without quite hittin g them. Christine was glad when the sound died away, and glad too that she had not been drawn into her strange, alluring cut-glass world.

It was two or three hours before Tray and Sarah came home. They stood in the doorway for a while, and when Christine looked up she caught the tail end of what must have been a very long kiss. She sat on the couch, speechless, while his arm slid around her waist and hers over his shoulders as they turned to enter the room.

"Hi, Christine. You have a good night?"

"Yeah, I got a lot of work done."

"That's great. Christine, Tray. Tray, Christine." They nodded. "Goodnight." They went into the room Sarah shared with Laura.

Confused, Christine rose and decided to go to the bathroom. On the way out, she glanced at the memo board on the door of their suite, then went back for a closer look. "LAURA: Please could you sleep on the couch tonight or in Fiona and Jane's room? Thanks so much, I'll do it for you someday, OK? Love you, Sarah."

She stared at the message, mechanically reading it over and over until the words became a meaningless blur and her thoughts divorced themselves from her eyes. She was spending the night with him...her mind reeled as she tried to cope with this new half of Sarah. She tried to reconcile kind, gentle and sweet Sarah with Sarah the adulteress, Sarah the Christian with Sarah the harlot...it could not be done. No one could be both good and evil, saint and sinner, believer and infidel, friend and slut...in Sarah that night the angel and devil were fighting and the devil would win, she would come out as what?...the whore of Babylon, had she said, was that in the Bible...?

"...a lecherous mouth begets a lecherous tail." Fiona's voice cleft the air behind her. She turned around to fix her with a stare of such confused torment that she hurried to add, "I'm only kidding. She's not really trashed, otherwise Celia would have done something."

"Is Celia trashed?" she demanded.

"I don't know, I don't think so. Why, are you upset about something?"

"She's sleeping with him in our room!"

"There are worse fates than a night on the couch, particularly one as commodious as yours. If you don't want to sleep there, we have an extra bed in our suite, Allison practically lives with Rajiv--"

"No, no, it's not that, Laura's the one who rooms with her but--"

"What's wrong?"

"She's-she's sleeping with him!"

"I know." She stared incredulous at Christine's expression of outrage. "She's a big girl. As long as she has her little friend handy, no harm will be done."

She turned to go down the hall. Christine shouted, "Do you approve of this?" with an edge of desperation in her voice that surprised them both.Fiona turned. "No," she said. "I don't. But it's her life. It's her body. It's even her soul." Her voice, in spite of its words, took on an oddly gentle tone. "It's all right. As a cardinal virtue, chastity's always been overrated anyway." She disappeared into her suite.

Eyes tearing, choking on the bitterness of Fiona's words, Christine stumbled into the bathroom. She gripped the edges of the sink and stared at herself in the mirror. And she watched her eyelids redden and her face puff as the tears rolled in great rivulets down the cheeks that were creased in a grimace of grief as she wept for the coldness of the tiles under her feet and the blackness outside the windows and the blank white walls closing upon her and the vacant air.

It was very early in the morning, and she had not slept at all. She wandered numbly through the building, without really knowing where she was heading except that it was downstairs. She passed the windows in the hall where the early morning sunlight threw the scat tered traces of the night's parties into stark white relief. The halls were empty and silent. She passed closed doors, knowing that each one sealed off another life from her contact, knowing that the sins of the flesh had claimed them all as they slept off the effects of gluttony and lust while wallowing in sloth. Nothing stirred but her. She inhabited the world of silence and light and pure morning alone. She tried to sing, but her throat swallowed her voice.

She went down and down the stairs, mind empty, waiting for something, anything. She had stayed constant and upheld her creed while they fell around her, she had withdrawn from the pit of error as they all slipped over the brink. She had come out from among them, she was separate. She alone was safe on the shore waiting for God.

But God had not come last night. He had not been in the bathroom with her, he had not been with her as she lay on her bed with eyes open. He had not been with her as she knelt through the small hours with her head on her hands, not even when the voices of the others rose to drown out her prayers with their unintelligible and hostile holiness. And he was not with her now as she descended the steps in the stinging brightness and stifling silence of the morning.

The last flight of steps left her in the basement, and she knew that any hope for a sign was abandoned. No ray of light could pierce the ceiling, no dove could struggle through a heating vent to land on her, no droplet of flame condense on the heating pipes over her head and drop down to halo her with the vermilion fire of the Spirit. Of course with God anything was possible...but had she ever really believed in miracles? Hadn't she always felt that there were some things, like a coffee table turning into an elephant or bread becoming flesh, that could not be done? Even when she had believed that God could shake the mountains, could she have believed that he could stretch his arm to her here under the earth? There would be no sign now. Whatever was wheeling through the heavens or behind the stars, she would not see anything but the brick walls or hear anything but the hiss of the steam through the pipes above her.

Overwhelmed by solitude, she closed her eyes and leaned against the brick wall. And from the corner of the tunnel, she heard something. A stream of single notes flowed from a piano in the music room. A clear rivulet of melody, unsupported and unadorned rose and descended in a single crystal stream. Her ears seized on the sound as a subtle deep ba ss chord shored it up, the bedrock harmony paving the riverbed with diamond so that the melody could tumble brilliant over it and swell from rill to river.

Almost blindly, following her ears, she walked slowly toward the source of the music. She closed her eyes and thought of the living water, cleansed in the ripples of music as they washed over her head. The current rushed faster and stronger until finally it poured in a cascade of melody, harmony and flashing light, light of such purity that it burned the eyes but so clear and clean...It was the sign. In her hour of need he had led her here to the wellspring and the saving angel at the piano who was showing her the joy of the bath in the eternal spring, however cold the water was.

The stream slowed, the bedrock dissolved in a shimmering mist, leaving the crystal melody to rise, descend, rise, and finally melt into a silence that reverberated inside her with echoes of peace.She opened her eyes slowly; she was outside the practice room. She was about to wh isper a prayer and turn away until she heard the key scrabbling in the lock from the inside and decided to wait and see who had been sent to be the instrument of grace. The handle turned, and her heart rose as she waited to look on the face of her savior.

It was Fiona's turn, as she turned around from locking the door again, not to understand the look of anguish and terror on Christine's face. She only saw the blackness rush into her eyes as the pupils widened just perceptibly, and she was struck by the impression that Christine was falling, spiralling away into space though she stood solidly in front of her.

"Morning, Christine."

"What are you doing up?"

"Marching band." She lifted her arms; the messenger was wearing blue pants with a white stripe up the side, a blue blazer, and a florid Hawaiian shirt with a button on it that read, "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero."

"Why are you here?"

"I woke up."

"But--are you doing laundry, or what are you doing down here?"

"I--don't know, exactly."

"Are you all right?"

She nodded, barely.

"Well, see you, Christine," she answered, and walked away down the hall.

"What was the name of it

She stopped and turned. "What, the piece? `The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.' I love it." She half-smiled. "Good old Claude..." Whistling the melody shrilly, she wandered away.

Christine fixed her blank eyes on the wall and fought against the pull of the abyss that had opened up before her. Fiona's orange-flame hair, green eyes, and pale face centered the vortex of foreign sounds and images, of her fragmentary memories of the word s no man spoke, frantic gestures in the air and wavings of arms toward a heaven she could not see, flickers of movements and sputters of sound and and fire that churned and twisted and threatened to suck herself and everything solid and sound into the maelstrom. She grabbed for props. And slowly at first, then with desperate speed, she began to say the words of the prayers.

She had to use all her strength to withstand the sight of Fiona every morning. She trod gingerly on the ice that had formed over the whirlpool, knowing somewhere in the black cobwebbed caverns of her mind that it would not bear her full weight, just conscious enough of this to make sure to step carefully. And when she looked on Fiona's bottleglass eyes and crazy cloud of orange hair she sensed the twin threat of fire and blade, and swerved instantly from the danger in order not to crash through and plunge into the icy torrent that rumbled just below.

THE END