Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She asks the one-handed woman what the story is and her new partner shouts, “Didn’t you get yours? You write down the name of the last bastard that abused you.”

What if he was anonymous , Sylvia wonders. What if he was a phantom?

They swing off Rimbaud and onto Main Street and there’s a group cheer at the sight of the City Hall Tower. Through the bullhorn, Paige yells, “Tell Mary and Martha to go check on the sheets,” and two women in matching sweat suits break off from the assembly and start to sprint down the middle of Main.

“What sheets?” Sylvia yells and the hook-handed mother gives her an annoyed look and yells back, “Didn’t you go to any of the planning sessions?

Up ahead, cars are being detoured out of the way by a cop with a flashlight. Clearly, Mayor Welby and Manager Kenner know how politically hot this thing could turn and they want as little confrontation as possible. Let Paige and Company vent some steam and if it means rerouting a little night traffic down Main Street, so be it.

The marchers pass unmolested down the center of the road though there are some comments about dyke bitches yelled from the doorways of the greasier bars. When they’re almost on top of City Hall, Sylvia is shocked to see the building totally surrounded by even more women. They’re spilling off the front steps, overflowing on the common and the side pavilion. The halogen spotlights that normally shine down from the Hall’s tower have apparently been knocked out and this sea of bodies is lit only by the hundreds of candles that everyone’s holding aloft. It gives the whole scene a weird, semi-religious feel and a churchlike hush falls over the crowd as Paige leads her platoon through a parting of massed spectators who simply roll back like the Red Sea and clear a path to the front stairway.

Paige climbs the stairs like some cross between a military president and a pope, someone who’s moved beyond the boundaries of ego and power and into a realm where the forces of history can be wrestled with and occasionally altered. In Sylvia’s small living room Paige gave off none of this larger-than-life quality. She seemed like a smart pragmatist, a savvy deal cutter who’d rely on lawyers and opinion polls. But here, mounting the steps of City Hall with bullhorn in one hand and flickering, penis-shaped candle in the other, she’s transformed into an icon, a definition of charisma and strength so vibrant it feels as if she could liberate every soul in earshot with the sound of her voice.

She takes her central position at the rail of the balcony that leads to the building’s main entrance. Two lieutenants take their places to the right and left of her. They unhitch a banner that drapes over the rail and reveals the night’s motto— Intercourse Is Genocide —written in red paint. Paige lets the quiet permeate the midst of this swollen mob, lets its meaning become palpable and fix the depth of her command. She turns her head from side to side, then lifts her candle into the air, to the full extension of her left arm.

Through the bullhorn, she yells, “The purge has begun,” and the crowd goes insane for the next few minutes, making it impossible for Paige to continue speaking.

The one-handed mother and Sylvia move up onto a knoll of grass that slopes down from the First Apostle Bank building, Sylvia watches the baby, almost a toddler and of indeterminate sex, shift its head on the mother’s chest. It’s a pudgy, sallow-faced child and even in this dim light smudges of crusted food can be seen on its cheeks, maybe some form of carrots or squash.

“Tonight,” Paige announces from the balcony, redemanding that attention of the crowd, “is the Night of Short Candles. And it will be remembered for years to come as the first strike in the battle that will free us forever. In a few hours, sisters, we are going to cut down their balls.”

Sylvia looks up at Paige Beatty, then around at the crowd. She listens to the escalation of the leader’s rage and feels the way it’s palpably spreading among the faithful. She turns to the mother and says, “That’s pretty extreme stuff.”

The new friend is ready for the comment.

“Paige says people are sheep. You’ve got to hit them over the head. You’ve got to be extreme. You’ve got to be visceral. Go for the throat. You have to make them see behind the screens. Make them understand all the signs and signals being pumped out as part of the war against us. All this common junk, you know, from Playboy to the beer ads, it’s even more insidious by its subtlety.”

“Beer ads are porn?” Sylvia asks.

The mother gives a look like she’s not sure why Sylvia’s here, like Sylvia might be something worse than the sheep. Something like the wolf’s collaborator. And Sylvia wants to tell her, this stranger with a metal claw at the end of her arm and a shivering child sleeping at her neck, that she’s nobody’s collaborator. That she’s a free agent. That she’s so free she’s dizzy with the isolation.

A new wave of explosive cheering sounds and it becomes clear that if Paige wants to get through the speech she’s going to have to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric.

“No one can fight for us,” Paige’s voice booms, hoarse with the intensity of both her rage and her empathy. “We unite. And we fight. Or we die. Because make no mistake, don’t let yourselves be deceived ever again, they are our enemy,” spitting out these four words loudly and slowly.

Sylvia leans into the ear of the mother and asks, “What’s the baby’s name?”

The woman turns and gives a surprised and maybe angry look, then says, “Maria.”

“They answer,” Paige screams, “we are your fathers, your sons, your brothers, and husbands. But no fact of relation can change the nature of the beast. And on that day the species enters puberty, the switch is thrown that regresses the boy back to the swamp at the dawn of time when the code of aggression was imprinted on his animal heart.”

“How old?” Sylvia asks Maria’s mother.

This time she says, “I’m trying to listen to this.”

“See the beast for what he is,” from the bullhorn. “He is our oppressor. He is the savage who would enslave our bodies, destroy our minds, and obliterate our spirits. He of the Y chromosome. He of the testosterone depravity.”

Sylvia stares at the child. She tries to picture, if Perry and she had a child, what would it look like. She can’t do it. She can’t produce the image.

All she can hear are the amplified words that seem to assault the air around her head.

“The exploitive, objectifying demon. The primal brain that escaped evolution and now strives always to dominate, to victimize, to abuse into submission, to erase our very presence. This is his Final Solution. This is his death camp. The images he makes us into are his ovens. And we will not, we can not, walk into those ovens peacefully. I am calling for an absolute separatism. And I am calling for a holy war. We must rage. We must fight. We must battle with everything we have inside us. There can be no truce. There can be no compromise. We must rise and we must triumph.”

The crowd hits its climax and comes together in an evangelical hysteria. And then Sylvia’s being hugged by her hook-sister. After a minute they step back, out of the embrace, and Sylvia sees the water off her slicker has partly obscured the name on the chalkboard. It must have been something like Benny or Barry. Sylvia reaches out and touches the chalkboard and says, “Did he do that? To your hand?”

The woman nods and shrugs at the same time and says, “Sort of. It’s a long story.”

Sylvia gestures to the Intercourse Is Genocide banner and asks, “Do you believe that?”