Heaven's Rending Ch. 02

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"Diane. Diane von Ludendorf."

"Could I call you sometime?"

She looked at him for a moment, a cloud of uncertainty crossing her face. "About?" she asked.

"Oh, never mind. I really shouldn't have said that."

"About?" she repeated, her quiet voice filled with natural authority.

"Uh, listen, here's my card, and the incident number is on the front here. Insurance company will need that. You can call the station and get a message to me if there's anything you feel I've missed." He stood and turned to leave.

"Officer Burnett," she said, looking down at the card he had given her, "Alan?" As he turned she held out her right hand. He looked down and took her hand in his. "I didn't mean to be so rude earlier. It took me a minute to get over what's happened, and I forgot just what you did for me today, and I'm grateful to you. I just wanted you to know I appreciate what you did for . . . what you do for us all."

Burnett looked at her for a moment and nodded his head slightly, then turned to leave. But her hand still held his, and not so gently. He stopped and looked at her and the power in her eyes overwhelmed him. Not a cold, empty soul wandering in barren drifts. No, not now. Hot fury bathed in resolute purpose - that was the impression the woman's eyes left deep within him inside that furious moment. His purpose, or hers? He wasn't sure. He continued to look at the woman, at her eyes, then he watched as she drew near and kissed him on the forehead.

He nodded his head again. "Good day, Ma'am."

Alan Burnett turned and walked out of the woman's house.

____________

A week later Burnett was sitting at one of the tables in the squad briefing room, looking at the little yellow post-it note on his department mail. There on top of subpoena and supplemental reports in need of follow-up was a note that said simply 'call me . . . Diane.' He crumbled the note up and tossed it into a trash can. He sat back and thought about the note, the woman, those eyes. He hadn't been able to sleep at all now, not after seeing those eyes. Letters from divorce lawyers, bills to be paid and bills that he couldn't pay, the pain in his arm - all had kept him up in helpless sleeplessness for a week now, but nothing had inspired his restlessness more than the thought of Diane von Ludendorf and those intolerably blue eyes.

He had run her criminal history; a couple of traffic stops and a minor in possession charge from almost two decades ago. The Ludendorf name was an alias. And IAD had let on that she was a hooker, and a really wild one at that . . . a so-called dominatrix. She specialized in pain, giving pain for kinks. And for money, apparently, according to Internal Affairs, for quite a lot of money. She had pulled in a little over three hundred grand last year in her 'consulting' business; what Alan Burnett had heard about the woman for the past week was enough to turn his stomach, but . . . his mind always came back to those eyes, to the compassion that had rippled through the very fabric of the woman's being - and his, for that matter - as she had worked on his arm.

He would lie awake at night lost in the ruins of his life and suddenly there she was in the air all around him. He would see her, then he would remember the feeling that had overwhelmed him as she had worked on his arm, and building waves of doubt and confusion rolled over him. He would see her in all of her outrageous - and to him, deeply flawed, sexuality - and he would drift . . . lost and overwhelmed . . . until his desire for her took him down unknown paths of lust and despair.

He would fantasize that she was the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold, that they would fall in love and the purity of their passion for one another would drive all shadows of evil from their path, and in this surreal fantasy-scape they would live happily ever after. He would shower in the morning and wash away the remnants of these musings and in the clear light of day - uniform on and badge shining in the moral certainty of his calling - he would find that the trail of his night's dreaming led only to an ambivalence that crept in and suffocated his desire.

He was lost. Lost between night and day, between truth and desire . . .

And so he sat in the briefing room, the thought of calling her felt like an onrushing tidal stream - it was overwhelming and unstoppable; and just as certainly the thought of - no, the reality of - her 'vocation' became nothing less than a suicidal rip in the fabric of time.

Burnett went to his locker and pulled out his briefcase. He opened it and pulled out a steno-pad, flipped through pages until he found the one he wanted, then scribbled down her number on a new post-it note, and returned his briefcase to his beaten beige locker. His hands were shaking, and his stomach felt like a burning knot, but he knew he had to call her. He knew it. She was a force of nature, and her gravity was pulling him in.

Entropy. The word kept wandering through his consciousness. Random change - chaotic transformation, no reason - just random change. Where was this headed? Was that even an appropriate response - a reasonable question - wasn't a state of entropy by definition completely unpredictable.

Was calling her an act with unpredictable consequences? What did he want from this woman? Pain? Love? Transfiguration? Were these consequences not completely unpredictable?

He walked out of the precinct house and drifted to his car. He got in, and sat behind the wheel. His hands rested on the top of the steering wheel, his fingers interlocked and his thumbs resting one on other. He looked at his thumbs, felt them touching, felt the touch of his skin - and he wondered what her touch would be like - what would he feel when his flesh met hers.

He drove to his apartment and parked behind the building. He sat, his eyes closed as he drifted past the event horizon of this new universe; he felt himself caught in the swirling maelstrom of desire that surely must lie at the center of her being. He walked up to his apartment and moved into the living room; he dialed up the air-conditioning and listened to the compressor kick in, felt the air begin to move around him, and everything around him began to spin and swirl. All he could see as he stood there beside the door was black leather, and this world smelled ancient, like it was bathed in musk and incense. He put his hands out and touched the wall, more to stop the nauseating motion that held him in it's grip than for any other sensation he could actually feel. Reason, he thought, reason seemed to have abandoned him now. He was bathed in the mists of instinct; it was more like free-fall, he thought, disconcerted by the reality of this sudden intrusion into a realm so foreign . . .

When the disorienting impulse left, he touched his way to the sofa and sat down. He found the post-it note in his shirt pocket, and turned it over and over in his hand and in his mind as he grappled with the consequences he could see gyrating in the sodden mists that held him. He remembered throwing the original note away, not retrieving it, and he watched it in his hand, wondering why he had fought his way to another pad and written the number down again. Malevolence, he thought, took on many forms, moved in random ways humans had a long ago forgotten.

Ancient currents moved through the air of his apartment. He fought a crushing pressure in his chest - he fought to breath through the sickening sweetness of the suddenly charged air - and he moved against impossible forces toward the telephone. He felt as if gravity had attacked him, was pulling him down and away from the world he knew and that this movement would send him spiraling toward her, toward a resolution of the chaos that defined this new world.

And there she was - there in the mist, holding his bloody arm in her hand, tending the wounds that bound them to this spinning, primordial universe. He felt the cold fury of her eyes dissolving as his blood swept over her, covering her cold chaos with the pulsing certainty of his blood. She stood there in the mist - covered in his blood - and her arms were outstretched, beckoning him to join with her. Join her in the mist. Swirling green and amber and cobalt mists, diffuse - yet all penetrating. Craving penetrations danced in his mind . . .

He dialed her number; an answering machine asked him to leave a name and number and she would return the call, but he hung up without leaving a message. He walked to the bathroom, dropped his grime soaked uniform into the hamper, and he showered - letting the hot water run on the back of his neck for what felt like an hour. He felt cold inside, though, cold to the point of feeling involuntary shivers run down his spine, and he knew it was because of her. The heat that surrounded him could not penetrate the coldness that radiated from the core of his being now. She possessed him now . . .

Lost. He knew he was lost. He was afraid. Of what, or whom, did he not know?

Could he really be so certain? Or was this new life really an illusion?

Burnett dried himself as he stood before the mirror over the bathroom sink, he stood watching his body shake and he laughed at the incongruity of this world. Her world. He dressed and went into the kitchen, looked at all the nothingness that waited to be eaten, this frozen food microwaved hell, hell that might have nourished him on another night, but not tonight - no, not tonight. Everything about his new world now felt out of place, incongruous, like he no longer belonged to the here and now. He belonged to the mist . . .

He walked out of the little kitchen, walked to the telephone, and called her number again. On the third ring, the answering machine kicked in, recited her message, and he waited.

"Yeah, Diane, this is Alan, uh, Officer Burnett. I wanted to see you. I need to talk to you. Please call me."

"Hello, Alan," her voice said. She had picked up the telephone. Sultry, knowing.

"Hello." Desperate, desiring.

"What do you want, Alan." Soothing, seductive.

"Dinner. Meet me for dinner." Lost in the storm, spinning out of this world's reach.

"When, Alan?" Confident, amused.

"I don't know, now, tonight." The universe aflame, her fires spreading in the dark - lighting his way.

"Can you pick me up about nine?" Ah, keeper of the flames, do you see him?

He looked at his watch: six twenty. "I'll be there." Yes, we see him.

"Bye." He is ours.

He listened as the remnants of her voice echoed in his soul, listened as the line went dead, floated on ancient airs as the swirling uncertainty of this reeling universe he had lived in for the past few hours dissolved, and was replaced with . . . what? What was this he felt inside - in this room he called his home - inside this space he called his body? Was he really here, was he really a part of this universe anymore? What was this choice? He thought of free will, of choices between good and evil, and he wondered again, what is this choice? What have I chosen?

Burnett called and made a reservation at his favorite restaurant, an Austrian place over by the lake, and he went into his little bedroom and changed his clothes. He put on a black suit and a white shirt, and looped a red bow-tie around his neck. He splashed on some cologne, polished his shoes and put them on. All rituals complete, he looked at himself in the mirror and laughed.

He walked down to his car, ran down to the car wash and drove through. He looked at his watch again and again, drove to the airport and watched as big jets landed and took-off in endless progressions of hello and goodbye. The sun kissed the horizon, the sky blazed with reds and oranges then settled comfortably into night, and he sat watching landing lights lined up outward to infinity, each machine waiting it's turn to come home to earth. Each filled with people who longed to love, and be loved. Strung out through infinity, an endless arc of hope and despair. All endless cycle, waiting to repeat in abeyance over and over. These waiting aircraft were part of a vast tidal flow of human emotion, he thought - all hope ebbing and flowing, all love being and becoming.

He drove off, he left that world of lights and dreams behind and drove on into her world.

He drove to her house, to the front of her house, and he switched the motor off and listened as the quiet of the night filled his mind. Quiet in what way, he thought? Expectant? He walked to the door, rang the bell. He listened. Do stars make noise, he thought as he looked up into the infinite?

He heard footsteps, the clicking of heels on tile, as they drew near. He heard locks turning and chains dropping, and he felt his heart pounding in his head. The door opened, and in very subdued light she stood in regal glory, and she looked at him, a smile spreading across her face. She was dressed in a black suit, a white blouse under, and a red choker adorned her neck.

"Well, great minds dress alike, say, Alan?"

He was lost for the briefest flash of time, then he saw her, saw her clothes, and he smiled. "I don't suppose this could have turned out any other way?" he said more than asked.

She looked at him - his question hung in the air - apparent. She smiled understanding. "Shall we go, or would you like to come in for a drink?"

"We've got reservations. Better head on."

She smiled. "Well, then. Lead on, Officer Burnett."

Burnett walked ahead of her as they moved away from her house, and as they reached the car he opened her door, took the hand she offered and helped her in.

She smiled as he walked around to his door.

____________

He ordered a Peisporter and escargot, and she nodded her head with bemused understanding. He tried not to stare at her eyes, but he wasn't successful and he knew it. Candlelight danced in her eyes, and he paused there, wishing, hoping, dreaming. They ate, courses of exquisite simplicity appeared and were picked at, and their talk was as mellow as the soft jazz that bathed the dark timbered room. The room was thick with the honied hues of Oscar and Ella and moonlight. They danced around the complexities of her life as they sat in their dark corner, ignoring the realities of her darkness as they focused on the flickering lights that he hoped would guide them both through these shadows.

__________

Joan Dickenson looked across the table at the cop, sipping her wine and smiling inside at his nervousness. What a simpleton, she might have said only a few days ago. But her world was different now; her life was taking on new contours even as they spoke. She listened to Alan Burnett with a gracious smile on her face, asking polite questions to guide him toward her secret, but on he soldiered, marching to the beat of his dreams.

Diane von Ludendorf, indeed. She smiled at this inside joke, wondered when she should let him in on her little nom de guerre. A mid-West girl gone bad, she thought. All virtue and goodness turning in chaos, little Joanie spinning lies and whipping the men and women who came to her for absolution. The Benediction of Her Whip, she thought, thinking of what she might have called her life's story. So far.

But all that had changed in the past week.

Shadows on film. Lump in her right breast. The inscrutable pressure of a mammogram, the truth so unwelcome. Probable cancer, in the nodes, mastectomy - radical - now that was a word. She thought of the ruin surgery would visit on her, at least at first. Then she thought of her mother, her only family, and she fought to master the anger and recrimination that had defined their relationship for more than ten years. She remembered how her parents had fought, how her mother had beaten and humiliated her father, how he had loved it when her mother had berated him, slapped him, and then loved him with her whip.

And she remembered how - when her mother was away - he would come to her, beg her to love him sweetly, and how revolted she was of him. More for his weakness, she used to think, than for his inability to take what he needed. She had teased him, taunted the last tattered remnants of this once decent man, and she had learned to control him, abuse him - and she had learned at once that she loved the feelings that broke over her like a wave when she controlled him.

She had dated in high school, but only those boys who submitted to her flawed humanity knew the sweetness within her tortured desires. A sweetness that too soon turned bitter.

She had taunted and tortured her way through college; English professors were her favored targets. They knew. Knew the beauty of her darkness, the beauty of submission, the beauty of the pain they craved. They had lent her an air of respectability, skewed though it was to a fundamentally twisted view of men and women and love. She had twisted that reality into a well-paying way of life. It was all relative, she thought.

Her father had passed away, and she hadn't even gone home for the services, and her mother had visited weeks later. She had discovered her daughters tastes, fought for her soul with the voice of experience - and lost. They hadn't spoken in years, no Christmas cards, no flowers on birthdays, just a bare wound where love might once have lived.

Joan Dickenson, little Joanie, all alone in the world. She brought to life fear and lust to the men and women who paid her, teaching timid housewives how to tame the torrid flames of warped desire, and here she was, alone. In the hours since - each a lifetime in itself - she had found her life barren and fruitless, and she had found that death seemed a release from this torment. Then she had thought of the cop, the beating blood of his wound on her hands, the wonder in his eyes, the wonder in her heart, and she had called him.

____________

He felt the chaos welling up inside his throat, it was choking him, burying him in dizzy waves of lust and desire. She sat across from him - expectantly - he thought, waiting for him, waiting for him to decide which road to take. He saw waves of tormented passion released when he looked in her eyes, he felt the sting of her whip, obedience to her commands was his heart's desire. He would become her supplicant. He would crawl to her feet and kiss them, worship the very ground she walked on. She was simply so beautiful, he thought. He had never seen anything so utterly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. Where was this night going, he thought? What rules applied in a universe gone mad?

They had talked about his work, life on the streets, the dangers and the boredom - all the usual questions - and he had slipped into the role. The cop thing, more than a little macho, ambivalent boredom his mantra, always the same. He talked about the men in her garage, the training he had endured to handle these situations, and she had looked at him so admiringly, lost - so he thought - to the trivial recitations he offered. He wanted her; he knew she knew. But did she know what he wanted. It was her universe after all . . .

"So, enough of me. Tell me about what you do," he asked without hesitation.

"What do you want to know?" she volleyed back.

"What do you do?"

"What do you know?"

"Internal Affairs and some of the guys in C.I.D. tell me you're a dominatrix, and that you make a lot of money doing it. I was just curious."

"Curious?"

"It's not your usual nine-to-five."

"No, I suppose not."

"So, do I have to beg?"

"Do you want to?"

He looked at her, disconcerted, for a moment not knowing what to say. "It was just a question, an . . . innocent . . ."

"Oh, Alan, hardly innocent. But is this what you really want to talk about?"

"Really, I was just . . ."

"Curious?" she interjected. "Yes, I know." She seemed to recoil inside herself, hide from the scrutiny she knew would come but dreading it none-the-less. "Really, Alan, what would you have me say?"