The Power

Armon positions two characters as foils. The first is Tatiana Moskalev, who emerges as the narrative’s delusional, hypocritical, egotistical, and dangerous villain. The second is Roxy, who emerges as the narrative’s moral center. Only by losing her skein does Roxy begin to assert the counterargument to Tatiana’s aggressive paranoia: that women are strong without artificial or natural enhancements to their biology.

As the president of the new republic of women, Tatiana works executes a strategy that recalls men who for centuries found power too intoxicating to resist. Tatiana has essentially become the familiar tin pot dictator—autocratic, tyrannical, hypocritical, deeply paranoid, and egotistical. She operates from a position defined by her determination to maintain power. In the unsettling alliance Tatiana forges with now-Senator Margot Cleary, the path is clear for an unavoidable and catastrophic military showdown. In her overheated rhetoric, Tatiana bewails the desperate position of her tiny nation and claims that women want only what people have always wanted: to live independently, to earn a good wage, and to be reassured that what they have earned cannot be taken away. She terms it the American dream. She wants the world community to see women as victims of men dreaming of opportunity, wanting only a chance to be accepted and left alone.

This polished and coaxing rhetoric is nice enough until Tatiana, engaged in a lengthy diatribe to her assembled guests, finds herself interrupted by a male waiter. It is a minor interruption. Yet Tatiana sadistically humiliates the man by making him kneel in front of her and slavishly lick up the shards of shattered crystal. This is a display of power for power’s sake. She denies the man his humanity and makes the show of force an end to itself. Despite the reality that in military engagements to this point, the skein has proven no match for conventional artillery, Tatiana continues to insist that women can win this battle between the sexes.

Finally, ripping out Roxy’s skein is akin to castration. The act suggests that power can be easily transferred, and that the skein itself is the source of power. Initially Roxy suffers in the agony of the hasty operation and accepts that the skein was her source of power. In losing it, she acknowledges her vulnerability. She accepts the role of victim and, in turn, her brother as the winner. As will unfold in the months heading into The Cataclysm, however, it is this moment of apparent loss that mark Roxy’s emergence as Armon’s moral center.

Meanwhile, any idea that the women’s power is directed toward noble aspirations or even social and political equality is revealed here to be ironic. The ceremony Tunde witnesses in the mountains of Bessapara indicates the corruption of the women. Much as Mother Eve begins to see the danger of Tatiana and the threat in her heated rhetoric, Tunde, in watching and recording the ceremony, understands the destructive implications of the skein.

Even before he reaches the clearing, Tunde comes upon a dead man rotting in the sun. The body is bound by plastic cords to a post in the center of a road. The body is flayed by burn marks from skeins, and there is a sign around his neck that reads, “SLUT.” Tunde is stunned. In the deceitfulness of his editor, who fakes his death as an opportunity to pilfer his writings, Tunde sees the depth of women’s amorality and their blind embrace of raw power. In the sacrifice in the clearing, however, Tunde watches as the young man goes to his death with a calm and peaceful demeanor. Certain that his death will somehow placate the women, the man dies to atone for the long-standing grievances of men. It is a desperate and futile hope—when the blind woman directing the ceremony dispatches the young man, she does so easily and dispassionately. Power has become its own justification. Men are now victims and pawns in women’s ascendancy to power, and the skein is an instrument of brutality and domination. 

Roxy emerges here as the potent counterforce to this reality. First, she negotiates with the blind woman for the release of the captured Tunde. She flees with him, and the two find in the company of each other the urgent consolations of friendship and trust. A man and a woman, as it turns out, can work together and operate from a position of trust and cooperation. They share their deepest secrets—Roxy about her brother’s betrayal and the loss of her skein and Tunde about his editor’s betrayal and the loss of his identity. They find comfort in the shared experience of being duped. They both have experienced the duplicity of the opposite sex. Abuse of power is not defined by gender. Men and women are equally capable of evil, abuse, dishonesty, and underhandedness. When the two give in to each other and make love in the abandoned warehouse, the moment is a respite from a narrative that otherwise records only grim episodes of predatory sexual violence ranging from gangrapes to pedophilia. This experience, at once gentle and intense, hungry and satisfying, gives the narrative its last interlude of peace between the sexes before they hurtle into The Cataclysm.