Berkeley Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  "Panagiotis, let's get the map and the pendulum. We're moving."

  That brought him out of his book. "Where?"

  "That's what the pendulum is for."

  "What about . . . Will?"

  I ignored that and got the full-page highway map of the United States and pendulum myself. I nudged his feet off the bench with my hip and took a seat, then spread the map across the table.

  "Will this bucket of bolts even survive the freeways?" Pan asked. "How much gas money do we have? I have three books out from the library that I haven't finished yet."

  "Berkeley does have an excellent library system," I said. "Be quiet."

  I swung the pendulum over the map, muttering certain words and trying to clear my mind. Pan's words—"The truck isn't prepped for cold weather, or hot weather, or, or, or"—intruded, and interfered with the results. The pendulum settled over Berkeley, and when I tried again, it settled over the same spot, as if there were a magnet nailed to the underside of the table. "I suppose a move away from the Hayward Fault is in order . . ." Pan started to say, but then he just said, "Oh," and looked at the dark shadow the pendulum cast upon the map.

  We were staying here. I should have sent Pan with a few dollars to the CVS or something while I refocused and tried again, but I was nervous to let him out of my sight. Riley hadn't attempted to contact me during the years I was in prison, or since my release, though I always expected he might reach out. There's something about being unfathomably rich, so wealthy that "one-percenter" doesn't cover it, that makes someone a very confident communicator. Not a week goes by in the Bay Area without some billionaire announcing that he wants to write the name of his app across the surface of the moon with a laser, or fund an endowed art history chair to generate new -isms to invest in, or give his favorite thoroughbred mare surgery sufficient to make her bipedal and thus more fuckable. And all this I heard about from people muttering at the supermarket, or glances at the headlines of discarded newspapers.

  I had avoided the Internet since I got out of prison in 2004, to obscure myself from Riley, but he simply snuck up on my blind spot and took over. For a week, all the social conversation turned to Riley, and his project up in Claremont Canyon right above my neighborhood. At the Peace and Freedom meetings at Niebyl-Proctor, his name was a rare curse. Usually I stood in the back, by the door, my arms crossed, silent, and let the social democrats (old, white, eager to run for office) and the Maoists (younger than me, people of color, hoping we would finally just vote to arm ourselves and storm up Telegraph Avenue) argue it out. It being anything from whom to support in Syria—surely our good thoughts would tip the scales in the left direction—to the question of whether shopping at Amazon.com was ethical. It's not.

  Riley confused everyone. His companies had never had a profitable quarter, yet he was one of the ten richest men in the world. He marketed Rcoins, his own cryptocurrency, but human beings weren't allowed to use them; the artificial intelligences he installed in homes instead traded them among themselves on virtual marketplaces. He was a capitalist who accumulated neither capital nor profits. He had no employees, but instead simply announced some idea or tweeted out some flowcharts, and other companies turned their efforts into realizing his fancies. Whatever Riley was doing, it wasn't anything Marx had ever predicted would come to pass, not even in his weird and speculative Grundrisse notebooks. And thus, he was the topic of the next meeting.

  That night, I was finally driven to speak. Pan, normally as bored as a kid in church at these meetings, whipped his head around and gaped at me. "It's magic," I said. Because I'd been silent for years, because I was white, because I have resting rage face, I wasn't interrupted or scolded. Into the void, I spoke again. "Real magic." I was tempted to roll up my sleeves and show off the unicursal hexagrams tattooed on my forearms, but I had their attention sufficiently already. "Applied psychology, heavy on symbolism, designed to alter our brain chemistries and social relationships. There's a specter haunting capitalism, and it's him. The question remains the same as it's been since 1903—what is to be done?"

  It takes a lot in Berkeley to be looked upon as some sort of kook, and with this crowd it's even more of a challenge, but somehow I was managing it. I soldiered on: "We all talk about social systems and how they overdeteremine society, and reality. That's why nobody here has ever driven up to Seattle and fricked Jeff Bezos." Someone giggled. "As in Alexander Berkman assassinating Henry Clay Frick," I explained.

  A general murmur of disagreement rose. I was losing them.

  I spread my arms and bellowed, "Quiet!" The effect was like a prison guard turning off a television in the common area. A roomful of sullen, burning stares.

  "Riley is having something built up in the hills," I said, calm again. "That's the rumor anyway."

  "Where did you hear this rumor!" an older woman snapped.

  "Scuttlebutt," I said. "Maybe it's nothing. But we know we're all discussing him because supposedly he has his thumb in some local pies."

  "I heard it caused the earthquake the other week," the woman said. "Whatever he's doing up there." Now she was the one who lost the audience. There are earthquakes all the time . . . We're due for an even bigger one . . . came the mutters. No, she might be right, I saw on YouTube . . .

  "I propose comrades who enjoy hiking make a concerted effort to find out what, if anything, might be under construction up there," I said.

  Heinrich, who had been facilitating the meeting, smiled widely enough that I could see his tobacco road teeth from across the room. "Of course you realize, comrade," he said to me, gleefully, "that generally speaking, anyone who volunteers an idea also volunteers her labor to organize the intervention. Do you enjoy hiking? You've been attending our meetings for months, and your child has probably eaten his weight in cookies from the refreshment table during that time, but in truth we know very little about you." He was just excited to talk down to me, to lord his tiny influence over me.

  "Some of you do," I said. A few men, only men of course, glanced at the floor or became suddenly interested in the paperbacks on the shelf closest to their seats. "But no, I'm from Lawn Guyland," I amped up my old accent. "I'm not much for hiking. But if there is something in the hills, and if our class enemy is involved, and if we can do something, we should do something. Someone has to do something. Praxis, not just theory."

  "There you have it then," said Heinrich. "Not much for hiking." The conversation resumed without me, and Riley was just another abstraction for leftists to tinker with. I waved for Pan and we slid out the door. Someone snorted the word "praxis" as we left.

  * * *

  In the morning, when I awoke, Pan was gone. I went to the park to teach my class and told Lindsey that my son had vanished in the night. She was distraught on my behalf, and peppered me with questions. Had he been bullied at school or seemed worried? What happened last night? When had I last seen him? I made her be silent and put her through the asanas, willing her to focus and tense with a glare and serene quiet.

  We attracted a crowd again. Heinrich and several of the hangers-on from the previous night's meeting. Now they were ready to help. Not the best start, but a start. I created a void, and they filled it. Lindsey broke down and told them what had happened. They decided to ask me for a picture of Pan, and to leaflet the area. If there's one thing leftists are still good at it, its wheatpasting flyers onto lampposts. I let them think it was their idea, and I let them stew while I performed my four asanas.

  The reality is that Crowley had poisoned these asanas. Traditionally, seated yoga is meant to be performed with a certain lightness. The stretches are slow, tantalizing. The practitioner is to be comfortable, to let the muscles settle upon the bones. Crowley practiced maximum tension, absolute silence, the cultivation of pain. And he practiced in the nude, of course, as did his acolytes. Perhaps he just got off on watching men and women grimace and sweat on his command, or maybe his kink was the pain he forced himself to endure.

  I was ready for the
pain too. It took less than a day for the narrative to unfurl as I'd wanted it to. I was offline, but Pan had an official identity for his online school, and he had a library card. One of the books he'd checked out recently was Love Is the Law, and from there it was easy enough to determine that I was Dawn Seliger, the third most famous criminal from Long Island after Amy Fischer and Ricky Kasso. I told the police everything I knew—that after we had attended a political meeting where I recommended a search of the Berkeley Hills to settle some local rumors, we went to the RV where we sleep. I even let them inside, so they could see two beds made up. The loft bed was for me, the couch for Panagiotis.

  "He must have left during the night," I explained. They didn't bother to run my plates, because I filled the voids of their minds with my narrative. An excitable boy, lost in the woods. That's the important thing. Find the boy, save the boy, be good men, be heroes for a change, not just the armed servants of the bourgeois state.

  One benefit of an RV was that I was able to evade most news media just by driving to another neighborhood. The police, of course, could track me easily and impound my home, so I drove south, into Oakland's Temescal neighborhood. The OPD and BPD tend to cooperate when their own asses are on the line—protests and riots—but when it's just some missing kid, or another piece-of-shit mobile home parked under an overpass, Oakland will let Berkeley hang 100 percent of the time.

  I moved my class to the little greenway behind the Claremont DMV and practiced alone for one morning and afternoon, squeezing out sweat and anxiety. Then I headed back to Berkeley. All of Telegraph Avenue was flyered, and the storefronts along College Avenue, which were usually far too tony to allow a mere missing child to interfere with trade, featured Pan's face. It just made sense—an impressionable kid deciding to do what his neglectful mother wanted him to do, so long as it sounded like an adventure.

  That night, the moon was new and I walked back into Berkeley, and saw dozens of small lights dotting the dark hills. Real flashlights, lanterns, and of course, given the town, endless numbers of lights from smartphones. They were looking for him, ten thousand twinkling fireflies. No, fireflies are a Long Island thing—there hasn't been one in Berkeley for forty million years. They were all tiny stars.

  * * *

  Lindsey found me on the third day, and joined class in silence, as she had been trained to. But perhaps I wasn't so good a yogi after all, because when we stood upon one leg in the third posture, the ibis, she started talking.

  "Your forefinger is supposed to be on your lips," I said. "To remind you."

  "I just feel so bad about your kid, up there, alone. Pan-pan-panna . . ." she said.

  "Panagiotis," I responded. "But people call him Pan for the obvious reason."

  "What does it mean?"

  If I didn't talk, she would think something was seriously wrong with me, and perhaps even go to the police. I kept my position, and spoke though my finger was pressed to my lips. "Panagiotis means all-sainted. Having to do with Mary, the Mother of God. And Pan, well Pan is the goat god. The lord of wild spaces, cliffs, and, you know, panic. The name suggests companionship."

  "Huh." Lindsey wobbled on the one leg on which she was standing.

  "Pan was the only god who died," I told her.

  Then she was quiet, as she was supposed to be.

  "A sailor, passing the island of Paxoi, heard a voice calling out to him, that said, When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."

  She was silent still, and quivering.

  "Palodes cannot be found on any map," I continued. "Probably it has since been consumed by the sea. But the sailor arrived there, and the port city fell to grief. The old gods were dying, a new one was born. It was terrifying, worse than any panic the goat man had stirred up when he yet lived." Another temblor passed under us, an aftershock from the quake of earlier in the week, but we stayed erect, one foot up, for a long time, and our muscles burned. Without her even knowing it, Lindsey got what she wanted—an example of real magic.

  * * *

  Finally, I had earned Riley's attention. Sending Pan to search the hills alone, and having him "get lost," did it. A black Mercedes had parked itself behind my RV, and I do mean parked itself, as it was a self-driving car, with the legally mandated warning stripes and signage across the doors and bumpers. The doors were unlocked, so I slipped inside and waited. I hadn't really driven more than a few blocks since Long Island. Prison, a few weeks begging for couch space, then a couple years in Greece, then California, staying on the couches or in the beds of comrades with a squalling infant. The windows were tinted, the trip fairly long, and the radio disabled, but the car still the nicest thing I'd been in for a very long time.

  We stopped at what I guessed was either a quickly purchased or a quickly built home—it was all windows, and jutted out of the side of the hill on stilts—north of Berkeley, near Tilden Park. The car must have made some lazy spiral through town, or had sketched a magic circle with its route, or perhaps Riley's techno-familiars weren't as good as all that after all. He was waiting for me at the end of a long driveway, and greeted me with a smile and a wave, as if I had his dinner order in my lap.

  Riley didn't say hello to me, but instead shared one of his bromides: "There are no political solutions, only technological ones. All the rest is propaganda."

  "Solutions to what?" I asked.

  "Come inside," he said.

  Riley was an old man now. I guess my father would have been nearly eighty as well. Riley had managed to stay slim, and held himself with the casually erect posture of a tai chi master. His right arm, which had been struck by a car right after my last conversation with him in 1989, was still withered and bent. Despite the weather, he wore a turtleneck. I'd marked his neck during that same conversation, with a punch from my trusty punk rock–girl spiked ring. In the popular imagination, Riley's interest in voice-commanded objects and household artificial intelligence had stemmed from his disability, but I knew that wasn't the case.

  In the kitchen, the refrigerator crushed some fruit and poured a pair of drinks, but we had to fetch the glasses ourselves and bring them to the table.

  "I found your son," he said.

  "What's your big project?" I asked.

  "Don't you care about your son?"

  "Of course I do."

  "Don't you care whether he's alive?" Riley said. It wasn't really a question. "Did prison harden you, or were you always truly the psychopath that hack author of Love Is the Law made you out to be?"

  "Pan's alive," I said. "I would know if he wasn't. Did he find you?"

  "Yes . . ." Riley's lips tried to twist into a snicker, but he straightened them. "He found the project anyway, and the crew."

  "He's a good boy," I said. "He knows every inch of those hiking trails, and isn't afraid to leave them. He's half mountain goat, I swear. What are you doing up there?"

  "It's a solution to the Bay Area's housing crisis," Riley answered.

  I laughed. "What, an earthquake machine atop the Hayward Fault or something? The first house that would collapse would be this one!" I stomped on the floor for emphasis. The place really had been slapped together out of ticky-tacky, like the old song says.

  Riley just peered at me. His eyes were . . . friendly. "Your son is alive, but he's not well."

  "You hurt him." That wasn't a question.

  "I wasn't even there," Riley said. "He got injured. My contractors found him. He had a certain book with him, and the on-site medic got his blood type, so I got a call. I'm a libertarian. I don't believe in aggression. No force, no fraud. I would never personally hurt a child."

  "You're building an earthquake machine, so spare me the rhetoric about who you'd hurt," I said. "Where is Pan?"

  "It's not an earthquake machine." Riley's voice was tinted with sudden impatience. "It's an earthquake futures machine."

  "You're going to predict earthquakes, months in advance."

  "In order to make strategic real estat
e purchases, and investments in publicly held insurance companies, yes," Riley said. "Once we solve this problem, we can broadcast the real risks of continuing to live in the Bay Area, and that should bring down prices, except for black-swan events—quakes eight and over, which of course will reduce supply and thus raise the prices. But now we'll be able to predict such events far in advance. Real estate can be a hedge, not a speculative investment."

  I sipped my drink. My throat was suddenly very dry. "That sounds like the sort of technology people would want to seize for the greater good. Nationalize it, make the code open source. We'll build in the safest places, firm up the buildings and infrastructure in the vulnerable areas, make sure everyone is protected."

  Riley laughed. "You think the government wants such a thing? Think of all the money it would cost them to make the Bay Area, or any place, safe from quakes. The government can't even handle hurricanes, and those roll up out of the Gulf of Mexico like clockwork. We need a free-market solution."

  "I don't mean the bourgeois government, Riley, Jesus Christ. Where's Panagiotis?"

  "The car will take you to him, if you want."

  "Why are you doing all this?" I asked. "Why did you bring me here, why are we even having this conversation?"

  "I always wanted to thank you for killing your father," Riley said. His tone was bland. "I've wanted to thank you for a long time." He held out his arms, like he wanted a hug. "Golden Dawn Seliger!"

  "Well rehearsed," I said. "How do I know you're not going to send the car off a cliff if I get into it, or just have it run over Pan with me in it, to frame me?"

  "I don't believe in—"

  "Force or fraud, yeah yeah."

  "What I mean is that there's no need for me to do any such thing, as I've already won. Thanks to you, really. Once your father was out of the way, I was able to truly cultivate an understanding of magick. It made me what I am. Your example made me what I am. Every man and every woman is a star, and you've been my guiding light for a long time."