Something starting now. I feel lightheaded right in the front of my skull, just between my eyes, as if there’s a mild magnetic upward pull on that one spot. A little smarting too, where my ears join my head. A buoyant feeling, like when you stand with a hard wind blowing in your face and breathing itself into you. I have to allow it all to happen.
“There are four principal demons. Demons also interact with think tanks, which is essential for divine service, and they tempt others to unabated accumulation of international reserves, the space of a second interior blow, borne to earth. Through its economic surveillance, the monetary system monitors by magic low-income countries to help an inward order charged with overseeing international boundries.”
My face and mouth are in motion, answering the cowled figure, while my mind is blank. A mentholation in my throat reaches down into my lungs with a flaming tickle and I break off coughing. The figure floats back into obscurity. I remove my head from the cowl and the monk, if this is a monk, steps out of the way.
We all go in together.
“Smoking is not forbidden within,” someone says. I see only a shape sinking back into the gloom. The interior of the monastery is pitch black, a cavernous, many-columned chamber filled with shadowy people illuminated only by flashes of lightning. I toss my mask aside with relief. It’s almost like a forest in here, and the air, although it has the musty, slightly sour odor of an old stone building, is strangely invigorating. My smoke is not being absorbed into this air; it gathers itself together into threads and trickles up into space without breaking. I don’t taste it, and it feels funny inside, like coiling syrup. There’s a hum of low voices. The people I can make out are all wearing bulky robes and there are several varieties of hats, tall fezzes, pill shaped hats with two points sticking up like little horns above the ears, bullfighter hats more or less, some are topped with an elevated crescent from ear to ear either horns up or horns down. People rustle to and fro. There are a few who sit with their backs against columns, and now I see they are writing or reading by very dim lights on drooping stalks. It is like a forest in here, but a forest adjacent to a country palace all alive with a gala ball, the guests straying in their finery out onto the paths at the forest’s edge just after sunset.
Something—a detonation—
—a brief flash and a rapidly-fading glow, and a musical note that starts with a rasping whine and gives way instantly to a great mellow resonation that touches off my whole nervous system at once so that I feel my body tremble and a jolt of excitement and a sourceless light pops right before my eyes.
It takes me a while to get back together again. Lightning struck the dome right above our heads. There is an angry red rip in the metal up there, now cooling and dimming. The dome is a bell clapped by lightning, translating the electricity to sound so that we can all be struck by the same lightning bolt, and feel the vibration set fire to our nerves. When it happens, a light comes out of your forehead just between the eyes—that’s the pop I saw—leaving you feeling unstoppered, a sudden climax of the brain alone. It so dazes me I have to sit down by the base of a column myself.
The two colossal heads of the oxen hang over me. They watch me rest, watch me rise, then follow me, silently, turning their heads to look up at the livid scar fading into the dome. Armed with my guides’ description, I make my way to the abbot, Sluch Temnuck, who sits on a big rock just a bit out from one corner of this enormous room. He looks awful. He is bunched in a stiff, voluminous white garment, and there’s a wide red streak of blood down the front of this garment and onto the floor before him—a trail of blood, blood that shoots in occasional gouts from his mouth and runs down over his streaked jaw. He is shockingly pale, and his eyes are invisible behind perfectly circular lenses that reflect some light whose source I can’t see. Whether he can see me or only senses me, he stirs at my approach and fumbles one hand out of his voluminous sleeve. He holds out a dead hand like a pickled specimen before the tunnel mouth set in the wall. I see the tunnel now myself, a gulf of intense inky black, big enough for a train. The abbot’s upturned cadaver hand vanishes into the darkness inside the tunnel. Then his arm dips slightly, once, and he brings his hand back out with a slip of paper in it, as if someone behind that shadow drape had firmly placed it in his outstretched palm. The abbot turns his face to me and reads the slip aloud in a matter-of-fact way.
“It keeps track of three other Deputy Managers when he had come to the person possessed; the revelation threatened him once, while he was paying for imports. All necessary conditions lead to an international debt to be struck with violence. There are 188 invisible persons, and that Demon repeated his commands aloud. These signs undoubtedly point around the corner, supporting institutions that facilitate international air for a few moments. The Devil, who provided them with financial policy advice to rebalance demand growth, extends surveillance to secret thoughts, during many years with prudence and perfect care. We have learned to despise these grinning impostors.”
His voice is hoarse and half-clogged with blood, which keeps spurting up out of his mouth and slopping down his chin. Although he leans forward, he is wearing a stiff, tall paper collar and his neck is a straight as his back is bent. He reminds me of a civil servant, not energetic, not tired, an old hand. This is the man I’ve come to see. It was at this point that I was to present my petition ...
As if in acknowledgment of the moment there is a stir somewhere in the depths of the room, a rustling of movement and a series of voices calling softly—
“Ahh ...”
“Ahh ...”
“Ahh ...”
—relayed from voice to voice towards me in the dark, as something comes toward me, and a way is cleared for its approach, and the stench of decay flies out of the blackness at me, snatches me by the throat and chokes me—
—I see it now! I see it!
*
I hear Assiyeh turn her face away.
“Oh God,” I hear her say.
The others are used to visitations and feign indifference.
My voice is horrible. I can’t tell her anything. Through the link in our memories, since our bodies were once joined in intimate contact, I receive impressions. Smoke still trickles from my bullet hole.
He’s dead! That’s why—... Shot! ... Shot!
For her this is the annihilating pain of surprise. She’s turned away. I can smell her nausea. It’s not love that brutally holds her open to this agony. It is love, but not love for me, or only a little love for me. It’s love for someone else leaping up again now, the way the blood jumps from a wound when the scab is torn away.
Without being able to feel it, I have touched her face with my hand, and she jerks away, crawling from me. She came here to deliver sentence on Urtruvel, without knowing that the sentence would have to go through me.
The man beside me is a vortex of pale ribbons around an oleaginous central body of dead, tarry stuff. He conjured me. I don’t know him. I don’t know where he came from. He has to appear dead to me as I appear dead to him, that’s the nature of the bond and spell. He stands on one side of me. My left. No. I can’t tell. There is a leopard with me, on one side, and he is on the other. I can’t find the leopard any more. Perhaps this man was the leopard before.
The abbot is a silent, living man, looking up at us calmly.
“I’m counsel for the decedent,” the man beside me says.
The abbot holds his hand out to the tunnel and gets a slip.
“Proceed,” he reads from the slip, and looks up.
“We are here for a decision on Eugenio Urtruvel,” the man beside me says.
The abbot reaches out and gets another slip.
“What are your charges?” he reads. He’s not reading from the slips automatically. He reads the slips silently to himself first, then says what they say, aloud.
“We accuse Eugenio Urtruvel of Selcrimeo Detinay,” the man beside me says, or that’s what it sounds like to me.
The abbot calmly slips h
is palm in the dark tunnel again and another slip is given.
“What is the judgement?” he reads.
The man beside me is silent. This part is up to me. I have to strain to use my voice, and it comes out in a barely articulate croon.
“Death ... Urtruvel ...”
The abbot is given another slip and reads it.
“Death,” he says simply. “Urtruvel.”
A whispering spiral detaches itself invisibly from him and plunges into a time aperture, one of many that honeycomb the air around the abbot.
One of the oxen says, “Death.”
The other ox says, “Urtruvel.”
The hot bond connecting me to Assiyeh thaws me, reopening desire and pain. The memory. I tremble inwardly. She hasn’t run, but she’s sitting by a column with her head averted, refusing to look at the shivering, panting mummy I am now. She’s kneading her hands—no, she’s got them over her ears, because the sound of my voice was too appalling. I will have mercy on her and none for myself, and go.
I fall away from the brighter darkness into infinite gulfs of nothing, where I can resume my circular wandering like heavy chaff twisting just above the bottom of the ocean.
*
Urtruvel at the conference. He’s sitting onstage with lights in his face, riding out a dilatory introduction from the podium. Any moment now the encomium will taper off, applause will follow, and, spurred on by a bleakly familiar pain, he will hasten to get to the microphone and put an end to it; it reminds him too much how dependent he is on it.
“Eugenio Urtruvel is an iconoclast, a maverick, a man who is not afraid to unmask sacred cows or to change his mind ...”
And when he changed sides he thought of Alcibiades. Not so much of cows with masks on.
Except Alcibiades was beautiful, he reflected ruefully. Urtruvel knows what kind of figure he cuts. A big rangy man, always a bit too heavy, a little too pale and shiny-pated and damp and obviously a little too much at home on a bar stool—it seemed as though wherever you saw him all he had to do was heave back and a bar stool would rise up out of the crust beneath him. The drinking is a holdover from an old journalism fantasy that has since become all too real.
“... Eugenio Urtruvel.”
There’s the little showmanlike pause.
Later that night of course it’s drinks and compliments, and Urtruvel is offhandedly imperial and cordial, but behind all the bonhomie there is still a weirdly unreachable biliousness. You can see there is something pushing him that isn’t going to let up; he wants more when he wins, and only very rarely, in those moments when success has overtaken him abruptly, do you ever surprise on his face a natural, relaxed and easy look, and that, within a very short interval, becomes a look of vindicated haughteur. He has to matter in the world and school up with the lords of creation, the Replicate, the chiefs of the Misled.
Yet for all his dragonism in writing, when challenged in person he becomes standoffishly shy and superior; he slows down, begins to stammer a little at the edges of statements before bearing down on the middle, trying to drive you back with a steady, slow, purely gestural pressure, now and then with a uncanny little leer if he happens to come up with something good—but really working; if he could only compose his words carefully enough he could turn talking into writing, disappear, and become invincible again. Even if it seems he bested his opponent, he does it joylessly, in fact, nothing gives him joy except the prospect that someone somewhere is talking about him, and that perhaps one day he might possess the important position that for now is still basically a posture, proving himself again and again. Sometimes he would tell himself sternly: that is all there is, only endlessly proving yourself until you wear out and drop along the wayside like the unknown solider, but there is no antidote to the dream that swam in front of him most of the time, that one day the proof will stick, they’ll add his bust to the gallery, and, while he knows he is not the man who could live that day, by some miracle he will become that man, saved, immortal, delivered in biographies. Urtruvel in the bathroom mirror, pop-eyed and bilious, skin shining like wax and a little waxy in color, and those pop eyes are queerly yellow ...
They all wanted to go to this horrid little tourist trap down by the sea called the Mortuary or something. I had to grin and bear it while a greasy bear of a massive Achrizoguaylan homosexual—all their queer seem to be enormous for some reason—swatted me on the shoulder and forced this disgusting drink on me and not a drop of whiskey in the place. Mateo, that was his name. Not my mate, old boy. I think the bugger poisoned me with that rubbish of his. I can’t seem to get the taste out of my mouth, like bad cream. Come to think of it, I don’t look so good either. I look—I look green!
*
Wiped out after a long day of conjuring minions deep in the bowels of the projects, that is to say the bowels’ bowels, but it’s a wholesome fatigue, the way I enjoy imagining cave man farm days would be. There’s often an especially nerve-wracking thing that happens, when I’m all ready for the spell to engage, and it’s there, it will, but it wants to tread water for another couple of seconds and when it does come I’ve peaked already. That leaves me with an unsatisfied uncertain feeling about the outcome. I wish I’d thought of making minions before the beginning of history instead of after the end, but then it might have had to be this way.
My minions are unemployment elementals, the grimy spirits that hover over poor neighborhoods, standing completely still in the noonday sun like transparent smog, reaching into children’s lungs with long tendrils of asthma, and loading the staggering outlines of adults with a heavy silt that settles in the legs, forearms, abdomen, head, like the mush at the bottom of a polluted river. But this is no metaphor. These hazes are the exhaust that fumes off chronically frustrated and despairing brains, filling the apartments and corridors and the rumpled up stores and the tumbling streets and the sooty parks. You walk down the street and it’s like a bus tailpiping in your face, the steady revving groan as it heaves itself another leap down the block to the next stop.
I conjure these fuckers from a number of non-secret lab locations in basements and vacant lots, and from the ground zero intersections of avenues chancred with potholes, using electric fans to collect the fumes and trapping them in squares defined by high tension wires and chalk outlines. I pathfind for them, by walking circuits, and if I do it right, then images of me split off at certain acute angles of the circuit and go streaking out into the city as I turn, detaching from me like an uncoupled sidecar and zooming away. Since I have to turn to give them shape, I don’t see them distinctly. It’s like seeing my reflection in a glass door as it opens and shuts in the corner of my eye, a flat image that moves by turning its angles. These minions don’t hang around for me to insult and bop on the head when they goof up; they do their goofing at a distance and are gone, like shouts. Away away, my pretties.
Sending them forth does two things. First, it creates a little employment, and that lightens the air a fraction. Second, it creates polarized axons through the unemployment-plasm that can carry coded messages to the Teeming. That’s not a circuit I can close; closing that circuit is up to them. When the circuit closes, the current flows, right? When the current flows, up comes the juice, up comes the work, understood as a term in physics, up comes the potential for work, the radiant gradient. When you stop something, it becomes universally connected. But then the next step is to move in and censor the right connections, because you want to ... wait, let me come back to that later. My fucking brain won’t leave me alone long enough for me to get back my wind. I’m hot and tired and I smell bad and I haven’t eaten. If I keep on this way I’ll thin out to a smear on the glass and flicker apart into dimming video stills. Concentration will burst you apart too, and dissipation can be just what holds you together.
Gloominous, Tenure, those others—they were my own elementals ricocheting through time. I got out ahead of them and I was already there when they arrived. I need to get them to use my shortcuts. I need them to
get out ahead of me and stay there. I need them to lead me, like scouts. I need them, because I’m always alone.
Now I’m back in my squat with a steam-powered computer and reading an online-headline:
“MR. URTRUVEL, HE DEAD.”
Liver failed, it says. Disney was right, wishes really do come true. Recommended to the country’s top liver specialist, but refused to see her because she’s an Arab and considering all the shit he wrote about Arabs, he’d been afraid to trust one with his life. Here’s her picture in the paper, calmly asserting that she treats her patients and leaves their politics outside the door. Vacillating about whether or not to see this Arab liver specialist, he’d let his transplant window go by. The next available donor was Salvadoran. After vomiting all over El Salvador for so long it would have taken a Salvadoran liver to finally sober him up. Anyway, there’s no shortage of heartless assholes where he came from and the niches are what really exist and we only fill them and yeah but some of us jokers fill niches with more zest than others and it’s one thing to find yourself in some niche or other and shrug and keep on as usual, and it’s another thing to claw your way into a bad niche and crown yourself king of bastards. There’s always just enough scrim sticking out of your fly to hang a disgrace on. Now they’re uncrating your honored name even before they’ve got your insides out on the embalming table. They incinerate the organs and bury the brittle shell, once it’s been pumped full of formaldehyde and shellacked. Or do they flush the stuff, right down the sewer? There’s that fucked up liver of yours touching down on the fire now, burning with a bright blue alcohol flame. Or maybe that’s it, slurping down the drain, inching its way back into a shitflow that no doubt strikes it as homey and oddly familiar.
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