by S. T. Joshi
The painting is dated 1899.
1888. 138. 1898. 1948. 1866.
1853. 1899. 1912.
1951.
Numerology is for idiots.
I stared at that painting for a very long time, until Mags asked why I found it so fascinating. I couldn’t tell her then. I could tell her now. I could point to one of her eleven books, all of which are still in my apartment, and none of which have been listed on eBay.
V
FOURTEEN DAYS AFTER THE BOOKS ARRIVED, THE phone rang. I answered, expecting Maggie, or a friend, or my mother. Instead, it was a librarian acquaintance of mine from the Rhode Island Historical Society. I’d sent him an email, inquiring about the history of the demolished church at the corner of Atwells and Sutton (which I dreamt of twice since that Wednesday), and I’d indicated he should feel free to reply by either email or phone, as I knew he was something of a latter-day Luddite and disliked email.
Skip the pleasantries.
“It had a few unsavory incidents in its past,” he said. “Most notably, it became ground zero for a pagan mystery religion known as the Church of Starry Wisdom, an adherent of which purchased the church building sometime in 1844. Possibly that May, but the details are hazy. The guy’s name was Enoch Bowen, an Egyptologist. Anyway, before Professor Bowen bought the place, it was known as the Freewill Church.”
“Egypt,” I said very softly, gazing out the window at nothing in particular.
“So,” he continued, “for the next thirty-three years, local pastors preached against the Starry Wisdom, and the tales of its practices grew wilder and wilder. There were claims of blood sacrifices, devil worship, sexual perversion, the kidnappings of locals for those wicked rituals, secret languages, and some sort of immense and unholy artifact Owen had brought back to the States with him from Africa—the whole shebang.
“Doesn’t look as if the Starry Wisdom congregation ever numbered more than a couple of hundred, but that seemed more than enough to throw local Baptists and Roman Catholics into a state of near histrionics. Then there was some sort of riot at the church in 1869, led by a mob of Irish boys following the disappearance of one of their own, a young man named Patrick Regan. Finally, in April of ’77, the church closed its doors, and a hundred and eighty-one members of the congregation are said to have fled the city before the end of the year. The cult drops off the radar after that, though there are rumors it might have resurfaced, at least briefly, in Yorkshire, England, in 1880.”
There was a pause, and then I asked, “That’s all you have?”
“Almost,” he replied. “Frankly, this next bit is such bullshit I considered not even passing it along.”
“Don’t stop now,” I told him.
“Okay, lady. But you asked for it. In 1849, there was supposedly a deathbed confession by a member if the Starry Wisdom, a fellow named Francis X. Feeney. He described that artifact Bowen was supposed to have brought back with him from Egypt. Called it the ‘Shining Trapezohedron.’ All this reached a certain Father O’Malley, who played a pivotal role in the Starry Wisdom being driven out of Providence. Anyway, Feeney apparently described this ‘Shining Trapezohedron’ thing as a sort of portal for summoning an ancient, evil god which could only be banished by bright light.”
“Not much of an evil god,” I said, “if you can scare it off with a flashlight.” But there were chill bumps on my arms.
“Some sort of writer named Robert Blake—”
“Like that guy played Baretta?”
“Yeah. Like him. Blake wrote some really awful stuff, pulp short stories back in the late thirties, after he moved back to Providence from Milwaukee. You know, for Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, and suchlike. Took a room on College Hill. So Mr. Blake, apparently being of a morbid bent, becomes obsessed with the old church on Atwells and breaks in a few times. Seems the Starry Wisdom left a lot behind when they fled, mostly ancient mystical tomes, blah, blah, blah, and maybe Blake even stole a few of these. But he definitely claimed to have found, in the bell tower, this ‘Shining Trapezohedron,’ and it seems to have driven him insane. Literally, if you believe this crap—and I do not, by the way—it scared him to death, right? Not long after that, a Dr. Dexter—can’t find out anything about him, might have been a professor at Brown, maybe, but I’m not sure—found the wooden box with the artifact, and was so frightened by it and by Blake’s notes that he claimed to have dropped the thing into the East Passage of Narragansett Bay, somewhere off Conanicut Island.”
I licked my lips. My lips were very dry.
“You’re not making any of this shit up?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You were a Boy Scout?”
“Figure of speech.”
“Thank fuck for that,” I said, and I tried to laugh. More pleasantries, and I can’t remember who hung up first. But I sat staring out the window for a long time, until dark. There was an especially brilliant sunset, as if the sky were burning down. I tried to stop thinking about a antidipyramidal n-gonal symbol depicted repeatedly in the Livre d’Eibon, another French volume from Maggie’s cardboard box. I thought about the figure, and a mathematics professor in college I’d had a crush on in my freshmen year of college. She’d done her dissertation on the repetition of crystalline arrangements within trapezohedral cells. I wanted to impress her, so I found it through interlibrary loan and tried to read it. But I was never much for geometry, and, besides, the crush . . . well, they never last very long, do they?
4
I’M COMING TO THE END OF THIS. OR I’M COMING TO the end of what I will permit myself to write about the incidents that followed Mags bringing those books back from Newport, then leaving them with me. More and more, that part of it seems intentional. It isn’t difficult, no great leap, to imagine her purchasing them on a whim, and then, on the way home from Newport, realizing she wanted nothing to do with them. So she left them with me. Or—and I dislike entertaining this notion, but here it is all the same—it may be the books coerced her into purchasing them, but then they found me more receptive and so saw to it she left them here.
Blake might have stolen some of the Starry Wisdom’s library.
Why did Owen and company leave them behind?
And how did they get to a Newport estate sale, if these are the same books? Isn’t that the most parsimonious explanation, that these are the same copies? Introduce as few unnecessary questions and speculation as possible.
Questions are my enemy. Ignorance is my ally.
I return to the rainy morning where this “narrative” began, before I skipped backwards and foolishly attempted to commit an act of coherency. We were not making love, nor were we merely having sex. Fucking is the only word that approaches the truth of it, and that, too, is inaccurate. She was on top, and she was never on top. She ground her hips violently against mine as if she meant to crush me with the weight of her, the fact of her. I saw something in her blue eyes that had always escaped my attention, or which had never been there. You see it in the eyes of caged predators. A big cat at the zoo, a wolf behind bars, a grizzly bear in a cramped circus wagon. It was hateful. There, I wrote it down. It was hateful, and it was vicious. She might have torn my throat out in that moment, and I would have been not the least bit surprised. I wouldn’t have resisted. By then, I understood how far we’d been dragged away from sanity by those goddamn filthy books. I understood much too much, and I was slipping towards resigned. I understood that Mags had decided, like Crowley at fifteen, to be the world’s best sinner. Even if, as I have stated, sin is only an illusion bequeathed to minds that would prefer not to fathom the truth of an indifferent universe.
She gripped my wrists and bent low over me, baring her teeth. Her thighs held my hips as firmly as any iron vise might have. Her breath smelled like ammonia and dusty places. Her breath might have smelled like the slow, inevitable rot of antique, silverfish-riddled books. It flowed around me as the sea flows around a granite boulder.
“I see things I never k
new before,” she said, smiling. Her voice almost wasn’t her voice. It was almost a voice I’d never heard from her before. There was almost an accent I might have thought was Greek or Turkish. “Light is dark, and dark is light.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t think. There was hardly anything left of my senses but the sense of her body and the hot press of her body against mine.
“I have never been so starved,” she whispered, and then she leaned closer, nipping my left earlobe hard enough to draw blood. I felt the pain, but it seemed somehow far, far away. She sat up again, and her lips were red. There was a smear of crimson of her pale chin.
“If I devoured you, as I am being devoured, would you struggle?”
“I wouldn’t,” I replied, words that were as small as a mote of dust drifting in near-vacuum filling up the space and time between stars. “I couldn’t.”
Nothing else was said, not until that violence of flesh and bone and fucking.
I might have dozed. I might have dreamed of the church that was torn down nineteen years before I saw it. When I opened my eyes, it was to the cold May rain pattering against the bedroom window. Mags was already awake. She was sitting up, staring at the doorway, or the hall beyond the open door. I didn’t ask.
Later, I hesitantly gently touched my ear lobe. There was a drying crust of blood, so I knew it hadn’t been a nightmare.
“I just don’t want them around,” I told her.
“When did shit like old books start to bother you? Did you become superstitious behind my back?” I didn’t answer the question, but I was relieved her voice was only her voice again.
“I’d rather you not keep them here, that’s all,” I said. “I feel like it’s not an accident that you keep forgetting that box.”
She laughed. Can a woman be deemed guilty of sins she only might have committed if she’d had the opportunity? Idiotic choice of words, sin. Or, for that matter, peccancy. No, she can’t. Not if in all the world there is no sin, and I’ve already said exactly that. I’ve said that in precisely those same words.
I’m trying to come to the end of this.
Or at least a place where I can stop.
5
IBEGAN TO UNDERSTAND THE BOOKS.
They told me stories.
Did I say I intended to write out a checklist of the eleven books, their titles, dates of publication, authors, et al.? I remember doing so, but flipping back through the pages, reading back over them, I can’t find where I said that. So, maybe I didn’t.
False memories. Those may play a greater role than I have given them credit for. Actually, I don’t think I’ve mentioned the subject, no matter its potential relevance. Unless I did, but like the promised annotated checklist I never promised to make, but recall having done so, all evidence to the contrary. (See Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Remembers and Forgets, and also Loftus, Elizabeth. 1980. Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget, Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.). I’ll not here broach the problem of how “false memory syndrome” may in and of itself be a falsehood. I don’t have the sort of dubious false memories recovered in hypnosis that lead people to claim they were abducted by UFOs, or the equally dubious sort “recovered” by some psychologists to bolster claims of sexual abuse. I mean, more simply, a phenomenon we have all experienced.
We have all fallen victim to those moments of absentminded confusion.
Didn’t I already do that? I could have sworn . . .
I mean only that, so maybe you should ignore Schacter and Loftus.
Regardless, I’ve decided not to make that catalog of the eleven books. I have my reasons. Several of them. The memory of some things is best not perpetuated, but systematically removed from history. If I believed in sin, I would say this is a necessary sin. Committing knowledge, however malicious oblivion. For the “greater good.”
If there were sin, we could call this heroic sin.
Though I am surely no hero.
I am nothing but a byproduct of happenstance.
It’s okay if you think I’m rambling. I think I am, as well.
6
IF I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND THE BOOKS, MAGGIE did something far more profound than learn the stories they had to tell. She did much, much more than listen. She absorbed, and in so doing, she was changed utterly. Maybe that’s why the books were left with me. She may not have intended me any harm (and, of course, I prefer to believe this), but unconsciously she might have been aware that by stumbling upon and then allowing the books to persuade her to buy them for only thirty dollars, she’d contracted something not so different from a virus. William Burroughs: “Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area” (The Place of Dead Roads, 1983).
And, “What scared you all into time? Into body. Into shit? I will tell you: the word. Alien Word the. ‘The’ word of Alien Enemy imprisons ‘thee’ in Time. In body. In shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open” (Nova Express, 1964).
My contention: Taken together, the eleven books contain the “genetic material made from either DNA or RNA, long molecules that carry genetic information; a protein coat that protects these genes; and in some cases an envelope of lipids that surrounds the protein coat when they are outside a cell.” The books have been infected, or are themselves the infection, and the mission of the Starry Wisdom was to spread the infection as far as possible.
In this way it is no different from any church, any religion, any cult.
Any word, as Burroughs is saying (I think).
“. . . evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area . . .”
My mind successfully fought off the virus. Consciously or unconsciously, mental antibodies were engaged. But Mags, maybe she possessed no such antibodies, as Robert Blake may not have (but this mysterious Dr. Dexter may have). Fuck, I’m losing the sense of this. I made pages of notes, and still I’m losing the sense of this, the thread of my argument, augmented by the arguments of another.
I am afraid, for whatever reasons, Maggie may have gone so far as to invite, to welcome in, the virus encoded in the eleven books, which I may as well term vectors.
She would spend the night, and I would awaken to an empty bed. I would find her somewhere in the house, reading the books. She would make an excuse about being unable to sleep or a noise having awakened her. That sort of thing. I’d ask why, if she wanted to read the books, she didn’t take them home with her. Usually, this earned me little more than a shrug. Once or twice, she grew angry at my asking. But always she came back to bed, and always, if I touched her for an hour or two afterwards, her skin would feel oily. And, eventually, I thought, I’d ask myself, Is this a symptom of a disease? Is this her body attempting to repel the virus? I watched for other symptoms. I might have seen them, and I might not have. Well, except for sex on that rainy morning. There was a presence inside Mags that was not her. Or. She was already becoming what the virus would finally make of her, as she approached the end product of self-replication. The vector of those books having followed the process of all viruses: attachment to a host, penetration, the release of viral genomic nucleic acid via uncoating, replication, self-assembly, lysis (see Topley and Wilson’s Microbiology and Microbial Infections, Volume One: Virology; 1998, 9th edition; but, also, 2008. Shors, Teri. Understanding Viruses [Jones and Bartlett Publishers]).
Maybe, following Burroughs . . . maybe I’d be best turning to panspermia and Francis Crick, hypotheses of exogenesis, viral molecules wafting between the stars.
Madness rides the star-wind.
I am coming to the end of this, which is to say, I have reached the place in this disjointed narrative where I have to say how it ended. The end product of Maggie Morse’s infection, if an infection it was and I abandon all ideas of the “supernatural” and of demonic agencies.
It will seem (sound, strike one as) insane, because it is insa
ne, but only by all the rules of existence we supposedly sane human beings have deemed sane. By the scientific laws which form our understanding of a sane universe. I can’t apologize for a lunacy that I maintain is only apparent, as the readers have not witnessed this illusion of the violation of biology and physics for themselves. I can’t resort to tautology, whether logical or rhetorical: This is insane because it violates our sane notion of the world, and our notion of the world is sane because we are sane, ergo anything which violates our sane notions is, by definition, insane. No. I’ll not go there. I owe Mags just a little more than that. I can do better than Father fucking O’Malley did back in 1877. Can’t I?
I began taking Vicodin (750mg, Watson 387, scored tabs), one an hour until sunrise. And drinking from a bottle of rye. So, to quote Mr. Josh Rouse, by way of the Walkabouts:
Can you still prescribe,
The remedies and lies,
’Til we feel no pain?
’Til we all have risen?
No, only the Walkabouts sang that; Rouse changed the lyrics.
And change, that’s what I’m coming to, isn’t it?
I found her this morning, and I know it was a few minutes after 3 A.M., because I glanced at the clock when I was getting out of bed. I woke, and she wasn’t beside me, which has become not so unusual, just like her spending more nights here than at her own place has become not so unusual. I stood a moment in the bedroom doorway, staring down the hallway. Echoes here of that rainy morning in May, I know, but so much of what has transpired comes down to echoes. The cosmos silently clamors with the echoes of unseen drumbeats, and very few of us are ever so unfortunate as to ever hear them. The echoes. Echoes. Drumbeats. Viral DNA and RNA. Gods who are not gods, but only beings that transcend our understanding of “being.” No sin, and no good. A code that defeats our hardwired binary expectations. Echoes which carry us down to a place where our post-bicameral consciousness and our computers are reduced to meaningless gibberish.