by Gemma Files
She dabbled in magic too, ex-child medium that she is, just like the rest of us—helped me raise my share of demons, in some vain attempt to exorcize her own. Before the rest of the Black Magic Posse dropped off, that is, and I turned professional. And she decided it was easier acting like she was crazy all the time than it ever was trying to pretend she was entirely sane.
Now I make my living calling on obsolete gods like Our Lord of Entrails here: They’re far more cost-effective, in terms of customer service, since they don’t demand reverence, just simple recognition. The chance to move, however briefly, back from the Wide World into the Narrow one.
Because the Wide World, as Carra herself first told me, is simply where things happen; the Narrow World, hub of all influences, is where things are made to happen. Where, if you cast your wards and research your incantations well enough, you can actually grab hold of the intersecting wheels of various dimensions, and spin them—however briefly—in the direction your client wants them to go.
Meanwhile, however—
“Way it strikes me,” Doug Whatever went on, “in terms of parts and labor alone, I must be givin’ you a thousand bucks every fifteen minutes. And aside from the dead dog, I still don’t see anything worth talkin’ about.”
And: Oh no?
Well . . .
I closed my eyes. Felt cold purple inch down my fingers, nails suddenly alight. My hands gloving themselves with the bleak and shadeless flame of Power. That singing, searing rush—a kindled spark flaring up all at once, straight from my cortex to my groin, leaving nothing in between but the spell still on my lips.
Doug and his girlfriend saw it lap up over my elbows, and stepped back. As they did, a sidelong glance showed me what I wanted to see: Doug transfixed, bull-in-a-stall still and dumb, while Mrs. Doug’s little blue eyes got even rounder. But she wasn’t staring at my sigil-incised palms, or the flickering purple haze connecting them—no, she was seeing what Doug’s testosterone-drunk brain would have skipped right over, even if he’d been looking in the right direction: The twilit bridge’s nearest support girder, just behind me, lapped and drowned in one big shadow that drew every other nearby object’s shadow to it . . .
. . . except for where I stood.
Snarky Chinese faggot, bloody knife still in hand, smiling up at her under the non-existent brim of that un-holy hat. With my whole body—burning hands included—suddenly rimmed in a kind of missing halo, a thin edge of blank-bright nothingness. The empty spot where my own shadow should be.
Noticing. Noticing me notice her noticing. Trying desperately to put two and two together and just plain getting five, over and over and over.
She wrinkled her brows at me—helpless, clueless. I just pursed my lips, gave her a sassy little wink. Telling them both, one last time:
“I said, watch.”
And shut my eyes again.
* * *
February 14, 1987. For the gweilo rubes of Toronto, it was time to hand out the chocolate hearts, exchange cards that could make a Diabetic go into shock, buy each other gift-bags full of underwear made from atrophied cotton candy. For us, it was just another night out with the Black Magic Posse.
Carra Devize, her pale braids stiff against the light, stray strands outflung in a crackling blue halo. Bruisy words crawling up and down her body as she spun a web of ectoplasm around herself, reel on reel of it, knotted like dirty string in the whitening air. Jen Cudahy, crying. Franz Froese, sweat-slick and deep in full chant trance, puking up names of Power, ecstatic with fear. And me, laughing, so drunk I could barely kneel.
With my left hand, with my bone-hilted hierarchical magician’s knife, I cut my shadow from me—one crooked swipe, downward and sideways, pressing so hard I almost took part of my heel off along with it. I heard it give that sigh.
I cut my shadow from me, without a second thought. And then . . .
. . . I threw it away.
* * *
“One for Midnight Madness,” I told the girl behind the Bloor’s window, slipping her one of Doug Whatever’s crisp new twenties; she smiled, and ripped the ticket for me.
I smiled back. There’s no harm in it.
Hitting the candy bar, I stocked up an extra-large popcorn, a box of chocolate almonds, and a Cappucino from the cafe upstairs. My Ma always used to tell us not to eat after 12:00 p.m., but the program promised a brand new Shinya Tsukamoto flesh-into-metal monster mosh-fest—and after tonight’s job, I was up for as much stimulation as I could stand.
Back down in the ravine, meanwhile, Doug and his girl still stood frozen above the remains of their mutual investment—their blood reverberate with a whispered loop of intimate-form Sumerian, heavily overlaid with mnemonic surtitles: Humbaba’s answer to their question. The same question I hadn’t wanted to know before they asked it, and certainly didn’t care to know now.
I didn’t exactly anticipate any repeat business from those two. But for what I’d made tonight, they could both disappear off the edge of the earth, for all I cared.
I took a big swallow of popcorn, licked the butter off my hands. A faint smell of Power still lingered under my nails—like dry ice, like old blood. Like burnt marigolds, seed and petal alike reduced to a fine, pungent ash.
Then the usher opened the doors, and I went in.
* * *
I used to be afraid of a lot of things, back when I was a nice, dutiful little Chinese boy. Dogs. Loud noises. Big, loud dogs that made big, loud noises. Certain concepts. Certain words used to communicate such concepts, like the worst, most unprovable word of all—“eternity.”
Secretly, late at night, I would feel the universe spinning loose around me: Boundless, nameless, a vortice of darkness within which my life became less than a speck of dust. The night sky would tilt toward me, yawning. And I would lie there breathless, waiting for the roof to peel away, waiting to lose my grip. To rise and rise forever into that great, inescapable Nothing, to drift until I disappeared—not only as though I no longer was, but as though I had never been.
So I read too much, and saw too many movies, and played too many video-games, and drank too much, and took too many pills, and made my poor Ma worried enough to burn way too much incense in front of way too many pictures of my various Hark ancestors. Anything to distract myself. I took my Baba’s feng shui advice, and moved my bedroom furniture around religiously, hoping to deflect the cold current of my neuroses onto somebody else for a while. Why not? He was a professional, after all.
And I was just a frightened child, a frightened prepubescent, a frightened adolescent—a spoiled, stupid, frightened young man with all the rich and varied life experience of a preserved duck egg, nodding and smiling moronically at the next in an endless line of prospective brides trotted out by our trusty family matchmaker, too weak to even hint around what really got my dick hard.
On the screen above me, bald, dark-goggled punks took turns drilling each other through the stomach, as yet another hapless salaryman turned into a pissed-off pile of ambulatory metal shavings. Japanese industrial blared, while blood hit the lens in buckets. I could hear the audience buckling under every new blow, riding alternate waves of excitement and revulsion.
And I just sat there, unconcerned; crunching my almonds, watching the carnage. Suddenly realizing I hadn’t felt that afraid for a long, long time—or afraid at all, in fact.
Of anything.
* * *
Then somebody came in late; I moved my coat, so he could sit down next to me. A mere peripheral blur of a guy—apparently young, vaguely Asian. Hair to below his shoulders, temples shaved like a samurai’s, and the whole mass tied back with one long, thin, braided sidelock—much the way I used to wear it, before Andre down at the Living Hell convinced me to get my current buzz-cut.
I never took my eyes off the action. But I could feel the heat of him all the way through the leg of my good blac
k jeans, cock rearing flush against the seam of my crotch with each successive heartbeat.
The screen was abloom with explosions. A melting, roiling pot of white-hot metal appeared, coalescing, all revved up and ready to pour.
Some pheromonal envelope of musk, slicking his skin, began expanding. Began to slick mine.
More explosions followed.
I felt the uniquely identifiable stir of his breath—in, out; out, in—against my cheek, and actually caught myself shivering.
Above us, two metal men spun and ran like liquid sun, locked tight together. The credits were beginning to roll. I thought: Snap out of it, Jude.
Run the checklist. Turn around, smile. Ask him his name, if he’s got a place.
Tell him you want to taste his sweat, and feel his chest on your back ‘til the cows come home.
Then the lights came back up, much more quickly than I’d been expecting them to—I blinked, shocked temporarily blind. Brushed away tears, as my eyes strained to readjust.
And found I’d been cruising an empty seat.
* * *
The next day, I picked Carra up at the Clarke, signed her out and took her for lunch at the College/Yonge Fran’s, as promised. She looked frail, so drained the only color in her face came from her freckles. I bought her coffee, and watched her drink it.
“Met this guy at Tetsuo III,” I said. “Well . . . met is probably too strong a way to put it.”
She looked at me over the rim of her glasses, raising one white-blonde smudge of brow. Her eyes were grey today, with that moonstone opacity which meant she was not only drugged, but also consciously trying not to read my mind—so whatever they had her on couldn’t really be working all that well.
“I thought you were taken,” she said.
I snorted. “Ed? He says I broke his heart.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
I shrugged. I could never quite picture anyone’s soft little musclebox as brittle enough to break, myself; it’s an image that smacks of drama, and Ed (though sweet) is not exactly the world’s most dramatic guy. But be that as it may.
“Dumb gweilo told me I had something missing,” I told her, laughing. “You fucking believe that?”
Now it was her turn to shrug.
“Well, you do, Jude,” she replied, reasonably enough. Adding, as she took another sip: “I personally find it quite . . . restful.”
* * *
Carra Devize, my one and only incursion into enemy territory—lured by the web that haloes her, the shining, clinging psychic filaments of her Gift. The quenchless hum of her innate glory. Most people want to find someone who’ll touch their hearts, enter them at some intimate point and lodge there, mainlining instinct back and forth, in a haze of utter sympathy. And Carra, of course—congenitally incapable of any other kind of real human contact—just wants to be alone; enforced proximity, emotional or otherwise, only serves to make her nauseous. So she bears my enduring, inappropriate love for her like some unhealed internal injury, with painful patience. Which is why I try not trouble her with it, any more often than I have to.
That calamitous December of 1989, when I knew the Hark family money tree had finally dried up for good—after I came out, a half-semester into my first year at RTA, and the relatives I was staying with informed my ultra-trad Baba that he had a rebellious faggot son to disinherit—I moved in with Carra for some melted mass of time or so, into the rotting Annex town-house she then shared with her mother Geillis, known as Gala: Gala Carraclough Devize, after whose family Carra was named. We’d sit around the kitchen in our bare feet, the TV our only light, casting each other’s horoscopes and drinking peach liqueur until we passed out, as Gala moved restlessly around upstairs, knocking on the floor with her cane whenever she wanted Carra to come up. I never saw her face, never heard her voice; I guess it was sort of like being Carra, for a while. In that I was living with at least one ghost.
And this went on until one particular night, she turned to me and said, abruptly: “So maybe I’m like that chick, that Tarot-reading chick from Live And Let Die. What do you think?”
“Jane Seymour.”
“Was it?” We both tried to remember, then gave up. “Well?”
“Have sex, and the powers go away?”
“It’s the one thing I never tried.”
In a way, we were both virgins; I think it’s also pretty safe to say we were probably both also thinking of somebody else. But when I finally came, I could feel her sifting me, riding my orgasm from the inside out, instead of having one of her own.
The next time I saw her, I’d been supporting myself for over a month. And she still had an I.V. jack stuck in the crook of her elbow, anchored with fresh hospital tape.
* * *
There were a couple of movies playing that Carra was interested in, so we ended up at the Carlton—but none of their 2:00-ish shows got out early enough for her to be able to keep her 6:00 curfew.
“So what happens if we stay out later?” I asked, idly.
Another shrug. “Nothing much. Except they might put me back on suicide watch.”
That pale grey day, and her grey gaze. The plastic I.D. bracelet riding up on one thin-skinned wrist, barely covering a shallow red thread of fresh scar tissue where she’d tried to scrub some phantom’s love-note from her flesh with a not-so-safety razor. No reason not to wear long sleeves, cold as it was. But she just wouldn’t. She wouldn’t give her ghosts the satisfaction.
I looked away. Looked at anything else. Which she couldn’t help but notice, of course.
Being psychic.
“This guy you met,” she said, studying the curb, as we stood waiting for the light to change. “He made an impression.”
“Could be,” I allowed. “Why? Something I should know about?”
She still didn’t look up. Picking and choosing. When you see so much, all at once, it must be very confusing to have to concentrate on any one particular sliver of the probable—to decide whether it’s here already, or already gone, or still yet to be. Her eyebrows crept together, tentative smears of light behind her lenses, as she played with her braid, raveling and unraveling its tail.
“ . . . something,” she repeated, finally.
We started across, only to be barely missed by a fellow traveller from the Pacific Rim in a honking great blue Buick, who apparently hadn’t yet learned enough of North American driving customs to quite work the phrase “pedestrian always has the right of way” into his vocabulary. I caught Carra’s arm and spun, screaming Cantonese imprecations at his tail-lights; he yelled something back, most of it lost beneath his faulty muffler’s bray. My palms itched, fingers eager to knit a basic entropic sigil—to spell out the arcane words that would test whether or not his brakes worked as well as his mouth, when given just the right amount of push on a sudden skid.
I felt Carra’s hand touch mine, gently.
“Leave it,” she said. “It’ll come when it comes, for him. And believe me—it’s coming.”
“Dogfucker thinks he’s still in Kowloon,” I muttered. Which actually made her laugh.
* * *
But we got back just a minute or two later than my watch claimed we would, and the nurse was already there—waiting for us, for her, behind a big, scratched wall of bulletproof glass.
Needle in hand.
* * *
After which I went straight home, through this neat and pretty city I now call my own—even though, having long since defaulted on my student visa, I am actually not supposed to be anywhere near it, let alone living in it. Straight home to (surprise!) Chinatown, just below Spadina and Dundas, off an unnamed little alleyway behind the now-defunct Kau Soong Clouds In Rain softcore porno theatre, whose empty storefront is usually occupied by either a clutch of little old local ladies selling baskets full of bok choi or a daily-changing roster of F.O.B. hu
stlers hocking anything from imitation Swiss watches to illegally-copied Anime videotapes.
Next door, facing Spadina, the flanking totem dragons of Empress’ Noodle grinned their welcome. I slipped between them, into the fragrant domain of Grandmother Yau Yan-er, who claims to be the oldest Chinese vampire in Toronto.
“Jude-ah!” She called out from the back, as I came through the door. “Sit. Wait.” I heard the mah-jong tiles click and scatter under her hands. It was her legendary Wednesday night game, played with a triad of less long-lived hsi-hsue-kuei for a captive audience of cowed and attentive ghosts, involving much stylish cheating and billions of stolen yuan—garnished, on occasion, with a discreet selection of aspiring human retainers willing to bet their blood, their memories or their sworn service on a chance at eternal life.
Grandmother Yau’s operation has been open since 1904, in one form or another. She’s an old-school kind of monster: Lotus feet, nine inch nails, the whole silk bolt. One of her ghosts brought me tea, which I nursed until she called her bet, won the hand with a Red Dragon kept up her sleeve, and glided over.
“Big sister,” I said, dipping my head.
“Jude-ah, you’re insulting,” she scolded, in Mandarin-accented Cantonese. “Why don’t you come see me? It’s obvious, bad liars and tale-tellers have got you in their grip. They have slandered my reputation and made even fearless men like you afraid of me.”
“Not so. You know I’d gladly pay a thousand taels of jade just to kiss you, if I thought I’d get my tongue back afterwards.”
“Oh, I’m too old for you,” she replied, blithely. “But you’ll see—I have the best mei-po in Toronto, a hardworking ghost contracted to me for ninety-nine hundred years. Good deal, ah? Smarter than those British foreign devils were with Hong Kong. We will talk together, she and I, and get you fixed up before I get bored enough to finally let myself die, with a good Chinese marriage to a good Chinese . . . ”