Derek sank back. "If you say so."
"I guess I wasted my breath in those letters I sent, huh? I have some ideas about the mandalas, maybe I could bounce them off you sometime if you wouldn't mind, you know, giving me your address? They're questions you could ask the mandalas next time they come around. I swear I won't abuse the privilege."
The privilege? Derek smirked, thinking of all the winos who had been "privileged" to puke in the piss-stains on the front steps of his address.
"All right," Derek said. "It's the least I can do in exchange for the ride." He picked up the paper sack that held Michael Renzler's copy of The Mandala Rites and scrawled his address on it, taking care not to include his phone number. The car jerked to a halt. In the backseat, a match flared and a cigarette began to burn.
"You want one?" Lenore said, putting her hand between the seats. He was tempted even though he didn't smoke. Michael took the cigarette absentmindedly, as if he had summoned it out of midair. Most of his attention was on Derek's address.
"Okay," he said. "I'll send you something."
"Wonderful." Derek opened the door.
Outside, he started to freeze again instantly. He hauled his bags over the seat, helped slightly by Lenore, then hurried toward the terminal, the Renzlers following. As he waited on a curb for another car to pass, he felt one of his bags taken from his hand. It was Lenore, smiling at him now; he could read almost anything in those eyes.
In the city, he would hardly have noticed her among so many of her kind. But he would have been wrong to dismiss her. Here, displayed to best advantage in the watery light of a small-town airport terminal, was an original, an archetype of which all the others were pallid derivatives. Lenore was like a human essence, distilled in secrecy; a fragile bottle waiting to be uncapped, to release her scent. He wished, with a pang, that he could have been the one to free her.
"You better hurry," she said. "You're gonna miss your plane."
He took her hand. "Good-bye," he said.
"See you later."
5
"This is a beautiful book, " said Lenore, flipping through The Mandala Rites as streetlights lit the pages in a protracted strobe.
Michael shifted into fourth on the dark narrow road he knew by heart and quietly said, "It is, isn't it?" Her comment sounded like the opening to an attack; she was trying to lull him. Next she was going to ask how much he'd paid for it, and if he told the truth—which he'd have to, slipping it in between the grinding of gears—the battle would begin.
"Really, really beautiful," she said.
Oh, no, he thought helplessly. She's onto me. This is going to be bad. Maybe the worst yet.
He knew they couldn't afford it; knew it wouldn't help to say he'd been secretly saving money all along, collecting spare change here and there for expenses like this. Lenore would have spent his stash by now if she'd known about it. She'd been griping for days that she was out of pot and desperate for more, but couldn't buy from Tucker till they paid their rent. And forty-five bucks was a sizable chunk of the rent they owed.
But her attack never came—or at least not from the expected direction. He glanced over and saw Lenore gazing down at the open pages, dark now that the last of the streetlights were behind them and only a thickness of trees stood along the road, branches bare but so densely woven that they blotted out the moonlight.
Maybe she would humor him for once; she was unpredictable that way. She flipped out if Michael bought a crystal ball or a magic dagger; she would battle nonstop about him wasting money on occult tools, with much the same ferocity he reserved for fighting when Lenore blew money on drugs. And, like him tonight, sneaking to buy the deluxe Mandala Rites, she had learned to make her purchases secretly and present them as a fait accompli. She no longer told him when she'd scored a fresh bag of pot, leaving it up to him to determine her chemical state by observing alterations in her behavior, her typically manic mornings and dark depressed afternoons. They'd been weaving this pattern in their relationship for so long that now, even in a dry spell, he could no longer look into her eyes without wondering where her mind was at ... if she was straight or stoned.
She hated his tools, his occult equipment. It struck her as a wasteful fetish—even basic necessities like incense and charcoal. On the other hand, she didn't seem to mind when he spent his money on books. It was fortunate for their domestic peace that virtually all of Michael's spare cash ended up invested in his library.
Maybe she felt some affection for his books because he'd started his collection around the time they met, scavanging treasures from dusty bookshop shelves in Manhattan and environs while he was ostensibly a student in the city. In those days he hadn't developed much in the way of common sense, but at least he'd possessed enough to ship the volumes to his mother as he acquired them, so they couldn't be sold again in a moment of weakness or stolen for someone else's drug money. Drugs had never meant that much to him. They were something to do while he was hanging out. He resented their grip on him and always knew he'd give them up. Magic was his real addiction. He often wished Lenore could have shared his spiritual passions; she didn't really have any other pursuit to compete with her all consuming interest in drugs.
When he came slinking down to North Carolina with Lenore in tow, all his precious books had been there waiting for him—waiting with his mother poised over them, cigarette lighter in hand. She had threatened to put them all to the torch unless he kicked his various habits. It had been one of her most lucid moments. Since kicking and getting Lenore to kick speed had been his chief aim in fleeing New York, he was able to convince her to spare the innocent pages. His mother must have realized that he'd need some new order in his life. What better than the wealth of magical systems detailed in his books, with their periodic tables of angelic powers and hierarchies of phantom guides and gods all striving toward various grails like players on a vast n-dimensional chessboard?
Despite her distrust and even disgust with anything smacking of religion, his mother had spared the books.
Crowe's Mandala Rites was only the latest addition to Michael's library, but already it had pushed all other systems of magic to the edges of his mind. It was the best new system he had ever encountered. Would-be gurus were always inventing new myths and methodologies to suit the current crazes, usually with results as lame as dressing a crone in a Day-Glo neoprene bikini. But the mandalas had an integrity that couldn't be explained away, as if they had always been lurking about, waiting for the proper time to reveal themselves.
He was more curious than ever to understand what had attracted the mandalas to Derek Crowe in the first place. Why choose him of all people? His first few books had been pure trash. Michael would have sworn they were insincere efforts, bland and uninspired, recycled occult pap cobbled together out of other older books. There was no clue in any of them that Crowe had ever possessed one real insight or would ever produce anything original. Outwardly the man himself seemed as unconvincing as those books. Cold and reserved, difficult to read, Derek Crowe displayed none of the passion that permeated The Mandala Rites, whose diagrams were so intense that they sometimes seemed to vibrate and spin free of the pages.
"So what do you do with these?" Lenore asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.
"Do?"
"Yeah, the mandalas. What are they for? I couldn't follow everything Crowe was saying tonight—there was just so much of it."
He shrugged. "Yeah, it's hard, coming in cold like you did. They're, you know, symbols. You meditate on them. Each has a certain energy, a—a kind of function. You invoke, I mean, call them and, uh, meditate, and—"
"Call them? Is that what all this is supposed to be? These words here?"
She had the radio on with the sound turned down; enough dim light leaked from the cracked plastic panel to show the pages spread across her knees.
"Yeah, those are the Keys—the Invocations. They're not in English."
"No duh."
He sighed at her mocke
ry. She was setting him up, ready to poke holes in what she perceived as silly superstitions. She tolerated his books, but that didn't mean she respected their contents. Lenore had never shown the slightest interest in magic or the occult. If he pressed for her opinion, she usually said that all mysticism was bullshit invented to keep people stupid and afraid so they could be conned by hucksters like ... well, like Derek Crowe, whose jacket photo she had once satirized for ten minutes. "This guy's got to be a con artist or an idiot," she'd said. "Who else would pose like that?" And the photograph was corny, showing his face cloven by melodramatic shadow, his long nose like a beak (it was even more obvious in person, Michael had noticed), a big shiny onyx clasp holding his cloak cinched at the throat as he leaned forward on a carved wooden staff. But Michael had defended Derek Crowe at the time; the mandalas had swayed him.
Now he waited, tensed, not really knowing where the stab was going to come from.
"You're doing a ritual tonight, right?" she said.
"Uh-huh."
"Can I do it with you?"
He tapped the brakes as if her words had leapt out in front of the car. "What?"
In the faint light she had a secretive, even mischievous look. He knew she wouldn't clue him in on her thoughts until she was good and ready, but he felt he had to press her for more. "Are you kidding?"
"Kidding? Why?"
"You never cared about this stuff before."
She shrugged. "Don't you like me taking an interest?"
"Of course I do! God, I've been trying to—to involve you for years. I just gave up, it seemed so pointless. I think I'm in shock."
"Well, get over it."
Her tone was so dismissive that he didn't think of questioning her any further. He couldn't believe this was happening. He had dreamed of sharing his real interests with her. Two soul-mates could go so much farther and faster in the occult realms than any one person traveling alone. He had never quite given up hoping that someday she would kick drugs altogether and really join him on his quest, the spiritual pilgrimage that had given him the strength to pull his psyche into shape.
"I'll show you tonight," he said breathlessly. "We'll do something out of the book if you want. Just a simple ritual to give you a taste of it, see how you like it, okay?"
"Okay," she said.
Yes, he thought. She said yes! She had affirmed everything he believed in and hoped for. She had stopped saying no, and maybe now there would be an end to her self-destructiveness. An end in sight, anyway.
He could hardly keep from laughing. "Okay," he repeated. "Okay!"
"Michael!" She dug her nails in his arm, nearly slashing him; the shock brought his eyes back to the dark road. He'd been blinded by emotion, a veil coming down over his mind, shutting him off from his eyes, and suddenly he saw the headlights sweeping a sheer rock face, heard the tires screaming around a hairpin curve he knew by heart (—by heart?—then how had he forgotten?—stupid—stupid—we're gonna roll—), felt the Beetle tipping, wheels on one side leaving the ground.
Then the lights swept on into trees, the road straightened, they bounced down again, flat and level, and he could breathe. He slowed gradually, acting as if it were deliberate, as if he'd been in control the whole time, showing off.
Lenore didn't make a sound. Any other night she would have been raging. But something new hung over them tonight, a presence that neither of them wanted to dispel.
Her grip on his arm relaxed at last. She pulled her hand away.
"Just get us home in one piece," she said, and left it at that.
6
When they walked in the house, they could hear stomping and banging overhead. The stereo was turned up high. It wasn't the kind of music you listened to for the words, but he could almost make out the words anyway. Tuck and Scarlet could make more noise than a houseload of people.
Michael dumped the laundry sack on a spring-shot couch and went straight to the library, which doubled as his temple. He was so excited that his fingers shook. Lenore went off down the hall; he didn't want her getting away, changing her mind, but that was ridiculous. Real change wasn't so fragile. She would come when she was ready; besides, he had plenty to prepare.
A makeshift altar stood opposite the door; the book-lined walls smelled of dust, incense, and mildew. Every summer the humidity attacked his books and every winter the heater dried the spores to green dust. There was also a lingering cat-piss smell from the time he'd spilled civit on the rug doing a lust spell that had sort of backfired.
He lit the pair of tapers on his altar—actually a bureau with a black velvet cloth draped over it—and cleared a space among bowls of salt and water, a brass incense burner, his hand-carved willow wand, and his athame. When he set the book down, it fell open to one of the mandalas.
Hearing a noise behind him, he turned to see Lenore in the doorway, watching. She seemed to be waiting for an invitation. The library was his private territory. He'd made it clear that she shouldn't disturb him when he was meditating or practicing some rite. Now he beckoned her in.
"Come on," he said. "I'll show you something."
She entered slowly, almost shyly, clinging to the doorframe till her eyes had adjusted to the candlelight. Then she joined him at the altar and put an arm around his waist, looking down at his tools. He had explained them all to her before, but he doubted she remembered. He touched his athamé.
"Remember this?"
"Yeah, your magic dagger."
"My athame. It represents the mind—double-edged, keen. The element of air."
She reached out and traced the edge of it with a finger. "It's sharp," she said.
"My wand represents the element of—"
"You told me this before," she said, already bored, looking up at the bookshelves, starting to pull away.
"You have to understand what we're doing."
"I don't really care about that witch stuff, Michael. I want to know about the mandalas. How do you call them? Or don't you know?"
"I know, " he said, irritated that she would challenge him on his own ground. "You have to use these things to call them, and you have to know why you're doing it."
"You mean you don't just call them and they come?"
Exasperated, he found his voice rising in pitch. "Lenore, just listen, all right? It's not like blowing a bird call. The gods don't speak English. They communicate with us through symbols, and we can talk back only if we use the symbols right. The tools and gestures are like ... like a code or a pidgin language for the astral world."
"But Derek said the Keys or whatever are already in the mandala language. So you should be able to say the words and they'll come."
"It has a lot to do with your attitude, your intentions—"
"That is such bullshit, Michael. Why should it? You're in France, you say words out of a phrase book and people understand you. They don't know jack about your intentions."
"Let me finish, Lenore!"
She fell silent, waiting, and he found himself with nothing to say, no argument left.
"It works," he said finally. "But maybe not the way you think. They act on thoughts ... emanations."
"So let's see something."
His frustration was too much for him. "Why are you so interested all of a sudden? I mean, what do you expect to get out of this?"
"I don't expect anything. No more than a guy in a lab coat expects some kind of results when he does an experiment. I just want to see what happens."
It was a fair answer, but he wasn't sure he believed her. There was something else behind her sudden interest, something pushing her, but he couldn't see it. The only explanation that made any sense was that Derek Crowe's lecture had flipped a switch inside her and brought out a latent interest that not even Michael had sighted before. He'd been amazed at how she'd practically thrown herself at Derek Crowe. He never would have expected it of Lenore.
"We should really do some kind of purification, a bath or something—"
"Fuck that, I'm
not taking a bath. It's freezing. If you can't just do it, then let's forget the whole thing."
His hopes of an effective ritual were dwindling by the moment. Maybe they should forget it. She definitely had the wrong attitude. What did she expect? Real magic was nothing like the movies, with powerful shapes appearing in columns of smoke, genies pumping from bottles; it didn't give you miraculous powers or cause objects to vanish or appear in midair. Those were stage illusions. Real magic was subtle. It whispered in your psyche, putting you in touch with sensations you rarely stopped to notice. You might smell flowers that weren't there, or unearthly incense. You might hear distant music, voices; or, with your eyes half open, glimpse faces that formed briefly in the shadows but vanished before you were quite sure you saw them. The real effects of magic were internal: increased self-confidence, a heightened awareness of natural beauty, a lingering feeling of calm excitement. It could be like the best parts of an acid trip, though far milder and longer lasting.
If Lenore wanted lightning bolts, shape-shifting, levitation, then she was bound to be disappointed.
But disappointment was a valuable lesson. He couldn't very well protect her from the experience. She had asked for it, after all.
"We have to undress," he said.
To his surprise, she didn't argue this point. She kicked off her boots and put them near the door, tugged off her jeans and tossed them in a wad with her shirt. Her small breasts looked slightly swollen, nipples protuberant in the chilly room.
"My panties stay on," she said. "I'm still bleeding a little."
"That's fine."
He closed the door and finished undressing himself. When he turned back to the altar, she was paging through the book. He ran his fingers lightly down her spine and felt her shiver.
"Sorry," he said. "My hands are like—"
"This one," she said, her voice hushed. Her finger lit on the frontispiece, drawn in dramatic black and red. It was the thirty-seventh mandala, the last in the book. He'd been working his way through the volume, but he hadn't yet gotten that far. It was a mandala with wavy spokes, a ring of dotted beads circling the circumference, and more of the beads clustered at the center.
The 37th mandala : a novel Page 7