American Goth

by J. D. Glass

  Elizabeth folded her hands on her lap and looked at me expectantly as I sat down.

  “There are some things that you know quite clearly by now,” she began. “Tell me, what is the first Universal Law, obeyed by default?”

  That was easy—we all lived it. “As above, so below.”

  “Exactly. And the greatest, the gravest possible sin against the Universe is…?” she asked as she peered at me over her glasses and I took a bracing sip from my mug, the warmth and weight now a familiar comfort.

  “To control another.” I swallowed, then answered, “To abrogate free will, to push your own mind, desire, or will onto another.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” I hesitated, not certain I could say it, explain it in a way that made sense. “Because it takes someone away from their…their path, from their potential.”

  “Good enough, for now anyway. Tell me what you know of absolute right and wrong.”

  I took a moment to think about how to answer this properly. “It’s like math,” I said finally. “There can only be one right answer to the equation. All the steps you take to get that result may be right, may be wrong, may be circuitous, but the correct answer is just that, the only solution, and it’s right, for all time, while the wrong answer, no matter how many correct steps to get there, is also equally incorrect, forever.”

  “Perfect,” she said and smiled. “There are no shades of gray, ever. But what if there are multiple answers?”

  Of course. I chewed my lip as I thought hard and focused on the fire Uncle Cort had thoughtfully lit before he’d left the room. There were equations that had multiple answers, all of them satisfying the problem. But I knew this, and suddenly, I realized just how well I knew it. I raised my eyes to Elizabeth’s and smiled. “It’s a solution set,” I said, “a grouping of correct answers that satisfy, each of them necessary, and no others permissible and,” I said as I thought it through, “it argues for the inevitability of certain outcomes no matter what the decision—absolute inevitabilities. Maybe…parallel universes.”

  Elizabeth straightened and leaned back against the padded brocade of the settee. “So you’re enjoying the physics, I take it?”

  I grinned at her, because I did. “Will it help me build a better amplifier?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Maybe, but tonight,” she said and resettled her seat, “we’re focusing on matters…harmonic in a different way.”

  She had my complete and total attention.

  “If the most grievous of crimes is to take another’s free will, what would be almost equally wrong? Or, perhaps, even worse?”

  As wrong as forcing another’s will… “To relinquish your own,” I said, my voice almost a whisper because I suddenly realized the full extent of what that meant, and Elizabeth nodded at me as I felt my eyes widen.

  “Yes, Ann. That is exactly it. You can’t get drunk, you can’t just go out and get stoned—not that I think you would,” she added hastily, correctly guessing that I was about to protest. “But you already know that to choose to give up your conscious ability to decide correctly, given your abilities—”

  “—is to permit the probabilities,” I finished for her.

  “Exactly. You know well enough what might happen. And because of this? You are still responsible for end results—there are no excuses, Ann, about being in any way, manner, or form out of control—you know, full well, what laying down your guard will bring. There are those that would commit the crime of stealing, taking freedom of choice—and thus the energy—from another.”

  “So,” I said as I considered, “they not only remove the person from their path, they also interfere with the plan, the order of the Universe—this is a direct attack against the Light and its manifestations, right?”

  “I’m so very glad you understand that,” Elizabeth said as her expression became grave, “because it means you know the weight of what happened and what you attempted earlier this summer.”

  I knew exactly what she meant, and I resisted the urge to rub at the marks on my arm by sipping from my mug in the silence. I stared into the flames as they danced in the grate.

  “I don’t…I didn’t really want to die, per se,” I said finally. I sat up straight and faced her, to find her eyes as warm as always on me. “I just…I don’t know. Even with the grand plans of the Universe or whatever,” and I gave her a half-hearted grin, “there’s not a lot here for me, you know?”

  Elizabeth gave me what I could only describe as a sympathetic glance. “I can understand why you might feel that way,” she said quietly.

  “Do you?” I asked her as I fought down the surge of hurt and anger that threatened to flood through me and I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders—I was warm enough. “Do you really?”

  She leaned forward and gazed at me intently, held my eyes with hers. “I do know what it’s like to live with the unchangeable, to love, to lose, to regret,” she told me, and I watched the flame dance in her eyes as she said so. “I know what it is to do what you must anyway, to ignore, sometimes to fight, the hounds, to be aware, always, of the path. This is what you’re learning to deal with—what you must deliberately choose to live with—and,” she straightened and sat back again, “this brings us very neatly to our second, but most important topic. Binding.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. That was completely unexpected and immediately took me away from the thoughts and the feelings that had started to roil through me. What?

  “I know you’ve just come out of an exercise with Cort, but I’d like you to slip into a monitor state—can you do that?”

  Closing my eyes, I agreed to try. First I put myself in the Light, the nimbus and barrier that charged and guarded the body. Once that was quickly accomplished, I forced my awareness back to the Material, carrying the ability to see or, at least, accurately sense the energies that whirled and massed around, through, and in us.

  “Got it,” I said and opened my eyes to a slightly different world. Hazes, like the waves that drip up off the asphalt and through the air in heat of summer, surrounded different items in the room.

  “Can you see the channels?” she asked, waving her hand along her body.

  I could, I could see where the energy flowed, the path it took, the centers where it gathered, and the greater areas of exchange. The centers shone brightly, were concentrated masses about the size of a tennis ball that flared in my sight over her head, her heart, slightly below her navel, and if I focused in just the right way, I could see almost through her body to the glowing exchange center that parked almost at the base of her spine.

  “What do you remember of overload?” she asked.

  God, what I knew I wanted to forget. Not more than a week after the session where I’d had the opportunity to stop but chose to go forward, I learned very painfully what overload was.

  A human body couldn’t withstand extreme heat, extreme cold, the vacuum of space, radiation—and in the same way, the body could be damaged trying to handle, or channel, too much energy, no matter how pure it was.

  It had been a few days, just a few, of slight overload. It had been enough to delay my period. Had that been it, it would have been no big deal, but it also made me cramp like I’d never had before, shot my blood sugar and blood pressure down so low I’d been left unable to do anything but curl up into the fetal position, thrown into a world of mind-numbing pain where all that existed was a world-wrecking nausea that made me heave, a throbbing ache that tore through the center of my spine to my gut, only to pit through the heart of my thighs, and it left me open, wide open to every single thought, being, imprint on the Aethyr, all a chaotic shout in my head and body. Uncle Cort found me on the hallway floor where I’d curled up before I could get to my room.

  “I’ll monitor,” he’d told Elizabeth, the only voice that was clear to me through the haze. “You clear the channels.”

  The contact of his mind, his energy, on mine, sent the tear of pain into a scud down my body and back
up to my throat and suddenly, Elizabeth, her hands, her face, so very clear before me, the concerned expression so familiar…It was a combination of physical and mental massage along the lines of my spine and kidneys that discharged the overflow, set the world to right again, and sent the pain and turmoil down to levels that were manageable. I slept for almost twenty-four hours straight afterward.

  I may have winced at the memory and Elizabeth nodded.

  “I know…I really truly do. That aspect wasn’t pleasant. Shut the channels for now,” she suggested, “so we can avoid a replay.”

  It was easily done and I waited with an almost nervous anticipation to hear what would come next.

  “There are several ways of avoiding a lot of that, though not all of it. Methods to discharge the extra energy, ground it out,” she said, “and the most effective can result in a binding.”

  “Really?” I asked with interest.

  “Do you have an idea of what any of those grounding methods might be?” She studied me with interest as I shook my head.

  “No clue.”

  She cocked her head to the side in a way I had come to recognize meant she was considering what to say even as she studied me. “Sex, Ann. Are you a virgin?”

  Well that certainly distracted me from whatever I’d been thinking. However, the rather pointed question caught me short, and I choked on my tea as Elizabeth gracefully waited for my answer.

  “Um, what exactly do you mean?” I asked in return when I could finally breathe freely without the danger of fluids pouring into my lungs. I was certain that the heat I felt in my neck and head were a very visible shade of red on my face.

  “That’s what I thought,” she sighed as she took off her glasses and rubbed her temples.

  “Is that something that matters?”

  “In fact, it is. You know how to work on your own Astrally, you know how to work with another, as you’ve trained with Cort. But,” she hesitated briefly, “you don’t yet know what it means to be truly bound to someone, and there are some bindings that take tremendous amounts of energy to break and some that can never be broken.”

  I found myself shaking my head again as I tried to understand what Elizabeth meant and she spoke to my confusion. “There are some that can take you from life to life, and there are bindings,” she paused and her words were measured, low, “bindings that can steal your heart, your soul, your life essence.”

  Now I was really confused. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” I confessed. “In fact, I don’t know what that has to do with anything I’ve been doing. And…” I hesitated; I didn’t want her to think I was being sarcastic or disrespectful. “Elizabeth, I’ve had the ‘birds and bees’ discussion with my father.” There was something, perhaps it was the weight of the knowledge that Elizabeth carried, that projected itself in such a way that I picked it up and read it. It took me past nervous anticipation to downright edgy.

  “And he would have had this one with you as well, when you were ready, as you are now. There’ll come a time,” she said, “when you’ll want to be bound to someone, or—” The skeptical glance I gave made her smile. “I know, I know, it doesn’t seem like that right now, but eventually, you’ll want to—at the very least—exchange the normal human closeness. If you choose to become bound to someone after your sealing, then they too either must be of a level equal to yours, or if they are not, they must become so, and bind themselves to the Light. This is Law, Annie—it cannot be gainsaid.”

  That made sense in a rather abstract way. “But what in the world does that have to do with sex?” I asked, “Or if I’m a…” That was a little too uncomfortable to think about, never mind say. “What’s the connection?”

  Elizabeth leaned forward. “Every aspect of the Material has energy—air, water, fire, wood, metal…skin, trees, sweat, blood—they each have a vibration. And then there’s the kinetic energy release connected to action—energy will disperse through movement, through sweat, through blood and the final release of sex, the act of—”

  I held up an uncomfortable hand. “I know the word,” I said.

  “Good—I didn’t want to have to explain it,” she said with a small grin, a grin I returned, relieved to know I wouldn’t have to sit through a technical discussion.

  “It’s very simple, really,” she said. “You carry extra energy because of the work you do. Sex is a life energy, and a great way of releasing some of the surplus, and sharing it with someone creates a link. Combine that energy in any way with a life essence—blood, for example—and you create a bond. Depending on what’s in your head and heart, your intent at the time, that bond can be completely unbreakable.”

  *

  I couldn’t really hear the rest of what she said, couldn’t absorb or understand it, because I didn’t really want to think about sex at all, and the more I tried not to think about it, the more I felt the uncomfortable stir, that long-ignored aspect of my life wake with a churning need that made me choke on my tea again.

  That was a good sign, I thought ruefully as I begged off from the rest of the conversation by claiming fatigue. It meant my body, and more, was vibrant, alive.

  But still, the arousal was worsened by the intermittent water pressure and the sudden drop in its temperature when I took a shower, and after, the towel I rubbed myself down with felt coarse and rough against my skin. I readied for bed only to strip before I got under the covers. It was too much, much too much. I tossed, I turned, then tossed some more.

  I didn’t want to think about what I’d just learned, because it took my mind to places I didn’t want it to go, an agonizing blank reach I didn’t want to make because I didn’t want to hurt. Oh I knew, because I’d just been told, that sex—by myself, with another—would literally ground the overload out, but then I’d have to…

  What did I think about sex? Or rather, what did I really know about it, other than the straightforward mechanical realities involved with reproduction?

  My first girlfriend, my best friend still, even though we hadn’t spoken in a few months, she and I…well, should I, could I call what had happened between us sex? We’d met as kids when I’d started swim team with the local club.

  Her parents didn’t allow her to socialize much with the other kids on the team, but it didn’t matter—we talked anyway. Between us, we were Frankie and Sammer or even Sammy, even though in front of her parents, and later, in school, it was Fran and Samantha. Then, before either one of us really knew it, closeness became attraction, became a kiss, and then another, until finally kissing became…something different, more intense, a mutual exploration. And then we’d gone from intensity to rivalry, and back to friendship again. While Nina…she and I had barely even touched by comparison. There was, there’d been one beautiful kiss, many wonderful hugs—the usual physical exchanges made by close friends, by teammates, and I missed her, mourned her, wanted her still, kicked myself for not going home sooner, wished I’d done something, anything, differently… How different was that than being bound, as Elizabeth had put it?

  My skin felt hot under my hands. There was no denying that Fran and I had a link, because I’d always known she’d call before the phone rang, could always anticipate her moods, her feelings, because I felt them too, like a haze on my skin… There was magic, magic and power in sex, in the burst of energy that was the end result of—God! I finally kicked the damn sheets off in frustration and leapt out of bed.

  I paced, not content with the lack of strain in the muscles of my thighs, unsure of where, how, to hold my hands, wishing like hell that I was running laps, or swimming them, racing them, pushing my body to the limit, while I prowled the wood floors of my room, stepping so deliberately it felt as if the oak gave under my feet.

  What the hell am I doing, what the hell am I doing here? I asked myself. My days…they were spent studying with Elizabeth, while my evenings were filled with martial arts and strange meditations. I now knew several dozen ways to disable a living being, spoke of imaginary
places as if they were towns another block or so down. And while I was living in a foreign country, thousands of miles from where I’d been born, I hadn’t really seen anything but the house, the shop, a few of the local historical sites…and I knew no one, absolutely no one, outside of Elizabeth and Uncle Cort. Oh. And the hounds. Great. That was lovely, simply lovely.

  I was old enough, I reminded myself, legally allowed to do all sorts of things in this country, an adult, and…I didn’t expect it, the wave that washed over me, the tide of longing that swamped my senses.

  I missed my father, though that was now a familiar feeling, but the other pangs were new, surprising almost, in their sharpness. I missed my friends. I missed the guys I’d hung out with in the neighborhood growing up, I missed Fran and even my other classmates. I missed Nina.

  I carefully put that thought away because it hurt, oh it hurt to think about her, through the throb that contracted my gut; and Fran…I wondered how she was, what she was doing. I wondered if she missed and hurt in the same way, for the same reasons.

  I wondered what it had cost her to call me, to tell me what she had heard from Nina’s father, and an awful regret ran through me that I had added insult to injury, accused her of lying.

  It had been—what, I mentally reviewed, early July?—when Fran and I had spoken last. The trip with Uncle Cort had really just started, but my plans had already been set: I’d decided to go home a week early, to surprise Nina and Fran, plenty of time to spend with both of them before I had to get ready for the move to the dorm before freshman orientation. Princeton was not only a phenomenal school, but I’d also been offered a scholarship, and it wasn’t too far from Staten Island, where Nina lived.

  And it had been where she’d planned to go as well…

  Fran. Fran was the one who called me to tell me she’d spoken with Nina’s father, and it started with a message she left during an afternoon when Uncle Cort and I were touring the countryside. “Hi Samantha, it’s Fran. Please call me as soon as you can, okay?”